I'm surprised that many people, even my fellow Slackers, don't know about Slackware's mailing lists. In usual Slackware down-to-earth-and-keep-it-simple approach to things, you just subscribe to the security mailing list, and you get an email when the team has applied a security patch to a package in the 'current' tree. Simple, effective, and you never worry about having a patch pushed to you that going to break something. From what I understand (I'm not on the list, as I take Slackware proper and then do my own thing and keep my own package tree) they're patched as soon as upstream has a patch.
As for GP, I'd just like to point out that Slackware is the most 'vanilla' distro you're going to find; you can customize it, cut it down, mold it... I've got an old socket A Duron @ 900 MHz that cold boots to a ~50 Slackware distro (services included). I run iSCSI that I compiled (user and kernel sides) by hand with the libraries that I use. With dependency tracking and whatnot, if you want a single package, you might end up apt-getting/yumming 300 megs of Gnome and all of its services because somewhere something is linked to GTK, whose library is compiled with a different libc than the one you're currently running, and next thing you know, you're dropping in a new kernel, libc, a handful of services, GTK and a desktop environment because you wanted a text-only calendar that needed a single library. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I had that problem on RHEL today - I wanted to install Zimbra, which needed fetchmail, but I wanted to get rid of all the other mail programs and just run Zimbra. So, I removed dovecot, postfix, and sendmail, which pulled out fetchmail because it needed an smtpdaemon. So, I yummed fetchmail back, and it pulled in exim with it to meet that requirement (even though Zimbra brings postfix with it... but it's not from upstream, so I can't let fetchmail use it to meet the dependency). To summarize, I wanted to remove three email programs, it took out four, and then made me put three back in. In Slackware the answer would have been './configure && make install', and to remove them I'd have 'make uninstall'. Just something to think about.
If you had problems, it might have been that you were running gjc. I always forget to rip out gjc when I do a centos install and I always realize it the first time I fire up Eclipse, it pegs the CPU and lags KDE. Same goes for the Java EE Red Hat/Centos/Fedora directory server. If you attempt to run any slightly complex Java apps on top of gjc, it *technically* works... but it doesn't, really.
< rant > This is another area where I like being a Slackware fanboy; RHEL/Centos/Fedora/SUSE all integrate the gjc sdk libs right in to the/usr hierarchy (and split the over the/usr/share,/usr/lib/,/etc) by default and leave you to try to use alternatives as a front end to your directory tree. They've got it setup as a symlink farm so that you can't really just relink without still having one pointing to the wrong library. I'm always a fan of putting stacks in/opt with a single symlink to each part of the stack - it just makes these issues that much more bearable when you come up against these issues.</rant >
FWIW, I'd give 64 bit Eclipse a shot under a Sun or IBM JRE/SDK/JDK.
Actually, if you think about it, support is just a money sink for Microsoft... it costs them lots of money and generates no extra business (if you're calling for support, they've already got your money, most likely).
Yeah, so long as you're not looking down the barrel of a critical app that is about to hit end-of-life without an upgrade path. For instance, anyone who had a critical in house application using COM/OLE when Microsoft switch to.NET. You've gotta' switch before you've got no safety net, so why not use it as an opportunity to switch platforms?
OTOH, to switch platforms solely for cost reasons, while said platform is treating you well, is fairly irresponsible and probably more costly than riding out your current solution to its EOL.
No doubt. Red Hat is the only company that I know of that will support other vendors apps to the point of fixing it themselves, or even having one of their kernel devs patch Linux. If fact, Red Hat is the only company that I know of that can really claim that they can get fixes for customers directly in to both the mainline Linux kernel and Samba. My understanding is they'll also support any of the products created by the thousands of vendors that are part of the Red Hat Exchange. Microsoft just can't offer that, even if they wanted to.
