30 Sep
2015
30 Sep
'15
11:08 a.m.
From: Liam Proven
I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that modern
computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire computer
turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more complex
than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
However, one thing I am going to quibble with:
This is a nice explanatory quote:
The main reasons TempleOS is simple and beautiful are
because it's
ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ...
It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware
and you don't have
bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated.
Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's
network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable system
in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable
today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript,
etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs in
the local machine.
To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably the
worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's
_potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is
responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have
systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade
security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not
likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active
content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of
flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern
machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box...
Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine,
it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas.
You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people -
effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other
words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine.
(And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial
strength ones like Multics.)
Noel
30 Sep
30 Sep
11:38 a.m.
New subject: Active content [was Re: A new Lisp-based OS that hearkens back to the old days of comprehensible computers]
If you want to have a system that's
network-capable, which is pretty
much mandatory for a _really_ usable system in this day and age, i)
that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable today, it has to
be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, etc) -
i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs
in the local machine.
Fortunately, neither part of that is actually true, unless you swallow
today's mass-market propaganda that the Web is the Internet and the
Internet is the Web, the Web is the One True Interface for anyone to
anything, that the world is divided into content producers (large
companies) and content consumers (end users), and that the consumer is
obliged to tolerate whatever crap the producer feels like inflicting.
As a refutation to part (i), I offer two of the computers on my desk
today. I don't know whether they're Web-capable, because I've never
even tried to do anything Web with either one (I know they're
HTTP-capable, but it's an abuse of HTTP, since it's used to transport
config files rather than hypertext, and is not the Web). As I have
them configured, they speak SIP, RTP, FTP, and SNTP, and I think that's
it. I find them highly useful. (Well, one of them's broken at the
moment, but before it broke....)
As a refutation to part (ii), I point out that what little Web I do I
do with lynx, which (as I have it set up) does not support any kind of
active content - and I want it that way.
Perhaps you feel you "need" to do things that can't be done within that
paradigm. If so, this is because of your idea of "usable", which not
everyone shares.
To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active
content is
probably the worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the
mud.
I agree. That's why I will have no truck with it.
I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no
active content -
just text, images, etc, etc.
You can still live there, if you're willing to. I am - and, watching
over others' shoulders, I believe I am far happier this way than I
would be if I had the likes of Facebook and YouTube infesting my
"experience". (I do wish I could find a copy of Mosaic source,
though.)
Of course, like everything, it comes at a price. I find that price far
lower than the prices that would be involved in putting up with today's
mass-market Web.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
1:32 p.m.
New subject: Active content [was Re: A new Lisp-based OS that hearkens back to the old days of comprehensible computers]
Plus a million. You can still view my personal page and get the full
experience in Netscape 2.0, Mosaic and so forth :O
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
If you want to
have a system that's network-capable, which is pretty
much mandatory for a _really_ usable system in this day and age, i)
that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable today, it has to
be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, etc) -
i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs
in the local machine.
Fortunately, neither part of that is actually true, unless you swallow
today's mass-market propaganda that the Web is the Internet and the
Internet is the Web, the Web is the One True Interface for anyone to
anything, that the world is divided into content producers (large
companies) and content consumers (end users), and that the consumer is
obliged to tolerate whatever crap the producer feels like inflicting.
As a refutation to part (i), I offer two of the computers on my desk
today. I don't know whether they're Web-capable, because I've never
even tried to do anything Web with either one (I know they're
HTTP-capable, but it's an abuse of HTTP, since it's used to transport
config files rather than hypertext, and is not the Web). As I have
them configured, they speak SIP, RTP, FTP, and SNTP, and I think that's
it. I find them highly useful. (Well, one of them's broken at the
moment, but before it broke....)
As a refutation to part (ii), I point out that what little Web I do I
do with lynx, which (as I have it set up) does not support any kind of
active content - and I want it that way.
Perhaps you feel you "need" to do things that can't be done within that
paradigm. If so, this is because of your idea of "usable", which not
everyone shares.
To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO
active content is
probably the worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the
mud.
I agree. That's why I will have no truck with it.
I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was
no active content -
just text, images, etc, etc.
