レナート   Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz   ﻟﻴﻨﺎﺭﺕ

Posted by Johannes at Tue Aug 3 09:02:40 2010
Come on, your real aim is to have more commits than Red Hat!

Posted by Juanjo at Tue Aug 3 09:30:01 2010
You're so tribal! ;)

Congratulations! Keep up good work!

Posted by Felipe Contreras at Tue Aug 3 09:42:18 2010
Remember that companies like Collabora take credit of work paid by Nokia.

Posted by NickG at Tue Aug 3 09:45:53 2010
@anonymous - What's wrong with PulseAudio? It's been great for me - never had so much control of my audio (other than when I was directly manipulating Jack!)

Posted by Colin Guthrie at Tue Aug 3 10:37:08 2010
@NickG, I guess the title of "Beating a Dead Horse" meant that at least someone had to come in and bash PA just to fit the cliché :)

Posted by Philip Van Hoof at Tue Aug 3 10:40:39 2010
Felipe is right, the Nokia stat is unfair as Nokia allows contractors to commit their paid Nokia work to opensource projects on upstream immediately (which by itself is great). Especially the contributions to the GNOME stack have traditionally been done by contractors like, indeed, Collabora, Igalia, Lanedo, Openismus, Codethink and before the Intel acquisition O-Hand (every sensible person in the GNOME community also knows this).

It would be quite silly if Nokia would reverse that policy, just because of some statistics.

Posted by einalex at Tue Aug 3 10:44:12 2010
this metric is deadly flawed anyway since it doesn't measure quality at all. (not implying anything)

Posted by Martin at Tue Aug 3 10:54:42 2010
You are great! But do not forget all the great work sponsored by Nokia and their contractors.

Posted by SouperTrouper at Tue Aug 3 13:14:49 2010
I am (probably) in the majority in that I use a Canonical distribution for the reason that it is the most widely used distribution, my customers all use it, there are some really active and useful forums devoted to it and - in short - I am part of that lazy Ubuntu rut.

How can I move to "Linux" while staying as compatible as possible?

I would dearly love a guide, for the world, on installing a distribution-agnostic Linux with distribution-agnostic applications. (And for all Linux magazines and websites to follow suit).

Posted by Karellen at Tue Aug 3 13:54:46 2010
@SouperTrouper: Um, there isn't really any such thing as "distribution-agnostic Linux". "Linux" is just an OS kernel. All it does is initialise and mediate access to your PC hardware and schedule programs which have been set to run. But by itself, it doesn't /do/ anything.

You need a lot of other programs, many of which at the lower level were written by GNU (hence GNU/Linux), to even give you a usable command prompt, and a whole bunch of others if you want a "windowed" interface and programs to work there, all of which are written by different groups of people.

To get all this from one place, and a (relatively) simple way of installing it, you /need/ a distribution.

Now, if you still really wanted to do things differently, you could get a relatively small distribution that comes with not much more than a command shell and a C compiler, and then download, configure, compile and install everything else, but, it's a lot of work, and when (not if) you break something, you might not have the skill to fix it. It will also be a pain to keep updated against security reports, as you'll need to follow these yourself for all the software you've installed.

Alternatively, if that wasn't hardcore enough, you could download the "Linux From Scratch" book (<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/>) which will take you through the entire process completely from scratch. However, there are some who maintain that "Linux From Scratch" is itself a "distribution" - depending on your definition of "distribution".

Basically, you want a distribution.

But, there are plenty to choose from. See <http://distrowatch.com/> for more info. The "page hit ranking" right-hand sidebar is a good indicator of the most popular (and hence most user-friendly) distros, and you can find out more info on each from the links there, or from Wikipedia.

HTH.

Posted by Andres G. Aragoneses at Tue Aug 3 14:51:07 2010
I'm wondering, do 10 commits of 1KB beat a commit of 11 KB? If yes, this statistic is completely flawed.

Posted by Anti Anonymous at Tue Aug 3 15:33:22 2010
"I guess, with your broken PulseAudio, the Gnome community lost more users than Canonical attract users to use Linux."

Which distro ships a broken version of PulseAudio that has given it this unfair bad reputation?

Posted by Tommy.S at Tue Aug 3 15:44:37 2010
@Karellan

You have the point but you mistaken the GNU/Linux. The GNU/Linux is name for development platform, not for the OS. You should not use GNU/Linux unless you want to prise just the Linux OS and GNU development tools. Normal software systems has lots more software than OS and development tools, same thing is with Linux distributions. The development tools are small and usually not used at all by the user. And some distributions use other development tools and system libraries than GNU's. They only use Linux as OS as well (Linux is not microkernel but a monolithic = operating system).

