Now install it on a network share and run it on a network of 10,000 workstations, some of which are 32-bit workstations and some of which are 64-bit workstations.
When I ran a large network, the workstations mounted [nfs share]/$(/bin/uname -m)/ as root.
It was quite trivial to add anything for any specific architecture on such a setup.
What the hell, it's a setup shared by anyone who wants to run software from a networked file system.
I remember running old NFS setups. Almost the entire installation was running off the network, it was dead easy to add more applications for everyone. You would "sudo apt-get install " (on an account was was allowed to do so) and everyone gets access to said application.
Of course, if you wanted to block access for certain users, groups, you could use setfacl (POSIX ACLs) to block users access from it. Ensure you blocked the.desktop files from these users and it wouldn't even appear in their menus. Dead easy. =)
The interesting thing about this, is that it doesn't really matter what 'client' distribution you're using on these networks, since all the libraries for the 'host' distribution is included on the system. I don't believe there is really any major problems with networked applications from being ran on Linux at this time.
I agree. I never said universal binaries were the problem -- rather, it's the lack of binary compatibility. It's the whole "source compatibility" / "binary incompatibility" that gives the win to Windoze over Linux in the gamine world.
Well, then why are there so many threads like this:
For the same reason there are so many things like this: Windows OS X
Ask a stupid question...
if the sound setup is done so well? There are four or five different conflicting threads for how to make stuff work... seems pretty clear. Also seems pretty clear cut that they rolled out a half baked sound setup in a LTS release. That's the main issue that did it for me.
If Windows/OS X setup is down so well? There are a billion conflicting results for how to make stuff work... seems pretty clear. Also seems pretty clear cut that they rolled out a half baked sound setup in every OS release.
If you're talking about cross-architecture, I could make a 'FAT' binary by essentially wrapping the executable binaries for each architecture inside a bash script (the same way Loki installers work) and have it execute the one for that architecture - Obviously not that simple for the person who has to do it, but then if you've ever made universal binaries for OS X, you'd know it isn't that much simpler either.
This guy worked in the closed-source world of video games where it's often not even legal to share your source code (due to middle-ware licensing and trade secrets) and even when it is legal, it's often not feasible for business or gameplay reasons (competitive coding advantage, preventing cheating hacks, disallowing "free content" mods, etc).
I have built cross-distro binary-only applications before.
Some notes on doing so:
Make sure you compile, link against a old version of glibc, this prevents issues of running applications built against newer versions of glibc spitting out "undefined reference errors" on systems with older glibc (much like when you compile a windows program against the winvista platform sdk and try to run that program on XP).
If you must link against the C++ runtime library (libstdc++), then provide a custom version of it with your software. That's about all you need (much like how many Windows applications come with the msvc runtime dlls they were compiled against).
This is legal, no source requirement (outside of providing the source to libstdc++ when requested - which wouldn't reveal anything).
It's exactly this reason that high-end cutting-edge games and other closed-source software will NEVER be viable on Linux unless there are major changes to the entire model of gaming development.
I honestly don't see how this is a substantial difference from Windows, could you explain it better, please?
Think IT guy who works on fifteen different architectures, has a "universal" USB stick, and walks up to a random guy in his office without having to figure out what platform the random guy is on in order to fix his problem. Do you think/he/ would like this?
Don't even need the USB stick, the package manager will install the right version and correct architecture for him. All he has to do is tell it that he wants program X installed.
My whole point is them monetizing through SPYWARE. I understand you don't enter a cc #, that doesn't mean they aren't tracking and selling user info.
I had already gone through this extension's source at one point in the past, admittedly a long time ago and I did not really understand the complaints of how it was acting as spyware (as some people complained in #kubuntu at the time), so if you do know how, feel free to inform me.
Your sound system response is prototypical of the exact problem. "Works for me".. do you have every possible configuration of sound card?
No, but I have 31 of the most common chipsets which are all fully supported. In the past I had a lot of problems with Intel HDA on various Linux distributions, but not had any since the last LTS release.
