A more fine grained access control scheme, to allow more complex [but necessary in most modern security schemes] permissions on an object if desired or necessary. Why does SSHD run with permissions to make devices?
The Unix philosophy is to limit users permissions to the bare minimum neccesaryu for the account to perform their functions. Unfortunately, the permission scheme on most popular Unixes stops this reality from occuring. sudo is a hack. There's no way I can give full control to an folder to the root users, read and execute permission to one group, read only permission to another group, and have all other access denied. This is an impediment for security.
Run top and see all those daemons running as root. They don't need te be, and they shouldn't be. There;s two reasons why they do - either bad programming, or the limits of traditional Unix style permissions.
But not all Unixs use rwxs. In fact, all the trusted varieties [AFAIK] of Unixes run with ACL based systems. There is a version for Linux called Linux Trustees [actually Trustees are difffeent and better than ACLs, but apply the same basic concepts of fine grained permissions].
Trustees needs to go into the next major kernel.
Yes, I realize this will involve rewriting most software [even in only a minor way for most]. But this has been done before for other utilities. Some degree of backware compatibility could be included into the scheme.
> 2. Quark
adobe's thing, framemaker. heard rumors it may be coming back to life on linux. This is probably your strongest point.
Framemaker is a document editing tool suitable for novels and network documentation. You'll never find anyone using frame for the purposed of Quark: magazines, posters, flyers, etc. They are two fundamentally different systems, one focusing on document structure independent of layout, the other focusing on layout.
Oh, and Framemaker on Linux's interface was pretty much unusable shite. Wake up closed source vendors: Linux users expect polished interfaces, not the same motif shite you churn out for Solaris.
> 3. 3DSMax or Maya. Take yer pick.
Blender. Moonlight Atelier. Povray. IMHO, yes Blender. The other two perhaps not.
> 7. Excel
Gnumeric. Star Office. Applixware.
StarOffice lacks features many consider to be fundamental to spreadsheet, most notably dynamic cross tabs [aka whatever MS calls them]. WPO2K has them, but it runs like a dog due to WINE. Applixware has a bizarre interface [yes, version 5] and though I know little aout the spreadsheet, the word processor lacks a word count. Enough said. Gnumeric won't import MS Office very well.
> 4. distributed network renderers for the above
ever watched Titanic? You've got him there.
> 5. Non-linear video editing systems
(Avid, Media100, Broadcast2000
BC200 lacks a few major features, according to a professional video producer I know. But MainActor [also aviliable for Linux] is damned fine.
>8. Powerpoint
Star Office. Mayber others I don't know about. StarImpress is actually a very good presentations app.
> 9. Outlook
yeah, like you need a gui to read email. mail, mailx, mh, mutt, pine on the CLI off thetop of my head. www-email in any of several browser, and this includes calendar functionality. Oh and of course the 20+ gui email clients (kmail and balsa come to mind)
I don't mean to be rude, but you don't understand what Outlook is at all. Some people do indeed need a GUI to read email, manage their time, schedule apointments, read attachments, use HTML email, create an addressbook, etc. It allows them to fit more text on the screen. it allows them to easily visualize their data [for example, one can look at Outlook and instantly see what new or otherwise. it provides standard controls to format their messages. It provides a neat spell checker. From a 24 x 7 Linux user, Outlook is great.
And yes, I know its security sucks. We're not talking about that, and that it runs scripts by default has nothing to do with its interface.
> 10. $GAME (Everything except Quake3 I guess).
www.loki.com for starters. More are out there.
Agreed. Linux gaming is getting much better. ATI and [sometimes] NViDia cards are benchmarking well under Linux and the range of titles is increasing.
> Academia? Government? Military?
hah. 70% of the scientific and engineering departments at my university run all-Unix-and-mostly-linux-at-that shops. I don't work for the government or the military, but they're hardly shining examples of wise procurement decisions in most cases.
Many of the government departments I've done some work for [Australian DOJ and SES] are mainly Unix based, with some NT. Linux is starting to infiltrate them as well.
The Australian military ITs department [allegedly] wouldn't know security if it bit them in the arse, and are still converting from Netware to NT4.
>From where I sit, installing Linux on a workstation reduces its functionality.
The problem is that you are apparently sitting in the short bus.:-)
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Reliability goes up, and downtime is the biggest part of TCO. Linux has a stable base and needs good GUI, Windows has a good GUI and needs a stable base. I see Windows as having the largest task ahead of it. Linux is also advancing more quickly than Windows is.
That the binary packages are compiled with palm-utils support in is their problem (unless you think it's important 'nuff to break off subpackages to deal with the problem)
Actually, I think most of us package managment types would much rather go for the latter option, not because the palm pilot support is `important' [it may or may ot be] but that's optional extra functionality. In fact, seperating evolutions libraries from the actual app [for use by other apps] would be good.
