Not really. I work for mandrakesoft now, and quite a lot of people here prefere gnome to KDE (although we started as RedHat+KDE). The reason for KDE in Germany is that SuSe dominates the markt there, and they have been pro-KDE from the very beginning...
I had a pleasure talking to Kevin about bochs, Vmware, open source etc. when he was in Paris, two weeks ago. He was very happy about getting to Mandrake and about open-sourcing the bochs. The guy really likes the work he is doing, and now he can actually do it withouth having to vorry about the financials.
Since Kevin did not take part in slashdot discussion so far, here are some of the quotes from our conversation:
- I always wanted to go open-source, but I also wanted to live from working on bochs. I am very happy to be able to have both at the same time
- You folks at Mandrake are really cute. The atmosphere here is so good that I may even consider moving to Paris.:-))
- VmWare guys have asked me to have acces to bochs source code for 'educational purposes' several years ago. Later they went commercial. No idea how much bochs code (if any) they actually used for VMware.
- I think plex86 will become actually usefull for "office" work in less than one year.
- The speed should be comparable to VMware, and I have some very interesting ideas about the memory managment, which might even give us some advantage in multi-user env..
- Having an open licence for bochs was very important for plex86 project. There is quite a lot of code which can be reused.
DISCLAIMER: We had some alcohol in blood, and I was not taking notes (now, THAT would be a good one!), so do not even try to pin me (or Kevin) on details.
Good or not, but as long as they do not GPL the YAST, it is not going to run on my machine.
I consider it utterly inexcuseable to put any other licence than the plain old GPL onto such a crucial pieces of software as installers and system-configurators. Especially installer: Since you cannot install a system withouth it, in effect YAST-licence becomes a licence of the whole SuSE distribution. This is imoral.
I do not understand why should "20 M chinese on net" be a "big news", unless it is meant as: Look, there are still ONLY 20 M chinese with internet access!
I wonder if I could have a population data too? This would make a "linuxcounter" database of USA much easier to maintain!
If anyone has such a database for other countries (how about the whole world?), please send it to me! I need "Town/state/country", and having "longitude/latitude" and "inhabitants" would be great!
I wonder if I could have a population data too? This would make a "linuxcounter" database of USA much easier to maintain!
If anyone has such a database for other countries (how about the whole world?), please send it to me! I need "Town/state/country", and having "lingitude/latitude" and "inhabitants" would be great!
In my opinion, the real problem is that we will soon grow tired of hearing this kind of stories and stop reacting. This is exactly the reasons why Corel and Sun are doing this:
"Let us see if anyone is watching us - if we get caught, we apologise, else we win. Sooner or later they will get tired of watching."
Imagine what will happen, when in 2 years Corel puts yet another stupid licence somewhere in their distribution? That's it: NOTHING, because we will all be so pissed off by corel that noone will even bother reacting anymore. What we need is a central linux (or more general "Free software") legal departement to fight them in the long term...
I know that a serious answer to a funny letter ("Corel: adults only" is my favorite:-)) sounds rather silly, but I have a feeling you are somewhat missinformed:
- RH 6.1 is not just "eyecandy". It is the MAJOR linux distribution. It is also a vell-done distro, at least the 5.x versions were. I do not know about 6.1, but 6.0 was a crap.
- SUSE is in Germany & Austria what RedHat is in the USA. Since the Germany is the biggest European country, S.U.S.E. is a very strong Linux player. I do not like the "YAST" licence at all, but this is a very well done distro.
- Mandrake still looks much like RedHat - (something I personally like very much), but it is certainly not RedHat anymore. It is much more polished for "workstation" use - trust me, I have switched 10 of them to Mandrake 2 months ago in order to spare myself work on fixing menue-entries manually (RH 6.1 may be better). I also have a feeling that Mandrake internationalisation efforts go a step further than those of any other distribution.
Sorry for interrupted sentence. What i wanted to say was: And finally, the profit margine on OS might soon become very low, because of the Linux & co. At that moment, Windows would become a stone on the neck of the Microsoft, instead of the money-maker. Therefore, other divisions may be better off withouth OS-division in the future, although it wasn't so in the past.