I hear a lot of non-sense from people saying X doesn't work on Linux and I'm using at that moment they state it and all it was, was installing the package normally to stupid stories about how Google doesn't render correctly in Firefox on Linux but works on windows. I've noticed people who are being honest are able to backup their information with a lot more than a what is contained in a tiny bug report that doesn't even provide any information on how it is what they claim it is.
The devs having exactly that attitude is why Ubuntu as a distro has moved into the crap pile in my house.
I'm not a dev, nor a helper on Slashdot. I'm a poster and if you don't even provide any information to back up your cases, I will go with my own knowledge and experience to help asses the information you are stating.
Most of the Linux users I know insist that Ubuntu "just works", and is far easier to manage than other distributions.
Many users of any OS, distribution I know insist that their choice "just works". Which is insane when you hear it from OpenBSD, Gentoo users etc. No OS just works. Not Windows, OS X or even Linux.
In one case it was the NTFS resizer corrupting a friend's filesystem which he'd shrunk to make room for Ubuntu.
The same NTFS shrinking software is used on every Linux distros installers, if it was going to fail, it was going to fail on every single distro (this is usually caused by an unclean NTFS system - which is why you should chkdsk/f c: it before doing any operations like this).
However, supporting a distribution for a longer period of time isn't the same as putting the engineering and testing resources into getting the initial release right.
If you consider how the releases in between are more of stepping stones to get to that initial release, it is in my opinion. You see a huge amount of changes that are done in six months between the various Ubuntu distros, slower release schedules seems to stunt growth if you looked at other Linux distributions - So I believe this to be a positive thing.
That brings me back to my original question: Has Canonical bitten off more than they can chew? Are releases really getting less good as time goes on? If so, what can they do to turn that around?
I don't think they are biting off more than they can chew, but I do believe their organizational and certain quality control systems still need to be refined, which I am confident that they will be over time. Their organization is one of the youngest ones out there in the OS market and with what they've done with the few years they have been in operation, it's quite fascinating.
Except, of course, its very developers but, oh! what would they know.
There was a large discussion between the Ubuntu devs and Firefox devs and the Firefox devs suggested they stay with the 3.x branch over supporting 2.x. It's buried deep in a mailing list somewhere which is taking me longer than five minutes to find - I can't be bothered putting more effort into locating the thread.
The "LTS" version of Ubuntu was the worst version I used (was a user since 7.04) and drove me to seek out another distro.
Best version for me. I'm not generalizing the entire thing, but I'm pretty sure for the majority it was fine. Of course, a few people will always have the opposite sway with the majority.
working sound (sorry, until I hacked and hacked the sound setup on Mythbuntu 8.04 didn't work right, nor did stock Ubuntu 8.04)Worked for me.
Ubuntu has shown its true colors as wanting to monetize with BS add-ons that shove crapware down users throats.
Yes, because that's the first thing you see when you install or do anything on Ubuntu.. Oh wait, the only place it does this is for the patent and licensing encumbered dvd playback in the USA only. Well shit, they must be out there to steal all your monies. This couldn't possibly be due to anything else at all, could it?
Pulse was introduced and was flakey, introducing all Ubuntu users to pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio.
Pulse audio actually worked quite well for me, it was just retarded stuff like adobe flash (packaged, but not considered supported) that gave me problems, since it wanted to use OSS which hasn't been apart of Linux in over decade and everyone knows the ALSA compatability layer doesn't like doing mixing with it.
Flash sound interfered with Pulse, so libflashsupport was introduces, but wouldn't work for more than an hour, so was dropped a day before the final release, leaving Flash to tie up ALSA.
Amusingly I replied to this point before even getting to read it.
F-Spot (the default photo manager) didn't launch on 64-bit due to a late change in Mono.
My experience on 64bit is limited admittedly. Never saw the point in using it when I didn't have the RAM to make using 64bit worthwhile.
Don't pretend that the LTS gets any more love than the regular releases do.