What non-free software has taken off on Linux that had even one half-as-good--or even just promising--free competitor? This is a major
hurdle to overcome.
Games. Right now, closed source games are vastly mmore popular to Linux users than Open Source games.
The most generous interpretation of the above is that freedom should be clearly secondary to functionality. A less generous interpretation is that freedom is not important at all.
Yes. Is this a bad thing? Many of us choose the best tool for the job, and simply want the solution that's going to work best. We don't use Linux because of the fact that its free, but because it is reliable and the particular featureset we neeed for a particular task. We know that Linux being Open Source contributer to its reliability, but when comparing, say, LInux 2.2 NFS and NIS to Solaris, we will benchmark and buy Solaris if the benchmark and other factors prompt us to do so.
You might find the concept unusual, but best tool for the job is actually more popular the OSS, though I'd like to think there's an overlap between the two. If closed source software produces good software, then I'll use it. Though being Open Source often acts as a feature in itself, and may even be necessary depending on the circumstances [eg, embedded devices]. But there's more to ther suitability of software to a particular task than licensing.
Seriously - it encourages the use of a vastly insecure legacy protocol amongst users, which is unforunately popular enough. Telnet is deprecated by SSH, which is nearly as ubiquitous and just as cross platform as Telnet, in addition to allowing X authentication that's possible to understand, and, or course, a reasonable level of security [though even SSH isn't perfect]. Most large environments these days are beginning to put Telnet on their list of banned procols, even within their internal networks, now that router manufacturers have discovered SSH. Vote with your dollars against the ones that haven't.
I'd like to think the Slashdot guys have enough sense to avoid installing Telnet clients and servers on their machines. God knows most Linux distributions don't, but then again, they install sendmail and wuftpd on workstation machines anyway, and generally love daemons which run as root.
The Transgaming DirectX path is distributed as a diff to Wine 20001222. The WINE site seems extremely poorly designed, with a series of sites [oddly labelled `mirrors' despite the fact none of them contaisn the same software]. I'm still hunting down the list for packages, or even source tarballs, but they're damned difficult to find and most of the sites mentioned are a little stale.
Sould someone please post a link to Wine 20001222? RPMs and DEBs would be great, but source will do.
the only thing stopping me from doing my job on Linux is Microsoft Exchange Server...inability to "natively" (i.e. without POP3/IMAP) interoperate with Exchange is a showstopper for any corporate installation.
HP Openmail is also available for Linux right now and supports Exchanage based mail delivery to Outlook and Entourage, with automated migration options.
The Rules of DVD and how they hurt consumers [not just RPC and CSS]
* Consumers have to pay inflated local prices, becuase unlike books and CDs, we can't get content overaseas at resonable prices that works with our system
* Limited range of titles - especially those of us who are fans of foreign cinema
* Being forced to wait until a movie has been released at the cinemas locally and had a full run before we can own a film. As an example of that, Bring it On has just been released in Australia. In the US, its been out on DVD for quite some time.
* Inability for consumers to create content on DVDRs due to the relevant bits already being pre-written as part of licensing for the technology
* Users are forced to sit through anti-copyright statements and DVD consortium ads, with a disabled fast forward button. Many movies force the user to sit through the same copyright statement in a variety of languages before the movie starts. The DVD versions of current [one minute or so] VHS anti-copyright advertisements are inevitable.
But the wonderful thing about those revolutionaries you mention is that they fought for all their people - even the ones who couldn't fight, the women and children, etc.
Nobody remembers the revolutionaries who didn't.
If you want to change the way computing works with Open Source, congratulations. The world will be better off. But not everyone can fight with you - they don't have the skills in that particular area. But they can pay your slary while you code, or promote your work to the world, or document it, and any number of non coding contributions. or they can do nothing at all if they choose.
He IS contributing. He's giving you feedback. Regardless, stop being selfish and give something to someone else without expecting something in return.
As someone who uses Linux perpetually, and who prefers it over Windows, I'd like to say this man has an excellent point. If we don't acknowledge what's needs improvement, then we can't improve it.
I'm an Open Source writer. I like StarOffice. But I can't use it because I need to write to 450 word pages, and StarOffice won't let me count the words in a selection [just the whole document]. It uses its own font system which doesn't include Verdana or a similarly readable font. It lacks antialiasing, which also slows me down from reading small sized text.
Yes, all these things will be fixed soon. That's good - people like Keith Packard can look at the current state of X and see what's wrong. Most Linux developers and users have the maturity to do this. A vocal few don't - so please don't shoot this guy down in flames.
Has RedHat, the thing presumably most ZDNet readers think is Linux, grown larger than one CD lately? [Last time I looked, the other two CDs in the box were bonus bits and source code]
Yes it has. Workstation installs still use a single CDs, but Server installs use two. And documentation is now on a seperate CD, which you'll end up installing anyway. I'm not saying that's bad or good, but it certainly is the case.
