hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0189.txt

Episode: 189
Title: HPR0189: Source Cast Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0189/hpr0189.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:17:15

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l
Hello and welcome to episode 4.5 of Soyscast. I'm JD and I'm Jeremy.
And this episode, it's a 0.5 episode similar to what we did with episode Pi a couple of
weeks ago. And in this episode we're just going to be talking about, well, Jeremy
we tried Vista for the first time. So we're going to be doing an unofficial review of Vista.
We're going to be tackling some viewer feedback and discussing Linux standards. First up,
viewer feedback. We got an email into our email, JD at Soyscast.org and Jeremy at Soyscast.org.
Would you explain the Gmail Equifax certificate thingy, which nearly caused an unanticipated
soiling during my configuration of evolution on Debian testing? What exactly does Gmail
have to do with Equifax? Signed Have a Val? Sorry, that looks like Polish or something?
Well, what Gmail has to do with Equifax is, as I think anyone who's set up Gmail in the
third party client knows, it uses SSL and they choose, not that there's much of a choice
since there's only about two of them, they choose to get their SSL certificate from Equifax.
By default, what did you say you were using? Evolution should realize that Equifax is a certified
place to get an SSL certificate from and just let it pass on by. But apparently they
don't do that, they don't have a list of certificate authority places in there. So it bugs
you and asks, you know, is this an okay certificate? Pretty much, if it's a site you trust
like Gmail, there's a pretty good chance you're safe just saying, okay, if it's like, you
know, shop at Joe's computer store.com where you're putting in your credit card information
and you've never heard of them and they have a, you know, bad SSL certificate, then it's
time to start worrying a little bit. But for Gmail and evolution, it's no big deal.
Our next, it's not an email, it's actually a comment that we got posted to SourceCast
episode 4 from Chris Bumgardner said, I like your podcast, but why is it that you trash
everything that you review? I mean, you two simply burn foresight at the stake. Yeah,
we did. We kind of did. You were right to do so if it is really that bad, but how about
the change of pace? Could you review something that you actually like? I am also giving
on this feedback in hopes that things will improve, but if a Windows user were to listen
to your podcast, they would conclude that what next must suck because you only say bad
things about it. You want to go first on this one, Jeremy?
Sure, I'll read the exact response I gave to him and that is some of our criteria are
very tough to be good at at the same time. For example, Gintu, incredible for power
users and servers. Granny will never ever figure out how to install it. If Granny can
install Arch, she's not going to be able to install Gintu. That's not happened.
And the reverse is true of Ubuntu. And this is why there are so many distributions of
Linux to begin with. A lot of them are purpose built and highly targeted. And you know,
some of them work given what they're designed for. And I think we've gushed a fair amount
over the Ubuntu's upsides like hardware support in their community and Arch is good side
like PKG builds and community in their website and so on. It's just that it's very hard
to get straight tens across the board giving the just number of things that we're grading
on. It's very hard to be good at all those things at the same time. And let's face it for
some of the more obscure distros we're looking at. They simply don't have the manpower to accomplish
some of these things. And you know, I don't hold it against them that much but it's not like
they're not trying to become the next Ubuntu. Everyone has to remember Ubuntu is almost four
years old now. And you know, they're really not doing any upstream work that much. And you know,
like they're packaging GNOME 2.24 when only GNOME 2.22 is in Debian. But they get to do a lot of,
you know, making things easier work. They don't have to concentrate on packaging everything.
So, and really, the reason we beg on so many distros is because as Jeremy mentioned,
there is no one perfect distro for everyone. Like, you know, I like Ubuntu sure. And I use it
sometimes when I'm feeling lazy or when I need to get a full gooey in about 20 minutes. But
I just, I just, I don't want to run it is my desktop OS and it will fail our criteria because
it's not aimed at advanced users. And the distros that we've epically ripped a new asshole,
which is mainly open-source and foresight. We're not judging them just because, you know,
oh, it's foresight. We're judging them fairly. And if, you know, foresight took apt and implemented
their transactional stuff on top of apt, I would be more than happy to, you know,
forgive everything that sucked about their packaging manager because pretty much nothing would
suck about it. Yeah, we're harsh, but at the same time, we're fairly straightforward and honest.
I think I said that if Susa just got rid of their software manager just threw it out the window
and replaced it with dev files and apt-get, it would be, it would be heavenly. It would be incredible.
