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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:25AM
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.
Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
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Debian General Resolution to Prevent Init System Coupling Fails to Pass
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:58AM
[quote]Well, I won't be using it again.[/quote]
Indeed. I've been using Debian since the late 90s. My desktop is now in the middle of a migration to FreeBSD and my laptop is busy compiling Gentoo. Sad days...
Plus I need to figure out what to migrate my server to before wheezy support ends.
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:00PM
Gah, HTML fail. Sorry 'bout that.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Konomi on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:05PM
We have forever immortalised your mistake on the Internet *evil laugh*.
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:34PM
:)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:06PM
Heh, yeah. <blockquote> or <quote> are I think what you were going for. We pondered <q> as well but it's apparently part of the html spec and used for in-sentence quoting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:08PM
Heh yep, I must be spending too much time on bad forums. I hereby promise to henceforth always use the preview button.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM
Not to sound like a stupid n00b but is there an easy way to escape the angle brackets and HTML tags on SN? I can use the escape codes but they are turned into their respective characters after a preview and will not render come the next preview or posting.
I would like to request that the Soylent dev team change the parser for the Comment box to eliminate the substitution of characters for their escape codes after a preview. We can then see the expected characters in the preview window and make the corrections in the text field. To me, the rendering of an escape code in the input field after a preview is an annoying bug. I have to edit the post off-line to preserve the escape codes and copy-paste to keep things sane.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:30PM
<foo> should be what you're looking for, for now. This behavior will be the default and not screw up (it does right now) when you hit preview with the 14.12 update most likely though. Been doing a lot of work on removing filtering of user input and only and properly filtering output.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:18PM
I only use Debian on servers.
To me, the most crushing blow after the fall of Debian is that all distros relying on it for upstream are now locked into systemd, and systemd has taken over almost all linux distros. I can't imagine that slackware and gentoo will hold out forever either, though I hope they'll keep going for a while.
My desktop is crux linux, which was the original inspiration for arch linux. The main difference is that it uses a ports system for packages. It's probably the only thing closer to BSD than slackware.
novak
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:31PM
Ah interesting, never heard of crux. They explicitly mention "BSD-style initscripts" - I may just have to give it a try. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:40PM
You're welcome. I've been using it since 2010 and I haven't found one I like better yet.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:05PM
How has it immunized itself from the threat of systemd?
To be honest, a year ago I would never have guessed that Debian would, as a project, make an absolutely idiotic decision like switching to systemd. I would never have expected it to tear the community apart like it has. I surely did not see myself moving all of my systems over to FreeBSD, like I'm currently in the process of doing.
What is it about crux that will prevent it from being infected by systemd?
FreeBSD has the advantage of not using the Linux kernel, as well as having a team of developers who just don't put up with shitty technology like systemd. What does crux have?
(Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:32PM
Systemd isn't an inevitability in Linux, it's a CHOICE. If Crux uses simple BSD style init scripts to adhere to the primary "keep it simple" philosophy, I doubt they'd adopt the antithesis willingly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:12PM
Of course, due to its nature, it has the danger of soon being not merely a choice. If the application you need depends on Gnome, and Gnome depends on systemd, then you only have the choice to either not use the application, or to use systemd. And the more common systemd will be on popular distributions, the more likely new software will be dependent on it, and new versions of old software will become dependent of it, and other alternatives not dependent on it will be abandoned and bit-rot away.
Note that while it is possible to run a Gnome application on an otherwise non-Gnome desktop, using Gome only for those specific applications, it is not possible to use systemd just for those programs that need it. Need one program that requires systemd, and you'll have no choice but to let systemd manage your machine.
Given the strong opposition to systemd, there's hope that a strong alternative will emerge. However that will soon not just be a slight variation, with just a few different packages installed, but due to the nature of systemd, it will mean a hard split; after a decade, systemd-Linux and alternative Linux will likely not be much closer to each other than Linux and *BSD are today.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:48PM
"Hope is not a strategy" :/
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:00PM
My desktop is now in the middle of a migration to FreeBSD
Same here. Hows it going? I've been keeping notes.
What do you think of their bootloader? Its only been 20 years of LILO later GRUB for me so its interesting to see something new. rc.ng or whatever its called is subjectively about twice as fast as systemd on the same hardware doing the same tasks which makes me laugh and laugh.
