I will give slackware (and gentoo and alpine) due consideration. ...ank

Why not use: "systemctl stop "?

Thanks for the helpful hint. I didn't know about that until now. (now I'll have to figure out what name my display manager is known by to systemd -- is there no end to the rabbit hole?) I'm still not sure, though, why systemd couldn't have left backward-compatible aliases around -- even if they spit out 20 caveats when you use them, including what commands I probably want to run instead. The command you suggested is shorter and more reasonable than what I figured out to use, but it's still way wordier than "killall gdm" or "telinit 3".

Also, I'm posting as me. Can you please do the same?

Also, I'm still not happy adopting an init system whose authors treat corruption of the journal as a "won't fix". Not happy at all. That's not an attitude that inspires confidence and I don't understand how any putative improvements in other areas out-weigh it, never mind the silly ones I've heard like "lower PID numbers!", "lower socket numbers!": yeah! as if that sort of stuff ever mattered.

To others: slackware will get my due consideration as will gentoo and alpine. Don't count on BSD escaping this nonsense, though. I understand Apple is pressuring Darwin to adopt a systemd like system there, too. Why, oh why!!?

except in a VERY black way.

Don't wait five years. I find systemd to be more and more annoying every day. The closest things I can find to "telinit 3" and "telinit 5", "systemctl isolate mulit-user.target" and "systemctl isolate graphical.target" (and talk about convoluted command lines!) can't be counted on to stop and restart the GUI part of my arch box.

Give me back my sysvinit. It may have looked crufty to some but it worked. systemd? meh

I'm running arch. Arch moved to systemd before I understood the issues at stake. I feel the systemd pain every day. I'm trying to get multi-head with nouveau working (a different set of pain, that I'll probably just switch to nvidia blobs to get around -- unless someone can point me where I want to be -- but I digress)

...and I don't understand why "systemctl isolate multi-user.target" vs. "systemctl isolate graphical.target" [try explaining THAT pair of command lines to start with] can't be expected to be as dependable as "telinit 3" vs. "telinit 5".

If I couldn't ssh into the box from somewhere else regularly, I'd be hitting the Big Switch a lot and we all know how well file systems take that kind of shenanigans.

I don't need to wait five years to hate systemd. I hate it more and more every day. My feelings do not extend to the authors -- as humans, they deserve my compassion and (in this case) pity. But I hate their software with a passion that grows more intense by the day. This is a sad day for Debian, it was one of the places I was thinking of escaping to.

Never mind using the word, cabal. I'm sure Mr. Poettering is very aware of its scary overtones and, in a mis-placed sense of mischief, he's push everyone's buttons with it.

But have you read the proposal there? It looks like "the cabal" means to have systemd as a virtual-box-hypervisor-like entity, able to select OS and version per login. Am I mis-reading something? This looks like 2nd System Effect gone absolutely berserk! I'll have to re-read the article to make sure his occasionally crusty English hasn't kept me from understanding something positive that "most users" really want whether they know it yet or not.

cheers...ank

You wrote:

>It doesn't make it clear if it means Canadian dollars or Australian ones, and that would make the value different.

Actually, it's safest to assume that slashdot thinks in US$ -- like all the ads we Canucks get from below 49. And oddly enough, in the current market, A$, C$, US$ and NZ$ are about as close to each other as I remember ever having seen them. You have to hit the Fijian Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar or Namibian Dollar to get really wild fluctuations.

If a coal plant breaks, it does not do so in my home. It does not spill its mercury in my rug from which the best cleanup manuals seem to imply it can never quite be removed as a long term environmental toxin.

CFLs are the new "Green Run" and the LEDs are only getting better and better, in my insufficiently humble opinion.

The article quoted above points to a paper that has some diagrams that shows how water would go through a branch -- no hoax here.

In brief, find a stalk of sappy wood -- my Dad showed us every spring how to make a whistle out of alder branches that look what the picture shows -- peel it, whittle it to size and then plug it into the end of a tube and gravity feed water through it.

simple...ank

Mod funny, no? I don't find it funny because it's devolution into plutocracy. bmajik's "A tale of two forums" reply in this subject has the right idea. the internet routes around defects...ank

because we still care enough about the community to want to make it better, even if we're powerless to do so.

I was under the impression that truly Classic Slashdot pre-dates AJAX by several years. If it's doing AJAX, it isn't "Classic" to anyone with a less-than-six-digit user ID, I'm afraid.

It's that until that scares me. You had me at "Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away." Everything after that clause -- and everything else in the post told me loud and clear that my opinion doesn't really matter. Thanks for the clarity.

What I do remember is being disappointed by every single redesign that I noticed as they happened. If you ask me, make everything feature-for-feature compatible with the pre-1997 design, write sanity tests that enforce that compatibility and then start innovating.

The CBC is almost like PBS without the begging. That's because (a) it gets a certain amount of money from government and (b) it actually runs commercials.

Its funding base was never as secure as that of the BBC (which used to be entirely funded from Television licenses) but once upon a time Canada used to practice "Universality" (not socialism, just good-neighbourliness) and living in a town in the 60s where the only available media was CBC (the then-equivalent of Radio 1 and CBC TV), we were thankful that their funding was stable and that they weren't an outright organ of any government.

As I said, it used to get a lot more money from the government than it does now, but thanks to Reagan-Thatcher-Murdoch and their local toad-in-Canada (Brian Mulroney) these moneys have shrunk, not quite to insignificance but substantially. Our current RTM-toad, Stephen Harper, has been cutting this cash still further -- along with his near Koch-like commitment to small government, this is also thought to be in revenge for the voice the CBC gave to folks from Ontario who were scared of him. (as his behaviour in office shows that they were right to be)

But other than a tendency to idolize Barbara Frum (skewer question) and Peter Gzowski (friendly to the point of deferential) too much, it still produces stuff like this.

Peace, Order and Good Governance forever! ...ank