From a freedom standpoint, I'd say RMS is dead on correct. Torvalds' is effectively rejecting our contemporary nation of free software. (And the GPL - like the US Constitution is and should be a living dcoument that adjusts over time.)
The upshot is that - from my reading - Linus is embracing what is far closer to a BSD license.
But here is here it gets really odd: What about Debian and the rest of the wonderful purists? If the kernel lags behind in a (relatively) antiquated GPL 2 status, why should free software embrace it at all? Would that mean the sudden surge of the Hurd?
Lots to think about here...
Personally, if the kernel stays at GPL 2, I'm finally ditching linux for good in favor of FreeBSD. At least their licensing viewpoint is not hypocritcal.
The problem is...they probably DO. One thing I like about Gnome is that they don't (seem) to try to reinvent every piece of software on the planet and have it play nicely with all of the GTK+ crap. (Ok, they do have their own cd player, etc.) But those KDE folks...sheesh, why not just recycle some perfectly good gnome apps. It makes me pine for the unified linix desktop idea. Have a few solid projects and make those ones great. The splinter effct is a bit maddening sometimes.
Despite all of the Suse/Ubuntu hoopla, don't worry, there are some dedicated Debian folks still swimming in the sea.
Here's some trool-bait: Is admin. a RH (or any Linux) really that difficult? I'm assuming they have some fairly sharp folks at Oracle and Linux would seem to be on the easier side of things. At least on Debian, even installing the client drivers for Oracle is a major hassle. I can't imagine what goes into support a full server setup. In comparison, Linux would seem to be a snap. This is from someone who is NOT is tech field/position. Through circumstance and interest, I have managed to program in 5 different languages and run many flavors of Linux and *BSD at a fairly high level. And I'm a freakin' librarian. Certainly supporting RH shouldn't be a challenge for *real* systems people.
It makes mw wonder who they are hiring at RH.
Well, here's my experince with Firefox/Mozilla/Seamonkey on Debian testing:
Seamonkey is noticably faster in both loading and throughout and the last few weeks since I installed it.
I believe a bug report has been filed with Debian pointing out Seamonkey's absense. Hopefully it will appear in sid in the near future.
The Project/Product nuances are worth exploring more. Here's my take:
Any Linux distibution is an amalgamation of the currently available feature sets: kernel, basic system, security and networking tools, xorg (if you need it), etc. In a word: snapshot. That reeks of Project status. ("Support for diver XYZ won't be available until the next release, as the hardware was released just after the launch date.")
Solaris and *BSD do not work that way. They are vastly (and centrally) planned operations. Goals are established and they are released at the pleasure of the developers. Yes, it is a pain in ass to get a Sun or *BSD system fully useful with many Project addons. But the point is to release a powerful, stable BASE system for your use. If that's tooo dificult for someone, well...too bad. Enough homework should allow you to be ready for the next release. (No finger pointing at anyone in particular here!).
Like my automobile, I want my OS to be a safe, reliable Product. There's a reason most Project cars probably won't pass inspection.
Agreed!
Not to start the troll fest....but this IS the reason why Solaris and *BSD are (and should be) considered to be mature and stable operating systems/. (Keep your tinker toys out of the server room, kids.) But Linux - perhaps by design and certainly by its' development model - will always be a Project and not a Product. Albeit a damn good project.
events like the kernel panic (sorry, I had to) that was all over this forum earlier this week. How would a truly major period of instability in the kernel affect any potential "player" vendors. Yes, of course, they'll be sticking to older, stable and in-house customized versions. But what if the kernel simply doesn't take the paths that are deemed to be required by corporate vendors? ("You're not implementing that sort of boneheaded thinking into MY precious kernel.") One can imagine the wholesale vendors developing their own unmergable forks. (Think it can't happen? Look at *BSD.) Imagine Novell, Redhat and Google Linux (???) all strutting their stuff about who has the most bad-ass, but bastardized faux-Linux.
Or am I being paranoid?
You are one seriously disturbed human. How dare you question the actions of any fellow slashdotter in regard to their FAMILY. That is beyond any sense of web fellowship and good taste. You don't know me (and never will) or anything about my supposed lack of support for my mother. (In terms of computers - and more important - in life.) In short:
Get a sense of what is important in life. And fuck off, you horrid bitch.