There are several extremly important things which will stop Billy & co. from going anywhere. They are called money, Money and MONEY
For one thing, it would be extremely unvise to do anything which could turn US goverment and/or "public opinion", against them in the moment when they have been found "guilty as charged" and about to be convicted. Such a (stupid) move would also rise prospects for all the future anti-M$ processes, which would be a certain suicide for Microsoft.
Next thing is - such a move would probably (and rightfully) be interpreted as as "start of the end" of the M$ empire - I can allready imagine titles like "Evil empire expelled from the US" on slashdot, or "M$ tries to hide in Kongo" in the more pro-M$ press.
Third thing is - US is still the wold largest computer-market. And US has means to protect its market from foreign competitors, even if they are from Canada. As soon as US goverment has nothing to gain from M$ anymore, they will turn a blind ear to it and start helping the competitors. Just think what would happen if the goverment decides that "M$-monoculture" in govermental institutions will not be tolerated anymore, and sets some open standard requirements for formate of the electronic documents. By-bye Microsoft...
And finally, the profit margine on OS will soon
So, do not worry - whatever happens, M$ stays where it is. With some luck, they split in several divisions and all of the sudden it becomes possible to run former M$-owned programs on Linux & co.
In my opinion this got into wrong rubric - it should be under "It's funny, laught". The whole tone of the web-page sounds more like "i'm kidding" than anything else.
Even if it is not a hoax, the sheer idea of making a frankestein-like 21-inch iMac is simply hilarious. (Besides - i like the foot better than apple...)
I cannot believe this is true. If it is, then FBI should start firing a lot of people:
The guys who did the stupid move, their chef, the one who gave them employement in the first place, the doctor who is responsible fof checking their health... I wonder how many people would that be in the end...
This is either a classical hoax, or a classical "shoot yourself in the leg" situation. I hope it is a hoax.
Unfortunately my notice on "redhat.org" did not make it into "quickies". Well, either the "editor" did not check it at all, or he is completely humor-impaired.
Anyway, just take a look at that baby - it is one of the best jokes i have ever seen.
I have a bunch of Linux computers which act as a "better replacements" for windows in my jurisdictions. Just simple workstations, two of them are even used by our secretaries.
Noone has found them difficult to use, but I have had a big hedache in upgrading these machines lately. Machines used to be RH5.x based, with a lot of updates. They worked fine for a while, but it has became very difficult to keep them "up-to-date" because of the incompatibilities between the "5.x" and "6.x"-based distributions. Then I had to add two more machines, and I realised it is time to start updating a whole set...
- First I tried the RH 6.0, but I had some problems with samba+vmware (yes, we do have legacy applications). Besides, Star Office was very instable. - At the same time I have tried Mandrake 6.1 at home and I liked it a lot, so I decided to turn them all into Mandrake. Star-office seams to run more stable nnow, but unfortunately, I have run into major set of difficulties with network printing, and samba+vmware still do not like each other as much as I whish they would. I have been thinking of giving RH 6.1 a try, but people seam to have all kinds of problems with these too...
So what we have now? Linux has got much easier to use lately. At the same time the quality has got worse. If this continues in the same direction, soon there will be no difference between Linux and Windoze. I hope to see some improvements soon.
I can only offer you a lowest estimate of the yearly growth - according to the "linux-counter" it is more than 60%. All other estimates give much higher growth rates.
My best guess is that less than 1% and more than 0.5% of the linux users register with the "linux counter"- that would be 12-24 Milions of the linux users today. You can download my graph showing the linux-counter growth together with RH-estimates here
Below is some more info about the linux-counter project. I hope you will find it interesting:
For those of you desperately wanting to see at least some statistics of the "linux counter", you can get them on my home-page.
Privacy issues: I am working on a new interface which will allow you sending e-mails to registred users, withouth exposing their addresses. So if you are concerned about spammers and co., just say "i want to keep my addres secret" on registering. As soon as the new interface is done, you will receive an e-mail from the counter with the explanation of the new system.
Linux counter has a new logo. please put it on your web-pages! (as a link to linux-counter web server).
It would be really great if linux-vendors would give us some more support. The only vendor which does it at the moment is "Slackware" (as far as I know). So, if you know someone from RedHat/SuSe/Caldera/Debian..., please tell them to put a link to us somewhere where it will be seen.
