I see your point, and agree with it. But lack of RPM 3 packages in Red Hat doesn't excuse the same error in Debian. I don't think `interoperability with Red Hat' is a goal, and if anyone does, they are wrong. If the LSB went with debs, initscripts in/sbin/init.d and all software in/opt, that's what I'd want out of Red Hat, Debian, and everyone else. But they didn't - they spent a great deal of time deciding on these issues, inclduing a standard package format and people should move towards that packaging system (if you want suggested / recommended dependencies, then add it to rpm).
Or use source packages - you get the standardized install, uninstall, querying, dependency checking, and verifying of packages, but people can rebuild and add compiler flags if they see fit. If you've amrked your package as relocatable then you can also allow users to install it wherever they please.
/opt has been in the LSB for a while. However,
it's reserved for local system administrator use, distributions can't use the directory unless they ask the local sysadmin if its okay to overwrite files that exist there. In other words,
Unix sorts file by type (lib, bin, doc, etc) and always has / will. I can see the advantages of sorting by program, but you don't want to break the exising system like/opt does (so some files are placed primarily by file type, others by app). The only real solution is a filesystem with multipel views (think BIND 9s split level DNS). QNXs package filesystem is similar to this.
My point is that repackaging something in a nonstandard format is a massive amount of unnecessary effort. Debian won't always include that latest apps (neither can any distro), and that people should be able to create Linux packages the same way they create Solaris or OpenBSD packages. To think that different Linux distros are different OS saddens me, as it means there's a massive fragmentation that's occured on the platform ala Unix and the individual Linux OS's will never have the same impact on competitive platforms as a single Linux OS would.
Re: my KDE example. If KDE produced a single set of packages against the LSB, and they didn't work on SuSE, then SuSE should fix whatever bug stops these packages from working - because very soon, people will take the attitude that if it isn't LSB, then it isn't Linux.
RPM 3.05 will happily install any RPM in existence.
Red Hat didn't join the LSB for a couple of years precisely to avoid these inevitable (and completely unjustified [well you didn't provide any supporting arguments]) accusations. They lost out on few things too - eg, initscript directories (and thank god, rc.d/init.d sucks). Everyone has (and has already often made) concessions towards the LSB, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE or otherwise.
From discussion with Debain users (and time spent administering Debian boxed at my workplace) Debian's rpm support doesn't work that well for anything apart from large self-contained statically compiled packages. The problem being that the Linux Standards Base will probably be considered the definition of what a Linux distro is in a couple of years (and is starting to be used as a yardstick these days). Yes Debian ostensibly supports the LSB via alien, but how well?
The distributions which put initscripts in nonstandard places have had to change, those install packages into/opt have had to change, and if they haven't, they've been looked upon negatively (and rightly so) for their lack of standards support. So how well does alien work, and would you use it to install some, or even most software on your system? A standardized packaging system is useful for more than just closed source apps - its useful for every open source app maintainer that's tired of maintaining different sets of packages for Red hat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Connectiva, and every other distro out there. Theoretically, the KDE people (for example) should only have to release one set of packages per OS. Doing otherwise wastes a great amoutn of time that could be used elsewhere.
And yeah, I'm a Red Hat user who has posted a non 100% supportive comment about Debian in a Debian release news item./me waits for the inevitable negative moderations from people who disagree with what I'm saying but can't voice their own opinions and repond maturely.
Apt-get isn't a packaging system. I presume you probably mean Debian. My office has been using apt-get to maintain our Red Hat boxes for a few months now, and it works quite well. Regardless, the release of KDE 3 marks a good time for the KDE webmasters to save users a bit of time when fetching the latest release my making the packages for Red Hat, SuSE, etc into an APT repository. Its quite easy (we're already doing the same with KDE 2.2.2 at work) and I might volunteer myself if I have the time.
Why are so many Linux people ignorant about the avaliability of the Flash format? Flash is about as Open as PDF: a new version comes out, the new format is documented reasonably soon afterwards and third party players, Open Source or proprietary, go about making their apps work with the new version without paying licensing fees.
I don't pretend to be an expert on video codec's and the like, but I would like to believe that some sane individuals could develop an open video compression system and stop all of this idiocy.
Liberalism is seldom associated with increased surveilance and invasions of personal liberties: Quite the opposite in fact. Most "soccer moms" who call for greater and greater restraints and government controls are conservatives.
