Episode: 210
Title: HPR0210: SourceCast Episode 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0210/hpr0210.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:54:46

---

Music
Hello and welcome to episode 4 of SourceCast. I'm your host J.D.
And I'm Jeremy.
And in this episode, we are going to be reviewing 4-site Linux.
Now, most of you probably haven't heard of 4-site because, well, it's a very small
distro that I'm surprised I even know about.
Basically, it's a distro that it seems like they're trying to compete with Sousa
or rather open Sousa, Fedora, Ubuntu, distros like that.
And, well, I guess you'll find out how well they do in this review.
So, into the review.
The three big ideas behind 4-site.
One, I love the idea of a transactional package manager where basically,
you can roll back any upgrade you made any time in the past.
Whether it was the day after you installed it,
six months ago, today, doesn't matter, you can roll it back.
That's really cool.
The other thing is 4-site uses 4-site and Connery,
which is their package manager, use and support recipe files.
Recipe files are like actual Linux package builds and Gentus e-builds
except they make package builds look hard.
Where a package build is usually about 10 to 20 lines,
depending on what you're doing with it.
It's unusual that a recipe file is more than 5 to 10 lines.
Also, they use Anaconda as their installer,
which holds a special place in my heart.
Because just Anaconda is so awesome if only it wasn't bundled with.
RPM distros, I hate you Ian Murdoch for abandoning progeny.
That being said, into the flaming, into the fire pit.
First, it's not one CD.
It's either two CDs or like one third full DVD.
Which is totally fucking ridiculous.
Canonical is shipping CDs for free around the world,
and these ass clowns can't even give it down to one CD.
Sorry, it's just a pet peeve.
Yeah, it's just a pet peeve.
I have a bunch of DVD, one DVD, so it's not really that big of a deal.
It's like, how the hell can you not bundle more than, you know,
they don't have anything super amazing bundled yet.
It's 300 megabytes larger than every other distro pretty much.
Also, that's CD.
We were just mentioning or DVD.
It's not a live CD.
They do not offer a live CD.
Yeah, and I'd love to know where all that extra room's going to,
because there's not even a KDE that's offered,
so they don't have to package any of that.
And that's only acceptable, by the way, having a need for more than one CD is only acceptable
if there's like a porn video easter egg.
If that's not where all that space is going, that's been it's not acceptable.
Yeah, porn video easter egg are like, no man XFCE on the desk, both of them,
or no man KDE or something like that.
But no, only no, you know, one DVD, two CDs.
Just, yeah.
For me, it was only bad hardware support.
I mean, like I said back in, I think it might have been open-suits.
You know, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gen2 actually,
because I was recently playing with Gen2,
which we'll review on the future distro.
Like, they all supported my touchpad.
Not for site.
For site, when I booted, X wouldn't start,
which is a known problem, some distros that start with the NVIDIA driver,
it can tell, and it'll start, some won't,
because my test laptop is a little weird,
but for site wasn't one of the good ones.
Connery, their package manager.
Again, great in theory.
Slowest box.
It takes, it feels like it takes twice as long to install any package
on Connery compared to even open-suits,
which was slow in and of itself compared to yum or apt or Pac-Man.
Also, the Connery syntax is, yeah, it's just as bad.
Actually, no, I'm sorry, it's worse than arch.
Out.
Basically, to install a package, it's not Connery install.
You'd think that would be logical.
It's Connery update package name.
To install a package.
Someone please explain to me how that's logical.
Like they were, I mean, dash capital S.
This is true.
Also, I've looked through the web-based repos.
The repos seem to be extremely slim of packages that exist,
and there is no third-party repo like the AUR.
Yeah, it kind of fails at that.
It also, it's just going to keep getting worse people.
It also fails at rolling release.
Yes, I know Connery is the first digital that comes out with a new norm,
and when a new norm is released, Connery comes out.
A foresight comes out about two days later using that new norm.
But everything else is more out of date than any other rolling release disk row I've used.
I think the kernel is 2.6.24.
Maybe they've upgraded to 2.6.25 by now.
It's 2.5.
Okay.
The GCC is way out of date.
The code extra way out of date.
It just feels like all they care about is no.
Nothing else, not the core of the system, just no.
I think GCC is 4.1, but I can't say too much there,
because I still use Gen2 along my servers,
and if you use the hard pad set for Gen2 on a server,
that means you're using GCC 3.4.
Now that's some old GCC.
Yeah, I would definitely say so.
Also, Package Kit, which is the GTK.
Again, they're not big fans of KDE,
which is the GTK-based Package Manager front end.
It's horrible.
