Succinct advice to a group of newbies on which Linux for what purpose

[Caryn]

When asked which free Linux is "best" ...

What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?

Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.

Stable ==> CentOS
Easy ==> Ubuntu
Complete ==> Fedora

[Jeffrey Needle]

I never looked at CentOS, so I downloaded the live CD of version 6 to see
what it looks like. Not bad looking, but the repositories, at least in
the live version, are incomplete and ancient, IMO. Chromium isn't even
there. And Evolution is still back in the 2.x versions. Could be that
Gnome3 isn't supported by CentOS.

I may take more time with the live CD to see what else is there.

[J.O. Aho]

There is no such simple answer, I wouldn't call Fedora in any way as
complete, more experimental and unstable.

The answer should really be a follow up question:

A: Son, what do you want to do with your GNU/Linux installation?

For a desktop distro makes a poor server and a server distro makes a bad
desktop, so depending on what you want to do, you pick a distro which is
made for that and which fits your way or doing things.

--

//Aho

[p-0''0-h the cat (ES)]

On 06 Jun 2013 14:57:38 GMT, Caryn <Ca...@example.com> wrote:

>When asked which free Linux is "best" ...
>
>What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?

function boring ($whichLinux, $boringQuestion){

install openSUSE;
RTFM;

}


>Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
>A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.
>
>Stable ==> CentOS
>Easy ==> Ubuntu
>Complete ==> Fedora

--
p-0.0-h the cat

Internet Terrorist, Mass sock puppeteer, Agent provocateur, Gutter rat,
Devil incarnate, Linux user#666, BaStarD hacker, Resident evil, Monkey Boy,
Certifiable criminal, Spineless cowardly scum, textbook Psychopath,
the SCOURGE, l33t p00h d3 tr0ll, p00h == lam3r, p00h == tr0ll, troll inf�me,
the OVERCAT [The BEARPAIR are dead, and we are its murderers], lowlife troll,
shyster [pending approval by STATE_TERROR], cripple, sociopath, kook

Honorary SHYSTER and FRAUD awarded for services to Haberdashery.
By Appointment to God Frank-Lin.

[Mike Easter]

Caryn wrote:
Subject: Succinct advice ...

Some questions don't 'answer well' succinctly.

> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...

That is one such question, for complex reasons, of course.

> What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?

Don't try to answer a complicated question 'simplistically'.

> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.

There are a number of things wrong with that premise which assumes
exclusivity to those 3 concepts, and the answers are rather/very
RedHat-centric.

> Stable ==> CentOS

CentOS, being based on RHEL, is a good example of a stable, conservative
distro. There are other very good non-redhat answers such as Debian.

> Easy ==> Ubuntu

'Easy' needs defining, which definition should include 'intuitive'; but
current versions of Ub are less intuitive than past versions,
comparatively. The evolution of the versions of the distros makes for
some of the complexity of the question and premise, to say nothing of
the number of different spins and flavors of the various versions of the
numerous distros.

> Complete ==> Fedora

That is more evidence of the 'redhattedness' of the selections made
above, but Fedora isn't nearly as 'complete' as would be other choices
because Fedora is based entirely upon open sourced ware, so it lacks the
'necessary' proprietary codecs and drivers that the majority of linux
users want and use, nor are they available in its repos.


--
Mike Easter

[Mark Warner]

http://www.mepis.org/

http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/

--
Mark Warner
MEPIS Linux
Registered Linux User #415318
...lose .inhibitions when replying

[Mike Easter]

Mike Easter wrote:

> Fedora isn't nearly as 'complete' as would be other choices
> because Fedora is based entirely upon open sourced ware, so it lacks the
> 'necessary' proprietary codecs and drivers that the majority of linux
> users want and use, nor are they available in its repos.

Of course, like many other default deficiencies some distro may have in
some category, there are strategies to relieve and mitigate the problem.

One such solution to Fedora's non-free problem is RPMfusion repos, which
are even available to configure during the install.


--
Mike Easter

[Stef]

Caryn wrote:

> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...

The "best" answer is there's not one. But depending on the asker's
requirements, there might be an optimum one or two or three.

It's like asking what's the best automobile? Or pizza. Depends. And
is very subjective.

> What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?
>
> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.
>
> Stable ==> CentOS

Debian Stable, and more up-to-date than CentOS.

> Easy ==> Ubuntu

PCLinuxOS or Mint

> Complete ==> Fedora

Not one. And certainly not Fedora.


Stef

[Aragorn]

On Thursday 06 June 2013 16:57, Caryn conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...
>
> What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?

First of all, I would like people to stop thinking of GNU/Linux as
freeware. It is not. It's Free Software.

Freeware is proprietary software which is available for use at no
charge. Free Software is software which may or may not be made
available for use commercially, but of which the license is free, so
that you may use, copy, study, modify and redistribute the code at will,
with possibly certain conditions to the redistribution of modified code.

> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.
>
> Stable ==> CentOS

Yes, but CentOS is essentially the freely downloadable version of RedHat
Enterprise Linux, and is thus plagued by RedHat's attitude of "We're the
upstream, so everyone else will simply have to follow us".

A good and proven alternative is Debian, but see farther below for more
details on that.

> Easy ==> Ubuntu

Ubuntu contains spyware and adware, with Canonical's blessing. Its
Unity interface is also an acquired taste, and not everyone finds it all
that user-friendly or easy.

This is why Linux Mint has become so successful. It's based on Ubuntu,
but it's much better and it doesn't use Unity. It stays true to the
classic desktop paradigm.

A long time ago, RedHat inspired the creation of a clone called Mandrake
Linux. It was essentially RedHat but with the KDE packages bolted on.
Mandrake then soon advanced more and started following its own path,
while still being based on the RedHat base layout.

MandrakeSoft then merged with Conectiva and the union became known as
Mandriva. Like Mandrake, Mandriva was a high quality and very versatile
distribution, but it too has since then spawned some offshoots. First
there was PCLinuxOS, which comes as an installable live CD or live DVD,
and which is very newbie-oriented but doesn't stand in the way of the
more seasoned user either. PCLinuxOS uses the RedHat Packager Format
(.rpm) packages, but with Debian's apt-get and Synaptic package
managers, so the installation and removal of software is easy.

The other offshoot is more recent - i.e. about two years ago - and is
called Mageia. This is a community-driven distribution - i.e. there is
no corporate overlord, unlike with Mandriva - and it has just recently
its third major release.

Unlike Ubuntu and Mint, Mageia does not "segregate" the desktop
environments across different distribution names or titles. The default
desktop environment is KDE, but GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, E17 and the various
standalone window managers (FluxBox, WindowMaker, et al) are all also
available.

Another high-quality distribution is openSUSE. It too is RedHat-based
for the base layout, albeit that it started off differently. It's
already quite old and quite mature, but of course, also very much up-to-
date. It uses its own package manager and system administration tools,
but is otherwise comparable in usability to Mandriva/Mageia. Lots of
software in the repositories too, and good third-party software support
due to the fact that many independent software developers often supply
packages specifically tailored for SuSE/openSUSE. (Independent
developers typically only support the more popular distributions with
optimized packages [*], so that means RedHat/CentOS, SuSE/OpenSUSE,
Debian and Ubuntu.)

[*] Quite often, software from independent developers also comes as
generic self-extracting archives which work on all distributions
and which may involve manual copying/moving of the extracted files
to their destination in the file hierarchy.

> Complete ==> Fedora

Fedora is bleeding edge and unreliable for serious work. It's the test
bed for the next RHEL/CentOS release. There are much more usable and
stable distributions out there with just as much software available from
its repositories, and in that regard, Debian is probably unbeatable,
plus that it's free from RedHat's "upstream dictatorship".

Debian is also the granddaddy to Knoppix, Ubuntu, Bodhi, Mint and a
bunch of others. It comes in three variants: Stable, Testing and
Unstable. Ubuntu is based upon Unstable (alias "Sid"). The previous
Testing branch (alias "Wheezy") has now just recently been declared
Stable ("Squeeze") [*] and bears the release number Debian 7. Of all
the distributions out there, Debian probably has the biggest
repositories, and it's definitely not a user-unfriendly distribution,
albeit that it's not quite as brain-dead as Ubuntu, and it doesn't spy
on you.

[*] With less than 100 bugs left for the entire Stable distribution.
That's outright impressive!

--
= Aragorn =
GNU/Linux user #223157 - http://www.linuxcounter.net

[Shadow]

On Thu, 6 Jun 2013 16:25:53 +0000 (UTC), Stef <n...@this.address.com>
wrote:

>> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
>> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.
>>
>> Stable ==> CentOS
>
>Debian Stable, and more up-to-date than CentOS.

I agree here. Debian stable is just that. And Ubuntu needs a
lot of hacking to get the spyware off it. More than what the average
newbie is willing or capable of doing.

>
>> Easy ==> Ubuntu
>
>PCLinuxOS or Mint

PCLinuxOS is the easiest install I've even done. Bit like the
old Mandrake. No idea why I uninstalled it. Maybe too easy ?

>> Complete

If Caryn meant "at install", that's a big disadvantage. I
hates dists that install a load of stuff I'll never use.
So, it depends what you need.
Is Windows "complete " ?
[]'s



--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

[Bell Bottoms [Blue Crushed Velvet with a Flowery Shirt]]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:46:22 -0300, Shadow <S...@dow.br> wrote:

>Is Windows "complete " ?

It is the richest computing environment available and friendly to Bears
although Google are catching up fast and may overtake. Watch out for my
OS wars posts.

--
Bears are best

[Caryn]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:40:45 +0200, Aragorn wrote:
> A good and proven alternative is Debian

OK. Since I'm trying to get somewhere with respect to simplifying for
a set of teens, and, given a pragmatic install of a single Linux,
how does this generic (over)simplification look now?

The short-list candidates:
Stable ===> Debian (apt-get) or CentOS (yum) or openSUSE
Easy ===> PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint or Ubuntu
Complete ===> CentOS, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu

The summary for the kids:
Stable --> Debian
Easy --> Ubuntu
Complete --> Debian

[Soupe du Jour]

Your question can't really be answered with a list of distros.

A good answer is: Choose the distro that someone you know uses so that
you can get help with it.

You could also choose any of the "easy-to-use" distros and not be wrong,
They can always switch to something else later if they want to.

I can make a recommendation, but it's going to be what's good for me, and
you or these teens may have very different needs.