In Australia the main conservative party are called `The Liberals'. Hence the confusion.
So you may win over people inside your company, but if the recipients are stuck in the 'proprietary software only' mindset you may have to keep PGP around for them. There are companies that have explicit IT dept guidelines banning open source, freeware, and shareware -- even if it's bundled with a commercial product. PeopleSoft claimed it had to ship an alternative commercial *nix web server with it's software for those companies where Apache would be against the set in stone policies.
Or better yet: fix the problem. Sit down on their NT Server and take a look at FTP.exe in wordpad. Show them the licenses for some of the software on the NT and Windows 2000 resource kits. Show them the licenses for some of the packages in Solaris 8 Software 2 of 2. Then suggest they they either enforce their policy and immedately remove NT 4, Windows 2000, and Solaris 8 for their system (and do not upgrade their older machines to these versions) or remove the policy.
I understood your point. I also understand that there are tools in the GUI world that will monitor the computers health. I'm not going to tell you what they are or where they are or how to find them.
You seem to have missed my point: its about having safe defaults, aprt of the reason people be Unixsysadmins inthe first place. A distro which installs and starts Telnet and a whole bunch of WU services listening externally can be easily patched too - its still shoddy engineering, and dangerous for that one time people forget - things can and will slip through the cracks.
You, after all, are the hot shot sysadmin. Don't put works into my mouth.
If you don't appreciate the reasons behind having safe defaults, go back to NT and stay there. Actually, maybe just keep your head up your arse while I kick you down a flight of Escher stairs.:)
Yes, I used to run Red Carpet on most of the machine's at my office. Its truly a very nice system to use. Unfortunately there seems to be no way of creating my own channel to deploy software with unless one pays for Red Carpet express. A reasonable tradeoff I guess, but I'd like to be able to add my own packages to the mix and deploy my own local software with a free tool.APT does that, but not very friendlyish. I see your point, its just a pity I couldn't do this with a $free system.
Thanks for the info about kwrited - I stand corrected here. This is excellent and something I've been waiting for ages - every graphical Unix environment should do this (and I think I've submitted bug reports about this before). Viva KDE, and thanks for telling me about it. I hope other desktops follow suit.
Same as the adminsitrator message - unless you're not using X, or running Xconsole all the time, you won't see the message. I'd have thought that was obvious. If you want a Windows comparison, a current version of Windows (last two years) will alert you to a device not responding in the GUI, same as a Linux VT will.
If my response was heated, its because you accused me of not thinking after not seeming to have understood the point of my message.
That's true. My complaint is that they shouldn't exist in the first place.
The reason the GUI doesn't report anything, is because its not its job.
So its the console's job to print these messages, but not Xs? Why is that so? What is it about desktop users (who almost invariably use X) that makes them not need to know that hdc hasn't been reponding for the last five minutes?
As for system updates, RedHats up2date and Ximian redcarpet are as easy to use as it gets, point, click and drool, while it downloads.
up2date doesn't handle installing packages off one's hard disk, cdrom or any local source. Its only repository is Red Hat updates. So I'll discount that as an option. Up2date is a maintenance tool, not a general multi-purpose software installer, which is sorely needed.
Red Carpet OTOH is great, but unforunately I can't find a way of creating my own Red Carpet repositories like I can with APT. If you can provide me with a link to such information, I'd be very grateful.
chmod +s/path/to/program will solve most of your "have to be root" problems, though for security reasons I don't recomend it.
Exactly. I don't want everyone to be able to run the program I just want people who can run the program be asked for the relevant passwords rather than having a nasty `Kpackage needs to run as ROOT!' message thrown at them. Its not necessary and confusing for end users. Again. smart tools like the aforementioned Red Carpet and all RHs setup tools do this, but many don't.
As for the man pages, I am sure a short shell script to check for a man page, info page or something in/usr/doc, would solve this problem straight away.
Exactly. Lets call it `help', and ship it with every Linux distro. Unfortunately that's not currently the case, which is my point.
Doing small things like this makes a big difference to end user experience. But thanks for your post - you've been a lot more polite than the other fellow who responded.
Linux will tell you if the admin of the server you're on is about to reboot.
No it won't for 99% of desktop users, who will be in X, where every single desktop environment doesn't bother telling users about these messages. They can get around this by running xconsole in perpetuity, but how many people do this? And why doesn't Linux have the brains to do it for them if they need to?