It takes forever to start up.
It's just got really an unfriendly interface that's just hard to navigate
and hard to find what you need.
As we mentioned, it's no longer only.
And this one actually surprised me a lot considering the type of distro it is
and the fact that it is maintained by a corporate entity,
kind of how Fedora is Red Hat's desktop distro.
Forsight is our path's desktop distro.
Does our path have like a sort of a rail equivalent?
I've always thought of Fedora as being sort of Red Hat's glorious playground
where if they fuck something up royally,
it doesn't really matter because it's not our corporate offering.
It's that way, but they believe that, you know,
our path, I believe, it's just a lot of beliefs,
I believe, believes that they want Forsight to be as high quality as our path,
which is their enterprise distro,
which I'll give it to them.
Our path is really cool because it's like completely customizable
and, you know, you can make basically appliances,
and that's really cool, but we're not reviewing our path here.
We're reviewing Forsight, they can't do that.
But being that, you know, Forsight's created by a company,
people are, you know, working on it, getting paid to work on it,
it has got probably the worst, smallest community I've ever seen.
There are about, again, last time I was in the channel,
there are about 50 people on the IRC.
That's nothing.
I mean, considering that it's a distro and, you know,
people go in there for support.
Also, the Forsight forums are quite regularly dead,
which does not make me happy about that.
Well, on to the ratings, I guess.
First up, the granny rating.
I gave it a 6.0, simply because
it's easy to install.
You know, I gave it the same rating as OpenSus,
because it's easy to install, the package manager sucks,
and pretty much other than my one or two little issues,
it worked fine for me.
As for PowerUser, I gave it a 1.5.
The reason I gave it a 1.5 is because there is no customizability.
It's not flexible at all.
Custom compiling.
It's one of those weird things where you don't feel like
you want to custom compile anything on it.
And so, you know, you kind of don't.
And the ease of getting bleeding edge,
anything, pretty much only option is to compile.
Even Forsight's Devel repo is just as unstable,
is just as up to date, is their stable repo.
So, that's kind of made of fail.
As far as annoyance, I gave it a 9.5 or a 0.5.
It doesn't bug you about installing codecs,
and it's got Skype in the Repos and stuff like that.
It's just using it on a day-to-day basis,
just, you know, the fact that it doesn't have a live CD,
the fact that it's 1 DVD, all these things just build up
and make it crappy.
As for software selection, I gave them a 1.5 because,
as I said, it's not very up to date,
and their repository is not very large.
So, yeah, that's made of fail.
And for community, I give it 0.5 because
the community's tiny, not much action in the forums,
IRC is typically empty,
and, you know, I've never been on the mailing lists,
but I would assume they're pretty empty as well.
There is one final thing I want to bring up that I did forget
to mention when I was talking about how much Connery Sox.
I tried to upgrade my system from Forsight 2 to Forsight 2 Devel,
and keep in mind, you know, I've got a pretty decent spec system,
and on Rx2, you know, let's say, add the testing repo on Debian
to go from testing to unstable, takes two minutes.
It took one hour and 20 minutes to go from Forsight 2 to Forsight 2 Devel
with Connery.
That's just unacceptable. I'm sorry.
Perhaps there are the people behind the zipper and open Susa.
That would not surprise me.
But, on to your review, Jeremy.
Did you forget performance again?
I didn't do performance, and neither did you,
but you'll explain why in your review.
I'm just going to have to pester the ever-loving hell out of you to do the performance.
The problem is, I've used most of these disc shows like a month or two ago,
and that was before we were doing this.
I haven't excused.
So Forsight Linux, which in hindsight is not 2020, is probably legally blind.
Okay, so the installer is in Curse's base like Arch or anything from like 2002 in Linux.
For me, it was the GUI Anaconda, but Anaconda is like 16 different installers.
I went for the GUI Anaconda, but it threw me in in Curse's.
Which will probably be related to the graphics issue that I'll get to later.
Yes, probably.
Interesting, something interesting I saw is when you get to the bootloader,
you can choose Grub or EXT Linux.
What the hell is that?
I've never heard of EXT Linux.
It's just Grub or EXT Linux.
What the fuck is that?
I've never heard of that before.
That's a file system, not a bootloader.
Yeah.
And the real problem with the installer is, fuck is it slow?
Damn.
My analogy that I told you before we started recording was that it was almost like
open-sus' software manager made love to a Galapagos turtle,
and their offspring was half paralyzed.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
It took me like literally five or six hours to install it.
Hours.
I could install Gen2 with a base KDE in less time on the same machine.
Damn.