It would be what Ubuntu strives to be. That would be the closest distro we have reviewed
to this point in terms of getting straight tens across the board. It would have probably averaged
if it if if open-source I had apt-get instead of their existing software manager, I imagine I would
have given it a total average of probably north of eight eight and a half. And I think our highest
right now is arch around seven and a half? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And also, Chris, I don't know
you may listen to other podcasts like Linux Action Show or Log Radio or Distress like that where
they basically are like, you know, the distro did this, this, this, and this well, but I had a couple
little issues and, you know, like if the thing seg faults on boot, they call that a little issue.
I call that a pretty big fucking issue. Your shipment of fail has arrived.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, at least me personally, both in real life and in the show,
I try not to beat around the bush and say, you know, like, oh, it's a good distro if they just,
you know, tried a little bit hot. No, the distro sucks, you know, change shit or it's going to keep sucking.
And despite the fact that we really ripped foresight, foresight, a new asshole, we had the community
manager for foresight and a former developer for foresight posted our forms and basically say,
hey, we agree with you guys on most of what you said. And the community manager said, hey,
we'll take this into consideration and work to make it better. And that's what we really want to get
out of this. Yeah, that, that is honestly, I completely agree there. That is the best thing
that we want to get out of this. Now you know, by listening to this podcast, what kind of
sucks about your distro and you can improve it. And yeah, it's not like we're going to be, I mean,
we're very, we're very honest. We're very fair. But it's not like we're going to be nice. We're
not going to go put these on some five-year-old think pads or some bells that originally
shipped with Ubuntu. We're going to put it on some evil ass hardware and see what it's got.
Yeah, I mean, you know, even if we would review my current distro of choice, Debian,
I wouldn't be able to give it like, you know, top, I wouldn't be able to give it, you know,
tens on everything. Hello, it would probably score within maybe half a point of arch Linux.
You know, and it's one of those things of like, there is no perfect distro. It's one of us,
you know, if you're a new user, go with whatever distro we give the highest, you know, like
granulating and software selection to. If you're a power user, go with the distro we give,
you know, the highest power user, software selection, and, you know, I can't think of a third
criteria that would be good, but performance. Well, that performance, sure. You know, it's more
of us, yes, we hate on everything, but yeah, we, we, yeah. Well, we hate on everything,
but if it's good, you know, we will, we will speak of it as such. I gushed a fair amount over
Susa before I rifted a new asshole for the software manager. Like I said, if they would just
use afkit and Debian, I would have a hard on for Susa. It would be that good. Yeah.
And hell, even, you know, like I said, even our distros have choice for me, Debian, for you,
Arch Linux, and or Gentoo, we wouldn't be able to give it, you know, 10 out of 10.
You know, or even the distro that I used to be working on, I quit that distro,
even that we still wouldn't be able to give it the 10 out of 10 on.
But, um, we also got a second comment that I have not pushed to the site yet because I'm too
lazy to click the approved button. It will be on the site by the time you're listening to this,
though. From a guy named TS said, hi, I agree with Chris. Your podcast is very negative at times.
Just say that something needs more work. You don't have to groan on about it being an epic
fail wrapped in the layer of stupidity. Bra, bra, whatever, TS. You're right. But
we do do what the distro developers like in that we explain what we dislike about it.
And we mostly say wrapped in the layer of fail and stuff like that, kind of for comedic purpose.
Hey, it's good at getting attention. I mean, uh, uh, to use the bad analogy because it sports.
And I imagine not many people who listen to this podcast or make sports fans. But I bet you when Bobby
Knight, I bet you when racist, I bet you when Bobby Knight threw his chair across the basketball court,
he got the ref's attention. I think it's time to go on the fun little ride and it's time for
the Vista review. Oh boy. Out of the frying pan into these. Yeah, let's preface this with um,
Chris and TS. If you thought we were hard on foresight, sweet Jesus. Oh, dear. Uh, basically,
I had a, um, a machine I was setting up for an employee at work and it came with Vista home
business or excuse me, Vista business professional hell. Fuck, I can't tell. There's like 20 different
versions of Vista and the only difference between them aside from the buried at the bottom of the
box description features is one word in the fucking name. Yeah, but I digress. It was one of the Vista
business one versions. And it was. Oh, fuck slow. It ran as slow as Sus' software package manager
did all the fucking time. And we're not talking about, you know, a Pentium two with 64 megs of
RAM here. We're talking about a brand new Dell latitude with a Centrino 2 Duo and two gigs of
RAM, absolutely choking and sputtering at every turn. Because, uh, I ran Vista back when it first
came out. And I don't know if I said this on episode one or not, but Vista was actually what made me
make the move till the next full time. Uh, it actually for about a week, it did run faster than
XP on my system. Yeah, it was that slow out of the box for me. There was no reprieve.