Have you ever typed halt and watched the broadcast across all the current connections? Probably not.
Of course I have. Its broadcast to a console. In an office with forty staff using Linux desktops, I've watched the broadcast hit VT 1-6 and be ignored by every staff member who runs comfortably in X, like almost all desktop users do.
And since we *are* talking about desktops, then I think its you who seems to be missing something.
I disagree, Windows has only one advantage over Linux and that is games. This may be a problem on the home desktop, but on the business desktop, it is not relevant.
Okay, here's a couple:
* I launch an app. For whatever reason, it fails to start. Smart apps like Galeon and Evolution provide this functionality (Xine, for example), but most other will simply not start with absolutely no explanation why. Lack of feedback is incredibly frustrating for users.
* I'd like to install a program. Witch a clever app like urpmi or APT, I can easily type the name of the app I want and downlaod / install it. its a great way to find Linux software. But to do that, I had to learn that `update' meant refesh the list of avaliable software, as opposed to `upgrade' which meant to upgrade my system. And that `rpm' handles queries of what's installed, but I should use a seperate program called `apt' to fetch and install stuff. New users shouldn't have to learn things like that. Where's our equivalent, of, say, the QNX installer? Something that has a bug button called `refresh list of available software', integrated help, that has clear labels and handles everything you need toi install apps, whether local or from repositories, in one app, as well as allowing end users to simply *browse* what's available. Synaptic can sort of do that, but it does a very poor job. I haven't looked at the other APT frontends but Synaptic supposed to be the best.
* And...
- My hard drive can be melting but Linux won't tell me.
- My system could be slowing to a crawl because of a scheduled task and Linux won't tell me. -
- My system administrator could be telling me to get the hell of the network as he's about to bring our server down for maintenance but Linux won't tell me
This is because KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, FVWM and every other user environment won't tell you the things you NEED to know unless you're running xconsole all the time. No messages, no `hdc is melting', no talk, nothing. The end result is that horrible things can happen behind users backs with generally no explanation from the interface. This is *really, *really* poor.
* Lack of understanding of basic user needs, especially for command line apps. `Hi, there's no man page for this, you need the info page'. Well then show me the fucking info page, you're a computer, its not that hard. People still write apps which say `you need to be root to run this'. How about talking to some generic library that can work out if I'm allowed to su to another account with the permissions (typically root, hopefully not), and *ask me* to enter in the damned password. You know I want to run the tool, you know I can run the tool, so let me run the fucking tool.
Anyway, that's my morning rant over and done with. Hopefully someone with the requisite skills is listening (I'm more of a sysadmin and I make a pretty poor programmer). If anybody ever changes anything based on this I'd be uber grateful, and if you're wondering, I'm slowly workign to changing it myself.
I hope that Mozilla 1.0 will have native widget support for Windows 2005.
If you want native widget support support on Linux now, with the added bonus of your web browser not being a flaming pile of shit (sorry, I truly believe that although gecko rocks, XUL is still unusable on every box I've tried) use Galeon. Version 1.03, which works with Mozilla 0.98 has just been released.
Linux RPM packages for both should be available soon.
Microsoft have FreeBSD servers running parts of hotmail, but also have Linux servers providing some of their DNS service for microsoft.com, as their DNS is outsourced to another company that chooses their own OS.
I honestly can't remember which PT was talking about when he said this - just that he famously said DNS wasn't a critical function of a network (right after a DNS outage proved hm very very wrong).
I'm well aware that FreeBSD isn't Linux, just as I'm sure you're aware of the difference between `their' and `there', although we're both a little confused right now ; )
I'm not really surprised by this. Following the recent long Microsoft DNS outage when it was revealed that quite a few of Micrposoft's own DNS servers were running Linux (not to mention they use akamai for their downloads), Paul Thurrot came out with the classic report that although this might be true `its proves Open Source zealots wrong as Linux wasn't being used for anything mission critical'
What the fuck? According to WHAT kind of logic is DNS not mission critical? If it its not critical, let's take those DNS servers offline (both Microsoft's and WinInfo's) and see how long either MS or Thurrot last.
The ans wer is, by the way, that it doesn't affect Debian in any meaningful way.
I disagree.
* The standard does not require that Debian drop its own packaging scheme.
* The standard does not mandate the use of RPM packaging within the distribution.