You joke... if only you knew that at the top left, about another hundred yards further is a national guard post. They've got and old Abrams (at least I think it is) tank and a tracked anti-aircraft vehicle parked on the grass with signs that tell us students to keep of the tanks. No. Seriously. I'm currently a student at KU and I wish I were making up the part about 'keep off the tanks'... I've been meaning to steal that sign forever. It'd be wicked to put on the wall.
Too bad I didn't know about this... I would have done it. That shot is a mile or two from my apartment and I'm the secretary of the Kutztown Technology Association and the president of the Kutztown Linux Group:)
It's unfortunate that they didn't show the whole town. It only extends a mile to the north... that road in the middle is Main Street; small town, lots of corn fields. But an awesome little Main Street.
You should be able to just get the GTK headers and libs and compile it. Patt dropped Gnome from Slackware for this very reason - it's a horribly complicated package to get right.
I could try to roll you a tgz later today. Are you running 12.0 proper? You'll have to drop some gtk libs in/usr/local/lib, but I can throw them in the package so you can do a removepkg to remove the app and libs in one fell swoop.
Well, the band "Me First and the Gimme Gimmes" are the exception that prove the rule.
If you're not familiar with them... They only do punk covers of old songs, sometimes better than the originals. The members call it a 'vacation band'... they're all in other punk bands and do the Gimmes records between tours. The whole thing is basically a bunch of very talented punks trying to be obnoxious and their talent got in the way of the joke. It's like an open joke where you either get it or you don't. But they've made a dozen or so records from not writing a single note and never practicing before a show (check out "Ruin Johnny's Barmitzvah" on youtube - they recorded a live album, drunk, without ever bothering to practice, for one of their corp. execs. sons' barmitzvah...) and they're legends. Seriously, they had one of the guys from Bad Religion fill in for one of the guys when he was touring with his other band. Oblig. wiki link
The point is, great musicians are great whether they're writing or performing. But there are also a lot of one trick ponies out there.
Nice. If I had mod points I'd throw one your way for correcting your mistake at personal cost (it sucks to lose 15 mod points over a wireless mouse that jumps from time to time, no?). At any rate, kudos and thanks.
If it doesn't enter the atmosphere as a single piece (your assumption for simplicities sake), won't you have more surface area thereby increasing the friction and accelerating the energy release (erm, I think impulse is the term I'm looking for... it's been a few years since high school physics and I was never any good at it to begin with)? Or, you'll have the same amount of energy released in a shorter time frame which will be more forceful than the 'shell' burning away in the atmosphere at a more steady rate. Is this correct?
Clearly you don't have any experience "hearding cats" or implementing large systems. If I followed you're advice I would get 10 'nice' applications, none of which address the problem at hand.
Look on the bright side, you'd get them in 15 different languages!
No doubt; I'd love to hack apart the code for Warcraft. IIRC (I was 10 at the time) it had an awesome engine under it. I love old game code. Those guys had things figured out 15 years ago that I won't have thought of until 15 years from now. It's actually humbling, as a software development student in college, to see this stuff. If this stuff is never released, it'll suffer bitrot, and that would be a shame.
So you would have no issue if Bush, Blair, Putin or any other government figurehead demanded that companies hand over their source code?
Comparing RMS to the Chinese government is apples and oranges. Our culture/society is based on the idea that we are free to choose (albeit, sometimes with consequences) many facets of our lives and businesses.
I, personally, believe that open source is a better process from a software development standpoint. That being said, I also respect that companies are free to choose their licensing and business models as they see fit (within reason, of course). RMS is saying that he wants the source to be free, whereas the Chinese government is demanding it.
Isn't this the same country that has been sending picture frames with viruses embedded to infect USB drives attached to them? They're making demands without having the common courtesy to pretend to have the moral high ground. Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Actually, I think you're out 5 bucks and 20 hours of otherwise productive time this week:)
I didn't know it's on Steam... what's the deal, one time fee of $5? If that's the case, I'll sign up for an account. By my calculations, that's like a good 100 hours or so of very enjoyable gaming for a fiver!
