 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 339, 1 February 2010 |
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Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! User-friendliness of computer operating systems is something that gets often discussed in open-source software circles. But adding features that are designed to attract more new users isn't always viewed positively in some hard-core geek communities. This week's feature story examines a case of a developer who was met with a hostile reception when he tried to present his easy-to-use live CD to an unforgiving group of OpenBSD hackers. In the news section, Sun Microsystems closes its corporate web site, but what does that mean for some of its popular products? Also in this week's issue, we investigate the idea of converting the ext3 file system to the newer ext4, take a look at Ubuntu's controversial deal with Yahoo, and link to an article that reveals a little-known, but useful Mandriva feature. All this and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!
Content:
 Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (37MB) and MP3 (49MB) formats
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
GNOBSD - killed by GUI-is-for-wimps hacker culture
New distributions are submitted to DistroWatch all the time. Although there are now nearly 650 free operating systems listed in the DistroWatch database (with more than half of them classified as either "discontinued" or "dormant") and further 200+ on the waiting list), there are still many developers who continue to create their own variants. One would think that with the increasing number of available distros, most people would find what they want among the existing ones, but the trend is actually in the opposite direction. The more distributions there are and the more people get involved in their development, the easier it gets to create one's own respin. The result is that no fewer than 25 new distributions were submitted to DistroWatch in January 2010 alone, including some that were rejected because of possible trademark violations or other reasons.
I have to admit that it has now got into a point where I dread every email with a subject line that says "Submit New Distribution" (there are still one or two of those, unopened, in my mail box as I write this). Don't get me wrong, I am not against people creating new distro projects; after all, DistroWatch thrives on this enormous variety. The problem is that the vast majority of these bring nothing new to the table. There is very little innovation, few new ideas, and almost no compelling reasons for anybody to use them for longer than a few minutes. After the initial enthusiasm of announcing themselves to the world, they die a (not so) slow death, just like the now hundreds of others that were once submitted to DistroWatch with much fanfare.
So it was with a great deal of surprise when, among the dozens of new distributions submitted to DistroWatch last month, I found something to get excited about. Stefan Rinkes, a big fan of OpenBSD, had decided to make an effort and create something that is now common in the Linux world, but which had not been done in OpenBSD - an OpenBSD-based live DVD with automatic hardware detection which would boot into a popular graphical desktop and which would also have a point-and-click graphical system installer. The result was a "distribution" called GNOBSD. When I tried it on my test machine, I was so impressed with the result of this fine work, that I decided to add it to the DistroWatch database straight away, thus by-passing the waiting list - something that I had not done for years.
Alas, my excitement at being able to present the DistroWatch readership with this interesting project was short lived. No sooner had I created the GNOBSD page on DistroWatch that the project's own home page went offline. It took several days before it re-appeared (last Sunday) - in a new coat, but without the ISO image of GNOBSD 4.6 that was previously available for direct download from the site. Upon closer investigation, the reasons became clear - Rinkes has taken the ISO images offline partly because of bandwidth problems, but mainly due to the extreme displeasure expressed by the hardcore OpenBSD user community at his audacity to create a user-friendly and easy-to-use variant of OpenBSD!
All becomes clear if you read through this mailing list thread. Rinkes made a rather modest announcement about the release of GNOBSD 4.6, hoping that other members of the community would help test the ISO image and provide feedback. But the response wasn't exactly what he expected. The first reply ("omg ... there will be blood ...") hinted at what would be forthcoming and it indeed didn't take long before open hostility started seeping through. "I won't be using your product," claimed one of the posters, because "if I use yours, I am slowly helping to doom OpenBSD." The GNOME desktop provided on the GNOBSD media also came in for some criticism: "Why add a bloated desktop like GNOME?," asked one poster, while another seemed to have completely misunderstand the concept when he wrote that "GNOME is in packages/ports so what's missing?" Further down the thread, Rinkes' work received even more ridicule: "Generally the best day to post these announcements is the first day of the fourth month of the year."
It's no surprise that, after receiving this sort of feedback, Rinkes decided to re-evaluate the idea of an easy-to-use OpenBSD live media. When it finally re-opened for business, his web site carried the following message: "The concept of GNOBSD is currently under re-factoring. Instead of shipping ready-to-use images, there will be scripts and a HOWTO for building and customizing GNOBSD. I don't want to be an enemy of the OpenBSD project. In the future you have to download or buy OpenBSD. That way you will support the OpenBSD project and still be able to use GNOBSD." As I mentioned earlier, the author had already pulled the ISO image from the web site, and it doesn't seem to be available anywhere else, not even on popular torrent download sites.
This, to me, was a disappointing development. After months of receiving submissions of mostly uninteresting respins of popular Linux distributions presented as "new" projects, GNOBSD was a much needed shot in the arm for DistroWatch. Put in the DVD, boot the computer, check out that everything works, start the graphical installer - and a few minutes later you are running one of the world's most secure operating system, without having to spend days of studying the project's documentation. Even if you don't believe that it's a good idea to run OpenBSD without learning about it first, I don't see why a more user-friendly variant couldn't co-exist peacefully with its parent. After all, choice is said to be good. Furthermore, there is a precedent in the BSD world - FreeBSD and PC-BSD (a user-friendly, desktop-oriented variant of FreeBSD) do co-exist without anybody at FreeBSD feeling threatened by the existence of an easy-to-use FreeBSD flavour (the two projects even actively cooperate). Some of the OpenBSD fans must be suffering from a very peculiar form of insecurity to really believe that GNOBSD would contribute to a "doom of OpenBSD"!
Since it looks like GNOBSD 4.6 was the project's last release in a live DVD format, here is a quick look at what it was like while it lasted. I booted the 2.2 GB DVD image on my spare box which has an AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) mainboard from MSI, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, an LG DVD/CD rewritable drive, a Realtek 8169 network card, and an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card. The data on the DVD image weren't compressed - hence the reason for its large size and for long boot and application start-up times. It took 3:15 minutes to arrive at the initial menu (with options to launch the shell, live desktop, installer or to exit) and further 5:55 minutes to reach the GNOME desktop. Clicking on the Firefox icon on the desktop resulted in more idle times - it took 1:45 minutes before the browser window appeared on the screen. Of course, once installed to hard disk, the system was as responsive as any other BSD or Linux system.
GNOBSD 4.6 - an OpenBSD-based live DVD with GNOME and a graphical installer
(full image size: 559kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Luckily, apart from the slow live mode, GNOBSD turned out to be a well-behaved system. The hardware auto-configuration was flawless, with the graphics card (using the nv driver), screen resolution (1280x1024) and network card (Realtek 8169) all automatically configured and ready for use. On the applications side, there wasn't much beyond the usual GNOME tools and utilities, but the system did come with Firefox, MPlayer and CUPS print server. Unlike in PC-BSD, no graphical package management tools were provided, so users wishing to install other applications would have to reach for the standard OpenBSD package management tools from the command line. Of course, those preferring to install software from ports can do so too. The system installer was similar to what one finds on any modern Linux distribution these days; it included a partitioning step with custom or auto-partitioning options and it enforced 8-character user and root passwords.
While not yet on par with Linux live CDs, especially in live mode, GNOBSD was, in my view, a step in the right direction that had a potential to bring more users to the world of OpenBSD. It is disappointing that it had been shut down before it had a chance to take off; if the author does indeed stay away from providing any more live media and focuses instead on writing scripts and HOWTOs for customising OpenBSD, then, I am afraid, the project would be just one of the many other unremarkable ideas out there - interesting and perhaps useful to some, but hardly revolutionary. Just like most of the "new" distributions that get submitted to DistroWatch these days.
The moral of the story? If you ever get an idea to develop a user-friendly feature for OpenBSD, don't even think of announcing it on any of the OpenBSD mailing lists. Unless you have a skin of an elephant...
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Future of Solaris, Ubuntu - Yahoo deal, Mandriva's auto_inst and "Cooker" changes
 Perhaps the biggest news of the week was the definite end of Sun Microsystems, a company which has been often hated and loved at the same time by the open-source software community. But with sun.com now redirecting to oracle.com, many developers and users of Java, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, Solaris, OpenSolaris and other popular software projects are asking what the future holds for them. While no clear answers are likely to be forthcoming for some time yet, chances are that not too much will change in the immediate future. That, at least, seems to be Oracle's position on Solaris: "In the case of Solaris, Oracle had already been a big supporter of the rival Linux operating system. Oracle has its own Enterprise Linux offering, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the idea that Linux and Solaris are mutually exclusive is a false choice. 'I don't think it's an either/or proposition, as UNIX does very well on the high-end,' Ellison said during a webcast Q&A session about the technologies. 'I think where you'll see Solaris going is running not so much as an operating system for a standalone computer. You'll see Solaris as an operating system for a cluster of computers.'"
* * * * *
 Back to Linux, a piece of news that rocked the Ubuntu world last week was the decision to switch the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo: "Those of you testing out the development version of Ubuntu 10.04 should notice a change in Firefox very soon. The default search provider for new installations of Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and upgrades will be Yahoo! and not Google. Canonical have struck a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! which generates income for the company. This revenue should help pay the wages of Ubuntu developers employed by Canonical, and support the infrastructure required to develop and build the distribution. So when using the search box in the top right corner of Firefox on Ubuntu, you'll be taken to a Yahoo! results page rather than the old default Google one. If you are upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 and you had Google as your search provider (the previous default) then this will change to Yahoo!. You can of course change the search provider." This change came as a surprise to many; after all, Yahoo's search engine is now powered by Microsoft's Bing. But as Slashdot put it so bluntly, "this would seem to mean that Microsoft will be paying people for using Ubuntu." Interesting times we live in.
In a separate news, the first issue of the Ubuntu User magazine is now available for free download in PDF format.
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 Bruno Cornec's blogs about a Mandriva Linux feature that is probably not all that well-known in the distribution's user community, but which could be its best-kept secret - auto_inst: "Have you ever tried to automatically install your Linux distribution? Of course, if you're a long-time system administrator and Red Hat user, you use Kickstart, or FAI if you happen to be a Debian fan. But if you're a Mandriva user, you also have a great tool to achieve the same goal: auto_inst. What? You were not aware! Well, not so surprising seeing the lack of documentation around that tool, since nearly the beginning. Mandriva has been lucky enough to have a contributor, David Eastcott, who published and updated for a couple of years a good auto_inst guide. It has been my bible, when I first looked at it, I found it very detailed and useful, even if I never understood why Mandriva didn't make more noise about it."
Also covering Mandriva on his blog, Frederik Himpe gives us a new round of noteworthy updates in Cooker, the distribution's development branch.
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Finally, something for the fans of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking (PHR) statistics. News has reached us that the developers of the smxi scripts for Debian GNU/Linux have written a script called dws, whose sole purpose is to check a distribution's current or historical position in DistroWatch's PHR tables: "dws is a little script designed to let you easily check one or more distro's rankings at distrowatch.com. It defaults to Debian's 7-day ranking, but you can change the defaults by editing the top two variables. Installation is simple, just download it, and set it executable. Select which distro to check with -d option, and time frame with -t. See -h help menu for full directions. Note that the distro name cannot contain spaces, dashes, or /. Simply delete these, like so: PC-BSD becomes: PCBSD (not case sensitive)." As the author himself admits, the script is rather "pointless, but I was bored and wanted something to distract me, mission accomplished, the rains are done and it's a nice sunny day today." There is also short thread about it on the Debian forum.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Converting ext3 to ext4
Curious-about-file-systems asks: I just installed a new version of my distro and the root partition defaulted to ext4 but my existing /home is still ext3, should I convert to ext4? Can I? If so how? And will there be any downside?
DistroWatch answers: It is possible to convert an ext3 partition to an ext4 partition. Since the two file systems are closely related it's a fairly straightforward process to go from ext3 to ext4. But let's cover your question of whether you should or not. There are a number of reasons someone might want to use ext4, including improved performance and defragmentation support, and it will allow larger files and partitions. A more complete list can be found here.
On the other hand, there are reasons why you might not want to switch. Some more conservative distributions don't support ext4 yet, which may become an issue if you want to change to another brand of Linux. The ext4 file system is still fairly young and some people will prefer to wait until it has been used in production elsewhere for a while before entrusting their data to it. When in doubt, I recommend staying with your existing file system, which you know works. For most people at home, ext3 is still a good choice.
Let's say that you have decided to move your /home partition to ext4, how do you do that? First, you should backup your data. It's always a good idea to have a spare copy of your important files, doubly so when you're changing the characteristics of your hard drive. The next step is to find out which device houses your /home partition. You can do this by running the mount command:
mount
The mount command will provide a list of partitions, their mount points and file system types. For example:
/dev/sda1 on / type ext4
/dev/sda2 on /home type ext3
The above output tells us that the / folder is mounted as ext4 and lives on the sda1 device. The /home folder is formatted as ext3 and lives on the sda2 partition. Now that we know which partition we're dealing with, we can begin work on it. The next step is to unmount the partition so it'll be safe to use. It's a bad idea to change a car's tires while it's moving and it's a bad idea to alter a mounted partition. I recommend logging out of your regular account and logging into a command line session as root for these next steps. Following our above example, we use the commands
cd /
umount /dev/sda2
The partition is now ready to be adjusted. Next, run the command
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda2
In the above line, that's a "dash oh", not a zero. This is the point of no return. Once you run the tune2fs command, you're committed to ext4. Next we run a check on the new file system:
fsck -pf /dev/sda2
Once the fsck command is finished, the partition can be remounted using
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda2 /home
To make sure your computer knows to mount the /home directory as ext4 in the future, open the /etc/fstab file and find the line which mounts "/home". Change the file system type (which is probably the third column in the line) from "ext3" to "ext4". For more information about converting to ext4, I recommend reading this page.
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| Released Last Week |
MoLinux 5.2
MoLinux 5.2, an Ubuntu-based Spanish distribution developed in cooperation between the Spanish regional government of Castilla La Mancha and Centro de Excelencia de Software Libre, has been released. Some of the more important new features in this version include: addition of the XMBC media centre for controlling music, videos and photos in one central application; new design of the boot, splash and GDM login screens; addition of transparencies to window edges of open applications; hardware compatibility improvements; ext4 as the default file system; version upgrades of most included software programs; addition of MolinuxSync, a tool for synchronising group work data; inclusion of Psychosynth, an interactive and modular music synthesiser.... Read the rest of the release announcement (in Spanish) for further information.
MoLinux 5.2 - a new release of the Spanish Ubuntu-based distribution
(full image size: 1,175kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
SystemRescueCd 1.3.5
François Dupoux has released SystemRescueCd 1.3.5, a Gentoo-based live CD containing a variety of disk and data management utilities. Here is the summary of changes since the previous release: "updated the standard kernels to Linux 2.6.31.12 with btrfs update from 2.6.32; updated FSArchiver to 0.6.5 (bug fixes, progress info, '--exclude' option); Updated GParted to version 0.5.1 (with workaround for partition resizing problems); added missing codepages (especially CP850) required by mtools / syslinux; implemented boot option 'dhcphostname' which is used by the DHCP client; updated LVM to 2.02.56 (Logical Volume Manager version 2); downgraded mtools to version 3.9.11 to fix problems; updated NTFS-3G to 2010.01.16 (bug fix release)." See the full changelog for further details.
PC/OS 10
Roberto Dohnert has announced the release of PC/OS 10, a user-friendly desktop distribution based on Xubuntu: "We are proud to announce that we have just released the newest release of PC/OS. PC/OS OpenWorkstation and PC/OS WebStation are the two editions released. These replace PC/OS 2009 OpenWorkstation and WebStation. This release is based on the Ubuntu 9.04 series. Some of the highlights are: 2.6.28 kernel series; Skype client on both the OpenWorkstation and WebStation release; Google Chrome is the default browser for WebStation; all security and bug fixes applied; updated OpenOffice.org in OpenWorkstation; support and recovery tools for the BFS file system; aTunes is the default media player on OpenWorkstation." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information.
PC/OS 10 - a user-friendly distribution based on Xubuntu
(full image size: 1,161kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Ubuntu 8.04.4
Steve Langasek has announced the availability of the fourth update to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the current long-term support Ubuntu version that is supported with security updates until April 2011 on desktops and April 2013 on servers: "The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. This is the final maintenance release of 8.04 LTS. In all, some 70 updates have been integrated." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to database
- GNOBSD. GNOBSD is an OpenBSD-based live DVD which boots into a GNOME desktop and which includes a graphical system installer (written in Ruby) for transferring the system to a hard disk or a USB storage device. The system includes some popular desktop applications, such as Mozilla Firefox and MPlayer.
- NexentaStor. NexentaStor is an enterprise-class unified storage solution built upon the foundation of the open-source file system Nexenta Core Platform, including the ZFS file system. NexentaStor adds to the open source foundation a complete set of managed features, including ZFS and synchronous block level replication, integrated search, console and graphical user interfaces, and optional advanced features, such as management of storage for leading virtualised environments, enhanced mapping and management for Fiber Channel and iSCSI environments, and active/active high availability. A free "developer's edition" based on the most recent stable Nexenta Core Platform is available free of charge for users with less than 4 terabyte of used disk space.
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New distributions added to waiting list
- gnuArtist. gnuArtist is a Xubuntu-based distribution providing the end-user with tools for digital content creation. Its main purpose is to demonstrate how open-source software can be used to replace the need for traditional commercial software for anything dealing with digital media.
- KLEO. KLEO is an Ubuntu-based live CD that's focused on collecting and organizing tools necessary for computer professionals to recovery servers, including the project's own Bare Metal Backup application.
- Prayaya Q3. Prayaya Q3 is a Gentoo-based live CD containing a Linux operating system designed with a modular approach. It ships with an up-to-date version of the Linux kernel, X.Org, KDE, and many popular applications for daily use. It has good internationalisation and locale support.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 8 February 2010.
Ladislav Bodnar and Jesse Smith
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| Reader Comments |
1 • GNOBSD is really an interesting project (by Geek at 2010-02-01 10:48:09 GMT from Israel)
The openBSD community is really foolish.
the project opens the project to more users.
pc-bsd didn't ruin hurt the freebsd project.
nor did ubuntu hurt debian
the opposite is true. I think user friendly distros help users in getting in to linux/bsd.
some people give it a try with ubuntu, like it and learn with it and then move to an hardcore distro.
2 • Ok, we've got the feathers... (by KimTjik at 2010-02-01 11:16:17 GMT from Sweden)
I read through the pretty short mailing list expecting to see nasty narrow minded battles, but the juiciest part is already quoted here. That makes me wonder: maybe we should calm down and give it some time before we'll make any further conclusions?
Let me complete a couple of the quoted phrases:
"Furthermore, I won't be using your product. I am afraid we are going
in a different direction, and I choose to use a product that directly
supports the developers of OpenBSD, mainly OpenBSD and OpenSSH. I've
been a supporter for years, and will continue to help them in anyway I
can.
Kind regards"
To me this doesn't sound as a mindless attack. Even though you might agree this person had at least a thought through reason for choosing to directly support OpenBSD. The "there will be blood" quote is kind of useless, since we don't know its intent; was it ironic, self criticism or just a plain joke?
The packager's/developer's comment "I don’t want to be an enemy of the OpenBSD-Project", does it translate hurt feelings? I don't know. He says he's German, hence his mother tongue isn't English, and until we've got his own explanation to what it means, why speculate?
I just write this because I'm bored by the too frequent speculations-based-on-rumours articles that spin the Webb. I don't know the truth or the whole story, but as a "feature story" its case looks pretty weak. There are more intriguing stories to cover, that actually justify some sort of speculation in the sense of making estimations based on known facts and lessons learnt from history, like h264 and its possible affect if becoming a widely used standard.
3 • GNOBSD (by the doc on 2010-02-01 11:17:21 GMT from Australia)
Nicely controlled commentary re GNOBSD
GNOBSD killed off by self-righteous fanboois: ya boo sucks to the BSD 'cognoscenti" what a pack of pitiful lightweights masquerading as the 'keepers of the flame": how to boost circulation and knowledge: go team; pffft to U. Nice middle finger to the rest of the poor effwits cest moi. please no drivel of having to 'earn' itr or other bulsh.
What an interesting achievement by the dev: and looks usable too.
>>I don’t want to be an enemy of the OpenBSD-Project<<
Damn boys break out the tar and feathers, throw on the hoods, lets git this traitor....nice lads, just to confirm again...wtf was the purpose of all that??
1000 downloads in 2/7 !!
Yikes..much to the disgust of the risible "core" there must be some interest neh? How about that.!
All kudos to Stefan Rinkes.. if he wants some $$ for bw: I'm in.
Personally, I call on the OBSD project leaders to respond and recognise what a nice tool this may have been and put all the mushrooms back in the cellar.
4 • GNOBSD (by Barnabyh at 2010-02-01 11:32:24 GMT from United Kingdom)
Shame, full hardware recognition in OpenBSD, sounds very interesting. And looks good too. Kudos to the creator.
5 • Great issue! (by Abacus at 2010-02-01 11:35:27 GMT from Australia)
Possibly my favorite issue this year ;) hehe.
Good work on putting forth such a valid position on GNOBSD. If the OpenBSD community can't be open to new ways of thinking, then surely they are destined to become less and less useful as time goes by.
Also, anyone worried about this Ubuntu/Yahoo business? What a great way for Microsoft to get their fingers a little deeper into the Linux pie.
6 • No subject (by Anonymous at 2010-02-01 11:45:59 GMT from United Kingdom)
While it appeared overly negative, I do understand the position of OpenBSD. Ubuntu has taken away developers who used to contribute to the Debian project, leaving it weaker as a result.
7 • No subject (by Flori at 2010-02-01 12:04:54 GMT from Albania)
Such a shame that the ISO of GNOBSD is not to be found for download....I could get a glimpse of OpenBSD finally on my laptop...
8 • GNOBSD (by Ronald Gibson on 2010-02-01 12:05:57 GMT from United States)
I have been looking for something like this to try out.
9 • GnoBSD (by Scott on 2010-02-01 12:08:31 GMT from United States)
I'm with KimTjik on this.
I would suggest that folks make a point of reading the thread before responding.
Most of the comments that weren't positive on the mailing list thread were also friendly, with various smilelys to negate the criticisms.
OpenBSD has never been about advocacy. As was said in the thread, the users will start expecting nice GUIs everywhere.