The standard mandates that RPM is the preferred packaging system for people creating applications to run on Linux. Debian;s LSB support is based on the existence of Alien. I don't know too many Debian people who would trust alien to install large parts of their system.
personally I'll stick with Lilo - here's why
on
Animate Your LILO
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· Score: 2
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it.
I never found that to be a deficiency in Lilo myself.
Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures.
Again, as a new stable distribution tested kernel (which is what I run on my workstation adn server boxes) comes out maybe twice a year, I frankly don't see the need for this.
So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
Indeed. Grub works well for testers. For the rest of us:
* Grub uses a completely different device syntax than my OS which I can't be bothered learning
* Grub has an arcane syntax if you do actually want some kind of interactive bootloader
Grub advocates also seem to miss two points:
* Grub has a pretty menu and can boot beyong cylinder 1024 / 8GB. Lilo has been able to do this for a couple of years too. Moot point.
* Grub complies to the `miltiboot specification'. Seeing as the Grub people wrote the `multiboot specification', who cares?
I like APT but there's a couple of reasons why I stick with Red Hat - I like their current yet well tested AC kernels, kudzu, setup, installer and a couple of other tools. Its always nice to just buy a network card and install it by sticking it in my damned machine and turning back on - no hunting for which driver module matches the hardware. A lot of software (Open Source apps like FreeSWAN, closed source apps like Kylix) seem to be tested on RH before other Linux distributions.
Anyway, APT has been available for Red Hat for some time now and its how I update most o my boxes. There's a few good publically avaliable repositories and more on the way - namely all the Red Hat CDs, all the updates as they come out, FreshRPMs, and Gnomehide. I have around 2.8GB of (binary) software from 9 different sources on an APT repository I maintain at my workplace, all of which are tested against 7.2. Sure, 2.8 is less than 6GB (the amount on Debian repositories), but its got everythign we need - acroread, postfix, enhydra, kylix open edition, just about everything else.
There's also the fact that the ability to install RPM packages is part of the LSB, and alien doesn't seem to handle this reliably.
If you're interested, download apt packages from Freshrpms
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, and agree with it. But lack of RPM 3 packages in Red Hat doesn't excuse the same error in Debian. I don't think `interoperability with Red Hat' is a goal, and if anyone does, they are wrong. If the LSB went with debs, initscripts in /sbin/init.d and all software in /opt, that's what I'd want out of Red Hat, Debian, and everyone else. But they didn't - they spent a great deal of time deciding on these issues, inclduing a standard package format and people should move towards that packaging system (if you want suggested / recommended dependencies, then add it to rpm).
Or use source packages - you get the standardized install, uninstall, querying, dependency checking, and verifying of packages, but people can rebuild and add compiler flags if they see fit. If you've amrked your package as relocatable then you can also allow users to install it wherever they please.
/opt has been in the LSB for a while. However,
/opt does (so some files are placed primarily by file type, others by app). The only real solution is a filesystem with multipel views (think BIND 9s split level DNS). QNXs package filesystem is similar to this.
it's reserved for local system administrator use, distributions can't use the directory unless they ask the local sysadmin if its okay to overwrite files that exist there. In other words,
Unix sorts file by type (lib, bin, doc, etc) and always has / will. I can see the advantages of sorting by program, but you don't want to break the exising system like
My point is that repackaging something in a nonstandard format is a massive amount of unnecessary effort. Debian won't always include that latest apps (neither can any distro), and that people should be able to create Linux packages the same way they create Solaris or OpenBSD packages. To think that different Linux distros are different OS saddens me, as it means there's a massive fragmentation that's occured on the platform ala Unix and the individual Linux OS's will never have the same impact on competitive platforms as a single Linux OS would.
Re: my KDE example. If KDE produced a single set of packages against the LSB, and they didn't work on SuSE, then SuSE should fix whatever bug stops these packages from working - because very soon, people will take the attitude that if it isn't LSB, then it isn't Linux.
RPM 3.05 will happily install any RPM in existence.
Red Hat didn't join the LSB for a couple of years precisely to avoid these inevitable (and completely unjustified [well you didn't provide any supporting arguments]) accusations. They lost out on few things too - eg, initscript directories (and thank god, rc.d/init.d sucks). Everyone has (and has already often made) concessions towards the LSB, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE or otherwise.
From discussion with Debain users (and time spent administering Debian boxed at my workplace) Debian's rpm support doesn't work that well for anything apart from large self-contained statically compiled packages. The problem being that the Linux Standards Base will probably be considered the definition of what a Linux distro is in a couple of years (and is starting to be used as a yardstick these days). Yes Debian ostensibly supports the LSB via alien, but how well?
