Geography is not altered by your political affiliations.

Never heard of init?

Its good for me.

I might recommend Slackware in a professional environment as its the only Linux distribution I am aware of that is truly knowable and stable. However, it needs a good architect to design and develop the systems and procedures in order to keep it in tip top condition. If you have those resources then yes, I would recommend it. It wont break stuff.

With regards to Patricks Volkerdings conundrum, he has made good choices in the past and Slackware has the stated aim of being a real Unix :) However we will see I guess.

Who in their right minds ever relies on a PID file? I never have in nearly thirty years.

Nothing is stopping you running your init scripts in parallel if you need it.

This makes no sense.

Can you explain how SYS V stops you having an implementation that is consistant across all installation any more than say, systemd or svcs does?

Roll out your base image and then your configuration management tool automatically builds all the other cruft on top of it. Cant see the difference

Absolutely, 100% agree.

It a complete distaster and addresses a problem that wasnt even there. rc.d or init.d were universally understood and even the dummest sys admin could get something in there. On Solaris for example, nobody ever remembers how to do it or how to check when something hasnt worked so you find people shoving re-start scripts in cron instead or using some config management tool.

With a Unix system you used to be able to follow the boot process from start to login just by looking at inittab and following the trail. This was great for newbies and great for finding out why things were not happening as they should.

systemd is the one of the worst thing Ive seen on Linux (apart from recent updates to su silently breaking any script that does su - username from root and then attempts to write to /dev/stdout) but it did get me back to my old friend Slackware after many years.

If I were a criminal in the US entering a home where the occupant could likely have a gun. I think I might be predisposed to shoot said occupant on sight and save myself some trouble.

The police know the right people too

I have a smilar experience and I would agree that there is a central theme running through European culture most of the time. We are more similar than we like to think.

I know you cant really mean that you think America is the worlds oldest democracy and that this is a joke but just in case you believe it is, it isnt.

America is the oldest country to have a completely American style democracy as well as being the only one. Many countries have had the principle of a government elected by the people for far, far longer. The Greeks, for example had a form of it 2500 years ago.

You could, I guess, argue that not everyone was allowed a vote in the older democracies but then, in the United States, women were only allowed the vote around 1928 whereas in Norway it was 1913.

Me too.

At work I have to deal with Red Hat and SLES but I have a sneaky Slacky box here and there and they cause far less trouble!

I guess it depends on your age. My perception is that originally star trek was indeed about flying around, shooting the crap out of things and being faintly rude to each other.

It was next generation that started all the peace missions and transporting elderly statesperson from planet a to planet b stuff as well as the "well we have this horribly beweaponed space ship thing but it hurts us more than it hurts you if we have to use it for anything other than being serene". Jeeez, they even had a councillor! on the bridge!! That would have turned kirks blood green.

Frankly I donÂt need a cheesy sci-fi TV to be my moral compass so I am happy to see trek return to its roots.

For too long Trek has been doing the "boldy go where no man/one has gone before" at the start of each episode while actually mostly going to places healthily populated by people who know who they are.

I used to laugh at it. What WAS that stupid program manager all about :) I was running Santa Cruz Xenix at home at the time. I had X windows and I had a crappy window manager twm or motif, cant remember now, it may even have been fvwm but what I do know is, crappy as it was, it didnt cram everything into a little box you could resize down to a square blob and lose :)

Nice :)

Those of us who have been good friends with Unix for many years cant help but raise a wry smile these days. Not so long ago we were all dressing to attend the funeral but now our friend has returned with a vengeance. My phone, my PC and my office machines are all different and yet, somehow, they are the same and its very comforting that they can all say "# "

My prediction for the future is Android.