Now that they've got their servers back up and running, let's slashdot 'em! Now I remember why I decided to go with software development over network administration!
Forget the posters and such... just give me a full manual like they used to. I remember when computer games always came with a honkin' big manual that covered every aspect of the game and even gave you some tips. A PDF on a CD doesn't even compare to having a spiral bound book with cheat sheets, stats and even a section in the back for notes. I guess I'm all nostalgic after coming across my old Neverwinter Nights manual the other day; ironically, I lost 1 of the 2 disks (although I found my old receipt with the manual) so I can't play it.
I just found out that they had a Linux version that you could download and integrate your Windows versions' data files. Perhaps it's better to be nostalgic about it than hunt down a copy and realize that it wasn't as good as I remember it being. Then again, I thought the same thing about Railroad Tycoon II and happened to hunt down a copy... it was every bit as good as I remembered it being.
For storing permissions and the such, are you using a.tar container? My biggest stumbling block with my backup scheme is storing ACLs and permissions.
I've got a few ideas about doing it, but they're all kludgy or force me to walk away from my rsync scripts which are really fairly mature at this point. Furthermore, I need to get deltas downstream and packing everything in to one file pretty much defeats that purpose at the several gig level unless I'm running an rsync server to calculate the diffs. These kinds of things become problematic due to the infrastructure I'm working with.
I'm really starting to lean towards running everything over iSCSI, but then I've got to get the VPN thing going which could require some re-subnetting at either end of the tunnel. Needless to say, I'd prefer to avoid that or any other solution that requires messing with stuff that Works Right Now.
Have you dealt with these issues at all, or at least know what won't work? I'd appreciate any insights before I use a brute force method.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that many people, even my fellow Slackers, don't know about Slackware's mailing lists. In usual Slackware down-to-earth-and-keep-it-simple approach to things, you just subscribe to the security mailing list, and you get an email when the team has applied a security patch to a package in the 'current' tree. Simple, effective, and you never worry about having a patch pushed to you that going to break something. From what I understand (I'm not on the list, as I take Slackware proper and then do my own thing and keep my own package tree) they're patched as soon as upstream has a patch.
As for GP, I'd just like to point out that Slackware is the most 'vanilla' distro you're going to find; you can customize it, cut it down, mold it... I've got an old socket A Duron @ 900 MHz that cold boots to a ~50 Slackware distro (services included). I run iSCSI that I compiled (user and kernel sides) by hand with the libraries that I use. With dependency tracking and whatnot, if you want a single package, you might end up apt-getting/yumming 300 megs of Gnome and all of its services because somewhere something is linked to GTK, whose library is compiled with a different libc than the one you're currently running, and next thing you know, you're dropping in a new kernel, libc, a handful of services, GTK and a desktop environment because you wanted a text-only calendar that needed a single library. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I had that problem on RHEL today - I wanted to install Zimbra, which needed fetchmail, but I wanted to get rid of all the other mail programs and just run Zimbra. So, I removed dovecot, postfix, and sendmail, which pulled out fetchmail because it needed an smtpdaemon. So, I yummed fetchmail back, and it pulled in exim with it to meet that requirement (even though Zimbra brings postfix with it... but it's not from upstream, so I can't let fetchmail use it to meet the dependency). To summarize, I wanted to remove three email programs, it took out four, and then made me put three back in. In Slackware the answer would have been './configure && make install', and to remove them I'd have 'make uninstall'. Just something to think about.
FWIW, Java has goto as a reserved word, but it is currently unimplemented. However, everything else that you say is spot on.
If you had problems, it might have been that you were running gjc. I always forget to rip out gjc when I do a centos install and I always realize it the first time I fire up Eclipse, it pegs the CPU and lags KDE. Same goes for the Java EE Red Hat/Centos/Fedora directory server. If you attempt to run any slightly complex Java apps on top of gjc, it *technically* works... but it doesn't, really.