You can still live there, if you're willing to. I am - and, watching
over others' shoulders, I believe I am far happier this way than I
would be if I had the likes of Facebook and YouTube infesting my
"experience". (I do wish I could find a copy of Mosaic source,
though.)
Of course, like everything, it comes at a price. I find that price far
lower than the prices that would be involved in putting up with today's
mass-market Web.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
1:40 p.m.
You can still have a useful machine without it being connected to the
public Internet. Network access is indeed very important, Internet
connectivity, less so.
I too rue the loss of simplicity ... and this has been voiced by many
people much more luminous than I ... Ken Thompson, for one, has commented
about the size and complexity in contemporary UNIX implementations ... This
is one reason why I love Plan 9 so much ... it takes you back a little bit
to when it was a pleasure to bang out a little code and you don't have to
deal with so much nonsense to get a little application that actually does
something, built.
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
From: Liam
Proven
I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that
modern
computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire
computer
turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more
complex
than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
However, one thing I am going to quibble with:
This is a nice explanatory quote:
The main reasons TempleOS is simple and
beautiful are because it's
ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ...
It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
simple and unsecure. If you don't have
malware and you don't have
bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code
complicated.
Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's
network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable
system
in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable
today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript,
etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs
in
the local machine.
To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably
the
worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's
_potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is
responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have
systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade
security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not
likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active
content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of
flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern
machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box...
Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine,
it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas.
You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people -
effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other
words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine.
(And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial
strength ones like Multics.)
Noel
4:13 p.m.
On 30 September 2015 at 17:08, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here;
I too feel that modern
computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire computer
turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
Indeed so.
I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel
they are _more complex
than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
Absolutely -- and there is a *lot* of legacy stuff that we could do
away with now.
Even though I'm a former Red Hat employee, I have long favoured
Ubuntu. Fedora's always been way too bleeding-edge for me. However, I
approve of one change they made recently: they've merged /bin into
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin. I think they're merging
/usr/sbin and /usr/bin as well. The argument is that the root
filesystem is huge anyway, and there's no longer any benefit to having
them separated, the distinction not being clear in any case.
However, one thing I am going to quibble with:
Mere point of reference: Acorn RISC OS still has a small active user
community. Its primary native web browsers, Oregano and NetSurf, don't
have a document object model and don't run Javascript. There's an
elderly port of Firefox but it's not maintained or current -- the hero
developer of the RISC OS Unix porting tools got a job in the states
and had to abandon the project, and in the insular world of RISC OS,
nobody else really understands the importance of it.
So, the old-fashioned pre-Web 2.0 WWW is still useful. More than you
might expect.
This is a nice explanatory quote:
The main reasons TempleOS is simple and
beautiful are because it's
ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ...
It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
simple and unsecure. If you don't have
malware and you don't have
bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated.
Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's
network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable system
in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable
today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript,
etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs in
the local machine. To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active
content is probably the
worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud.
Just out of curiosity -- who? I can't place it.
It's
_potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is
responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have
systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade
security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not
likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active
content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of
flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern
machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box...
All agreed with!
But OTOH a machine whose lowest level isn't a C-like language is in
principle immune to buffer overflows, stack-smashing, etc.
Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want
a networked machine,
it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas.
Conceded.
You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_
of other people -
effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other
words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine.
(And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial
strength ones like Multics.)
:-)
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
5:20 p.m.
On 9/30/2015 3:13 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 30 September 2015 at 17:08, Noel Chiappa <jnc at
mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I generally agree about the distros - the issue for me wasn't so much
that Fedora is "bleeding edge" but more that patch support only lasts
around a year, as compared to Ubuntu LTS.
As for the directories, some of what you wrote confused me a little
(e.g. and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin seems to be a NOP. ;) I suspect
/sbin was supposed to appear in there somewhere... ).
Anyway, there was more to this than just the location of the
directories. The original idea of the "sbin" directories that they were
only in root's path, and not in the path of ordinary users. So one
side-effect of this change will be commands that used to be less visible
to ordinary users (and their command completion) will now be visible.
Also, historically, /bin was that which was necessary for the system to
boot and run - predates even the existence of the sbins.
They had also better make sure that they put in links from the
"deprecated" directories to where the stuff actually ended up, or they
will break *tons* of shell scripts.
