Posts by gosand

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Re: It ain't going to work

It's simple... because most big corporations want that support contract from a vendor. I have worked for many big corps over the years. For mission-critical things like the OS and databases (among others) they want and need a support contract. They rely on those companies for the hard problems, patches, etc. Many times they will have a policy requiring it. I've seen it first hand with Postgres. Even though we had tons of great DBAs, we relied on the chosen vendor for a lot of things.

That is why their distro was renamed from Red Hat Linux to RHEL back in early '00s. They became a Linux VENDOR for commercial purposes. It's so widely used because there is a company behind it which offers a sense of stability.

(RH 5.1 was the first distro I installed in '98 but I went Debian-based around '05 and am still today)

Researcher bags two-for-one deal on Linux bugs while probing GNOME component

"Originally"? I still use locate. In fact, I overheard someone at work talking to someone else about options for running 'find', and I said "Don't forget about locate" and he didn't know what it was. He ran it and said "I'll have to remember that, you can teach an old dog new tricks". He's a few years younger than me, but higher up and quite technical.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Self-reinforcing

I switched away from FF when it started sucking, and I had been using it since it was Netscape (save a year or so on Opera). But I didn't go to Chrome, I chose Pale Moon. It was great for a couple of years, then I had continued problems with it not working/crashing. I made the mistake of asking about it on their forum, where developers lamented about how users were 'morons'.

By then FF had fixed things and it's been great ever since.

Many years ago I managed testing teams at a large bank, and our platform requirement was to work on FF, but at the time FF wasn't an 'approved' brower. Can't install it, can't test with it. Tools to test on different browers are light-years ahead of where we were then. Not to mention that if things are coded to 'standards' and you don't have custom code, there are many fewer problems. Of course, Google is pushing things down that same road that MS did with IE, hopefully not to the same extent.

Microsoft whips out probe after Windows 11 users suffer the blue-screen blues

Probably not related...

Just spent 2 days with my daugher at university (via phone) because her laptop froze during an update (Win11) and then refused to boot. I walked her through doing image restores, etc. She finally took it to a local shop. I talked to the tech, and he said he has seen a lot of issues this week which was the first week of classes. He said the OS was corrupted and it's getting a re-install now. It's not an Intel (Ryzen 7) and probably isnt related to this story. She had been using the laptop over the past couple of months at home, so I am sure it's just some wild random coincidence. smh

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Can you install another init like in Debian?

You can install Debian without systemd, as noted in their wiki : https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_installation_time

I could only figure out how to do it from the old red-and-blue installer although it doesn't specify that on the wiki. I couldn't seem to get to a terminal from the calamares installer.

So I have Debian 12 running in a kvm with sysvinit.

If Xebian only supports calamares, I am not sure if you can do it. I'm running Devuan, and its updated version based on Deb12 is available. So if my dist-upgrade goes sideways and I have to reinstall, then maybe I'll try out Xebian. Not likely since the last few dist-upgrades have been quite boring and successful.

Good to have options.