http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5556692387.html

I thought some of you might enjoy this piece. Others probably won't.

Al Canton
(singing own name since there is another Al C... who is not me!)

ANC wrote:

> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5556692387.html
>
> I thought some of you might enjoy this piece. Others probably won't.

Well, it's not really a question of enjoying. I'm puzzled. Once in a while I
try some other distro - most of the times to come back to Slack, because
some automagic configure script just gets on my nerves.

I tried some recent SuSe's. 9.1, 9.2. Neither stayed more than a couple of
hours on my hard-disk, before being wiped away. I may be picky about some
no-no's in a distro, but these two got everything wrong. Nothing worked as
it should have done.

And now I learn that Slackware is the "SuSe class". Huh?

Niki Kovacs
--
I'm not as think as you stoned I am.

Le Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:40:59 +0000, ANC a écrit*:

> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5556692387.html
>
> I thought some of you might enjoy this piece.

Ah, so you wrote this for republicans ?

> Others probably won't.

Others what, others who ? Did any survive the rollercoaster
roll of the market sharing its Kyoto shears.

> Al Canton
> (singing own name since there is another Al C... who is not me!)

That's right, he can do some clean scripts between crisis ;-)

From the article

"SuSE came from Slackware...

It is my understanding that this is a common misconception. At on
time, the developers who would eventually create SuSE used Slackwar
as a base. However, then they recreated their distro from scratc
and based it on a German distro called "Jurix." And that is th
distro that is now SuSE

Message posted via
====================
www.linuxpackages.net/foru
www.linuxpackages.ne
Expanding the world of Slackwar
=====================

Ooops. Meant to provide a source for my post

http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...8-Jan/0360.htm

Message posted via
====================
www.linuxpackages.net/foru
www.linuxpackages.ne
Expanding the world of Slackwar
=====================

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 04:02:34 +0000, jerry wrote:

> "SuSE came from Slackware..."
>
> It is my understanding that this is a common misconception. At one
> time, the developers who would eventually create SuSE used Slackware
> as a base. However, then they recreated their distro from scratch
> and based it on a German distro called "Jurix." And that is the
> distro that is now SuSE.

The article is a fluff opinion piece whose sole purpose is to promote the
author's company and software product by creating a means of posting links
to both.

As such, accuracy and truthfulness were not requirements.

I appreciate the clarification though (if true). I was aware of Slackware
involvement in SuSE beginnings but did not know the story. An old version
of pkgtool is included on SuSE 8.2 (running my server until I replace it
with Slackware later this weekend) with a somewhat (derogatory?) comment
in the description in the YaST Add-Software module.

pkgtools version 1 Tools to install ancient tgz packages 32.2 kB

I thought the use of the word ancient was a bit over-the-top.
But then the version of pkgtool is ancient so maybe not (ver. 1.00)

Franklin wrote:

> pkgtools version 1 Tools to install ancient tgz packages 32.2 kB
>
> I thought the use of the word ancient was a bit over-the-top.
> But then the version of pkgtool is ancient so maybe not (ver. 1.00)

Having an ancient package tool is something to be proud of. If it's done
right first time, why change it? And tgz will work on any unix, wheras
rpm or deb will work on those flavors only. Such fragmentation of the
origional unix systems into incompatible subsets let Microsoft into the
market in the first place.

***Thats what will happen if you use debs!***

:-)

Franklin wrote:


>
> The article is a fluff opinion piece whose sole purpose is to promote the
> author's company and software product by creating a means of posting links
> to both.
>

Yes, I agree. You are 100% correct.

Without getting into a full debate on the subject, the PRIMARY purpose of
ALL commercial (advertising supported) media is NOT to inform or entertain
but to sell advertising... which uses graphics, language, and sound (in
case of electronic media) to get you to pay attention to it... and
ultimately buy the product or service being advertised.

The content is simply a vehicle to bring eyeballs to the advertising.
However that does not mean that the content is BY DEFINITION stilted or
biased or simply untruthful (although in MANY EXAMPLES is it.)

> As such, accuracy and truthfulness were not requirements.