But you forgot to mention how your Mandrake system [if it was 7.2 and you clicked `workstation'] installed and turned on sendmail. Nothing against Mandrake [its the best desktop Linux IMHO] but many Linux distributions have a habit of installing large server apps in workstation installs, as well as useless bits and pieces like xeyes, manual pages in portuguese [if you just clicked English in the installer], etc.
If Linux distributions are bloated, that's the only way it would be argued. But I do agree with you're main point, and Linux is still useful out of the box whereas Windows isn't.
And the kicker is that it should NOT have any of the source or docs. Make it so that you can change everything without needing to recomile anything. Now I'm not sure if thats possible but if it isn't then Linux is screwed on the home pc, because Ma is never ever ever going to compile a damn thing.
Its entirely possible. And you're right, if it weren't, Linux would be screwed on the desktop. But it is.
I have the skills to compile apps, but I generally avoid it and if I find something I like which is not packaged, I get it from rpmfind [and debian users have it even easier with apt].
The only thing I've compiled on my main system, being used at least ten hours a day for regular Joe Blow stuff [StarOffice, Napster, net surfing, email, etc] is Open Media System and Xine, for playing DVDs.
I agree. But although the README file for the kernel calls Linux a `Unix clone', I'd beg to differ. John Maddog Hall said that Linux is the standard Unix. And I'm inclined to believe him. Linux improves Unix beyond what most Unixes are.
So many `standard Unix' elements have remained stagnant for so long. Linux has improved, and replaced them, maintaining backward compatibility. Its quite clear that Linux developers know that while Unix principles are good, previous implementations have been poor. And they're willing to throw out the legacy junk for the sake of improvement, while maintaining backward compatibility.
DevFS. The XFree86 teams new rendering system for X. GTK and QT. KDE and GNOME. Simple Directmedia Layer. All these things replace what's commonly regarded as the Unix `standard' way of doing things. Regular/dev, X11R6, motif and openlook, CDE and Openwindows, and err... nothing like a standard cross platform multimedia API. Yes, many of these things aren't part of Linux the kernel, but they're common parts of Linux the Operating System.
Linux uses much Unix philosophy. Linux is Unix compatible. Linux implements many of the features of Unix. But Linux is, in terms of philosophy and community, not Unix. And its more than beards versus goatees.:-)
Unix is designed to be...well...Unix. Security.
Unix systems are locked down more by default. But Unix rwxs permissions suck, compared to POSIX ACLs [most secure versions of Unix OSs use them, and I wish Linux would too]. Far too many daemons run as root due to a lack of a fine grained permission system. The idea of all system administrators logging in as root isn't particularly well thought out. Default Unix permissions are goold, the default permission system is terrible.
Small program to do specific task.
Indeed. But Linux also has a heap of friendly big programs to tie all those little apps together. There's nothing wroing with this approach for Joe Blow.
Very focused on the developer/researcher/other academia nut.
I guess the thing here is, one persons unbloated command line firewall can be another guys icon filled desktop system. It has that flexibility. The mentality of most Linux interface developers is to maintain that sleekness and keep the small components while providing something friendly for people to use. cdparanoia + bladeenc + GTK + GNOME + more = GRip. That program Joe Blow clicks on to turn his CDs into MP3s. But Dave Digital Audio engineer still has the freedom to use those individual parts, and the beauty of the system is, that if Dave doesn't like bladeenc, he can substitute another encoder without too much difficulty. Even if he had the source for RealJukebox, it would be a much more odfficult task, due to the monolithic nature of the app.
Unix and Linux are trying to simplify their complex backgrounds, where as the commercial OSes are working from a simplier standpoint, giving out more hardcore details to those who know to look for them. Personally, I believe that's the smarter thing to do.
Firstly, most Linux distributions are commercial, in that they are given away to generate revenue to the distributor. The opposite of Open Source is closed source. The opposite of commercial is noncommerical. Whatever the status of a project, they have no bearing on eachother.
Secondly, I think its harder for a large, unmodular system to break itself down into little parts than it is for a small moduler system to create larger, friendlier apps. NT has proven itself [via WinCE / PocketPC / NT Embedded] to be much less down-scalable than Linux. Windows 2000s recovery console [command line only mode] is only minimally functional, and you'll never have the opportunity to take it to Linux's level. Finally, its much more difficult to replace components of such a large system as NT / 2000. For example, integrating IE into Explorer was insanely unstable until they got it right (and yes, they did, eventually after IE 4.0, 4.01, 4.01SP1, 4.01SP2].
How do you define what is in a package system?
How do you define what is/should be flagged as a 'dependancy'?
I define it differently from you. That's fair enough, but my main point is that every other system which labels itself as a package management system defines it similarly to my definition, and Slackware users are generally the only persons who share the other view.
It would seem that this means Slackware's package system is at least effective enough for me to do such things as upgrade a major part of my system, no?
