January 2007 - KCLUG

Distros
by Bradley Hook 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

There has been a lot of chatter about different distros on the list recently, and I just wanted to throw out a quick poll of sorts, and maybe encourage a little more discussion. I would prefer to avoid any flames or childish "xyz distro sucks" insults, but I would like to know what KCLUG members have and are using. So, what distro(s) do you use on your primary system(s)? What distros have you tried in the last year or two? In 10 words or less describe why you did or did not like them. As for me, I use Slackware on almost everything. I have 2 Slackware machines at home: one for me to game on, one for my wife to dabble on. At work, I have a triple-boot laptop running Slackware/OSX/WinXP. I have roughly 10 servers, all running some version of Slackware. We are also running some UML instances within these servers, which all use a Slackware root_fs. We keep a few machines around running various other distros, from DSL to Ubuntu. Distros I have tried: Slackware - I love it because "It just works(tm)" Ubuntu - I recommend it a lot, but I don't do GNOME Kubuntu - Easy to install, and I like KDE Damn Small Linux (DSL) - Name says it all Knoppix - Eh, it's cool RedHat - Fragged my bootloader more than once Debian - Bad experiences with dependency checking Gentoo - Novel idea, but installs take too long Also, on every installation, I tend to download the latest kernel source (without a fourth number, ie 2.16.19) and build it specific to my hardware. I also usually compile my own Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL from vanilla sources. ~Bradley

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None
by Dale Beams 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

I do this exactly. I have a separate drive where I store my data, and a separate drive where I store my OS's. _________________________________________________________________ Type your favorite song. Get a customized station. Try MSN Radio powered by Pandora. http://radio.msn.com/?icid=T002MSN03A07001

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Ricers
by Jonathan Hutchins 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

I find the analogy also holds like this: Unlike the do-it-yourself hot rods of the fifties, one of the implications of calling a car a "ricer" is that it's composed of a bunch of bolt-on performance enhancing kits and accessories. You get the feel that you've built a hot rod, and all the tweaking and fiddling needed to keep the bits from falling off or out of sync makes you feel like quite the mechanic, but you're not an engineer or a machinist. In like manner, all those meaningless messages scrolling off your screen too fast to read when you do an emerge world make you feel like some 'leet coder, even if you wouldn't know what they meant if you _could_ read them. Yeah, you can get under the hood and mess with the USE flags and the package masks - but you're really just pressing the same button as someone using aptitude. Yeah, you learn a lot about how to fix the gentoo package sysetem, but it's gentoo specific knowledge, seldom applicable to any other linux distro. Source packages, and instructions on how to tune and rebuild them, are available for all of the binary distros I know of.

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Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Jared 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

> I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in > Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva. Better yet, the binary packages work > when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because > some required file won't build or isn't the right version. Sigh. We must run such criticism through the JH filter, and see if anything survives. (ie. it could be an email from someone who Just Hates everything he doesn't understand). Thus, if he doesn't like Gentoo, it's possibly because he couldn't get it running, not because it has any flaws. For example: > Nobody should kid themselves that using emerge is anything like building LFS, > compiling and installing from a tarball, or the best practice, building your > own binary .deb or .rpm files. Those tasks will teach you useful things > about your system. Gentoo will just teach you to hate it because it's always > broken. Let's look carefully at the logic here. Logically, this is comparing binary .deb and .rpm scripts with "using emerge". Not a fair comparison. This is two different classes. Why not compare "creating ebuild scripts" and "building .deb or .rpm"? Emerge is only "always broken" to people who don't know how to fix it, same as anywhere else. So the true underlying question, having filtered the noise out: If you want to learn useful things about your system, do you want to study source or pre-compiled binaries? Leaerning "useful things about your system" does not come from installing binary pre-compiled packages, HALF as much as it comes from installing from source. Yes, it's more difficult to master. So? Gentoo. Smooth, and like a rock. And very very fast, managed by people who know what they're doing. Look, I know VERY LITTLE, and I'm comfortable with Gentoo. It's not that I know a lot, it's simply that I do not despise what I do not know. Debian is still my favorite, even though it's "always broken." And Suse is what's on my dual-boot box, only because I haven't figured out how to get rid of it without clobbering the Windows partition. And none of these I despise. :) Oh, and here is what EDOS says about packages. You'll see that "always broken" is not specific to any single flavor of Linux. http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/PackageOverview -Jared

