On 13 June 2016 at 18:43, Brendan Shanks <brendan at bslabs.net> wrote: That's a good guess. Looking it up... http://lowendmac.com/1993/centris-660av-quadra-660av/ ... that looks like a 6100 case, so maybe someone re-cycled part of a case cover or something? A decade later, I'm still sad and annoyed that I missed a Quadra 840AV on my local South London Freecycle group. I'd always wanted one. I did have a Quadra 650, though. Lovely machine. I sold it when I left the country -- I no longer own a house, so I don't have the space. :-( I kept a beige G3 or two. I will revive and restore them at some point, and keep the best and sell the rest. They'll at least use EIDE drives, cheap plentiful SD-RAM and can run (elderly versions of) OS X, which makes it dramatically easier to get stuff on and off them, either by Internet or by disk, especially USB disk. It feels a tad dishonest, like cheating, but it's far easier to fire up 10.3, fetch something off the Web or a thumbdrive or something, unpack it, then reboot into MacOS 9 and actually use it, than it is to get access to that stuff direct from classic MacOS. -- 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)

On 13 June 2016 at 20:18, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: Might have got it like that & never noticed...? That's very true. I've never used a live A/UX system and badly want a play. Tempted to try Shoebill... https://github.com/pruten/shoebill ... but emulators aren't the same. I guess so -- I don't know all the models that well. There are also US-model Macs that always remained very scarce in Europe. The G3 All-in-One is an example -- I've never seen one in the flesh. I can see that. To this day, I don't consider OS X to be the _real_ Mac experience. I like it well enough -- I'm typing on it right now, on a Macintel with an original ADB keyboard. It's a nice OS, I like and appreciate the NeXTstep heritage, but it's not a _proper_ Mac. But I spent real money -- very very rare for me -- on upgrading an old 7600 or 7700 I got for free to run OS X 10.0, to get to know the new OS. More RAM, G3 upgrade, EIDE controller, etc. Then I got a free Blue'n'White and it was my main machine for a while. Then I switched to Linux full-time and never looked back. Me too, although I'd not call my s/w collection massive. But the snag is that 68K means SCSI, and SCSI is a pain when it doesn't work. It also means AAUI, ADB, weird monitors, etc. The G3 era meant more standard bits, but the beige machines are still a classic Mac. They'll take a cheap PCI USB card, you can use vanilla USB mice, with a graphics card a standard monitor, etc. -- but they're still _Macs_. They boot to a happy (or sad) Mac, and they run Classic. The last Mac that was vaguely a Mac, for me, was the Blue'n'White. All modern and it used PC componentry, but it has an ADB port. (And Firewire.) When ADB went away, soon after, classic MacOS went away, and then, they're just weird PCs with (briefly) weird processors that only run a weird Unix (or Linux). Nice boxes, but they don't feel all that Mac-like to me. The Beige machines have a foot in both eras -- they take, or can take, PC hardware, but they're proper classic Macs with Mac firmware and can run both the actual Apple Mac OSes. I can understand that. Also a point. Yes, true. An OS I still miss, for all its instability and quirkiness. I'd love to see a modern FOSS recreation, at least of the concept and the style, even if it was binary-incompatible. I wish the Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project -- 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)

The spatial Finder. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "I'd love to go out with you, but I have to floss my parakeet." ------------

On Jun 13, 2016, at 8:52 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote: I can?t agree enough. For what it?s worth, in recent versions of the Mac OS if you have the toolbar turned off in Finder it mostly functions in a spatial way, but there are glitches that wreck your folder layouts and positioning from time to time. -- ...although, I could be wrong... Ryan Eisworth - Brenham, TX, USA

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 04:51:43PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: [...] Not that I'm any fan of Windows, but don't NTFS junctions do this? They're a kind of cross-volume hard link.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2016 10:05 AM Subject: Re: Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label? On 15 June 2016 at 17:23, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote: Honestly, I'm not sure. But if they do, Explorer doesn't know about it, and Windows shortcuts don't do any of it. Even plain old symlinks are more capable than shortcuts; only Explorer really understands them and not always then. ================== Shortcuts, Junctions, Hard links and Symbolic links, all different. Symbolic links are the only ones that can span different volumes AFAIK. m

It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated: So did the Amiga and it didn't have the baggage of drive letters. Okay, so it had drive names. Instead of A:\path\to\file it had: DF0:path/to/file But you also had logical drive names. Give the drive the name "Fred" and you could reference a file as: Fred:path/to/file A nice side effect is that if there was no disk with the name of "Fred" installed, AmigaOS would pop up a dialog box asking for the user to insert the disk named "Fred". It wouldn't matter what physical drive you popped the disk into, AmigaOS would find it. And, if you copied the files off the disk Fred to the harddrive, say: DH1:applications/local/fred you could do assign Fred=DH1:applications/local/fred and there you go. I find that nicer than environment variables in that it's invisible to applications---the OS handles it for you. And while on Unix, the shell will expand environment variables, individual applications (say, an editor) vary on support for such expansions. Personally, I like CLIs, but I'm used to them from the start. And for some work flows, I find its faster and easier than a graphical system. Then why even bother with DR-DOS then? -spc