As Ubuntu, Fedora, and others have proven over and over again, such GUIs start to limit the user and sacrifice performance for convenience and pretty graphics and start tying in system functions, such as sound and networking, with the GUI.
The criticism wasn't violent or nasty.
10 • GnoBSD (by Barry on 2010-02-01 12:14:13 GMT from Russian Federation)
This is the way the OpenBSD community regulates its membership - by denying access to those who prefer GUI (or ease of use? or even usability?)
On the one hand the users who prefer GUI may be useless (as contributors) to the OpenBSD community. What is the result for community when someone like me downloads live cd or dvd, runs the system, says "Wow" and forgets about it until the next article at DW? - Waste of traffic.
Why does he/she forget? Because he uses Ubunutu and do not want to waste his time at configuring the system while his major interest could be far from system administration: web-site construction for example.
On the other hand...
If the OpenBSD community intentionally denies access to those who want ease of use what is the future of their OS? It is doomed to be marginal OS without broad user base. If this is their vision of the project they by all means should preculde the "popularization" of their OS
11 • The OpenBSD Project (by Niki Kovacs on 2010-02-01 12:26:56 GMT from France)
Linus Torvalds once called the OpenBSD developers "a bunch of masturbating monkeys" (sic). Go figure :o)
12 • You won't laugh at this... (by Smile at 2010-02-01 12:28:34 GMT from United States)
anyone worried about this Ubuntu/Yahoo business?
Its only a matter of time before the Linux kernel is replaced with the nt kernel in Ubuntu...
13 • Distros galore (by Niki Kovacs on 2010-02-01 12:30:24 GMT from France)
Too many distros around ? I suggest you simply refuse those (roughly) 99% of distros that have strictly no added value. Whenever I read "Ubuntu-based", I want to grab my gun.
14 • Re 9 (by Antony at 2010-02-01 12:44:19 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes, we could read through the thread.
But is it not the case that there must have been rather a lot of unexpected pressure for him to drop it - otherwise Stefan would not have bothered with the project in the first place, eh?
Seems a shame to me.
15 • @ Abacus #5 (by Untitled at 2010-02-01 12:54:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
It seems to me that it's a great way for Linux (Canonical, to be exact) to get their fingers into the Microsoft pie.
16 • Distros galore (by richard on 2010-02-01 12:55:23 GMT from United States)
I agree with 13. There is too much repetition in distro's when they all mimic one and another with little added value. I'd just stick to the main ones and omit the rest unless something uniquely different comes along that would change my opinion.
17 • GNOBSD rinkes thanks to all that attempt new distros (by Jimmy bond on 2010-02-01 12:59:59 GMT from United States)
From someone that uses linux almost exclusively and can't edit
an extra or etc or something file, thanx to all those that give their
creative time to create new distributions.
And to Rinkes , thanks for the effort, despite the politics i am sure
that some in the BSD community will benefit.
thanx
18 • GNOBSD (by the doc on 2010-02-01 13:00:06 GMT from Australia)
The smilies as referenced above: not friendly: condescending..
Interesting thread here: with TdR telling that project to f#ck off:
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&w=2&r=2&s=comixwall&q=b
To Stefan Rinkers: dont be put off or ashamed.
You've obviously got support in the LOL 'other world', hey brother; after such a slap down: take it it to PCBSD or even anywhere where some interest is appreciated.
19 • openbsd (by tom on 2010-02-01 13:34:21 GMT from Portugal)
im very ashamed of the openbsd atittude.
these were weak comments.
what a great tool it was if we coould install openbsd easily, since we
dont have the time to lean all the effort needed to install and master
ports.
install all devel tools, and after, the xwindow, configure it at hand.....jsus!!
I WANT THE GNOMEBSD. OPENBSD will die if we continue to treat
like that those brothers who simply want to help.
im a openbsd user but i hate to remember all when i just want to install
a thing. and installation on command line isnt easy or useful as in graphical
20 • GNOBSD (by Dan at 2010-02-01 13:44:41 GMT from Canada)
I am not sure I completely understand the animosity towards GNOBSD. I hardly think that taking an open source operating system and modifying it in some way so that it is more accessible/immediately useful to a new group of users is detrimental to OpenBSD. Isn't the purpose of open source licensing: so people can do just that? More over, isn't the aim of making free (in the open source sense) software accessible one of the implicit aims of the whole OSS movement? To me it just seems absurd to attack someone for something that is not only useful (bringing OpenBSD to a wider audience), but in keeping with the spirit of the OSS movement. Granted, I could be way off in my assessment, as I am no expert when it comes to things open source. Still the criticism and attacks on GNOBSD seem to be antithetical to what I perceive to be the core tenets of the OSS philosophy.
I really hope the developer decides to continue the project in spite of all the criticism.
21 • spin (by Marin on 2010-02-01 14:07:29 GMT from Serbia)
will this go through?
22 • OpenBSD live CD (by Jesse at 2010-02-01 14:11:07 GMT from Canada)
I've been waiting for a OpenBSD live CD for years so I could easily demo the system to friends/peers. Now we finally get the project, complete with system installer, and it's shut down practically over-night. I am very sorry to see this project end so quickly.
23 • Mandriva 2010 (by Sanjay on 2010-02-01 14:11:15 GMT from India)
Mandriva 2010 is best in my opinion, still there some bugs but Its a nice desktop especially when you are a KDE 4.x lover. Get a experience on Mandriva 2010 at
http://distrolove.blogspot.com/2009/10/mandriva-2010-rc2-linux2u.html
24 • GNOBSD (by zygmunt on 2010-02-01 14:17:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
Anyone got a copy??
25 • Mandriva best-kept secret - auto_inst (by Vavai on 2010-02-01 14:23:07 GMT from Indonesia)
openSUSE has autoyast install since a long ago. Actually, why Mandriva keep it as a secret sauce?
26 • GNOBSD (by bc on 2010-02-01 14:30:08 GMT from Canada)
Maybe now the developer can move on to a more worthwhile base OS. OpenBSD is over rated garbage. It's security value is debatable, and once you remove that it has zero value as an OS. OpenBSD developers are overrated, self absorbed twits that don't deserve to stand in FreeBSD or Fedora's shadow.
27 • Distrowatch (by alie at 2010-02-01 14:46:58 GMT from Singapore)
I didnt understand, why my post has been removed ? anything wrong with it ? Please explain :(
28 • Discontinued and Dormant Distros (by Solo at 2010-02-01 14:56:17 GMT from United States)
IMHO, any Distro that is Discontinued should be delisted from DW, eliminating un-needed clutter on DW's servers. Any Distro that is considered Dormant, and has been for awhile, should lose their page and be consolidated to just one list on one page along with the rest of the Dormants. If it is Dormant for a set period of time, then it should be considered Discontinued and delisted at that point. If a Distro comes out of the Discontinued status then it would need to go through the waiting list process all over again. Same with Dormant Distros; find a way for them to prove themselves before giving them a page again. Or, as in some cases, give them a page if they buy advertising, thus supporting DW and getting their page back all in one shot (like some new Distros have done in the past).
29 • ext4 partitions not supported in Partimage (by BobET at 2010-02-01 15:01:37 GMT from United States)
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 which created the root partition as ext4.
Before making major changes to an installation, I use "partimage" from a Live CD to make partition image copies. That way if mistakes are made, I can use the partition image copies and "partimage" to easily restore the installation.
Partimage does not support ext4 partitions.
Now using "tar" to make a full backup of the ext4 root partition. Have not tried to do a full restore yet to see if I get the same type of result as using "partimage".
30 • Ubuntu, Yahoo!, Gentoo! SendTo, Whotoo, Youtoo .. (by Redondo at 2010-02-01 15:13:19 GMT from United States)
Regarding Ubuntu "controversy". When I install Ubuntu, I immediately remove Firefox and install Chrome, so its a non issue for me.
Even so, what's the beef? If Ubuntu gets more money from it, so what. To all those that oppose that. I have one statement for you...
GET A LIFE !
31 • Looking at the Distrowatch page hit ranking (by Felix Pleșoianu on 2010-02-01 15:13:45 GMT from Romania)
...
7. Arch Linux
...
11. Slackware
12. FreeBSD
...
16. Gentoo
...
50. OpenBSD
No comment.
32 • bing/yahoo web search and Ubuntu (by anonymous at 2010-02-01 15:36:02 GMT from United States)
Oh, well... It's only a "sudo" command away for someone to own your system. What's the point of using Linux/Unix again?
33 • Ununtu's Firefox switch to Yahoo (by Robert on 2010-02-01 15:48:55 GMT from United States)
Yahoo, just like Google still stores data about your searches. If you want a truly private search engine use Startpage. To add it to your Firefox Search bar:
Open Firefox> Click the down arrow in the Search bar upper right hand corner> Click Manage Search Engines> Click Get More Search Engines
Once the Add On page appears, enter "Startpage". Select "Startpage HTTPS" and make that your default search engine after installation.
Totally private browsing and now Startpage gives you the option of proxy browsing from within the Startpage search results!
34 • GNOBSD (by Harry C on 2010-02-01 15:55:42 GMT from United States)
I'm sure the people who brought about the end of GNOBSD are the same ones talking about how FOSS is about freedom of choice. I think some people don't get the concept.
Personally, I have long been looking for an easy to use BSD to run on my system. FreeBSD doesn't work, and I have at times thought about using OpenBSD, but its just too much to install and configure. And before I get accused of being a newbie, I'm a UNIX developer with 40 years of experience. I've done my digging. I just want install and go.
In the past, I have largely been put off of OpenBSD by the childishness of the OpenBSD community. Because of this latest event, I am even less likely to use it. Its not GNOBSD that makes me feel this way. Its the OpenBSD community.
Congratulations to Stefan Rinkes on what looks to be a great job. Maybe he should have a "Theo de Raadt moment", and take the idea elsewhere. I sure would like to see GNOBSD continue.
35 • GNOBSD (by dragonmouth on 2010-02-01 16:02:05 GMT from United States)
I, for one, would lovely to use a Live CD/DVD version of OpenBSD!
It is the morons who want o keep OpenBSD as a niche and insular O/S who will contribute to its demise, not Rinkers. They should look at how Linux took off once LiveCD distros were introduced.
@#9 - Scott, besides insisting on using command line, do you also insist on taking baths in cold mountain streams, walking barefoot in the snow and living in a lean-to just to prove that you are a hair-chested he-man? Nobody is going to think any less of you if you use electricity, buy your clothes off the rack and use Live CDs. The days of re-compiling your system every time you made changes to it are long gone.
36 • @28, Discontinued and Dormant Distros (by Fred Nelson at 2010-02-01 16:06:01 GMT from United States)
I disagree. Distrowatch is a valuable source of information for the vast ecosystem of Linux (and BSD) distributions, including those which have closed up shop. Reducing the amount of information available on the history of said distros, much of which is only available here, is a bad idea. If clutter is a problem, then all that needs to be done is make two drop-down list boxes at the top: one for current distros and one for discontinued and dormant distros.
37 • Live GNOBSD (by Anonymous on 2010-02-01 16:24:43 GMT from India)
I agree with the author that this is really unfortunate that the opposition should come within it's own community. I am willing to try out other distros myself but because of lack of time, it becomes impossible. Anything that makes it easier to try out something new would definitely get my interest.
My adoption of Ubuntu was primarily because it had a LIVE version which allowed me to check the compatibility and then load it up via a seperate install (in the earlier versions). Those who opposed the live version need to dissociate themselves with the project. It only smacks of their ignorance.
38 • GNOBSD (by Gene Venable on 2010-02-01 16:26:03 GMT from United States)
I would have tried GNOBSD. Now I'll keep waiting. +1, you fended me off!
39 • GNOBSD (by Jay at 2010-02-01 16:44:08 GMT from United States)
I hope that Herr Rinkes is reading these comments and sees the support he is getting. If the vocal OpenBSD community that is against him continues to harass him, he could shove the BSD license in their faces. Alternatively, he could give the PC-BSD project his expertise and let those haters have their precious, "pure" OpenBSD.
As a side note: If bandwith is a problem, bitorrent could be the sole distribution method for GNOBSD (I'm sure that has already been considered).
40 • GUIs and the BSDs (by Anonymous at 2010-02-01 16:56:41 GMT from Spain)
I am sick and tired to read about all those BSD fanboys.
Yeah! They all swear by the command line and against that bloated GNU/LINUX
thing, which is also incredibly insecure, they say...and then half of them
use a Mac as desktop solution.
I am sure it is a much more secure, stable and tweakable environment...
Better practice what you pray!
41 • Fail Linux/BSD is fail. (by SaintStewart on 2010-02-01 16:57:10 GMT from United States)
GNOBSD is the last straw for me, and why I will not be using or supporting Linux or BSD anymore. I fail to see how everyone wants to push open source into the mainstream, yet with the other hand, they ridicule anyone who makes it easier for the masses to use. Rather than go into a long tyrade about how fail the open source community is, I am just going to easily and quietly switch back to my closed source systems I have neglected for nearly 10 years.
I am reinstalling OSX back on my Macbook and going out to buy Win7.
See you later, and good riddance. Learn to think outside your own selfish and conflicting thought processes.
42 • BSD, FAI (by Redondo at 2010-02-01 16:59:24 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the courage to report on the GNOBSD fiasco. Hopefully the author will rethink his position on the matter now that you brought it to the forefront.
Regarding the automatic installs. This is the first read. Being a Ubuntu user, I will try FAI in the future!
43 • gnobsd (by Russ on 2010-02-01 17:06:02 GMT from United States)
Please keep working on this distrobution for me it was the first time I have been able to load and use OpenBSD. Not all of use are programers or power users, but we like to try new distrobutions just the same.
We need to remember that we are all good at something, While I am not a power user I would like to be able to try/use OpenBSD and this lowers the bar for for entry.
Russ
yRush2 on Twitter
44 • GNOBSD (by Radimir on 2010-02-01 17:12:25 GMT from Costa Rica)
Ich habe das Recht zu wissen GNOBSD ...
Bitte Herr Rinkes, denken Sie an diese Worte des Don Quijote: "Wenn die Hunde bellen, bedeutet dies, dass wir bewegen ..."
I have the right to know GNOBSD ...
Please Herr Rinkes, think about these words of Don Quixote: "If the dogs bark, it means that we move..."
45 • OpenBSD (by Ken H on 2010-02-01 17:12:26 GMT from Canada)
The hard-core, Command-line-commandos had best review their history. The PRIMARY reason the MS giant even exists is because the CLI elite were dogmatic that any & all PC users should be CompSci grads. This is the same cranial-rectal inversion that caused Western-Union to reject the telephone (Why would anyone need to "talk" to the other party directly? Telegrams are so much more concise!), Henry Ford to reject the Model A (Anyone who is too lazy to get out & hand crank the engine to start it, shouldn't be driving!) Anyone remember VMS? Anyone want to buy some shares in my pager company? My guess is OpenBSD is headed down the same path.
I have built from scratch (Debian netinstall) & maintain CLI-only servers for some niche services, but these are not high-powered fully featured systems. I have even - gasp- compiled form source...and I still prefer to have at least some form of GUI webconsole even if only for ease of passing management duties onto the next person.
Regards
Ken
46 • GnoBSD (by fernbap on 2010-02-01 17:31:00 GMT from Portugal)
There are snobs everywhere. A snob, by definition, is someone that says "see? i can do what the others can't, i belong to an elite minority that is able to use BSD".
Snobs hate to see their exclusiveness challenged. An easy to use BSD? OMG! That means everyone will be able to use it, and i won't be elite anymore!
Of course they hate the idea.
What *should* matter here is that everyone hates snobs. They should be put in their place. You can do it only by not condescending to their "demands".
That should be one of the Linux/BSD priorities: getting rid of the snobs.
47 • Re #41 by SaintStewart.. (by Jon Iverson at 2010-02-01 17:45:11 GMT from United States)
SaintStewart the faint hearted wrote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"GNOBSD is the last straw for me, and why I will not be using or supporting Linux or BSD anymore. I fail to see how everyone wants to push open source into the mainstream, yet with the other hand, they ridicule anyone who makes it easier for the masses to use.."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Your linking of "everyone" and "they" into a single entity that makes it impossible for the masses to benefit from and enjoy open source in a user friendly manner is myopic to say the least, and disingenuous at best.
Sure, there are gray beard users out there who misguidedly think of Linux and BSD as their own private CLI playground, a place where they alone set the rules and dictate terms - and damn anyone who dares think differently.
However in the grand scheme of things their numbers are fewer and fewer while progressive (read: user friendly) developers and designers are more and more dominate in the community at large. To suggest that the rest of us should back off in the face of old line CLI only dictates seems the coward's way out, something that is, thank God, a path that most of us will refuse to take.
--------------------------------------------------------
"..I am reinstalling OSX back on my Macbook and going out to buy Win7."
--------------------------------------------------------
Enjoy.. In the meanwhile multiple millions will continue to enjoy the benefits of free open source top tier completely user friendly offerings that are equal to and in many cases better than anything you'll pay big $$ for from closed source corporations.
48 • GNOBSD (by David Kiwerski on 2010-02-01 17:50:53 GMT from United States)
This attitude is precisely why BSD is ranked so low. It's a shame that the GNODSB developed was treated so badly. He deserved MUCH better!!!!
49 • PC GNOBSD (by Anonymous at 2010-02-01 17:57:42 GMT from United States)
As PC-BSD just came out with a live CD version I would think that it would be an obvious switch to try and come up with a PC BSD variant with a better integrated GNOME desktop. Last I heard switching out of KDE broke a lot of functionality in PC BSD, and if you don't feel wanted by one OSS community you can switch to another. Good luck to people trying to innovate in BSD and Linux.
50 • Yahoo concerns (by Leo at 2010-02-01 17:59:34 GMT from United States)
I think the real concern about Yahoo is not really that it is hard to change your browsing set up back to something else, because it is not. My concern, at least, is that MS may become, indirectly, a significant sponsor, and at some point have Ubuntu by the horn (that is, start controlling it through funding). That's about the main concern _I_ have, otherwise, of course I want Ubuntu to do well financially.
Let's keep in mind something Ladislav has pointed out several times: MS goes and buy ad space in Linux webpages and such, and spreads FUD against Linux in those ads. That's about as cheap a shot as it gets (MS has effectively infinite funding to do that)
Oh well!
51 • GNOBSD (by Stefan on 2010-02-01 18:21:29 GMT from Germany)
In case Stefan Rinkes reads that: look here: http://wiki.netbsd.se/Desktop_Project -- they surely appreciate any help, and perhaps some of your work could be easily ported, since NetBSD is not that far away from OpenBSD (in what concerns porting, of cause, the attitude of the community is quiet different).
Good Luck, s.
52 • GNOBSD (by sly on 2010-02-01 18:31:05 GMT from United States)
Why review an apparently dead version of BSD? The last paragraph of the feature article seemed like a waste because we can no longer check it out the distro for ourselves.
Yahoo vs. google. I actually prefer Yahoo and use it for all web browsing.
53 • GNOBSD (by bert barten on 2010-02-01 18:58:01 GMT from Netherlands)
On the website of GNOBSD I read the following:
Thanks for all the emails!
Feb 1st
Posted by stefan in GNOBSD
A big “thank you” to all the people who wrote an email to me and try to encourage me to publish the gnobsd-images again.
Because of the huge amount of request there will be a torrent-tracker for the images.
More details coming up when it is done.
(I think the next two or three days)
cya Stefan
This means that in a few days it will be possible to download GNOBSD.
Then everybody can test this new distribution.
Be alert of the news on:http://gnobsd.sri-dev.de/
Good luck!!!
54 • GnoBSD (by Scott on 2010-02-01 19:00:31 GMT from United States)
@35, what's wrong with traipsing barefoot in the snow? Wimp.
We walked 5 miles to school that way--and it was uphill both ways.
Ok, serious answer to a good question (sorry, I couldn't resist the above though).
My two points were that a) I didn't think Herr Rinkes was criticized that harshly. (Actually, I think there are already a couple of live OBSD versions, but using a lighter desktop.)
As for my second point--I don't think that everyone should have to become an expert in the command line to work with Linux. My problem is more with it becoming and more an more difficult to use the non-GUI options.
As for OBSD and their attitude, I think they've always been the folks who aren't that concerned with advocacy, but are more of a mind of, this is what we like, if you wish to join us, fine, if not, that's fine too. I don't think there's anything wrong with that attitude, but again, I didn't feel Herr Rinkes was criticized that harshly.
There's already BSDanwhere.
http://bsdanywhere.org/
Hrrm, seems OliveBSD, another one, is pretty dated.
Anyway, short answer, I think it was Herr Rinke's decision. Perhaps if he sees al these posts, he'll change his mind.
55 • @52 RE: GNOBSD (by Jay at 2010-02-01 19:02:39 GMT from United States)
The article on GNOBSD is labeled as an Opinion not a Review. I believe it was a way of Mr. Bodnar to show his support to Herr Rinkes, but you can think whatever you want.
56 • Yahoo deal (by Michael Raugh on 2010-02-01 19:45:57 GMT from United States)
The Yahoo deal is bad, to my mind, for a couple of reasons.
First, it inflates the search marketshare of Bing. As soon as Lucid ships and people start upgrading, their search engine default will change. How many users will go to the trouble of changing it back? Depends on whether they get adequate results from their first few searches, I expect. Microsoft can then start charging advertisers more because Bing appears more popular. They also get more leverage in negotiating more deals to inflate Bing's usage stats, or to get in-demand content providers like News Corp to restrict Google from indexing their pages (thus forcing people to use Bing for news searches if they want that content). Ultimate it's about MS wanting to cut off Google's oxygen supply, just as they did to Netscape by bunding IE with Windows way back when. Anything that makes MS more powerful -- especially in a market they don't already own -- is bad for consumers/users.
Second, it puts Canonical in the position of taking money from Microsoft. Every company that does that suffers eventually; either they get bought and assimilated or crushed through imitation. Canonical thinks they're going to be the exception, apparently. We'll see.
Oh -- and the "Hey, this means MS is paying people to use Ubuntu!" folks are deluded. MS is paying people to use Bing.
