How unstable is "Debian unstable" ???

[Judland]

By the way Judland, I live in Denmark and a part of it is actually, in english, called Jutland (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutland), that where you got your inspiration from?

Hey, cool! But no, that's not where I got the name. Judland is a name you might recognize if you're a Star Wars fan (used in Episode IV, to be precise)

If you don't remember where it was used.... time to go watch it again. Hey, great idea! I'm off.

[Tsuroerusu]

Linc, question for you, how does the ports systems of NetBSD and FreeBSD compare to each other? For instance when you compile from source with OpenBSD it creates a binary package installs that instead of doing a "make install" directly.

Well, there are 2 ways to use the package system in NetBSD. You can use the binary packages that are alredy created or install the package system which will fetch the source(s), patch them and compile for your machine. It's a good system, popular and has been ported to many things like solaris and linux as well.

Fair enough, thanks for the info, I'll check it out, when I'm with some of my homework

By the way Judland, I live in Denmark and a part of it is actually, in english, called Jutland (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutland), that where you got your inspiration from?

Hey, cool! But no, that's not where I got the name. Judland is a name you might recognize if you're a Star Wars fan (used in Episode IV, to be precise)

If you don't remember where it was used.... time to go watch it again. Hey, great idea! I'm off.

Ehmmm, well, the last time I watched a Star Wars movie was like 2 years ago, and the one I watched on TV was one of those from the 80'
I pretty much know nothing specific about Star Wars, only the very very junior basics

[Judland]

Judland, do you feel like writing a quick and dirty how-to install guide for arch? I've talked with many folks who swear by it, and I'd like to give it a spin at some point. Their wiki looks like t has a lot of good info, but it's kind of spaghetti-esque. I'm apparently too stupid to get sysfs to do it's thing.

Snarkout, I was in the process of polishing up a short how-I-did-it tutorial (trying to remember everything I did) for Arch, then discovered that a pre-release of 0.7.1 with support for encrypted file system is available.

So, this weekend, I'm going to download the latest ISO, install it with encryption, and make notes on every command I do. Then I can post something useful and complete.

[Patrick]

Snarkout, I was in the process of polishing up a short how-I-did-it tutorial (trying to remember everything I did) for Arch, then discovered that a pre-release of 0.7.1 with support for encrypted file system is available.

So, this weekend, I'm going to download the latest ISO, install it with encryption, and make notes on every command I do. Then I can post something useful and complete.

I really gotta give Arch a try. It sounds very interesting.

[snarkout]

Cool! I saw that on the main site.

I'm very interested in arch at this point -- some of it seems needlessly esoteric, but after reading a few interviews, I really appreciate the reason why. They want to cut down on stupid newbie-esque questions on the forums, and their reasoning is that if it's a bitch to install, fewer mega-n00bs will be running it.

I, for the most part, really like kubuntu at this point, but the forums are god-flippin'-awful. I'm sure they're great for people who are interested "building the community" or for newbies who can't be bothered to see that their exact same frickin' question has been asked twice already *ON THE FIRST PAGE OF THE FORUMS!!!!* Maybe I'm starting to get cynical, I dunno, but that sort of thing really bothers me. There's also a thread in the dapper forums right now where the discussion is an auto-magic .deb installer that is gui, finds deps for whatever flippin deb you happen to have found, and installs it for you. Apparently dpkg is far too difficult to expect people to learn. This is bad enough on its own, IMO, but to add to that, someone wants to be able to add rpm repos and have the imaginary installer install rpms, too. This sort of thing *really* discourages me -- these fuckers aren't running F/OSS for any other reason than it's free as in beer. They don't want linux, they want Mac OS X. They're just to cheap to pony up the cash for that iBook!!!

Er. Wow. Kind of got of on a rant there...

[Judland]

Cool! I saw that on the main site.

I'm very interested in arch at this point -- some of it seems needlessly esoteric, but after reading a few interviews, I really appreciate the reason why. They want to cut down on stupid newbie-esque questions on the forums, and their reasoning is that if it's a bitch to install, fewer mega-n00bs will be running it.

Actually, I think newbies in the Arch are encouraged (generally speaking), but they must be newbies willing to read, research and learn.

There's no "stupid" questions... but there are "lazy" ones. And that's the kind the Arch developers don't encourage.

I think leaving the Arch installer as a text-only one is a good way to filter out the suitable Arch users. Not to belittle anyone, though. I wasn't ready for Arch myself, until now.

[snarkout]

Actually, I think newbies in the Arch are encouraged (generally speaking), but they must be newbies willing to read, research and learn.

There's no "stupid" questions... but there are "lazy" ones. And that's the kind the Arch developers don't encourage.

Yeah, that's what I was making reference to in my perhaps clumsy way. Maybe it's the overall laziness of some of these new newbies that really galls my ass. I have absolutely no problem spending hours helping someone who really wants help, and wants to learn. I have a very hard time even spending 5 minutes helping someone who can't be bothered to even read the first page of a forum to see that several other threads are already open discussing their particular issue. Also, the sense of *entitlement* some of these folks bring with them is absolutely absurd. People *demanding* that dvdcss and w32codecs be made free and even more easily available, people demanding that 3rd party wifi-drivers (or what have you) be available OOTB, and people essentially demanding that they never be required to use the command line. I have a major problem with windows users insisting that linux be exactly like what they're used to, *or else!* To be honest, this is the sort of behavior I became a linux user to avoid. Of course, maybe it's just me being intolerant.

[Judland]

I hear ya! And you know who we've got to thank for this sort of mentality of the "average computer user."

"Computer operator" used to be a profession and/or a skill-set. Now many consider it a right of some sort.

But that's another discussion altogether.