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RE: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Maybe I should clarify. I use a separate /home partition. I just typed too fast. It should have read: "This is exactly why I keep a separate partition for /home directory." _____ From: Oren Beck Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 1:03 PM To: Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO Cc: KCLUG(a)kclug.org Subject: Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu??? On 1/4/07, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO <> wrote: This is exactly why I keep a separate /home directory. You can always slap it in another system and copy it over or wipe the other partitions and reinstall and all your crap is still there. Some of your dot files may need to be deleted, but should still work with newer program versions. You shouldn't need /var unless you put stuff like your website in there or files for FTP or mail files. Since I use web mail and have FTP directory on another drive that is not a problem. I only save /home before a new system load. And I do back that up prior to reload, usually. I've only had to save it from the dead once by breathing life back into the partition table, but then I like a good resurrection every now and then. This is getting plugged in here at a later date due to sober deliberation. I am going to raise a proposal here that will also be used to begin a different thread- but is quite on topic here. If one is doing a migration from one distro to another that seems a good point in time to add a "userdata" drive. My admittedly painful lack of detailed "how to" not being of issue here, What's involved in copying /home, /var and anything else liable to have unique "userdata" in it to a new drive, and setting partitions to have the physical location/s be keeping OS on one drive and "your data" on another drive? Would not having "your data" safe on a totally separate device lower the worry factor of migrations? And it would seem that Gentoo power users doing frequent emerge updates would have lower risk of losing "their data" Or am I far wrong?

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Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Jon Moss 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Since Fedora Legacy Project has gone belly up, I've been rethinking what to do with the workstation my daughter (a high school senior soon to be college student) uses. It currently has FC4 installed. I'd like to move her to Ubuntu (specifically kubuntu because she likes KDE) but I'm not sure if I can "ugprade" to it from FC4. I'm going to backup all of her files and photos to a CD or DVD, but I'm afraid I'm going to miss something (and I'd rather not back up the entire hard drive if I don't have to since the OS or distro won't matter any longer). Has anyone ever done this? Upgrade from one distro to another? Or do I have to just wipe the hard drive and start from scracth (like I would if it had Windows XP installed)? Happy New Year! Jon Moss __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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Re: OT: ERP survey
by Jared 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

>> Also, the BrotherJonathan project ... > > Which does what? Oh yeah. I forgot to mention. It's an Open Source ERP. I named it MRP when I started because I didn't know the different between MRP and ERP. Thanks for asking. -Jared

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OT: ERP survey
by Jared 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=585887 This is a research survey put together for a fellow writing a master's thesis on Open Source in Enterprise Resource Planning. I'm posting it here because I think that research papers on Open Source development are an integral part of the long-term credibility which comes to us. If you have any experience with Open Source ERP, and would like to participate in the survey, please do. Also, the BrotherJonathan project will be released on SourceForge in its first complete, working form, in about a week. It's still at 0.3.4 because I'm being conservative with version number, but it all works now. I'll post an "It's a boy!" message to the group when it goes up. -Jared

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imaginary(?) window manager feature
by David Nicol 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

So I have been experimenting with alternatives to lwm, which is pleasantly out-of-the-way and allows me to run KDE kicker for a "task bar" What I want is a wm with a particular twist on a tiling feature : a way to dock windows to each other so that the bar between them can be moved back and forth, resizing both (or all) of the so-connected frames. Is anyone aware of a wm that can do that? There are "docking" features in various wm's task-bar kind of things, which this idea is pretty close to; it would allow arbitrary windows to dock with each other, (and also undock of course); so I could for instance dock all my xload windows to each other and have a "raft" of xloads that would raise/lower, cycle, etc as a unit. I had this idea after experimenting with ratpoison again yesterday. Ratpoison allows splitting windows in half either horiz of vert but does not support (at least not without reading the whole instructions) splitting windows somewhere other than half, or mousing the dividing line up/down or left/right. thoughts? happy new year

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Free Monitors
by Jim Herrmann 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

I have an opportunity to get some free monitors. They are supposed to be 17", and they are all supposed to work. I'm not sure how many there are, but I was wondering how many of you would be interested in getting one of these. I'm going to check them out tomorrow, er, later today, and I will get back with details, but just to gage an initial interest, I thought I would mention these. I plan to be at the meeting tomorrow night and I hope to bring one in to look at it. Let me know. Peace, Jim

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