-MR
57 • GNOBSD (by chris at 2010-02-01 20:23:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Here's a link to the GNOBSD .iso and .img images for all you lamers
ftp://17638-gnobsd:Bx27tgH4@www.zion-studios.net/
58 • Prayaya Q3 is a Gentoo-based live CD (by rob on 2010-02-01 20:57:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
No mention of Gentoo on their website only based on ububtu, another cloned drinks coaster
Oh well never mind
59 • Sun/Oracle (by gord-s at 2010-02-01 21:14:38 GMT from United Kingdom)
IMCO, ZFS is the single greatest asset to the planet's data storage that any vendor has created so far in history. Yet many people haven't even heard of it.
Killing Opensolaris or stifling development of it by commercially strangling it lifeblood would be a _very_ shortsighted step.
Oracle needs to realise that Opensolaris (and Solaris itself) is used by far more smaller companies than is currently realised, usually (and often exclusively) to get native ZFS support in an otherwise Linux-based environment. (ZFS-fuse is unsuitable for mission-crtitical tasks that are trusted daily to OpenSolaris+ZFS)
Converting the ZFS licence to GPL or similar would go a long way to showing goodwill to an otherwise (recently) embittered userbase, allowing native integration to other OSs kernels. Embittered customers don't make good customers.
How much would this cost? Very little. The benefit? Huge respect from customers and casual observers alike. Casual observers include buyers.
I can't see current Opensolaris/Solaris customers moving to Oracle Enterprise Linux - the one's I've seen and talked to are going for Debain (mostly) or otherwise RedHat. Customers lost. Respect lost.
I would also like to challenge Oracle to produce something even approaching the global contribution of ZFS, before they start to get all high and mighty about their linux offerings, which are based on Redhat anyways - just sayin
60 • @57 GNOBSD (by sly on 2010-02-01 21:18:38 GMT from United States)
Great!! I'll check it out the distro.
To Jay Re: #55, the last paragraph of the feature article appeared to be a very brief review of GNOBSD, and it was that paragraph that I referred to.
Maybe some good will come from Mr. Bodnar's opinionated article after all. I do agree with him on his major premise that ease-of-use will lead to more Linux converts.
It seems kind of ironic though...... I may be wrong, but I thought Mr. Bodnar disliked distros that promoted 'out-of-the-box' ease of use.
61 • Ubuntu-derivatives knocking (by Anonymous at 2010-02-01 21:24:34 GMT from United Kingdom)
While I'm up on my high horse, serveral Ubuntu derivatives are pretty useful commercially, some people seem to forget that Linux is used by many industrial users that have very diverse requirements and little time for configuration of obscure packages from source when they just need to get a job done quickly using temporary resources.
I've already, this week, come across two commercial users of the Ubuntu Electronics Remix, out there, earning daily money for the businesses in question (remember, thats the Ubuntu-spinoff that people were keen to knock when it was announced only last week here on DW). Before that they were on M$ and commercial packages to do the same daily work. One is now keen to move to Debian in the server-room, as a direct result.
So, would you all prefer peple to be banned from producing their own distros? Back to debate #1 it seems.
(Don't think I'm an Ubuntu fan, I'm BSD-based usually, Debain otherwise)
62 • tdr's revenue (by celle at 2010-02-01 21:39:16 GMT from United States)
I remember looking at the openbsd project a few years ago and I still track it. I read then that there were two versions, what you downloaded and what you bought. Both were openbsd but the one you bought had a better installer written and copywrited by Theo which he used to push sales. What Herr Rinkes did was release openbsd in a user version with a better installer and gui for free which threatened Theo's revenue stream. All this is about Theo and group killing, in their view, a potential competitor and problem source. Herr Rinkes should just to grow a pair, shove the bsd license in Theo's face and keep going. Judging from the increasing interest in such a release Herr Rinkes won't have any problems. Theo might be forced to actually improve the usability of the openbsd. Competition hurts and encourages most when it hits the pocketbook.
63 • Re: #56, Yahoo deal (by Leo at 2010-02-01 21:48:06 GMT from United States)
I think you hit the nail on the head, much better (but along the same lines) than my blurb above. I agree in all you said, this is a hit-two-birds-with-one-stone sort of thing: control linux (like with the Mono/SUSE saga) and attack Google. Hope they don;t do much damage with this, and I really with they (Canonical) had gone for a deal with Google ...
64 • GNOBSD , OpenBSD. And Thank You Ladislav! (by JayCool at 2010-02-01 21:48:32 GMT from United States)
Ladislav , Thanks for your great article! it's good to see this type of story exposing a horrible injustice to the community and developers! you truly are a great force in the open source community! I have read myself and have been told by several others that the OpenBSD community is very unkind and hard to deal with. FreeBSD Girl a BSD advocate even admitted having trouble with them at times! that's why she switched to FreeBSD! (that and it's better) Once Again Thanks For the article and coverage!
I Hope GnoBSD will start up again because it seems like a really nice project! Not everyone wants to do a lame network install of OpenBSD and Gnobsd makes me more interested in OpenBSD then not, so OpenBSD Community be nice! If you don't want everyone to think your crazy mean jerks! (Like we do now!)
65 • GNOBSD (by Martin on 2010-02-01 22:04:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
Great article Ladislav, and thanks for drawing our attention to this distro, brief though it's appearance was! Hopefully it will become available again via torrent, as I would love to try it out.
66 • gnobsd (by lucky13 on 2010-02-01 22:15:43 GMT from United States)
How is Gnome on OpenBSD any different from Gnome on Linux? If you want to run a live CD or install it to use Gnome and whatever applications, stick with Ubuntu or some other live Linux CD that doesn't require any skill or continue to use Windows with open source applications. OpenBSD developers could've already released such an image with a pre-configured desktop if they wanted to attract un-sophisticated, trigger-happy users. "Pre-configured" OpenBSD is an oxymoron. If you don't want to be bothered with reading documentation or using commands in a console or terminal and setting up exactly what you want via ports or packages, then you have already plenty of other options.
67 • @66 gnobsd (by Jay at 2010-02-01 23:12:25 GMT from United States)
I guess I'll feed the troll.
lucky13:
Yeah, I know what you mean. Why should anyone bother with making any other OS user friendly. Why bother with Ubuntu, Mandriva, PC-BSD, et al? Just get an Apple Mac. Apple made Unix easier before all the other distros.
68 • perspective (by subg at 2010-02-01 23:14:22 GMT from United States)
@2 and @9 make good points. The purportedly oppressive thread doesn't support the editorial this week criticizing the OpenBSD community. It's a specialist distro with a niche group of developers that can determine their own path. Perhaps DW is a little embarassed it skipped the usual waiting period to list the distro that it prudently imposes for just this reason.
69 • Comment 67 Was Posted With Heavy Doses of Sarcasm (by Jay at 2010-02-01 23:15:01 GMT from United States)
My above comment was firmly in sarcasm country.
70 • @66 (by BSDUser at 2010-02-01 23:58:32 GMT from United States)
And why not? Is OpenBSD opensource? Nobody tell you that you need to download or install or whatever do with the GNOBSD.
If I want to install DOS I will install DOS because I WANTED to install no because you or T.R. will tell me...
71 • @69 (by lucky13 on 2010-02-01 23:59:33 GMT from United States)
You actually felt a *need* to explain/elaborate on that? lol
As for your previous comment, OpenBSD is very user friendly. RT*M.
As far as your specious accusation of trolling, again I ask: Why is Gnome on OpenBSD any different from Gnome on Linux? If your goal is just the bleeping desktop environment without configuring it, you already have options for that and under those options the underlying OS is irrelevant.
Gnome != OpenBSD
And most importantly: GNOBSD != OpenBSD
Have a nice day. :-)
72 • BSD Yahoo (by Matt at 2010-02-02 00:07:37 GMT from Canada)
well i don't know why this GNOBSD is getting such positive comments on here. for one thing, it's a dvd distro and the linux/bsd communities should boycott those until developers realize that they should use cd distros. how can ubuntu, argueably the most popular linux out there, use cd's while something like sabayon that has very little over ubuntu, needs gig upon gig of space for a live disk? what a waste.
openbsd has long been boycotted by me because the website is too difficult to manouver around, to find which iso you need to download to use it, if you want me to use your os, you better make it easier than ubuntu to use. that's what i use now, and it works, so if i want to try someting else you better give me reason to.
as for yahoo... shut up people, no one really cares. it's super easy to change the default search engine, no one likes yahoo anyway and so they'll change it right away back to google, or they'll just use chrome. but power to ubuntu for changing, microsoft is too big and has a monopoly yes, but google is hard on their heels for monopolies in things. they're sticking their finger in every pie they can find, so maybe it's good to try and even things up a bit. but for me personally, a google monopoly doesn't bother me, or a microsoft one for that matter. i'll use what works, monopoloy or not. that's why i use ubuntu and not windows or osx, and google chrome and all the google products. it just works.
73 • @59, etc (by Re at 2010-02-02 00:15:15 GMT from United States)
I haven't haven't seen anything from Oracle the points to them killing Solaris or ZFS. And why would they?
74 • RE: 71 -- OpenBSD (by Jesse at 2010-02-02 00:33:42 GMT from Canada)
"OpenBSD is very user friendly. RT*M"
In that post you just demonstrated why OpenBSD is not user-friendly. There is nothing particularly friendly, nor intuitive about OpenBSD. If it was user-friendly, there wouldn't be any need for Linux/BSDers to read the manual. It may be a fine, secure, useful operating system, but user-friendliness is not one of its characteristics. Even navigating their website feels like a chore.
As for why would you use Gnome on OpenBSD, why not? If it's vanilla Gnome, it won't look special, but all systems have their quirks. The more people use Gnome on a BSD system, the more they'll discover little differences from running it elsewhere. Look at all the various flavours and themes of Gnome on Linux. Running Gnome on Ubuntu, Fedora and Hymera are all very different experiences. So don't knock a pre-configured Gnome running on top of OpenBSD until you've tried it. This project has the potential to attract a lot of people to OpenBSD who would otherwise be intimidated by it.
75 • GnoBSD (by Scott on 2010-02-02 00:40:11 GMT from United States)
Don't think anyone has mentioned this, but the developer was so pleased by all the letters he received that he's reviving the project.
That's the nice thing about opensource.
76 • @74 (by lucky13 on 2010-02-02 01:19:41 GMT from United States)
"The more people use Gnome on a BSD system, the more they'll discover little differences from running it elsewhere."
They probably won't notice *any* difference -- particularly the unsophisticated users I mentioned earlier who need a *pre-configured* live DVD from which to install and/or just see it in action. The rest of your comments are equally useless. Minor configuration differences between distros? Big deal. Themes don't change the inherent functions Gnome provides above X, which is distinct from the operating system. At that layer, it's pretty irrelevant what operating system is beneath X Window System and various libraries (again: especially unsophisticated users who don't want to use the actual base operating system). Put Gnome on top of any operating system and it functions virtually identically, unless or until you open a terminal.
What will you say next, that BSD uses different names for devices than Linux does? Again, no big deal. It's straightforward how Gnome functions on top of any operating system.
As far as attracting users, I won't speak for Theo and company but I think they're more than capable of putting together such a release if they're interested in "improving market share" or attracting unsophisticated users. A project like this does not translate into anything beneficial to their project -- OpenBSD development is funded through sale of their CD sets. It is *not* funded by people who don't even work within their project taking it upon themselves to bring in another kind of user (i. e., unsophisticated) they very well may not want. The people attracted by "easy" to install (not upstream) images support the fork, not the upstream project. And such unsophisticated users typically flood email lists and forum boards with questions already answered elsewhere (again: RT*M -- you may not think that's friendly, but the documentation is very user friendly).
Back to your "little differences" and what you wrote @22, how many of your little friends, just running Gnome, would actually be able to tell the difference if it was atop Linux versus OpenBSD or any other operating system just by looking at it or opening apps? Probably zero. Be honest.
77 • @71 (by Jay at 2010-02-02 01:24:43 GMT from United States)
lucky13:
The reason I elaborated on my post @67 is because people from all over the world come to this site. Sarcasm can get lost in translation especially when English is your second or third language, and I did not want anyone thinking I agreed with you.
I will answer your question: "Why is Gnome on OpenBSD any different from Gnome on Linux?" It basically isn't.
It's a waste of my time to comment on the rest of your post @71.
78 • Does this GnoBSD liveDVD have texlive? (by AngryMathDude at 2010-02-02 01:25:47 GMT from United States)
Dear all,
I can't find images for this GnoBSD anywhere. The link posted asks for a password and I tried several, but to no avail :(
ftp://17638-gnobsd@www.zion-studios.net/
It did not work. This liveDVD looks very good, but I could not get it. I miss FreeSBIE live and RoFreeSBIE because they had kile, tetex, math softwares on the LiveDVD, FreeSBIE did not but it was the father of many liveBSD's out there. Looks Like both of these projects died out, it is a real shame. One could install with a graphical gui a system faster and easier, Not that it can't be done the other way, but it is *harder* to set things up, packages and all. After installation, One can install many apps via ports :)
On another thing, anyone out there build successfully a LiveCD/DVD of a real Slackware 13.0 x86_64 with LLS(Linux Live Scripts)? It would be nice to make one, but aufs and squashfs are incompatible with older versions of squashfs as so said by Tomas Matejicek creator of Slax. Thanks for any info regarding this.
79 • My dollar's worth (inflation). (by jake at 2010-02-02 01:42:27 GMT from United States)
As a consumer of OpenBSD (firewalls, industrial control systems, alarm systems, surveillance systems, the odd kiosk and/or POS, my old cluster of vaxen, etc.), I would be quite happy to have an easier installer, especially for the base system ... and that is from someone who has been using BSD since 1.0 ...
As a long-term un*x user, I'm quite happy to use a GUI. But not Gnome, at least not on the systems I use OpenBSD for. The monitor to my right is running OpenBSD with xfce ... It doesn't have a GUI web browser installed, and usually has nothing but eight or twelve xterms on half a dozen desktops (usually bash and csh, depending on need and/or mood ... but I always have at least one xterm running vi as the shell) ... GUIs are really useful tools if the operator groks the concept of multitasking. The laptop I'm typing this on is running Slackware13 and a somewhat modified version of KDE 4.x ... GUI tools have their place, even for people who are happy/comfy with a CLI.
As for the antagonistic/abrasive fanbois in the OpenBSD "inner circle", all you have to do is look to the project leader ... like attracts like. de Raadt is the main reason that I no longer follow any of the BSD mailing lists or Usenet groups. (Yes, I know, I can be a cantankerous, crusty old fart myself ... )
Hopefully, Herr Rinkes will indeed ignore de Raadt's pack of fanbois and re-release the fruits of his labor. OpenBSD really ought to be easier for John Q. Public and/or Jane Random to evaluate. I suspect he will gain a bit of a following ... I will certainly be following the project.
Thank you, Ladislav! It's articles like that one that have been bringing me back to DWW all these years. Keep up the good work.
80 • Does this GnoBSD liveDVD have texlive? (by AngryMathDude at 2010-02-02 01:47:44 GMT from United States)
Dear all,
I can't find images for this GnoBSD anywhere. The link posted asks for a password and I tried several, but to no avail :(
ftp://17638-gnobsd@www.zion-studios.net/
It did not work. This liveDVD looks very good, but I could not get it. I miss FreeSBIE live and RoFreeSBIE because they had kile, tetex, math softwares on the LiveDVD, FreeSBIE did not but it was the father of many liveBSD's out there. Looks Like both of these projects died out, it is a real shame. One could install with a graphical gui a system faster and easier, Not that it can't be done the other way, but it is *harder* to set things up, packages and all. After installation, One can install many apps via ports :)
On another thing, anyone out there build successfully a LiveCD/DVD of a real Slackware 13.0 x86_64 with LLS(Linux Live Scripts)? It would be nice to make one, but aufs and squashfs are incompatible with older versions of squashfs as so said by Tomas Matejicek creator of Slax. Thanks for any info regarding this.
81 • re: Fail Linux/BSD is fail. (by Peter Besenbruch at 2010-02-02 01:48:58 GMT from United States)
GNOBSD is the last straw for me, and why I will not be using or supporting Linux or BSD anymore. I fail to see how everyone wants to push open source into the mainstream, yet with the other hand, they ridicule anyone who makes it easier for the masses to use.
The people who want to push open source software into the mainstream are not the same people who ridicule others who try to make the software easier to use. Treating the open source community as a monolith, like you do, is a bad idea. Dividing the community into two groups, like I just did, is simplistic, as well. The open source community is a big, diverse bunch of people.
Rather than go into a long tyrade about how fail the open source community is, I am just going to easily and quietly switch back to my closed source systems I have neglected for nearly 10 years. I am reinstalling OSX back on my Macbook and going out to buy Win7.
I hear good things about the Mac OS, and Windows 7 represents a major improvement over Vista. Have fun.
See you later, and good riddance. Learn to think outside your own selfish and conflicting thought processes.
No, just people with a wide range of attitudes. I just spent the morning fixing up a neighbor's Windows XP machine. That's XP, as in pre-SP1, with no updates to IE6. The fix initially involved installing Firefox. The neighbors were amazed at the speed increase. Firefox didn't throw up Javascript error windows every few seconds, either.
More worrisome was the 5 command line shells that opened up and then vanished at every boot. Eventually, the family let me put in Linux. Gparted shrank the Windows partition. Debian filled the resulting free space. It's an old machine, with the typical specs for a computer from 2001.
I could have purchased Windows 7, or the Mac OS, but neither would have run. I could have upgraded Windows XP, but such upgrades tend not to work if there is malware on the system. No, in this case, a change to Linux made the most sense.
I actually succeeded once in installing OpenBSD to a virtual machine. I even got a working desktop. It was fun, but the experience told me plainly that OpenBSD was intended for use as a server, most likely headless. A project like GNOBSD looks interesting, but it doesn't strike me as something the OpenBSD community would be all that interested in. That's a server using and maintaining crowd.
82 • dws (by A CHICK - OHNOES. on 2010-02-02 02:05:52 GMT from United States)
It's a cute little toy, and I admit, I never thought it'd ever be mentioned here...... Still, nice "smxi developers" .... idle hands were the Devil's playground ;) You know certain distros are going to pee themselves w/ jealousy.
83 • Rage quitting trolls (by Duhnonymous at 2010-02-02 02:24:02 GMT from United States)
Just ignore the trolls, people. They're probably paid shills from Microsoft trying to cause pointless arguments.
If something is worth producing, it will be produced and distributed and used. No amount Microsoft shilling will change that fact, and long after Microsoft has been dead, buried and justly forgotten, Linux/BSD/other free OSes will still be actively developed.
Try talking-pointing your way around that you Microsoft sell-outs!
84 • The OpenBSD community needs to grow up (by ozonehole at 2010-02-02 02:31:26 GMT from Taiwan)
A few years ago, I ran OpenBSD for several months. I did appreciate it's stability, but it was lacking a few features that I thought were important. On a few occasions, I asked on the OBSD mailing list in a very tactful and polite way about these features, and even very gently mentioned that perhaps they could be added in the future.
To no avail. Any suggestion to the OBSD community that their OS was not already absolutely perfect was met with open hostility.
One example: Linux has a daemon called "powernowd" which saves power and runs your CPU cooler. It works by slowing down your CPU when you don't need its hefty number-crunching ability (like when reading a simple web page), but speeds up the CPU automatically when needed (ie watching a Flash video). I asked if OpenBSD had such a utility - answer was an emphatic "NO!" coupled with comments like "OpenBSD doesn't need that feature" or "you want it, so write it yourself" or "if you think Linux is so great, why don't you use it, a**hole and stop bothering us!"
So I'm happily back on Linux now. It has powernowd, drivers that "just work," an intuitive graphical installer, and a great online community of users who cheerfully offer assistance in the few situations where I need it.
cheers,
OZ
85 • GUI vs CLI (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-02-02 02:44:37 GMT from United States)
Scott wrote: "My problem is more with it becoming and more an more difficult to use the non-GUI options. "
I'm curious. What could you do easily at the command line in the past that you can't do now? I'm a systems administrator by trade and I still do the majority of my work at the command line. On certain types of infrastructure servers I prefer not to install X at all. I don't feel limited in any way with any of the current mainstream server or desktop distros. I've been doing UNIX administration since 1995 and LInux since 1998.
I'm not saying this to be argumentative. I really, genuinely wonder what you find changed.
86 • BSDs and gentoo (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-02 03:28:09 GMT from United States)
Both have much in common. The developers tend to be self centered and not interested in converting outsiders to their 'cause'.
Visiting forums in either will generally get you a RTFM or worse.
Neither group wanta to make it easy to install their system. That would only bring more newbies to their forums to waste their time. I kind of understand that.
If GNOBSD had NOT included an installer, the community may have reacted differently. Recall the last live gentoo dvd did not have an installer either. The gentoo developers certainly must be capable of creating an installer, yet they refuse.
As mentioned earlier, if you want to run gnome, kde, or other gui desktop linux is by far the best choice. You will find linux support much more friendly.
I have several BSD versions installed and all are a real pain to work in. I must have a second computer opened to "The Manual" to accomplish common tasks that I don't even think about in linux. After gaining the knowledge you still must waste HOURS compiling programs. Such a waste of time.
87 • GnoBSD (by Andy on 2010-02-02 03:33:00 GMT from New Zealand)
I'm very keen to try out GnoBSD if it becomes available again.
Good on the GnoBSD dev, and shame on those who have flamed him.
88 • Kiss of Death (by Redondo at 2010-02-02 03:34:23 GMT from United States)
I guess all those silly(CLI) BSD neanderthals got taken to the cleaners by Ladislav finding a jem in GnoBSD.
Think god we're not all living in a cave or under a rock, and only get rilled up when someone, aka GnoBSD, comes along and upsets our old school thinking.
So in the end, its going to be the kiss of death for the attacks on a thoughtful outsider.
I'm looking forward to see much more about GnoBSD.
What I can't believe is how PC-BSD survived?! If it wasn't for PC-BSD I would have NEVER tried BSD.
89 • ext3 to ext4 migration (by Sunshine at 2010-02-02 04:48:58 GMT from China)
For those who can read Chinese and intend to use Grub legacy bootloader, the article in this thread may be useful.
http://www.linuxsir.org/bbs/thread343284.html
90 • GUI vs. CLI (by Scott on 2010-02-02 05:06:56 GMT from United States)
@Caitlin, boot, for one thing. :) (Depending upon distribution and graphics card.)
(And no, your question didn't strike me as argumentative.)
