--- Frank Van Damme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ok you're making some very clear and concise points > here. I'll try to respond > the best I can (and try to show you're wrong at some > of them ;) ). > > On Monday 06 May 2002 12:27 am, you wrote: > > Hello Frank > > > > I do disagree with several of the points your > making, > > however you make great points. If someone did > only > > include "5" apps, well I imagine its ease would go > > right out the window. And you are right, these > guys > > have spend a great deal of time, making small > changes > > to packages already available, and give you some > > programs that they have created. Distros have > gave > > the comunity some nice "ease of use programs" such > as > > linuxconfig, diskdrake (and the many other drakes) > > among others. These guys have also done some > great > > under hood changes. Red Hat has been a key > respondent > > to PAM, and have improved many libraries, and > xfree86, > > ive really yet to see some really improved speed > > implemenations though. If you look at > programming, do > > Think so? I challenge you to take xfree version 4.0, > 4.1 and 4.2 and a bunch > of video cards ant test video or opengl performance. > I'd swear this has > improved greatly. I think it was with 4.1 that the > speed of openGL on linux > generally bypassed that on windows. > :) you have me here, because of new way that xfree modulizes and among other things, it does greatly spead it up. I've never really tested openGL so as far as that is concerned i don't really know. other than that, i mean though rather generally, about the same thing as xfree did in the first place, more modularization, cleaner memory management, optimization techniques, etc. Under Hood changes that can speed up a program. To us even, semi-expesiveness is ok, even if we only get a 3% increase.
> I think that the role of distributions lies, > partially, in being a > contributor to free software projects - in > proportion to their capacity. > Mandrake does a good job here (although I liked > their old versions of > DrakConf better, at least they worked - but I > digress). > That is what we are trying to be, were not trying to "remake the wheel" were mainly trying to make the wheel, more like, well i forgot what the wheel was called, but you know those nice ones, that can even get punctured and still drive for a long time, are great in rain and snow, and generally on the freeway not so woried about a blowup.. just make it better. > The other part is maintenance of a good, consistent, > coherent, up to date > collection of software; the fact a user is > guaranteed that his distro will > survive (we've seen disasters happen - corel or > progeny to name two) I know what you mean, thats really what i mean by not having 3 of the same packages right out of the box. Some people like one thing, some like the other. But if you have 3 of them installed at one time its a waste - incoherent. Another thing is that Windows/Mac/Beos, has been real great about a consistent look. It's not incredibly easy to fully find that in linux. There are many window managers, toolkits, themes, etc. Were trying to put together for the default, a very consistent desktop, with the same toolkit, etc. A thing to note, in reality if something doesn't use the same toolkit, which is hard to find, we will put the effort in to change that program to that toolkit. It of course wont happen all at once, but it will happen. Also, I suppose, i think, that corel relied to heavely to wine, they did some great stuff with it, btw. But ultimatly their software didn't work the way it was anticipated, and was slow. Still they made some great improvements. Progeny im not familiar with, ive seen a great deal of distrobutions, more than half fit into the category of weird, extreame clone, or embeded(this one is not wrong, its just not our focus). and that > he will have his security updates in a matter of a > day, We really want to minimize this, i mean the security updates, we are trying to pick services that were built with security in mind. Like a lot of the djb stuff (qmail, tcpserver, daemontools). We have done heavy research into this, sometimes finding tools that are less mainstream, that do a great job and are well tested. And of course, we will post security fixes. I have primarily been responsible for the security area, so this is good for me. I have 4 security certifications, and have talked to many companies that needed a heck of a lot of fixes, updates, changes, etc. I tend to lean on the side that there is never enough security, and tend to be a bit psycotic about it, my aspiration is for ArtimisOS to be NSA spec. I hope that qualifies me... and his regular > updates when the distro decide they have ripened > enough to be in their main > tree; and someone to answer the phone when they ring > the tech support line > they paid for. Absolutly true, though not only phone, have to make sure to utilize all technology in this matter. Phone, email, on-site, messageboard, chat ( like what compaq uses ), irc channel, etc. It's still better to do a small > project that does what it has > to do, and does it good, like ltsp. It's useless > overhead to start with a > whole distro, far better to 'support' existing > distro's. I fear the quality > of the current ltsp 'distribution' wil suffer from > it. > The ltsp features that will be there, can be used in any other distro. manly ltsp isnt going to be the only thing of that nature in that server offering. we want to have full spectrum. ltsp, vnc, support for windows/Mac/Novel networks. we aren't going to sell ltsp as the primary feature, nor have we ever thought of classifying it, as you need our distro to use ltsp. What we wan't out of the ltsp part of things, are wizards, and to shorten a heck of a lot of problems that are found when setting up ltsp. In other words, we go through all the weird errors in the archive, and what we have seen from this email list and minimize those, as well as get some great imput from a great community, in several areas we'll have, things that can make ltsp easier to use, such as non reocurring lookup, unless a change in hardware has occured, (we make use of a lot of things through ldap and databases) also, trying to collect information on how to make it easier to find the hardware in the first place. > Few will want just an ltsp distro. Users will get > the impression that things > like ltsp