And when you first start Vista, you get Vista gadgets. And Vista gadgets are like, um,
are like KDE 4.1 widgets or are the OSX, uh, forget what you call them, what scriptlets,
applets, whatever. Uh, yeah, Wigitz dashboard widgets. Yeah, it's just like that in an OSX and
widgets in KDE 4.1. Only none of them are fucking useful. And it's done really badly because
you have no choice but to have them at the right edge of your screen. You can't move them around
randomly. They're in the little bar on the right side of your screen. And if you don't like it,
turn them off entirely. And that brings me to my next point, turning them off entirely.
It takes, it took like 10 minutes to figure out how to make them go all the fuck away.
They don't make it very easier, obviously. There's a little widgets button down there at the bottom.
And you think, oh, well, I'll just click on that and go to disable or something like that. No,
you can't get to go away like that. And there's, if you hover over the gadget, a little X will appear
in the top right. You can get rid of it. And I did that for all of them. But it took me like another
5 to 10 minutes to figure out how to get rid of the fucking Google search widget. And really,
what the hell is the point of that? I mean, is the search bar in Firefox and Opera and IE simply
not convenient enough? Yeah, I would, I would somewhat agree with you. But, you know,
why do people on Macs, let's say, use like widgets for getting movie times? Isn't it by your logic?
It would be easy enough to open up Firefox or Safari or whatever. Oh, no, no, no. This is just
a simple Google search box. It saves you nothing. You have to go into the browser anyway.
You're saving like a double click on the desktop. That's it. This is, this is true. And I'm using
it very musically. The first time I turned it on, I got a nice warning in the bottom right saying
multiple security problems. Well, it's Windows. No shit. Yeah. And so, uh, the security problem is
the fact that you're running Windows. And so I did that and I ended up having to install like, I don't
know, 40 VISTA security updates. A lot of them, by the way, the same updates you would get an XP
that should tell you something for VISTA sharing codebase and where the bloats coming from.
And, uh, and get this. After I installed the security updates, I had to wait as it did
further processing when I shut down and I had to wait for like five minutes. And I turned it
back on. And I had to wait another five minutes while it did further processing. And I said,
oh, okay, well, it must be done now. Wrong. I logged in multiple security problems. And I had to
do this whole song and dance again. And in fact, after I did it the second time, one more time for
good measure. You can't use VISTA for more than, oh, say a half hour without stumbling into UAC.
A half hour? Really? I'd give it about five minutes.
Yeah, you get one as soon as you try and do a security update. So, yeah, probably, probably five
minutes. I think you get one the first time you run anything on the desktop as well. So if you
try to pull up a browser, you'll get one. Okay. Yeah. I think you get one the first time you
open the control panel, too, because you know, keeps, by the way, the first thing we do is go to the
control panel and fuck with settings. It is absolutely deplorable. To give you an example,
it would be like using the conqueror web browser when conqueror 3.x. And every time a website
tried to set a cookie, it gave you an allow or deny button. And your only option was to simply
and it didn't give you a way to simply allow or set further settings. It just gave you an allow
or deny every time you got to a website with a cookie. That's kind of like using VISTA. Anytime
you do anything, continue or deny. And so, of course, after, after a day or so of using VISTA,
you get fucking fed up with the bullshit and you just click continue, continue, continue,
continue, continue, which means that when you actually get a virus that's trying to infect
your machine, what are you going to do? Continue, continue, continue, continue.
Just negating all security advantages of VWAC. Yeah, that's a complete design and implementation
cop out from Microsoft. Get some balls and fix the code, Redmond. That's such a good idea.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is they tried to copy pseudo-ingulates or the way of asking you for your
password when you need to like install something from a .pkg in OSX, except they failed really
horribly at it. Also, and amusingly, you can't even shut down VISTA easily. When you go to the
start menu and you click on the little power button, it hibernates. Okay, what the fuck? So,
you bring it back up from hibernation and you go, okay, so where's the real shutdown button?
