Re: [gentoo-user] Money Dance
Alex Combas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'm thinking of purchasing Money Dance because I'm looking for a good > financial program that will let me make on-line bill payments and do > on-line banking. > > And Money dance certainly looks good, and its pretty inexpensive. > > Has anyone gotten it to run on Gentoo yet? Yes. You can download it to try it out and see for yourself. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Who uses sudo?
Arnold Krille [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Content-Description: signed data > On Saturday 29 March 2003 23:50, Paul de Vrieze wrote: > > For that login shells have been invented: > > su - > > Hmm, thanks! > > su -l didn't work... Incidentally, I still recommend you use sudo. Sudo gives you the benefit of not typing your root password. If you do the above, it's hardly more difficult to type 'sudo su -' to get your root shell, and if you enable password caching (or, in the case of desktops or similar systems NOPASSWD) you get to skip typing your password in at all at least part of the time. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Tan, Stephen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on > Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a > production environment. > > (Having had 2 occasions in the past 6 months that I have been running Gentoo > where portage/emerge related issues have hosed (a) gcc and (b) libstdc++.so, > I'll stand by that statement!) > > I have Gentoo running on my desktop here at work and at home, but the real > production machines are Debian. Debian's stable really is stable! Gentoo is > nifty and extremely cool but is prone to nasty emerge issues such as the > ones I have just noted. I have to agree with you here. I'm currently using gentoo on production servers (webservers, database servers, and a couple of others (dns/mail/etc) I love gentoo, but in a corporate environment there are a few problems. Gentoo is a cutting edge distribution. If you stick with stable, you're generally ok, but even then (as mentioned above) you aren't immune to problems that can crop up. Myself, I've made my own custom setup that keeps a custom portage overlay around with the package versions I want to use. I just copy over the new ones I want as they come out from the real portage tree whenever I want to update. But this is an extra bit of administration. It's no big deal to me, neither is adjusting dependencies in the overlay to avoid upgrading other packages unnecessarily. However, I'm not the rule when it comes to admins. In my experience, the unix sysadmin field is fairly flooded with barely competant to completely incompetant people. For every true admin I meet, I meet 2 that couldn't tell me the difference between NIS and NFS. In addition, most commercial applications tend to lag behind in development. I have several that just plain won't run on gentoo 1.4 because they haven't gotten around to rebuilding it on the newer glibc yet. That's a real pain. It's not gentoo's fault, it's the curse of using closed source applications, but we don't always have a choice in these matters. It's unfortunate that there's no compat library for the 2.2 glibc. Because of these things, we'll probably be switching to redhat advanced server when the next version is released. It makes me ill to think of all the work it's going to take to clean those servers up, and rewrite/rebuild all those packages so they make sense and don't have all those stupid dependanciesbut in the end, if I get hit by a bus they'll have a much easier time finding someone else competant enough to keep the servers running that way than if I left it the way it is now. I love this distribution, and it'll probably stay on some of the servers (monitoring) that are not commercial software dependant, and are not mission-critical, but the rest will switch. It'll be a sad day. :-( -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Spider [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > begin quote > On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 > Jose Gonzalez Gomez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Okay, I'll take the bait... here > > One thing that scares me with the ease-of-install and simplicity, the > lowering of the threshold for users to install Gentoo, is this. > I agree with what you had to say as well spider. I don't think it's necessary to make the installation process artificially difficult (hiding documentation, or even not having any, etc) but I wouldn't want to make a significant change (like a gui installer) even one that allowed for the same level of customization. I also don't think it's all that politically incorrect. I think someone else already said this, but I think the install makes for a good barrier to entry. If you can't handle that, then it's not going to get better/easier for you, so you should hold off and gain some more experience with another distribution and come back later when you start getting frustrated with its limitations. Note that this preference to exclude a group isn't a permanent exclusion. I think any linux user that sticks with it has the potential to use and enjoy gentoo. In