Finally, I expect this will break a *ton* of ./configure scripts for
software installation.
Overall, I am not so sure this is such a great idea.
JRJ
I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints
here; I too feel that modern
computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire computer
turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
Indeed so.
I like the functionality of modern system, but I
feel they are _more complex
than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
Absolutely -- and there is a *lot* of legacy stuff that we could do
away with now.
Even though I'm a former Red Hat employee, I have long favoured
Ubuntu. Fedora's always been way too bleeding-edge for me. However, I
approve of one change they made recently: they've merged /bin into
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin. I think they're merging
/usr/sbin and /usr/bin as well. The argument is that the root
filesystem is huge anyway, and there's no longer any benefit to having
them separated, the distinction not being clear in any case.
5:50 p.m.
Just the whole idea of so many Linux distributions makes me bang my head
against the coffee table. One thing I greatly admire about the *BSD
projects has been the strong arm of unification, all contributors are
working towards one goal... It just so happened that Linux was the "free
UNIX that took off" (just like i386 was the "architecture that won") and
we
have to live with the repercussions of that in IT ops every day for better
or for worse ... But that's just my two cents and no more ... I know this
topic can get religious! :O
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:
On 9/30/2015 3:13 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
complex
I generally agree about the distros - the issue for me wasn't so much
that Fedora is "bleeding edge" but more that patch support only lasts
around a year, as compared to Ubuntu LTS.
As for the directories, some of what you wrote confused me a little
(e.g. and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin seems to be a NOP. ;) I suspect
/sbin was supposed to appear in there somewhere... ).
Anyway, there was more to this than just the location of the
directories. The original idea of the "sbin" directories that they were
only in root's path, and not in the path of ordinary users. So one
side-effect of this change will be commands that used to be less visible
to ordinary users (and their command completion) will now be visible.
Also, historically, /bin was that which was necessary for the system to
boot and run - predates even the existence of the sbins.
They had also better make sure that they put in links from the
"deprecated" directories to where the stuff actually ended up, or they
will break *tons* of shell scripts.
Finally, I expect this will break a *ton* of ./configure scripts for
software installation.
Overall, I am not so sure this is such a great idea.
JRJ
On 30 September 2015 at 17:08, Noel Chiappa
<jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
> I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that
modern
> computers are too complex, etc. (Although
some of it, like the entire
computer
turning
into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
Indeed so.
> I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more than they
need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
Absolutely -- and there is a *lot* of legacy stuff that we could do
away with now.
Even though I'm a former Red Hat employee, I have long favoured
Ubuntu. Fedora's always been way too bleeding-edge for me. However, I
approve of one change they made recently: they've merged /bin into
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin. I think they're merging
/usr/sbin and /usr/bin as well. The argument is that the root
filesystem is huge anyway, and there's no longer any benefit to having
them separated, the distinction not being clear in any case.
6:42 p.m.
On 09/30/2015 02:50 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
Just the whole idea of so many Linux distributions
makes me bang my
head against the coffee table. One thing I greatly admire about the
*BSD projects has been the strong arm of unification, all
contributors are working towards one goal... It just so happened that
Linux was the "free UNIX that took off" (just like i386 was the
"architecture that won") and we have to live with the repercussions
of that in IT ops every day for better or for worse ... But that's
just my two cents and no more ... I know this topic can get
religious! :O
I find that most of the difference between Linuces lies in the GUI, not
in the "guts" of the system. Many, if not, most use a Debian-based
kernel with other stuff bolted on--and even that's not cast in Sakrete.
I'm sitting at a system now running Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop (I
can't stand Unity). At the command-line level, there's little that's
substantially different among Linuces.
Anent BSD, you'll find considerable differences in approaches to OpenBSD
compared with FreeBSD. OpenBSD is conservative to the point of being
almost paranoid, an approach I greatly admire. OpenBSD management seems
to despise virtualization in any form, so no Wine for you, much less
VirtualBox. Ftp is not officially supported, etc. Compared to OpenBSD,
FreeBSD is a painted whore.
It's been a long time since I've updated my systems with NetBSD, so it's
hard to say much there.
