-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 My friend Tony wrote an interesting blurb on Debian. I thought I'd share it with you. He likens Debian to a franchise restaurant model. It really came back into my mind when I was speaking with some of my friends (at the time there were about 5 developers in total at Yellow Dog Linux) about the distro we once slaved on for $12/hour in the hectic startup frenzy. Anways one of them found this thread on YDL vs Ubuntu. Since Bill had mentioned Ubuntu PPC to me yesterday it all just sort of meshed. The forum discusses how while people were waiting for YDL 4 they found Ubuntu and were very pleased.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=6255 The history of YDL after Champion Server is rather interesting. A short summary is that the CEO wanted to replace the old ncurses installer which he called `text' with a GUI. I used to snicker because in some days NEWT was considered a GUI. Anyways... so I designed a replacement for anaconda because it was very redundant and I felt very kludgy. In the end the few of us actually managed to get the installer nearly ready for release by Mac World 2000. My old roomate and friend Stephen had already years ago written YUP (now permuted as YUM) since he preferred the way Debian handled updates so smoothly and so on. So to make a long story short we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into writing an installer from scratch. Clausen logged into my iBook and finished off the PowerPC portions of GNU Parted just in time to write GUI wrapper for it and include it in our final release. So it seems really cool to me that this comment was in the forum praising our installer and bashing Anaconda: """It's good to hear other Maccers with similar experiences. I couldn't even get Yellow Dawg 3 or 4 to initiate the GUI installer (Anaconda, I think it's called?). In fact, I used release 2 most often as a convenient way to completly erase my Hard drive partitions so I could install Mandrake (Mandrake 9's "erase partition" doohicky never worked. So I would install Yellow Dawg just long enough to erase the HD, then manually eject the disk, reboot, and make another attempt installing Mandrake. Certaintly not the correct way to do things, but I get points for resourcefullness ).""" Another user writes: """Happy to hear it wasn't my ineptitude causing the non-working GUI. One thing's for sure: the Ubuntu install was the smoothest thing I've ever seen outside of a mirror. Funny thing is, the GUI install worked when installing YD 2.x, but never any releases after that. I suppose they had to "break" it somehow. Well, I'm happy Yellow Dawg and Mandrake both didn't work 'cause now I found Ubuntu. (On that note, however, developers for both those distros deserve a tip o' the hat for fighting the good fight. Thanks to all!! )""" If you'd like to look under the hood I still have the old hackish version of the installer. The idea was to 1, reduce the number of reboots... previous to YDL 2 you had to reboot a couple of times because pdisk couldn't sync the disk after writing the partition map. I also wanted to to not bomb out and say fuck you start all over again like anaconda when a bug popped up. So I wrote a rather interesting exception handler inspired by the debian installer. The result was very amazing, imho: http://penguinppc.org/~core/yi-0.6.0.tar.gz Needless to say our names slowly seemed to be ommited from the source code. Funny how companies don't like to have the names of old developers lingering around. Anyways thanks for allowing me to vent and gloat and all of those vital human diversions from loving-kindness. ;-) It does really warm my heart to see that we really did have something going. That all that horrible dramatic ending to that job really was because we had hit a wall. It's very interesting that we pushed Debian switch so hard and even tried to make Red Hat as Debian-like as possible and it was a hit. And the high-ups wouldn't listen and crushed our Debian uprising. We were really foward-looking and had the best interests of the users and investors in mind. It was not a religious war it was a heartfelt honest plea from a side where we realised that 6 month release cycle for RPM based distro is insanely tight. Because Red Hat doesn't release the tools that actually work to rebuild the distro out-of-box. Because they do everything in their power to NOT support the Power architecture because they're in bed with Intel. I just loath Red Hat. And any RPM based distro. The package format is crap. Bla bla... ok... I'm rambling... need to get this off my chest though. Five years I've kept my foot in my mouth on the whole YDL drama. Kudos to Ubuntu!!! Kudos to all Debian developers who created that base. Kudos to Clausen for making a solid open source partitioner! Kudos to Mac users who've made the leap to freedom in open source. Kudos to Apple for supporting the Linux movement in the years preceeding the fruition of OS X. peace, core -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDPD73GAuLrxOyeJMRAopCAKD700NtbTHGAOLyjRtQrJYJA2vIqwCffNAU VPvBZ/MzFu4TQf9SuBdudiM= =mgri -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
