The strict policy for Red Hat RPMs (and those of any other RPM based distribution I'm familiar with) is not to demand user interaction in %post, %pre and the likes. debs have a very different philosophy there (or at least used to, haven't checked out the latest Debian yet).
We generally use %pre and %post to autogenerate stuff, not to prompt users.
Getting changes to the standard approved would probably take much too long (how long has it been since the last revision of, say, Postscript, or the X protocol?).
While there are definitely some good points for it, it also slows down additions of new features. Not always a good thing.
I've talked with Aduva people a while ago, their plans are to add support for 7 in a while.
As for "silently" dropping 4.2, it's not really true. We have always supported the end-of-line releases for the last 2 major versions, meaning 4.2 was dropped when 7 was released, 5.2 will (unless our policy changes) be dropped when 8 will be released. I'm quite sure this information is publically available somewhere.
RPM is not at all outdated..deb packages have a lot of things that are an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time, such as the post-install configuration. We don't want this type of stuff because it makes installation unnecessarily complicated.
The only real advantage of debs compared to rpms is apt-get, which has now been implemented for rpms as well. So why switch to anything else?
It's a good idea, but it has its problems.
What if YourOffice 1.0 adds a new feature that needs to be stored in the document?
Either you break the standard, or you extend it.
If extending it is allowed, Microsoft will abuse it by finding some excuse for storing everything in vendor extensions.
Read the MBR at bootup, and if it doesn't contain Microsoft's code, tell the user there's a "boot sector virus" and Windows won't start to save the user.
Block everything else, market it as protecting the user -- has been done before.
I don't think those are really "problems" leading up to each other.
I've always been interested in computers, but up to a certain point, I was a pretty normal kid (who just happened to start coding at 8, without turning into some "monster").
Things started to get different in highschool - I
I never went to dances (I'd much rather have my fingers dancing on the keyboard than stepping on people's feet), and started to find most "normal" people's attitudes weird (they don't care about all that interesting stuff, and all they talk about is how they want to date [name removed] because she looks so good? I wouldn't date her if she begged me to! No matter what she looks like, she's overly selfish and stupid, and doesn't share any of my interests! (#include ).
This sort of stuff made me somewhat of an outsider, causing me to spend even more time with the computer, causing me to discover Linux 0.99.11, causing me to spend even fewer time with "normal" people, causing me to spend even more time with the computer...
So, at least for me, it's not a clear A + 1 month = B, more a (1/2)(A+B) + 1 month = (3/4)(A+B)
[For the record: I think I've arrived at (7/8)(A+B) and will stay at precisely that point. I'm 23, I've never had a date, but I do know some people who aren't geeks and can get along with them, so it's probably not a gradual process that must eventually end up in (A+B).
It's probably time to show them they can't get away with this sort of stuff - by making a free and better alternative (just as Linux is to proprietary OSes).
Anyone with good connections to hardware makers...?
Nobody has ever doubted that earth heals itself - but this doesn't mean we can do anything we like to it.
Earth can be compared with an animal in regards to healing itself - give it a light disease, and it will eventually recover.
Give it a huge disease (or many light diseases at the same time), and it won't.
The green view is nice AND necessary, though (like everything else) it can be overdone.
All of my servers so far (3, 1 of them high-traffic) are using AMD chips, and I've never had a problem with them, and that's without recompiling everything with AMD optimized CFLAGS.
Also, Intel in the home is all but dead. Users who don't know much about computers will get whatever they heard of - and that's usually Intel. Even if they had no technical merits at all, they'd continue (just like Microsoft - and unlike M$, Intel actually has some advantages, such as SMP support).
Install autologin so they don't need to handle users and permissions
Install StarOffice - anyone who has used M$ office before can learn to use it quickly, they're not that different UI-wise
Create a link to StarOffice on the desktop
Install wine and set up binfmt_misc to execute.exe files out of the box for some Windows applications they want to use
Concerning the problems you're addressing:
Lack of Productivity Software: What exactly are you missing? StarOffice is at least as good as Word for normal use, KMail is at least as good as Outlook (and not vulnerable to VBS viruses)
Lack of fonts: Linux can use the exact same TrueType fonts Windows can use. At least any modern distribution can. XFree86 4.0 has TrueType support by default, Red Hat and Mandrake (and probably others) have shipped patched XFree86 3.x servers to handle TrueType fonts before that, SuSE has shipped xfstt (an alternate TrueType fontserver).
Lack of popular games: There are currently more Windoze games than Linux games, yes. But a lot of very good games ARE available for Linux. For the others, there's always wine and dual boot.
Lack of drive support: Such as??? I've never had a problem with my drives on Linux
No easy way of doing things: What's hard about KDE 2.0? And what functionality do beginners need that KDE 2.0 doesn't provide?
A couple of advantages my parents have from converting to Linux:
They can't mess up their system anymore (thanks to the fact that, unlinke Windows 9x, you don't work as root all the time in Linux)
Stability. No more bluescreens.