[Shadow]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:56:00 +0100, "Bell Bottoms [Blue Crushed Velvet
with a Flowery Shirt]" <OldAndKnacker...@BatonRouge.invalid>
wrote:

Where do I subscribe ?

[Aragorn]

On Thursday 06 June 2013 18:56, Caryn conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:40:45 +0200, Aragorn wrote:
>

>> [...] A good and proven alternative is Debian [...]

>
> OK. Since I'm trying to get somewhere with respect to simplifying for
> a set of teens, and, given a pragmatic install of a single Linux,
> how does this generic (over)simplification look now?
>
> The short-list candidates:
> Stable ===> Debian (apt-get) or CentOS (yum) or openSUSE
> Easy ===> PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint or Ubuntu
> Complete ===> CentOS, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu
>
> The summary for the kids:

> Stable --> Debian

Yes.

> Easy --> Ubuntu

No. PCLinuxOS or Mint.

> Complete --> Debian

Yes.

With that in mind, I would like to draw your attention that Debian fills
two of the three requirements, as it is both "stable" and "complete".
It may not be for the brain-dead, but it is - in my opinion -
sufficiently user-friendly for people who have their wits about them and
who aren't afraid of learning something new.

Ergo, if you have to pick one distribution by the criteria you yourself
have set forth, then I'd recommend that it be Debian.

[usenetopian]

On 6/6/2013 12:40 PM, Aragorn wrote:
> On Thursday 06 June 2013 16:57, Caryn conveyed the following to
> alt.os.linux...
>
>> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...

>><snip>

What about the user that is a noob to linux, wants something stable
(several distros I tried kept crashing when trying to play a song) and
also has a BEAUTIFUL, artistic graphical interface (did I word that
right? and cool sound effects too (I sound like I'm 5 years old I know...)

side note: Where is Dan C's wisdom on all of this? Did someone reformat
his brain?

[Soupe du Jour]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:40:00 -0400, usenetopian wrote:

> On 6/6/2013 12:40 PM, Aragorn wrote:
>> On Thursday 06 June 2013 16:57, Caryn conveyed the following to
>> alt.os.linux...
>>
>>> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...
>>><snip>
>
> What about the user that is a noob to linux, wants something stable
> (several distros I tried kept crashing when trying to play a song) and
> also has a BEAUTIFUL, artistic graphical interface (did I word that
> right? and cool sound effects too (I sound like I'm 5 years old I
> know...)
>

I don't know about the sound effects, since I never turn them on, but I'm
partial to Linux Mint with the Mate desktop environment for a stable
distro that looks good. Our tastes may well differ though... so you'll
still have to decide for yourself.

> side note: Where is Dan C's wisdom on all of this? Did someone reformat
> his brain?

I put him in my killfile and he ceased to exist.

[John Hasler]

usenetopian writes:
> ...has a BEAUTIFUL, artistic graphical interface...

Get a Mac. You can, of course, configure Debian to have as beautiful
and artistic a GUI as you want, but that would require that you actually
*do* something.
--
John Hasler
jha...@newsguy.com
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA

[Zak Hipp]

Just thread info' and a nod to Aragorn's post.

GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline 12.10:
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.10/gldt1210.png

.png is 3.6MB. There's also .svg and .tar.bz2 downloads.

From:
http://futurist.se/gldt/


Zak Hipp

[David W. Hodgins]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:57:38 -0400, Caryn <Ca...@example.com> wrote:

> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...
>
> What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?
>
> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.

Find a linux geek you trust, who is willing to help you learn,
and use whichever distro they recommend.

Regards, Dave Hodgins (Mageia qa team, deputy leader).

--
Change nomail.afraid.org to ody.ca to reply by email.
(nomail.afraid.org has been set up specifically for
use in usenet. Feel free to use it yourself.)

[Caryn]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:26:09 +0200, Aragorn wrote:

> Ergo, if you have to pick one distribution by the criteria you yourself
> have set forth, then I'd recommend that it be Debian.

This does make sense, given most people said it was both stable &
complete (complete meaning has what most people need).

[Whiskers]

That is the wrong question, grasshopper. When you have learned the correct
questions to ask, then you will be ready to learn the answers.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

[ray carter]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:57:38 +0000, Caryn wrote:

My advice: go to distrowatch.com and pick something near the top of the
'hit list' - you won't go far wrong.

My particular favourite is Debian 'testing'

[Martijn Lievaart]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:47:31 +0000, ray carter wrote:

> My particular favourite is Debian 'testing'

I hope it's better now, but I had that break to often on me in the past.
It's called "testing" for a reason....

M4

[Shadow]

Splitting hairs, but "testing" has been "tested" in "sid"
before it gets a place in "testing". I would prefer term
"next-stable". But I suppose anything is possible for a dist that
calls a release "Wheezy".
:)

[Aragorn]

On Thursday 06 June 2013 23:29, Shadow conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> On Thu, 6 Jun 2013 23:12:34 +0200, Martijn Lievaart
> <m...@rtij.nl.invlalid> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:47:31 +0000, ray carter wrote:
>>
>>> My particular favourite is Debian 'testing'
>>
>>I hope it's better now, but I had that break to often on me in the
>>past. It's called "testing" for a reason....
>
> Splitting hairs, but "testing" has been "tested" in "sid"
> before it gets a place in "testing". I would prefer term
> "next-stable". But I suppose anything is possible for a dist that
> calls a release "Wheezy".
> :)

The reason why it's called "Testing" is that it still has more than 100
open bugs, which is the number of bugs still left when the previous
Wheezy ("Testing") release was rebaptized to Squeeze ("Stable").

That's how stringent Debian is on quality assurance. They would rather
tell you that a fairly stable release is still insufficiently tested
than, as for instance certain proprietary OS vendors do, tell you that
it's a must-have, better-than-everything-else operating system, which in
truth still contains 60'000 bugs, of which approximately 20'000 are
fatal. [*]

[*] These figures are by no means a representation or even a guess
regarding the amount of bugs still left in Debian Wheezy. However,
I was making a reference to what happened when Microsoft released
Windows 2000 for official sale. It still had 20'000 fatal and
40'000 non-fatal bugs, and this has been admitted to by a Microsoft
spokesperson. Who was probably taken out and shot at the first
light of dawn the next day. :p

[Mark Warner]

On 06/06/2013 08:29 PM, Aragorn wrote:
>
> The reason why it's called "Testing" is that it still has more than 100
> open bugs, which is the number of bugs still left when the previous
> Wheezy ("Testing") release was rebaptized to Squeeze ("Stable").

<nitpick>
Wheezy was never "rebaptized" to Squeeze. They are two different
versions (6.0 vs. 7.0). Up until a month or so ago, Squeeze was Debian's
stable release, and Wheezy with the next version in line, but still
considered testing. Wheezy has since been declared stable, and is
offered up as Debian's default stable release. Squeeze is now
categorized as old-stable. The current testing release is code named
Jessie. Unstable is always called Sid (Sid breaks things).

Since the Jessie code was just recently migrated to testing from
unstable, I'm certain there are a lot more than 100 bugs. It's the
nature of the Debian development model -- bring in a bug-laden mess of
code and work on it for a couple of years until it's as close to bug
free as humanly possible. Since this migration is very recent, Jessie is
now going to be very, very rough. On the other hand, when Wheezy was
nearing completion, it was about as close to rock solid stable as one
can get, even though it was still categorized as testing.
</nitpick>

[ray carter]

OK - so use 'stable'. It's about as stable as anything in this world.

[Shadow]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 02:29:15 +0200, Aragorn
<thor...@telenet.be.invalid> wrote:

> However,
> I was making a reference to what happened when Microsoft released
> Windows 2000 for official sale. It still had 20'000 fatal and
> 40'000 non-fatal bugs, and this has been admitted to by a Microsoft
> spokesperson. Who was probably taken out and shot at the first
> light of dawn the next day. :p

They're not bug, they're FEATURES --> Bill Gates 2000
Wait till you see the FEATURES in Windows 8.1 -> Steve Ballmer 2013
;)

[Aragorn]

On Friday 07 June 2013 04:22, Mark Warner conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

Well, I appreciate that nitpick, since it obviously corrects my
misconception that the new Testing release would still have been called
Wheezy. I was under the impression that these names were persistent in
relation to their Stable/Testing/Unstable monikers. (Isn't Unstable
always called Sid?)

The reference to the 100 bugs was rather tongue-in-cheek, though. Quite
obviously, Testing is now comprised of what used to be Sid, and is thus
indeed going to be "somewhat of an unpolished product". Therefore, I
would definitely advise the OP to install the current (and still freshly
released) Debian 7 Stable. ;-)

[mike]

On 6/6/2013 7:57 AM, Caryn wrote:
> When asked which free Linux is "best" ...
>
> What do you suggest as improvements upon this simplistic advice?
>
> Q: Dad, which free Linux is best?
> A: Son, you can have stable, easy, or complete; pick one.
>
> Stable ==> CentOS
> Easy ==> Ubuntu
> Complete ==> Fedora
>

It's not that simple for the linux desktop.
First, acquiesce that you can live without 10% of what you want
that you can't get with any linux.

Then, from the 90% that's left, decide which 10% you can live without.
Choose your distro based on which has the fewest annoying deficiencies.
Don't count on a mere mortal being able to get all of the 90%
working on one linux machine. If you can do that, you're a guru
and don't need advice.

Don't worry too much about which default window manager, apps,
utilities, libraries are available, because they'll all be
different on the next release.

Be prepared to do everything an entirely different way.
Learning is fun, right?

I like varied frustrations, so I have plug-in hard drives with several
different linux distros to keep life interesting.

[Mark Warner]

On 06/07/2013 12:28 AM, Aragorn wrote:
>
> Well, I appreciate that nitpick, since it obviously corrects my
> misconception that the new Testing release would still have been called
> Wheezy. I was under the impression that these names were persistent in
> relation to their Stable/Testing/Unstable monikers. (Isn't Unstable
> always called Sid?)

Unstable is always Sid, but all the other versions have unique names and
move from testing to stable to old-stable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Debian_release_code_names

> The reference to the 100 bugs was rather tongue-in-cheek, though. Quite
> obviously, Testing is now comprised of what used to be Sid, and is thus
> indeed going to be "somewhat of an unpolished product". Therefore, I
> would definitely advise the OP to install the current (and still freshly
> released) Debian 7 Stable. ;-)

After a new stable release (like now), testing will be a mess. But right
*before* a new stable release, testing will be damn solid. It's all in
the timing. The problem with people/distros that use a Debian testing
base is the quality of that code varies wildly, depending on where they
are in the Deb development cycle.