Linux is getting to be (or has gotten to be) the host of the latest
shiny toy. They no longer support older chipsets, such as the VIA 8237A
nothbridge (it was just ripped out without commentary, so you have no
hard disk access). The BSDs--and even Windows seem to have kept it.
--Chuck
8:34 p.m.
Well, it's all the same Linux kernel; for each branch of each distribution,
they pick a kernel train they want to run with and then backport patches as
required for security or device driver support from more modern kernels ...
Nothing to stop you from running X kernel (or Z window manager) on Y
distribution, generally. The primary differentiator is really the packaging
scheme; whether it uses the Debian style (*.deb) or the Red Hat (*.rpm)
style or perhaps something more basic (*.tar.gz) like Slackware.
While there are a few "forks" of BSD, there never was a proliferation of
various "distributions"; that is to say, there is only one, definitive
FreeBSD, one, definitive NetBSD and one, definitive OpenBSD. All are
significantly stripped of crud out of the box compared to Linux.
Ironically, I had to migrate a few of my home servers _to_ Linux _from_
FreeBSD (with some reticence) because FreeBSD dropped support for my Fore
PCA-200E cards and I didn't want to stop running OC-3 MM ATM at home :O
I do still run some FreeBSD systems at home but just as ESXi VMs.
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 09/30/2015 02:50 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
Just the whole idea of so many Linux
distributions makes me bang my
head against the coffee table. One thing I greatly admire about the
*BSD projects has been the strong arm of unification, all
contributors are working towards one goal... It just so happened that
Linux was the "free UNIX that took off" (just like i386 was the
"architecture that won") and we have to live with the repercussions
of that in IT ops every day for better or for worse ... But that's
just my two cents and no more ... I know this topic can get
religious! :O
I find that most of the difference between Linuces lies in the GUI, not in
the "guts" of the system. Many, if not, most use a Debian-based kernel
with other stuff bolted on--and even that's not cast in Sakrete. I'm
sitting at a system now running Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop (I can't stand
Unity). At the command-line level, there's little that's substantially
different among Linuces.
Anent BSD, you'll find considerable differences in approaches to OpenBSD
compared with FreeBSD. OpenBSD is conservative to the point of being
almost paranoid, an approach I greatly admire. OpenBSD management seems to
despise virtualization in any form, so no Wine for you, much less
VirtualBox. Ftp is not officially supported, etc. Compared to OpenBSD,
FreeBSD is a painted whore.
It's been a long time since I've updated my systems with NetBSD, so it's
hard to say much there.
Linux is getting to be (or has gotten to be) the host of the latest shiny
toy. They no longer support older chipsets, such as the VIA 8237A
nothbridge (it was just ripped out without commentary, so you have no hard
disk access). The BSDs--and even Windows seem to have kept it.
--Chuck
1 Oct
1 Oct
7:45 a.m.
On 1 October 2015 at 02:34, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote:
While there are a few "forks" of BSD, there
never was a proliferation of
various "distributions"; that is to say, there is only one, definitive
FreeBSD, one, definitive NetBSD and one, definitive OpenBSD. All are
significantly stripped of crud out of the box compared to Linux.
Well, there's one OpenBSD and one NetBSD.
Off the top of my head, FreeBSD has begotten:
* DragonflyBSD
* m0n0wall
* PC-BSD
* GhostBSD
* NeXT BSD
From some cursory research, there are also:
*
MidnightBSD
* pfSense
* FreeSBIE
* DesktopBSD
Whether FreeNAS and NAS4Free count is open to interpretation.
There are others, too.
I have played with PC-BSD and GhostBSD, both of which I quite liked
but found too minimal for me compared to Linux. I thought MidnightBSD
was dead but apparently there's recently been a new release, which I
shall investigate.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
10:48 a.m.
Who knew? Not me :O But those are all kind of "piddly" (sorry) ... I don't
think they have much "mindshare" or very many actual installations compared
to the top-line FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD ... and those BSD repackagers
don't have so much potential influence to argue over the basic direction of
*BSD, versus say, Red Hat might have with Linux ...
I would consider some like m0n0wall and pfSense exceptions because the goal
of the project is really to provide a pre-rolled security appliance rather
than an OS distribution proper ... same reason I wouldn't call PIAF a Linux
distribution, just a pre-rolled Asterisk appliance.