On the phone, bottom right, there's a little right arrow because when I think shut down a restart,
like it will sit, and of course, after you do an update, the Windows Update Manager sits in the
tray like a Jack Russell fucking terrier jumping up and down, up and down saying, hey, you need to restart,
you need to restart, you need to restart. And so, of course, you have to go find how to restart.
It's see, this is very fun. It's like boxing with your computer. And there's a little right arrow
button because when I think restart, I think right arrow button. And after you click the right
arrow button, then you get the full listing of options like shutdown and restart and hibernate.
Who the hell made this decision? When you click that little right button, you get the full
menu of, you know, shutdown restart hibernate. The shutdown, or perhaps it's restart, by default,
if there's still security updates, it, you know, does security updates and then shut down. And
they just below it, it has a little bit, you know, a little line of hard to read text, you know,
click here if you'd rather shut down without doing updates. It's like, I just want to shut the hell
down. Why can't you talk to me about my updates via that thing in the trade fucking later?
Yes, I want to know who made these user interface decisions at Redmond so I can hit them in the
nuts repeatedly with a titanium-faced golf driver. Here's another bit of absolute bleeding from
the asshole pain. If you insert, if you take a external hard drive, put it in your external hard
drive case and plug it in with USB into your computer, obviously that drive has nothing on it.
Nothing, it's totally pristine. And Vista doesn't even do anything, it doesn't say, hey,
you plugged in the drive. What a form at it? No, it just acts like nothing happened.
And apparently being able to pull up my computer and look at the drives and right-click on them and
go to properties and then format or something like that, apparently that's too simple. So now you
have to right-click on my computer in the start menu and then you have to go to some other sub-menu
and or something like services or manage my computer and then after you, there's not even
something as simple as dis-management. If you have to go to something like services or manage
my computer or some lame generic bullshit and that pulls up like a secondary control panel,
doesn't look like the normal control panel is something else entirely and one of the little
options you can choose is disk management. And so after you've spent these several minutes to
fucking find that probably by using Google, you can't just click on the drive and format it.
If you do, it'll just, it won't do it. It doesn't give you an error, it doesn't say why,
it just fucking doesn't do it. You have to specifically go out of your way to create the master
boot record on the drive and then format it. Why the fuck are you making me do this? There's no point
in that. If you see that the drive is blank, simply do it all in one shot like you have been for the
last decade. Why was this done? I think the VISTA developers hated everybody, they were just,
you know, anti-social kind of assholes and they decided, you know what, let's be dicks and let's
make this the hardest OS for anyone to use ever. And of course I had to set up network shares and
network printers on this machine. And network printers is pretty much identical to XP, even looks
the same, they probably haven't even touched that code. But adding a network share is a whole new
ball game. There's no my network, there's no way to sort of browse the network and see what's
out there. Instead, you are given a button to click in the GUI, which by the way is very hidden,
it's where you would expect a tab to be if when you were in my control panel, there's a tab,
it's like a network place or something like that. And it's in the position you would expect to be
if it was like an Internet Explorer tab. It's not exactly out there and obvious. And when you click
on it, it's nothing more than a GUI front end to the Net Use command. And for those unfamiliar with
that, if you are using Windows XP and trying to authenticate to a Samba share on a Linux server,
and you're not longing into that Linux server with the exact same user name that the current
user is logged in with XP. And the exact same password they have in XP, you have to pull up MS-Thos
and put in a command called NetSpace Use space. And then the drive letter you want to mount this
net share as, and then colon, then another space, and then backslash, backslash, the host name,
or since Windows is more incompetent, the IP address, and then another backslash, and then the share name.
And that's the only way that in Windows XP, you can authenticate to a Linux Samba share using a
username and password different from the one you're logged in on XP. And because after you press
enter on endos on that, it'll say, logged in as guests failed. Do you want to log in as somebody else?
Well, fucking yeah, I'm in dollars, aren't I? And so basically in Vista, they gutted all of the
sort of helpful gooeyness of my network places, and instead just put in a GUI front end to the
Net Use command, which is sort of a step forward if you are, say, a system administrator, and you
already know what all the information is on all the network shares, and you don't want to go through
the trouble of the username and password on the boxes, which I had to go through that, it's not fun.