[John Hasler]

Aragorn writes:
> Quite obviously, Testing is now comprised of what used to be Sid,

Packages are linked into Testing one at a time whenever all of their
dependencies can be satisfied in Testing and they have spent ten days in
Sid with no severe bugs. Packages enter Unstable ("Sid") whenever the
package maintainer chooses to upload them. Thus Testing and Unstable
always differ considerably. During a freeze, of course, no packages are
allowed into Testing. When a freeze ends packages begin flowing into
Testing again. Sid and Testing always differ considerably.

[John Hasler]

mike writes:
> First, acquiesce that you can live without 10% of what you want that
> you can't get with any linux.

I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
exclusively since the end of the last century).

> Don't count on a mere mortal being able to get all of the 90% working
> on one linux machine.

Every one of Debian's 36,000+ packages can be installed with a few
clicks of your mouse. Otherwise they would not be in Debian.

> Don't worry too much about which default window manager, apps,
> utilities, libraries are available, because they'll all be different
> on the next release.

You can easily install any window manager, apps, utilities, and
libraries you choose and easily keep the ones you have when you upgrade.

[Soupe du Jour]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:09:28 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

> mike writes:
>> First, acquiesce that you can live without 10% of what you want that
>> you can't get with any linux.
>
> I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
> exclusively since the end of the last century).

I think what mike meant is that Windows malware won't run on GNU/Linux.
Malware seems to be a wildly popular thing with Windows users - judging
by the number of them who run it.

[Shadow]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:55:18 -0700, mike <ham...@netzero.net> wrote:

>It's not that simple for the linux desktop.
>First, acquiesce that you can live without 10% of what you want
>that you can't get with any linux.

<irony intended>
Malware ---> Trojans, worms, etc. OK, I can live with that.

>
>Then, from the 90% that's left, decide which 10% you can live without.

I don't follow. Debian stable has over 20.000 apps . What
exactly is missing ? OK, Microsoft games (unless you install WINE). I
can probably live without them. Certainly, the average small
business/firefox user/email user can live without them.

>Choose your distro based on which has the fewest annoying deficiencies.
>Don't count on a mere mortal being able to get all of the 90%
>working on one linux machine. If you can do that, you're a guru
>and don't need advice.

With a stable distro, you just click on the app, and all the
dependencies are automatically installed. I still don't follow. With
windows, I have to go to a download page, download, wait a few weeks,
upload to virustotal, then, if no malware is detected, install the
app. And then sometimes it doesn't work.

>
>Don't worry too much about which default window manager, apps,
>utilities, libraries are available, because they'll all be
>different on the next release.

Debian stable has had the same basic GUI for the last 10 years
or so. It's just a matter of choosing "fallback" at login. Gnome 2
looks/behaves rather like Windows XP. Hard to get used to, but once
you do, it's easy.

>
>Be prepared to do everything an entirely different way.
>Learning is fun, right?

Yes , it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8zcwj0AGw

>
>I like varied frustrations, so I have plug-in hard drives with several
>different linux distros to keep life interesting.

Try installing to different partitions. Ever heard of grub ?
Learning is fun, right ?
</irony intended>

[Aragorn]

On Friday 07 June 2013 15:09, John Hasler conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

Just for the record, John, "mike" is a troll, albeit that at least part
of his trolling is unintentional and stems from his complete and utter
ignorance regarding GNU/Linux as an operating system on the one hand,
and FLOSS as a software development model and ideology on the other
hand, and linked to that, his refusal to accept any attempts from
experienced members of the community at elucidating him on the facts.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:09:28 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

> I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
> exclusively since the end of the last century).

Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
in media (MTP) mode, for example.

There is no temperature graphing utility known on Linux (like what
Windows users have with siSoft Sandra).

Locating a TrueCrypt that will automatically dismount when the
machine idles is futile on Linux - but works fine on Windows.

Trying to install Exiftran on Linux, is likewise futile.

Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is futile.

Likewise, it's futile to find Azureus and next to impossible to find
and install avidemux (all of my experience is on CentOS though).

DISCLAIMER: All this is just *my* experience, and all on CentOS 6,
and all from memory of my bad experiences over the past year.

[unruh]

On 2013-06-07, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:09:28 -0500, John Hasler wrote:
>
>> I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
>> exclusively since the end of the last century).
>
> Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
> in media (MTP) mode, for example.

Not sure what this means. AFAIK Android presents the filesystem via usb.
But if some linux's do support it, then all do. If you mean out of the
box, that is possible, and if so that can be fixed.

>
> There is no temperature graphing utility known on Linux (like what
> Windows users have with siSoft Sandra).

No idea what Sandra is, but I have certainly graphed temperatures. If
you mean that there is not, packaged, an exact equivalent on Linux for
every program sold for Windows, you are right.

>
> Locating a TrueCrypt that will automatically dismount when the
> machine idles is futile on Linux - but works fine on Windows.

Why don't you talk to the TrueCrypt people. It is their program.

>
> Trying to install Exiftran on Linux, is likewise futile.

Whatever that is.

>
> Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
> problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is futile.

Futile why?

>
> Likewise, it's futile to find Azureus and next to impossible to find
> and install avidemux (all of my experience is on CentOS though).

Maybe because Azureus is now called Vuze?

And what was your problem with avidemux?

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:05:55 -0300, Shadow wrote:

> I don't follow. Debian stable has over 20.000 apps . What
> exactly is missing ? OK, Microsoft games (unless you install WINE). I
> can probably live without them. Certainly, the average small
> business/firefox user/email user can live without them.

It would be nice to know, ahead of time, if Debian has these
quite common applications for the average user (if I'm average anyway):

mtp (required for media-mode connection of newer Android cell phones)
kolourpaint (a great photo editor much easier than The GIMP)
truecrypt (a disk encryption mounting util but fails autounmount on Linux)
pan (a common nntp newsreader but without SSL it can't do encryption)
devede (a great DVD authoring program)
brasero (a common disc-burning program)
avidemux (a common video editor)
azureus (a common bittorrent browser)
exiftran (a common EXIF editor similar to jhead)
recordmydesktop (a common desktop recorder)
aircrack-ng (a common wifi debugging utility similar to Kismet)
reaver (another common wifi debugging utility similar to Scapy)
macchanger (a useful utility for hotel wifi connections)
etc.

DISCLAIMER: This is all the stuff, IIRC, I had to install on Centos,
many of which failed to be found in the standard repositories.
I would hope Debian support for the home user is much better!

[Mark Warner]

While I don't claim to know anything specifically about CentOS, I
understood that it was essentially an unbranded version of RHEL, which
is considered more a server OS than a desktop OS. Which may or may not
explain some of your difficulties. BICBW.

--
Mark Warner
...lose .inhibitions when replying

[Soupe du Jour]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:40:45 +0000, Bannon wrote:

> On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:05:55 -0300, Shadow wrote:
>
>> I don't follow. Debian stable has over 20.000 apps . What
>> exactly is missing ? OK, Microsoft games (unless you install WINE). I
>> can probably live without them. Certainly, the average small
>> business/firefox user/email user can live without them.
>
> It would be nice to know, ahead of time, if Debian has these quite
> common applications for the average user (if I'm average anyway):

Have at it...


http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

[Shadow]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2013 19:25:56 +0000 (UTC), Bannon <ban...@is.invalid>
wrote:

1) Don't have an Android ---> Bear will help here, he uses
Google linux trash
2) Temperature utilities ? Tons of them. I suggest you search
and choose the one that suits you best. Installing the app will
install the sensor modules as dependencies.
3) I believe Truecrypt is the same on any OS. Just download it
from the homepage, it's pre-compiled. Or from your repos, if
available. Read the very short instructions. You must be doing
something wrong
4) Had stunnel with pan for, well, at least 6 years, probably
more. You must be doing something wrong.
5) avidemux works "straight out of the box". You must be doing
something wrong.
6) Why use "Azureus", if you can use qbittorrent ? If you must
have Vuze, remember you need Java (as you do in Windows). You can
download it from the homepage.(The download page is the first link if
you Google "azureus download"). Vuze for windows is exactly the same
java binary as Vuze for Linux.

You seem to have a lot of difficulty "installing". Are you
sure you know how to use a package manager ?
What errors do you get when you "try to install" exiftran ?
I sometimes get the horrible idea you are downloading the
source code and expecting it to work by clicking on it.

[John Hasler]

Bannon writes:
> Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
> in media (MTP) mode, for example.

Not having a smartphone I wouldn't know about that.

> There is no temperature graphing utility known on Linux (like what
> Windows users have with siSoft Sandra).

There are many graphing utilities. Is this

psensor - display graphs for monitoring hardware temperature

what you mean?

> Locating a TrueCrypt that will automatically dismount when the
> machine idles is futile on Linux - but works fine on Windows.

Debian has a tcplay package (a TrueCrypt implementation). I have no
idea if it does what you want.

> Trying to install Exiftran on Linux, is likewise futile.

Debian has an exiftran package.

> Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
> problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is
> futile.

Debian has a pan 0.139 package.

> Likewise, it's futile to find Azureus and next to impossible to find
> and install avidemux (all of my experience is on CentOS though).

Debian has a vuze package (new Azureus name). Avidemux for Debian is
available at <http://www.deb-multimedia.org/> .

> All this is just *my* experience, and all on CentOS 6...

Which is a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is explicitly intended
for businesses to run servers and closed-source software such as Oracle
on. Anything that does not support that goal is an afterthought.

[John Hasler]

Bannon writes:
> It would be nice to know, ahead of time, if Debian has these quite
> common applications for the average user (if I'm average anyway):

Decide what you want to accomplish, not what programs you think you have
to have.

[Dave]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:17:33 -0300, Shadow wrote:

> You seem to have a lot of difficulty "installing". Are you
> sure you know how to use a package manager ?
> What errors do you get when you "try to install" exiftran ?
> I sometimes get the horrible idea you are downloading the
> source code and expecting it to work by clicking on it.
> []'s

Or maybe just trouble searching.If you try :
yum install exiftran
you get
No package exiftran available.
But try:
yum provides exiftran
you get
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit, remove-with-leaves
fbida-2.09-2.fc18.i686 : FrameBuffer Imageviewer
Repo : fedora
Matched from:
Filename : /usr/bin/exiftran

Just part of the fbida package.(also in fbida in Centos)

Dave

--
Registered Linux User #444770
Fedora 18 Spherical Cow

[John Hasler]

H-Man writes:
> devede - not in my repo list deb package available from dev
> aircrack-ng - no - deb package available from dev
> reaver - no - tarball available from dev

All available in Unstable.