One example is Fedora's NetworkManager. I'm not sure about other distributions, but Fedora's NM has (or at least had--don't use NM, so I don't know if it's been fixed) an issue where it wouldn't work with static IP addresses.
Now, I can easily fix this. The thing is though, it's more work than it used to be. Fedora feels I'm going to want to use NetworkManager, and I have to first disable it.
Around Nov. 2007, Fedora began tying sound to consolekit, and if you wanted to have sound in textmode, you had to edit console.perms.d/whatever-default.
So fixable, but a nuisance, requiring googling for something that had always worked.
So, it's not so much *can't* as it is, becomes more of a nuisance to do.
91 • #78 Slackware live DVD + #82 ????? (by gnomic at 2010-02-02 05:14:31 GMT from New Zealand)
# 78 Re live Slackware, not quite what you seek but a gentleman on the Slax forum did make a live DVD of Slackware 12.1 some time ago. 32 bit. The thread below relates, I imagine some of the contributors might be able to assist with your mission. Actually this link is the result of a search of the Slax forum, the topic was as shown. The ingenious chap goes under the name markds.
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=12043&highlight=live%20DVD
Getting Slax equivalent to Slack12.1 Full Install
#82 Afraid I haven't got a clue what this post means - can anyone enlighten me?
92 • DWW+GnoBSD (by D1Knight at 2010-02-02 06:10:35 GMT from United States)
Another great DWW, I thank you kindly. Hopefully Oracle will continue to encourage the development of OpenSolaris/Solaris.
To Stefan Rinkes, congratulations! You have the victory, already. It does appear that there is already an excellent amount of interest in your distro, it has already succeeded. I hope you continue with it or give it another go. Hopefully OpenBSD community will become more, well....open. The next release of GnoBSD would be great if it is more compressed (save bandwidth, too) and/or a VirtualBox version. A .img file to install would be great too. Like Ladislav pointed out FreeBSD and PC-BSD, co-exsit, sounds to me they would inviting towards you and your endeavors. Keep up the great work. You have a lot of people with interest in your project and are behind you. Cheers and Peace. :)
93 • GNOBSD (by Mike at 2010-02-02 06:16:43 GMT from United States)
Nice article but I really take issue with the assertion that the openBSD user/developers are so hostile they shutdown this project. The developer of GNOBSD is free to do what he wants it just doesn't mean that everyone will agree with or like his project. I am no surprised by the response that he got, but then again neither should he be shocked if he is a openBSD user. Not everyone feels that an OS should be administered or installed by GUI's, which is why we have Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo, some people like it that way. I agree with one of the comments about maybe putting his efforts into the NetBSD Desktop project to help work with people who share the same goals and ideas about making a BSD accessible to a broader range of people with a GNOME desktop and GUI installer.
94 • Re: Slackware "live" (by jake at 2010-02-02 06:23:43 GMT from United States)
Slackware has had "live" CDs (and later DVDs) for around a decade and a half.
Slack "live" doesn't boot into a GUI ... but I rather suspect that anyone wanting to check out a new Slackware distribution, or install Slack, and/or willing to attempt to repair Slackware, doesn't exactly need a GUI.
Slackware isn't for everybody, but it does what it does very well. Which is kind of what the entire un*x concept is, when you think about it.
Slackware is a good distro ... if you want to learn how Linux works, as opposed to learning how to use the pointy-clicky-thingy.
It's also a good base to build a "user need not understand how it works" distribution for friends and family, IF you understand how the base distro works, AND you grok how the end user plans to use the computer. My Mum & Great Aunt are happy Slackware users ... but they call it "the version of windows that jake put on my computer" ... I can't convince 'em to call it "Linux" or "Slackware" ... Damn the Microsoft marketing machine!
95 • OpenBSD and ComixWall (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-02 06:24:09 GMT from United States)
Those that did not read through the mailing list threads: Read this: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=126037728930452&w=2 then tell us who among you would willingly contribute time or money to such an organization? and especially why?
96 • Sad (by Ian MacGregor on 2010-02-02 07:54:41 GMT from United States)
I have been researching switching from Linux to a BSD variant, but I don't want to get involved in a community that acts the way OpenBSD did toward GNOBSD.
97 • gnobsd (by nix at 2010-02-02 08:51:23 GMT from United States)
Looks like there was a change of heart from gnobsd:
"
A big “thank you” to all the people who wrote an email to me and try to encourage me to publish the gnobsd-images again.
Because of the huge amount of request there will be a torrent-tracker for the images.
More details coming up when it is done.
(I think the next two or three days)
cya Stefan
"
Good to see stefan do what he wants; this is open source software after all.
PS: The analogy of PC-BSD and FreeBSD doesn't work for OpenBSD and GnoBSD. Mainly because theo makes his income off of OpenBSD.
98 • GUI-is-for-wimps hacker culture (by megadriver at 2010-02-02 09:03:25 GMT from Spain)
Please, don't demonize those of us who love the command line, don't like GUIs, automation and what we consider "bloat" that much, and prefer to compile some of the programs we use to enable the options we want and disable those that we don't.
Those that try to impose their views on others and ridicule them are just a minority, a very loud one indeed, but a minority. OpenBSD, unfortunately, seems to be a "refuge" of sorts for that kind of people. Those few "fanbois" and "zealots" are the ones who "kill" projects like GNOBSD, not the "GUI-is-for-wimps hacker culture" in general. Most of us just quietly do things "our way", without bothering anyone.
Just like there's a lot of you who don't want to be "forced" to use the command line or compile stuff, there are also some of us who don't want to be "forced" to use things like DEs, HAL, Pulseaudio and all those *kits. "There's no accounting for tastes", they say. And I think there's room for all of us in the FOSS world.
99 • Link in #95 (by Barnabyh at 2010-02-02 09:35:40 GMT from United Kingdom)
Masturbating monkeys indeed. These are people who feel easily threatened and are quite insecure.
For comparison, Pat V. also makes money from Slackware sales of the official DVD set, but it's also freely available for download with no restrictions, it's exactly the same copy, and derivatives are encouraged, or at least not discouraged. Too be honest I think he doesn't care too much and just does his thing, and if somebody wants to build on it they're welcome to.
That's the spirit. Obviously not all in the 'open' community get this.
100 • A sad state of afairs & GNOBSD (by x at 2010-02-02 09:47:09 GMT from United States)
Most of the OpenBSD users do not pay for a copy and never have, the criticisms are not about money. No doubt, some of the comments made by OpenBSD developers (?) reflect an attitude that limits possibilities. The statements made by some are attempts to limit possibilities others wish to explore. OpenBSD needs to expand its' horizons or it will continue to be relegated to guarding the borders and minor duties in some shops. As to home use, it will never be more than a hobbyist's toy.
The approach they take to develop and secure software should be the standard for all software. The quality of the code is some of the finest available. The impact they have made has affected most computer users was made without a lot of fanfare. The rigid attitude concerning licensing requirements are more stringent than virtually all Linux distributions.
I find it interesting that the criticisms voiced by many on this forum reflect the worst of the behavior on the referenced thread. As to the attitude some claim they encountered when asking for help from OpenBSD users, they need to go and read some of the truly abusive responses others have received from many of the Linux forums. As a group, Slackware users seem to be the most helpful and polite.
There may be other issues that we are not aware of that caused the GNOBSD project to modify its' approach, we will never know. I hope Stefan Rinkes is successful, and is able to further develop it without having to take the route Theo did to pursue a desired idea.
By providing an easy to use introduction more people will be willing to dive into the details. Offering an easy to install and use system does not violate the premise of free and open software. Eliminating the ability to customize and make changes is the real problem, a practice rigidly enforced by certain companies we are all familiar with.
I share Ladislav's opinion expressed in the article, I do not agree with some of the ranting expressed in the comments.
101 • @95 (by lucky13 on 2010-02-02 13:13:30 GMT from United States)
Do you mean contribute to ComixWall or to OpenBSD? I fully support the latter. I might support the former if the person(s) promoting it had chosen to do so within the community rather than from outside. Dittos for GNOBSD.
Nobody said to stop distributing anything with respect to ComixWall or GNOBSD. They asked that others unaffiliated with the OpenBSD community stop posting to their lists about such things.
Why is it so difficult for some of you to comprehend that OpenBSD isn't obligated to support forks started outside their existing community or to encourage outsiders to advertise forks on the OpenBSD lists? There's no entitlement for support from upstream but they're also not trying to stifle anyone from using their code as anyone sees fit. They just don't want to be dragged into the kind of mess others can bring back to their project (particularly from unsophisticated users drawn to an idea like a pre-configured desktop) -- if these things were approached from within the community, there might be a more receptive reaction. But noooooooooo, some people are too freaking important and self-absorbed to actually work within a project. I guess if you don't respect the people in the project enough to join them, you won't respect them when they ask you to not advertise your wares in their lists. Respect is a two-way street. Some of you should try harder to look both ways before you cross it.
102 • Problem is "just looking, thanks". (by OS2_user on 2010-02-02 13:56:41 GMT from United States)
Without disparaging the efforts of anyone who tweaks on source code and presents a customized version, there are TOO MANY distros. As the author here states, most are trivially new.
And too many download without ever intending to more than look, guilty of that myself, but it's now just wasting BW and time. Of course, one can HOPE for a wonderful new variation, but at *this* stage, it's not reasonable to expect one.
I'm looking in from an OS/2 perspective and will just blithely pontificate: The open source community is dissolving into trivialities and eye candy. Hasn't been any increase of function for a while now, beyond keeping up with new hardware, and in general, it IS bloating up like Windows, so much that I begin to doubt that I'll ever be able move from OS/2, and will use Linux only for virtualization. So the OpenBSD types have a valid point in my view.
Because something that works, even if simplistic, dull, and a bit limited, has a reasonable appeal. (I'm sure many users would be shocked to find that GUIs are actually just shells on plain of comand line programs.) Eventually, all of you too will ossify as one poster says, and just want something that works without continual tweaking.
Besides, OpenBSD types have a "right" to their uniquely quirky variant. Similarly, I'm set in my little rut because OS/2 is now pretty much dead (despite Ecomstation, which is stalled).
So, in sum, there's too much pointless developin' goin' on, and I'm afraid that sampling distros *really* doesn't help. Everyone should pick ONE and actually *learn* it. Promiscuity isn't a virtue, doesn't make you an expert, nor happy...
And then *think* about *applications* you could write that would actually provide innovation, or at least increase convenience. The OS, as such, is plenty good enough.
103 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-02 14:01:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #101
What is all this nonsense about "unsophisticated users" you continue to spout...a recurring theme throughout your posts. It's almost as though and your fellow OpenBSD chums have declared yourselves as "above the rest". How silly you all sound..."we won't do that or this or wotever"..."there will be blood".
You really should get out more...if all you can do is get into some OS then most of us probably feel you can't get a gf...mind you there is something Darwinian in that...
Do try to get some perpective; you sound like some other folk on this forum, who also believe they know more than most or any subject...and attempt to prove it...a futile pursuit if only they knew.
If, as we read, there may be an ulterior motive for the vilification of Stefan Rinkes, then, put plainly, that stinks.
Now, before you attempt some skewed justification of OpenBSD, just remember Stephan R plans to release the iso anyway....and what you lot think you think is of no consequence whatsoever.
104 • GNOBSD (by 101 my ass on 2010-02-02 14:06:56 GMT from Canada)
GNOBSD is working with OpenBSD by trying to make a modern desktop out of it. Calling it unsophisticated because it uses an modern installer is elitist garbage. Calling the desktop preconfigured is more masturbating monkey talk - it's just a starting point. Only the OpenBSD community would call someone self-absorbed for trying to take their OS and improve on it. PCBSD and FreeBSD have no such problem. That's probably why they are both more useful that OpenBSD. OpenBSD is nothing more than a bunch of elitist fringe nerds.
105 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-02 14:15:20 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #102
Your penultimate paragraph...utter drivel. You appear to not understand folk can develop whatever they want...since when do you decide there's "too" much development.
Ref said development, do you mean in your country or elsewhere on the planet?
Some of the developer folk, across the planet, who do not bother with whatever anyone else thinks, and simply work for their own community, LEAs, nation, whatever, and enjoy the GNU license as it were, would laugh themselves silly at such comments as there is "too" much development.
To repeat from an earlier post, get some perspective. It is not for you to decide who develops what for who and where.
106 • No subject (by Sen on 2010-02-02 14:49:57 GMT from United Kingdom)
People don't seem to realise this is a VERY clever trick by the developers of OpenBSD. They make us slaver at the mouth at the thought of a Live OpenBSD by denying it to us. Then they will suddenly have a change of heart and we will all rush to get it!
Very clever!
107 • FreeBSD (by Johannes on 2010-02-02 14:54:45 GMT from Germany)
BSD is a great thing... why bother with the fools at OpenBSD? Use FreeBSD :-)
Nevertheless, GNOBSD was a good idea.
108 • #80 (by Notorik on 2010-02-02 15:19:57 GMT from United States)
I got this email and am just passing it on if anyone is interested and if this post doesn't get deleted...:
From: Anders Gavare gavare@gmail.com
Subject: updated patches for Live CD with FreeBSD 8.0-RC2 + GNOME
To: freesbie@gufi.org
Date: Sunday, November 1, 2009, 4:22 PM
Hi FreeSBIEers,
Just in case someone is interested: I've updated the FreeBSD+GNOME
patches for FreeSBIE at
http://gavare.se/freebsd-gnome-live-cd/
so that they work with FreeBSD 8.0-RC2.
(I've only tried the result in QEMU so far, not on real hardware.)
Anders
109 • RE: 106, Don't know if that happened. (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-02-02 15:21:48 GMT from United States)
@Sen: I don't believe the unsophisticated developers at OpenBSD have had a change of heart. It's still a money thing.
@forest: I agree with you on post 103 and 105.
On the Ubuntu / Yahoo search news. I just don't find anything about this being newsworthy. The conspiracy theory people will act with alarms over ANYTHING.
110 • @102, 105 (by Patrick on 2010-02-02 15:50:06 GMT from United States)
I do agree with the sentiment of 102. I don't think he is saying people can't or shouldn't develop new distro's, but that at the point we have reached now, a lot of it amounts to wasted effort. It often doesn't contribute much to the greater good. It is not like more people will want to use Linux because there are now 655 instead of 650 distributions. Now of course, if distribution 651 brings a leap in quality, this does make a difference. But the base distro's are so good now that this isn't that likely to happen.
I do think there is much more room for improvement left in the applications. It still happens from time to time I run into unimplemented features or things that don't work right. Or things I wish some app would do. That is not to say the applications we have are bad. I use them every day and they are generally great. But there are some holes that could be filled, both in missing applications and applications that could use some extra functionality. Don't ask for specific examples, since I can't give you any. It is just a feeling that has developed over time, and as such, subjective.
111 • RE: 101/102 (by Landor at 2010-02-02 16:53:24 GMT from Canada)
#101
I agree 101# :)
A fine example here was or is Sabayon. When I was using Gentoo as my daily system I know for a fact many in the Gentoo forums and IRCs were not too impressed that they had an influx of Sabayon users coming over and using the forums and the like for help with a distribution that in essence was not Gentoo. Gentoo didn't build it and Gentoo shouldn't have to support it. That's why Sabayon was built, to be a different distribution. Being such there should have been very little, or no, reason for a user to not find support or communicate about Sabayon outside of Sabayon.
#102
You make a great point here that's probably going to fall on deaf ears. How many actually learn something very useful by bouncing around from distribution to distribution. If someone told me they hopped through 100 Ubuntu variants in 3 months and learned so much I'd have to wonder what? How to invoke the installer? The only difference would be if someone told me they used LSF, CRUX, Arch, Gentoo, etc, etc. Then I'd think, ok, maybe this person did learn at least something.
I'd also say picking a distribution that is only built for ease of use isn't going to help much either, it contributes to another point of yours, behind any GUI is the back end command line, they're not going to learn any real functional knowledge.
We are talking about people who are willing to learn though. I'd wager that many here hop just for the sake of hopping. Maybe it makes them feel good, maybe they think they've become immersed in the GNU/Linux community.
On another point separate from the two above, I've seen elitist thrown around here quite a bit. Do any of you even making these comments even realise it's those same elitists that build your applications and distributions?
It's sad to see when one of the biggest elitists, Torvalds can insult a whole community like OpenBSD with that one comment and everyone here jumps on it and repeats it, yet in the same breath they'll happily admonish elitists, while still using the code they wrote!
Don't think Torvalds isn't an elitist either, he's got more attitude than anyone in the OSS/FOSS community in my personal opinion. That one comment alone proves he thinks his way is far better than those of OpenBSD and knocks them for it.
Oh, Patrick, you asked about a LFS review, did you ever see my reply about it
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
112 • Re. Clever trick, 106 (by Barnabyh at 2010-02-02 17:00:56 GMT from United Kingdom)
Noooo, when they change their mind and want to give it to us freely we won't want it any more. Aaargh!
113 • 111 (by Barnabyh at 2010-02-02 17:22:56 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi Landor, you're making a good point for the most part of your post. But in re. to #101, the way I read it it was not about support at all but only the release announcement posted to the OpenBSD mailing list. As it basically is OpenBSD and the man seems very involved and interested in their community as an enthusiastic user of the OS, he probably wanted to let them know what he had achieved with their underpinnings. I believe they also have a right to know.
He probably thought he had done good and did not expect this hostility at all.
Anyway, this is all speculation, and I may have misread it. The comments section's slowly overheating because of OpenBSD. Take care.
114 • @111 (by Patrick on 2010-02-02 17:27:26 GMT from United States)
Uhm, I don't think it was me who asked about a LFS review. :-)
I did read through the LFS book a couple of years ago, and it had some use for learning the nitty gritty... but I still thought that (at the time, things may have changed) there was too much of "apply this patch just so things work, or do this or that, but we're not going to tell you why" stuff going on. As I was doing the effort to really delve into the details, I wanted to know WHY I was doing stuff, and that information wasn't always there.
Since I felt like LFS expected me to just follow the steps without asking why, I felt like I was just executing steps in a script... and you know, computers are much better at executing scripts than humans are. So I decided to use buildroot instead, which executed the script for me, applied all patches, compiled stuff, etc. I decided that I didn't need to spend my own time, since LFS didn't seem the right tool to teach me the "why"s anyway.
115 • GNOBSD (by Piter at 2010-02-02 18:52:32 GMT from Serbia)
I think this would be really promising project.Pity.
116 • GNOBSD (by John DiBlasi on 2010-02-02 19:13:09 GMT from United States)
I know people who still enjoy using ,slide rules,and pen & paper; this is fine. Let's not remove a brick without giving another to take it's place. This is their "Hurt Locker" We all need something that we can say we do well, to make us feel proud and build our self esteem.
Don't take that away from them.
117 • GNOBSD (by Anon on 2010-02-02 19:31:25 GMT from United States)
Well, lets not forget that OpenBSD, while striving for security, becomes as insecure as any other OS once you customize it for a particular task by using the ports tree, even though they brag on their home page, "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" Which is a strong point to be made. But they have no exposure so they can easily get away with claiming this.
I believe, that had they embraced the GNOBSD project, this would have created a large influx of new users to the OpenBSD project that would have helped expose flaws and bugs in the OS, allowing them to be addressed, and in the end making the OS stronger and more resilient.
Whatever reasons they have against this are irrelevant. History has shown that this kind of rejection will only lead to one path: extinction.
Grow some balls OpenBSD and put your money where your mouth is.
118 • Just a wish. (by Onederer on 2010-02-02 21:21:01 GMT from United States)
I wish that someone would pick up the development and updating of "Desktop BSD". It would be nice to have an updated version with all the latest applications. I found it to be quite a desirable distro! Too bad that the developer has abandoned it, and stopped developing it. As it stands now, it is a consolation to know that at least, updates can be done using the facilities of OPEN-BSD. But the graphics portion of user friendly "Desktop BSD" will from now on, never get a face-lift. It will always remain the same as the last day that this distribution was discontinued.
119 • RE: 113/114 (by Landor at 2010-02-02 21:21:16 GMT from Canada)
#113
You have to take a look at things from a Linux perspective as well and few here really are.
What kind of reception would a person receive if they jumped on a mailing list for Ubuntu and announced that they made one of those variants that make Ladislav cringe when he looks at his mail. Would the whole comments section be up in arms about the same with that scenario?
The whole reasoning behind the article plays on the elitist belief of OpenBSD, nothing more. I really like Ladislav's writing and was happy to see an article by him until I read what it was about. Though, to give him credit, it is personal opinion based and his opinion is as valid as mine. Back to the point though, if it wasn't for this whole elitist belief people have of OpenBSD and comments like the one Torvalds made, this would be a non-issue, completely.
I read the whole thread and there was some bickering yes, there were also key points made too, especially in regard for the right medium to market it. I'm sure he could have found a better way to let people be aware of his project and maybe only is at fault for being a bit overly excited, but the fault does lie within his poor choice for the announcement.
Based on what I read too, and where Ladislav talks about having a skin as thick as an elephant's, Stefan has too thin of a skin if it led to him shutting down his project, everyone gets criticized and that wasn't really heavy at all, light in comparison to what we see here on a weekly basis in fact.
#114
I agree totally about the handbook, it's like people copying pasting commands almost, with little to no understand at all of what they are doing. Oh, and of course, you are correct. I went back a few issues ago and looked and it was KevinC that had asked. My apologies to both of you for mixing up the two of you.
Keep your stick on the ice..
Landor
120 • ref@119 (by Redondo at 2010-02-02 22:06:14 GMT from United States)
"Based on what I read too, and where Ladislav talks about having a skin as thick as an elephant's, Stefan has too thin of a skin if it led to him shutting down his project, everyone gets criticized and that wasn't really heavy at all, light in comparison to what we see here on a weekly basis in fact. "
Good point. Creating your own distro one needs thick skin.
Maybe he should re-open it under the name of ElephantBSD with the idea he's staying around.
121 • CLI and GUI environments (by Jesse at 2010-02-02 22:09:51 GMT from Canada)
I think Scott, in post 90, has a point. Some distros, such as Fedora, seem bent on typing a lot of things together and getting the user to interact with applets. Which would be fine if
A) they worked properly
B) there were suitable CLI equivalents
I find myself disabling things in Fedora these days and searching for work-arounds to their new "features". Their new updater and SELinux pop-ups are, in my opinion, especially annoying. Fedora does some great, cutting-edge stuff, and it's fun to experiment with their distro, but it seems to becoming more of a chore to maintain as a day-to-day desktop machine.