Download a recent rebuild of LTS iso, you will find that it works quite well and has had the very few rough edges that that I first encountered, fixed. Certainly a lot more love than the non-LTS releases.
I can fix that for the entire system in just five clicks (four, if I cheat with a drop down menu). I prefer Kubuntu's method of being friendly to novice users and letting more advanced users customize it with little trouble.
I tried to update from 9.4 to 9.10 but after 5 hours the update stopped responding
I have to say, the only systems I do 'upgrades' on are servers and that's only because of a extensive modification to the main system configuration files - These upgrades are mostly painless except for the odd thing with me having daemons configured uniquely to fit a strange purpose.
Now when it comes to workstations on the other hand, I just make a extra backup of my home/users path, reinstall the OS from scratch (takes about 15 minutes with Kubuntu), recreate my user account, copy the files back. Install a few 3rd party apps again (Zimbra, Skype etc.) and start using my system once more.
It's clean, fast, no issues as there is no cruft from the previous install. I would suggest you do follow this methodology for any OS. Windows, OS X, Linux distros etc. You will rarely find problems with it.
A lot of users had good things to say about their early releases
Just like users on every other distro and platform, and if you Google problems, you will find a tonne of users for any platform, distro complaining about problems.
I did, however, see their installer eat several friends' systems, which gave me a lot of reason to believe the opposite.
Eating a system? What does that mean? The install failing?
I do however find that hard to believe when the livecd is running well enough to be functional enough to start the installer - which is essentially the system (the difference is only slightly in the configuration from the livecd) that gets copied on to the system. Then again, perhaps the burned copy of the disc was shoddy, but, there is a built in disc check for that when you first boot off the disc to check that.
With each release of Ubuntu, I hear a larger number of complaints.
I would imagine this is due to Ubuntu's growth more so than the same users, although even in those instances, it can be said this is anecdotal.
They don't seem to have the resources to keep up the quality that they managed with their early releases.
I don't think you researched the distribution much and thus wouldn't know the difference between the LTS and non-LTS versions to be honest. LTS generally having higher quality packages and supported for three years, and then move into a secondary support stage that supports a select amount of packages for two more years. LTS having a release every two years.
I, myself use only LTS versions of Ubuntu on my production systems (I also run a tonne of other distributions and operating systems).
While Fedora isn't perfect, the people behind it are much better at what they do.
Considering Fedora's idea of security is chrooting stuff as root processes rather than derooting the various deamons (from syslog to hal crap), looking at how often the selinux setup is on Fedora broken in someway, compared to apparmor or hell, even selinux on other distros. The amount of packages that are broken (check the fedora bug tracker) with every release. five words, proprietary hardware support piss poor.
I can only determine from my experience that they're better at doing it wrong? Because you didn't provide any information as to what they do better, I filled in the holes with my own knowledge on the matter.
And their primary reason for existence isn't to convert Windows users
I agree. Their primary reason for existence is to be "Redhat experimental".
Slashdot Mirror
Who is the end boss?
When I ran a large network, the workstations mounted [nfs share]/$(/bin/uname -m)/ as root.
It was quite trivial to add anything for any specific architecture on such a setup.
Whoever built it was not very good at building. It's not hard to build a 32bit application that works cross distribution and relies on it's self. Said application would run on 64bit Linux fine. From the behavior of the original developer (of that proprietary application), I don't see how the developer would have built the application to even work with fatelf.
Getting someone to copy paste a string of text in an e-mail is actually not that difficult.
Now, trying to instruct them to do stuff via a GUI, oh God, no.
I remember running old NFS setups. Almost the entire installation was running off the network, it was dead easy to add more applications for everyone. You would "sudo apt-get install " (on an account was was allowed to do so) and everyone gets access to said application.
Of course, if you wanted to block access for certain users, groups, you could use setfacl (POSIX ACLs) to block users access from it. Ensure you blocked the .desktop files from these users and it wouldn't even appear in their menus. Dead easy. =)
The interesting thing about this, is that it doesn't really matter what 'client' distribution you're using on these networks, since all the libraries for the 'host' distribution is included on the system. I don't believe there is really any major problems with networked applications from being ran on Linux at this time.