can only be done with your distro then - > this may be some > commercial trick, but I hate commercial tricks :) . > Moreover it limits their > choice fiercely. I put my thoughs on this above. If many users are like my case they > will have a distro > installed on a powerful computer allready and then > discover ltsp and install > it. (I removed the biggest hd from my p133 and used > it as a thin client upon > discovering ltsp.). Do you have any data on how many > of your users do have > setups with dedicated servers, how much an allready > existing system and how > many of them would like to ditch their current > configured system? I don't > think you can make such big decisions before having > investigated this > seriously. > Your definitly right here, some people that when they find ltsp they already have stuff in place. Our main focus is people on other sytems (windows, windows/terminal, windows/cytrix, mac, beos, novel, traditional unix) if ive forgotten any there probably included in there too... The only way i can think of to bring over already linux users, is our feature set, and tech support. I'm makeing the assumption that linux users won't care about the ease of use, because they are already used to default linux. So hopefully these can bring some over. > > > you have any idea how messy it is to hard code > values > > inside your program, such as a path? This is bad, > and > > i mean really bad coding, linux has to put > symlinks > > every which direction, just because programs arn't > > dynamic. Well, if you ever decide that is just > abit > > nasty to you, look to us, we have a great deal of > it > > in place. When you have an image that slows down > your > > program because you wanted it beautiful, is it > fair to > > the user? why have and image in kb, when it > should be > > in bytes, why have all these images floating > around > > when it is much more dynamic to look in a library. > I > > wan't talking about implementing dll's, i was > talking > > about icl's. Image Libraries, which the > technology is > > already there, just nobody wanted to invest the > time > > to use it. > > Programming. Ok I can't program so I'll be careful > with my answer ;) > > First of: the hardcoding of paths and things like > that in programs. I am not > sure users want as much customisations that they > want to be able to change > the most basic images in programs (splash screens > etc) but I think you have a > point there. It would be neat if a user could just > point the program to his > own image library. I think Enlightenment 0.17 does > this to some extent, by > storing themes and menu layouts in database files. > About the size: I don't > understand what you mean. Is it the disk space taken > up by > 'rest-of-the-cluster' bytes? > About images: I didn't fill that in totally. Say a program has 20 images, meaning (icons, .pgn, .gif) whatever. some of the loading time is those images loading. There are many things to do with this, how the image is interpreted, by shape by pixel, etc. how fast the png image libarary has a lot to do with it, but anyhow. All those images have to load into memory before the program is displayed. 60k full color png takes much longer to load than say, a 10k 256 color lnz gif. Which is obvious. Now take that another step. 20 images, vs 1 file with many images. When you use a library of images, only the file needs put into memory, and the program pulls images from the library dynamically. Instead of loading all those 20. When these things are considered, using image libraries is a great thing. In fact I've just found out gnome agrees with me, according to what ive seen, gnome 2.2 will be using image libraries. > > Also, distros all have their ideas, "i want > something > > this way, or that", well we arn't inventing > something > > to make it harder for a person. Microsoft has > this > > great idea called "zero admin" well, linux is the > > furthest you can get from that. Im not going to > ask > > the stupid question "is everyone so againt > microsoft > > that they want linux hard to use where microsoft > is > > easy?" no, it just hasn't went there yet. With > use, > > to start a new service, you just put a link in a > > directory, to have an item in a menu, you just put > it > > in a directory, we have in mind later a nice > config > > feature, that just pulls all its info from a > config > > directory, is as powerful as you make it, and > unlike > > windows registry, no nasty 1 point of failure. To > > convert windows/mac/beos/* users you need it to be > a > > heck of a lot easier underneath the deck before > you > > going to get major changeover. You also need to > try > > to get some well known apps that arn't on linux to > > join aboard. > > About linux versus microsoft user-friendlyness: this > is a war that has been > fought since both windows and unix co-existed on > this blue ball. I'll be glad > if nobody starts trolling now, but I'll set the good > example ;) > > It is clear that windows and unix are two opposites > from a sysadmin point of > view. Maybe the idea 'zero admin' speaks to the > imagination. I think that is > mosty a lie. Generally people need the features that > unix devellopers put in > really powerfull applications, like ftp and web > servers, in distributions' > package management systems and so on. This, together > with the security and > multi-user features of unix and the fact that open > source apps are basically > develloped in wild-growth makes a pretty complicated > cocktail. Granted. > BTW, this will still be very much powerful, we took away sysV for a reason, if you put a script into the directory, just like a symlink, it will run. even more powerful than the way linux already does it, just simpler. We arn't taking away power, sysV you have to edit a script, determine what runtime, etc. You don't have to do that anymore. In future versions of other distrobutions you will see it going away also. We have our own ideas about some of the ideas, but most people agree that having do manual editing is rather time consuming and doesn't equal productivity. This message got truncated so, have to find the rest of it... __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com _______________________________________________________________ Have big pipes? SourceForge.net is looking for download mirrors. We supply the hardware. You get the recognition. Email Us: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