On Tue, 14 Jun 2016, Liam Proven wrote: He claimed to be the original owner, and he was a teacher. He probably got it as part of some educational program, maybe it was used then. I dunno. Maybe it was at a school that had a lot of macs and they robbed a case cover from a dead one. It's weird, but I'm okay with weird. I still haven't either. I've got it, and I'm dorking around trying to get my hardware straight (still waiting on AAUI 10BT dongles and a few other bits of kit). Fortunately, it's easy to get a hold on from places like Mac Garden, et al. They have ISOs for NextSTEP and OpenSTEP, too. I'd like to try those on my Quadra 700. I just ordered an extra SCSI2SD for that guy. PS: I like the word "kit" to describe "gear". I hope I'm using it right. I also prefer "grey" over "gray". I hope you British folks don't mind an American bootlegging those terms. Oh, and I'm drinking some Earl Grey. :-) I like emulators for "helping" with real hardware. Ie.. making disks or disk images, transferring files, etc.. However, I'm with you, emulators aren't as fun. They are awesome tools, and they are *some* fun, just not as much as the real thing for me. Well, you guys had Acorn and I never got to play with those, much. Shame that there wasn't more import/export of such things, since more is better. :-) I can't really back up that position, but I totally agree. Not that I have anything "against" OSX. It at least doesn't have an identity-complex that Linux does. It's just it's own thing. They have SUS and UNIX 03 standards conformance, but they don't pretend like they are focused on being a UNIX variant. Apple just goes it's own way and everyone hopes for the best. It's GUI is just it's own unique creation with some very loose visual (and strong code-based) connections back to NeXTSTEP, and has a quality and value all it's own. Linux+systemd desperately wants to be Windows nowadays but adherents still get offended when UNIX purists frown at their "unification" efforts (ala systemd and others) which de-emphasize KISS, small-is-beautiful, make everything a filter, etc... Linux wants to cop that cool, without any binding respect towards the UNIX philosophy. Linux seems the most engaged in the "re-invent it poorly" activity that is so emblematic of why a lot of folks are leaving. Most technologists I know who were long time Linux users are now fleeing to BSD or elsewhere. I read someone say recently of OSX, BSD, and Linux: "Where does Linux belong? OSX makes a far superior workstation and BSD is better on servers. Why do I need Linux again?" I very much agree with the spirit of those questions. That's one thing I liked about IRIX. It's still a true UNIX variant, not "based on UNIX". The GUI is old-looking and primitive by today's standards, but still I think they struck a nice balance or at least one that appeals to me, personally. When it comes to GUI operating systems, I want them to drink the whole bottle of GUI kool-aid. Classic MacOS did that, IMHO. It was totally a desktop OS and didn't try to bifurcate to also make a good server. Hence, Apple turning to A/UX and AIX back in those days for servers. Do you normally just find free stuff or grab folks cast-off items ? The stuff I find cool is too rare and too many other geeks liked. I paid about $150 for the Quadra 700 recently. Most were selling well above that level, but mine didn't have a HDD included (no big deal with SCSI2SD, baby). I see B&W Macs on Craigslist a lot and for cheap. I want a machine of that generation, too. However, I haven't decided which one, yet. The only PPC box that ever caught my eye was the G4 cube. I see a lot of those on Ebay, but I'm kind of waiting to catch one locally. I too used Linux from 1993 to about 1997. Then, the more I learned about BSD, the more I liked it. Hordes were flooding in to use Linux by then, so I bailed out. I haven't really run Linux as a workstation since then. I'm a current RHCE and I still interact with Linux a ton at my job, but there is little joy in it. I find myself pursing my lips and shaking my head a lot while fixing systemd problems or working on some dirty PoS of a JBOSS server. It was a nice well when it was first dug, but now it's fouled by too many people and too much toxic admixture. There is so much "free stuff" online these days for M68k Macs. You can get just about _anything_ you ever remembered or wanted and it's all considered "abandonware". For me, these "productivity" programs don't change much. A word processor from 1993 is just as good for my purposes as one from 2016. Photoshop still has layers and channels in 5.5, etc.. It sure can be. It's made worse by the stupid stupid fact that Apple's disk utilities don't recognize non-Apple devices without a patch. There are a lot of chicken & egg problems to solve until you can get that FTP client installed. Then it's smooth sailing. :-) AAUI == Pita. Yet another ugly dongle, too, ugh. I got a Farallon Nubus ethernet card for the Quadra because of this. Unless I'm dealing with fiber, I hate AUIs, MAUs, etc... ADB == Not too big of a deal since KB & mice are still plentiful. However, it's disappointing that there aren't easily accessible converters for PS/2 and USB. RGB == Another PITA, but at least VGA HD15 converters are cheap and work well. Those sound a lot easier to cope with. If it wasn't for my love for the 68k, I'd have probably gone that direction, too. Like I said before, I'll probably still get one just to use as a "bridge" for the older gear. Maybe I can get a cheap G4 laptop and avoid sucking up too much more space in my retrolab. Yep. I agree. Perhaps getting too used to the older interface and dynamics pre-biased me. That would be great. Did you hear about Apple making the marketing change of my brain still dreamed that Apple would license the classic MacOS to a hobbyist shop to continue with new releases etc.. That would have made things a lot more interesting in the 1990s. Windows seems pretty unassailable, but the public can be fickle. I've always wondered why companies don't make operating systems for free, then sell licensing rights, partner deals, driver development, etc... Either you can't make enough $$$ that way, or the draw of charging for the OS is just too lucrative. I'm not sure which it is. -Swift