But for Joe Blow user, trying to get the printer that they just right clicked on and went to
share printer, they're not going to have much fucking fun. And so that was about the
total totality of my Vista experience. I several times got up and walked away from the
computer and went to using my new ThinkPad with Arch, while it did security updates and other
things like that. Otherwise, I would have ran the risk of putting my fist through the display
of that Dell, because it was fucking infuriating to use. Holy shit.
Oh, and there's one thing I want to bring up. If either your computer can't run them,
or you choose to turn them off, because they do rape your GPU, rape your CPU and rape your RAM,
I'm talking about the arrow graphics here, if you can't already tell.
The UI either looks arrow, which uses up all your resources, or it looks like shit.
Yes, arrow, so you can scroll through blue screens, black screens, red screens, and endless,
yes, you know, security warnings and eye popping 3D.
Yeah, it's, it's green, like I don't like compass, I don't like it on by default, I don't use it,
unless I'm, you know, showing off to somebody. This is like compass, except fewer effects,
and it eats about four times the amount of RAM of compass.
It's, it's compass with one effect, and 10 times the overhead. All right.
Yeah, that's, that's excellent. I failed Simpsons voices, obviously. I'm not going to do that again
for you, to you people. Yeah, so that's how much Vista sucks, and aren't we mostly glad that we
all run Linux? Yes, if I had to rate out Vista, it would, it would probably be like 0.25 average,
I would just mercilessly thrash it. Wow, that's pretty bad.
Yeah, but it installs cleanly, one point, the end.
Yeah, installs, everything else sucks.
Ah, but on to our next topic, Linux standards, or lack thereof, or lack thereof, indeed.
Anyone who's been around Linux the past couple of years knows about,
it's a package in some distros, some distros don't have it, it really depends.
Um, a package called Linux standards base. Basically, it's supposed to say,
okay, if you want to be a standard Linux distro, you install these packages,
you use, you use this package manager, and you use this directory structure,
which in theory, it's a great idea, except the last major revision to LSB was in about
2004, before any distros use live CDs, before Firefox 1.0 came out. Very, you know,
very old, very early Linux it feels like. And also, it recommends, well, actually the only
package manager that is LSB approved is LSB, or is RPM, I'm having an off day, obviously,
is RPM. And that's mine. Yeah. What's that? That's my numbing. Why? Just why? Yeah, as we'll probably
show next week, RPM is still made of foul, because next week we're reviewing Fedora, that never mind.
And it's just why can't I don't get why nobody has like thought up or nobody has, you know,
all gotten, let's say the RPM and YAM, and dev and app developers into a room and said,
you know, hey, let's come together, make a great package manager that's got the speed of RPM,
it's got the, you know, reasonably easy to use and good dependency management of dev.
And we'll have a great package manager, and we won't be divided between people who love Deb,
and people who love RPM, and, you know, people like, you know, C panel and Plask, who only distribute
RPM, is because they don't see W and base distros as a worthy distro for their tools.
And probably to a lesser extent, just playing lack of resources and ignorance, and only so much
time to get it out the door as usual. Yeah, and I mean, it's not only package managers that have
that issue, it's package managers, it's, you know, tech steditors, really the list goes on,
and I just, I don't understand why no one can agree on something good.
I would take a different approach instead of trying to meet a middle ground with all the distros
regarding package management, and let's, let's be honest here for a second, the Linux foundation
will be largely dominated by the corporate presences within Linux because they're the people who
are funding the damn thing, and that means it's going to be RPM because all the big corporates
are RPM, period. That's, that's just the way life is right now. And I think the better solution
to be to take one step higher and to create a new sort of liaison package manager, it's not a
package manager in and of itself, it's simply, well, okay, in what form are you talking about smart?
No, I'm talking about package, Ken. I've never heard of this go on.