The only reason I could guess that it was so slow was maybe DMA wasn't
enabled on the hard drive.
Maybe, but it wasn't that slow for me.
So I would assume that since it worked fine for me, DMA was enabled.
The only reason I thought it might have been DMA is it took like 20,
30 minutes to install icon packages which hammer the hard drive
with a whole bunch of little files.
I would have taken a look with HDParm to see if it was on,
but unfortunately, when you're in the Anaconda environment,
there's no man entry for HDParm.
It's not sophisticated enough for you to pipe dash, dash, help them or
so you can read all the help options.
And in the spirit of fairness, I'm not going to go pull another computer up
and go read the manual for HDParm.
I want it to be able to succeed or fail on its own and it failed on its own there.
When I finally got to running, you know, you cut away seen several hours later.
When I got to running it, it was just hardware failure all around.
Splashy was failed, it gave video mode errors.
It had no working X and considering that my Dell test bed has intel graphics,
that's really awful. Intel graphics are like a gimmie.
It doesn't get easier than that.
Yeah, if you can't do intel graphics, you're doing something wrong.
You're doing it wrong.
And the infamous Broadcom wireless also did not work.
And just out of curiosity, I ran D-message and it said no firmware for B43
and then it gives the URL to go and download the firmware,
which brings up my tireless, endless complaint of if you know I have that hardware
and if you know it takes that firmware, why the hell don't you just prompt me to install it
and make me agree to, you know, whatever restrictions there are on the firmware.
You can't redistribute it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Click yes if you want working Wi-Fi.
Is this so much to ask? I mean, really.
Okay.
I really didn't like the concept behind Connery and the whole rest piece thing.
It's a really great idea for a software manager.
It's just highly unfortunate.
It's just so unfortunate that it's surrounded by fail wrapped in a, you know,
put in a sesame seed bun of, you know, failure.
It's just, it's fail in every way imaginable.
So, and of course then there's my other pet peeve that it can't just upgrade
or it's not a rolling release, which annoys the hell out of me too.
So, on to my ratings.
For Granny, I was almost tempted to disqualify it for no X,
but instead I'm going to be a mean little bastard and give it a zero.
For Power User, I give it a two strictly because Connery in particular recipes
seems like a very useful and potentially quite powerful if you put it on the distro that doesn't suck.
And for annoyance, I give it a, you know, I was going to say a nine,
but I think I'm going to go for it and give it a 10.
Or for in-herscoring on the forums a zero.
There's no one CD, there's no live CD, there's no KDE,
there's no software selection, there's no working X on a fucking Intel graphics card,
there's no splashy, there's no working Wi-Fi, there's just a bunch of no, no, no.
So, and of course then there's the six hour install problem.
So, 10 annoyance, I'd rather have a root canal.
Software selection.
I sort of gave it a few gimmies because I did see in the six hours I had to sit by the laptop as it tried to install,
that it was installing some things like Java and Flash,
did a lot of other distros, don't install.
So, I sort of gave it a few sympathy points there and I gave it a five.
For community support, I'll give it a six because the website is rather pleasant looking,
it's rather slick, it's all there and integrated.
And I'm not going to penalize them too much for not having that many people there because that's kind of a catch-22 situation.
So, I will sort of give them credit for having a nice functional and pretty look at website six.
For performance, I was able to get GeekBitch running and test it, however,
it was not a fair test because no wasn't running, it was basically just a shell and that was it.
And that's not really fair because on all the other benchmarks we have a full running desktop environment
and all the load on the system that you incur with that with services and network manager and this, that and the other.
So, I just qualified it on performance and I'm just not going to give it a score there because it's not really fair to have a score
for it running just in a shell with nothing else running when all the other distros, I benchmarked,
we're running at least a full desktop environment.
Yeah, I would agree that's...
So, just qualified there, F all around, great software manager concept, wrapped in a massive avalanche of fail.
Yeah, I mean, I've got to say recently, this is a little ranty.
I've tried, and again, ranty and sad, I've tried every major distribution on DistroWatch,
Fedora, CentOS, Gen2, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, I mean, the list can go on for a long time.
Honestly, foresight is the only one that I've thought, my God, nothing has anything failed me this hard.
You know, and no, nothing else has.
Okay, so, should we read some viewer mail we have gotten?
I think we should.
Okay, this is from a Jerry and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and if I wasn't such a lazy editor,
I would put in Bugs Bunny right about now.
He says, I really enjoy the show, and I especially like the idea of the .5 episodes.
Episode Pi was great.
The audio quality with your new headsets is greatly improved too, so I guess we knocked them dead with the quality.