On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Liam Proven wrote: Whoa. I didn't know that. You are right. I'll have to convert to using "kit" exclusively next time I'm in the UK. I'm usually just in Heathrow or Gatwick waiting to fly out to Oslo. I still have some friends in Norway I visit every 5-10 years. They speak British English, too. So, for all I know they might think the same in Oslo. However, I don't remember hearing that particular term there when I lived in Norway about 15 years ago. However, I lived in a little town called Moss, and there wasn't much in the way of hard drugs to talk about, hehe. :-) Rock on. That sounds fun. Those are some cute little micros. I cite the similarities between 'svchost' and 'systemd'. Despite the desperate hand-waving that they are "nothing alike" or "have completely different functions" by systemd apologists, my opinion is that they are *extremely* similar in both form and function and those people just don't like that the truth hurts and wears and ugly M$ mask, to add further insult. They want to duck, obfuscate, or deny the fact that Linux just made the exact same *mistake*. In fact, systemd probably has even more functionality centralized and rolled into one set of tools than 'svchost' does. I don't mean to attack you or your opinions, Liam. I'm just explaining my basis for the statement about Linux wanting to be Windows, nowadays. While that's probably an exaggeration, it's still got some nasty and uncomfortable similarities. That's a good and healthy perspective. I think the core problem with the systemd drama is that it's created a schism in an area that some naive folks like me thought there could/would never be one. Politicians, business weasels, mafiosos, and lawyers are the ones who are supposed to have these kinds of ugly disagreements, not geeks. That was my mindset, I think. It's shocked me quite a bit to see the whole thing go down and to understand that there was a "new breed" of folks who saw discarding the UNIX philosophy as a natural progression, not a denigration or regression of first principles. Hmm, that's hard to argue with as I think of the commercial variants. However, I think the BSDs have stayed out of this trap and devised some fairly clever strategies (like ports/pkgsrc) to keep them above the fray and true to their values. However, there are three projects (net/free/open) and if one goes off the rails, it's easy to turn to the others. However, if we are talking about Solaris 11 or AIX 7.2, okay yah, having to ship your OS on a DVD is pulling your RV into Stupidtown and staying parked. Right there with you. My last NetBSD -current install a week or two ago was @280M (full install, uncompressed). So, there are still very lightweight choices available. Well, I work with both consulting gigs and direct client support for other Linux admins. So, I directly work with systemd and with users who struggle with it. I've written some in depth documentation for systemd. It's about the same from the user point of view. I mean, "service mysqld start" isn't much different from "systemctl start mysqld". If you mean that it'd be easier for a user to setup a unit file than a script; probably so. However, most packages/software come with a script or unit file anyway (or both in some cases). I don't think systemd is significantly easier or harder for users, honestly. It's just different at that level. It's what's under the hood and the way it was done that's more controversial. Well, I respect your opinion, but I think you might be missing my particular point. They might see what they are doing as "moving on", but folks who revere and respect UNIX as a set of ideas see that as a betrayal of those ideas. Ie.. like saying you are "moving on" from your wife to your mistress. It's definitely a change, but it's also breaking faith with someone who trusted you. Right or wrong, justified or not, that's how a lot of people felt. Also, the underlying point that I was really trying to make is that I get a sense from newly minted Linux zealots that they don't feel they've done anything "against" the UNIX way, they see their actions as coherent with it. I would disagree if I could catch my breath and stop laughing at them. I think they are deluding themselves for the sake of trying to hold on to some cache' associated with UNIX. That's an association that Linux deserves less than it did pre-systemd (again, my opinion, not trying to state it as a fact). Heck at this point, Linux is probably more well known than UNIX is, so why do folks get so butthurt & riled when some old "greybeards" like myself or Brian Kernighan look askance at their latest dramas and threaten to take away their UNIX card (speaking figuratively of course) ? My answer on offer is "Because UNIX has some street cred that Linux users want to (at this point falsely) lay claim to." That's my real point. Well, neither am I, really. It's just super-uber-geek stuff and probably a tempest in a teacup to everyone else. Linux has incredible momentum right now. So, does Windows. TBH, most of the folks who made a big show of flouncing off were already gone. I walked away from Linux a long time before systemd exited the collective Linux colon. I'd imagine most people making noise about systemd probably did the same. So, you are right, it probably didn't polarize anyone who wasn't already there. However, it's like watching an ex-girlfriend start dating a drug dealer. You don't really care *that* much, but you still shake your head and wonder what happened. Hmm, it's pretty hard to say for sure. I did see a noticeable (not huge) influx of pretty hardcore Linux users show up on the FreeBSD forums and mailing lists during the hottest parts of the systemd drama. However, I'd hesitate to call that anything but anecdotal. Then again, for me it's always been quality over quantity. So, if only a handful did jump ship and move to BSD, well... it's probably the handful we wanted. The rest of them not only can stay with Linux, they really really should stay there. It goes back to the pristine-beach example where if you find a pristine beach, you might think twice about building an easy road to get there and trying to tell everyone about it. Otherwise, it's not going to be pristine for long, and will eventually morph into something you hate, with a McDonalds and a Disney gift shop out there. It won't just be other nature lovers visiting for long. That's a fair point. Also, I was repeating/quoting something I'm seeing on forums and Reddit, I'm not sure I'd agree that OSX + BSD encompass the ultimate solution to all problems either. There are definitely some people who feel more comfortable with those values. Plus, Linux is free and that has a ton of value that OSX can't compete with also. Schoolkids in 3rd world countries are much better served by Linux than OSX, as far as I can tell. The Apple hardware and licensing is just too expensive for some uses. I should have been more specific and said "some feel like it's better for