fact, I think it's /inevitable/ that they'll come here, once they start feeling the limitations of their current distribution. This is not a superiority thing. I don't think I'm better than any of these people, I've just got more experience and/or have worked harder at it. With time and effort there's no reason that most people couldn't have at least as easy a time at this as I do. I'm nothing special in this regard, I don't have some special gentoo gene or anything. -- No one is more hopelessly enslaved than the person who falsely believes he is free. --Johann Goethe -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Carlos C. Gonzalez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi Robert, > > On April 3, 2003 08:11 am, Robert Spahr wrote: > > [snipped] > > > Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! > > It never ceases to amaze me how adding a nice installer and hardware detection > front-end to Gentoo and other such things is considered by many to be a > dumbing down of Gentoo. Honestly. I just plain can't understand it. It's easy. If you have an easy installer, you have a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, and then they get in and "surprise" this distribution isn't redhat. Nor is it as easy to administer as redhat. "Surprise" bad things can happen, and you have to be able to fix them. > How would adding something like an automated install and hardware detection > dumb Gentoo down? The command line and the opportunity to install things > manually (aka the hard way to do things) would still remain available. It's not about what remains available. It's about who that kind of distribution attracts. And once you have newbie's here, who've just barely managed to get the install done, you'll have them spamming the lists and forums with questions that are answered in documentation, or that they should just plain already know before using a distro like this. As a result, people who actually know what they are doing, and can answer /real/ problems and questions will leave the list to avoid the noise. And the developers will get so tired of being pestered about things that they should never have to deal with that they'll make changes to "dumb" gentoo down to avoid it. They can't be blamed for this btw, it's just self-defense. A perfect example is this whole optimizaiton thing. Someone capable of setting up gentoo, particularly one setting all those optimization flags, should know enough to try rebuilding with a lower setting if weird unexplainable things are going on. But because we are ALREADY at a point where we have too many people below that bar constantly making bug reports that can be fixed by reducing optimizations we now have a problem of trying to protect them from themselves so that we can reduce the workload of the developers, from all their bogus bug reports. > If by dumbing down we mean that Gentoo will not challenge one's to rise to the > vigarous exercise of learning how to tinker, and configurate, and pull their > hair out once in a while as they learn the intricacies of "power use" then it > seems to me that to not give people the chance to skip some of that is to > limit their choices. > > Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. > Namely choice. That's ridiculous. You have plenty of choice. If you don't like gentoo's install you can choose to install redhat, or suse, or whatever. Do you go to redhat's mailing lists and complain that they aren't offering choice because they don't have an installer like gentoo's? Aren't they limiting choice by not doing so? If all distros have to offer all the options so that everyone has your definition of choice then why would we even bother having different distros? Are we limiting choice by not having redhat packaging as an option? Not to mention dpkg, and autopackage, ad nauseum? > As it stands now people have no choice in this matter. It's either gut it out > and spend tons of time working through all kinds of Gentoo quirks and > idiosyncracies or go to another distribution. Exactly. Wait ... either ... or ... isn't that pretty much a perfect example of choice? > I can't wait to become an expert on Gentoo and to have the time to create my > own distribution based on Gentoo. That will take the best of Gentoo and add > a healthy dose of what I call "ease of use" based on what Redhat and other > distros are doing. Look. If you like what redhat and other distros are doing why don't you use those distros? I'm not trying to be mean, it's an honest question. Why try to make gentoo like another distro you like instead of just using the distro you like? But if this is what you want, you are sure as heck welcome to start your own distribution based on gentoo with a graphical installer. The license certainly allows for that. Just make sure you don't point your users here for support. > I honestly don't understand it. Especially when anything having to do with > making Gentoo easier to install and use is seen as "dumbing" down Gentoo. > Ease of use in my thinking is not equal to dumbing down a distribution. As > if everyone using such ease enhancements would be a dummy. > > I and many others who are no dummies, would use such enhancements for the > simple reason that they save time, add consistentcy, and allow us to get the > most out of Gentoo quicker. As well as "sell" it more successfully to our > bosses or our customers. No, using those enhancements doesn't make you a dummy. It doesn't negatively reflect on the user at all. However, it is indispu