There is a simple perl script for machine-registration on linux-counter web-server. It would be nice if some more people would give it a try. The prefered way of use is installing it in a crontab (as normal user, by all means!) - once it gets properly tested, we will be able to put some real-time statistics about the linux machines online (UPTIMES!).
We are considering e-mailing every registred user once a year - e-mail would be used to find out if the address is still OK, and it would give the registred users some info about the status of the counter... I hope one e-mail a year is not too much. WDYT?
"Genetical engineering" is probably the most important thing humans have learned how to do in a long time. Yes, I think it is much more important than internet.-)
Imagine the possibilities in front of us - plants could be made "better" in various ways:
- The rice lacks some vitamines? Let us fix this.. - Beeing vegetarian is bad for you because some proteines are missing in plants - well, not any more!
And what does our dear food-industry produce using this technology?
- plants which cannot reproduce: so you have to buy seeds again and again and... With a good chance that your neighbour will have to do the same, because of the cross-insemination.
- plants with higher resistivity against insect-killing and (other) plants-killing chemicals... Meaning more chemicals can be trown over the fields, killing everything except the plant they sold you. As a side effect, YOU will get more more chemicals in your food, insect become more resistent and all those farmers who do not buy "resistant" seeds get ruined.
I suppose I should not be surprised - after all, the same thing happens every time a new industry is build: the "bad guys" get a grip on it first.
First - may karma of the troll who marked my first posting as "flamebait" be set to -100 or so. I am quite annoyed.
Now back to the buisness: In order to install software on a (single) linux system properly, following steps must be performed:
1) check for dependencies and all the other troubles the package may nead or may break. For example: Will I overwrite something? Are the libraries I need on the system 2) prepare for the instalation (PRE_INSTALL script), if nessesary 2) unpack the software-package and put the files where they belong 3) do the nessesary changes in etc-files, (re) start some demones etc => POST_INSTALL script 4) write down a protocol about the installed files, packages this one depends on, and what has to be done if one wants to deinstall it later (i.e. POST_INSTALL script). Obviously, if there is some kind of a package manager on the system this "protocol" shouls be handed to it.
In my opinion, there is only one way to do this properly: by generating the binary packages on-the-fly. I will call the hypothetical program which generates packages "translator" (not installer) from now on.
If you generate packages on the fly, a tarball including binaries + "description" in combination with the "translator" is suficcient to get your program installed on "any" linux system.
I suppose, we could call this kind of distribution a "binary meta-package". I can imagine all kinds of troubles one would run into with these "binary-meta-packages" - because every distribution is a little bit different, but if one concentrates on lets say debian (or RedHat/SuSe/whatever), separates the distribution-related stuff in modules and puts the code under GPL, most of the distributions would make the nessesary modules themselves.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The situation gets even worse in case you want to install the software on many machines as I do: In case I have a.rpm package, all i have to do is check if it installs properly on one machine, then put it in a directory where "autorpm" will find it. If I do not have an.rpm package, I have to go trough the "install" procedure N-times. (I can tell you that I will hate You if you do this to me.)
However, ever standard.rpm packages aren't so good as they could be - Usually one has to edit some/etc files after instalation and so on - so basically one ends-up with either "installing N-times" again, or making customized rpm-s, or making a tarball ( or.rpm, or...) out of the files which have been changed after the instalation.
An "installer" which produces custom-made.rpm packages (or.deb or...) on-the-fly, so that the package can be safely installed using the rpm-manager (or whatever tool on other systems) would be a really GREAT tool. I would be extremly happy to answer all the questions (or whatever) during the first phase - that is, while the "installer" is trying to guess the right configuration. I do not mind reading the licencing agreements or whatever during this phase.
However, the end-product of this (more-or-less painfull) pre-instalation should be a package custom-made for my system. With all the dependencies, pre-instal, post-install and post-uninstall scripts in place, as well and all the configurations files fixed so that i can say "rpm -i package" and install it and start working with the program later.