122 • Just a wish. (correction to #118) Not OPEN-BSD, change to: FREE-BSD (by Onederer on 2010-02-02 22:20:39 GMT from United States)
I wish that someone would pick up the development and updating of "Desktop BSD". It would be nice to have an updated version with all the latest applications. I found it to be quite a desirable distro! Too bad that the developer has abandoned it, and stopped developing it. As it stands now, it is a consolation to know that at least, updates can be done using the facilities of FREE-BSD. But the graphics portion of user friendly "Desktop BSD" will from now on, never get a face-lift. It will always remain the same as the last day that this distribution was discontinued.
123 • GNOBSD (by pan on 2010-02-02 22:21:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
Congratulations DW, good to see GNOBSD back online today - a result which I'm sure was hastened by your article.
With regard to the project's worth; if it sucks, no one will work with it and that is that. If it's really good, then this has all been a rather silly waste of words and there are going to be some very red faces.
124 • Nothing new presented... (by KimTjik at 2010-02-02 23:08:47 GMT from Sweden)
... that would change my view since my first comment (# 3). Still it looks like much ado for nothing.
The only thing proven is that many commentators here have been more eager to tear flesh apart than those OpenBSD folks in the mailing list. That however doesn't tell anything particular about Linux users generally.
If you out of the blue post big new like that, of course it will stir up reactions. Those indifferent would likely not comment. To succeed you need to stubbornness and passion, and down the road the project hopefully attracts helpful supporters.
What puzzles me about the freedom Linux and BSD give us is how it's used as a tool to force anything to be what you want it to be. If that's against the free vision of others doesn't seem to matter much. We've seen several cases when usually new users suddenly question, close to demanding, that the distribution is question changes and becomes something else, be it labelled vaguely as user friendliness or whatever. Complaints attracts cheerleaders who amplify the murmurings, but eventually they move on to wherever they find some commotion.
In this case I doubt that sincere interest in the project GNOBSD is the actual driving force behind the shown hatred against OpenBSD. I mean it's even a common joke that a good response to "I use Linux... you haven't used Linux?... do you use Windows or OSX?" is "I run OpenBSD on my laptop"! If convincingly said it will get some jaws hanging over the cliff. My point here is: why should there be an easy version of OpenBSD when the whole idea behind the project never was to create an easy desktop system? Should we ask for a server edition of the Moblin interface as well?
If Stefan wishes to make that happen I wish him all the best and I wish he finds people who share his vision . I just think most here don't have a clue what they're complaining about. Just because BSD hasn't evolved in zillions of *buntu versions, doesn't mean it has to, or that freedom demands OpenBSD to multiply by the hundreds. The FreeBSD branch is better suited and for all those eager ones in this thread, if it's more than words thrown in the wind, could right now join any of those quite excellent easy FreeBSD desktop editions. The developing structure behind BSD is quite different from Linux.
If anyone wonders: no I don't use OpenBSD and never has. FreeBSD though is implemented both at home and at work.
125 • GNOBSD (by Negotiation at 2010-02-02 23:57:01 GMT from Portugal)
I think that this comment made by nix @ 97, is true:
"The analogy of PC-BSD and FreeBSD doesn't work for OpenBSD and GnoBSD. Mainly because theo makes his income off of OpenBSD."
But to increase their income they need to expand and innovate, and GNOBSD seems to be the right tool to attract new users and bring more money in.
To be successful and achieve that objective, Rinkes absolutely needs support from the upstream.
So they need to seat, balance things and decide a cooperation formula.
126 • Re, DWW, 5, 12, 13, 122 (by Vukota at 2010-02-03 00:04:51 GMT from United States)
>> Possibly my favorite issue this year ;) hehe.
Indeed! Mine too. :-)
>> anyone worried about this Ubuntu/Yahoo business?
Not really, it is expected that GOOG will overtake MS' position in a short future, so supporting little competition will probably help open source movement (and we may see in the Future MS' helping it).Ever played RISICO? Once u become only one major player, end of the game is close. Look at Chrome on Windows... Memory hog with installed back door for updates (unlike FF's update tool that runs only when you start application).
Re: OPENBSD & GNOBSD
Most OpenBSD folks thinks that by always changing cmd line parameters, they will discourage hackers to attack their platform and will make it less desirable to users and hackers. Probably true, but on the end they will not be able to keep up with all these cmd-line cryptic things them self, and rest of their folks will get tired and will abandon platform for good.
>> Too many distros around ? I suggest you simply refuse those (roughly) 99% of distros that have strictly no added value. Whenever I read "Ubuntu-based", I want to grab my gun.
I am with you. Only difference I can see is when distinctive segment is covered (in example gnuArtist from this week's DWW). Actually I would like to see distros grouped by these segments, so I can easily find one when I need one that is specialized for Gaming or Development, or Internet TV or Rescue CD or... I would like to see clear choice and rankings as well :-)
Re: Sun/Oracle
Oracle will have to let go one OS or merge them sooner or later. Mark my words!
> I wish that someone would pick up the development and updating of "Desktop BSD"
Me to. It was probably one of the fastest fully functional desktops I was actually running in past 7 years.
127 • RE: 136 (by Matt at 2010-02-03 00:52:59 GMT from Canada)
i'm not sure where your comment came from about Chrome being a memory hog in Windows but you should maybe get your facts straight before posting. EVERYONE knows that Chrome has a far lighter footprint than IE, FF, Opera, Safari, and probably more but those are the most used ones. so when you next post something, make sure your facts are straight.
128 • Ref 105 (by OS2_user on 2010-02-03 01:26:15 GMT from United States)
I said there's too much "pointless developin' goin' on", meaning duplicated efforts, with the apostrophes trying to imply a bit of humor. Think you missed my overall theme, where I support OpenBSD types to stick to their preference despite criticism.
Doesn't matter to me which, nor trying to limit anyone's efforts, just saying that *focusing* on *one* is what's needed. Only by living with and learning *one* system intimately do you discover how to make better. -- And why things are done the way that they are.
Wasn't clear that I consider learning how to compile from scratch good in itself for *personal* fun, BUT the number of distros simply dilutes an overarching goal of promoting Linux or BSD -- IF you have that goal, and I do in general.
129 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 02:47:39 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #128
How do you define pointless? I not sure many of the hobbyist fraternity truly recognise their input to GNULinux is of very little consequence to the planet as a whole...because they are simply that, hobbyists. But, would these hobbyists consider their efforts pointless? if they are learning something...anything, then that exercise has value
And how do you define OpenBSD types? There would appear to be at least two factions. To use an earlier expression, there are neo techno Luddites and there are types like Stephan R, who comes up with a different way of doing things...and is virtually crucified for daring to veer off the beaten track...so much for innovation then...(but on the third day...)
You might have seen the scenario before...you need look no further than Galileo.
130 • ...From heretics to heroes... (by Newton John at 2010-02-03 05:25:06 GMT from United States)
"Ref#129..you need look no further than Galileo", My god that's it..
Burn 'em at the stakes. Their all heretics.
...Nearly all great scientists start out as heretics nailing their theories to the door of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein were all at some point in a minority of one; Alfred Wegener was dead before continental drift was taken seriously....and now we have Herr Rinkes nailing GNOBSD on the forehead of the ancient.
131 • Nomenclature change needed? (by jake at 2010-02-03 05:31:16 GMT from United States)
OS2_user scrive: "BUT the number of distros simply dilutes an overarching goal of promoting Linux or BSD"
How many distros are there, really?
Changing desktop artwork and/or adding/removing a few bits & bobs of software to suit your politics/religion/opinion/needs/hardware, and/or adding codecs, doth not a distro make (this includes choice of GUI, IMO ... the GUI is an interface, not an OS).
Maybe the terminology needs to change, with the different versions being called just that, "versions", instead of "distributions" in their own right ... along the lines of "the Ubuntu version of Debian" or even "the Mint version of the Ubuntu version of Debian". As a little on-topic for this week, "the OpenBSD version of BSD", "the Oracle version of Solaris", "the Oracle version of Red Hat" and until 2.0 is released, "the eComStation version of OS/2".
Before anyone asks, yes, I WOULD be happy with "the Slackware version of SLS", but only as long as Slackware was still based on a currently being maintained SLS. After it's on its own for a couple generations, call it a new distro. But not until then.
Yeah, I know, now I've moved the bar to defining "generations" ... and you OS/2 guys&gals can yell at me, if you like ... I use ECS too, occasionally, and know it's probably qualified as being a couple generations from IBM, but ver2.0 will be a clear break, if it ever gets released. IM(NS)HO, of course, as always ;-)
Gut feeling is that the question that is my first paragraph isn't really answerable. The only thing I'm certain of is that Ladislav isn't going to get email from me asking him to add my personal versions of Slackware to his database.
Yes, "versions". One is for my own use, and would probably confuse the shit out of most of the people reading this. One is the one I use for the completely computer-illiterate (me Mum, Great Aunt, etc.). Another is for folks like my wife, who are quite computer literate, but are applications users and not sysadmins. A fourth version is the codebase that I use for setting up Slack in corporations (the same base sits under both servers and desktops, with kernel and installed package changes as needed). I consider all of them Slackware (thank you, PV!), not my own creations.
132 • GNOBSD - my two cents (by tom at 2010-02-03 11:14:13 GMT from Germany)
Reading through the previous postings, perhaps the OpenBSD forum is just not the right place to announce a project like GNOBSD?
I think the (majority of) OpenBSD devs don't seem to be heading for the desktop and attracting desktop users, the focus is on deployment scenarios requiring a hardened, extremely secure system. And this kind of system is usually not set up by someone who *needs* a GUI, though some people might find it makes things easier at times.
In this context, the GNOBSD announcement seems to have caused
- fear because of a possible fork (as the project has relatively little manpower, and its focus is elsewhere)
- concern about the OpenBSD forum being subsequently deluged by GNOBSD users without knowledge of (and possibly no real interest in) the underlying system.
Similar (perhaps a lot less fervent) reservations are to be found with Gentoo resp. Arch advocates vs. Sabayon resp. Chakra proponents.
IMHO, the second point does not reflect as much of an elitist approach as it seems to. Some Arch users, to the surprise of other people, call Arch "user-friendly" because you get to know the system during the installation process - that's the "Arch way". From this perspective, an OpenBSD system with preconfigured GUI gives a swift entry, but the rest is completely up to the individual user, whether they are ready to really deal with the underlying system because they'll have to sooner or later. What is perhaps elitist is to think that "they surely wouldn't want to". But again, spreading desktop use doesn't seem to be a topic for the majority of the OpenBSD users (resp. those frequenting their forums), and therefore, most of them might be unwilling to give any support to desktop-only users.
Personally, I do not see a real necessity to run OpenBSD as a desktop system. But this is not to discourage the endeavour - keep up your work. Why? Because you're free to do!
133 • RE 22 OpenBSD Live CDs (by Steve at 2010-02-03 11:52:11 GMT from United States)
Years? Whoa. There are several OpenBSD live CDs at:
http://jggimi.homeip.net/
134 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 12:30:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #132
I am intrigued by your mention of, "the focus is on deployment scenarios requiring a hardened, extremely secure system."
Can you cite examples please? I ask purely in the spirit of gaining knowledge.
Stephan R, came up with the installer function, which appears to have caused the rumpus, perhaps he was looking further than the hardened secure system. If that is the case then it follows not all folk look to OpenBSD for security.
If, as read earlier, there was concern about resources being diluted by "deviant" (my expression) forks...then it begs the question would one trust a small outfit to maintain OpenBSD for vital security deployments?
135 • Re: #85 ( Caitlyn Martin) (by Leo at 2010-02-03 13:19:51 GMT from United States)
I think the concern is not about Linux/BSD as a server, as much as a desktop. There are countless headless servers, so yes, that part works well.
On the other hand, not everyone designing pretty GUIs follows the FSF design principle of decoupling the windowing system from the core functionality. The FSF recommends writing graphics agnostics libraries and then hook to them with a given GUI toolkit (say, Qt, Gtk, etc). That way, other GUI's can be created for the same functionality.
I think that's a valid concern, but we can't say in the stone age out of fear that people will design things incorrectly. We should rather encourage and propose clean software design.
Ubuntu, for one, is going that way.RedHat/Fedora too. Network-manager is a library with Gtk and Qt frontends. And the list goes. The freedesktop.org folks are also developing technologies along these lines (I think HAL went south, but DBUS was a success).
Cheer,
Leo
136 • RE 134 - what matters? (by KimTjik at 2010-02-03 13:24:14 GMT from Sweden)
You don't have to look hard to find out that when OpenBSD is discussed as a desktop system it's phrased as "it's possible". It has to my knowledge never been announced as a typical desktop system.
Humans make errors, but simplicity with less layers increase chances of hammering out security flaws. With less system calls playing pinball, less chains, you'll of course have a better overview. A typical desktop system isn't particularly secure in this sense.
From what I can see, what Stephan did hasn't created a lot of fuzz until Ladislav decided to make it a head story of DWW. The story is still quite telling since he easily could strip down the live-CD to scripts.
If a project has a clearly defined purpose and fulfil it successfully it's worth trust. Focusing on more than you can handle isn't worth trust. Why should you loose trust in OpenBSD just because some of its users, maybe maintainers, don't see the point in actively supporting a live-CD? To me such an argument makes no sense. Many of us benefit daily from the OpenBSD teams' work. They are active in technical solutions that not only benefit their own distribution but are widely used by others, probably including several who expressed their dismay of OpenBSD. To me that sounds hypocritical.
137 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 14:35:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
But can you cite a specific example(s) of a requirement for a hardened extremely secure system?
138 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 14:38:24 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #135
"Agnostics"...steady on CM, some folk really do think FOSS is a religion...
139 • RE 137: judge for yourself (by KimTjik at 2010-02-03 15:42:05 GMT from Sweden)
It's kind of pointless to specify what level of security I expect and how well that corresponds to what OpenBSD offer. Be your own judge. You as a user decide. If your interested you have a valid starting point to criticise OpenBSD for maybe not fulfil your requirements. If you haven't any real interest in the security idea behind OpenBSD, then you whole argument becomes irrelevant. Because we're not arguing because we can, are we?
OpenSSH isn't unique for OpenBSD, but OpenBSD maintains and develop it. Are you interested in cryptography, then examine whether OpenBSD delivers the kind and level of it you wish to have. Is limited use of OpenSSH enough for you or you also value use and improvements of IPsec, then OpenBSD might interest you since they have developers engaged beyond the distribution itself. Do you look for enhanced security check of memory, of the network stack, or something else, maybe OpenBSD then is of interest since that's there by default. Opinions might differ as how security is achieved, but few would question that OpenBSD actively is working with these matters.
As I already said: be your own judge. What's important to me or someone else, might be of no importance to you. How would I know?
140 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 16:56:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #139
In #132, Tom of Germany stated "the focus is on deployment scenarios requiring a hardened, extremely secure system"; he was referring to OpenBSD.
I asked him to cite some examples of this requirement. You responded, or rather, you didn't.
I asked, again in #137, for an example or examples.
In #138, you responded yet again, still no examples.You made reference to the user deciding. You then went on about arguments and then cryptography. Then you went on about how opinions might differ on how security is achieved, and how OpenBSD is working, actively it seems, on these matters.
Then you decide I should be my own judge...depending on what is important to me or a third party. Finally, you ask, "How would I know?"
But, you have still not cited any examples of the so called hardened, extremely secure system, have you?
The reason why I asked about the security angle, mentioned by Tom, is I was genuinely intrigued by the security scenario.
However, I am even more intrigued by your inability or perhaps reticence to cite a single specific example.
Had you mentioned "online banking or online shopping say, it might have made some sense. If you had mentioned the need for secure comms between business partners/employees/customers, again it would have made some sort of sense.
If you had mentioned the need to protect a commercially sensitive data base, say, then that would have made even more sense.
But you didn't.
The impression I am getting now is that this whole OpenBSD security business is really just a bit of Boys Own "adventurism" stuff.
Perhaps, when LT made his remark along the lines of Simian Self Abusers, he had encountered some sort of sub species of dogmatic devs that prayed to the god of obfuscation. You must be the judge, how would I know?
141 • Agree with you about GNOBSD (by babel on 2010-02-03 18:36:16 GMT from Mexico)
I totally agree with you about this article, it's a shame that even in the "open" source world we still find minds that closed. I know being different and using an "expert" distro is good and makes you feel you're a "cool hacker", but come on, it was a good idea to make BSD friendlier; and as you say, it could be a way to approach other kind of user to the BSD project, cuz i know some users would like to "taste" the project before even try to read and learn how to install BSD, so this project could be a "light" to drag BSD from the dark. I think the main problem is that some users prefer to remain in the dark, that way they feel cool, secure and original.
Well, it's too bad to see some users so threatened by a distro that doesn't even harms theirs, but I guess that's the beauty of open source: we have all the kinds of people.
I don't want to insult anyone, this is just my opinion as a Linux user. Good article by the way.
142 • RE: 132 (by Landor at 2010-02-03 19:11:46 GMT from Canada)
I've said the same thing about Gentoo. I consider it very user-friendly and though I hate the term, everything works "out of the box."
That's a perspective though and I'm quite sure many here won't agree with it, that's their problem though as they're not seeing through my eyes.
That is also said for the OpenBSD team. This article hasn't really done anything to change anything, nor will any of the comments. It wouldn't be too much of a prediction that the OpenBSD team has been already and will continue working on "their" status-quo.
I wonder how many of the torch bearers will be using GNOBSD as their daily system bringing change to OpenBSD that they're so fervent about. I'm guessing none. Which says a lot about those posting. Anyone else have some thoughts on that number?
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
143 • OpenBSD & GNOBSD (by David on 2010-02-03 19:40:53 GMT from United States)
In my opinion OpenBSD may be one of the best authoritarian projects out there. Slackware is another great example of where there is a defined leader but elicits the help of many underlings.
This for the most part is a good thing because it controls the direction and attitude of the project helping the leader achieve his/her objective. This can also prevent the “To many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome like what we saw with the Gentoo project years back.
I have used OpenBSD on my laptop as a primary desktop and found it quite easy to configure. This of course was only achieved after I spent due diligence reading the necessary man pages, and referring to magazine articles that I have collected over the years.
I do not fault, nor do I hold Theo responsible for the attitude of the BSD community. But, I do find it a bit disconcerting that a developer would abandon a projects original direction based on the criticism of others. This may be out of respect or simply out of fear: hoping it’s not the latter.
I would like to commend Stefan on this project and applaud him for bringing back the iso’s for us to enjoy.
144 • Re: #138 (by Leo at 2010-02-03 20:50:26 GMT from United States)
You really made me LOL!
145 • Distributions (by fernbap at 2010-02-03 21:16:33 GMT from Portugal)
Ref#131:
How many distributions are there? As many as people think are needed.
Example: i want a live CD able to rescue data from a crashed windows. It needs, of course, to be compatible with as many hardware as possible, as i don't know in advance on which computer i will need it to run. It also needs to have a bunch of applications that might be usefull for editing partitions, backuping data, etc.
Of course, i can make one regardless of the linux i am using, but if i needed to make one using OpenBSD i would have to spend months. All i want is a live CD to rescue data from crashed windows installations.
That CD will be debian/slack/gentoo/red had/whatever based, i couldn't care less. All i want is for it to work.
Is this not a distro? Of course, i can say it is a custom live cd based on ubuntu based on debian, withh a few apps installed (or stripped) for instance, but the point is that it really doesn't matter. The point is that the CD is a product in itself with intrinsic value.
If i lived in a country with a language that is not supported by most linuxes, i could make a ubuntu/fedora/opensuse/whatever custom CD where i would integrate the language spoken in my country (and perhaps a different wallpaper), and make it available to my fellow countrymen. Is it not a distro?
If i lived in that country and i needed a linux distro, would it not be useful for Distrowatch to include that distro so that i could find it and get it?
146 • RE 140 (by KimTjik at 2010-02-03 21:57:41 GMT from Sweden)
I didn't respond is an attempt to follow up Tom's comment. I only responded to some part of your comment. That's all.
Read your # 137 comment once more, please. Your wording actually suggest you're asking for requirements that makes a system secure, not as you now suggest, how to use such a secure system.
I see you figure it out yourself, and I'm not here to debate. Good luck!
147 • Re 134, 137, 140 (by Tom at 2010-02-03 22:44:10 GMT from Germany)
RE 134
"I am intrigued by your mention of, 'the focus is on deployment scenarios requiring a hardened, extremely secure system'.
Can you cite examples please? I ask purely in the spirit of gaining knowledge."
My point is not to define what makes up such a system and what doesn't.
Imagine, I'm not even an OpenBSD user! ;-)
Im just trying to understand what might have made people at OpenBSD reluctant towards GNOBSD, why "there will be blood". And I've made perfectly clear what my own position is: of course Stephan should continue his work if he wants to, even more because there seem to be people willing to help now.
148 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 23:05:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #146
Alas, no, that is not what I asked.
I'm more inclined to believe all this talk of needing secure systems, courtesy of OpenBSD, is just that, talk.
I'm inclined also to believe that some of the OpenBSD adherents are so narrow minded that when a person writes some auto installer...so that the process is made easier...a shudder "echoes" throughout the hive/collective...because that might mean, shock, horror..."anybody" could "join"...without the trial of techno self flagellation or undergoing the correct assimilation process.
Deary me, talk about arrested development.
149 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-03 23:09:08 GMT from United Kingdom)
Aggghhhhh!
150 • Seems familiar (by Jesse at 2010-02-03 23:27:39 GMT from Canada)
A lot of people are jumping all over the OpenBSD community (or at least certain members) but this is the same sort of reaction large parts of the Linux community has to new, user-friendly distros. For example, look at all the negative comments here recently in regards to Mint. Or, going back a little, all the ill-will toward Ubuntu. When I first got into Linux, I remember people bashing Mandrake because it was "Just Red Hat with useless [configuration] wizards."
It's unfortunate, but people (myself included) tend to react badly to new things with which they're not familiar.