/opt have had to change, and if they haven't, they've been looked upon negatively (and rightly so) for their lack of standards support. So how well does alien work, and would you use it to install some, or even most software on your system? A standardized packaging system is useful for more than just closed source apps - its useful for every open source app maintainer that's tired of maintaining different sets of packages for Red hat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Connectiva, and every other distro out there. Theoretically, the KDE people (for example) should only have to release one set of packages per OS. Doing otherwise wastes a great amoutn of time that could be used elsewhere.
/me waits for the inevitable negative moderations from people who disagree with what I'm saying but can't voice their own opinions and repond maturely.
The distributions which put initscripts in nonstandard places have had to change, those install packages into
And yeah, I'm a Red Hat user who has posted a non 100% supportive comment about Debian in a Debian release news item.
By allowing me to decline their license and give me the refund they promise if I do so, I don't see why I should accept it and activate periodically.
ncftp -u xpkey -p xpkey -P 6473 24.22.15.128
I'm on RPM-based distro. How about apt-get-based?
Apt-get isn't a packaging system. I presume you probably mean Debian. My office has been using apt-get to maintain our Red Hat boxes for a few months now, and it works quite well. Regardless, the release of KDE 3 marks a good time for the KDE webmasters to save users a bit of time when fetching the latest release my making the packages for Red Hat, SuSE, etc into an APT repository. Its quite easy (we're already doing the same with KDE 2.2.2 at work) and I might volunteer myself if I have the time.
Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?
Why are so many Linux people ignorant about the avaliability of the Flash format? Flash is about as Open as PDF: a new version comes out, the new format is documented reasonably soon afterwards and third party players, Open Source or proprietary, go about making their apps work with the new version without paying licensing fees.
I don't pretend to be an expert on video codec's and the like, but I would like to believe that some sane individuals could develop an open video compression system and stop all of this idiocy.
You mean like Ogg Tarkin?
Liberalism is seldom associated with increased surveilance and invasions of personal liberties: Quite the opposite in fact. Most "soccer moms" who call for greater and greater restraints and government controls are conservatives.
In Australia the main conservative party are called `The Liberals'. Hence the confusion.
So you may win over people inside your company, but if the recipients are stuck in the 'proprietary software only' mindset you may have to keep PGP around for them. There are companies that have explicit IT dept guidelines banning open source, freeware, and shareware -- even if it's bundled with a commercial product. PeopleSoft claimed it had to ship an alternative commercial *nix web server with it's software for those companies where Apache would be against the set in stone policies.
Or better yet: fix the problem. Sit down on their NT Server and take a look at FTP.exe in wordpad. Show them the licenses for some of the software on the NT and Windows 2000 resource kits. Show them the licenses for some of the packages in Solaris 8 Software 2 of 2. Then suggest they they either enforce their policy and immedately remove NT 4, Windows 2000, and Solaris 8 for their system (and do not upgrade their older machines to these versions) or remove the policy.
I understood your point. I also understand that there are tools in the GUI world that will monitor the computers health. I'm not going to tell you what they are or where they are or how to find them.
:)
You seem to have missed my point: its about having safe defaults, aprt of the reason people be Unixsysadmins inthe first place. A distro which installs and starts Telnet and a whole bunch of WU services listening externally can be easily patched too - its still shoddy engineering, and dangerous for that one time people forget - things can and will slip through the cracks.
You, after all, are the hot shot sysadmin.
Don't put works into my mouth.
If you don't appreciate the reasons behind having safe defaults, go back to NT and stay there. Actually, maybe just keep your head up your arse while I kick you down a flight of Escher stairs.
Yes, I used to run Red Carpet on most of the machine's at my office. Its truly a very nice system to use. Unfortunately there seems to be no way of creating my own channel to deploy software with unless one pays for Red Carpet express. A reasonable tradeoff I guess, but I'd like to be able to add my own packages to the mix and deploy my own local software with a free tool.APT does that, but not very friendlyish. I see your point, its just a pity I couldn't do this with a $free system.
:)
Thanks for the info about kwrited - I stand corrected here. This is excellent and something I've been waiting for ages - every graphical Unix environment should do this (and I think I've submitted bug reports about this before). Viva KDE, and thanks for telling me about it. I hope other desktops follow suit.