Perhaps I should have install AbiWord for her at the time? But I think that defaults to.abi, which is yet again a bit of a problem for the non-power users.
Lesson learned on this one...leave more time to tweak the install for your relatives!
Thanks for any/all comments on this.
I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install.
Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them.
Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.
She's 70 years old, running Ubuntu Hoary on dialup and lives in the middle of nowhere in another state. Trying to explain that would be....well, that's the whole point. It shouldn't have to be explained. The default should be RTF.
OOO seems to default to it's own formats. Rather that.rtf or.doc. Change this and it will be a lot easier for new adaptors...Like my 70 year old mother using Ubuntu. She uses it to type up her recipes and book club discussions. Emails me everytime a document can't be opened by one of her Windows-using old lady friends.
Of course at this point I don't use GNOME (or any other WIMP window manager) because it/they just get in the way. But that's another post for another day.
You are severely missing the point. Debian is a wonderful OS, wit the bloat kept to a minimum. Ubuntu ha staken that solid base and added far too many memory hoggers to GNOME. As an aside, if you are such a a fucking stud, then why are you using Ubuntu in the first place?? It's for newbies. Command line "experts" like yourself should stick with Debian. Or better yet, run a BSD or Solaris environment. Ubuntu is great for newbies. But I suspect you are simply an idiot. You're certainly a damn fool.
Gentoo? Pluuease, compiling everything from scratch is so 10 years ago.
I hope you aren't a systems admin and people are relying on your bloated bianry installs. Seriously. I gave up on Linux (mainly because of Ubuntu and the bloated kernel) and headed for FreeBSD, but I do admire the Gentoo approach. Try compiling KDE from scratch these days and see the real difference.
Special? It seems almost unusable as a desktop OS. Unless you install the new-ish Xubuntu, which utulizes XFCE with all of the GTK stuff set up for you. I tried it again on my 2.4/512 machine and it took forever for any apps. to open and load in Gnome. The KDE side wasn't any better.
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From a freedom standpoint, I'd say RMS is dead on correct. Torvalds' is effectively rejecting our contemporary nation of free software. (And the GPL - like the US Constitution is and should be a living dcoument that adjusts over time.) The upshot is that - from my reading - Linus is embracing what is far closer to a BSD license.
But here is here it gets really odd: What about Debian and the rest of the wonderful purists? If the kernel lags behind in a (relatively) antiquated GPL 2 status, why should free software embrace it at all? Would that mean the sudden surge of the Hurd?
Lots to think about here...
Personally, if the kernel stays at GPL 2, I'm finally ditching linux for good in favor of FreeBSD. At least their licensing viewpoint is not hypocritcal.
The problem is...they probably DO. One thing I like about Gnome is that they don't (seem) to try to reinvent every piece of software on the planet and have it play nicely with all of the GTK+ crap. (Ok, they do have their own cd player, etc.) But those KDE folks...sheesh, why not just recycle some perfectly good gnome apps. It makes me pine for the unified linix desktop idea. Have a few solid projects and make those ones great. The splinter effct is a bit maddening sometimes.
Despite all of the Suse/Ubuntu hoopla, don't worry, there are some dedicated Debian folks still swimming in the sea.
Here's some trool-bait: Is admin. a RH (or any Linux) really that difficult? I'm assuming they have some fairly sharp folks at Oracle and Linux would seem to be on the easier side of things. At least on Debian, even installing the client drivers for Oracle is a major hassle. I can't imagine what goes into support a full server setup. In comparison, Linux would seem to be a snap. This is from someone who is NOT is tech field/position. Through circumstance and interest, I have managed to program in 5 different languages and run many flavors of Linux and *BSD at a fairly high level. And I'm a freakin' librarian. Certainly supporting RH shouldn't be a challenge for *real* systems people.
It makes mw wonder who they are hiring at RH.
Well, here's my experince with Firefox/Mozilla/Seamonkey on Debian testing: Seamonkey is noticably faster in both loading and throughout and the last few weeks since I installed it. I believe a bug report has been filed with Debian pointing out Seamonkey's absense. Hopefully it will appear in sid in the near future.