Just because you can upgrade a major chunk of your system with a tool does not prove that tool is a packaging system. I just upgraded some major components of a Windows 2000 machine using Windows Update [yes, I use and prefer Linux]. That doesn't mean Windows Update is a package management system.
Clearly, you would not want your package system to remove all dependancies. In this example, your system would be useless without the glibc libraries.
When you remove a package, a packaging system may prompt to remove all packages dependent on that package. Not all packages that package is dependent on. You seem a little confused about this.
My point is that there is more than one way to define a package and its uses. Slackware is slightly different,
Agreed on both points. Slackware's definition of a packaging system is a very rare and unusual one. It doesn't match the definition of `packaging systems' that AFAIK all other packaging systems use. That's Sun's, Red Hat's, Debian's, Microsoft SMS's, and others.
Finally, if packages were so simple and definable, why are there so many package systems available?
I agree. Just because soemthing is a packaging system, it doesn't mean its god. Many OSs get along fine without packaging systems. Slackware might be a great OS, it just doesn't have a packaging system but any defiition of `packaging system' other than that of Slackware users.
As a common example, this happens because fooApp.rpm lists the "libglade" (version >= 1.2) package as its dependency and I have libglade-1.2" (version 1.2.4) installed.
That package isn't actually misnamed. Its the standard way of naming RPMs.
[packagename]-[version]-[packageversion and extra info]-[platform]
libglade-0.14-1k-i586.rpm
for example.
I've installed around 150 non vendor produced packages on my Mandrake workstation. I've very rarely had to use --force - and mainly because I took the rather unusual setup of replacing glibc with hack-glibc, and other packages are dependent on the name.
Conventions for package naming are also likely to improve on RPM based distros, as Debians excellent packagaing uidelines are used as a basic for RPM based APT repositories.
Debian already has these features and goes quite far to eliminating many of the problems you've mentioned.
Who made you the authority in determining the requirements for a "package management system"?
Nothing does, and I'm not. As said in the original post, what most people [IMHO] define as packaging systems contains those criteria. And [for a something more concrete than opinion] that every other software installation method apart from Slackwares that describes itself as a packaging system contains these features.
Draw your own conclusions from the latter, but mine is that the popular definition of a package management system includes dependencies as a base feature.
There are conventions for RPM naming. They're usually stuck to, apart from the odd CVS extracted package, where there doesn't seem to be much of a standard [CVS packages are very rare though].
To use your example, seach for libglade on RPMFind. And see, out of the hundreds of results, which packages are misnamed.
Err, How about some facts to back up your assertions?
How about reading the post you're responding to?
In which I maintain that dependencies are an integral part of any packaging system. Your link doesn't refute that. Yes, Slackware archives have some meta information, but do not meet the other requirements listed above to be classified as a package management system.
slackware packages are fairly primitive. To the best of my knowledge, they don't support dependencies.
Then in my opinion, and from poular definition, they're not packages. They're software archives. A packaging system is a set of rules for software installation, with not only the archived software, but instructions to install it, versioning information, and meta information about how packages relate to each other. These are all key elements of every other popular package management system, and though there's no dictionary definition of software package [or is there?], they form the basis for the current popular definition.
It seems Slackware is just renaming their current technology to be competitive with DEB and RPM based distributions. As more polished, easier to operate Debian versions arise, and APT for RPM grows in popularity, there's going to be a huge difference in software management techniques and installation ease between other distributions and slackware. Linux needs packages - an Open Source system is fairly compartmentalized and even regular user apps may consist of many other applications brought together. If there's no centralized management then things fall apart very quickly.
ATI has long had a reputation of putting out awful drivers. If they manage to put out decent drivers and improve their technical support, then they might be a worthy contender.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing! As of two weeks ago, Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pros running OpenGL under Linux Quake 3 [as an example] now generally outperform Windows, thanks to drivers ATI commissioned from Precision Insight. Download them from ATIs site.
Cybersource uses Dreamweaver for designing all its client sites, as well as its own site. Macromedia have chosen to support Coldfusion, JSP, and ASP with Dreamweaver Ultradev. As far as I know, they seem to be extremely ignorant over PHP [which surely has more market share than JSP, at least].
My suggestion? Send a polite note to Dreamweaver with your license numbers of the existing product. Tell them you'd upgrade for PHP enabled Untradev.
Same with anyone reading this. And I'll do it too. Dreamweaver is by far the most popular web dev app these days and PHP support is a must have feature for many of us creating dynamic web sites.
Slashdot Mirror
A more fine grained access control scheme, to allow more complex [but necessary in most modern security schemes] permissions on an object if desired or necessary. Why does SSHD run with permissions to make devices?
The Unix philosophy is to limit users permissions to the bare minimum neccesaryu for the account to perform their functions. Unfortunately, the permission scheme on most popular Unixes stops this reality from occuring. sudo is a hack. There's no way I can give full control to an folder to the root users, read and execute permission to one group, read only permission to another group, and have all other access denied. This is an impediment for security.