/me smiles
Same as the adminsitrator message - unless you're not using X, or running Xconsole all the time, you won't see the message. I'd have thought that was obvious. If you want a Windows comparison, a current version of Windows (last two years) will alert you to a device not responding in the GUI, same as a Linux VT will.
If my response was heated, its because you accused me of not thinking after not seeming to have understood the point of my message.
All the issues you mentioned are easily solved.
/path/to/program will solve most of your "have to be root" problems, though for security reasons I don't recomend it.
/usr/doc, would solve this problem straight away.
That's true. My complaint is that they shouldn't exist in the first place.
The reason the GUI doesn't report anything, is because its not its job.
So its the console's job to print these messages, but not Xs? Why is that so? What is it about desktop users (who almost invariably use X) that makes them not need to know that hdc hasn't been reponding for the last five minutes?
As for system updates, RedHats up2date and Ximian redcarpet are as easy to use as it gets, point, click and drool, while it downloads.
up2date doesn't handle installing packages off one's hard disk, cdrom or any local source. Its only repository is Red Hat updates. So I'll discount that as an option. Up2date is a maintenance tool, not a general multi-purpose software installer, which is sorely needed.
Red Carpet OTOH is great, but unforunately I can't find a way of creating my own Red Carpet repositories like I can with APT. If you can provide me with a link to such information, I'd be very grateful.
chmod +s
Exactly. I don't want everyone to be able to run the program I just want people who can run the program be asked for the relevant passwords rather than having a nasty `Kpackage needs to run as ROOT!' message thrown at them. Its not necessary and confusing for end users. Again. smart tools like the aforementioned Red Carpet and all RHs setup tools do this, but many don't.
As for the man pages, I am sure a short shell script to check for a man page, info page or something in
Exactly. Lets call it `help', and ship it with every Linux distro. Unfortunately that's not currently the case, which is my point.
Doing small things like this makes a big difference to end user experience. But thanks for your post - you've been a lot more polite than the other fellow who responded.
Mike
Linux will tell you if the admin of the server you're on is about to reboot.
No it won't for 99% of desktop users, who will be in X, where every single desktop environment doesn't bother telling users about these messages. They can get around this by running xconsole in perpetuity, but how many people do this? And why doesn't Linux have the brains to do it for them if they need to?
Have you ever typed halt and watched the broadcast across all the current connections? Probably not.
Of course I have. Its broadcast to a console. In an office with forty staff using Linux desktops, I've watched the broadcast hit VT 1-6 and be ignored by every staff member who runs comfortably in X, like almost all desktop users do.
And since we *are* talking about desktops, then I think its you who seems to be missing something.
I disagree, Windows has only one advantage over Linux and that is games. This may be a problem on the home desktop, but on the business desktop, it is not relevant.
Okay, here's a couple:
* I launch an app. For whatever reason, it fails to start. Smart apps like Galeon and Evolution provide this functionality (Xine, for example), but most other will simply not start with absolutely no explanation why. Lack of feedback is incredibly frustrating for users.
* I'd like to install a program. Witch a clever app like urpmi or APT, I can easily type the name of the app I want and downlaod / install it. its a great way to find Linux software. But to do that, I had to learn that `update' meant refesh the list of avaliable software, as opposed to `upgrade' which meant to upgrade my system. And that `rpm' handles queries of what's installed, but I should use a seperate program called `apt' to fetch and install stuff. New users shouldn't have to learn things like that. Where's our equivalent, of, say, the QNX installer? Something that has a bug button called `refresh list of available software', integrated help, that has clear labels and handles everything you need toi install apps, whether local or from repositories, in one app, as well as allowing end users to simply *browse* what's available. Synaptic can sort of do that, but it does a very poor job. I haven't looked at the other APT frontends but Synaptic supposed to be the best.
* And...
- My hard drive can be melting but Linux won't tell me.
- My system could be slowing to a crawl because of a scheduled task and Linux won't tell me. -
- My system administrator could be telling me to get the hell of the network as he's about to bring our server down for maintenance but Linux won't tell me
This is because KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, FVWM and every other user environment won't tell you the things you NEED to know unless you're running xconsole all the time. No messages, no `hdc is melting', no talk, nothing. The end result is that horrible things can happen behind users backs with generally no explanation from the interface. This is *really, *really* poor.