servers." In reality, I'll be realistic here, it's not "better" it's just different. I regularly work with Linux servers with many years of uptime on them. I see it run very stable and securely in the majority of jobs people put it to. FreeBSD also lacks a lot of features vis-a-vis Linux. The LVM2 feature list is longer than GEOM's, DRBD is more functional than HAST. The majority of the LVM code in NetBSD is ported over from Linux and they shaved a few features there, too. Linux supports many more graphics cards and weird server hardware. So, there is *definitely* going to be places that, in practical terms, Linux might be a great choice and even "better" than FreeBSD. I don't think for a minute that my horror at systemd changes any of the latter facts. It's a value-system thing for me, personally. I don't have the hubris to believe it's bigger than that. I won't argue that one bit. I agree. However, I don't think any of the points I'm trying to make are either validated nor repudiated by the sheer volume that Linux gets used. It's a value-system argument by a specialist to other specialists. To an Android or set-top-box user, all this is laughable. They could care less and I get that. Sure, but as a desktop or server OS, Android, oh man, I don't even know where to start. I'll just say that you won't find me buying any Android desktops or servers in the near future, no matter how many lemmings run off that particular cliff. I like my illusion of *some* privacy, too, but I digress. I wholeheartedly agree and quietly hope that it stays that way. Hordes of humans don't tend to improve things. There is a sweet spot that BSD hits nicely for me. Remember all the talk by Linux users about "world domination" ? I say "Be careful what you wish for." They basically have achieved world-renown and, as you point out, MASSIVE popularity beyond most peoples expectations. However, large-scale-adoption doesn't buy you street cred with everybody. I'm not a Beyonce' fan, either, and she's hella popular. Some people have a more specific value scale. The world might not care, but that's cool, we don't care about the world, either. :-) Well, you have very reasonable attitude. I'm guessing to most people, you sound much more enlightened on the topic. I'm sure I probably come across as "raving" or like some kind of inflexible purist. Again, this all comes down to first principles, not a contest about what gets the most use and adoption. The value associated wide adoption isn't something germane to my assessment of worth in this case. Yes. IRIX is dead as a doornail. Also, with the way it died, I'd give about 1000:1 odds of any legal form of IRIX ever re-surfacing. However, I noticed that the source is floating around several places. Maybe some illegal/hobbyist/illicit stuff might eventually see the light, but I doubt it. It seems to me even the forums on Nekochan are slowing down. I still use it and love it, and I have no problems securing it for "real world" stuff. However, it's nothing but a hobby, nowadays. Yes, and I wish both of those projects well. I've actually donated money to both projects. Like you, I like lots of OS's floating around. My world would be terribly boring with just one or two. Cool; you're a true scrounger, then! I might have been tempted to try that, but my nostalgia always seems to come a day late and a dollar short. They gear is always rare and priced-up by the time I care. SGIs were the only thing I was smart enough to horde up at the time they were cheap and current. Macs, Amigas, etc.. I have to revisit on Ebay. :-/ That definitely saves on space. However, I tend to keep laptops in bags with all the other kit that comes with them. So, nowadays I have to consider the size of the bag not just the laptop. When I do that, sometimes a small desktop can still make sense. However, not in this case. I've had to purge some other stuff to make room. I got rid of some junk PCs and monitors. The RGB monitors for the 68k Macs take serious space. I only have one right now. It's the AppleVision 14" that came with this 660AV. I thought it was junk, but it's really just beat up. The real problem was the PRAM battery. Once I replaced that, the machine booted up fine and the monitor powers on once it sees the video signal. It's a bit out of focus, but I took the cover off and adjusted the pots on the CRT logic board to my liking. It looks very nice, now. Cool. That's longer than me. I started in 1992 with HPUX, then 1993 with Linux, then @1997 or so with BSD and went nuts with tons of other variants, too. That was my "UNIX World Tour" time (the mid-1990s). I wanted to learn them ALL (and I'm still trying). I've been pretty obsessed with UNIX since day-one. It was definitely love at first sight. Hmm. I think you'd fly right through it, Liam. You are a smart guy, I doubt you'd have any significant problems these days. Still, it's a console-based install. FreeBSD guys know that it's really damn hard do a graphical install on a machine that's setup on a serial mux. I think OS vendors radically underestimate how many machines are in that configuration. Since I work with customers who have fairly large data centers, I see that all the time. However, I know that the character based installation puts a lot of people off. I do, nonetheless revel in the fact that it's still that way. Also, if you haven't seen the new 'pkg' (package management tool ala 'apt-get') that's come out for FreeBSD in the last few years, I think you'd be impressed. It's extremely solid. Still, it's definitely not for everyone. I got that impression a bit from some forum posts about Mac Garden and others. I have already found one (virus) on a compilation CDROM. So, I'm definitely going to heed that advice. Still, I've never seen such a large and attractive "endowment" of software waiting in the wings. There are still *far* more games on the M68k macs, for example, than I can get for Linux (just volume-wise). Though there have been some great games for Linux that have come out recently (Age of Wonders III comes to mind). SteamOS is struggling with adoption, but there are some great games around as part of the effort. Man, I wish I had done that. I had to go burn a bunch of shareware CDs to get Stuffit, BinHex, patched HD tools, etc... Until you have that stuff you are well and truly stuck. Yeah, I'm not quite intrepid enough to want to collect any 68000-based macs. They didn't start to interest me until the Mac IIfx/IIci days and the 040' came around. You can all get a belly laugh from the fact that the main reason I got a Quadra 700 is that it looks so damn cool in Jurassic Park (and it runs A/UX). :-P Ugh. When I saw that on OSnews or Slashdot or wherever, I let out a big sigh, because it's *hard enough* to find 68k-related stuff. Market-droids these days can only act on previous programming. That's why we have so many Marvel movies and "reboots" / "re-imagined" versions of older movies. Real creativity must be approved by the corporate board (and doesn't get approved). -Swift