Like I said, it must have been so good that they had just been put into a coma and couldn't tell us if it was better or not.
Yes, I know so.
Shut up this guy.
And he mentions in the previous episode, so we talked about the person who wrote in with the HP laptop with the Super Evil Broadcom card,
and he has some experience with it.
He says, you had an email from a listener with an HP looking for a solution for his wireless card.
I have the same BCM 94-311 card in my laptop, and the only way I've been able to get it work is with IndusRapper and BCMWL5.inf.
I've tried several distros and fought with B43 and FW Cutter for weeks on end, and it was a king-sized fail.
My only issue with an HP laptop that I've ever had.
I've tried open Suza 11 recently, and I totally agree about the total shit software mismanagement system.
It's the one thing that kept me off Suza for many a year.
I don't care much for RPM-based distros in the first place, and I must agree there wholeheartedly.
Just wait until you hear this for a view of foresight.
At least, Zipper didn't suck as horribly at doing everything.
It only sucked at most things.
Still, I do have to give some props to Mandriva and there.
I always want to just say army per me.
I don't know why.
You are PMI, and that's almost a yogurt right there.
Our favorite.
I think we'll just go stick with yogurt in arch.
And their package manager.
If you review Mandriva or PCLegs off, I'd like to hear what you guys think of.
We're going to have to come up with a pet name for this one too, like we have with yogurt.
We'll have to come up with something for it.
Before the next stop with you.
Great show.
Keep it up.
I'll keep listening.
First of all, I would like to review...
Which was the second PC with XOS?
PC with XOS.
But that review will not turn out well.
Oh, there.
Just throw.
It's ever been released.
It will not turn out well because I am very against the fact that they use...
...apt, which is probably the best package manager I've used or possibly the second best after Pac-Man.
They use apt on top of RPM, which is at least to me.
That's just total blast from me right there.
Yeah.
Well, the interesting thing is between Mandriva, PC, Linux, and XOS.
And Sousa, those are probably the only three distros that have a comprehensive GUI control panel that aims to be a friendly sort of one-stop shop for doing anything with your system.
Yeah.
Unsurprisingly, all three distros are quite high on distro watch.
Probably because of that.
I know when I first started using Linux, Mandriva's control panel back around 7X was a big reason why I chose them.
Same here, although I never picked it up back in the day because of legal issues.
And we talked more about that in the episode 0, so...
Yeah.
It might be...
It might be worth discussing at a 0.5 or at least just general software management tools because...
Despite having used RPM distros for the overwhelming majority of the time that I've used a binary distro...
I really have sort of a soft spot for .debs because it seems like nobody has managed, at least in the distros I've tried.
And nobody has managed to significantly screw up the ability to dist upgrade with that dev files.
Also, I've created devs from scratch and I've created RPMs from scratch.
And as much as people hate on it and say, you know, devs suck at creating from scratch, yes, it is a bitch.
But I would much rather create a dev than an RPM.
But thank you for writing in, Jerry.
And as usual, we encourage you guys to write into us.
He's JD at sourcecast.org, and I am Jeremy, J-E-R-E-M-Y, at sourcecast.org.
You can also reach us on the forums, which is sourcecast.org slash forum.
And our IRC channel on IRC.Sourcecast.org, pound sourcecast.
There's actually a couple of people other than us idling around in there these days.
Yes, yes.
Some with ridiculous powers on that network.
Like yours, truly.
Oh, more than just you. I see some people in there with superpowers.
Oh, there.
Finding in the shadows, you know.
Waiting to jump out and stab you.
And it looks like judging on downloads that the .5 release was particularly popular.
So I think we're probably going to stick with it.
Yes, I agree it was quite the popular thing.
And if you have any ideas for our next .5 discussion or our next obscure Linux distro to review,
post the forums or contact us on IRC or email, because we're sort of,
we still have up in the air what our next .5 discussion will be and what our next obscure distro will be.
If it's probably pretty likely that our next distro review will be Fedora.
Yes.
What we're doing in case you all can't tell is of course the obscure distros will just hit randomly.
But the not obscure distros will go in their order on distro watch as of review day.
This could change in the future if you're listening to it.
But again, going in the order on with on review day.
Yeah, could change in the future, but at least for like the top .8 or so,
that order tends to be pretty solid.
Yeah, this is true.
So until next time, if you read market watch,
we hear its source cast wholeheartedly endorse John C. DeVore as columnal market watch,
where he suggests Adobe released the Creative Suite for Linux as a way of rebuffing Microsoft
and their silver light offerings and their whole debacle with the NBC Olympics website with silver light.
And he gets no spam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.