I'm surprised. Oh yeah, you didn't get to a GUI in foresight, that would be, that would make
sense why you have never used it. Basically, what it's meant to be is it's meant to be a front end
to, I believe it has both the command line and a GUI interface, although I've only used the GUI
interface. It's meant to be a one front end that's the same on every distro that supports, it supports
RPM and Yum, it supports Connery in, in foresight, it's supposedly it supports Deb, but the
last time I tried it, the Deb support was horribly lacking to the point where it can install and it
can remove and that's all it can do. How about Pac-Man? No Pac-Man backing yet, but apparently
from what I've heard, people are working on one, but there is, like, I think there's a smart
back end, there's a PISI back end for partisan Linux, there's a back end for man dreamers, you are
MPI thingy. We forgot to come up with a funny nickname for that, damn us. Yeah.
But yes, that's, now that's, see, now that's what I would call sexy, now that will solve so many
problems, just one sort of sitting on top interface, they can go and interface with that to get,
go interface with man dreamer, and Pac-Man, and Yum, and whatever the hell chooses using this release,
that is perfect. Then you can have people like Adobe, who, by the way, recently joined the Linux
foundation, and then these are the people we really want supporting Linux to begin with, people
like Skype, for instance, because what Skype does right now is they go, well, here's an RPM,
fuck you, go fix it for your distro, we're not going to support all of you. We don't have the time
of the resources. And now, instead of just throwing out an RPM and saying, go fix it if you don't use
RPM, they can release one package, and it will work with every distro. That, that is awesome.
Well, that's not the way, that's not the way, um, package kit marks. You still, it's still
Debs, it's still, you know, RPMs, it's still whatever actual packages that man dreamer uses,
it's just instead of, you know, having to, let's say, I'm a Debian user, and I want to move
to Fedora, having to run Yum, if I know package kit, I can handle installing and removing packages
easily on any distro that package kit supports. Okay, we're talking two different things here,
you're talking about just a universal front end that doesn't do anything more, it simply calls
up the program. I'm talking about, that's all, uh, actually it is. I'm talking about one format
that supports both binary and source based, that then properly interfaces with apt-get and Yum,
and RPM and all the others, so that depending on what system it's resident on, it alters the
package on, on the fly, and then prepares it and installs it on that distro. That's what I'm
talking about, and that's, that would be sexy. Something like auto package. Yeah, I know there's a,
there's a similar effort out there and smart package manager, but that doesn't aim to be a
universal thing. It aims to be a complete, you know, front-out replacement. I wanting something
that just sits one level higher, that'll work on any distro, because then you can have somebody
like Adobe and Skype make one package, and it'll work on any distro that supports it, and that,
now that's real progress for standards. That's what auto package supposedly can do,
but, you know, auto package files are really hard to create, and they just, they just don't work well.
And if auto package, if they did something, I don't know what they could do, but if they did
something to fix it and make it more like, you know, a normal package that's easy enough to create,
you know, Adobe, Skype, they would all use it. I mean, it does, we don't even have to go
straight to this sort of one, one layer higher package manager that does everything. Even just a
program that I can, as a, you know, third-party vendor, fill out my dependencies, fill out my
version information in the description, everything, and press a button, and then it spits out a
dev, and it spits out an RPM, and it spits out a PKG build. Even if that would be huge progress.
Well, that, you can cheat with that. There's something at least on Debian called, and I think it's
on RPM-based disk yours as well, but I'm not sure, called Alien. It's designed to, basically,
let's say you make a Deb, you build the Deb. You run Alien, Dash, Dash, RPM, and then the
file name of the Deb, and it creates an RPM. And you go, you know, Alien, Dash, Dash,
TargGZ, the name of the Deb, and it creates a Slackware package that I think is backward
compatible with Arches, but don't quote me on that. And what would be perfect is to just
change that, so it adds more formats like e-builds and package builds and official arch Linux packages.
And you're done, you know, that all you have to do is make one package and run it through Alien
for the others. And it seems to me that's, that is the sort of thing that the Linux foundation
should be working and focusing on. I understand that corporate interests are going to drive the
thing, but come on now. And the decision to basically require RPM to, to be, quote unquote,
LSB compliant. That's nothing more than, you know, throwing away like a half to two thirds
of Linux out there and saying, well, fuck you, use RPM or go away. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean,
also by using that, they're throwing away literally the most popular Linux distribution
in history since Linux has existed, which would be a boom too.
