On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 05:57:08PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> That depends on where you're coming from.  Stripping down something like
> Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core can be quite a chore, and getting rid of all
> the excess baggage we don't really need for our purposes gets more and
> more complicated. It's the main reason I switched to Gentoo.  Only
> disadvantage is that I spend a lot of time building new packages from
> source. :) To those poor blighters still afflicted by RPM, they're gonna
> have a hell of a time trimming the fat.
> 

Yun nga lang :( If there are any poor folks using unhashed rpms (i.e., those
who don't maintain a dependencies list, who don't use yum/apt-rpm and such)
are stuck in limbo with this one... But seriously, does anyone still run these
behemoths? (No offense intended to those who do ;)

For me, if it wasn't Debian, then it would have been Slackware or Gentoo.
Slackware 'coz it does have some rudimentary package system that can be fairly
extened using well-tuned bash/perl scripts; Gentoo 'coz like you, it has a
good dependencies system and a clear choice to build from source, the result
having a fairly stable, optimized system. Gaya nang sinabi ko sa another
thread, kung meron na nang (at least) 256 kbps unmetered DSL at P500 pesos a
month then maybe I'll consider a switch ;)

> > For the more sophisticated, turning off daemons and long-running
> > processes are even better ideas. However, the real solution would be
> > to inform people of the hows (and whys) of the Un*x system and its
> > structure as opposed to Windows (and perhaps other OSes).
> > That way, people would begin to understand the little
> > 'eccentricites' that pervade each OS, and (hopefully) make their own
> > decisions as to fixing, tuning and customizing their Linux system.
> 
> Few newcomers, using today's distros, are ever exposed to this in a
> serious way until they try to do more ambitious customization.  The more
> modern Linux distributions look more and more like black boxes than
> their forebears, but their nature still allows you to rip the covers off
> a lot more easily than Windows, or even proprietary Unix variants.  It's
> just getting a harder (but it is doubtful that this will ever become as
> hard as their proprietary counterparts make it), but certainly it would
> be a Good Thing to have this trend slow down some.
> 

How true. I always like the good old days, when one can just pick up a Linux
CD, pop it into a box, trash windows and install linux, then read
/usr/share/doc/ and company. And hey, I'm still doing it. ;)

I guess I'm fortunate enough to receive a lot of computer know-how at such an
early age. I was grade 4 when I started programming (BASIC was the norm then)
and playing the DOS 5.00 command line. Before I went to high school, I got a
copy of DOS 6.22, installed it in my 40M seagate, and watch it fry my 286. The
particular distro also had a virus as a bonus, which initiated my
self-training as a 'performance hacker': debug was my best friend at the time,
and there was no hexdump or strace to give a hint. I didn't had a clue about
Linux or free software or piracy at the time; and to talk about 'fat' in the
computing world meant comparing DOS/Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, or the famous
'file allocation tables' stuff and how to put more data than a 1.4M can
possibly hide.

I got wind of Linux on 1997, when I was on first year high. Our school got
connected to the Net, and with the obscene amount of 90 pesos an hour you can
surf to heart's content, at 28.8K. Hell, it was a joyride. Still, i didn't
really paid much attention, focusing instead on securing Windows (now 98) by
user vigilance: remove background apps, creepers and rundlls, 'coz I know for
a fact (and I feel vindicated now ;) that these things that claim to work
wonders for your PC would be the very same things you'd be cursing at 5 or 10
years later (MS Blast wasn't a surprise; so was Swen and the rest of
spam-zombie species).  So, while people around me were crying in pain as the
latest virii trashed their disk, I was all up at a whistle ;)

Now, I run Debian. The virii/spam landscape hasn't changed much, and can still
listen to howls of pain as another windows user succumbs to the BSOD.
Thankfully I didn't have to undergo that hell, especially with Linux.

Sana nga lang, people would more attentive and assertive and 'see through the
looking glass', not through some rose-colored pair of bottles' bottoms. Had
people be more into looking /usr/share/doc rather than pr0n, we all would have
fared better.

Cheers,
Zakame

-- 
|=-------------ZAK B. ELEP  (Registered Linux User #327585)-------------=|
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||      Location: Daet, Camarines Norte         Running Linux 2.6       ||
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 Debian - When you've got better things to do than to fix a borken system
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