But distribuion really is what we all need, we just need to choose good distributor who packages F/OSS software ran by Linux OS in such configs and ideas that it fits easily to our purpose to use computer.

Posted by Lubomir Rintel at Tue Aug 3 15:57:03 2010
You committed more than Kelly Family and Alcoholics Anonymous together as well. Congratulations!

Posted by Karellen at Tue Aug 3 16:01:02 2010
GNU/Linux refers to the GNU userland running on top of the Linux kernel. The GNU userland includes the GNU C library, GNU bash, all the GNU POSIX.2 tools (cat, sed, grep, etc..., as found in GNU "coreutils"), the GNU compiler collection, GNU Emacs, GNU mailutils, etc..., many of which (mostly the POSIX.2 toolset) I meant to encompass with the (bad, I admit) term "lower level programs"

If you wanted a minimal usable Linux system, you could do that with the GNU userland tools on top of Linux, even if you didn't have a C compiler or any other "development" tools, and the name GNU/Linux would reflect that OS.

Posted by SouperTrouper at Tue Aug 3 17:03:51 2010
@Karellan and @Tommy.S - you can call such a system whatever you want to call it, but I am sure that you know exactly what I am asking.

A guide to installing a Linux system running FOSS components with a modern graphical desktop manager, that is not tied to the commercial imperatives of the distribution packager (and free too of download shops, cloud services, social networking, copyright-controlled fonts and codec patent agreements exclusive to the packager).

I can answer this question myself, however inexpertly, by installing (some very popular distribution), not using the exclusive elements, setting up my partitioning and user profile in a relatively standard way and hoping that changing distribution will not affect my data and settings. Some expertise could easily create a guide to a distribution-agnostic Linux system that has great appeal - not least with complete adherence to open standards and interoperability.

Like I said, my customers and I use Linux and want to be sure that we see the same issues when discussing problems, which would be even better if the distribution-specifics could be eliminated.

Posted by Karellen at Tue Aug 3 19:29:11 2010
@SouperTrouper: OK, that's a bit more to go on.

In that case, when installing your Distro, which ever one you choose:

1) Put /home on its own partition.

2) Only install the absolute minimal set of packages you can during the basic install.

Then, when adding more software to your system, check whether it has a non-distro project website, or if it's available for other distros, particularly large community or free-as-in-freedom distros. If it's available for e.g. Fedora, Debian or Slackware, then you should be OK.

(e.g. to see if package "apache2" is available for Debian, just go to <http://packages.debian.org/apache2>)

If you don't like your current distro, then with /home on its own partition you should be able to install any other distro without too many problems. The new distro installer should be able to blow away the / partition and start from scratch, leaving your data in safely in place.

You'll probably want to take a copy of the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files so you can put the old users back on the new system with the same UIDs and group membership (see passwd(5) and group(5) for more details) but aside from that you shouldn't have too many problems. Although it would still be wise to take a backup first :-)

Is that closer to what you were looking for?

Posted by Karellen at Tue Aug 3 19:46:41 2010
@SouperTrouper: I didn't want to come out in favour of any particular distro, particularly given the "tribalism" vibe that this post is part of, but re-reading your request, you really should take a look at Debian, particularly their Social Contract and the DFSG (both available at <http://www.debian.org/social_contract>). It has no commercial imperatives, nor does it offer any of the other things you wish to avoid.

It's not necessarily the only distro that will fit your needs, but it might be a good place to start.

Posted by SouperTrouper at Tue Aug 3 22:34:12 2010
@Karellen (please excuse my earlier mis-spelling), yes that is exactly the kind of advice that I would like to see widely disseminated. It would help also if journals, blogs and even the installation pages of packages were also distribution agnostic - I was just looking now at the homepage of a lovely package that is devoted to Ubuntu, yet installs and runs fine on almost anything (even Mac).

Posted by Astreek at Wed Aug 4 05:45:52 2010
Many, many contribute more code to GNOME, but which is the most popular distro? maybe because it is easy to use?

HIG is not that much code, can this be the reason?

P.D. Herr Poettering, I do appreciate you PulseAudio, systemd, (and other apps) work. Also, they work nice in KDE :)