Everything is intense deja vu very similar to Debian but different. Wasn't it a trip seeing the installer basically being the same and asking the same questions, almost but not quite? I swear you could slap "Debian Jessie" on it and search/replace some strings and totally prank someone... So similar but some differences in the details.
So the docs are in subversion, and the core OS has one updater, and there's a binary package system, and the ports system, or you can install stuff by hand, sounds crazy but apparently they "work together" well enough. So far I have done Nothing with ports at all. All packages. On my to do list.
I haven't gone ZFS yet. On bare metal linux for a decade (or more?) I always LVM to make drive upgrade/migration easy and haven't adjusted my workflow to the BSD way of thinking. This will require some thought and screwing around and reinstalling.
I found installing X to be really weird. You have to enable hal and dbus then install xorg, then you get "Elf Binary type 3" errors which means you need to load up the linux shim in order to load the linux nvidia driver which unfortunately my peculiar card requires. Isn't the BSD equiv of linux's /etc/modules baroque? So there's entries in /boot/defaults/loader.conf but you override them in /boot/loader.conf, which is similar but different from /etc/rc.conf (isn't everything conceptually supposed to be in /etc/rc.conf... except for what isnt?)
xmonad doesn't automatically pull in hs-mobar and dmenu and trayer so manually install those packages. And what is up with this hs- prefix?
The HAL found my mouse and moused worked perfectly on the VCs and I've enabled allscreens_flags="-m on" but the blasted X wouldn't detect the mouse until I rebooted. What is this F-ing windows? Craziest thing ever. Willing to ignore it as just bad luck or cosmic rays or something. But windows style "you've installed a mouse, you need to reboot" type BS... Grrr.
I had the usual X startup entertainment from memory xmonad didn't put in a desktop stanza, my favorite *DM doesn't run on freebsd, I ended up starting xmonad in .xinitrc. On the Debian boxes it usually lives in .xsession. I think this very *DM dependent and itsn't really a BSD issue.
Speaking of XDM you manually edit /etc/ttys to turn it "on". Really, freebsd? Really?
I have a monitor that is insane and reports its 1024x768 even though its physically 1600x1200 and its a PITA under both linux and freebsd to "force" the video card to output the correct resolution. Fun fun fun but my problem not linux or BSDs problem.
Sound autodetected and works perfectly, basically the typical linux experience since the early 90s with the exception of the hideous pulseaudio years. Boring! Networking hardware and config was the same way, nice and boring and predictable and simple. I don't do any GUI foolishness or "network mismanager" or any of that much harder more agonizing stuff. Just works.
LDAP install was interesting (I used kerberos and ldap at home) and the client lives in BOTH /usr/local/etc/ldap.conf and /usr/local/openldap/ldap.conf. That was interesting. I also had to edit /usr/local/etc/nss_ldap.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf. That done, its a perfectly behaved LDAP client. Hurray! I had some hilarity where my linux login shell isn't in the same place as BSD's login shells but BSD doesn't mind following a symlink, thankfully.
Kerberos was excruciatingly boring and predictable. Shockingly /etc/krb5.conf is the same thing on linux and BSD. There's some funkiness where its "linux speak" to put a deny at the end of your PAM paragraphs and the "BSD speak" is to list pam_unix multiple times, before pam_krb5 and at the end. In the end things worked. There is still some minor funkiness, like pure WTF 10 hour ticket lifetimes, probably just a config option I missed somewhere. Also don't forget to edit /etc/pam.d/xdm to kerberos-isfy it.
AFS was truly boring (yes I run AFS at home... its really easy once you've set up LDAP and kerberos you're about 98% there). What linux calls /etc/openafs is what freebsd calls /usr/local/etc/openafs. Add afsd_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf and you're good.
As far as apps go, chromium was kinda dull, some WTF-ness about the sysctl kern-ipc.shm_allow_removed=1.
I have some puppet automation to get going. I have just realized that setting up "dual boot" on the same ip addrs etc isn't going to work very well with puppet as puppet will have no idea if my hostname has booted as linux or bsd and randomly shoving files will be a problem. I want to figure out what I'm doing with puppet before I fool around with reinstalling and experimenting. I want that "bare metal to fully configured in ten minutes, no manual configuring" I've come to expect from linux and puppet.
From memory emacs worked. My home dirs all come from AFS so as long as I run roughly the same version on the legacy linux boxes as on the new BSD installs, I'm all good.