Run top and see all those daemons running as root. They don't need te be, and they shouldn't be. There;s two reasons why they do - either bad programming, or the limits of traditional Unix style permissions.
But not all Unixs use rwxs. In fact, all the trusted varieties [AFAIK] of Unixes run with ACL based systems. There is a version for Linux called Linux Trustees [actually Trustees are difffeent and better than ACLs, but apply the same basic concepts of fine grained permissions].
Trustees needs to go into the next major kernel.
Yes, I realize this will involve rewriting most software [even in only a minor way for most]. But this has been done before for other utilities. Some degree of backware compatibility could be included into the scheme.
Linux Trustees for Linux 3.0!
> 2. Quark
:-)
adobe's thing, framemaker. heard rumors it may be coming back to life on linux. This is probably your strongest point.
Framemaker is a document editing tool suitable for novels and network documentation. You'll never find anyone using frame for the purposed of Quark: magazines, posters, flyers, etc. They are two fundamentally different systems, one focusing on document structure independent of layout, the other focusing on layout.
Oh, and Framemaker on Linux's interface was pretty much unusable shite. Wake up closed source vendors: Linux users expect polished interfaces, not the same motif shite you churn out for Solaris.
> 3. 3DSMax or Maya. Take yer pick.
Blender. Moonlight Atelier. Povray.
IMHO, yes Blender. The other two perhaps not.
> 7. Excel
Gnumeric. Star Office. Applixware.
StarOffice lacks features many consider to be fundamental to spreadsheet, most notably dynamic cross tabs [aka whatever MS calls them]. WPO2K has them, but it runs like a dog due to WINE. Applixware has a bizarre interface [yes, version 5] and though I know little aout the spreadsheet, the word processor lacks a word count. Enough said. Gnumeric won't import MS Office very well.
> 4. distributed network renderers for the above
ever watched Titanic?
You've got him there.
> 5. Non-linear video editing systems
(Avid, Media100, Broadcast2000
BC200 lacks a few major features, according to a professional video producer I know. But MainActor [also aviliable for Linux] is damned fine.
>8. Powerpoint
Star Office. Mayber others I don't know about.
StarImpress is actually a very good presentations app.
> 9. Outlook
yeah, like you need a gui to read email.
mail, mailx, mh, mutt, pine on the CLI off thetop of my head. www-email in any of several browser, and this includes calendar functionality. Oh and of course the 20+ gui email clients (kmail and balsa come to mind)
I don't mean to be rude, but you don't understand what Outlook is at all. Some people do indeed need a GUI to read email, manage their time, schedule apointments, read attachments, use HTML email, create an addressbook, etc. It allows them to fit more text on the screen. it allows them to easily visualize their data [for example, one can look at Outlook and instantly see what new or otherwise. it provides standard controls to format their messages. It provides a neat spell checker. From a 24 x 7 Linux user, Outlook is great.
And yes, I know its security sucks. We're not talking about that, and that it runs scripts by default has nothing to do with its interface.
> 10. $GAME (Everything except Quake3 I guess).
www.loki.com for starters. More are out there.
Agreed. Linux gaming is getting much better. ATI and [sometimes] NViDia cards are benchmarking well under Linux and the range of titles is increasing.
> Academia? Government? Military?
hah. 70% of the scientific and engineering departments at my university run all-Unix-and-mostly-linux-at-that shops. I don't work for the government or the military, but they're hardly shining examples of wise procurement decisions in most cases.
Many of the government departments I've done some work for [Australian DOJ and SES] are mainly Unix based, with some NT. Linux is starting to infiltrate them as well.
The Australian military ITs department [allegedly] wouldn't know security if it bit them in the arse, and are still converting from Netware to NT4.
>From where I sit, installing Linux on a workstation reduces its functionality.
The problem is that you are apparently sitting in the short bus.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Reliability goes up, and downtime is the biggest part of TCO. Linux has a stable base and needs good GUI, Windows has a good GUI and needs a stable base. I see Windows as having the largest task ahead of it. Linux is also advancing more quickly than Windows is.
The FAQ uses `hackers' as its term for malicious attackers, rather than engineers.
Surely the Open Source world knows of this distinction, and this could be reflected in the FAQ?
That the binary packages are compiled with palm-utils support in is their problem (unless you think it's important 'nuff to break off subpackages to deal with the problem)
Actually, I think most of us package managment types would much rather go for the latter option, not because the palm pilot support is `important' [it may or may ot be] but that's optional extra functionality. In fact, seperating evolutions libraries from the actual app [for use by other apps] would be good.
What non-free software has taken off on Linux that had even one half-as-good--or even just promising--free competitor? This is a major
hurdle to overcome.