[p-0''0-h the cat (ES)]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:31:42 -0500, Bear <bear.bo...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>After serious thinking Bannon wrote :

>It is anyone's experience with Linux. There are many things that can't
>be done on Linux and everything can be done on Windows.
>
>Even things that can be done with Linux and Windows, well the
>experience of getting there with Linux is usually a nightmare.

How many hours have you put in with Windows?

How many hours have you put in with Linux. A couple maybe.

How many more hours are you going to stomp your feet? Try redirecting
all that energy > RTFM.

--
p-0.0-h the cat

Internet Terrorist, Mass sock puppeteer, Agent provocateur, Gutter rat,
Devil incarnate, Linux user#666, BaStarD hacker, Resident evil, Monkey Boy,
Certifiable criminal, Spineless cowardly scum, textbook Psychopath,
the SCOURGE, l33t p00h d3 tr0ll, p00h == lam3r, p00h == tr0ll, troll inf�me,
the OVERCAT [The BEARPAIR are dead, and we are its murderers], lowlife troll,
shyster [pending approval by STATE_TERROR], cripple, sociopath, kook

Honorary SHYSTER and FRAUD awarded for services to Haberdashery.
By Appointment to God Frank-Lin.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2013-06-07, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:

> On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:09:28 -0500, John Hasler wrote:
>
>> I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
>> exclusively since the end of the last century).
>
> Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
> in media (MTP) mode, for example.
>
> There is no temperature graphing utility known on Linux (like what
> Windows users have with siSoft Sandra).

munin will graph temperature (and thything else that can be measured
by a computer and represented numerically) SANDRA seems to be a
benchmarking app, does it also graph temperature?

> Locating a TrueCrypt that will automatically dismount when the
> machine idles is futile on Linux - but works fine on Windows.

perhaps set your machine to hibernate when idle.

> Trying to install Exiftran on Linux, is likewise futile.

it's in debian.

> Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
> problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is futile.

debian stable has pan 0.139-2

> Likewise, it's futile to find Azureus

guess what, also in debian.

> and next to impossible to find
> and install avidemux (all of my experience is on CentOS though).

you've gotta go to the unofficial "deb-multimedia" repository to get
avidemux for debian

> DISCLAIMER: All this is just *my* experience, and all on CentOS 6,
> and all from memory of my bad experiences over the past year.

which major distro is an anagram of "dearth"? :^)

(FX: duck, run)

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ne...@netfront.net ---

[William Poaster]

Yes, it's just more FUD & BS from the 'mike' wintroll.

--
Linux is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends
are.

Linux is the scientific community’s operating system of choice.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is controlled by Linux.
NASA and SpaceX ground stations use Linux.
DNA-sequencing lab technicians use Linux.
Really, for applications that require absolute stability,
which most scientific experiments are, Linux is the obvious choice.
http://tinyurl.com/d9ta82o

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:46:24 -0400, Mark Warner wrote:

> While I don't claim to know anything specifically about CentOS, I
> understood that it was essentially an unbranded version of RHEL, which
> is considered more a server OS than a desktop OS. Which may or may not
> explain some of your difficulties. BICBW.

Understood. It's certainly the reason that CentOS isn't really a
good OS for my home desktop needs - yet - why it's the OS of choice
for my employer's software needs.

Our needs differ (mine & the employer).

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> Locating a TrueCrypt that will automatically dismount when the
>> machine idles is futile on Linux - but works fine on Windows.
>
> Debian has a tcplay package (a TrueCrypt implementation). I have no
> idea if it does what you want.

That's the Truecrypt v7.1a I'm using on Centos:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo epel install tcplay -y

Unfortunately, the Linux TrueCrypt doesn't automatically unmount
when the disk is unused.

Dunno why. Just doesn't.

The Windoze version does. Bummer.

[unruh]

I still do not understand what it is that necessitates your using
centos. It is linux. Yes, your employer uses it, but so what? Are you
going to get fired if you do not run it?
And why can you not simply install the programs you need or want for
home use on centos? Yes, the centos repository may not have them, but
there are other rpm based distros (eg Mageian/mandriva).
And you can always recompile the source.

>

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> There is no temperature graphing utility known on Linux (like what
>> Windows users have with siSoft Sandra).
>

> Is psensor - display graphs for monitoring hardware temperature
> what you need?

If it graphs PC (cpu, disk, gpu, etc., temperature - that's what I need!)

Unfortunately:
$ yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/psensor"
Reports "no matches found"

The repositories searched were:
adobe-linux-x86_64.repo
CentOS-Base.repo
CentOS-Debuginfo.repo
CentOS-Media.repo
CentOS-Media.repo.rpmsave
CentOS-Vault.repo
elrepo.repo
epel.repo
epel-testing.repo
google-chrome-64bit.repo
google-chrome.repo
linuxtech.repo
mirrors-rpmforge
mirrors-rpmforge-extras
mirrors-rpmforge-testing
naulinux-school.repo
nux-dextop.repo
rpmforge.repo
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates.repo
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing.repo
torproject.repo

Looking in http://rpm.pbone.net, I see only RPMs for OpenSuSe. Bummer. :(
It always seems like Centos is the bastard child for desktop needs.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
>> problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is
>> futile.
>
> Debian has a pan 0.139 package.

There's none on Centos; so Debian seems to be a better choice than
CentOS for typical desktop user applications.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> Trying to install Exiftran on Linux, is likewise futile.
>
> Debian has an exiftran package.

Hmmmmmmmmm...... I made a mistake on exiftran! :)
(mistakes are good when they work out for the best)

Given that, I just took another look for a CentOS repository:
$ yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/exiftran"
Reports: fbida-2.07-8.el6.x86_64: FrameBuffer Imageviewer,
Repo: epel, Filename: /usr/bin/exiftran

So, this installed exiftran:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo epel install fbida -y

Woo hoo! I'm happy! Thanks.

PS: My prior mistake was typing "fbido" in my search, and not noticing the typo!

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
>> in media (MTP) mode, for example.
>
> Not having a smartphone I wouldn't know about that.

It seems that with Android 4.x, Google dropped USB mass transfer mode
in favor of MTP (media transfer protocol?). The result is that nobody
with an Android phone such as the Samsung Galaxy S3 can easily transfer
files by wire to their CentOS/RHEL6 desktops.

It's all over the web but the solution is either to compile your own
simple-mtpfs (simple mtp file system) or to give up and use PTP
(camera mode) instead.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> Adding SSL to Pan 0.135 on Centos with stunnel is an exercise in
>> problematics while finding a Pan 0.139 repository for Centos is
>> futile.
>
> Debian has a pan 0.139 package.

Sadly, RHEL6 & CentOS do not.
The only solution, besides rolling your own, is Wine or Stunnel.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:14:08 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

>> All this is just *my* experience, and all on CentOS 6...
>
> Which is a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is explicitly intended
> for businesses to run servers and closed-source software such as Oracle
> on. Anything that does not support that goal is an afterthought.

I don't disagree!

I'm beginning to learn, if you want server software, go RHEL6->CentOS;
but if you want desktop software, go something like Debian->Ubuntu.

[John Hasler]

Bannon writes:
> I'm beginning to learn, if you want server software, go RHEL6->CentOS;

Only if you want closed-source. Debian has all the Open Source server
software Red Hat does and a lot more.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:17:33 -0300, Shadow wrote:

> Temperature utilities ? Tons of them.

Just to clarify, I said temperature *graphing* utilities.
I'm currently using lm_sensors & gkrellm; but they don't graph:
$ sudo yum install lm_sensors -y
$ sudo yum --enablerepo epel install gkrellm -y

> I believe Truecrypt is the same on any OS.

> You must be doing something wrong

I wish it were that simple. I really do.

The TrueCrypt version 7.1a in tcplay, for whatever reason, doesn't
even have the option to unmount automatically, yet that useful
automatic unmount option is in all the Windows versions.

> Had stunnel with pan for, well, at least 6 years, probably
> more. You must be doing something wrong.

Oh, SSL is working with Pan 0.135. Just getting it to work is
problematic, mainly due to the paucity of CentOS-oriented SSL
tutorials. You can find lots of step by step tutorials on the
other distros; just not on CentOS. I had to write my own.

> avidemux works "straight out of the box". You must be doing
> something wrong.

IIRC, avidemux was the first time I had to locate and use the
naulinux-school repository; so I agree with you on that one.
It was harder for me, because I had to find it first.

$ sudo yum --enablerepo=naulinux-school install avidemux -y

> Why use "Azureus", if you can use qbittorrent ?

I wanted Socks5/A support.
Grepping for "socks" in the qbittorent wiki, I don't see it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBittorrent
However, the bittorrent wikipedia implies it supports Socks5/A:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_client

If qbittorrent supports Socks5/A, that would be good.

> You seem to have a lot of difficulty "installing". Are you
> sure you know how to use a package manager ?

All I know how to do is find RPMs and install them.
Maybe you guys know of a better way to find RPMs, and, if so,
I'd be *ecstatic* to hear of it, because of the packages
that *I* just can't find using my approach below:

The basic process I use is summarized below using the newly
suggested psensor package as the test case:

Q: Is "psensor" in the standard set of typical CentOS repositories?
A: No.
yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/psensor"
Note: This includes not only CentOS vaults but also adobe, elrepo,
epel, google, linuxtech, rpmforge, naulinux, nux-dextop, rpmfusion, etc.

Q: Is a CentOS psensor RPM found at http://pkgs.repoforge.org ?
A: No.

Q: Is a CentOS psensor RPM found at http://pkgs.org ?
A: No.

Q: Is a CentOS (or variant) psensor RPM found at http://pbone.net ?
A: No.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:32:00 +0000, Dave wrote:

> Or maybe just trouble searching.

Yes. I agree the exiftran problem was wholly my mistake!
I've just installed fbida, which includes exiftran!
Thanks!

$ yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/exiftran"
Reports fbida, in Epel, so, this works:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo epel install fbida -y

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:36:46 +0100, p-0''0-h the cat (ES) wrote:

> How many more hours are you going to stomp your feet?
> Try redirecting all that energy > RTFM.