Having a big green smiley with "PRESS ME TO INSTALL THE SOFTWARE" on it in the end of the instalation (which does rpm -i package" in my case) is OK, but I really want to have this binary RPM, otherwise i have to make one myself later and that is an utterly annoying and unnessesary work.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++ In case someone really does not want to use the package-manager, he should make programs which get installed under/opt/program. However, I cannot see what good is an "installer" in such a case - All there is to be done is unpacking the tarball and anyone can make a "graphical installer" which unpacks tarballs in a few minutes. For anything more complicated - give me an rpm or I will yell at you.
By the way - i have had a "priviledge" of installing some win95 machines (virtual, under vmware) lately. Instalation of programs was a major pain in the ass: - press on the "install" icon, answer some questions, wait (you can watch some stupid animation while waiting, though) part was not so bad, but "reboot the PC", followed by "Oh, someone has changed the libraries, should i put them back" was really annoying. As I heard, even win2000 will have some kind of a package-manager.
I have read it. And i do not agree. Should I be happy because a crappy way of installing the program gets easier to do?
No thx. Commercial products should be made as packages and thats it. They should check the dependencies and put entries into the install-database, so that I can spot them, check the integrity and uninstall them later.
If supporting several different package-systems troubles the commercial vendors, they can always think of something to make package "on-the-fly":
1) Check the system, decide on type of the package 2) make a binary-only package with pre-install, post-install and post-uninstal scripts. 3) install using the native package-manager.
If they want a colorfull interface, it is OK with me, but installing stuff on its own is completely irresponsible - this is a job for the "RPM"-, or "DEB"- package manager. Magic words are:
Why for the gods sake would I need an installer on pacage-based system? Does it produce an ".rpm" (or ".deb" , in case the system is debian-based) package on the fly?
If it doesn't, I do not see what is it good for. I certainly do not want to get the same situation as in Windows - A program gets installed, breaks some dependencies and you may re-install the system to get it fixed.
But, as far as I know, US-companies arent even allowed to make interfaces to strong-cryptography programs. I suppose that is the main reason why pine support for PGP is so crappy. If the US goverment wants to be really "anal" about the crypto-law, RH is going to have a lot of difficulties.
So, the US goverment has finaly realized that Microsoft, IBM, SUN & co. will be in trouble if they cannot export cryptographic software. Now, name at least two well-known US-based companies which will continue to suffer from these restrictions!
Right! Redhat and Caldera (especially RedHat, since they really want to keep their distribution "free") still have the same problems, because their "products" are open-sourced. Cute.
I can think of two possible scenaria, one which makes sense and another which does not:
It would make sense for a bank to pay for the information HOW did the cracker get into the bank. If they get the exact description, they can also prevent any crackers comming in that way later. Thus they are effectivly paying in order to improve the security, which makes sense.
It makes absolutely no sense to pay-off the blackmailer withouth getting the above mentioned info. This way the bank looses money, stays completely clueless, and the cracer is free to come-in again the same way later or simply sell his knowledge to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. I work for mandrakesoft now, and quite a lot of people here prefere gnome to KDE (although we started as RedHat+KDE). The reason for KDE in Germany is that SuSe dominates the markt there, and they have been pro-KDE from the very beginning...
I had a pleasure talking to Kevin about bochs, Vmware, open source etc. when he was in Paris, two weeks ago. He was very happy about getting to Mandrake and about open-sourcing the bochs. The guy really likes the work he is doing, and now he can actually do it withouth having to vorry about the financials.
:-))
Since Kevin did not take part in slashdot discussion so far, here are some of the quotes from our conversation:
- I always wanted to go open-source, but I also wanted to live from working on bochs. I am very happy to be able to have both at the same time
- You folks at Mandrake are really cute. The atmosphere here is so good that I may even consider moving to Paris.
- VmWare guys have asked me to have acces to bochs source code for 'educational purposes' several years ago. Later they went commercial. No idea how much bochs code (if any) they actually used for VMware.
- I think plex86 will become actually usefull for "office" work in less than one year.
- The speed should be comparable to VMware, and I have some very interesting ideas about the memory managment, which might even give us some advantage in multi-user env..
- Having an open licence for bochs was very important for plex86 project. There is quite a lot of code which can be reused.
DISCLAIMER: We had some alcohol in blood, and I was not taking notes (now, THAT would be a good one!), so do not even try to pin me (or Kevin) on details.