I haven't begun converting the servers at home and work. I think that'll be easier. After all I don't care about mouse support under X or linux nvidia driver support on the "data warehouse" box at work. I'll have some adventures in JVMs, I'm sure. Its a lot easier to "port" a compiled scala project distributed as a jar to another machine, than, say, a legacy-ish rails app that hasn't been updated since 2.0 in '08 or something. Eventually, everyone hates rails, it just brews up at different time for everyone.
Its 2014, I don't run applications locally unless they're hardware related, everythings a webpage so as long as chromium works I'm all good. I'd like the mythtv frontend on freebsd to talk to my legacy linux mythtv backends, and getting mplayer or equivalent up would be nice. But really all I ever use in a desktop is a console, emacs, and a browser, and that works, so I'm pretty much done other than the fine tuning.
And thats a paraphrase and some commentary of my much longer notes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:11PM
Thank you for these great details! Keep up the excellent work!
It's imperative that we all do whatever we can to help the Debian refugees find safety within FreeBSD, or even Slackware.
Nobody should have to suffer like they've had to suffer at the torturing hands of systemd.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:05PM
I've been saying for awhile that "I" will make a doc trying to help refugees transition from linux to freebsd. In my infinite spare time aka its never happening beyond talking about it.
"someone" with more spare time than myself should create a wiki for ex linux users to translate into freebsd, or more likely a matrix of ex-debian people into freebsd and ex-redhat into openbsd or whatever as a 2-d matrix. I have the time to cut and paste my notes and add hyperlinks to the official docs. But not to run a wiki project.
The freebsd docs are good, but "we" are not their audience. I kid you not, they have cut and paste instructions for making a freebsd install flash drive from a freebsd command line. Thats useful for some people, but not experienced linux admins.
My biggest conversion problems have been "assumptions" about whats unified and what isn't, what has like 10 places to edit on one os vs one file here, what needs to be done in two places for WTF reasons, what is just plain weird and only documented in the deepest darkest pits (seriously, I shouldn't have to hit google multiple times all over the planet to set up X, even if for me as an experienced admin it was pretty easy, it was clumsy...) Oh and simple translation. I know where ldap.conf is on linux and I know where its been for a decade or so and I need a simple cheat sheet for freebsd.
Taking a tour of new features in *BSD is a side issue, maybe integrate it. Bhyve? Maybe. The mystery and miracle of ZFS? Maybe. The really cool jails system? Maybe. They don't fit directly into a transition guide, however. On the other hand, if you're gonna transition, best take advantage of everything there is to offer.
Yeah maybe in my infinite spare time this weekend. Maybe.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:54PM
That's been my problem with trying out FreeBSD as a main OS, period: Time. I barely have any free time in the first place (free time meaning time outside of work and quality family time) so what little I have, I devote to more productive/entertaining things like learning Python and catching up on what little gaming I do. The migration back to Slackware from Crunchbang was fairly painless and quick; I have tons of experience using Slackware off and on for the past 15 years so it was a no-brainer. But FreeBSD is a different animal, that requires a heavy investment of time to learn all those little quirks and oddities (compared to GNU/Linux) that you wrote about above.
Speaking of, thank you for sharing! Just reading over it on my break at work has gotten my brain into the groove, so to speak. When I get home tonight (given enough time) I think I'll get started on really learning FreeBSD on bare metal, instead of the half-functioning VM rotting away on my main workstation.
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM
ZFS is great.
There are very few times where I can honestly say it's a pleasure working with a FS.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:44PM
loader.conf is generally used to set kernel level modules and options (particularly sysctl variables). While rc.conf is intended for the rc system. For instance, how is the rc system supposed to load when it can't read the disk because the kernel module required hasn't been loaded? Many options seem redundant because it works both ways, for instance you can create a bridge in rc.conf, and it automatically loads the bridge kernel driver for you, but some chicken and egg problems can't be done that way (or require the option be directly compiled into the kernel).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:57PM
Yes.... this is the kind of philosophical mental model I want to document to help other people convert.
The very simple model of "linux has one file per package/daemon, mostly" and "freebsd has one monster file /etc/rc.conf that does it all" when examined in detail is somewhat more complicated.
So level 1 of learning how stuff is configured is the one liner I gave and level 2 of learning, in more detail, is your post, more or less.
Probably there's some kind of level 3 of learning in even more detail but its advanced enough I haven't figured out where it is yet much less what it is...
(Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:15PM
It's not so much one file vs many. Both have the many, but BSD init is much cleaner in return for lacking run-levels.
Linux with SysVInit: /etc/init.d has the basic scripts; each script reads settings from its own config file in /etc/default. /etc/rc0.d through /etc/rc6.d - one directory for each run level - contain a forest of symlinks to those scripts, with prefixes. The letter of the prefix is S for start or K for stop. The digits control the order they are run ("priority"). Enabling or disabling a daemon changes the corresponding symlinks. The run-level is controlled by /etc/inittab.
FreeBSD: /etc/rc.d has the basic scripts; each script reads settings from /etc/rc.conf. Common boilerplate is separated out into /etc/rc.subr. Dependencies between scripts are handled by special comment lines in the scripts. There is no forest of symlinks. Enabling or disabling a daemon is done in /etc/rc.conf. There are no run-levels. Single-user is a kind of fall-back if boot-to-multi-user fails, but it is possible to boot to single-user, and you can exit to single-user from multi-user by "kill -TERM 1".
Both systems have an /etc/rc.local to stuff any kind of one-time on-boot stuff you want that does not fit into a daemon model, or you do not want to bother with a daemon.
I have simplified the FreeBSD description a little, but not much. For example, there is a /usr/local/etc with its own parallel files. / is for the base system, and /usr/local is for packages/ports.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:29PM
FYI, Entries for many services can be added to /etc/rc.conf.d/service-name . This cleans up rc.conf quite a bit.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:02PM
Probably there's some kind of level 3 of learning...
So I understand that you would like to become a dev. We shall prepare the rite. Baptize your hard disk with /dev/zero so we can begin pure.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:00PM
Nice! I'll try to add some comments of my own:
To me it seems that FreeBSD takes quite a bit longer to boot than Debian (without systemd), could be related to disk encryption and/or a wrong impression though.
Haha yep, the installer could be the Debian installer from a parallel universe. I like it.
I've had to build some Xorg stuff from ports to get a dual screen setup working with the Radeon driver on 10.0. I think this has since been fixed but I had to admit that I still have a bit of a mess where I'm not entirely sure how to keep track of binary packages and ports that have been manually compiled.
Last time I used ZFS on FreeBSD I had some rather unfortunate stability issues which were AFAICT related to my machine not having enough RAM. I won't be doing any further such experiments until I have way more than 4 GB available.
I haven't had any "Elf Binary type 3" issues but then I'm not using the nvidia drivers. The stuff with loader.conf takes some getting used to and I still haven't mastered it (i.e. I have no idea how to debug it).
Haven't had that but it certainly sounds annoying. I did have to restart X at some point when messing with a mouse (on a different machine) though, seems a bit less smooth than on Linux.
Hmm, I think I just installed "slim" which did all that for me.
Indeed, I still feel dirty whenever I have to set that. One of these days I'll have to lookup what it actually does :)
(Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:37PM
Yes, this is a weakness. I had to compile postfix from ports because the binary package was compiled with stupid options. Then "pkg upgrade" will try to stomp on it if a newer binary package appears. What I did discover is that you can "pkg lock postfix" to prevent this. So now you can safely run "pkg upgrade" again. Until you "pkg unlock postfix", it will bypass any newer postfix packages.
Hope this helps.
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:43PM
It does indeed, thank you!
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:26PM
I assumed that it relaxed security in relation to shared memory segments but I was wrong. It seems to hold shared memory segments open until the last process terminates. Effectively, it ignores shmctl(shmkey, IPC_RMID, 0);
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:36PM
I've just gotten a FreeBSD install running on my Thinkpad as well. Aside from a shit wireless card that's always been a little funny, even under Linux, it's all well. Takes a bit longer to boot than I might hope, but once it loads it's foolishly responsive, especially when I compare it to the Windows 7 install which still infests a partition on the machine.
Looks like I can nab a standard Thinkpad 5100 wireless card off fleabay for under $10, so that should be a quick easy fix.
My last serious go at FreeBSD was on a G4 PowerBook a couple of years ago. I ended up giving up and reinstalling OSX since video performance was abysmal. I think that was 9.x.
At any rate, my current FreeBSD experiment is designed to get some good experience with it. I moved all my stuff to linode in preparation for moving last month, when I get into a permanent place, I'm pretty set rebuilding my basement server as a FreeBSD box.
I think I feel my neckbeard getting longer
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.