And the, the other standards pet peeve I have, and I'm going to hammer Fedora on this just
because at least when I last used Fedora, at least before I will this week for our next review,
was around Fedora Core 4 or 5. And I remember it had the most ridiculous path
for a config file I have ever seen. I would like to see standards for config file locations
and for naming conventions of Damon's and things like that. For example, if I want to start
a patchy in Gen 2, it's et cetera slash an it dot D slash Apache 2. And if I want to do that in
arch, it's et cetera slash RC dot D slash. And then I think just a patchy, maybe HTTPD,
I'm a little hazy. But anyway, and then in like, in Fedora, it's like et cetera slash
an it dot D slash HTTPD. And that's just really annoying. And they do this shit for like all the
Damon's too. I can gen 2, et cetera slash an it dot D slash my SQL. And then in arch, I know
this one for a fact, it's et cetera slash RC dot D slash my SQL D. That shit's annoying.
Yeah, I'll agree there. But as for your thing about the config file,
well, the way it does it, it doesn't make me happy, but it's better than what you were probably
thinking of. It is in Etsy in Etsy. It's kind of like Pac-Man. There's a yum.com. And then
there's a yum.com.d with all your repo URLs in it. Yeah, the particular path I'm going to
pick on on Fedora is like Fedora core four or five back at the time. It was like
slash et cetera slash and then it was like web and then slash local and then slash a patchy
slash HTTPD.com. That may just been, you know, the sort of tweaked way that that the host I was
using did it, but holy shit was that annoying. And you could imagine the time it took me to
find the damn thing. Because of course, I would, I, because at the time, I was fairly big new,
won't server stuff. And I just said, okay, locate a patchy. And of course, it'll just show me the
patchy folder name there. So I still didn't know where the config file was. That's, that's so annoying.
That's one of the few things that I really, that I really, really like about Gen2 on, on the server.
They will modify where a package says it's config files. They will force that to put it in slash
Etsy. And then usually there'll be a folder name that mirrors the package name or the Damon name
in Etsy. And then you can go in there and all the stuff is in there. But they, I know that by
default, mySQL wants to slash Etsy slash my.cmf. And Gen2 said, no, the hell you're not Etsy slash my
SQL slash my.cmf. And I, I, I'm super anal attentive with how I organize my computer. It's just,
I can't help it. You know, my room can be, you know, a three alarm fire disaster. But by God,
my computer is going to be organized just so. Yeah. And that, that's just so annoying. And I don't
know. And the Linux Foundation really does nothing to address naming conventions or location
saving conventions. And then isn't, isn't this what, like, things like Linux Fast and Linux
Fast Northwest? In, isn't this what the entire point of them is about to be doing? You know,
instead of like the upconf and for doors, little convention thingy that I think they have. And,
you know, whatever else, one big convention where all the distro people go. And
you discuss, you know, making things standard because all distros are there. Yeah. Well, yeah.
Well, it depends on your definition of Linux Fest. At least the ones that I'm familiar with tend to be
super duper community oriented. Although this, this will be changing in two weeks. And I will
unofficially make the announcement here because I can and I know things. Actually, I know where you're
going. I know where you're going. And I, that's a good announcement too. Yes. And this, go go ahead.
Well, I'll say it here, I guess this is official from one of the developers who will not be named
Steam and the source engine. So Counter-Strike Source Half-Life 2 portal. Yes. The cake is alive.
Yes, I don't know too many other source, source, uh, uh, source-based games, but you all get the idea.
Is coming native to Linux on September the 14th? I'll finally get the play team fortress natively.
Spies happen that century. And again, according to the developer, it is a little bit faster on Linux
compared to Windows. Win. Yes. And to make people a little bit more disappointed, I gotta, I gotta
throw this out there. Um, it was the, all the graphics for the games or what the source engine was
actually rewritten in was STL, not native, uh, OpenGL, but STL is decent, I guess.
Well, STL is easier to code in and, oh, well, Ikylis has done a superb job with a lot of the STL code.
Yeah. And the Steam GUI will be written in Q, is written in QT4. Oh, yes.
Yes, except so many discos and so many people use Nome. It's like, damn it. Why?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I probably know why. I mean, I believe this is just, you know, personal. I
didn't get this from my developer friend. Uh, I believe that the source engine is written in C++.
So it was a little bit easier to build a GUI first, first team in C++ instead of, you know,
having to keep the core in C++ and then write the GUI in C and then write like a little translate,
you know, not what the actual work. Excellent. That, that's, that is a huge announcement.