Games. Right now, closed source games are vastly mmore popular to Linux users than Open Source games.
The most generous interpretation of the above is that freedom should be clearly secondary to functionality. A less generous interpretation is that freedom is not important at all.
Yes. Is this a bad thing? Many of us choose the best tool for the job, and simply want the solution that's going to work best. We don't use Linux because of the fact that its free, but because it is reliable and the particular featureset we neeed for a particular task. We know that Linux being Open Source contributer to its reliability, but when comparing, say, LInux 2.2 NFS and NIS to Solaris, we will benchmark and buy Solaris if the benchmark and other factors prompt us to do so.
You might find the concept unusual, but best tool for the job is actually more popular the OSS, though I'd like to think there's an overlap between the two. If closed source software produces good software, then I'll use it. Though being Open Source often acts as a feature in itself, and may even be necessary depending on the circumstances [eg, embedded devices]. But there's more to ther suitability of software to a particular task than licensing.
Or, you could pick up a Toshiba Libretto on eBay and pop in a 20GB drive for an MP3 jukebox you can telnet from.
The story referred to Telnet casually, endorsing its common use. The above post was not off topic.
Thanks. To make myself clear, I was talking about WineHQ specifically when I was commenting how badly the downloads are arranged and managed.
Mirrors should have the same content. Release info for a particular stable build should have a link to download it in different formats.
Seriously - it encourages the use of a vastly insecure legacy protocol amongst users, which is unforunately popular enough. Telnet is deprecated by SSH, which is nearly as ubiquitous and just as cross platform as Telnet, in addition to allowing X authentication that's possible to understand, and, or course, a reasonable level of security [though even SSH isn't perfect]. Most large environments these days are beginning to put Telnet on their list of banned procols, even within their internal networks, now that router manufacturers have discovered SSH. Vote with your dollars against the ones that haven't.
I'd like to think the Slashdot guys have enough sense to avoid installing Telnet clients and servers on their machines. God knows most Linux distributions don't, but then again, they install sendmail and wuftpd on workstation machines anyway, and generally love daemons which run as root.
The Transgaming DirectX path is distributed as a diff to Wine 20001222. The WINE site seems extremely poorly designed, with a series of sites [oddly labelled `mirrors' despite the fact none of them contaisn the same software]. I'm still hunting down the list for packages, or even source tarballs, but they're damned difficult to find and most of the sites mentioned are a little stale.
Sould someone please post a link to Wine 20001222? RPMs and DEBs would be great, but source will do.
the only thing stopping me from doing my job on Linux is Microsoft Exchange Server...inability to "natively" (i.e. without POP3/IMAP) interoperate with Exchange is a showstopper for any corporate installation.
HP Openmail is also available for Linux right now and supports Exchanage based mail delivery to Outlook and Entourage, with automated migration options.
The Rules of DVD and how they hurt consumers [not just RPC and CSS]
* Consumers have to pay inflated local prices, becuase unlike books and CDs, we can't get content overaseas at resonable prices that works with our system
* Limited range of titles - especially those of us who are fans of foreign cinema
* Being forced to wait until a movie has been released at the cinemas locally and had a full run before we can own a film. As an example of that, Bring it On has just been released in Australia. In the US, its been out on DVD for quite some time.
* Inability for consumers to create content on DVDRs due to the relevant bits already being pre-written as part of licensing for the technology
* Users are forced to sit through anti-copyright statements and DVD consortium ads, with a disabled fast forward button. Many movies force the user to sit through the same copyright statement in a variety of languages before the movie starts. The DVD versions of current [one minute or so] VHS anti-copyright advertisements are inevitable.
But the wonderful thing about those revolutionaries you mention is that they fought for all their people - even the ones who couldn't fight, the women and children, etc.
Nobody remembers the revolutionaries who didn't.
If you want to change the way computing works with Open Source, congratulations. The world will be better off. But not everyone can fight with you - they don't have the skills in that particular area. But they can pay your slary while you code, or promote your work to the world, or document it, and any number of non coding contributions. or they can do nothing at all if they choose.
He IS contributing. He's giving you feedback. Regardless, stop being selfish and give something to someone else without expecting something in return.
As someone who uses Linux perpetually, and who prefers it over Windows, I'd like to say this man has an excellent point. If we don't acknowledge what's needs improvement, then we can't improve it.
I'm an Open Source writer. I like StarOffice. But I can't use it because I need to write to 450 word pages, and StarOffice won't let me count the words in a selection [just the whole document]. It uses its own font system which doesn't include Verdana or a similarly readable font. It lacks antialiasing, which also slows me down from reading small sized text.
Yes, all these things will be fixed soon. That's good - people like Keith Packard can look at the current state of X and see what's wrong. Most Linux developers and users have the maturity to do this. A vocal few don't - so please don't shoot this guy down in flames.
