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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the save-a-buck-fire-a-smart-guy dept.

We've previously mentioned Eric Hameleers AKA alienbob AKA Alien BOB and his run-Slackware-from-removable-media project. He even created an account here to comment on our story about that. (His sole activity here, so far.)

He now blogs

I am being laid off by my employer, IBM. Jobs in the Netherlands move to lower-wage countries like Poland and India, while IBM changes course towards a "cognitive" future in which there is less interest in the traditionally skilled technical IT jobs.

Unparalleled (because forced) job cuts in the Netherlands are the result of that change of focus. Almost 10% of the IBMNL work force is sent away in a "re-balancing" operation and I am out of a job per November 1st.

[...] As long as I still work for IBM (seven weeks), I have access to Safari Books Online where I can freely access and use the available course materials which prepare for the RHCE exam. This will of course affect the time I can spend on Slackware. I commonly spend nearly every after-work hour on packaging, scripting, and assisting people online and via email. That stops now.

[...] I also cannot promise that--when I have found a new job--that I will be able to provide the levels of support that you may have gotten used to.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:38PM (#402356)

    Yes systemd is bad. However, SO IS THE init.d system that pretty much every distro reinvented or borrowed from BSD. It is why ubuntu went down the upstart path. They wanted a way to control the interdependence between all the service applications. Things like I need the video card to be initied before X can fire up. But while that is going on I can get the network stack going but do not want to start the ntpd system yet because network is not going yet. Oh and do it in an order so it starts up quickly.

    You can build something like systemd out of init.d. Some distros even made a pretty good lash at it. Overall we stagnated with a 'good enough' attitude. We let one group dictate what it should be so now we have systemd being the borg of startup. Doing things it should not be doing. At this point it is either get with the program or make your own. Oh if you go your own you better be able to hit a good amount of the feature set RH is doing. Good luck, I am sure they would enjoy the competition.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:48PM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:48PM (#402362) Homepage Journal

    "we stagnated with a 'good enough' attitude"

    This. I am currently really irritated at Xubuntu 16.04, precisely because development stopped with "good enough". I had sound. I had a desktop. I wanted sound to work in a VM, and followed reasonable-sounding instructions. This somehow mangled Xubuntu, such that mounting a new partition (be it a USB disk, or an encrypted partition, or whatever) now causes part of the Gnome desktop to become active - mangling xfce.

    It's irritating as hell. Linux sound has always been a dog's breakfast, of course, but the whole situation reeks of half-assed, untested code that was never developed past barely "good enough".

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by justinb_76 on Thursday September 15 2016, @05:09PM

      by justinb_76 (4362) on Thursday September 15 2016, @05:09PM (#402369)

      my current gripe with Xubuntu 16.04 is every time I close the lid on my laptop, I have to do Ctrl+Alt+F1 then F7 to have a visible cursor again. Meh, I'm just used to it now...

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday September 15 2016, @09:51PM

      by Marand (1081) on Thursday September 15 2016, @09:51PM (#402494) Journal

      Linux sound has always been a dog's breakfast, of course

      In my experience, sound on Linux has been a smooth "just works" experience for well over a decade. The trick has always been to purge the abomination that is pulseaudio from the system, which usually is the source of the problems. Thanks for making that buggy piece of shit, Lennart. PA has gotten better since he left it but it's still usually more trouble than it's worth. In fact, when I had to install it a few months ago it only took a few hours of fighting to get it to act somewhat sane.

      Though it did nearly damage my hearing with its insane dynamic volume levels default that allows programs to set the volume to 100% even when you explicitly set it lower. Insane, irresponsible setting only chosen to make it more familiar to windows users. I was wearing headphones when something raised the volume to max from the 25% I had it set to. Ears were ringing for hours thanks to that idiotic design decision.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday September 15 2016, @05:02PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday September 15 2016, @05:02PM (#402366) Journal

    SO IS THE init.d system that pretty much every distro reinvented or borrowed from BSD

    The init.d system is from System V, not BSD. OpenBSD still uses the classic BSD rc system, where you have a big monolithic rc script to start everything. FreeBSD uses RCng, where every RC script advertises things that it requires and things that it provides and the init system orders them. I think NetBSD is similar to FreeBSD (and that parts of the FreeBSD system come from NetBSD, though I couldn't tell you exactly which). And, of course, the most popular desktop BSD uses Launchd.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM (#402432)

      FreeBSD imported the NetBSD rc system ages ago, like in the FreeBSD 5.x days iirc.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM (#402433)

      And current SysV (in Debian) also advertises dependencies and runs things in parallel. Open the init file and check the header, like:

      ### BEGIN INIT INFO
      # Provides:        sshd
      # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
      # Required-Stop:    $remote_fs $syslog
      # Default-Start:    2 3 4 5
      # Default-Stop:
      # Short-Description:    OpenBSD Secure Shell server
      ### END INIT INFO

      Properly written ones will source /lib/lsb/init-functions and not reinvent wheels unless really needed.

      Also look for /etc/init.d/.depend.{boot,start,stop}

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:24PM (#402424)

    What you really want is a Macintosh.

    Admit it!

    SAY IT!!!