Pooh,
You're usually very helpful.

You must realize that I *have* read all there is to read on
how to find the packages that I list below for your convenience.

But, all the RTFM in the world fails to find, for example, the
"psensor" RPM alluded to in this thread as a tool for graphing
core CPU temperatures over time.

Likewise, all that RTFM effort isn't going to make Truecrypt magically
add the option of automatically dismounting with disuse (which is
clearly on the Windows version and just as clearly not on the
tcplay version of Truecrypt).

Furthermore, all that RTFM reading and testing isn't going to make
Pan 0.139 suddenly appear in an RPM format for CentOS 6 desktops.

Worse yet, none of that RTFM reading will make MTP actually work on
CentOS for connecting an Android 4.x smartphone (at least not without
extreme effort - which took me weeks to finally be successful with
and which most people simply give up and use non-wire methods on).

So, while you're normally a very helpful and astute guy, don't
assume these issues are simply because of a lack of RTFM skills.

In fact, if you (or anyone) could solve just *one* of those problems
listed above with an RTFM solution - you'd be my all-time hero again!

:)

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 13:13:34 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

> Only if you want closed-source. Debian has all the Open Source server
> software Red Hat does and a lot more.

I looked up the family tree for Debian and Redhat.

While Redhat fathered Centos & Fedora, it seems that Debian fathered Ubuntu.

Given that, wouldn't Ubuntu be a better desktop choice than Debian?

[John Hasler]

Bannon writes:
> Given that, wouldn't Ubuntu be a better desktop choice than Debian?

Ubuntu is an excellent choice for the sort of ex-Windows user who has to
hire an electrician to change a lightbulb. It's "Linux for the rest of
us".

Debian gives you choice. Some people don't want choice. It confuses
them.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:38:00 +0000, unruh wrote:

>> Some Linux's don't support Android 4.x smartphones (like RHEL6/Centos!)
>> in media (MTP) mode, for example.
>

> Not sure what this means. AFAIK Android presents the filesystem via usb.
> But if some linux's do support it, then all do. If you mean out of the
> box, that is possible, and if so that can be fixed.

It's complicated. The problem is that Google apparently removed their mass
storage code in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. So, unless the phone manufacturer
adds it separately, USBMS mode is no longer in newer smartphones such as the
Samsung Galaxy S3.

Most Linux distros seem to have figured out a method to enable users to
connect by wire; but the RHEL6/CentOS group has no solution for the users.
The result is that you can't easily connect a phone by wire on CentOS.

More details are to be found on the net, but here's one pointer:
http://androidforums.com/computers/499522-looking-linux-file-transfer-tool-android-4-0-devices.html

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 17:32:44 +0000, unruh wrote:

> Are you going to get fired if you do not run it?

I don't think you understand a production software environment by that
statement so please let me explain.

My job is to run demos for a software package which is installed by
my employer and which is tested on CentOS. If I run some *other* distro,
and something doesn't work during a customer demo - then - yes - they
will *fry* me to a crisp.

Now, if everything works just fine, then of course they won't even notice,
nor will they fry me - but there's no gain to that equation, only risk.

Plus, I report bugs all the time in the software, and, part of bug
reporting is to list the operating system. It's not my job to test other
operating systems - I'm just supposed to do demos but if I run into bugs,
I'm supposed to document and file them. If I found a bug on the other
operating systems, I'd *still* have to duplicate it on CentOS in order
to file the bug. And, worse yet, if I did *not* find a bug on the other
operating systems which was on CentOS, they'd wonder why I didn't find it
in the first place.

Likewise, the employer issues updates all the time, and, more importantly,
issues patches and other recommendations down to how to set up the /etc/hosts
file and other nuances. If I was on the *wrong* operating system, my life
would be grueling, as I'd personally have to translate everything to the other
OS. I'm not 'that' good! :)

This, by the way, I would assume, is a very typical software situation
for many people who are handed a computer with an operating system set up
by their employer.

> And why can you not simply install the programs you need or want for
> home use on centos? Yes, the centos repository may not have them, but
> there are other rpm based distros (eg Mageian/mandriva).
> And you can always recompile the source.

My record recompiling source is less than 50% successful as I'm not a
coder and I don't have a development environment set up. Plus I don't
know makefiles all that well.

The software that I just can't find in a CentOS repository are, from
memory, things like pan 0.139 (with SSL), reaver, psensor, etc.

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:20:11 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

> Decide what you want to accomplish, not what programs you think you have
> to have.

I had used that approach with the CAD software, "draftsight".

First, I couldn't find it in a standard repository for CentOS:
$ yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/draftsight"

Then, I fakiled to find an RPM in the standard Internet searches:
http://pkgs.repoforge.org
http://pkgs.org
http://pbone.net
etc.

So I had to resort to downloading draftSight.rpm from:
http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsight/download-draftsight/

Yet, the RPM provided by the company that wrote it had unresolved
dependencies (libaudio.so.2). Libaudio was apparently in NAS, so
I had installed that separately:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo epel install nas -y

But it still failed on that same dependency and I was tired of trying
to make DraftSight work.

So I switched to InkScape instead and it installed right away:
$ sudo yum install inkscape

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:51:48 +0000, Soupe du Jour wrote:

> Have at it...
> http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

This was a nice url. It found all the packages that I remember
having tried to find on CentOS.

The only test it failed was an unfair test, but I was hopeful:
*fotosketcher*

Results:
You have searched for paths that end with fotosketcher in suite wheezy,
all sections, and all architectures.
Sorry, your search gave no results

To be fair, fotosketcher isn't ported to Linux AFAIK; but I was hopeful
that the Debian lookup could do magic! :)

[unruh]

On 2013-06-08, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:

Centos is NOT a desktop operating system. It is Redhat with the name
changed. Is is a server OS. Have you tried the rpms for suse? Often they
will work. Or if not, you can often get them to work by downloading the
source rpm (.src.rpm) and doing
rpu --rebuild name.of.src.rpm

>

[unruh]

On 2013-06-08, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:

?? Redhat used to be a full scale rpm (Redhat Package Manager) based
distro. They changed to a server based distro and spun off Fedora as a
testing site and free software and user supported distro. Centos is
precisely Redhat repackaged as a free distro (Redhat charges for its
distros, under the guise of support). Redhat tried, against the terms of
the GPL, to make Redhat a distro that could not be copied.

Ubuntu is a packaging of Debian with gnome as the desktop manager.
Kubuntu is with KDE. They also have some weirdnesses about their distro.

I like mandriva/mageia (Mandriva was a spinoff of Redhat before Redhat
went the server route, but has had severe financial problems. Mageia is
an open distro spun of from the floundering mandriva) They tended to be
more up to date than Debian (Their stable releases tend to be pretty
old, which often means newer hardware does not work, but are stable when
they do) All distros right now are floundering with Redhat's forcfeeding
of systemd startup onto Linux.
>

[Aragorn]

On Saturday 08 June 2013 21:48, unruh conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> On 2013-06-08, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 13:13:34 -0500, John Hasler wrote:
>>
>>> Only if you want closed-source. Debian has all the Open Source
>>> server software Red Hat does and a lot more.
>>
>> I looked up the family tree for Debian and Redhat.
>>
>> While Redhat fathered Centos & Fedora, it seems that Debian fathered
>> Ubuntu.
>>
>> Given that, wouldn't Ubuntu be a better desktop choice than Debian?
>
> ?? Redhat used to be a full scale rpm (Redhat Package Manager) based
> distro.

Yes and no. RedHat does still carry window managers and desktop
environments in their packages repositories, and the same is true for
CentOS, which itself is a rebranded RedHat, as you say.

> They changed to a server based distro and spun off Fedora as a
> testing site and free software and user supported distro. Centos is
> precisely Redhat repackaged as a free distro (Redhat charges for its
> distros, under the guise of support). Redhat tried, against the terms
> of the GPL, to make Redhat a distro that could not be copied.

I believe this only applies to certain branding - e.g. logos et al.
Actually, the one trying to turn GNU/Linux into a proprietary product
was Caldera, currently known as The SCO Group, but not to be confused
with the former Santa Cruz Operations, which were acquired by Caldera
and inspired Caldera to change its name.

RedHat is also not the only distribution which is only commercially
distributed. TurboLinux - itself also based upon the RedHat base layout
and the .rpm package format - is similar in that regard.

> Ubuntu is a packaging of Debian with gnome as the desktop manager.

Actually, with Unity as the desktop manager. Unity is a shell around
GNOME 3, but is somewhat different from the official GNOME Shell in its
look & feel.

As I told the OP already myself higher up, it's also an acquired taste.
Not everyone likes it.

> Kubuntu is with KDE.

But Kubuntu is - as of still relatively recently - no longer sponsored
by Canonical itself, and thus it is considered an "unofficial" Ubuntu
variant.

Canonical does however still sponsor Xubuntu and Lubuntu, which come
with the XFCE and LXDE desktop environments respectively.

> They also have some weirdnesses about their distro.

Yes, several, and the logic they use for justifying those weirdnesses is
flawed. Plus that Ubuntu constains spyware and adware, which are not
easy to remove by the newbie they allegedly aim for with their
distribution.

> I like mandriva/mageia (Mandriva was a spinoff of Redhat before Redhat
> went the server route, but has had severe financial problems. Mageia
> is an open distro spun of from the floundering mandriva) They tended
> to be more up to date than Debian (Their stable releases tend to be
> pretty old, which often means newer hardware does not work, but are

> stable when they do) [...

Note to the OP: Bill Unruh is talking of Debian now when he says that
their stable releases tend to be pretty old. The wording was somewhat
ambiguous there.

> ...] All distros right now are floundering with Redhat's forcfeeding

> of systemd startup onto Linux.

Not every distribution uses systemd yet, and some are very reluctant to
even adopt it. Gentoo supports it, but the default is the Gentoo-native
openrc init system, by which Gentoo also supports FreeBSD. Slackware
uses rc.conf and Debian (and spin-offs) use upstart.

RedHat/CentOS/Fedora, Mandriva/Mageia, SuSE/openSUSE, TurboLinux, Arch
et al use systemd by default.

There was a rumor that GNOME - which is currently also being developed
over at RedHat, just like udev and systemd - would make systemd into a
hard dependency in the near future, making it impossible for anyone to
run GNOME without also running systemd, but RedHat has denied that this
would be the case.