/usr hierarchy (and split the over the /usr/share, /usr/lib/, /etc) by default and leave you to try to use alternatives as a front end to your directory tree. They've got it setup as a symlink farm so that you can't really just relink without still having one pointing to the wrong library. I'm always a fan of putting stacks in /opt with a single symlink to each part of the stack - it just makes these issues that much more bearable when you come up against these issues.< /rant >
< rant > This is another area where I like being a Slackware fanboy; RHEL/Centos/Fedora/SUSE all integrate the gjc sdk libs right in to the
FWIW, I'd give 64 bit Eclipse a shot under a Sun or IBM JRE/SDK/JDK.
Actually, if you think about it, support is just a money sink for Microsoft... it costs them lots of money and generates no extra business (if you're calling for support, they've already got your money, most likely).
Yeah, so long as you're not looking down the barrel of a critical app that is about to hit end-of-life without an upgrade path. For instance, anyone who had a critical in house application using COM/OLE when Microsoft switch to .NET. You've gotta' switch before you've got no safety net, so why not use it as an opportunity to switch platforms?
OTOH, to switch platforms solely for cost reasons, while said platform is treating you well, is fairly irresponsible and probably more costly than riding out your current solution to its EOL.
No doubt. Red Hat is the only company that I know of that will support other vendors apps to the point of fixing it themselves, or even having one of their kernel devs patch Linux. If fact, Red Hat is the only company that I know of that can really claim that they can get fixes for customers directly in to both the mainline Linux kernel and Samba. My understanding is they'll also support any of the products created by the thousands of vendors that are part of the Red Hat Exchange. Microsoft just can't offer that, even if they wanted to.
You joke... if only you knew that at the top left, about another hundred yards further is a national guard post. They've got and old Abrams (at least I think it is) tank and a tracked anti-aircraft vehicle parked on the grass with signs that tell us students to keep of the tanks. No. Seriously. I'm currently a student at KU and I wish I were making up the part about 'keep off the tanks'... I've been meaning to steal that sign forever. It'd be wicked to put on the wall.
Too bad I didn't know about this... I would have done it. That shot is a mile or two from my apartment and I'm the secretary of the Kutztown Technology Association and the president of the Kutztown Linux Group :)
It's unfortunate that they didn't show the whole town. It only extends a mile to the north... that road in the middle is Main Street; small town, lots of corn fields. But an awesome little Main Street.
You should be able to just get the GTK headers and libs and compile it. Patt dropped Gnome from Slackware for this very reason - it's a horribly complicated package to get right.
/usr/local/lib, but I can throw them in the package so you can do a removepkg to remove the app and libs in one fell swoop.
I could try to roll you a tgz later today. Are you running 12.0 proper? You'll have to drop some gtk libs in
Well, the band "Me First and the Gimme Gimmes" are the exception that prove the rule.
If you're not familiar with them...
They only do punk covers of old songs, sometimes better than the originals. The members call it a 'vacation band'... they're all in other punk bands and do the Gimmes records between tours. The whole thing is basically a bunch of very talented punks trying to be obnoxious and their talent got in the way of the joke. It's like an open joke where you either get it or you don't. But they've made a dozen or so records from not writing a single note and never practicing before a show (check out "Ruin Johnny's Barmitzvah" on youtube - they recorded a live album, drunk, without ever bothering to practice, for one of their corp. execs. sons' barmitzvah...) and they're legends. Seriously, they had one of the guys from Bad Religion fill in for one of the guys when he was touring with his other band. Oblig. wiki link
The point is, great musicians are great whether they're writing or performing. But there are also a lot of one trick ponies out there.
Nice. If I had mod points I'd throw one your way for correcting your mistake at personal cost (it sucks to lose 15 mod points over a wireless mouse that jumps from time to time, no?). At any rate, kudos and thanks.