Good or not, but as long as they do not GPL the YAST, it is not going to run on my machine.
I consider it utterly inexcuseable to put any other licence than the plain old GPL onto such a crucial pieces of software as installers and system-configurators. Especially installer: Since you cannot install a system withouth it, in effect YAST-licence becomes a licence of the whole SuSE distribution. This is imoral.
I do not understand why should "20 M chinese on net" be a "big news", unless it is meant as: Look, there are still ONLY 20 M chinese with internet access!
This is less than 2 percent of the chinese population, and my first thought was "this estimate is much too low". However, after taking a look at the CIA-factbook, I am ready to believe it. Their 1998 estimate for China is: 105 milions of telephones (compare this with US, with 180M telephones and 1/4-th of the chinese population)! Adding the Hong-Kong does not change the situation much: 1998 estimate for HK is 4.5M telephones.
I wonder if I could have a population data too? This would make a "linuxcounter" database of USA much easier to maintain!
If anyone has such a database for other countries (how about the whole world?), please send it to me! I need "Town/state/country", and having "longitude/latitude" and "inhabitants" would be great!
I wonder if I could have a population data too? This would make a "linuxcounter" database of USA much easier to maintain!
If anyone has such a database for other countries (how about the whole world?), please send it to me! I need "Town/state/country", and having "lingitude/latitude" and "inhabitants" would be great!
In my opinion, the real problem is that we will soon grow tired of hearing this kind of stories and stop reacting. This is exactly the reasons why Corel and Sun are doing this:
"Let us see if anyone is watching us - if we get caught, we apologise, else we win. Sooner or later they will get tired of watching."
Imagine what will happen, when in 2 years Corel puts yet another stupid licence somewhere in their distribution? That's it: NOTHING, because we will all be so pissed off by corel that noone will even bother reacting anymore. What we need is a central linux (or more general "Free software") legal departement to fight them in the long term...
I know that a serious answer to a funny letter :-))
("Corel: adults only" is my favorite
sounds rather silly, but I have a feeling you are somewhat missinformed:
- RH 6.1 is not just "eyecandy". It is the MAJOR linux distribution. It is also a vell-done distro, at least the 5.x versions were. I do not know about 6.1, but 6.0 was a crap.
- SUSE is in Germany & Austria what RedHat is in the USA. Since the Germany is the biggest European country, S.U.S.E. is a very strong Linux player.
I do not like the "YAST" licence at all, but this is a very well done distro.
- Mandrake still looks much like RedHat - (something I personally like very much), but it is
certainly not RedHat anymore. It is much more polished for "workstation" use - trust me, I have switched 10 of them to Mandrake 2 months ago in order to spare myself work on fixing menue-entries manually (RH 6.1 may be better).
I also have a feeling that Mandrake internationalisation efforts go a step further than those of any other distribution.
Sorry for interrupted sentence. What i wanted to say was:
And finally, the profit margine on OS might soon become very low, because of the Linux & co. At that moment, Windows would become a stone on the neck of the Microsoft, instead of the money-maker.
Therefore, other divisions may be better off withouth OS-division in the future, although it wasn't so in the past.
There are several extremly important things which will stop Billy & co. from going anywhere. They are called money, Money and MONEY
So, do not worry - whatever happens, M$ stays where it is. With some luck, they split in several divisions and all of the sudden it becomes possible to run former M$-owned programs on Linux & co.
In my opinion this got into wrong rubric - it should be under "It's funny, laught". The whole tone of the web-page sounds more like "i'm kidding" than anything else.
Even if it is not a hoax, the sheer idea of making a frankestein-like 21-inch iMac is simply hilarious. (Besides - i like the foot better than apple...)
I cannot believe this is true. If it is, then FBI should start firing a lot of people:
The guys who did the stupid move, their chef, the one who gave them employement in the first place, the doctor who is responsible fof checking their health... I wonder how many people would that be in the end...
This is either a classical hoax, or a classical "shoot yourself in the leg" situation. I hope it is a hoax.
Unfortunately my notice on "redhat.org" did not make it into "quickies". Well, either the "editor" did not check it at all, or he is completely humor-impaired.