It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated: I'm not a fan of systemd, but it's not because SysV init is better, but because of the increasing scope of systemd. Okay, fine, it's a init that tracks daemons and will restart them automatically if they stop (or crash, or whatever). That's nice. I don't have a problem with that. It can parallelize the startup daemons. Okay ... I never had an issue with how long a system takes to come up as I don't really shut any of the computers off (even my desktop boxes). But hey, okay. But no more syslog (okay, I know that's not technically true, but syslog becomes a 2nd class citizen here). No, Lennart decided to use a binary-only logging system that's mostly undocumented (or rather, it's documented in code that is subject to change from version to version) and there's no need to forward the logs to another system---use that 2nd class syslog for that crap if you need it. But that's it. systemd only requires journald to run. Oh, let's use dbus for IPC because ... well ... I have no idea what, exactly, dbus brings to the game that any of the other IPC mechanisms that currently exist in Unix fail to have, other than being a usermode program and yet another dependency but now required for servers as well. Linus is *still* fighting the systemd guys because they want to force dbus into the kernel. Oh, and because of the say systemd works, it takes over cgroup management. The Linux kernel provides mechanism, not policy, but now, we have systemd forcing a cgroup policy on everything. Okay, perhaps systemd is the first program to actually *use* cgroups but if at some point in the future you want to play around with it, well ... sorry. systemd is in control there. Login management is now the domain of systemd. Oh, and don't forget the little dustup over the "debug" kernel command line: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza Over time, syslogd is taking over more and more of the system. And that would be fine if it were just RedHat (and RedHat derived) distributions. But no, Lennart is, by sheer force of will, forcing *all* Linux distributions to use systemd. Hell, it's now trying to force systemd specific behavior in applications: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428 Never mind that said application can run on other Unix systems. Oh, and forget running GNome on any other system than Linux with systemd. THAT is my problem with systemd. It's mandating a $#!?load of policy and dependencies with largly undocumented APIs. Um ... what? Plan 9 is written in C. And they still use binaries, just fat binaries (that is, the binary contains multiple code and data segments for each supported architecture0). This isn't just limited to Plan 9---Mac did this as well. ^^^^^^^^^^^ Wow! Nice insult there. Care to add more? And for the record, I still use Linux as (one) of my desktops machines. And you want an older Mac ... why? System 9 is dead. Gone on. Pining for the fjords! Move on, man! Move on! It was SysV with kickass graphics hardware. Suns were BSD (at the time, prior to Solaris) with not-so-great graphics hardware. That's pretty much the difference. -spc (Never did like Suns, but then again, I was spoiled by using SGIs)