However, current development of systemd already includes udev as a hard
dependency of systemd, and all evidence seems to indicate that udev and
systemd would indeed become integrated into one package in the
foreseeable future, which would have much farther reaching consequences
for all distributions than the mere making of systemd into a dependency
of GNOME. Some of the Gentoo developers have taken the initiative -
albeit that this is not considered an official Gentoo project by the
other developers or by the Gentoo Council - to fork udev so as to
guarantee that it will always work with other init systems than systemd.
The fork is called eudev.

--
= Aragorn =
GNU/Linux user #223157 - http://www.linuxcounter.net

[Thad Floryan]

On 6/8/2013 2:46 PM, Aragorn wrote:
> [...]

> RedHat is also not the only distribution which is only commercially
> distributed. TurboLinux - itself also based upon the RedHat base layout
> and the .rpm package format - is similar in that regard.

> [...]

SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop) and SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise
Server) also come to mind:

https://www.suse.com/products/server/

https://www.suse.com/products/desktop/

Some info about TurboLinux:

http://distrowatch.com/turbolinux

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Turbolinux-897.shtml

http://www.turbolinux.com/ feed this URL into Google translate

[unruh]

They tried very hard to a) make those logos etc very hard to get rid of,
and b) claimed that they make the distro poprietary and uncopyable. This
is of course directly contrary to the GPL which forbids using anything
to forbid anyone else from copying it. (They at least never tried to
claim that their distro was a "mere amalgamation" and thus outside the
GPL as some of their supporters tried to do)

[Moe Trin]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux, in article
<0VJst.3485$j55....@newsfe09.iad>, unruh wrote:

>Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:

>> Understood. It's certainly the reason that CentOS isn't really a
>> good OS for my home desktop needs - yet - why it's the OS of choice
>> for my employer's software needs.

Understandable

>> Our needs differ (mine & the employer).

Also understandable

>I still do not understand what it is that necessitates your using
>centos. It is linux. Yes, your employer uses it, but so what? Are
>you going to get fired if you do not run it?

User compatibility and ease of use. If you hit www.distrowatch.com
and look at the distribution database, you'll find

DistroWatch database summary
* Number of all distributions in the database: 752
* Number of active distributions in the database: 300
* Number of dormant distributions: 49
* Number of discontinued distributions: 403
* Number of distributions on the waiting list: 288

One can sort of differentiate between "Debian" and "Red Hat" derived,
"popular" verses "business" verses "hobby" verses Ghod only knows
what else, but each one of those distributions knows that the other
guys are doing it all wrong, and they're the only one to do it right.
It may all be Linux, but the details will bite you in the butt every
time. You discovered this with /sbin/hwclock being run as a user.

Like many who use Linux at work (or perhaps school), I find it a lot
easier to be using the same (as much as practical) distribution at
home, just to avoid the confusion factor. Remember the hoops you had
to jump through when you transitioned from SunOS-4.1.x to Sloaris?

>And why can you not simply install the programs you need or want for
>home use on centos? Yes, the centos repository may not have them, but
>there are other rpm based distros (eg Mageian/mandriva).

Minor problem - the "other" rpm builder isn't keeping track of what
changes are made to distributions other than his own. Installing
rpms from other distributions is not risk-free. CentOS being a GPL
version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I'd be slightly more inclined
to investigate Fedora packages, as Fedora is the ultra-bleeding-edge
Alpha for RHEL. Note that I am NOT recommending it - Fedora is too
unstable for my liking.

>And you can always recompile the source.

Often a better choice.

Old guy

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 00:46, unruh conveyed the following to

alt.os.linux...

> On 2013-06-08, Aragorn <thor...@telenet.be.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday 08 June 2013 21:48, unruh conveyed the following to
>> alt.os.linux...
>>

>>> [RedHat] changed to a server based distro and spun off Fedora as a

>>> testing site and free software and user supported distro. Centos is
>>> precisely Redhat repackaged as a free distro (Redhat charges for its
>>> distros, under the guise of support). Redhat tried, against the
>>> terms of the GPL, to make Redhat a distro that could not be copied.
>>
>> I believe this only applies to certain branding - e.g. logos et al.
>> Actually, the one trying to turn GNU/Linux into a proprietary product
>> was Caldera, currently known as The SCO Group, but not to be confused
>> with the former Santa Cruz Operations, which were acquired by Caldera
>> and inspired Caldera to change its name.
>
> They tried very hard to a) make those logos etc very hard to get rid
> of, and b) claimed that they make the distro poprietary and
> uncopyable. This is of course directly contrary to the GPL which
> forbids using anything to forbid anyone else from copying it. (They at
> least never tried to claim that their distro was a "mere amalgamation"
> and thus outside the GPL as some of their supporters tried to do)

Well, RedHat is quite a big and influential player in the field. As I
addressed elsewhere already, they currently employ the developers who
are the absolute upstream for udev, systemd, PulseAudio and GNOME -
possibly also GTK+, but I'm not sure about that at this point in time -
and they are also contributors to upstream Linux, the kernel.

However, being such an important player, RedHat has already quite often
manifested arrogance and even objectionable conduct towards other
distributions and projects, both as a company and by way of its
developers - most notably Lennart Poettering, the developer of
PulseAudio and systemd, and current co-developer of udev (alongside Kay
Sievers).

For instance - and this is already quite old but still - RedHat
initially refused to support KDE 1.x because although KDE was Free
Software, the Qt widget libraries upon which it was built were not.
However, through mediation of Richard Stallman, Troll Tech, who were the
developers of Qt, released the next generation of Qt - this was Qt 2 at
the time - under the GPL, and as such, KDE was off the hook for building
Free Software as a derivative work of non-Free software. Yet, despite
Qt and KDE now both being valid Free Software, RedHat continued to
refuse to support KDE for several years, and even went so far as to
launch hate campaigns against the KDE developers.

Another thing which I personally found annoying was the filesystem
support in their Anaconda installer. reiserfs, XFS and JFS are all
GPL'd filesystems which have been adopted in the upstream Linux kernel
for many years, and yet the RedHat-originated [*] Anaconda refused to
let you create reiserfs, XFS and JFS partitions, and if you had already
created any of them in advance, then it would refuse to let you install
the operating system on those partitions. It insisted on ext2 or ext3
at the time, even though all of the aforementioned were significantly
faster. (I haven't tried any later versions of RedHat/CentOS, so I
don't know what it currently supports during installation in terms of
filesystems.)


[*] At one point in time, Gentoo included an experimental graphical
installer based upon Anaconda, but I don't know whether this
"sabotage" on account of reiserfs, XFS and JFS was part of the
Gentoo version. I've already installed Gentoo before but I did it
the recommended way, i.e. via the command line and chroot. Said
graphical installer has either way been removed from the Gentoo
repositories in the meantime, because Gentoo is first and foremost
a hands-on and sources-based distribution. Installing a pre-built
binary base layout from a tarball is only the initial stage of
installing Gentoo anyway, and a GUI installer can never offer as
many choices as Gentoo wants to continue offering its users.

[Stef]

Bannon wrote:

> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 17:32:44 +0000, unruh wrote:
>

> [snip]

>
> The software that I just can't find in a CentOS repository are, from
> memory, things like pan 0.139 (with SSL), reaver, psensor, etc.

Add additional CentOS, other than the basic ones, and third-party repos
that probably have those apps. RPMForge is the biggie.

http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge

And learn how to use yum, the package manager.

Stef

[mike]

On 6/7/2013 8:20 AM, Aragorn wrote:
> On Friday 07 June 2013 15:09, John Hasler conveyed the following to
> alt.os.linux...
>
>> mike writes:
>>
>>> First, acquiesce that you can live without 10% of what you want that
>>> you can't get with any linux.
>>
>> I haven't found that ten percent yet (and I've been using Linux
>> exclusively since the end of the last century).

Turbotax
Trip planning software eg streets & trips or one of the zillion others.
The circuit board layout program that I already bought and know how to use.
The microprocessor development tools that I already bought and know how
to use.
The software development tools I already bought and know how to use.
20 years of my software that won't run in linux.

I could go on until you quit paying attention...which was probably
months ago.

People who's only method of transportation has been a bicycle have
no appreciation of the advantages of a vehicle that can go more than
50 miles, or on water, or in the air. They're perfectly happy.

Those of us with wider experience won't be satisfied with a bicycle
as our only mode of transportation, no matter how virus free it is.

I concede that linux is a technically superior operating system.

But if it doesn't do EVERYTHING you want done in a way you're familiar with,
it's not an upgrade.

A major improvement would be to make all those interchangeable parts
actually actually interchange, seamlessly, without user intervention,
across distros and releases.
>>
>>> Don't count on a mere mortal being able to get all of the 90% working
>>> on one linux machine.
>>
>> Every one of Debian's 36,000+ packages can be installed with a few
>> clicks of your mouse. Otherwise they would not be in Debian.
>>
>>> Don't worry too much about which default window manager, apps,
>>> utilities, libraries are available, because they'll all be different
>>> on the next release.
>>
>> You can easily install any window manager, apps, utilities, and
>> libraries you choose and easily keep the ones you have when you
>> upgrade.

Tell that to the newbie who just wants to use the tool.
>
> Just for the record, John, "mike" is a troll, albeit that at least part
> of his trolling is unintentional and stems from his complete and utter
> ignorance regarding GNU/Linux as an operating system on the one hand,
> and FLOSS as a software development model and ideology on the other
> hand, and linked to that, his refusal to accept any attempts from
> experienced members of the community at elucidating him on the facts.

Hi Aragorn, glad to see you're still around.
It's not at all about the understanding that's so close to your heart.
It's about applicability to real-world users who don't wanna be gurus.
Users don't give a rat's about ideology. Just make the damn thing work!!
alt.os.linux.ideology would be a good place to start.
>

[Bannon]

On Sun, 09 Jun 2013 03:12:17 +0000, Stef wrote:

>> The software that I just can't find in a CentOS repository are, from
>> memory, things like pan 0.139 (with SSL), reaver, psensor, etc.
> Add additional CentOS, other than the basic ones, and third-party repos
> that probably have those apps. RPMForge is the biggie.
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
> http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge
>
> And learn how to use yum, the package manager.
>
> Stef

Hi Stef,
I didn't mention this, but I've asked for a few clarifications and additions
to those very same articles, all of which have been made by the kind folks
on Centos.org who responded to my requests.

