Bruce Perens on UserLinux and Ubuntu

SDenmark writes "Ever wondered what happened to UserLinux, and how it's faring now that Ubuntu has stolen the spotlight? Linux Format has an interview with Bruce Perens, founder of UserLinux, the Open Source Initiative and Linux Standard Base. Perens discusses the impact of Ubuntu, how industry bodies are helping open source and why figureheads are important for the Free Software community."

Figureheads? Let's do it Hollywood style

[TheSpatulaOfLove]

Figureheads are useles unless they're glamorous. I can see it now - (Pick your favorite Hollywood Floozie) dressed in a business suit touting the wonders of (favorite flavor Linux). Marketing speaks to mouth-breathers.

Re:Money talks

[LordKazan]

I tried Ubuntu - it's not great, it's downright crippled

latest version has PAM older than .79 and the latest is .99, the default GCC installed (GCC 4.0) from the default debian repositories cannot build executables, /etc/security/console.perms is missing, /etc/ld.so.conf is missing

that last one was the last straw for me and i proceeded to wipe that ext3 partition and load Fedora Core 5 on it.

For all it's faults atleast things work right with Fedora Core and I can compile mythtv with miniminal effort

Bruce Perens

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time that people open their eyes and realize that Bruce Parens is nothing more than a self absorbed head line grabbing nutter with opinions that have as little value as the sense they make. He's nothing more than a blathering histrionic like this guy RMS who spends most of his time fantasizing about Fidel Castro and picking fleas out of his beard. Paren's time is past, he is now just a passé footnote to history. Time to move on.

UserLinux

[bhirsch]

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't UserLinux just sarge (when it was testing) pinning some sid packages? I honestly don't remember it being anything terribly more substantial than that along with some convenient metapackages like graphical-desktop-environment and enterprise-server.

When Perens announced at the Desktop Linux conference in MA a few years ago, it sounded like a pretty half-baked idea.

IMHO, Linux is just a mess.

[Anonymous Coward]

59 gazillion distros, with different file system layouts, default compiler options blah blah woof woof. Linux is just a nightmare for me. In 2004 I used to use a mixture of Gentoo and a couple of other distros, but got sick and tired of the ever changing baseline which meant using it as a workstation became an impossible proposition for me to actually get any work done.

My workstation is now a locked down install of Solaris 10 on a dual-proc Blade 2000 and all my servers are running OpenBSD-STABLE. No pointless faffing with crappy configuration issues and when I switch the power on I get rock solid secure boxes that stay up and running. No conflicts, no crashes, no module problems.

Mod me -1 Troll, but that is my experience with Linux and no amount of angry moderation will change that.

Re:What is Userlinux?

[data64]

Interestingly enough, its listed under Inactive or Discontinued distributions [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.

Re:What is Userlinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it has been inactive for a very long time. In the article, Bruce says that he will try to get back to it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Money talks

[aCapitalist]

Every single one of them LOVE Ubuntu and will not switch back to windows. Why? installing new software is brain dead easy... Far easier than windows and MAC os has ever been, plus they all do not care about running brand name apps but simply something that works.

It sounds like your family and friends really don't need that much in the way of software. There are a lot of people that can basically live in a browser. That's fine, but once you need to step out that repository universe, installing software becomes much more difficult than on windows or mac.

I never quite understood why something like autopackage wasn't adopted as a universal package format and native package systems could be retrofitted to play nicely with it.

For example, a developer could just package up his code in an autopackage and it would just work with all the major distros. The native package system could go out and find all the dependencies and install them seamlessly. Of course there could be library versioning problems with that scenario, but who knows.

I actually consider Linux (or something like Ubuntu) to be a better fit for newbs than windows. I'll still use windows on my desktop though because I can basically get a full Unix environmnet, plus a whole lot more with windows. I tend to run colinux or an xserver to the machine in the basement.

Re:Money talks

[cHiphead]

ALWAYS use Synaptic, its loads stabler than Adept (and its interface is more traditional and not so 'search filter' lamed). Also don't use 'Kubuntu' iso installs, install Ubuntu then apt-get the kubuntu-desktop package.

Coincidentally, if you are doing development from within linux, you should use a distro you are comfortable with and actually know how its configured. Did you spend any time on ubuntuforums.org or (especially) on the irc channel asking for help? I've never come across a more nub friendly free support experience.