For the price of a Mini I could get a rather decent laptop. That's not really cheap in my opinion.
Binary compatibility is quite easy in my opinion and I speak from previous experience.
For the same reason there are so many things like this:
Windows
OS X
Ask a stupid question...
If Windows/OS X setup is down so well? There are a billion conflicting results for how to make stuff work... seems pretty clear. Also seems pretty clear cut that they rolled out a half baked sound setup in every OS release.
Just an application to run? This is what I wrote on how to compile an application to work cross-distro.
If you're talking about cross-architecture, I could make a 'FAT' binary by essentially wrapping the executable binaries for each architecture inside a bash script (the same way Loki installers work) and have it execute the one for that architecture - Obviously not that simple for the person who has to do it, but then if you've ever made universal binaries for OS X, you'd know it isn't that much simpler either.
I have built cross-distro binary-only applications before.
Some notes on doing so:
Make sure you compile, link against a old version of glibc, this prevents issues of running applications built against newer versions of glibc spitting out "undefined reference errors" on systems with older glibc (much like when you compile a windows program against the winvista platform sdk and try to run that program on XP).
If you must link against the C++ runtime library (libstdc++), then provide a custom version of it with your software. That's about all you need (much like how many Windows applications come with the msvc runtime dlls they were compiled against).
This is legal, no source requirement (outside of providing the source to libstdc++ when requested - which wouldn't reveal anything).
I honestly don't see how this is a substantial difference from Windows, could you explain it better, please?
Don't even need the USB stick, the package manager will install the right version and correct architecture for him. All he has to do is tell it that he wants program X installed.
Simple, no?
What's wrong with Mono?
I had already gone through this extension's source at one point in the past, admittedly a long time ago and I did not really understand the complaints of how it was acting as spyware (as some people complained in #kubuntu at the time), so if you do know how, feel free to inform me.
Here is a response as to what it is:
http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/162-What-is-this-Multisearch-thing-in-my-Firefox-about.html - contained in the information that bug was marked a duplicate of.
No, but I have 31 of the most common chipsets which are all fully supported. In the past I had a lot of problems with Intel HDA on various Linux distributions, but not had any since the last LTS release.
I hear a lot of non-sense from people saying X doesn't work on Linux and I'm using at that moment they state it and all it was, was installing the package normally to stupid stories about how Google doesn't render correctly in Firefox on Linux but works on windows. I've noticed people who are being honest are able to backup their information with a lot more than a what is contained in a tiny bug report that doesn't even provide any information on how it is what they claim it is.
I'm not a dev, nor a helper on Slashdot. I'm a poster and if you don't even provide any information to back up your cases, I will go with my own knowledge and experience to help asses the information you are stating.
Odd, never saw that.
Many users of any OS, distribution I know insist that their choice "just works". Which is insane when you hear it from OpenBSD, Gentoo users etc. No OS just works. Not Windows, OS X or even Linux.
The same NTFS shrinking software is used on every Linux distros installers, if it was going to fail, it was going to fail on every single distro (this is usually caused by an unclean NTFS system - which is why you should chkdsk /f c: it before doing any operations like this).
If you consider how the releases in between are more of stepping stones to get to that initial release, it is in my opinion. You see a huge amount of changes that are done in six months between the various Ubuntu distros, slower release schedules seems to stunt growth if you looked at other Linux distributions - So I believe this to be a positive thing.
I don't think they are biting off more than they can chew, but I do believe their organizational and certain quality control systems still need to be refined, which I am confident that they will be over time. Their organization is one of the youngest ones out there in the OS market and with what they've done with the few years they have been in operation, it's quite fascinating.