It turns out it's very difficult to follow those "additional resources"
hints, simply because they're written by guys who know all the answers
and who have forgotten what to tell people when they're starting out.

I don't remember all the suggestions I've made that they've put in, but
some of them they had to only hint about, like which repositories to avoid
(like ATRPMS) and which *order* to use when multiple repositories exist.
(Yes, I know about yumpriorities).

Point is, pointing to those articles is often useless because they just
don't supply the answers for the questions that you are responding to.

In fact, the *very examples* given will *not* be found using those articles
(i.e., pan 0.139 (with SSL), reaver, psensor, etc.).

DISCLAIMER: Those articles are fine. They just don't help when the software
is hard to find. They are *great* when the software is *easy* to find! :)

[Caryn]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:15:25 +0000, Moe Trin wrote:

> One can sort of differentiate between "Debian" and "Red Hat" derived,

> "popular" verses "business" verses "hobby" verses Ghod only knows ...
> ... Fedora is the ultra-bleeding-edge Alpha for RHEL.

Looking at the linux trees, is this correct in simplicity?
Popular: Debian ------> Ubuntu
Business: RHEL -------> CentOS/Fedora

>> ... you can always recompile the source.

Is compiling preferable to an RPM?

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:38:47 +0000, unruh wrote:

> Have you tried the rpms for suse? Often they
> will work. Or if not, you can often get them to work by
> downloading the source rpm (.src.rpm) and doing
> rpu --rebuild name.of.src.rpm

I've never used SUSE RPMs but I have used Fedora RPMs,
e.g., here's how I installed DeVeDe on Centos:

0. FAILED: yum --noplugins --showduplicates --enablerepo \* --disablerepo c6-media,\*-source,\*debug\* provides "*/devede"
1. FAILED: http://pbone.net -> advanced search -> CentOS 6, RHEL 6 and Scientific Linux 6 -> devede
2. WORKED: http://pbone.net -> advanced search -> add Fedora 12 and 13
3. Downloaded devede-3.16.9-1.fc13.src.rpm
4. rpmbuild --rebuild devede-3.16.9-1.fc13.src.rpm
5. That created: /home/USER/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/devede-3.16.9-1.el6.noarch.rpm
6. cd /home/USER/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/
7. sudo rpm -ivh ./devede-3.16.9-1.el6.noarch.rpm ==> reported dependencies of mencoder & vcdimager
8. sudo yum install mencoder vcdimager
9. sudo rpm -ivh ./devede-3.16.9-1.el6.noarch.rpm
10. This created the menu item: Applications -> Sound & Video -> DeVeDe DVD/CD Video Creator

Yet, that rebuild command failed on me more times than it worked! :(
$ sudo rpmbuild --rebuild azureus-4.3.1.4-1.fc13.noarch.rpm
REPORTED:
Installing azureus-4.3.1.4-1.fc13.noarch.rpm
warning: InstallSourcePackage at: psm.c:244: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID e8e40fde: NOKEY
error: source package expected, binary found
error: azureus-4.3.1.4-1.fc13.noarch.rpm cannot be installed

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:48:43 +0000, unruh wrote:

> Redhat used to be a full scale rpm (Redhat Package Manager) based
> distro. They changed to a server based distro and spun off Fedora as a
> testing site

You know, I never thought of what R.P.M. stood for. Thanks!

Here's what I've summarized from what you said, for simplicity:
Debian (desktop) -> Ubuntu (Gnome) or Kubuntu (KDE)
Redhat (server) -> Centos (RHEL) or Fedora (testing)

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:46:39 +0200, Aragorn wrote:

> Plus that Ubuntu constains spyware and adware, which are not
> easy to remove by the newbie they allegedly aim for with their
> distribution.

In a general sense, what is the purpose of the spyware and
what is the privacy information that is given out?

[Bannon]

On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:18:52 +0000, Jasen Betts wrote:
> it's in debian.

You've convinced me on Debian, since my main problem with CentOS
is finding desktop software (such as video editing & screen capture
& NNTP SSL authentication and bittorrent socks5/a security).

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:03:30 -0600, H-Man wrote:

> All of this stuff is available and
> will work in Debian.

Given my main beef against the CentOS that I'm forced to have
on my desktop (for work reasons) is the tedious search for
software I need/want, you've (collectively) convinced me
that Debian has far more packages that I need than does CentOS.

I'll start RTFM'ing how to dual boot with Debian/Centus using grub.

Thanks!

[Bannon]

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:10:49 -0500, John Hasler wrote:

> All available in Unstable.

I'm going to go with Debian as the dual-boot solution!

Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can even put the menus on the sides
of the desktop without them becoming useless in the process!

:)

[William Poaster]

mike wrote:

> On 6/7/2013 8:20 AM, Aragorn wrote:

<snip "mike's" whining & bleating >

> It's about applicability to real-world users who don't wanna be gurus.

JeezUS, this guy's a moron. I wonder who tells him how to breathe.

> Just make the damn thing work!!

It *does* work, you ignorant windoze stooge.
*PLONK* in this group too .

--
Windows isn't a virus, viruses actually *do* something!

Linux is the scientific community’s operating system of choice.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is controlled by Linux.
NASA and SpaceX ground stations use Linux.
DNA-sequencing lab technicians use Linux.
Really, for applications that require absolute stability,
which most scientific experiments are, Linux is the obvious choice.
http://tinyurl.com/d9ta82o

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 07:56, mike conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> It's about applicability to real-world users who don't wanna be gurus.
> Users don't give a rat's about ideology. Just make the damn thing
> work!!

You have already been told ad nauseam that you approach things from a
consumerist end-user perspective, and that you are expecting GNU/Linux
to be a substitute for the consumerist end-user platform you are
accustomed to, while GNU/Linux was never intended to be such a
substitute.

GNU/Linux was intended as an alternative to proprietary UNIX - no more,
no less - and people accustomed to using proprietary UNIX have both
different needs and a different mindset from consumerist end-users.

GNU/Linux is not an operating system for you. You do not understand its
organization as a multi-user client/server operating system
architecture. You do not understand its development model. You also do
not understand its distribution mechanism, nor the reasons why it is
being distributed this way. You do not even understand that Free
Software is about freedom, rather than about gratis labor done by other
people - as you so cynically keep on telling the residents of
alt.os.linux.ubuntu.

All you ever do is criticize that which you do not understand, with the
arrogant footnote attached to it that you have no desire to learn and
understand, but that it should just "simply work", with the definition
of "simply work" being "exactly the same way as in Microsoft Windows".
This is what makes you into a Tim-troll, a term originating on Usenet
after your British and letter-spaced buddy from alt.os.linux.ubuntu and
alt.os.linux.mint, who instigated this type of trolling and has been
going on with that for the better part of (at least) three years
already.

GNU/Linux is for people who _want to use_ GNU/Linux [*], not for people
who want Microsoft Windows but don't agree with Microsoft's licensing or
are fed up with the bugs, instability and insecurity of Microsoft
Windows. Those people should complain to Microsoft so that Microsoft
would improve upon the quality of the platform to which they are selling
commercial licenses, and I wish them good luck in their efforts at
getting Microsoft to do anything right for a change.

GNU/Linux is free for use by everyone, but those who choose to use it
for more than a bit of web browsing and e-mailing are expected to be
willing to put in a bit of effort at trying to understand at least the
basics of both the operating system design on the one hand and the time-
proven mechanisms and philosophies behind its development and
distribution.

If you cannot be bothered with documenting yourself to that little
extent, then I'm sure Uncle Bill will be glad to take your money in
exchange for a computer operating system which offers remote access to
the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, US Homeland Security and the US Department of
Defense, not to mention Uncle Bill's little hacker shack over in
Redmond, Washington, USA.

[*] And if you and your letter-spaced friend want to call us
"hobbyists", then that's alright by us, given that your opinions on
operating system design, development and distribution are worth
exactly nothing at all. Mainframes, supercomputers and the loads of
dedicated scientific workstations at NASA or CERN are hardly what
anyone with a proper understanding of (or education in) IT would
call hobby material, but /we/ can live with /you/ calling it that.
/We/ are the ones who /do/ understand, and we're quite happy with
what it is and how it works.

> alt.os.linux.ideology would be a good place to start.

I don't even know whether that group really exists, and I'm not even
going to bother checking whether news.eternal-september.org carries it,
but if such a group really does exist, then at least your reference to
it here confirms that you acknowledge that GNU/Linux /does/ have an
ideology.

So perhaps you should attempt to /understand/ that ideology rather than
to barge in on the community and telling them that they should adopt
your consumerist end-user ideology and toss away a philosophy and
infrastructure which have both shown to work _very well_ for the last 20
years, _in spite of_ all the anticompetitive measures that Uncle Bill's
hacker shack in Redmond and their shills have tried to put in place so
as to kill off what they in their monopolistic and predatory view
perceive as a competing platform, just as they have done with DR DOS,
OS/2 and BeOS.

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 11:44, Caryn conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:15:25 +0000, Moe Trin wrote:
>
>> One can sort of differentiate between "Debian" and "Red Hat" derived,
>> "popular" verses "business" verses "hobby" verses Ghod only knows ...
>> ... Fedora is the ultra-bleeding-edge Alpha for RHEL.
>
> Looking at the linux trees, is this correct in simplicity?
> Popular: Debian ------> Ubuntu
> Business: RHEL -------> CentOS/Fedora

Apples and oranges. Ubuntu is a populist distribution based upon Debian
Unstable, whereas Debian Stable is just as usable by businesses as
RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS due to its reliability.

Fedora is an unstable bleeding edge testbed sponsored by RedHat, in
which RedHat lets the community do the dirty work of developing and
regression-testing the software before it gets deemed stable and
subsequently turned into a commercial and business-oriented product.
CentOS is the same thing as RedHat, but without the business support
contracts and the RedHat product branding.

>>> ... you can always recompile the source.
>
> Is compiling preferable to an RPM?

Only if there is no .rpm for the software you want to install, or when
the .rpm does not meet your needs - e.g. due to a serious bug.

The whole idea behind binary packages such as .rpm - or .deb for Debian
and derivatives - is that the user wouldn't need to bother going through
the process of compiling from sources, because compiling often includes
manual dependency handling and the installation of the required header
and source code packages - such packages commonly have the abridged term
"devel" in their package name. As such, for most users, installing the
.rpm - or .deb on Debian and derivatives - is the preferred and
recommended approach.