On 17 June 2016 at 00:10, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: That's a fair point, and I totally accept it. OTOH, arguably, so is Linux itself. In contrast: Many favour the BSDs because they apparently "feel cohesive", "like one piece of software written by one team", as opposed to... Huh. Googled for the quote, found, er, myself. Weird. ? Friends of mine who are the sort of Unix beardie who lives at the command line and sneers at graphical desktops tell me that BSD feels more like an integrated whole than Linux: apparently, they say, you can tell that everything came from a single team and one source, rather than Linux's "three thousand unrelated bits of code flying in close formation". Me, I wouldn't know; all I care about is that commands like /dmesg/ and /top/ and /fdisk/ do what I expect, which is more than they do on Solaris, say. ? And yet, now that significant chunks of the Linux underpinnings are being combined into one purpose-written close-knit chunk, designed by a single team, the same sort of people that praise *BSD for its conceptual unity are harshly damning the thing bringing comparable unity to Linux. Odd, that. -- 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)

On 16 June 2016 at 22:09, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Really? Wow. I spend real money on getting my machines to start faster. I am delighted when new OS releases include faster booting; it was a major benefit of Windows XP over Windows 2000, and several Ubuntu releases have done similar. It's also immensely important to scalability of modern web apps that the many VMs in their server farms start as quickly as possible. It's a really big deal to me, and to many people. Very interesting -- thanks for that. I was previously unaware of this one. Yes, I'm aware of that spat. I'm OK with that, and I suspect most FreeBSD etc. users are too. :-) I wrote a piece a few years back pointing out that after GNOME 3, the GNOME community had exploded and shattered: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_f… I ascribe this to hostile action from Microsoft. Few agree. :-) There are a whole host of cross-platform Unix desktops. For a while, GNOME totally dominated, as I wrote in that piece, but it fell apart. Or rather exploded. Now there is an opportunity for other desktops to promote their cross-platform compatibility as a (so to speak) selling point. It is an odd move, I entirely agree. I am somewhat mystified that it is thriving so much when it's relatively immature code, wildly controversial and widely hated. Most mainstream distros have adopted it. I don't get it. I also hear that it's not well-documented, that they're adding a lot of functionality of questionable relevance to its core function, that there's little democratic decision making, etc. etc. I am aware of the problems, or at least of some of them. And yet... the sky is not falling. Most big distros have moved to it. They still work. The apps still work. Some people are saying "OK, I didn't like it, but I learned to use it and actually it's pretty good." And there are still choices. There are other distros; there are other Unixes. This /increases/ the choice, it promotes adoption (or creation) of minority distros, it is helping the cause of FreeBSD. Meanwhile, for all that it violates tradition, it brings benefits to Linux. Overall, I think it's a win. :-) I am one of those weirdoes, you know, and I also used to work for Red Hat. My laptops and one of my Raspberry Pis run Ubuntu. Used to. Then I bought a cheap used Mac mini. Good question. I have no /need/ and little /use/ for one. But hey, I'm on a classic computing list for a reason. I like them. It's a hobby. But overall, I'm glad Apple bought NeXT and got NeXTstep as well as Steve Jobs back. I'm happy that the company is strong today. It makes good products, some of which I like and use, some I don't but they've influenced other products that I like and use. Much as I loved BeOS, if Apple had bought Be, it'd be long dead. Hmmm. OK, thanks for the clarification. I am enough of a lightweight Unix type that I can't generally tell BSD from SysV, so I think I would not have cared. :-) -- 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)