Anyway, just take a look at that baby - it is one of the best jokes i have ever seen.
I have a bunch of Linux computers which act as a "better replacements" for windows in my jurisdictions. Just simple workstations, two of them are even used by our secretaries.
Noone has found them difficult to use, but I have had a big hedache in upgrading these machines lately. Machines used to be RH5.x based, with a lot of updates. They worked fine for a while, but it has became very difficult to keep them "up-to-date" because of the incompatibilities between the "5.x" and "6.x"-based distributions. Then I had to add two more machines, and I realised it is time to start updating a whole set...
- First I tried the RH 6.0, but I had some problems with samba+vmware (yes, we do have legacy applications). Besides, Star Office was very instable.
- At the same time I have tried Mandrake 6.1 at home and I liked it a lot, so I decided to turn them all into Mandrake. Star-office seams to run more stable nnow, but unfortunately, I have run into major set of difficulties with network printing, and samba+vmware still do not like each other as much as I whish they would. I have been thinking of giving RH 6.1 a try, but people seam to have all kinds of problems with these too...
So what we have now? Linux has got much easier to use lately. At the same time the quality has got worse. If this continues in the same direction, soon there will be no difference between Linux and Windoze. I hope to see some improvements soon.
I can only offer you a lowest estimate of the yearly growth - according to the "linux-counter" it is more than 60%. All other estimates give much higher growth rates.
My best guess is that less than 1% and more than 0.5% of the linux users register with the "linux counter"- that would be 12-24 Milions of the linux users today. You can download my graph showing the linux-counter growth together with RH-estimates here
Hi
Below is some more info about the linux-counter project. I hope you will find it interesting:
"Genetical engineering" is probably the most important thing humans have learned how to do in a long time. Yes, I think it is much more important than internet .-)
Imagine the possibilities in front of us - plants could be made "better" in various ways:
- The rice lacks some vitamines? Let us fix this..
- Beeing vegetarian is bad for you because some proteines are missing in plants - well, not any more!
And what does our dear food-industry produce using this technology?
- plants which cannot reproduce: so you have to buy seeds again and again and... With a good chance that your neighbour will have to do the same, because of the cross-insemination.
- plants with higher resistivity against insect-killing and (other) plants-killing chemicals... Meaning more chemicals can be trown over the fields, killing everything except the plant they sold you. As a side effect, YOU will get more more chemicals in your food, insect become more resistent and all those farmers who do not buy "resistant" seeds get ruined.
I suppose I should not be surprised - after all, the same thing happens every time a new industry is build: the "bad guys" get a grip on it first.
First - may karma of the troll who marked my first posting as "flamebait" be set to -100 or so. I am quite annoyed.
.rpm package, all i have to do is check if it installs properly on one machine, then put it in a directory where "autorpm" will find it. If I do not have an .rpm package, I have to go trough the "install" procedure N-times. (I can tell you that I will hate You if you do this to me.)
.rpm packages aren't so good as they could be - Usually one has to edit some /etc files after instalation and so on - so basically one ends-up with either "installing N-times" again, or making customized rpm-s, or making a tarball ( or .rpm, or...) out of the files which have been changed after the instalation.
.rpm packages (or .deb or ...) on-the-fly, so that the package can be safely installed using the rpm-manager (or whatever tool on other systems) would be a really GREAT tool. I would be extremly happy to answer all the questions (or whatever) during the first phase - that is, while the "installer" is trying to guess the right configuration. I do not mind reading the licencing agreements or whatever during this phase.
+ ++ /opt/program.
Now back to the buisness: In order to install software on a (single) linux system properly, following steps must be performed:
1) check for dependencies and all the other troubles the package may nead or may break. For example: Will I overwrite something? Are the libraries I need on the system
2) prepare for the instalation (PRE_INSTALL script), if nessesary
2) unpack the software-package and put the files where they belong
3) do the nessesary changes in etc-files, (re) start some demones etc => POST_INSTALL script
4) write down a protocol about the installed files, packages this one depends on, and what has to be done if one wants to deinstall it later (i.e. POST_INSTALL script). Obviously, if there is some kind of a package manager on the system this "protocol" shouls be handed to it.