If it doesn't enter the atmosphere as a single piece (your assumption for simplicities sake), won't you have more surface area thereby increasing the friction and accelerating the energy release (erm, I think impulse is the term I'm looking for... it's been a few years since high school physics and I was never any good at it to begin with)? Or, you'll have the same amount of energy released in a shorter time frame which will be more forceful than the 'shell' burning away in the atmosphere at a more steady rate. Is this correct?
Clearly you don't have any experience "hearding cats" or implementing large systems. If I followed you're advice I would get 10 'nice' applications, none of which address the problem at hand.
Look on the bright side, you'd get them in 15 different languages!
No doubt; I'd love to hack apart the code for Warcraft. IIRC (I was 10 at the time) it had an awesome engine under it. I love old game code. Those guys had things figured out 15 years ago that I won't have thought of until 15 years from now. It's actually humbling, as a software development student in college, to see this stuff. If this stuff is never released, it'll suffer bitrot, and that would be a shame.
Well, you gotta' give it to 'em. They played the numbers saying, "what's the worst thing that could possibly happen?"
Luckily we'll all be wiped out before that question is answered.
My mistake, I thought that he might have left office right before I typed that up, but I was too lazy to check my facts :).
So you would have no issue if Bush, Blair, Putin or any other government figurehead demanded that companies hand over their source code?
Comparing RMS to the Chinese government is apples and oranges. Our culture/society is based on the idea that we are free to choose (albeit, sometimes with consequences) many facets of our lives and businesses.
I, personally, believe that open source is a better process from a software development standpoint. That being said, I also respect that companies are free to choose their licensing and business models as they see fit (within reason, of course). RMS is saying that he wants the source to be free, whereas the Chinese government is demanding it.
Isn't this the same country that has been sending picture frames with viruses embedded to infect USB drives attached to them? They're making demands without having the common courtesy to pretend to have the moral high ground. Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Actually, I think you're out 5 bucks and 20 hours of otherwise productive time this week :)
I didn't know it's on Steam... what's the deal, one time fee of $5? If that's the case, I'll sign up for an account. By my calculations, that's like a good 100 hours or so of very enjoyable gaming for a fiver!
The feeling is mutual. But, look on the bright side... at least we're not database administrators :)
Now that they've got their servers back up and running, let's slashdot 'em!
Now I remember why I decided to go with software development over network administration!
Forget the posters and such... just give me a full manual like they used to. I remember when computer games always came with a honkin' big manual that covered every aspect of the game and even gave you some tips. A PDF on a CD doesn't even compare to having a spiral bound book with cheat sheets, stats and even a section in the back for notes. I guess I'm all nostalgic after coming across my old Neverwinter Nights manual the other day; ironically, I lost 1 of the 2 disks (although I found my old receipt with the manual) so I can't play it.
I just found out that they had a Linux version that you could download and integrate your Windows versions' data files. Perhaps it's better to be nostalgic about it than hunt down a copy and realize that it wasn't as good as I remember it being. Then again, I thought the same thing about Railroad Tycoon II and happened to hunt down a copy... it was every bit as good as I remembered it being.
Overachiever.
Randy! :)
It's a small internet, no?
Check out S3Backer. It lets you mount an Amazon S3 bucket to your Linux/Mac/BSD/*NIX box. GPL F/OSS as icing on the cake.
For storing permissions and the such, are you using a .tar container? My biggest stumbling block with my backup scheme is storing ACLs and permissions.
I've got a few ideas about doing it, but they're all kludgy or force me to walk away from my rsync scripts which are really fairly mature at this point. Furthermore, I need to get deltas downstream and packing everything in to one file pretty much defeats that purpose at the several gig level unless I'm running an rsync server to calculate the diffs. These kinds of things become problematic due to the infrastructure I'm working with.
I'm really starting to lean towards running everything over iSCSI, but then I've got to get the VPN thing going which could require some re-subnetting at either end of the tunnel. Needless to say, I'd prefer to avoid that or any other solution that requires messing with stuff that Works Right Now.
Have you dealt with these issues at all, or at least know what won't work? I'd appreciate any insights before I use a brute force method.