On Sat, 18 Jun 2016, Stefan Skoglund (lokal anv?ndare) wrote: In most simple cases, their argument is that it's easier to write a unit file because you don't need to know shell script. However, as you point out, that all starts to fall apart when the unit files, which ARE basically the same format as Windows INI files (square bracket section header with key-value pairs following). That's because INI files aren't a Turing complete language and what you start seeing is edge cases where, even using unit files, you still need management scripts. So, that leaves you shaking your head asking why did Linux do all this crap in the first place, if most of their "benefits" start to disintegrate as soon as your init-need gets the least bit complicated. That's a great example, but only one that someone who digs in and discovers things at a low level will notice. Most of the loud voices on the pro-systemd side are people who don't interact with Linux at that level. They are just overjoyed that it boots 2 seconds quicker. Nevermind that ALL of the other alternative init systems boot faster than init. It's easy to do once you bootgraph everything (and init could easily be extended to do the same, and has been in some experimental cases). As you know, you have to trace each unit-file's "wants" back to another unit file and keep going until you hit one without any dependencies. It's about the same turd hunt as looking at LSM tags (nothing lost, nothing gained). That's just my opinion based on working with both. As you say, it doesn't ease the process, nonetheless. I've heard that before from RHEL customers who were a bit shocked (and didn't know anything about the systemd controversy). Also, just for fun, my comment on cgroups is that they were just fine and working great well before systemd. Systemd forces everything to be potentially managed by cgroups (ie.. systemd is process ID 1). So, some would say this is better & easier. Me? I preferred the method of dorking with the cgconfig, cgcreate, cgset, and raw control interfaces where needed in /sys. That works great for /proc and the utilities that use it. I don't need systemd to mitigate this process for me (and I don't like it). Zero of the benefits of cgroups are tied directly to systemd (but boy, don't ask the systemd guys to admit that), nor do they need to be, nor is it impossible to put init under cgroups control (in fact it's quite easy). Putting an abstraction layer around something means that someone who's an "expert" now has to learn the abstraction layer AND the actual tool. Having now done both, I at least feel comfortable stating my position. Yep, so you end up having to bifurcate your unit files, write scripts, or some other "ugly" method (ugly in the eyes of systemd folks) that systemd didn't really factor into reality before rolling out. They've adopted each other. I, for one, always hated GNOME anyway, (as Liam suspected). Birds of a feather sure flocked together in this case. However, that's a good thing. I like when things I dislike clump together. It makes them easier to avoid. Well, some of the freakout is over the fact that parts of NTP are some magical stuff and the maintainer is attempting to bow out. However, it doesn't detract from your very valid point. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if Lennart just plunged ahead and wrote a new protocol (as long as it only works on Linux and has plenty of suck). The guy isn't short on energy. I'll give him that. As you know, the method for socket activation is completely different from inetd/xinetd and as you point out, requires devs to maintain *both* now, if they want to be relevant outside of Linux. Great example. So, we end up with a significant portion of the open source software world being forced into a choice they never signed on for. Do they focus on Linux and thus use extra cycles to create unit files and other systemd cruft or do they stick with init scripts and get "left behind" by folks who claim there is no problem whatsoever with using init scripts with systemd (yeah, they work, but it drives the systemd guys crazy). Yep. It just creates more work for folks wanting to write really open software. Now they have to include extra crap for Linux users or face the wrath of the Potteringites and possible exclusion from all the distros who drank the whole bottle of systemd koolaid. Of course, they can always maintain both bits, and waste time they could be putting into their core software, but hey, it's "progress" right? Yah, I'm sure they won't mind. :-< -Swift

On Mon, 20 Jun 2016, Jay West wrote: Not to mention that it could go on for freakin' years. It's a "wedge issue" as they'd say in politics. I'm done. FYI. It's my last systemd related post to the list (or probably any list) for me. The PoS has already taken enough of my time. Based on the posts this time, it's just troll bait at this point. -Swift

Netflix streams 39% of peak US internet traffic[*] from FreeBSD servers. At the high end, we?re even able to do about 85G of https (encrypted) traffic on a single socket server off NVMe drives, and would do more but we?re DRAM memory bandwidth limited. Netflix OCA network has thousands of machines streaming tens of terabits per second for hours at a time at peak located in dozens of countries in hundreds of data centers worldwide. I can?t disclose exact numbers, but I?d call that real. Warner P.S. I am a little biased as a FreeBSD user since the early 90?s and as one of the guys working at Netflix to make our OpenConnect Appliances (OCA) rock. [*] According to published reported by Sandvine and others.