Best,
Sean
On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 1 October 2015 at 02:34, Sean Caron <scaron at
umich.edu> wrote:
While there are a few "forks" of BSD,
there never was a proliferation of
various "distributions"; that is to say, there is only one, definitive
FreeBSD, one, definitive NetBSD and one, definitive OpenBSD. All are
significantly stripped of crud out of the box compared to Linux.
Well, there's one OpenBSD and one NetBSD.
Off the top of my head, FreeBSD has begotten:
* DragonflyBSD
* m0n0wall
* PC-BSD
* GhostBSD
* NeXT BSD
From some cursory research, there are also:
* MidnightBSD
* pfSense
* FreeSBIE
* DesktopBSD
Whether FreeNAS and NAS4Free count is open to interpretation.
There are others, too.
I have played with PC-BSD and GhostBSD, both of which I quite liked
but found too minimal for me compared to Linux. I thought MidnightBSD
was dead but apparently there's recently been a new release, which I
shall investigate.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
3 Oct
3 Oct
11:40 a.m.
Don't top-quote!
On 1 October 2015 at 16:48, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote:
Who knew? Not me :O
Exactly.
But my point was, _yes_, there _are_ lots of *BSD distributions. You
not knowing about them doesn't change that!
But those are all kind of "piddly" (sorry)
...
Not really, no. PC-BSD is over a decade old and is quite popular, for
instance. I also suspect that some of the firewall distros are
widely-used, but they're like the old Linux-based SmoothWall: get it
right, they're close to fit-and-forget, so you see little to no noise
online of the form of "how do I do X?" because you don't do anything
with them.
I don't
think they have much "mindshare" or very many actual installations compared
to the top-line FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD ...
[[citation needed]]
Is this because you hadn't heard of them?
and those BSD repackagers
don't have so much potential influence to argue over the basic direction of
*BSD, versus say, Red Hat might have with Linux ...
RH is not Linux.
You know I worked for RH until last year, right?
Nobody has that much control over Linux as a whole. The small-dev-team
thing is part of the appeal of *BSD for many.
But some of the distros introduce their own packaging formats and so
on. Yes, they are significantly different.
I'm not trying to be offensive, Sean, it just seems like you don't
know much about this but aren't prepared to back down and admit that.
I would consider some like m0n0wall and pfSense
exceptions because the goal
of the project is really to provide a pre-rolled security appliance rather
than an OS distribution proper ... same reason I wouldn't call PIAF a Linux
distribution, just a pre-rolled Asterisk appliance.
Depends. As I said, I think the changes in the config-file structure
of m0n0wall are so big and drastic that it definitely counts as a
significantly different project.
Another sort-of related project springs to mind:
Minix 3.
Minix 3 is a whole new OS, an actual honest-to-hypothetical-deity FOSS
microkernel Unix-compatible OS. And it is gradually importing much of
the NetBSD userland, piece by piece. So in time, Minix 3 will be very
BSD-like, but with a genuinely new type of kernel. That's radical and
arguably makes it a member of the BSD family.
--
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1 Oct
1 Oct
1:11 p.m.
On Thu, 1 Oct 2015, Liam Proven wrote:
* m0n0wall
Isn't m0n0wall just a LiveCD for a firewall? It was when I used it last.
g.
--
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3 Oct
3 Oct
11:33 a.m.
On 1 October 2015 at 19:11, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:
On Thu, 1 Oct 2015, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, yes. Discontinued this year but has surviving forks t1n1wall and
SmallWall.
The interesting thing about m0n0wall technically, AIUI, is that it had
removed almost all config files from /etc and everywhere else and
stored all config in a single XML file, administered via a remote GUI
written in PHP. This is pretty significant divergence from Unix
standards, so in my view, counts as an interesting distro, yes -- even
if a single-person one.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
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* m0n0wall
Isn't m0n0wall just a LiveCD for a firewall? It was when I used it last. 
2 Oct
2 Oct
12:31 a.m.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 01:45:27PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, there's one OpenBSD and one NetBSD.
Off the top of my head, FreeBSD has begotten:
FreeBSD keeps a "BSD family tree" chart in ASCII. Of course it is
not complete, and open to disagreement.
But here it is from the commit repo:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/misc/bsd-family-tree?view=markup
mcl
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