Has RedHat, the thing presumably most ZDNet readers think is Linux, grown larger than one CD lately? [Last time I looked, the other two CDs in the box were bonus bits and source code]
Yes it has. Workstation installs still use a single CDs, but Server installs use two. And documentation is now on a seperate CD, which you'll end up installing anyway. I'm not saying that's bad or good, but it certainly is the case.
That's an excellent point, and entirely true.
But you forgot to mention how your Mandrake system [if it was 7.2 and you clicked `workstation'] installed and turned on sendmail. Nothing against Mandrake [its the best desktop Linux IMHO] but many Linux distributions have a habit of installing large server apps in workstation installs, as well as useless bits and pieces like xeyes, manual pages in portuguese [if you just clicked English in the installer], etc.
If Linux distributions are bloated, that's the only way it would be argued. But I do agree with you're main point, and Linux is still useful out of the box whereas Windows isn't.
And the kicker is that it should NOT have any of the source or docs. Make it so that you can change everything without needing to recomile anything. Now I'm not sure if thats possible but if it isn't then Linux is screwed on the home pc, because Ma is never ever ever going to compile a damn thing.
Its entirely possible. And you're right, if it weren't, Linux would be screwed on the desktop. But it is.
I have the skills to compile apps, but I generally avoid it and if I find something I like which is not packaged, I get it from rpmfind [and debian users have it even easier with apt].
The only thing I've compiled on my main system, being used at least ten hours a day for regular Joe Blow stuff [StarOffice, Napster, net surfing, email, etc] is Open Media System and Xine, for playing DVDs.
Unix is designed to be...well...Unix.
/dev, X11R6, motif and openlook, CDE and Openwindows, and err... nothing like a standard cross platform multimedia API. Yes, many of these things aren't part of Linux the kernel, but they're common parts of Linux the Operating System.
:-)
I agree. But although the README file for the kernel calls Linux a `Unix clone', I'd beg to differ. John Maddog Hall said that Linux is the standard Unix. And I'm inclined to believe him. Linux improves Unix beyond what most Unixes are.
So many `standard Unix' elements have remained stagnant for so long. Linux has improved, and replaced them, maintaining backward compatibility. Its quite clear that Linux developers know that while Unix principles are good, previous implementations have been poor. And they're willing to throw out the legacy junk for the sake of improvement, while maintaining backward compatibility.
DevFS. The XFree86 teams new rendering system for X. GTK and QT. KDE and GNOME. Simple Directmedia Layer. All these things replace what's commonly regarded as the Unix `standard' way of doing things. Regular
Linux uses much Unix philosophy. Linux is Unix compatible. Linux implements many of the features of Unix. But Linux is, in terms of philosophy and community, not Unix. And its more than beards versus goatees.
Unix is designed to be...well...Unix. Security.
Unix systems are locked down more by default. But Unix rwxs permissions suck, compared to POSIX ACLs [most secure versions of Unix OSs use them, and I wish Linux would too]. Far too many daemons run as root due to a lack of a fine grained permission system. The idea of all system administrators logging in as root isn't particularly well thought out. Default Unix permissions are goold, the default permission system is terrible.
Small program to do specific task.
Indeed. But Linux also has a heap of friendly big programs to tie all those little apps together. There's nothing wroing with this approach for Joe Blow.
Very focused on the developer/researcher/other academia nut.
I guess the thing here is, one persons unbloated command line firewall can be another guys icon filled desktop system. It has that flexibility. The mentality of most Linux interface developers is to maintain that sleekness and keep the small components while providing something friendly for people to use. cdparanoia + bladeenc + GTK + GNOME + more = GRip. That program Joe Blow clicks on to turn his CDs into MP3s. But Dave Digital Audio engineer still has the freedom to use those individual parts, and the beauty of the system is, that if Dave doesn't like bladeenc, he can substitute another encoder without too much difficulty. Even if he had the source for RealJukebox, it would be a much more odfficult task, due to the monolithic nature of the app.
Unix and Linux are trying to simplify their complex backgrounds, where as the commercial OSes are working from a simplier standpoint, giving out more hardcore details to those who know to look for them. Personally, I believe that's the smarter thing to do.
Firstly, most Linux distributions are commercial, in that they are given away to generate revenue to the distributor. The opposite of Open Source is closed source. The opposite of commercial is noncommerical. Whatever the status of a project, they have no bearing on eachother.
Secondly, I think its harder for a large, unmodular system to break itself down into little parts than it is for a small moduler system to create larger, friendlier apps. NT has proven itself [via WinCE / PocketPC / NT Embedded] to be much less down-scalable than Linux. Windows 2000s recovery console [command line only mode] is only minimally functional, and you'll never have the opportunity to take it to Linux's level. Finally, its much more difficult to replace components of such a large system as NT / 2000. For example, integrating IE into Explorer was insanely unstable until they got it right (and yes, they did, eventually after IE 4.0, 4.01, 4.01SP1, 4.01SP2].