This thread has gone far off-topic. Let's focus on classic computing. J

On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Jerry Kemp wrote: I completely agree with you. I have had a Shoebill setup for a while, now. It just kinda whet my whistle, so to speak. I do. Two things are strong reminders that have stuck with OSX. The first is Objective-C and the other is the zillion library calls that *still* start with "ns" (next step). However, that's a sign of heritage, not a tribute to [NeXT|Open]STEP or a return to it's UI. TBH, I haven't messed with it much since about 10.6. Now that they've embraced this "app store" concept, I'm _done_ with them. I don't believe that's going to lead to anything that I'm going to like. Great concise description, actually. Hmm, I dunno about that. There are lots of new things besides just drivers and what-not. New network protocols, better fine-grained locking, storage features galore like LVM2 caching and asynchronous DRBD solve some long-itching business problems. It's come a long way. I just don't like where it's *going*. Well, the GNU guys are at least. Talk to Linus and he seems to bridle at the assertion that the GNU guys have written a larger volume of high quality code than him and his LKM cohorts. I've seen him speak and scoff at the "GNU/Linux" moniker. AIX has SRC, Solaris has SMF, OSX has launchd, so I guess they wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Only those megacorp OSs had nobody to ask or be beholden to when they decided to invent a new init system. Linux's leadership is just as, if not more independent, but also I'd argue they had a bit more responsibility to the "community" than what they showed. Linux was built by volunteers. They didn't do much asking before they went down a road a LOT of those same volunteers hated (and I'm talking programmers, not some whiny user). I'm still irritated by that, honestly. It never "worked out" any better than us "greybeards" though it would. However, it was only a minor "let's overcompliate this a bit" compared to the complete head-transplant done by systemd. However, Solaris has SMF which actually does use binary opaque data (SQLlite database files) in lieu of standard text files. That was unforgivable blasphemy in my eyes. However, since they waited until Solaris 10 to really go ape with it, I don't care. ZFS got ported elsewhere and that was the main attractive feature in SunOS 5.10, IMHO. My two least favorite Solaris "features" are SMF and SDS/SVM. True. However, systemd replaces an awful lot of the "legacy" systems. I'd refer you to the sock puppet. http://giphy.com/gifs/hungry-systemd-5xtDarAgrjoOrBxSVYk Oh, I'm sure that will become more and more of an issue as systemd becomes "the way we've always done it." to younger Linux admins and users. Maybe it's my bias, but I think UNIX is dead-easy to learn, but it does take *some* effort in the learning. I teach various UNIX classes on a regular basis (commercially not at a school). I'd bring up another old addage (Harley Hahn, I think said it): "Unix is easy to use but harder to learn. Windows is hard to use but easy to learn." The truth of that slowly sinks in the more you think about it. People can usually "click around" until they get whatever they need done on Windows. However, doing the same thing in Unix can often be one quick command that you can "just type". However, "just" doing it does require a bit of learning. Fast food is quick and easy to get, but not that good for you. Cooking your own meal is a lot harder and requires patience and learning, but will result in better health, more choice, and greater control (unless you cook like me in which case a better life insurance policy is in order). That's a good point. You've got your BSD stuff in /usr/ucb, your GNU stuff on the hook from SunFreeware (well, mirrors nowadays, Sunfreeware went commercial) and you've got POSIX & SysV stuff right there also. I didn't mean to be *that* hard on Sun & Solaris. You'll have to forgive me. I'm still smarting from SunOS -> Solaris. I guess that counts as holding a grudge. :-) Solaris is very flexible. It's also hopeful to me that there are still open-source projects predicating what are essentially new operating systems using the OpenSolaris codebase. However most of the critical stuff actually accepts both types of syntax or there are two subsystems available. I'm thinking of things like 'df' or 'ps'. You can do 'ps aux' (BSD style) or 'ps -ef' (SysV style) with GNU 'ps', for example. Yep. Thank goodness SCO did some good before Zombie-SCO came in and and and... ugh. I can't even talk about it. Very well said. Post-Rick Belluzo SGI was a train wreck. It was so so sad. He was a M$ executive and it *showed*. The guy was a complete idiot who made a dog's dinner out of everything he touched. He was a useless failure even for a business weasel. You weren't the only ones. It has/had a lot of commercial apps that you won't find on any other UNIX variant. Many of them went to Windows after SGI tanked. Some went to Linux. It rocks very hard. I think there were a lot of folks in the FreeBSD camp who really wanted to adopt it directly, but then the GPL got in the way. XFS is truly great, though. I did some file system testing for a private lab about 5 years ago. XFS was head and shoulders better than any other exant Linux file systems in my tests. It didn't have quite the performance of ext4 in some performance tests (it's slower on most metadata operations). However, it was still plenty fast for things that matter to database applications and that's the bulk of what I end up seeing in server farms. Ext4 was categorically terrible in some of my reliability tests. In one power-pull test I remember it ate the entire file system and I had like 300,000 files in lost+found with inode numbers. "See, I recovered for you." Thaaaaankss ext4, I can see a lot changed from ext2... not. Not in UNIX at least, but it's definitely part of MacOS which is what I was thinking about at the time. ... and all of those are okay, but don't really compare to Aqua/OSX. The level of polish and integration just isn't there. Plus, you have all kinds of hard-to-understand turf wars when it comes to GNOME and a much lesser extent on KDE. I'm a fluxbox user most of the time, because most desktop environments I find to be lame and in-the-way. I think most of the BSD folks are okay with that. We work in the shadows for the good of mankind (or at least the men who man-up to BSD). :-) -Swift

And thank $GOD for that. It was P.R. that created (and perpetuates) Linux.

On Thu, 16 Jun 2016 16:46:41 +0200, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Not as far as I'm aware; the full list of certified UNIX operating systems is on http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ (OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, K-UX). Regards, Stephen

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Al Kossow wrote: That is sad. Damn market-droids. Are they socketed? I guess you are just saying that it'd be technically possible? That was my thought, too, until I opened it up. It's definitely not upgraded. It doesn't even have any adapter installed on the slot. I guess maybe that's only there if you want to use Nubus. The case is silkscreened, too, not a sticker. I think it might just be the cover from a 6100 or something. -Swift