The Project/Product nuances are worth exploring more. Here's my take:
Any Linux distibution is an amalgamation of the currently available feature sets: kernel, basic system, security and networking tools, xorg (if you need it), etc. In a word: snapshot. That reeks of Project status. ("Support for diver XYZ won't be available until the next release, as the hardware was released just after the launch date.")
Solaris and *BSD do not work that way. They are vastly (and centrally) planned operations. Goals are established and they are released at the pleasure of the developers. Yes, it is a pain in ass to get a Sun or *BSD system fully useful with many Project addons. But the point is to release a powerful, stable BASE system for your use. If that's tooo dificult for someone, well...too bad. Enough homework should allow you to be ready for the next release. (No finger pointing at anyone in particular here!).
Like my automobile, I want my OS to be a safe, reliable Product. There's a reason most Project cars probably won't pass inspection.
Agreed!
Not to start the troll fest....but this IS the reason why Solaris and *BSD are (and should be) considered to be mature and stable operating systems/. (Keep your tinker toys out of the server room, kids.) But Linux - perhaps by design and certainly by its' development model - will always be a Project and not a Product. Albeit a damn good project.
events like the kernel panic (sorry, I had to) that was all over this forum earlier this week. How would a truly major period of instability in the kernel affect any potential "player" vendors. Yes, of course, they'll be sticking to older, stable and in-house customized versions. But what if the kernel simply doesn't take the paths that are deemed to be required by corporate vendors? ("You're not implementing that sort of boneheaded thinking into MY precious kernel.") One can imagine the wholesale vendors developing their own unmergable forks. (Think it can't happen? Look at *BSD.) Imagine Novell, Redhat and Google Linux (???) all strutting their stuff about who has the most bad-ass, but bastardized faux-Linux.
Or am I being paranoid?
You are one seriously disturbed human. How dare you question the actions of any fellow slashdotter in regard to their FAMILY. That is beyond any sense of web fellowship and good taste. You don't know me (and never will) or anything about my supposed lack of support for my mother. (In terms of computers - and more important - in life.) In short:
Get a sense of what is important in life. And fuck off, you horrid bitch.
Perhaps I should have install AbiWord for her at the time? But I think that defaults to .abi, which is yet again a bit of a problem for the non-power users.
Lesson learned on this one...leave more time to tweak the install for your relatives!
Thanks for any/all comments on this.
I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install. Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them. Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.
She's 70 years old, running Ubuntu Hoary on dialup and lives in the middle of nowhere in another state. Trying to explain that would be....well, that's the whole point. It shouldn't have to be explained. The default should be RTF.
OOO seems to default to it's own formats. Rather that .rtf or .doc. Change this and it will be a lot easier for new adaptors...Like my 70 year old mother using Ubuntu. She uses it to type up her recipes and book club discussions. Emails me everytime a document can't be opened by one of her Windows-using old lady friends.
Of course at this point I don't use GNOME (or any other WIMP window manager) because it/they just get in the way. But that's another post for another day.
You are severely missing the point. Debian is a wonderful OS, wit the bloat kept to a minimum. Ubuntu ha staken that solid base and added far too many memory hoggers to GNOME.
As an aside, if you are such a a fucking stud, then why are you using Ubuntu in the first place?? It's for newbies. Command line "experts" like yourself should stick with Debian. Or better yet, run a BSD or Solaris environment. Ubuntu is great for newbies. But I suspect you are simply an idiot. You're certainly a damn fool.
Gentoo? Pluuease, compiling everything from scratch is so 10 years ago.
I hope you aren't a systems admin and people are relying on your bloated bianry installs. Seriously. I gave up on Linux (mainly because of Ubuntu and the bloated kernel) and headed for FreeBSD, but I do admire the Gentoo approach. Try compiling KDE from scratch these days and see the real difference.
Special? It seems almost unusable as a desktop OS. Unless you install the new-ish Xubuntu, which utulizes XFCE with all of the GTK stuff set up for you. I tried it again on my 2.4/512 machine and it took forever for any apps. to open and load in Gnome. The KDE side wasn't any better.
Can this idiot be banned from /.???
China: About 61,400,000 results United States: About 61,200,000 results
Well...we don't want to give the impression that all of the male geeks are serial killers.
idea for the /. crowd.
Why don't you single folks set up you OWN site:
dating.slashdot.org comes to mind. Imagine the fierce competition for any woman who dared post herself on it.
I'm not kidding about this either.