151 • GNOBSD (by stolennomenclature on 2010-02-04 00:38:42 GMT from Australia)
Stefan should not let the opinions of a few people deter him from what he is trying to do. Not everyone will like every idea, there will always be those who do and those who do not - theres nothing wrong with that. It is quite ok for Stefan to like the idea of a live OpenBSD DVD, and quite ok for some on the mailing list to dislike the idea. What i think is not ok is for Stefan to allow the opinions of these people to change what he is doing. How many thousands of people are there, i wonder, who would love to have a live DVD of OpenBSD but who do not read the OpenBSD mailing lists. Stefan should continue to provide this new product for those people. The people on the mailing list that do not approve will simply ignore it - but thats ok. But it would be aa shame to deprive the many who would like the product simply because some do not.
152 • GNOBSD (by stuckinoregon on 2010-02-04 02:49:58 GMT from United States)
I couldn't care less about the other drama or the supposed slight by the OBSD folks, but the project seems interesting and I find it more than slightly humorous (alright and a touch ironic) that the old download page for the project shows that it's running on an ancient Ubuntu Apache deployment.
153 • The art of Arguing (by Woodstock69 on 2010-02-04 03:33:45 GMT from Papua New Guinea)
Some observations to begin with.
Is it just me or are the commentators on DWW becoming more and more hostile to each other? It's also apparent that some commentators are lacking in objectivity and logical argumentative skills which brings the whole mood down at DWW.
We should be able to discuss and dissect without the threat of name calling and repetitious ad hominem. If the latter appeals to you, please google and wiki "How to politely and effectively argue your point". "You're an ass-hat" doesn't qualify!
Try keeping your comments to the top 3 regions of the hierarchy of disagreement. The last 4 add nothing to your perceived arguments. Let the trolls feed themselves.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Now to the point of the commentary section. I'd have to agree with @101 and Ladislav. I do think there are a proliferation of distributions that are not bringing anything but the naming rights of the author to the table. The late 90's and early '00 were a boon for Linux innovation, my favourite distro was Knoppix at the time. From my experience there are many "nice" distributions, visually very appealing, but the guts are essentially all the same, just a different shirt and pants.
What I'd like to see is a fundamental re-writing of the underlying applications in such a way as to increase their overall performance, to "get rid of the bloat". One of the most appealing aspects of Linux in it's early days was "runs on any old hardware". Now days, it seems Linux is heading the way of MS Vista. Visually stunning, but getting very slow on anything but a P6000 running at 10 trillion gigahertz (that's sarcasm people). And no I don't want to spend money on a new rig, my 2003 P4 1.7GHz 768mb rig is fine thanks. Programmers need to program more efficiently instead of relying on inefficient IDE's and super computers.
Currently I'm running Vector 6, Mint 7 KDE (come on 8...), openSuSE 11.2 and SimplyMEPIS 8. Tried PCLinux 2009 but it refused to start on my desktop, HP Laptop worked fine. Whilst I wait impatiently for Mint 8 KDE, I use Mepis frequently because it supports KDE3 and with that I feel at home. The problem with most distro's is KDE4. It's boring, looks like MS Vista and is lacking any useful default themes in my opinion. I've tried to find something as appealing as anything in the KDE3 themes but I must be too "unsofistikated" to find them or install them.
AS stated before, I'd like to see the optimisation of the underlying applications and OS now, instead of more eye-candy. I love KDE3.5.10. It's fast, fully featured and mature. I really dislike KDE4 because the majority of the functionality from KDE3 is missing. For example Konqueror and Dolphin. What's Dolphin? Why kill Konqueror for the sake of a half baked Dolphin?? And yes, as I've said many times, KDE4 will eventually become better than KDE3, but it's a long time coming and I want my piece of cake NOW damn it!
By the way, I do like distro's that include all the codecs, add ons and auto drive detection for me as I don't have time to hunt and configure and download. I just want my OS to work with minimal fuss. The example of this is Debian to Ubuntu to Mint. Nothing wrong with Debian, just not pre-configured enough. SimplyMepis is another shining example of something that is very inclusive. I am also "studying" LFS, but that's in my "spare" time. Not something I like to do get my work done.
DVD or CD? Give me a DVD any day. I use the internet connection at work to download and that can be done over several nights (albeit over a week or two due to it's slowness!) as I'm not connected at home.
So it's obvious that GNU/Linux is all things to all people all the time. Just don't be an ass-hat when letting us know your take on things. Happy dissertations! My whinge is over for now....
154 • RE: 153 (by Landor at 2010-02-04 03:42:06 GMT from Canada)
I'm currently messing with Debian Squeeze and KDE 3.5. I pulled in the 3.5X PPA from Ubuntu 9.10 and all seems pretty standard. I did an XFCE install then pulled in the repos for KDE 3.5.
It seems pretty good thus far. I also installed a libre kernel too, my own build from sources, 2.6.32.6.
There's always options for us 3.5 diehards. Thanks goes to Pearson for this option though, doing the PPA.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
155 • The worm turns, at near-infinite RPM (by Jeff Dickey on 2010-02-04 09:44:04 GMT from Singapore)
Two days ago, I blogged about this after reading the DWW story (http://archlever.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-thought-oss-was-supposed-to-break.html). Earlier this afternoon (Thursday 4th), I got an interestingly predictable "go away, don't bother us" comment (publicly visible). I replied back, as a comment to my own blog, since there was of course no way to respond directly to an anonymous poster.
I've included my response comment below; please of course feel free to read the OP and anonymous comment.
----
Well, I think that the OpenBSD camp was unique in their interpretation. Given that it is their lists and so on, that's their call; nobody is disagreeing with that, as far as it goes.
But I (and I gather other people) do have serious issues with the way this makes the OpenBSD camp look and function with respect to outsiders/newcomers. The fact that they seem singularly uninterested in this, to the point where "go away, don't bother us" messages like the earlier comment are too often posted anonymously, just pours petrol on a fire that was already burning quite nicely, thank you. What I was saying in the original post — and inviting others to do — is to "just leave you alone." You've announced your firm intention to be completely irrelevant to anybody outside your boys'-cult clique, and the rest of the world does in fact have better things to do than massage your egos.
I just got off the phone with one of my recent clients who's been running OpenBSD on 5 servers (without technical issues). He'd been told by his internal "tech guy" about the flame war that's been going on, and the CEO has now directed that all current OpenBSD installations be moved to "any other technically similar, suitable system, immediately." Nobody in the real world has time to play in your sandbox, and OpenBSD, as a movement, will soon be deader than BSD/OS.
Good riddance.
156 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-04 10:42:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #153
Thanks for the tips on arguing, Woodstock69. LOL.
The only problem with the sentiments expressed, is that they were written when the authors were in a non argumentative frame of mind.
The first thing that happens when an argument kicks off, in real life, is that the blood is up, tempers stretched etc, etc. and reason takes a back seat. We all know this, and rational instructions on how to argue are almost oxymoronic...
The steps listed in the article are all very well in their way, but half the "fun" is going for the man...never mind the ball, it's human nature, and we have all witnessed soccer players, say, turning this sort of behaviour into an art form, on and off the pitch.
At this very moment in UK, T Blair, ex PM, is being grilled on the subject of war with Iraq. Reading between the lines, the primary object is to get to the bottom of a possibly pointless and/or illegal war, but really the "target" is Blair.
IE there's no rationality involved, he has been in a lot of folks' sights for a long time and to see him squirm, as he will, is the real aim. Even better if a case can be laid against him and he ends up having to be very careful, or open...minded, were he to drop the soap...
Now, in this forum what we have seen very recently is the art of obfuscation...practiced by those who cannot answer a direct question...and oiling away from a challenge is their only strategy.
All this is moot tho', ref #155. It would appear that OpenBSD have shot themselves in the mouth, simply by opening it at the wrong time. Jeff D relates his experience...and, given the size of the planet...this story is unlikely to be unique.
Still, it is a prime example of Darwinism at work, and a lesson to us all...adapt or die. So when we read of "the too many distros" blather try to understand this is evolution at it's finest.
(Note too how I have included "distro" and "OpenBSD" in the copy to remain on topic...)
157 • GNOBSD (by zygmunt on 2010-02-04 12:31:20 GMT from United Kingdom)
Thanks to DWW and the news of GN0BSD and the now available torrent I am typing this on GNOBSD through the live DVD. In order to try "OpenBSD" with GNOME I would have needed to make an empty hard disk primary partition or slice on my 14 partition SATA disk. Not sure whether extended partitions are allowed at all on such a disk which would mean wiping all but the 4 primaries. Thus the GNOBSD live DVD has saved much work in trying an "OpenBSD" flavour. Thanks for a valiant effort.
158 • Being realistic. (by Antony at 2010-02-04 15:29:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Regarding proliferation of 'distros':
I am sympathetic towards Ladislav. Regardless of what technically constitutes a 'distro' (and yes, this is DISTROwatch Weekly), you have to be realistic when a certain definition allows for something which realistically offers very little (other than to the creator) for adoption.
I certainly think a lot of offerings are considered as irrelevant within the context of what most would reasonably consider a distro to fundamentally be.
A 'distribution' implies distinct from another - technically, a minute difference is distinct, but 'realistically', there needs/should be 'enough' of a difference.
A distribution after all, implies an overall scale of uniqueness - setting it apart - rather than minor differences, doesn't it.....realistically?.
I don't think there are "too many distros" - I think there are too many offerings classified as 'distros'.
A recent high example of a unique entity is Pardus.
I know it would not be easy but I think perhaps it may be time for some rethinking of criteria/classification.
I don't think anyone suggests that people should be dissuaded from dabbling with their own interpretations, but in thinking about what 'reasonably' might constitute a distro - we need to be realistic. Same with anything else in life. As forest pointed out earlier (156) when conventions were offered (153) for 'proper' argument....... theory is nice, but realistically things can be different - as long as people don't 'tear the arse out of it' then it's not too big a deal.
OpenBSD:
forest at 148 hits the nail on the head I think:
"..because that might mean, shock, horror..."anybody" could "join"..."
To allow "anybody" to join would diminish the elite status of the clan, in turn diminishing the perceived status of the individual - unwelcome.
The OpenDSD people might have certain parameters for themselves/OpenBSD which is one thing but if they had used a little bit of tact when expressing their position to S.Rinkes, then probably this affair would have assumed a different colour?
159 • GNOBSD (by Stephen Brayshaw at 2010-02-04 17:43:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
GNOBSD can be downloaded from the link in the article but only as a torrent
160 • Blogs (by Landor at 2010-02-04 17:49:51 GMT from Canada)
WoW, I think I need to write a blog, then comment and say that a guy that runs 200 servers off of GNOBSD moved over to OpenBSD because they actually understand what it means to run a business and kick ass.
It would have the same legitimacy as 155's post, and probably just as true.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
161 • can we get back to focusing on Linux ? (by Henning Melgaard on 2010-02-04 18:07:49 GMT from Denmark)
I get so bored reading all theese comments about " You said, that I said that......".
Come on people, theese comments are fun and exiting to read, when the topic is what it should be :Linux
162 • @161 and of course BSD, unix, solaris etc. (by Henning Melgaard on 2010-02-04 19:17:28 GMT from Denmark)
didn´t mean to shut anyone out :-). I would just like to read and learn about the software.....
163 • GNOBSD TRACKER UP (by GNOBSDWANTR at 2010-02-04 20:47:33 GMT from United States)
Straight from the enemy of OpenBSD:
http://www.sri-dev.de/wordpress/
USB IMG= http://www.sri-dev.de/gnobsd_46_i386.img.torrent
DVD ISO= http://www.sri-dev.de/gnobsd_46_i386.iso.torrent
Keep up the good work Stefan
164 • Depends on what is important (by KimTjik at 2010-02-04 20:58:48 GMT from Sweden)
Antony wrote: "To allow "anybody" to join would diminish the elite status of the clan, in turn diminishing the perceived status of the individual - unwelcome.
The OpenDSD people might have certain parameters for themselves/OpenBSD which is one thing but if they had used a little bit of tact when expressing their position to S.Rinkes, then probably this affair would have assumed a different colour?"
I'm no part of and haven't interacted with the OpenBSD community, and can't therefore judge whether they are elitist or not. What I however question, and already did in a previous post, is the emphasis some put on democracy, as if software development with a BSD, GPL, Apache or some other license demands it to adhere to some sort of ideology. I doubt the practicality in such reasoning.
Personally I value a good respectful attitude within a community, and would hesitate to engage if it wasn't. I don't question that part, but even if a community would act rude, treat folks like dirt, would it make any difference for us? If that's the environment those developers/maintainers hypothetically prefer to work in and get results, I leave it to them, take use of their software, which I can because of the license, and forget about it.
Freedom is a huge responsibility. It doesn't mean we've all the right to demand others to accept us, or do it our way. The nice twist with free software is that we don't have to agree on a whole package of surrounding clauses or rules; we might simply decide to use and even rewrite software, give a donation if we so wish and forget the rest. If a community decides to be grumpy-elitist-geeks it's their free choice. It won't make me run to join them, but that's my choice.
The downside of a too closed community, if it can't attract folks with the same goals and set of mind, is it might lose momentum. That however doesn't look as an immediate risk for the OpenBSD community.
...
I got a bit argumentative, but at least with no emotions involved what so ever. There are so many hostile comments here attacking OpenBSD, so my comment doesn't hurt anyway.
165 • Some bits (by Barnabyh at 2010-02-04 21:15:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re. 153
"And yes, as I've said many times, KDE4 will eventually become better than KDE3, but it's a long time coming and I want my piece of cake NOW damn it!"
It will probably be KDE5 by then :). Seriously, the Kde team is already nearing 4.4 now and still more than half of the functions and apps that the wider 3.5 eco-system provided are a long way off. When will KDE4 actually become as usable and functional as that?
(Please, I'm fully aware everybody here will define functionality differently and a lot of people claim it does the whole job and more for them, but even if it does I don't want to buy a quad core to run it. And I'm only speaking for myself.)
Xfce 4.6.1 has become a great alternative, love it.
Re. 155
That seems a bit harsh, after all it doesn't work any worse now than before. I wonder what the Tech guy told him? And obviously nothing critical on them if they can just take these 5 servers down like that.
I'll be taking a break now from the comments section for a while, it's becoming far too time consuming, a bad habit almost.
Peace and out.
166 • The coming of age of KDE4 (by Observer at 2010-02-04 21:26:12 GMT from Australia)
The Greatest KDE Distro Ever: An Early Look at openSUSE 11.3
This week the first milestone release of openSUSE was made available. Together with the KDE 4.4 release candidate and excellent integration of GTK applications such as Firefox, openSUSE simply provides the greatest KDE experience available to date. Here’s why.
Christopher Smart
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
[....]
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7693
167 • Re #158...Too many distros. (by sly at 2010-02-04 21:43:59 GMT from United States)
Why don't we convene a commission to sort our what qualifies as an officially recognized distro and end the debate. First the commission needs to create criteria for being recognized as a distro. Some criteria that may need to be put in place would include: 1) How many points of difference does a distro need to be distinct. 2) Does it have to have paid developers. 3) Does it have to be built from scratch, including the kernel? 4)Should an upstart be required to have a minimun number of users to be considered a 'distro', 5) Is there a longevity requirement.
I'm being sarcastic,...but it seems that a lot of Linux users have forgotten that the most popular distro was built on Debian. But now that we have a king, let's scrutinize all of those upstarts, because one of them might dethrone the king one day.
It sounds a bit hypocritical to slam disproving BSD users and then voice your disproval of upstarts who would dare build upon an established distro.
168 • linux n00b needs distro (by Geoff Tummel on 2010-02-04 23:55:40 GMT from United States)
Hi - I am at a small school where I won a laptop. I want a linux on it as it has xp now.
I have studied linux a little bit and have only two requirements for the distro choice:
1. hopefully newbie friendly
2. must be "rolling release"
I see Arch is but it appears too complicated for me at this time, maybe later.
What others please? Recomendations appreciated! :)
169 • KDE4 & Then Some (by Woodstock69 on 2010-02-05 00:03:48 GMT from Papua New Guinea)
Now don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to KDE5...er....4.4 and I'll be the first to admit that if a distro uses it, I'll download it as a live CD just for a peek. I won't actually use that distro exclusively, just load it for a look.
There are some things, like the ALT+F2 command bar that I love. The ability to do calculations and such straight in the bar is a brilliant move. That's saving me heaps of time. But the plasma desktop thing is a mystery rivalling creation. Can anyone indicate to me the benefit of it over the traditional desktop and folder system? Why would I want to rotate an Icon and why are the borders of the icons so big? I don't want ANY borders. Borders make the icons seem chunky.
What should have happened (and I realise KDE was basically rewritten) KDE 3 should have been the base, replicate/port KDE3 completely to Qt 4 then improve it, rewriting the apps but without cutting the functionality of the those apps. It's like everything went back to alpha. Konquerer, Amarok, K3B, etc. The devs say "we'll add that functionality later", well it was already there, why was it removed? The porting of apps from 3.5 to 4 has been extremely poorly executed in my opinion. It may be a philosophy of open source programming to "release early release often" but it's not going to break the ceiling of market penetration because the masses don't want half baked software. We're not all hobbyists. 80% of our time must be used to generate income and that means the tools must be working for us not the otherway around.
Now of the distro's with KDE4 I have liked, openSuSE, Mint 7, Pardus, Mandriva, etc, I really disliked the bland MS Vista/ Mac OS clone air/oxygen theme. It's so depressing and there's no alternative in the defaults. The file copy/move notifier is terribly chunky and consumes too much real estate. The one from 4.1 was better in my opinion. Less is definitely better in this case.
Any distro with LXDE is also a winner in my opinion. I've never been a fan of Gnome or Xfce but LXDE has something compelling about it. The problem is that it's not as feature rich as KDE. Unfortunately many of the apps I use require KDE in some form or another due to dependencies (thats something the devs could do better also) so I end up having LXDE and KDE wondering why I'm bothering with LXDE. Keep in mind that the context I use is a SOHO setting. It's conceivable and a valid reason to use LXDE on small terminals or as a base for other works in the same way TinyCore or DSL are/were created of course. There are niches.
And I don't mind the fact that people want to make a distro for themselves, that's why we love Linux/GNU. Making a distro and distributing it is like writing software, a long and happy tradition, but as with writing software, the not so worthwhile ones eventually die. It's just time consuming to have to wade through them all.
Come on Mint 8 KDE ........The anticipation is almost nerve-wracking.....
Time to go, I think Mr Twain is knocking at the door.....
170 • spining the hate (by Marin on 2010-02-05 00:12:14 GMT from Serbia)
all gnobsd mourners, at ease. gnobsd aint for you live or no live. you're usually lost soon, with gnome or without.
171 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-05 01:01:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #168
Well, Geoff T, If you want all singing all dancing with minimum mucking about, and your hardware is up for it...you might have a gand at Uxx or a version of Mint.
However, you might also try out any particular distro simply by running it live. This means, and for the sake of...education...you do not have to install the distro to the hard drive.
If this running live is a new concept(?) to yourself, there are myriad references to be studied, but in essence means your machine can boot and run a distro off the optical disc...the OS does NOT have to be installed to your hard drive.
That way you can "distrohop" to your heart's content and find what works for you functionality wise, before you commit to junking XP.
172 • Easy rolling release (by Jesse on 2010-02-05 01:11:57 GMT from Canada)
I don't mean to put you off your quest, but rolling release and user-friendly usually don't go hand-in-hand because rolling releases are, by nature, constantly changing. Most people associate user-friendly with more stable environments.
That being said, most distributions have a "development" rolling release branch. Debian has it's "unstable" repository, Fedora has "rawhide", Slackware has its "current" branch, etc. So really, many distros can become a rolling release if you wish.
My recommendation, if you're interested, would be to grab a really easy distro, like Mint, Ubuntu or Mandriva. Once you get comfortable with it, adjust your package manager to use their rolling/development repository. That'll give you the best of both worlds.
173 • @168 (by Antony at 2010-02-05 01:39:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi Geoff,
I used to use PCLinuxOS for a long while.
Not used it for some time now though. Anyway I believe it matches your criteria.
It is rolling and very beginner-friendly.
Good luck.
174 • @168 (by Antony at 2010-02-05 01:47:33 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes, if you are not so strict on the rolling bit, then the best recommendation has to be as per 171 & 172. That is: Mandriva, Mint or Ubuntu.
175 • @167 (by Antony at 2010-02-05 01:59:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
I think there is a bit of a difference between the S.Rinkes project and something amounting to little more than a re-theme job.
There is nothing wrong in building upon the established, I'm not saying that at all - it's not my intention anyway.
Is it right that I or any other Tom, Dick or Harry could (effectively) make the slightest of changes to something and have it realistically considered as a distro? It's a bit like modern-art - The 'art' may (or not, even) have some meaning to it's creator, but realistically it's meaning/appeal to others is basically zilch.
It's only sensible, to draw the line somewhere, sometimes.
Doesn't bother me if the 'king' is dethroned, at least it would mean the 'upstart' challenger would logically be different 'enough' (worthy) to make an impact.
I have no problem with any 'upstart' as long as they genuinely build/improve/enhance upon existing templates. I am always on the lookout for different approaches.
I appreciate the motivation behind things like Mandrake, Simply Mepis, Chakra, Sabayon, sidux, to name but a few. I am for innovation - that is what is so appealing to me in Pardus.
In the end, I don't think we all here are a million miles apart in our views, it just sometimes appears that way I think. For a start, my awkwardness with words and inability to adequately express myself is frequently problematic.
Anyway, take care all. I'm off to bed.
176 • @169 (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-05 03:21:56 GMT from United States)
Have you checked out Knoppix 6.2 DVD?
It defaults to LXDE with all the gnome and KDE4 apps in the menu.
Low ram footprint and quick.
177 • @168 (Geoff T) (by jake at 2010-02-05 04:05:08 GMT from United States)
Try Knoppix as a live distro, or Mint if you're certain you want to install Linux.
A bit of advice: Ignore rolling distros until you get your feet wet past your ankles. And maybe past your knees, too.
