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The other day, Michael W Lucas, who is normally known for good technical literature, put up a wild experiment of a short story: Savaged by Systemd. It's erotica, sort of. It's computer erotica, to be specific. It's Linux sysadmin erotica, to be more specific. OK, fine, it's systemd erotica. Really. Anyway, despite the subject and the genre, and in spite of the combination of the two, the e-book is trending and rising in quite a few lists.
Hopefully he can still remain focused on Absolute FreeBSD and be able to get that finished by the next BSDCan.
[Ed note: Has anybody actually bought and read this short story? I wasn't going to spend $2.99 to see what the hubub was about. - cmn32480]
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Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must
have somebody to divide it with.
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday September 17 2017, @02:36PM (4 children)
My most inexplicable systemd experience, the one that convinced me to run Slackware specifically to avoid it, was rendering my system non-bootable through the simple act of unplugging my mouse. On a sane system, it boots up without a mouse and you have to do everything via a keyboard. On systemd as it stood then (they might have remedied this since - I wouldn't know) it sat there with a black screen and offering no feedback whatsoever nor responding to the keyboard in any way. I tried several hard resets (the only thing I could do) to try to figure it out. Finally, I re-plugged in the mouse, hard-reset again, and it immediately started up.
I mean, come on, Lennart, you never considered the possibility that a non-essential accessory might not be plugged in?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by krait6 on Sunday September 17 2017, @07:22PM (2 children)
I have a (working) server running (with no mouse attached) with systemd installed, so I'd like to think that this may not be a problem today. I believe your story though, because I tried systemd early on before many of the distributions adopted it and I ran into a number of problems back then.
And today systemd is still quirky. As a user/administrator one needs to know systemctl commands, and as a maintainer packages need some specific changes because of systemd. For instance systemd tends to start services before networking is up and available, even when requested to wait until the network is actually up and running before starting things, and that causes problems for some daemons, which end up coming up but listening to nothing. And there are further quirks with disabling services via environment variables in /etc/default/ files. And then surprises like systemd mounting the EFI bios read/write, so that doing an 'rm -rf /*' ends up bricking certain laptops.
The good news is that on some distributions systemd can be removed, but it gets tricky if one wants to run KDE or Gnome where expectations of systemd services being available.
For the time being I'm living with systemd, but I keep re-evaluating if I want to keep it that way, because of the proliferation of other services like systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd, and so on.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday September 18 2017, @01:07AM (1 child)
Artix, an admittedly somewhat rough fork of ArchLinux, seems to work well enough. I had some issues with the Calamares installer; it's best to partition your drive manually and then just have Calamares mount the partitions, not format them, apparently. And initial install takes a while since it's mostly coming off Sourceforge. But once in it works just like Arch with OpenRC init. I run Plasma 5 with no problems, and was able to get Gnome 3.24 going with no issues (except, well, it's Gnome 3.x...).
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:35PM
Sounds interesting; I'll give a trial in VirtualBox. My Linux box is running Manjaro-OpenRC ATM and seems to be fine now, though there was some issue with the elogind change a while back that caused problems I couldn't fix. Admittedly these might have been my fault as a) I was running a non-Manjaro kernel and b) I've not been an actual honest-to-goodness Linux administrator for 20 years or so, hence it's possible/probable I did something that caused it.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:29AM
That is pathetic. I haven't tried recently, but I'm pretty sure even Windows can boot without a mouse plugged in.