What was not truthful or accurate about the piece? When you make a charge
like that you ought to back it up with examples. Did SuSE NOT originate
from Slackware? Is the Slackware package management not ancient by today's
standards? Like beauty, truth and accuracy are often in the eyes of the
beholder.

As for either being a requirement, the site has two well-credentialed senior
editors Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Henry Kingman:

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3932484952.html

I'll pass your comment on to:

Rick Lehrbaum
Executive Editor
Linux-Watch.com, DesktopLinux.com, LinuxDevices.com

who was my contact there and who did the editing of the piece. If you look
at his credentials via Google I think you will see that he has the
experience and knowledge to separate truth from fiction.

The vast majority of 'news sites' have some kind of editing or peer-review
before submissions get posted. If you don't believe me, why not submit a
piece (to Linux-Watch.com, for example) that is totally untrue or highly
inaccurate and 'test' your theory that "accuracy and truthfulness were not
requirements."

Aren't people on this group always saying "Do your %$#@ing research?" Well,
there you go.


Al C.
Recent articles:

http://www.inc.com/articles/2005/01/opensource.html
http://www.inc.com/articles/2005/02/opensource.html
http://www.inc.com/articles/2005/02/adware.html
http://www.inc.com/articles/2005/05/webservices.html
http://www.inc.com/articles/2005/05/usenet.html
http://www.inc.com/partners/sbc/arti...bdesigner.html
http://software.newsforge.com/softwa....shtml?tid=132
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/08/31/1533252
http://debcentral.org/modules/news/a...php?storyid=16

David Jenkinson wrote:

> Having an ancient package tool is something to be proud of. If it's done
> right first time, why change it?

Hmmm. So are you still running CPM? Or maybe Slackware 1.0? They were "done
right" the first time, say many who still use these ancient systems.
(TTBOMK everything I can do on non-X Slackware I could do on my Osborne 1
and my Kaypro 3 with CPM. )


> And tgz will work on any unix,

Huh? You know this how?

> wheras
> rpm or deb will work on those flavors only.

Um, you mean you can't install an RPM or a .deb on Slackware? Do your
research.


> Such fragmentation of the
> origional unix systems into incompatible subsets let Microsoft into the
> market in the first place.

Well, I suppose a logical construct could be made with the above as a
hypothesis, but not a very strong or convincing one. Unix started out
'fragmented' and didn't grow to become fragmented. Each hardware
manufacturer wrote their own version of "unix". Eventually two flavors got
more popular than others... SysV and BSD. But even those were heavily
tweaked for various hardware (PDP, Gen. Data, Sequent, Pyramid, DEC Alpha,
IBM-AIX, HP-HUPX, Apple-AUX, etc.)

If you accept the hypothesis that "Linux != Unix (minix, etc.)" than
Microsoft has been around a lot longer than Linux:
http://www.li.org/linuxhistory.php

Al

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 14:08:00 +0100,
David Jenkinson <cow@dow.uklinux.net> wrote:

> And tgz will work on any unix, wheras rpm or deb will work on those
> flavors only.

To be fair, it is at possible, although probably not wise, to use an
..rpm or .deb on non-native Linux distributions. Slackware comes with an
RPM package for example, and there are various package conversion tools
like alien.

In reality, it doesn't seem that .rpm/.deb files are too proprietary.
Here's a little snippet from a web pages about the RPM, Debian package
formats:

#----------------------------------------------------------------------

"RPM uses a format that has small header and then a cpio archive of the
files. The header contains meta information about the package, pre/post
scripts, package signature, and similar information.

Debian packages are ar format archives, with all meta-information
contained as entries within the archive. The problem with ar is that
it's not platform-interdependent. When building packages, particularly
"noarch" packages that will run on any architecture,

A format that is architecture independent is useful, and not really very
hard. RPMs have solved this pretty well, using cpio. A better choice may
be the POSIX tar specification, which is truly cross-platform. Except
that tar headers and files are padded at 512 byte boundaries. CPIO, I
I believe, is not."

From: <http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20050609_124142>
#----------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Mark Hill