The above is if you are just interested in using the system. If you want to actually learn how Linux works, try Slackware's -stable ... but be aware that there is a learning curve. Once you are comfy with -stable, and you are sure you want a rolling release, try Slack-current. Slackware's user community is fairly tolerant of newbies, as long as said newbie is willing to do a little detective work on his/her own, and then ask intelligent questions after they get stuck. See:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Disclaimer: I've been using Slackware for over 15 years, and IMO it acts closer to the actual UNIX[tm] that I learned on around 35 years ago than any other system. Learn Mint, and you'll learn how to use the Mint version of the Ubuntu version of Debian Linux. Learn Slackware, and you'll learn how to use virtually any version of Linux. Just don't forget that there WILL be a learning curve ... although Slack's curses-based installer isn't really as difficult as some of the louder GUI fans would have you believe.
178 • Distribution vs version: A starting point to narrow it down? (by jake at 2010-02-05 04:32:54 GMT from United States)
Take a look at Ladislav's very own "distro search" page:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php
Between "Country of origin" and "Desktop environment", we find the category "Based on". I propose that the Linux versions "Based on" these Distributions are just that, versions that are based on actual Distributions, and not distros in their own right.
Although I have my doubts about a couple of them, Ubuntu being prominent ... Ubuntu is still based on Debian, and not a distro of it's own. IMO, of course.
And obviously, there are a few proper Distributions that don't appear in the "based on" list, for example dyne:bolic, LFS, etc.
179 • mint 8 (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-05 06:04:25 GMT from United States)
Here is a UK blog review on mint 8
http://reddevil62-techhead.blogspot.com/2010/02/linux-mint-8-polished-professional-and.html
I'm neither for nor against.
Just supplying some input for the curious.
180 • Mint 8 (by Sean at 2010-02-05 10:54:28 GMT from United States)
That distro took over on most of our computers here. A few Windows 7 holdouts and one Vector Linux.
We are worried that next year they'll stop supporting it and a new fresh install will be required, which will be a big pain for so many machines with so much data to back-up (shades of Windows 98 to 2000 to XP, etc).
181 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-05 12:53:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #180
Sean, alarm bells started ringing, lol, when you mentioned' "which will be a big pain for so many machines with so much data to back-up"...implying a future event.
At the risk of teaching you to suck eggs, err...are you not backing up your "irreplaceable" data ALL THE TIME anyway on external hard drives, or better yet, NAS devices with RJ45 connectors (Ethernet type)?
If this IS new tech for you (which I can't believe, lol), then basically all your data is sent to an external hard drive, or preferably drives, situated in different locations.
Once the routing switch is turned on and all the permissions for file sharing have been set up, then any machine can read any file from any other machine and any NAS.
So, if a machine falls over it is only a question of plumbing in another lump and normal service is resumed.
The NAS devices are as cheap as...(in UK they were £50 for 320GB, no doubt you would be able to get a discount on several...don't forget the cables and routing switch) and worth many times their initial cost if you do need to do a rescue mission.
I have been doing the above for a few years now (albeit just using usb connections), so a new distro install is just that, the data lives on hard drives and accessed in the normal way.
Very recently I tried the networking exercise with some of the machines where I live...worked a treat.
And for what it's worth was able to play video files on one machine from the hard drive in another, so you get a media network at the same time, how's that for added value? LOL
182 • data at our facility (by Sean at 2010-02-05 14:24:47 GMT from United States)
The term "data" here is a dynamic one (this is a school), and one that is tempered by the concept of confidentiality (it is a parochial/medical facility, partially funded by a church entity).
It was our dream, back at the beginning, to completely eschew Microsoft products over time in favor of linux. We've found that to be quite a challenge in our particular situation.
We cannot simply duplicate medical/student/church records and store them off-site or even off-machine; they travel with the principle owners in part, and get archived in part; our needs in that area are met by having solid operating systems with excellent security that linux offers.
But we just can't keep re-installing. :( That messes up everything in so many ways that it causes our funding partners to repeat to us that "Windows is the way to go," etc. "Windows 7 is vastly improved," etc.
183 • Backup and redelpoy (by Jesse at 2010-02-05 14:30:57 GMT from Canada)
Sean, I agree with forest that all those computers should already be backed up up on a regular basis. You never know when a computer might die, regardless of OS. As for re-deploying, if you have to do a large migration in the future, check out Clonezilla. It'll let you image one machine and clone its install to all the others on your network. It'll save a lot of time.
184 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-05 15:09:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #182
Crikey, those are some conditions that are imposed on you...almost a chicken and egg scenario.
How about then, just musing so to speak...you install an "external hard drive" inside a machine, connected by usb internally, but powered externally, so if the machine died on you or the hard drive gave up the ghost, the drives would be isolated so to speak.
This would adhere to the dictat you mentioned about the data not being able to leave the machine.
I now recall your mentioning about the funding bods dropping heaven sized hints about using MS. I suppose you could "just happen" across a monumental Windows7 catastrophe and then come out with something along the lines of that sort of thing not happening in GNULinux 'cos of...fill in the blanks yourself...
185 • re: data at our facility (by fernbap at 2010-02-05 15:21:14 GMT from Portugal)
All your troubles become a non-issue if, at install, you create a separate partition for /home.
That way, you can install further versions of the OS always keeping the same /home partition and recreating the same users.
186 • Political correctness and witch hunt (by Adjudant Tifrice at 2010-02-05 16:14:07 GMT from France)
In the CLI/GUI "debate', there are people who like sudokus and cross words, and would be very upset if sudokus were prefilled...
And, for the ease of learning of BSD if it has a GUI, a book is more comfortable than any GUI...
187 • Kongoni Linux (by kongoni at 2010-02-05 16:34:03 GMT from United States)
http://kongoni.co.za/
Kongoni Linux.
188 • /home partition for more than one distro (by bitfire on 2010-02-05 16:58:36 GMT from Germany)
I like the idea too to have one /home for several distros on one HD.
BUT - sometimes each distro puts genuine "stuff" into /home
I am afraid this may cause problems some time down the line?
I am not sure?
189 • single /home multiple distros (by zygmunt on 2010-02-05 18:45:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
I would like to second what #188 warns. I don't really see how a single home directory can ever be recommended, although I have seen it often prescribed across distros (can't give a reference at the moment however)
CLI ls -la /home/[user] will show all the hidden directories for user=[user]
This, as you may determine from the results is bound to be "dangerous" across distros especially if each have variously different applications with different versions. I have always desisted from a single /home to be safe from such trouble.
190 • Sharing a home (by Jesse at 2010-02-05 19:03:02 GMT from Canada)
Sharing home directories across distros usually isn't an issue. It _can_ cause minor problems if you have very different versions of the same applications. The distros themselves usually don't put anything in the home folders, it's the application the user runs. So if you have distro A running Firefox 2.0 and distro B running Firefox 3.6, I could see that causing a problem. But, in my experience, it's safe to use the same version of the same apps across distros. Actually, sharing a home directory can be very helpful because of the problems it works around. You don't have to set your preferences, bookmarks and desktop layout for each distro you run. Just set them up once and the settings follow you to other distros.
191 • Great news regarding Ubuntu (by wilbuntu at 2010-02-05 19:04:00 GMT from Portugal)
Matt Asay becomes Canonical's COO
"After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer."
http://news.cnet.com/openroad/
192 • @168 (by KP at 2010-02-05 20:01:15 GMT from United States)
How about Chakra (an Arch distrolet), fast, easy install, rolling release, KDE, and can be test driven as a live cd. Not exactly a beginner distro but if you're willing to learn Arch has great documentation.
193 • #190 shared home (by zygmunt on 2010-02-05 20:22:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Would you contemplate shared /home in a development environment with 32 and 64 bit applications, with distros having different kernels and versions?
I can't so easily see the wood for the trees!
194 • @193: Home sweet home (by Jesse at 2010-02-05 21:38:50 GMT from Canada)
I suppose that would depend on the development environment and which applications were being used. I don't think your kernel version will affect your home directory's contents, so that shouldn't be an issue. In my mind, the bigger question is: Why are you running such different operating systems / distributions on the same box? If it's for code development and testing, surely a virtual environment would be easier to maintain and switch between?
195 • OpenBSD (by RimZi on 2010-02-05 21:48:42 GMT from Lithuania)
Theo De Raadt and his bunch of venom-spitting sectants. This is blood on their hands over TWO FABULOUS PROJECTS already. This is not kind of behaviour I would expect even from the likes of Microsoft. This is not open community. This is closed sect. A bunch of masturbating monkeys, like some fellow said.
Please, anyone who is reading this, do not use OpenBSD. You only give these sectant monkeys power to abuse. Just don't. There are better alternatives.
196 • #194 Far from home (by zygmunt on 2010-02-05 23:56:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
Thanks for the interesting comments but we are wandering far from home. In a word the answer is Historical. Have used vmware and kvm/qemu with various distros. There are performance penalties.
197 • Home sweet home (by fernbap at 2010-02-06 00:04:34 GMT from Portugal)
The subject started by someone that was afraid of having too much trouble when upgrading a distro, say, upgrading from Mint 7 to 8.
Things got a little out of hand, the issue is not having multiple distros in your hard drive (what for?) but installing another OS using the same home folder, which is perfectly acceptable. I upgraded from Mint 7 to Ubuntu 9.10 to Mint 8 in one workstation without a single issue.
198 • Preserve /home (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-06 01:36:17 GMT from United States)
A simple and safe way to upgrade or change distros is to copy your /home directory to a flash drive, or another partition.
After the new install, copy /home back.
Make sure the user ID is the same, usually 1000, but sometimes different.
If different a chown -R (as root) can fix that.
199 • Confused about the hostility to openBSD (by Mike at 2010-02-06 05:38:20 GMT from United States)
Reading this weeks comments regarding the article on GNOBSD I am really confused. I have found way more venom, hostility, and anger expressed in the comments to the openBSD Devs and Theo de Raadt then what GNOBSD dev experienced on the mailing list. I don't know why anyone frankly cares what a couple openBSD guys said on their mailing list? Just because people didn't agree with his project, choices, or approach doesn't mean they have the power to kill it and doesn't mean that their community is hostile. From what I know of the openBSD community is they seem to be a no nonsense kind of crowd that loves the project they work on. They are passionate about the goals and direction of their project and want to keep a certain feeling or integrity within it. I really don't get why so many people would feel outrage of an opposing viewpoint. The openBSD community at large aren't trying to attract the Ubuntu/Mint/PCLinuxOS/Fedora crowd. They don't want GUI installers, or GUI administration tools, they want to attract contributors and users to the project who appreciate it for what it is, rather then what people think it should be. I read through the thread again on the mailing list and really think most of the comments were tame compared to what I have seen here or on other major linux distro forums. I hope openBSD continues to be a successful project and I hope GNOBSD reaches whatever audience it is trying to reach, but I know which I will support.
200 • #198 /home jam (by zygmunt on 2010-02-06 09:59:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
If you NEED to chown then /home would not work on the previous distro. (Of course if it has been deleted that does not matter) But the rhetoric was about SHARED /home on MULTIPLE distros. E.G. Debian, Fedora, Slackware.
201 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-06 10:40:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #199
It's not a case of OpenBSD trying to attract the "other distros crowd" at all. Stephan R wrote an installer for OpenBSD. Consequently the installer could/would make Open BSD more accessible to folk who simply wanted to have a "look round" at an xxBSD.
The error made by OpenBSD was in thinking they could control who had access. Comments passed within the OpenBSD community, so we are informed, resulted in Stephan R pulling his version.
To many folk this notion was unacceptable and at odds with the "open" principal...hence the "venom, hostility, and anger".
Personally, I have an aversion to all this "secret" societal stuff, or notions that the numbers of distros should be restricted, on some ridiculous premise or other.
We read of differences of opinion in how distros are defined...again using the most ridiculous criteria.
What seems to escape the nay sayers is that someone, somewhere sat down and worked hard to make something they wanted, without bothering or upsetting anybody else.
For all we know this "proto" dev was required to do this for a college or uni project.
Now, if "we" are attempting to "grow" GNULinux the way NOT to do it is to nip it in the bud, is it.
202 • Re: 201 (by Antony at 2010-02-06 13:39:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
forest said: "What seems to escape the nay sayers is that someone, somewhere sat down and worked hard to make something they wanted, without bothering or upsetting anybody else."
That is fine, and should not be discouraged. But the potential 'value' of what "they wanted" may in certain cases be of _extremely_ limited value for adoption by others. That is all.
It is not about trying to inhibit creativity, not a bit.
What about every single applicant of say, X-factor, should they all be promoted or regarded as singers?
I agree with your comments regarding OpenBSD and the way S. Rinke's ideas were handled and you will probably think it is hypocritical of me (as did another here). But it is obvious that what was being worked on was motivated by thought for others and not just a vehicle to say 'look at me'.
It's all about motivation/wider appeal of a project. All I am saying is that not every last single offering warrants, or should be promoted as a distro.
My particular issues have no bearing/impact or relevance regarding suppression of 'proto-devs' whatsoever. (I realize the 'proto' thing was not purely for the benefit of my attention alone, btw).
I certainly am not calling for torches to be lit, and .....nobody expects ............the spanish inquisition! (this space reserved for evil smiley)
I'll try to leave it there, as I don't seem to be able to properly present my position. I'll just end by saying that, as long as things don't get silly (either way), it's not a big problem.
203 • Pardus 2009.1 (by david on 2010-02-06 14:33:02 GMT from United States)
For those of you who have not tried the recent iteration of Pardus I highly suggest you do so. It's appears polished and stable in my experience. I would recommend it next to Suse, Ubuntu and Mandriva as a user friendly os.
Congrats and props to Turkey!!
204 • Re: 201 (by Mike at 2010-02-06 17:54:35 GMT from United States)
I don't understand why you think the responses S. Rinke received were somehow an attempt to "control access". The project is openBSD, it is by nature open, the source code is freely available as well as the install iso's, how does that control access? Whether you prefer a graphical installer or a text installer the access is the same, the comfort-level may not be for some users, but that goes without saying. Even the best graphical installers are intimidating for some users, does that mean access to the project/distro is restricted, no just uncomfortable for that user.
S. Rinke's decision to temporary pull his iso's is his own not the result of some comments. Rinke was free to do what he wants which is "open" principal people felt so motivated castigate the openBSD community for preventing.
Your comment "Personally, I have an aversion to all this "secret" societal stuff, or notions that the numbers of distros should be restricted, on some ridiculous premise or other." to me shows your hypocrisy. If a distro or project does not conform to your standard "open" or your standard of "ease of use" then you feel justified to attack it even though the number of distros that mirror your thinking and belief far outnumber the ones you view as "secret" and "restricted".
I find this line telling "What seems to escape the nay sayers is that someone, somewhere sat down and worked hard to make something they wanted, without bothering or upsetting anybody else." I feel this concept has eluded you in regards to the openBSD community, they did sit down somewhere and worked hard to make something they wanted, so why is it you and others feel the need to attack it?
205 • Stefan Rinkes is a genius! (by NippoNoob at 2010-02-06 20:46:11 GMT from Brazil)
*
> The moral of the story? If you ever get an idea to develop a user-friendly feature for OpenBSD, don't even think of announcing it on any of the OpenBSD mailing lists. Unless you have a skin of an elephant...
*
The moral of the story? Never announce a revolutionary BSD variant to a bunch of masturbating monkeys.
My suggestion to Stefan Rinkes: Take a look at SalixOS, VectorLinux and Wolvix. They use a sane (not too bloated) desktop environment and are nearly what GNOBSD should be. BTW, please change that name to Cool-BSD and adopt a cool desktop environment like LXDE.
If half a dozen primates keep complaining about your fine work, then FINGER those idiots and go ahead. Evolution can't be stopped.
206 • Re: 205 (by Mike at 2010-02-06 21:17:37 GMT from United States)
What do you find evolutionary or revolutionary about a live DVD featuring GNOME?
207 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-06 22:53:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #20
It may be that you are not familiar with LB's Feature Story in this week's DWW? In para four LB writes:
Upon closer investigation, the reasons became clear - Rinkes has taken the ISO images offline partly because of bandwidth problems, but mainly due to the extreme displeasure expressed by the hardcore OpenBSD user community at his audacity to create a user-friendly and easy-to-use variant of OpenBSD!
You say that is not the reason, but you fail to elaborate, why? You could have tried refutation, as mentioned in #153, if you knew something we didn't.
It you were to think about it...it's only because the OpenBSD community went on about it that we all know, now, there is an easier way to get into OpenBSD.
In fact Stephan R could not have imagined, let alone hoped for, the kind of publicity and huge support he now has for his project.
I would hazard a guess that OpenBSD now understands only too well the expression, "an own goal".
As for the rest of your post...if you profess not to understand some points...then you don't understand.
208 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-06 22:56:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #207
Reference was to #204.
209 • @post 185 by fernbap (by Sean at 2010-02-07 00:58:34 GMT from United States)
My gosh, one of the old linux concepts to the rescue!
Having that escape us is embarrassing.. we will discuss this at our "MMM" (Monday Meeting of the Minds).
Thanks for that, to say the least.. and it looks like Mint may be able to stay despite not being true "rolling release."
The pieces are coming together. Thanks to distrowatch.com!
210 • RE 207 (by KimTjik at 2010-02-07 01:11:33 GMT from Sweden)
"...it's only because the OpenBSD community went on about it that we all know, now, there is an easier way to get into OpenBSD."
I pass on the main subject of your argument, and just single out what's quoted. This is probably the biggest misunderstanding of them all. It's one thing to make a live-media based on some scripts, scripts that would work without the provided remastering of OpenBSD, but that has at this moment close to nothing to do with it making it "easier... to get into OpenBSD". Yes, you get in, but that's all. You still would have to learn the bits and bolts of OpenBSD to really use it. In that way such a live-media is pretty useless for most users. Sure, if the whole interest is to be able to take a look at a Gnome desktop and walking around a OpenBSD system, yes then maybe it does the job, but it won't make it easier for someone to get a fully working environment.
Freedom enables anyone to make one more BSD live-media, I see no valid argument against that, but its usefulness for the crowd making most noise is scarce. Some here say Rinkes is a genius, and sure he's probably a bright guy. Still those scripts are nothing by itself, and it would only become ingenious when the project have more than remastering to it. No need to exaggerate.
211 • RE: 203 and OpenBSD (by Matt at 2010-02-07 02:02:56 GMT from Canada)
ok well to the person who wrote post 203, no one should run pardus, they have an extremely lazy team behind their project who take forever to release updates. if firefox gets an update, ubuntu and distros like that get it really quickly, whereas pardus takes absolutely forever. they always have out of date software. don't run it, run something where the developers actually care about their project.
as for the discussion bashing openbsd, yes, for what they did they should be bashed and shame on those who defend their actions. but it's not only openbsd that should be bashed for what they're doing to opensource. maybe a year ago or something mandriva was getting bashed for how they treated an employee of theirs that was very popular with the users on the forums. for this reason i refuse to run anything based on mandriva, i don't feel they deserve my support or the ability to add me to a list of people that use their garbage. it's not only mandriva and openbsd though, any distro that charges for use should be boycotted as well. mepis is in there, vector, mandriva, etc. they should be boycotted because that is not opensource, you cannot charge for linux. you can charge for support like canonical does, and you can get support by a store on your site, adds on your site etc. but don't you dare charge for the distro.
oh and lastly, if openbsd has the kind of community that is only interested in an elite class of developers, they don't want gui's, they don't want to appeal to the ubuntu/mint/whatever user friendly distro crowd... then why give them the time of day on a site like this, you should take them off here, because if they're not interested in appealing to a broad crowd of people, in appealing to more than just their insane group of nerds, then they don't deserve a space on here. nerds are fine, even crazy nerds are fine, but you have to not be elitist and you only deserve to be involved in linux/bsd if you're going to help others out.
just my 2 cents worth
212 • Re:211 (by Mike at 2010-02-07 03:15:23 GMT from United States)
um, wouldn't the very definition of appealing to a broad crowd of people imply people who like GUIs and people who don't?
213 • RE: 211 + 212 (by Landor at 2010-02-07 06:24:36 GMT from Canada)
To take your comment one step further, Mike:
Would the very definition of appealing to a broad crowd imply those that want a hardened OS/Server?
I always smile when all anyone here in the comments section can think about is the desktop. I think Ladislav made an error naming the site. It should have been desktopwatch.com, or enduserwatch.com.
The majority here only think about desktops and battling the evil MS and how Linux is better than Vista or W7. Then, the odd time, you'll hear one of them throw out, but Linux has X-amount of the market share, almost as if they just realised that.
I'd still like to know how many people are going to be using GNOBSD as their daily system. I think it would be good to know since it's garnered SO much support. Where is all the support too, a comments section?
My opinion Ladislav, you got as overheated/sensitive as Stefan did, with little to no reason. If you would have stopped and thought clearly about it I'd bet this article would have never happened.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
214 • @213 (by jake at 2010-02-07 06:54:20 GMT from United States)
"I'd still like to know how many people are going to be using GNOBSD as their daily system."
I haven't had a chance to fiddle around with it yet, but if GNOBSD's installation scripts are fairly hardware agnostic (Knoppix-ish), and allow me to modify things to ignore Gnome, I will certainly use it fairly regularly. I've been trying to set aside the time to marry Knoppix's basic hardware detection & OpenBSD for my own purposes for several years now ...
As a desktop? No. But then, I almost never use the BSDs as a base for what most folks would call "a modern desktop". But as a daily accessed server or servers? Absolutely.
215 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-07 09:07:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #210
You OpenBSD people still don't get any of this do you?
Nobody is suggesting for a moment OpenBSD is going to be deluged with newbies cluttering up your forums asking for advice.
It's simply the having a look around, comparing this and that. Most folk do not have the luxury of wasting time really getting into anything else other than their distro of choice.
Hobbyists are another issue entirely, to them it is another "OS" to explore...if that access is made easier then less gifted hobbyists might have a look around.
Stephan R made that process a bit easier, for those that could be arsed to look around anyway.
If the OpenBSD community weren't so precious in their outlook then this would not have blown up the way it has.
Now to #213.
Landor, do you think this is the forum for you? Now you have decided LB made a mistake in naming the site, and writing up articles you decide would be better unwritten...what next?
If the majority of folk make the "error" of thinking this site is about desktops...then you might consider you made the "error" of imagining you are the person to correct said "error".
Other times, according to you, someone got this or that wrong...and luckily for us all you were on hand, correcting our mistakes.
You have made mention of having your own site, why not spend time polishing up your project and you can say whatever you like...without us having to read it.
Then, you can sprinkle the patronising, "It makes me smile..." around as much as you want. You'll be happy on your site...and we'll be happy you are on your site.