* Lack of understanding of basic user needs, especially for command line apps. `Hi, there's no man page for this, you need the info page'. Well then show me the fucking info page, you're a computer, its not that hard. People still write apps which say `you need to be root to run this'. How about talking to some generic library that can work out if I'm allowed to su to another account with the permissions (typically root, hopefully not), and *ask me* to enter in the damned password. You know I want to run the tool, you know I can run the tool, so let me run the fucking tool.
Anyway, that's my morning rant over and done with. Hopefully someone with the requisite skills is listening (I'm more of a sysadmin and I make a pretty poor programmer). If anybody ever changes anything based on this I'd be uber grateful, and if you're wondering, I'm slowly workign to changing it myself.
I hope that Mozilla 1.0 will have native widget support for Windows 2005.
If you want native widget support support on Linux now, with the added bonus of your web browser not being a flaming pile of shit (sorry, I truly believe that although gecko rocks, XUL is still unusable on every box I've tried) use Galeon. Version 1.03, which works with Mozilla 0.98 has just been released.
Linux RPM packages for both should be available soon.
Microsoft have FreeBSD servers running parts of hotmail, but also have Linux servers providing some of their DNS service for microsoft.com, as their DNS is outsourced to another company that chooses their own OS.
I honestly can't remember which PT was talking about when he said this - just that he famously said DNS wasn't a critical function of a network (right after a DNS outage proved hm very very wrong).
I'm well aware that FreeBSD isn't Linux, just as I'm sure you're aware of the difference between `their' and `there', although we're both a little confused right now ; )
I'm not really surprised by this. Following the recent long Microsoft DNS outage when it was revealed that quite a few of Micrposoft's own DNS servers were running Linux (not to mention they use akamai for their downloads), Paul Thurrot came out with the classic report that although this might be true `its proves Open Source zealots wrong as Linux wasn't being used for anything mission critical'
What the fuck? According to WHAT kind of logic is DNS not mission critical? If it its not critical, let's take those DNS servers offline (both Microsoft's and WinInfo's) and see how long either MS or Thurrot last.
The ans wer is, by the way, that it doesn't affect Debian in any meaningful way.
I disagree.
* The standard does not require that Debian drop its own packaging scheme.
* The standard does not mandate the use of RPM packaging within the distribution.
The standard mandates that RPM is the preferred packaging system for people creating applications to run on Linux. Debian;s LSB support is based on the existence of Alien. I don't know too many Debian people who would trust alien to install large parts of their system.
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it.
I never found that to be a deficiency in Lilo myself.
Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures.
Again, as a new stable distribution tested kernel (which is what I run on my workstation adn server boxes) comes out maybe twice a year, I frankly don't see the need for this.
So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
Indeed. Grub works well for testers. For the rest of us:
* Grub uses a completely different device syntax than my OS which I can't be bothered learning
* Grub has an arcane syntax if you do actually want some kind of interactive bootloader
Grub advocates also seem to miss two points:
* Grub has a pretty menu and can boot beyong cylinder 1024 / 8GB. Lilo has been able to do this for a couple of years too. Moot point.
* Grub complies to the `miltiboot specification'. Seeing as the Grub people wrote the `multiboot specification', who cares?
Mike
I like APT but there's a couple of reasons why I stick with Red Hat - I like their current yet well tested AC kernels, kudzu, setup, installer and a couple of other tools. Its always nice to just buy a network card and install it by sticking it in my damned machine and turning back on - no hunting for which driver module matches the hardware. A lot of software (Open Source apps like FreeSWAN, closed source apps like Kylix) seem to be tested on RH before other Linux distributions.
Anyway, APT has been available for Red Hat for some time now and its how I update most o my boxes. There's a few good publically avaliable repositories and more on the way - namely all the Red Hat CDs, all the updates as they come out, FreshRPMs, and Gnomehide. I have around 2.8GB of (binary) software from 9 different sources on an APT repository I maintain at my workplace, all of which are tested against 7.2. Sure, 2.8 is less than 6GB (the amount on Debian repositories), but its got everythign we need - acroread, postfix, enhydra, kylix open edition, just about everything else.
There's also the fact that the ability to install RPM packages is part of the LSB, and alien doesn't seem to handle this reliably.
If you're interested, download apt packages from Freshrpms
the people who gave us "Pussy Galore" and "Ivana Onatopp" better not be whining about use of double entendre!
:)
You forgot Plenty O'Toole, who Bond assumed was named after her father.