There was a large discussion between the Ubuntu devs and Firefox devs and the Firefox devs suggested they stay with the 3.x branch over supporting 2.x. It's buried deep in a mailing list somewhere which is taking me longer than five minutes to find - I can't be bothered putting more effort into locating the thread.
So yes, the FF developers were consulted.
Best version for me. I'm not generalizing the entire thing, but I'm pretty sure for the majority it was fine. Of course, a few people will always have the opposite sway with the majority.
working sound (sorry, until I hacked and hacked the sound setup on Mythbuntu 8.04 didn't work right, nor did stock Ubuntu 8.04)Worked for me.
Yes, because that's the first thing you see when you install or do anything on Ubuntu.. Oh wait, the only place it does this is for the patent and licensing encumbered dvd playback in the USA only. Well shit, they must be out there to steal all your monies. This couldn't possibly be due to anything else at all, could it?
Which almost everyone considered it polished, it wasn't like they decided to include something unpolished.
Pulse audio actually worked quite well for me, it was just retarded stuff like adobe flash (packaged, but not considered supported) that gave me problems, since it wanted to use OSS which hasn't been apart of Linux in over decade and everyone knows the ALSA compatability layer doesn't like doing mixing with it.
Amusingly I replied to this point before even getting to read it.
My experience on 64bit is limited admittedly. Never saw the point in using it when I didn't have the RAM to make using 64bit worthwhile.
Download a recent rebuild of LTS iso, you will find that it works quite well and has had the very few rough edges that that I first encountered, fixed. Certainly a lot more love than the non-LTS releases.
Ubuntu stable is the LTS versions. Current LTS is 8.04. The other ones are 'bleeding edge' releases.
I can fix that for the entire system in just five clicks (four, if I cheat with a drop down menu). I prefer Kubuntu's method of being friendly to novice users and letting more advanced users customize it with little trouble.
I have to say, the only systems I do 'upgrades' on are servers and that's only because of a extensive modification to the main system configuration files - These upgrades are mostly painless except for the odd thing with me having daemons configured uniquely to fit a strange purpose.
Now when it comes to workstations on the other hand, I just make a extra backup of my home/users path, reinstall the OS from scratch (takes about 15 minutes with Kubuntu), recreate my user account, copy the files back. Install a few 3rd party apps again (Zimbra, Skype etc.) and start using my system once more.
It's clean, fast, no issues as there is no cruft from the previous install. I would suggest you do follow this methodology for any OS. Windows, OS X, Linux distros etc. You will rarely find problems with it.
There was hype? Where?
Just like users on every other distro and platform, and if you Google problems, you will find a tonne of users for any platform, distro complaining about problems.
Eating a system? What does that mean? The install failing?
I do however find that hard to believe when the livecd is running well enough to be functional enough to start the installer - which is essentially the system (the difference is only slightly in the configuration from the livecd) that gets copied on to the system. Then again, perhaps the burned copy of the disc was shoddy, but, there is a built in disc check for that when you first boot off the disc to check that.
I would imagine this is due to Ubuntu's growth more so than the same users, although even in those instances, it can be said this is anecdotal.
I don't think you researched the distribution much and thus wouldn't know the difference between the LTS and non-LTS versions to be honest. LTS generally having higher quality packages and supported for three years, and then move into a secondary support stage that supports a select amount of packages for two more years. LTS having a release every two years.
I, myself use only LTS versions of Ubuntu on my production systems (I also run a tonne of other distributions and operating systems).
Works for me. I could not reproduce your issue based off your limited information.
Use LTS versions only then.
Considering Fedora's idea of security is chrooting stuff as root processes rather than derooting the various deamons (from syslog to hal crap), looking at how often the selinux setup is on Fedora broken in someway, compared to apparmor or hell, even selinux on other distros. The amount of packages that are broken (check the fedora bug tracker) with every release. five words, proprietary hardware support piss poor.
I can only determine from my experience that they're better at doing it wrong? Because you didn't provide any information as to what they do better, I filled in the holes with my own knowledge on the matter.
I agree. Their primary reason for existence is to be "Redhat experimental".