Much better net access (Last time I checked, Windoze couldn't share an ISDN connection between 2 computers. Did they fix this in ME?)
Easy way to get things fixed up - if they have a problem, I can just ssh in and fix it. Show me a way to do that with Windows without spending a lot of money on extra software.
It's free as in $0 - no need to waste money on buying updates to the OS and Office suite
For the paranoid among us:
There was no breakin. Microsoft just claims there was so they can sue open source projects that incidentally/through legal reverse engineering have come up with code similar to theirs.
Unlike what the article claims, the treaty does NOT outlaw BugTraq and the likes.
Article 6.2 (which the "illegalizing BugTraq" part must be referring to) explicitly states it's illegal to [...] distribute [exploits] "with intent that it be used for the purpose of committing the offences established in Articles 2-5".
I didn't know BugTraq's intent was to make exploits available to script kiddies...
Yes, it will - the reason is that it's supposed to be compatible with the future, and therefore ugly semi-FHS compliant locations like/usr/lib/kde2 should be avoided.
I'll be pushing out a kde1-compat package (so people can continue to run KDE 1.x apps) later today.
You're forgetting it's all open source.
If it's worth it (haven't looked at the code yet, cvs -z4 co OpenOffice is still running, curse my 64 kBit/s connection!!), you can be sure some of the code will be included in KOffice.
Also, their code is probably pretty much UI independent (because it works on so many different OSes), so it's probably not a lot of work to create a patch to make it KOpenOffice.;)
Please send bug reports on these, including sample code.
FWIW, all of Red Hat Linux 7, including Powertools and the Extra CDs for the European edition have been compiled with 2.96 using -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i386 without problems.
KDE 2.0 is completely c++, doesn't cause any problems with 2.96 -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i386.
I installed the Inti class library [...] because the gtk library that got installed [...] is a devel one that's prone to crashing
Inti is not yet beta code. Neither is the gtk version it uses. And that's quite clear even from the packagename (gtkbeta).
Red Hat Linux 7 also includes gtk 1.2.8, which is the most stable gtk release yet, and that's the version of gtk that's used unless you want to play with experimental stuff.
If you think you have found something that is really a compiler bug (as opposed to the compiler complaining about broken code), report it and the problem will be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
The strict policy for Red Hat RPMs (and those of any other RPM based distribution I'm familiar with) is not to demand user interaction in %post, %pre and the likes. debs have a very different philosophy there (or at least used to, haven't checked out the latest Debian yet). We generally use %pre and %post to autogenerate stuff, not to prompt users.
Getting changes to the standard approved would probably take much too long (how long has it been since the last revision of, say, Postscript, or the X protocol?). While there are definitely some good points for it, it also slows down additions of new features. Not always a good thing.
I've talked with Aduva people a while ago, their plans are to add support for 7 in a while.
As for "silently" dropping 4.2, it's not really true. We have always supported the end-of-line releases for the last 2 major versions, meaning 4.2 was dropped when 7 was released, 5.2 will (unless our policy changes) be dropped when 8 will be released. I'm quite sure this information is publically available somewhere.
RPM is not at all outdated. .deb packages have a lot of things that are an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time, such as the post-install configuration. We don't want this type of stuff because it makes installation unnecessarily complicated.
The only real advantage of debs compared to rpms is apt-get, which has now been implemented for rpms as well. So why switch to anything else?
It's a good idea, but it has its problems.
What if YourOffice 1.0 adds a new feature that needs to be stored in the document?
Either you break the standard, or you extend it.
If extending it is allowed, Microsoft will abuse it by finding some excuse for storing everything in vendor extensions.
Read the MBR at bootup, and if it doesn't contain Microsoft's code, tell the user there's a "boot sector virus" and Windows won't start to save the user.
Block everything else, market it as protecting the user -- has been done before.
We do have an important struggle to leap into right now - most people are just not seeing it.
;)
The Free (Software) World must get evil dictators like Microsoft, MPAA or RIAA under control.
Change the world - write some code today.
I don't think those are really "problems" leading up to each other.
I've always been interested in computers, but up to a certain point, I was a pretty normal kid (who just happened to start coding at 8, without turning into some "monster").
Things started to get different in highschool - I
I never went to dances (I'd much rather have my fingers dancing on the keyboard than stepping on people's feet), and started to find most "normal" people's attitudes weird (they don't care about all that interesting stuff, and all they talk about is how they want to date [name removed] because she looks so good? I wouldn't date her if she begged me to! No matter what she looks like, she's overly selfish and stupid, and doesn't share any of my interests! (#include ).
This sort of stuff made me somewhat of an outsider, causing me to spend even more time with the computer, causing me to discover Linux 0.99.11, causing me to spend even fewer time with "normal" people, causing me to spend even more time with the computer...
