Posts by r0land

Microsoft open-sources its emojis as part of new design philosophy

Why have never the egytians claimed copyright, or patent, protection for their beautiful hieroglyphs???

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: Genuine Question

Well, all the tools are there, automated installations, both scripted and from images has been around on linux for more than 20 years, Active Directory works nicely with linux for those who want that, I you rather do your central management by some other tool, NIS, LDAP among others has also been around for a long time.

SALT, Puppet, Chef are all just a few examples the range of mature solutions that has been around for a long time. Several popular distros are providing their own tools for those who does not fear vendor lock in; Landscape, YAST etc.

What actually may be lacking, is what Windows admins call "Best Practices", popular and well proven solutions that most admins approve of. The abundance of tools paired with easy scripting of most everything makes Linux system administration a much more diverse field. Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter, Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia and all the other large players would not even consider touching linux, if they could not automate their large scale deployments. The fact that those companies are running far more linux servers than linux desktops, does not alter the level of truth in my conclusions above. On the other hand you will naturally find more information about using the tools stated above for server management, but the will work equally well for the management of desktop computers.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Disk Operating Systemt

CP/M never was an OS, Operating System, it was a Disk Operating System, hence the comparisons with UNIX may be interesting from a historical perspective, but not from a more technical standpoint.

A Disk Operating System is never intended to do Operating System tasks, the added "Disk" to the name clarifies that it is intended to do the disk related functions only, load and store files, and load files as programs and then run them. No memory management, no processes, no user accounts (there are exceptions to this, but CP/M is not one of those), and sometimes you will get print functions. But not in a modern sense with device independent graphics and advanced stuff like print spooling.

Disk Operating Systems where only intended to make basic computing equipment usable at all, not to give anything even remotely like what we can expect from anything IT related today. For most people nowdays, that is deeply hidden in the haze and foggs of history.

Besides that omission, the article is interesting and well written.

Microsoft previews free Visual Studio Code for the Web

This is not that new really, I found that Eclipse Che is already doing this.

It can probably be a good way of doing things, post covid, with hybrid working arrangements.

https://github.com/eclipse/che

Visual Studio Code Server untethers developers from their workstations

At last a text editor (or should I say IDE) for all those Quassel fanboys!

Why run vi or emacs in screen or tmux on a shell server when you can fully enjoy the latest high tech wonders and disasters from Miro$oft????

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

On a broader level I do agree, Pulse is far to big and complex for 95% of the users. There are some special cases where the extra features might be usefull, but those could easily be satisfied with special tools in a perfect world.

The answer to your question about why systemd is messing with my audio, as far as I have been able to figure out, indeed there could be security implications if I leave my computer locked while strangers in the vicinity of my machine could both hear voice messages intended for my ears only and they could even give some nasty answers in my mic. That is the official status for this issue; but for 98% of the users this view makes no sense at all.

The easy solution is to disable the screen saver ,-)

There is no doubt that Lennart Poettering is a brilliant programmer, regardless of other things that has been said about him.

It will be very interesting to see what will happen to systemd now, if mr Poettering is leaving for Microsoft to abandon systemd or if it is because Microsoft is so much in love with Linux that they are planning on sponsoring his work on systemd, is something that we will have to find out in the near future.

If he actually is leaving the future of systemd up for others to decide upon, then we may see something akin to the development of PulseAudio which, under his supervision, was going to revolutionize the linux multimedia experience. Beside from introducing new (and, at that point, unseen) magnitudes of complexity in the configuration department, it still provided a modern sound experience. We could enjoy sounds from various and simultaneous sources at the same time, an unheard of luxury at that point. At the start of the project the promise was low latency sound at the same level of flexibility as on both Windows and Macos. PulseAudio was intended to take over everything from juggling the bits with the audio adapters to communicating with the programs that needed sound. Lennart invented many interesting use cases, for his subsystem, many involving sound over the network. What happened was that PulseAudio became such a feature rich system that it got ported to both Windows and Macos, regardless of the claims that both those systems where the main sources of inspiration for PulseAudio.

After that Lennart Poettering abandoned PulseAudio, the project has given up some of the original visions, for instance nobody seems to want to replace the ALSA audio adapter drivers for "native" PulseAudio modules.

We will probably see a similar development regarding systemd, some of the less useful functions will get removed from systemd, the interfaces will get more stable and the various systemd modules will become actual modules, that can (and will) be implemented by other programs when needed.

We may see some rethinking regarding session management, compared to service management; what is good for service management may not be (even) useful for session management. There has been a lot of confusion about what simple commands like su are supposed to do under systemd, those things should be easily sorted, with a more pragmatic leadership. Another similar note is how systemd figures it needs to do something about my desktops sound output when my screen saver activates. With systemd its seems like a major headache setting up your desktop in a way that you can play music in your speakers, while you are fixing yourself a nice cup of drink. On a general level, systemd becoming more stable and less of a moving target will definitely save us all a lot of work. Systemd may never become an alternative to either LXC, OpenVZ, or Docker, but most of us will not be sorry for that.

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

There where several interesting contenders, for being our new init system, 10-15 years ago. The competition was definitely not lacking.

But Lennart Poettering had a driving vision, that the people behind the other systems lacked, he wanted to include most everything regarding basic infrastructure from logging to DNS resolving. Among other things that systemd engulfed was D-BUS. Since he promised a brighter and better future for the D-BUS system (and I think also for udev, which also may helped convincing both KDE and Gnome) the major desktop environments (especially Gnome and KDE) decided they wanted that. Accordingly the major distros had to follow their decision, if they wanted to continue to be relevant on the desktop.

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

Well the major desktop environmenst needed a better D-BUS implementation, since systemd included such a thing, both Debian and KDE (and several other desktops) made systemd a requirement. Hence making systemd obligatory, may have been a painful decision, it still was the only sensible way forward, if you wanted to make your distro compatible with the major desktop environments.

Getting a proper service manager was an added bonus, and all the feature creep, with systemd taking over everything from logging to anything that Lennart laid his hands on, was more of the price we had to pay, for the joy of getting both a better D-BUS and modern service manager.

Please never forget that the first name that Lennart suggested for systemd was not systemd but actually "Baby Love", maybe the only love systemd ever got...

/r