How do you define what is in a package system?
How do you define what is/should be flagged as a 'dependancy'?
I define it differently from you. That's fair enough, but my main point is that every other system which labels itself as a package management system defines it similarly to my definition, and Slackware users are generally the only persons who share the other view.
It would seem that this means Slackware's package system is at least effective enough for me to do such things as upgrade a major part of my system, no?
Just because you can upgrade a major chunk of your system with a tool does not prove that tool is a packaging system. I just upgraded some major components of a Windows 2000 machine using Windows Update [yes, I use and prefer Linux]. That doesn't mean Windows Update is a package management system.
Clearly, you would not want your package system to remove all dependancies. In this example, your system would be useless without the glibc libraries.
When you remove a package, a packaging system may prompt to remove all packages dependent on that package. Not all packages that package is dependent on. You seem a little confused about this.
My point is that there is more than one way to define a package and its uses. Slackware is slightly different,
Agreed on both points. Slackware's definition of a packaging system is a very rare and unusual one. It doesn't match the definition of `packaging systems' that AFAIK all other packaging systems use. That's Sun's, Red Hat's, Debian's, Microsoft SMS's, and others.
Finally, if packages were so simple and definable, why are there so many package systems available?
I agree. Just because soemthing is a packaging system, it doesn't mean its god. Many OSs get along fine without packaging systems. Slackware might be a great OS, it just doesn't have a packaging system but any defiition of `packaging system' other than that of Slackware users.
As a common example, this happens because fooApp.rpm lists the "libglade" (version >= 1.2) package as its dependency and I have libglade-1.2" (version 1.2.4) installed.
That package isn't actually misnamed. Its the standard way of naming RPMs.
[packagename]-[version]-[packageversion and extra info]-[platform]
libglade-0.14-1k-i586.rpm
for example.
I've installed around 150 non vendor produced packages on my Mandrake workstation. I've very rarely had to use --force - and mainly because I took the rather unusual setup of replacing glibc with hack-glibc, and other packages are dependent on the name.
Conventions for package naming are also likely to improve on RPM based distros, as Debians excellent packagaing uidelines are used as a basic for RPM based APT repositories.
Debian already has these features and goes quite far to eliminating many of the problems you've mentioned.
Who made you the authority in determining the requirements for a "package management system"?
Nothing does, and I'm not. As said in the original post, what most people [IMHO] define as packaging systems contains those criteria. And [for a something more concrete than opinion] that every other software installation method apart from Slackwares that describes itself as a packaging system contains these features.
Draw your own conclusions from the latter, but mine is that the popular definition of a package management system includes dependencies as a base feature.
There are conventions for RPM naming. They're usually stuck to, apart from the odd CVS extracted package, where there doesn't seem to be much of a standard [CVS packages are very rare though].
To use your example, seach for libglade on RPMFind. And see, out of the hundreds of results, which packages are misnamed.
Err, How about some facts to back up your assertions?
How about reading the post you're responding to?
In which I maintain that dependencies are an integral part of any packaging system. Your link doesn't refute that. Yes, Slackware archives have some meta information, but do not meet the other requirements listed above to be classified as a package management system.
slackware packages are fairly primitive. To the best of my knowledge, they don't support dependencies.
Then in my opinion, and from poular definition, they're not packages. They're software archives. A packaging system is a set of rules for software installation, with not only the archived software, but instructions to install it, versioning information, and meta information about how packages relate to each other. These are all key elements of every other popular package management system, and though there's no dictionary definition of software package [or is there?], they form the basis for the current popular definition.
It seems Slackware is just renaming their current technology to be competitive with DEB and RPM based distributions. As more polished, easier to operate Debian versions arise, and APT for RPM grows in popularity, there's going to be a huge difference in software management techniques and installation ease between other distributions and slackware. Linux needs packages - an Open Source system is fairly compartmentalized and even regular user apps may consist of many other applications brought together. If there's no centralized management then things fall apart very quickly.
ATI has long had a reputation of putting out awful drivers. If they manage to put out decent drivers and improve their technical support, then they might be a worthy contender.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing! As of two weeks ago, Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pros running OpenGL under Linux Quake 3 [as an example] now generally outperform Windows, thanks to drivers ATI commissioned from Precision Insight. Download them from ATIs site.
Cybersource uses Dreamweaver for designing all its client sites, as well as its own site. Macromedia have chosen to support Coldfusion, JSP, and ASP with Dreamweaver Ultradev. As far as I know, they seem to be extremely ignorant over PHP [which surely has more market share than JSP, at least].
My suggestion? Send a polite note to Dreamweaver with your license numbers of the existing product. Tell them you'd upgrade for PHP enabled Untradev.
Same with anyone reading this. And I'll do it too. Dreamweaver is by far the most popular web dev app these days and PHP support is a must have feature for many of us creating dynamic web sites.