So, at least for me, it's not a clear A + 1 month = B, more a (1/2)(A+B) + 1 month = (3/4)(A+B)
[For the record: I think I've arrived at (7/8)(A+B) and will stay at precisely that point. I'm 23, I've never had a date, but I do know some people who aren't geeks and can get along with them, so it's probably not a gradual process that must eventually end up in (A+B).
We've all seen numerous pictures... And since he's wearing a Red Hat(tm) in each of them, we even know what OS he's running. ;)
It's probably time to show them they can't get away with this sort of stuff - by making a free and better alternative (just as Linux is to proprietary OSes).
Anyone with good connections to hardware makers...?
Nobody has ever doubted that earth heals itself - but this doesn't mean we can do anything we like to it.
Earth can be compared with an animal in regards to healing itself - give it a light disease, and it will eventually recover.
Give it a huge disease (or many light diseases at the same time), and it won't.
The green view is nice AND necessary, though (like everything else) it can be overdone.
The speed of poisoning depends on what poison you use...
I tend to think a spammer with an address database containing root@localhost, postmaster@localhost, abuse@localhost, root@localhost.localdomain, , abuse@localhost.localdomain, root@[127.0.0.1], postmaster@[127.0.0.1], abuse@[127.0.0.1], and uce@ftc.gov wouldn't have too much fun before being kicked by his ISP.
Unfortunately, many spambots are probably intelligent enough to filter out the common variants of these...
All of my servers so far (3, 1 of them high-traffic) are using AMD chips, and I've never had a problem with them, and that's without recompiling everything with AMD optimized CFLAGS.
Also, Intel in the home is all but dead. Users who don't know much about computers will get whatever they heard of - and that's usually Intel. Even if they had no technical merits at all, they'd continue (just like Microsoft - and unlike M$, Intel actually has some advantages, such as SMP support).
Some of the things I did to the system are not exactly standard, but work for them(tm).
Quick instructions:
Concerning the problems you're addressing:
A couple of advantages my parents have from converting to Linux:
We need: user@foo ~$ ./notepad.exe
Actually we have that.
Install wine, and
echo ':windows:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
echo ':windowsPE:M::PE::/usr/bin/wine:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc_register
The wine package in Red Hat Powertools 7 does this automatically.
For the paranoid among us:
There was no breakin. Microsoft just claims there was so they can sue open source projects that incidentally/through legal reverse engineering have come up with code similar to theirs.
Unlike what the article claims, the treaty does NOT outlaw BugTraq and the likes.
Article 6.2 (which the "illegalizing BugTraq" part must be referring to) explicitly states it's illegal to [...] distribute [exploits] "with intent that it be used for the purpose of committing the offences established in Articles 2-5".
I didn't know BugTraq's intent was to make exploits available to script kiddies...
Yes, it will - the reason is that it's supposed to be compatible with the future, and therefore ugly semi-FHS compliant locations like /usr/lib/kde2 should be avoided.
I'll be pushing out a kde1-compat package (so people can continue to run KDE 1.x apps) later today.
You're forgetting it's all open source.
;)
If it's worth it (haven't looked at the code yet, cvs -z4 co OpenOffice is still running, curse my 64 kBit/s connection!!), you can be sure some of the code will be included in KOffice.
Also, their code is probably pretty much UI independent (because it works on so many different OSes), so it's probably not a lot of work to create a patch to make it KOpenOffice.
There has been a problem (check the Qt source RPM for our patch).
We've had a close look at it, and we think it's non-standards compilant code in Qt.
With the patch, Qt works without problems.
Writing this from Konqueror 2.0RC2...
Please send bug reports on these, including sample code.
FWIW, all of Red Hat Linux 7, including Powertools and the Extra CDs for the European edition have been compiled with 2.96 using -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i386 without problems.
KDE 2.0 is completely c++, doesn't cause any problems with 2.96 -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i386.
I installed the Inti class library [...] because the gtk library that got installed [...] is a devel one that's prone to crashing
Inti is not yet beta code. Neither is the gtk version it uses. And that's quite clear even from the packagename (gtkbeta).
Red Hat Linux 7 also includes gtk 1.2.8, which is the most stable gtk release yet, and that's the version of gtk that's used unless you want to play with experimental stuff.
the simple fact that exit(0) breaks in certain programs
Such as? There's no report about this in Bugzilla, and it most certainly doesn't happen here.
Provide a testcase, and it'll be fixed.
(And the compiler change is not related to kernel 2.4, by the way. Among other things, it's related to the need for ia64 support).
There are many applications that don't compile with gcc 2.96. That's almost always not the compiler's fault.
gcc's syntax checks got much stricter; unclean code doesn't compile anymore.
If you think you have found something that is really a compiler bug (as opposed to the compiler complaining about broken code), report it and the problem will be fixed.
They're shipping 2 compilers because their userland compiler doesn't work
Untrue. It works almost perfectly. There is, so far, one known problem that fails to compile code that is ok (and that's currently being fixed).
It can't compile 2.2.x kernels because of bugs in the kernel code (ask Alan), that's why the two compilers are needed.