In my opinion, there is only one way to do this properly: by generating the binary packages on-the-fly. I will call the hypothetical program which generates packages "translator" (not installer) from now on.
If you generate packages on the fly, a tarball including binaries + "description" in combination with the "translator" is suficcient to get your program installed on "any" linux system.
I suppose, we could call this kind of distribution a "binary meta-package". I can imagine all kinds of troubles one would run into with these "binary-meta-packages" - because every distribution is a little bit different, but if one concentrates on lets say debian (or RedHat/SuSe/whatever), separates the distribution-related stuff in modules and puts the code under GPL, most of the distributions would make the nessesary modules themselves.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The situation gets even worse in case you want to install the software on many machines as I do: In case I have a
However, ever standard
An "installer" which produces custom-made
However, the end-product of this (more-or-less painfull) pre-instalation should be a package custom-made for my system. With all the dependencies, pre-instal, post-install and post-uninstall scripts in place, as well and all the configurations files fixed so that i can say "rpm -i package" and install it and start working with the program later.
Having a big green smiley with "PRESS ME TO INSTALL THE SOFTWARE" on it in the end of the instalation (which does rpm -i package" in my case) is OK, but I really want to have this binary RPM, otherwise i have to make one myself later and that is an utterly annoying and unnessesary work.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In case someone really does not want to use the package-manager, he should make programs which get installed under
However, I cannot see what good is an "installer" in such a case - All there is to be done is unpacking the tarball and anyone can make a "graphical installer" which unpacks tarballs in a few minutes. For anything more complicated - give me an rpm or I will yell at you.
By the way - i have had a "priviledge" of installing some win95 machines (virtual, under vmware) lately. Instalation of programs was a major pain in the ass:
- press on the "install" icon, answer some questions, wait (you can watch some stupid animation while waiting, though) part was not so bad, but "reboot the PC", followed by "Oh, someone has changed the libraries, should i put them back" was really annoying. As I heard, even win2000 will have some kind of a package-manager.
I have read it. And i do not agree.
Should I be happy because a crappy way of installing the program gets easier to do?
No thx. Commercial products should be made as packages and thats it. They should check the dependencies and put entries into the install-database, so that I can spot them, check the integrity and uninstall them later.
If supporting several different package-systems troubles the commercial vendors, they can always think of something to make package "on-the-fly":
1) Check the system, decide on type of the package
2) make a binary-only package with pre-install, post-install and post-uninstal scripts.
3) install using the native package-manager.
If they want a colorfull interface, it is OK with me, but installing stuff on its own is completely irresponsible - this is a job for the "RPM"-, or "DEB"- package manager. Magic words are:
DEPENDENCIES, and UNINSTALL!
Come on, wake up!
Why for the gods sake would I need an installer on pacage-based system? Does it produce an ".rpm" (or ".deb" , in case the system is debian-based) package on the fly?
If it doesn't, I do not see what is it good for. I certainly do not want to get the same situation as in Windows - A program gets installed, breaks some dependencies and you may re-install the system to get it fixed.
But, as far as I know, US-companies arent even allowed to make interfaces to strong-cryptography programs. I suppose that is the main reason why pine support for PGP is so crappy. If the US goverment wants to be really "anal" about the crypto-law, RH is going to have a lot of difficulties.
>Ok: this make SuSE happy, isn't it?
Sure. But it does not make me happier - I still think their Yast licence is a BadThing(TM).
>And for instance makes happier Software companies
> in Europe: the crypto laws of USA were a godsend
No, it does not. Closed-source is OK now, so european companies loose anyway. Except maybe for SuSe and symmilar.
>But anyway I downloades ssh from a server in >Finland, ad I'll continue to download from it.
Sure, I download it too, but I would prefere to have a better integration with "strong cryptography" in the "core" package.
Now, name at least two well-known US-based companies which will continue to suffer from these restrictions!
Right! Redhat and Caldera (especially RedHat, since they really want to keep their distribution "free") still have the same problems, because their "products" are open-sourced. Cute.
I can think of two possible scenaria, one which makes sense and another which does not:
I am very patient man, and I used to be amused by Amiga-articles, but this is too much now, even for me. Here is what I am going to do now:
Goodbye Amiga. Pitty, it is such a nice machine.