216 • RE 215 (by KimTjik at 2010-02-07 09:42:13 GMT from Sweden)
"You OpenBSD people still don't get any of this do you?"
If you calm down you should have noticed that I've stated several times that I haven't even used OpenBSD and have no plans to do so. How can I then become one of the "OpenBSD people"? I use FreeBSD for some specific purposes, but not as a desktop system. Yes, I know something about OpenBSD from documentation because of pure technical interest. However I'm looking at this spectacle from the side line with nothing invested in the matter, be it emotions or effort.
The only reason I bother to engage is because many comments here are more radical than what they criticise. Exaggerations and unconfirmed assumptions fly all over the comment section. The OpenBSD mailing list has already faded in comparison to the "nice" attitudes presented here. This isn't the last time a controversy will arise. Clement Lefebvre came close to a far more worse confrontation when he suddenly mixed politics with the use of MintLinux, and I could mention other examples.
I think we as users get blind or romanticize the process of software development. The mailing list of Linux kernel developers is... "slightly" tougher than what we're dealing with here.
/With eager anticipation of the desktop version of Clonezilla
217 • GNOBSD (by Notorik on 2010-02-07 09:59:11 GMT from United States)
Thanks for a great article on GNOBSD. I think it was timely, provocative (it kept the forum busy all week), and very helpful in that we all benefit from being able to download and try GNOBSD.
I just want to mention again, how great Salix is. The attention to detail is impressive. I really like the auto-update Gslapt feature. It surprised me. It actually works better on one of my older computers than many of the distros that are advertised as being great for old hardware. I have been looking for a Slackware based distro like this for a long time. Zenwalk never gave me this functionality and it was buggy. Vector never worked right (and they want to sell their version). Wolvix was clearly the leader but it seems stuck right now. Absolute seems to be improving incrementally with each minor release. Slax has contributed much in the way of scripts but nobody really uses it. Of the rest, only Austrumi is worth mentioning and it has a limited usability due to it's size. The verdict is still out on Slitaz. TinyCore is just crap but at least it is trying to be something and there are some interesting ideas going on there. He would be better off re-making DSL.
218 • Free vs free (by Jesse at 2010-02-07 13:53:56 GMT from Canada)
"any distro that charges for use should be boycotted as well. mepis is in there, vector, mandriva, etc. they should be boycotted because that is not opensource, you cannot charge for linux. you can charge for support like canonical does, and you can get support by a store on your site, adds on your site etc. but don't you dare charge for the distro."
I see this a lot and I can never understand the reasoning behind it. Why is it you "cannot" charge for a Linux distro? Or any other open source product for that matter? The GPL license certainly allows people to charge money for their work. All of the distros you list in your post also offer free-of-charge versions, so it's not like you're blocked from accessing the software. Open source (the way the GPL lays it out) means you can get the source code for products you have received. It doesn't mean people aren't allowed to make money. Isn't it sort of silly to insist that everyone else conforms to your ideal of open source?
219 • Paying for linux (by Sean at 2010-02-07 14:05:25 GMT from United States)
It's hard not to notice that the distro with the most page hits here at this site is free, and one of the best (so good that many distros are derived from it).
But donations aside, I believe in commercial distros because it is yet another choice in the linux world, linux being about choices of all sorts.
I ran Xandros on one of my better (old now) PCs for over a year (ended up moving on, but still). :)
220 • Overblown (by Redondo at 2010-02-07 15:41:06 GMT from United States)
"However I'm looking at this spectacle from the side line with nothing invested in the matter, be it emotions or effort."
Spectacle! Yes, that's what its become.
A 3 Ring Circus at best.
Much ado about nothing.
It appears some folks just want to complain, and find reason to do so at any given moment.
221 • RE 215 (by Matt at 2010-02-07 16:11:00 GMT from Canada)
I fully agree with forest in the 215th post... i couldn't have said it better.
as for paid distros, i think we should boycott them because the people from vector linux for example don't pay for linux, don't pay for the base that they build vector on, they don't pay for any of that stuff, and yet they feel they can charge for the distro!? no. that's wrong. you get someting for free, with the assumption that you will take it, improve it, and then offer it again for free. shame on vector and those other development teams that just want to make money. that's not the point of linux.
there are some linux's out there that make it difficult to get drivers or codecs or those kinds of things if you don't buy the full version. for people who run openbsd or whatever, the people who know the commandline inside and out, they wouldn't have a problem with that because they can do it easily themselves. but to the majority of desktop users, it's too difficult.
and as for why i say that linux should appeal to desktop users is because those who do servers will either use linux already, or mac or windows or whatever else, and they're not likely to change that, at least not as likely as a desktop user is to change for the majority of desktop users, they can accomplish the exact same thing in linux, osx and windows. so appeal to them by your products and you will win users. don't waste your time just appealing to the server market.
but back to forest's comments... in designing a linux distro, you should appeal to people who just interested in distro hopping. and landor, yup, find your own forum where you can post your stuff and not annoy the rest of us!
keep your stick on the ice :p haha
matt
222 • Developing linux past the "parent" distro (by Sean at 2010-02-07 16:49:30 GMT from United States)
Matt, do you feel there is no work involved in fashioning Vectorlinux (your example of many I'm refering to)?
Nothing worth paying for? Fortunately, you are disagreed with and the many of the developers of these products are either donated to or paid outright by users.
Do what you wish with your stick, as long as you don't try to touch me with it. ;)
223 • RE: 222 (by Matt at 2010-02-07 17:46:33 GMT from Canada)
well the keep your stick on the ice, i just figured i would give an, albeit pathetic, attempt at mocking landor by using his classic closing remark.
i realize there is a lot of work involved in producing vector linux, but only the same amount as is involved in producing something like linux mint. if mint can stay alive by donations, ads and the like, then why can't vector? they both pay the same amount of money out for the base of their systems (nothing) and so they both don't deserve to charge for their products. don't think i'm picking on vector or mint here, they are just examples.
and it's worth paying for by donation yes, i have donated on multiple occasions to the mint project and love what clem is doing for linux, and i think a lot of people would donate to the vector project or any of those other projects, i just don't think it's right to make people pay outright for the distro's.
anyway, this is just my opinion and i realize a lot of people disagree, and a lot of people agree with me, but that's what this is for isn't it? expressing your opinion on linux (or bsd) distro's. other than landor and his infuriating attitude on here, i certainly am not making personal attacks on anyone or really even any project specifically, just a trend i see in some of the attitudes of developers of some projects.
matt
224 • RE: 223 (by Landor at 2010-02-07 18:44:46 GMT from Canada)
First off, I'm sorry that I infuriate you so much that you make what you called a pathetic attempt to mock me. I was always told though that no person can make you feel or do anything (within reason of course, for the latter), the choice is always yours.
Also to note, It's a very rare occasion when I actually attack the person, mock them, etc. At least I have the ability to discuss my views of the subject without using base attacks meant to somehow injure the person in the question. Says a lot in my opinion of the differences, but that's just my views of it.
Anyway, the real reason I chose to reply to you. :)
My understanding via a comment that Ladislav made here is that Clem charges for support for Mint. He doesn't just get money from ads or donations. He charges for support. Now, yes that is different than charging for the distribution but on the same note, how is making money to provide support any different than charging money to produce a distribution?
My theory is that the two are not different at all. Both allow the distribution a means to support their continued development. They might be for different reasons but they both provide the same outcome.
Maybe you weren't aware that Clem charges for support?
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
225 • RE: 214 (by Landor at 2010-02-07 19:06:32 GMT from Canada)
I should have stated as I did earlier, those that are screaming for a blood price. :)
The idea of using Klaus' detections scripts is a great idea, that's a fine personal project to be working on. Is it the difficulty or the time available that has taken so long?
I personally haven't even looked at GNOBSD. I have no real interest at all in using OpenBSD on my desktop. No sense in downloading something I'll just boot up, take a peek at (for no reason) and discard.
On the server side of things I'd prefer to go with the actual base than deal with what someone may have decided to include or not, as the case may be. That's subjective of course. :)
Anyway, I hope Stefan does well in whatever he does, also though, learns to accept criticism a little bit better. Maybe if he does he can come back here and teach the same to some of the comment section's participants.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
226 • Vector correction (by RollMeAway at 2010-02-07 19:07:06 GMT from United States)
Vector does not 'force' you to pay for the distribution.
You can download and use it free of charge.
Like many other distros, the online store is just another way to
keep the distro alive, the server bills paid and the forums hosted.
Someone has to pay the bills. Nobody owes you completely free access to their work.
Stop and think about what it takes to create and maintain a distribution and
a good web site to support it. It is not free.
I do believe in making donations to the distros I wish to see survive.
Currently I contribute money to about six.
I strongly suggest everyone contribute to their favorite distro.
Donate $5 or $50 or whatever you feel comfortable with.
If nobody does, that distro will likely disappear.
227 • Reply to 206 (Mike) (by NippoNoob at 2010-02-07 19:20:56 GMT from Brazil)
*
> What do you find evolutionary or revolutionary about a live DVD featuring GNOME?
*
There's nothing really special in a DVD featuring GNOME, if we are considering Linux. But in this case we are talking about OpenBSD...
You must agree that such a hardcore OS featuring a graphical installer, a graphical environment, and anything else to make it resemble a typical Linux distro OOTB is much more than revolutionary. It's an authentic MIRACLE.
I'd like to see all the BSDs playing in the same league as Linux. In the server field they have much to offer in terms of stability and security. In the desktop field they keep being a failure due to the community of Neanderthals who use them (not including our good friend Landor, of course, who was a FreeBSD user :^).
I myself wanna try FreeBSD when (and only when) it come in the form of an installable LiveCD/DVD featuring either a desktop environment like XFCE/LXDE or just a window manager like Openbox/Fluxbox.
228 • charge for distro (by Matt at 2010-02-07 20:50:09 GMT from Canada)
i am aware that at least ubuntu charges for support and it wouldnt surprise me if clem did the same. however, ubuntu and mint are free to download, not a crippled version, the same version that everyone gets, paid or not, donation or not, you all use the same version. for the average home user, you can get free access to the free forums for these distro's, or for all distro's in general on something like a linux.com forum or whatever. however, if you choose to get paid for support for say an enterprise using ubuntu or mint, then that is your choice and i can easily accept them charging for that kind of support. but for those who don't wish to pay anything, they can have the EXACT same experience except wait an hour or two to get a response on the forums rather than instant support if you pay.
but to charge money for the distribution itself is another thing altogether, that's against the principles of linux IMO. linux and open source are supposed to be free. i personally see a huge difference between charging money for support for the minority of people that want it, and getting much of your money from donations (which i do), and from ads etc. if someone wants an entirely free computing experience, they can download mint for free and use the web forums for support. for people with very little spare cash around, this is the best way of doing it, and then they can donate maybe $5 or whatever they feel they can spare. that's what all distro's should do. all distro's should have a way that you can run a non crippled version of the distro, for totally free.
as for vector offering a free version, there's a standard (free) and deluxe (paid) version. the word deluxe implies, and i have read reviews that confirm this, that there is more included in the deluxe edition, that you get a "crippled" version for free. don't pounce on me using the word crippled, it was simply the best one i could find to describe what i was talking about.
229 • Re:227 (by Mike at 2010-02-07 20:55:46 GMT from United States)
BSDanywhere is a live CD with a graphical desktop environment based on openBSD that has been around since 2008, granted it doesn't have an installer but you can test drive openBSD. PC-BSD is competing with Linux on the desktop side since 2006, again where is this miracle?
I don't see why you think there will be this large influx of contributors to the BSD community with a one-click install openBSD system? What people will really experience is the GNOME desktop, not openBSD. All the administration functions and utilities are still going to be command line based, how will these people really experience openBSD without touching a command line?
Why the incessant need to insult a community of respected contributors like the openBSD community? Are they really Neanderthals for appreciating an operating system with a different perspective than yours?
If you really want to see the BSD's have more success on the desktop side why don't you contribute to the testing and development of PC-BSD, or contact the NetBSD Desktop devs? Maybe with your help they can create the installable live CD with the desktop of your choice.
230 • Re:228 (by Mike at 2010-02-07 21:02:34 GMT from United States)
Matt you really need to read the GPL and BSD licenses a little closer. You are not entitled to a free of cost distribution. You are entitled to a distribution that respects your freedoms, not your pocketbook.
231 • Paid distros (by Jesse at 2010-02-07 22:21:31 GMT from Canada)
Matt, I agree with Mike. There's really no reason why open source developers shouldn't charge for their work. The licenses certainly allow for it. Developers put a lot of time and effort into making their products and if they want to charge for them, I think they should have that right.... that freedom, if you will. No one is forcing you to put down money for a paid version of any distro.
Your reasoning that since they get the pieces for free there for the final product should also be free seems to bit short-sighted in my opinion. After all, water is typically free, but bottled water comes at a price. Trees grow for free, but try getting lumber from someone without paying for it. Some distros are completely free and that's great, but I don't think you should try to diminish the work of so many other developers by saying their efforts aren't worth anything. Linux isn't just about getting free stuff and people donating their time. If it was, then why are more of the kernel developers getting paid for their work?
232 • Free or not (cost wise distros) (by anticapitalista on 2010-02-07 22:40:14 GMT from Greece)
Apart from agreeing with Jesse and Mike above over what the GPL says, I'd like to point out that Matt is wrong in his implication about MEPIS.
MEPIS is free as in free beer. The fact that the dev asks people who like it to pay some money doesn't stop MEPIS being free (beer).
The free download of MEPIS is exactly the same as the one you pay for (if you wish) from the MEPIS shop. There is no 'delux' version for those that pay or a crippled version for free.
233 • Donations (by Notorik on 2010-02-07 23:01:31 GMT from United States)
I never said people shouldn't donate. This is a good thing to do and I fully support it. Without characterizing anyone in particular, I must say that I read a lot of capitalist poppycock in this forum. A lot of people are out of work right now and need an operating system to look for work. Linux is giving people a way to connect to the world at large, a way out of poverty, and access to information they need to help themselves live better lives. Linux is a gift, given freely and as such it should be freely taken with gratitude.
On another topic, I'm not trying to knock Mint but it won't even boot up on ANY of my computers. I don't see any real advantage to it over Ubuntu which is so easy already that the Debian people complain about it. If you want proprietary codecs you just point and click on the help button. By the way, there is no ethical issue using proprietary codecs other than the fact that they should not be allowed to be proprietary. Download 'em, install 'em and enjoy.
Capitalists please remember that you do not own the world and your world view is based on greed and is not shared by the majority of the rest of the world.
234 • Kongoni (by Notorik at 2010-02-07 23:18:45 GMT from United States)
Maybe everyone knows this already but the great Kongoni is dead in it's infancy. Very sad to see a distro like this die.
http://kongoni.co.za/news/the-end
235 • Re:233 (by Mike at 2010-02-07 23:24:33 GMT from United States)
Notorik, please remember that nothing guarantees you a free of cost operating system. People or companies that make their distributions available free of charge are to be respected and applauded, but not expected. Linux and BSD are a gift to your freedoms, that most are available gratis is just icing on the cake.
Hopefully the economy around FOSS companies/projects keeps growing and expanding so that more people can find their way out of poverty. The more people that can make a living because of FOSS the better. If that is capitalistic poppycock then so be it.
By the way I love how people can speak for the "rest of the world", I don't seem to posses that talent.
236 • Re: 229 (Mike) (by NippoNoob at 2010-02-07 23:31:18 GMT from Brazil)
*
> BSDanywhere is a live CD with a graphical desktop environment based on openBSD that has been around since 2008,
I know that.
> granted it doesn't have an installer but you can test drive openBSD.
I also know that.
> PC-BSD is competing with Linux on the desktop side since 2006, again where is this miracle?
Read my post again. I said that OpenBSD (NOT FreeBSD) featuring a friendly graphical environment OOTB is a miracle. Please understand: OpenBSD, NOT FreeBSD.
> I don't see why you think there will be this large influx of contributors to the BSD community with a one-click install openBSD system?
I didn't say it. Why do you have such a big difficulty of understanding? I think all my next posts will be in Portuguese. Brazilians always understand what I say.
> What people will really experience is the GNOME desktop, not openBSD.
Wrong. When you are using a graphical interface you are actually running the operating system itself, although you will only be able to do administrative tasks by means of a terminal. BTW, you confirmed this when you said: "granted it doesn't have an installer but you can test drive openBSD." (Translation: If I can test drive OpenBSD using a LiveCD without an installer, it's obvious that I use OpenBSD itself when I use the graphical environment, not only the CLI.)
> All the administration functions and utilities are still going to be command line based, how will these people really experience openBSD without touching a command line?
It was answered in the previous paragraph. But remember that some Linux distros almost free us from using the CLI, even for doing administrative tasks.
> Why the incessant need to insult a community of respected contributors like the openBSD community? Are they really Neanderthals for appreciating an operating system with a different perspective than yours?
Yes, I was a bit disrespectful. But the own community you are defending now was extremely hostile to Stefan Rinkes and traditionally insults Linux users. IMO, any BSD user who behaves like this is nothing else than a TROGLODITE (i.e., a Neanderthal, a cave man). They can appreciate vanilla OpenBSD, but they don't have the right to combat a wonderful project like GNOBSD just because they associate it to Linux (which they consider an "inferior" OS).
> If you really want to see the BSD's have more success on the desktop side why don't you contribute to the testing and development of PC-BSD, or contact the NetBSD Desktop devs? Maybe with your help they can create the installable live CD with the desktop of your choice
I have other priorities: testing Linux distros.
237 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-08 00:09:07 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref the OpenBSD debate.
It seems that the point about all this might have been lost in translation.
The main objection against OpenBSD, by the commentators at large...is simply because Stephan had the temerity to write an installer, which offended the sensibilities of the main movers and shakers in Open BSD, and consequently he was "obliged" to remove his work from public eyes.
In addition there was a question of bandwidth. (see LB's feature), which I take to convey he received no financial support.
This, in turn, offended the sensibilities of the folk who preferred the notion of free speech and decided this objection to Stephan R's efforts amounted to censorship. The more noise created by followers of OpenBSD merely fanned the flames of criticism against it.
Remember, all this work on the installer was produced by someone who genuinely believed he was doing OpenBSD a service by helping to make OpenBSD more accessible for those who were not so adept at the command line.
That it happened to be OpenBSD is neither here nor there...it was the very notion of censorship that annoyed folk.. and the implied bickering in their ranks...and you do not need me to remind you where that can lead.
I would refer anyone who is still interested to re-read #155, last section. JD remarks that some business CEO decided he could not risk what he perceived to be internecine warfare in a software "house" he relied on for his business IT support.
The sad thing is that from all accounts OpenBSD writes good code, and is well regarded in some circles. It is their attitude to SR's work which attracted criticism.
Seems that promoting censorship can hit you very hard...especially in the wallet.
238 • RE: 227 (by Landor at 2010-02-08 00:39:11 GMT from Canada)
If you want to run FreeBSD and say Xfce easily I "think" it "should" be possible by using a couple simple commands after installing PC-BSD. Don't quote me though as I don't use PC-BSD.
This is taken right from the FreeBSD Handbook:
5.7.4.2 Installing Xfce
A binary package for Xfce exists (at the time of writing). To install, simply type:
# pkg_add -r xfce4
Alternatively, to build from source, use the ports collection:
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4
# make install clean
Now, tell the X server to launch Xfce the next time X is started. Simply type this:
% echo "/usr/local/bin/startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc
The next time X is started, Xfce will be the desktop. As before, if a display manager like XDM is being used, create an .xsession, as described in the section on GNOME, but with the /usr/local/bin/startxfce4 command; or, configure the display manager to allow choosing a desktop at login time, as explained in the section on kdm.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x11-wm.html
I didn't check, but it's also possible the PC-BSD's own package system has Xfce available as a package. That's pure speculation though.
Seems like the easiest way (at least currently) to give FreeBSD a spin with the criteria for the WM/DE you laid out.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
239 • @225 (by jake at 2010-02-08 01:15:40 GMT from United States)
"The idea of using Klaus' detections scripts is a great idea, that's a fine personal project to be working on. Is it the difficulty or the time available that has taken so long?"
If this question was directed at me, it's time that I'm lacking. I need 36 hour days ... we're running close to a dozen businesses out of this place, and I don't have time for fun projects like this. If anyone wants to take the idea and run with it, I won't get upset ... in my mind it's a natural. I'm just surprised nobody has done it yet, OpenBSB inner-circle's opinion not withstanding.
240 • Re: 237 (by Mike at 2010-02-08 03:10:06 GMT from United States)
disagreement or criticism by openBSD users/devs of GNOBSD is not censorship. criticism comes hand in hand with free speech. Rinkes is free to do or say what he wants and no comments on a mailing list will change that.
as for post 155 I am not going to say that what he wrote isn't true but it surely doesn't sound like a business decision that would be made in the real world. No one is going to disrupt mission critical software/operations on the whim of a mailing list argument, but who knows.
241 • RE: 240 (by Landor at 2010-02-08 05:57:50 GMT from Canada)
Well, I personally disbelieved its validity and stated such, and I still do.
Funny thing, I've looked around for more on this article and where I have found it most people have a completely different attitude on the whole subject. They're very pro OpenBSD.
As I like to say, that says a lot, in my opinion. Yet the few here that dispute the affront are in the wrong.
Here's one comment I found that is a tad more in line with reality on the topic:
"I consider "How could you dare to hurt my feelings!" cried the leech to be a
more accurate summary of the actual events than the sensationalist and wrong headline of this distrowatch text. "
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
242 • No subject (by forest at 2010-02-08 09:56:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #237
Unfortunately for your argument some folk believe it is censorship.
The comments in other forums stated Stefan should remove his "work" because it was interfering with OpenBSD perceived policy. Others stated they saw no need for a GUI or automatic hardware detection...that would be criticism.
Stefan was obliged to remove the link. Ergo it was not just criticised, it was censored. I do appreciate there are semantics in some of this, but if LB deletes a post he has not only criticised said post ...he censored it too.
Ref #241
Landor, I despair.
Here's one comment I found that is a tad more in line with reality on the topic:
"I consider "How could you dare to hurt my feelings!" cried the leech to be a
more accurate summary of the actual events than the sensationalist and wrong headline of this distrowatch text. "
Number of Comments: 242
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