That is, that's progress there. Oh, okay. Um, do you have any other pet peas with standards?
I think between naming conventions and the lack of a package format that can be easily translated
to all distros. Those are pretty much my pet peas with standards. I know that almost all
distros, even, even ones like Gen 2 are pretty much post-excompliant. And if they're not, it's,
it's so close as to not make a difference anyway. I know that, that Apple made a, a big deal about
masturbating that themselves, when they got post-excompliance for OSX, but, you know, what do you
fucking do? It's post-excompliance. Well, does it make a big deal for big app developers?
Well, they didn't, they didn't get part, I believe it's pronounced posics. Uh, not important, I guess,
but they did have posics compliance before, but now they got officially recognized by
the Unix Foundation, you know, the people who were behind like BSD and some of the really big
shit from back in the day said basically, okay, macOSX is a certified Unix operating system
according to us. Posics, you are indeed correct, sir, my bad.
No problem. But, uh, yeah, and what makes that a really bad statement is OSX is Unix certified.
Linux is not. Yeah, it pretty much is. The only difference there is going to be that, if you say
the word Linux, you're referring to so damn many distros and I'm, uh, surely some of them aren't,
but if you're, if you're developing, well, now you're referring to the Linux kernel,
and the Linux kernel is not Unix compliant according to the Unix group, whoever the hell they are.
Wow, they can, they can blow me. If you're developing a Unix app, it's going to work in Linux.
It's just going to. Yeah, and it's, it's pretty much, I think the fact that like no Linux developer
has paid them $50,000 to say that Linux is Unix compliant because really nobody who, you know,
is a Linux developer or who has that kind of money who's into Linux really gives a crap.
Yeah, and for those who don't know anything about Posics, it's a really just ridiculously simple
standard, like, uh, Posics one is like process creation, control, errors, illegal instructions,
segment, uh, seg faults, Posics B is like priority scheduling, real-time capabilities,
shared memory, asynchronous and synchronous IO, and the highest win, which is Posics C,
once C is nothing more than all that with thread extensions. I mean, we're talking some
primitive stuff, your stuff that any operating system that's Unix based has had since the mid-90s.
And I like that Windows is actually not even Posics compliant unless you install the Microsoft
Windows services for Unix. Yeah. Actually, I, I did not know this. Free BSD Linux,
well, actually all the BSDs and Linux are not fully Posics compliant.
Yeah, they're, they're quote-unquote mostly Posics compliant, but that's a load of bullshit.
Yeah. Besides, if you look at, uh, frankly, if you look at the number of people who are
quote 100% unquote, Posics compliant, it reads like a graveyard of operating systems.
Yeah, and it reads, and it reads like, you know, companies who, you know, when they did make
these operating systems, had a couple million dollars in the banks, so that might be hinting
at something. AIX, Minix, OpenSloris, HPUX, IREX. Yeah, basically people who are dead.
Yeah. Really, the only two that met, or the only three that matter rather are OSX,
Sloris and OpenSloris and VX works. Yeah. Which is surprising because apparently,
according to this, my WRT 54G is fully Posics compliant. That's a little bit sad.
But I think what makes Linux not Posics compliant, although we've gotten a little bit off
topic here, uh, what makes it not Posics compliant is because the Linux kernel supports like
UC-Lib-C and Diet-Lib-C and those aren't Posics compliant, but Lib-C six that is used on every
distro that's not meant for embedded devices is Posics compliant. Loretable shoot. Yeah, pretty much.
But do you have any other standardization beef to discuss other than those that we have covered?
I don't think so. So until next time, if you want to contact us, you can get us through the
usual methods, email jermyatsourcecast.org. J-D-at-sourcecast.org. And feel free to stop by on the forums
and let us know what you think. We still have our poll up and running on whether or not you'd like
to see this become a video podcast. We as just as obviously you can tell, we're going to continue
along with these .5 releases. And as always, you can also get us in the IRC channel at
irc.sourcecast.org, pound sourcecast. And we're both eye-doing in there pretty much all the time.
And so until next time, if you want to get XORG updated, just have us come on and bitch about it
because this week, Mesa71 was released and now XORG 7.4 will finally come out about a year late.
So if you're a software project is behind on release, give us a ring, we'll bitch about it,
and you'll get an update.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio.
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