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 12:03, Bannon conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

If you search for local files on your system, your search is sent to
Canonical, who then anonymizes it by hiding your IP address from the
search, and then forwards the search request to Amazon. You will then
in turn be spammed on your desktop with commercial offers Amazon thinks
you'd be interested in when you're only searching for a file you've
saved somewhere. That's the mechanism.

The purpose is that Amazon pays money to Canonical for this chance to
spam you.

[Caryn]

On Sun, 09 Jun 2013 17:55:36 +0200, Aragorn wrote:

>> Is compiling preferable to an RPM?
>
> Only if there is no .rpm

Thanks.

[Caryn]

On Sun, 09 Jun 2013 17:55:36 +0200, Aragorn wrote:

>> Popular: Debian ------> Ubuntu
>> Business: RHEL -------> CentOS/Fedora
> Apples and oranges. Ubuntu is a populist distribution based upon Debian
> Unstable, whereas Debian Stable is just as usable by businesses as
> RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS due to its reliability.
>
> Fedora is an unstable bleeding edge

OK. How's this for a (corrected) succinct (oversimplified) summary of
the three major linux distros and their most common progeny?

1. Debian (stable desktop) -> Ubuntu (user friendly) or Kubuntu (KDE) or Knoppix (live)
2. Redhat (stable server) -> Centos (RHEL clone) or Fedora (bleeding edge)
3. SUSE (stable workstation) -> openSUSE (business) or SLED (desktop) or SLES (server)

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 12:01, Bannon conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

RedHat isn't necessarily a server-only operating system, as Bill
suggests. It is both a server and a workstation platform - they do
after all develop GNOME, remember? - but business-wise, RedHat as a
company has more of a focus on the server implementations. CentOS is
the exact same thing software-wise, but without the business support
contracts and the copyrighted RedHat product branding.

Debian is usable on both servers and desktops, and Ubuntu also exists in
a server-oriented version, but with the exception of the LTS ("long-term
support") releases, Ubuntu is always based upon Debian Unstable (alias
"Sid"). Ubuntu also does not use GNOME proper, but rather Unity, which
is a shell around GNOME 3 and which replaces the GNOME Shell.

Xubuntu is an Ubuntu desktop release with XFCE as its desktop
environment, and Lubuntu is an Ubuntu desktop release with LXDE as its
desktop environment. Both are officially sponsored by Canonical.
Kubuntu is a desktop-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu but with the
KDE desktop environment, and is no longer officially sponsored by
Canonical itself, but has in the meantime found another corporate
sponsor.

Linux Mint has now just released Mint 15 "Olivia", which is based upon
Ubuntu but has some differences, among which the Cinnamon desktop
environment, which is a fork of the GNOME 3 code base with the more
traditional WIMP paradigm of GNOME 2. Up until recently, Cinnamon used
the upstream GNOME 3 code base, but due to a number of decisions made by
RedHat with regard to the further evolution of GNOME, Mint has decided
to fork the code, so that it could be better attuned to the Cinnamon
environment. (RedHat has its own agenda and for all they care all other
distributions can simply go to hell.)

Mint also has an LMDE ("Linux Mint Debian Edition") release, which
sources its packages directly from Debian Stable, rather than from
Canonical/Ubuntu. Mint is also a so-called rolling release, so one
could in theory install any version of Mint and then upgrade to the
latest version by simply installing the updated packages from the
repositories. The idea is that a user who regularly updates their
packages will always be running the very latest release.

PCLinuxOS and Gentoo are also rolling release distributions, but they
are different from Debian and RedHat. PCLinuxOS has the RedHat base
layout and uses .rpm packages, but with Debian's apt-get package manager
and Synaptic as the GUI front-end to it, rather than with RedHat's yum
package manager.

Gentoo is a sources-based distribution, in which the user downloads uses
the Portage package manager to fetch source code packages and
automatically build and install them on the local machine, with
optimizations for both the underlying hardware and user-defined support
(or omission thereof) for certain other packages by way of USE flags.
Gentoo provides ample documentation - albeit that most of that is
already a bit dated by now - but it's not exactly a newbie-oriented
distribution, given the work involved in both installing and maintaining
the system. It is however a very interesting option for people who wish
to learn more about the innards of a GNU/Linux system in a hands-on
experience (and who want to really tailor their system to their own
needs and preferences) but without leaving them to their own devices
completely. It's definitely not a distribution for people with no sense
of responsibility over their own actions.

[John Hasler]

Aragorn writes:
> Ubuntu is always based upon Debian Unstable...

It is based on Debian Unstable but is by no means simply a copy of it.
--
John Hasler
jha...@newsguy.com
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 18:11, Caryn conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

First of all, openSUSE is a community distribution, so it's not
business-oriented. In fact, that's where SLED and SLES come in. Those
are the official business distributions - in desktop and server versions
respectively - and come with a support contract. So you had that one
backwards. ;-)

Secondly, I don't think that one can speak about "the three major
distributions", because it's not quite that simple. Independent
software vendors will often offer binary packages for Debian, RedHat,
SuSE and Ubuntu, but just as often you will find that they narrow that
down to only packages for RedHat proper and Debian proper, and such
packages /may/ then also work on respectively SuSE (or Mandriva, or
Mageia, et al) or Ubuntu (or Mint), but this is not guaranteed.

Furthermore, there is also Slackware, which doesn't really have any
native package format - they just use tarballs with binary files or else
they compile from sources - and Slackware also has quite a number of
derivative distributions, several of which come as Live CDs.

You can't really narrow it down too much. Every distribution has their
own reasons for being, whether it is based on another distribution, or
forked from another distribution, or offering an entirely new approach
altogether - as e.g. was the case with Gentoo, which uses a sources-
based approach after the example of the FreeBSD ports system.

The way I see it, the main two distinctions are "popular" and "I can
think for myself". "Popular" is what the masses prefer, with a little -
actually, quite a lot - of coaxing by computer magazines and other hype
queens. "Popular" also means "I'm an absolute n00b and I want to stay
one too", because those distributions do not encourage you to learn
anything new and keep you locked into the same dumbed down consumerist
paradigm as you get from Microsoft Inc.

"I can think for myself" is everything else. And among those, there are
many distributions which I would consider "sufficiently user-friendly",
but they do not disguise the fact that it isn't Microsoft Windows or
Apple OS X that you're staring at on your screen. They don't stand in
your way if you want to learn something and do more with your system
than what the typical household kitchen sink computer user does with it.

You may take all of the above with a grain of salt, because that's my
view on it all, and I'm not exactly the average Joe Sixpack. I'm not a
flock person; I follow my own path in life and in just about everything.
That's why I've never accepted Microsoft Windows as "the standard
operating system" for an x86-based computer, or MS-DOS before that. I
already knew of alternative operating systems long before I had a
computer of my own, and I was already running 32-bit OS/2 when other
people were still running DOS 5.0/6.x (with Windows 3.x) or Windows 95.

My only conscious decision to use Windows was Windows NT (when other
people were running Windows 95/98), and only as a compromise solution,
and then even still I only wasted two years on that. After that I
discovered GNU/Linux, and with it, the operating system I had always
wanted to have.

At the moment, I have two distributions installed on this machine here.
One is an older 32-bit PCLinuxOS installation - because that hard disk
came from another, broken computer, and I'm keeping it around as a
failsafe system - and the other is 64-bit Mageia 1. Mageia 1 is also
already old by now - the current release is Mageia 3 - but it suits my
needs and I have my own ways of securing my operating system. I do such
(now considered) exotic things as having the system installed across
multiple filesystems which all have distinct mount options, and I have
tweaked PAM and friends. All of those are things which used to be quite
common in the UNIX world several years ago, before the invasion of the
GNU/Linux world by lazy and demanding Windows refugees.

It is my experience and conviction that if you're going to introduce
absolute newbies to GNU/Linux way of distributions like Ubuntu or Mint,
then you're giving them a fish, but then you'll be feeding them fish for
the rest of your life. (Note: Canonical doesn't even want to identify
itself with the GNU/Linux community anymore, as it no longer refers to
its distribution as GNU/Linux, but rather as "the Canonical Operating
System".)

If on the other hand you introduce those newbies to GNU/Linux by way of
a decent quality distribution such as Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Debian or
openSUSE, then you're feeding them a fish for today, but at the same
time you're then also giving them a fishing course, and they will be
able to feed themselves from there on.

[Aragorn]

On Sunday 09 June 2013 18:45, John Hasler conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

> Aragorn writes:
>
>> Ubuntu is always based upon Debian Unstable...
>
> It is based on Debian Unstable but is by no means simply a copy of it.

No, of course not. I never meant to suggest that it was. Canonical has
its own agenda and thus it adapts the packages they source from Debian
to serve that particular agenda.

Ubuntu is Debian Unstable with the addition of Botox and silicone
implants. <grin>

[unruh]

On 2013-06-09, Caryn <Ca...@example.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:15:25 +0000, Moe Trin wrote:
>
>> One can sort of differentiate between "Debian" and "Red Hat" derived,
>> "popular" verses "business" verses "hobby" verses Ghod only knows ...
>> ... Fedora is the ultra-bleeding-edge Alpha for RHEL.
>
> Looking at the linux trees, is this correct in simplicity?
> Popular: Debian ------> Ubuntu
> Business: RHEL -------> CentOS/Fedora

No. Centos IS RHEL. They are identical except for some redhat logos
displayed on the screen. Fedora is redhat's "test bed" (read-- bug
finding distro). Redhat/centos may be geared toward business.

Debian is a full featured distro, and has everything including the
kitchen sink. Its official releases are designed to be stable, and thus
old. They will often not support the latest hardware. Ubuntu is built on
Debian but with much more eyecandy.

>
>>> ... you can always recompile the source.
>
> Is compiling preferable to an RPM?

If you find an rpm that works, use it. If you can recompile an rpm from
elsewhere, do that. That way the rpm database remains up to date. If you
cannot do either, compile from source.

>

[unruh]

On 2013-06-09, Bannon <ban...@is.invalid> wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:38:47 +0000, unruh wrote:
> Yet, that rebuild command failed on me more times than it worked! :(
> $ sudo rpmbuild --rebuild azureus-4.3.1.4-1.fc13.noarch.rpm
> REPORTED:

noarch is NOT src. That is NOT a source rpm. It is an text based stuff
rpm. Just install it.
DO NOT TRY TO COMPILE IT.