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Carlos C. Gonzalez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi Mark, > > Hmm You may have a point here too Mark. I guess I tend to view newbies > through the lens of my experience. Since I still consider myself a newbie. > I tend to read the documentation and do my own research and frankly > oftentimes I find that's it quicker for me to do that than post another > question. > > I find that 99.99 percent of my questions do not have ready answers found in > the FAQ's or by a search of Google Linux or the Gentoo forum. Many of my > questions come about as a result of having to work my way through holes left > in the Gentoo documentation or my relative inexperience with Linux. -nod- I hope you didn't take my comments as a direct reflection on you. I don't know you, nor did I do even a cursory survey of the type of questions you ask. It was in reference to a specific (large) subgroup of users that I've observed over the last 9 or 10 years. > But I guess I have to concede that there are many newbies which just want > everything fed to them on a silver platter. I can't expect every newbie to > put in the time and the effort that I have to getting a Gentoo system up and > running and running reasonably well. -nod- Agreed. But that's also why we have easy to use distributions that don't require much thought and planning. ;-) As I mentioned elsewhere, when setting up systems where another admin might take over, I never use gentoo. I don't want to put undue burden on a company when it comes to finding a replacement. Finding someone to efficiently run a gentoo system is significantly more difficult than finding someone who can keep a redhat box running. > > > Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. > > > Namely choice. > > > > That's ridiculous. > > A bit strong here Mark :). I'll take it as an expression of your intense > feelings on the subject and not as a personal lambast of what I said. ;-) I apologize. I think it was actually just my being tired of people pulling out phrases like that all the time. Particularly since the spirit of open source/GPL really has nothing to do with choice, but rather with freedom. It might seem like semantics, but it really isn't. I swear that we need a Godwin's law equivelant for this type of argument. Also, after reading some of your other posts in this thread, I can read your arguments here in a better light. You're obviously more well reasoned than this original post would first suggest. I apologize for speaking otherwise. > Because I like Gentoo better for various reasons. Certainly nothing to do > with the hairy installation or hassles of configurating packages. More with > where Gentoo is going, the willingness of forum and list members to help out, > and the flexibility that Gentoo gives me in creating the kind of distribution > I want for myself or that I want to offer my customers. Keep in mind that there's a certain willingness of forum/list members to help out in part because they can have a reasonable expectation that you have /some/ idea what you are doing, or that if you don't that you're capable of doing some reading to get there. IOW, we don't have to have everything spelled out for us, we just need a push in the right direction from someone who has already been down the same path. > But I can see that there is also a responsibility to the Gentoo community that > I must keep in mind. How will my newbiesized documents affect the community? > Will it indeed cause a flood of spurious newbie questions? > > Not saying that I will stop creating better documents (for purposes of newbies > or those who don't want to re-try installing Gentoo twenty times). I'll have > to think about what you said. For sure. I don't think I'd ever suggest that having more documentation would be a bad thing. Honestly, a plethora of documentation only slightly lowers the barrier to entry. The users we should be concerned about never read documentation. > Glad to hear you think that Mark but I am not so sure that others in the > Gentoo community would agree with you. In regard to those using those > enhancements not being dummy's. Heh. I don't disagree. I've run into a fair number of people who take that attitude. There's people on both sides of that fence who feel like they can only choose one method of doing things. > I don't how many times I have heard statements to the effect of "well, it > works for me" also. As though that alone should make me realize that if I > was a more experienced Linux user the solutions to the problems would be > self-evident. Gurus tend to speak down to those who don't know as much as a > general rule I think. Precisely because they end up starting to know so much > that it starts to get to their heads. Hrm. Well, I can't speak to your specific situation, but it might be that those communicating that thought might actually be trying to h
