I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
I don't know which one I should pick.
I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
Why is that?
All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
from the little bit that I used it. Incredibly tedious hand-picking
hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system called?
And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
I think I can just type some incantation and get all the updates to it.
But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
Is Gentoo better about that?
One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
I guess there's some special support for cmucl or clisp under Debian?
How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.
Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed parts
of the system. Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.
I'm going to run GNOME, I guess. Isn't that what you're supposed to run?
They all look the same to me.
My machine is a low-end tower system without any fancy or exotic hardware.
I would, however, as a secondary concern, like a system that could also
be easily deployed on servers with little LCD front panels, laptops,
and maybe even embedded systems. I do have a server I would eventually
like to put it on, with RAID disks and all that crap.
I looked over all the Linux distro home pages last night; that didn't help.
The obvious candidates are:
Fedora - maybe too bleeding edge? what special benefits?
I always found RedHat very easy to install and use.
Debian - is it flexible enough?
is it just popular for political reasons?
how do packages and updates really work?
Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to recently
was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely incoherent).
Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
and I don't understand what their point is.
Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?
I've been putting this off for a while now, but I somehow accidently
trashed my Linux system last night while plugging in a new disk drive.
Most of the files I cared about seem to be on an intact ext3 partition,
so I just have to be very careful not to blow that away when I install
a new operating system. I installed Debian on a small partition, just
to poke around at things, but will need to do a complete re-installation.
An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.
Let the flaming begin!
Chris
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
I've using Debian for about 4 years. IMHO for a developer it is very
good.
The huge number of packages, ease of updating come to mind, good lisp
support.
> All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
> from the little bit that I used it. Incredibly tedious hand-picking
> hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
> Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system
called?
> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
Dselect is still there but as far as I'm concerned you're supposed to
run aptitude these days. While still an ncurses app it is much
friendlier than dselect.
> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to
install.
> I think I can just type some incantation and get all the updates to
it.
> But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
> When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
> go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
> or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
Woody is seriously dated. For a desktop machine (and intranet servers
for that matter) I go for Sarge. Of course, it is possible to upgrade
from woody to sarge, but sarge being so close to release (well, at
least on Debian time) I'd just grab a netinstall cd and skip woody.
> Is Gentoo better about that?
>
> One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
Depending on how bleeding your edge is, it might be OK to just use
packages from debian/sid for some of those packages. If that's not
enough you're on your on basically.
> I guess there's some special support for cmucl or clisp under Debian?
> How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
Debian has pretty good lisp support with clc (see
http://www.cliki.net/common-lisp-controller ), packages for sblc,
cmucl, clisp, gcl, and installers packages for lispworks and allegro.
It also has quite a lot of cl packages. I guess the learning curve is a
bit steeper being a hacker's distribution.
I think that gentoo has clc as well.
> I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
> want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.
>
> Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
> to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed
parts
> of the system. Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
> of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
> environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.
>
> I'm going to run GNOME, I guess. Isn't that what you're supposed to
run?
> They all look the same to me.
I thought one is supposed to run stumpwm. http://www.cliki.net/Stumpwm
>
> My machine is a low-end tower system without any fancy or exotic
hardware.
> I would, however, as a secondary concern, like a system that could
also
> be easily deployed on servers with little LCD front panels, laptops,
> and maybe even embedded systems. I do have a server I would
eventually
> like to put it on, with RAID disks and all that crap.
>
> I looked over all the Linux distro home pages last night; that didn't
help.
> The obvious candidates are:
>
> Fedora - maybe too bleeding edge? what special benefits?
> I always found RedHat very easy to install and use.
> Debian - is it flexible enough?
Absolutely.
> is it just popular for political reasons?
No. Not here, but I appreciate that as well.
> how do packages and updates really work?
Interactive solution: start aptitude, type #\u to update your package
list, type #\g to see what's going to happen, type #\g again to
upgrade.
> Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to
recently
> was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely
incoherent).
> Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
> and I don't understand what their point is.
>
> Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?
It's a minor thing, but grub is more dynamic: it can read filesystems,
boot whatever you type at the boot prompt, does not need rerunning
everytime you change something in the config or the kernel.
> I've been putting this off for a while now, but I somehow accidently
> trashed my Linux system last night while plugging in a new disk
drive.
> Most of the files I cared about seem to be on an intact ext3
partition,
> so I just have to be very careful not to blow that away when I
install
> a new operating system. I installed Debian on a small partition,
just
> to poke around at things, but will need to do a complete
re-installation.
> An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.
>
> Let the flaming begin!
>
> Chris
OK, I'll do my best. I gave up on following the trends in distributions
long time ago. Like it's flaming useless to learn a new editor every
two years when you have emacs, it is also wasteful for a developer to
use anything else than Debian. In short, the best linux for you is
Debian GNU/, be that woody/sarge/sid. Oh, and since it would be immoral
to use anything without GNU in its name, it is pretty much the only
option anyway.
Gabor
····@hotpop.com writes:
> Woody is seriously dated. For a desktop machine (and intranet servers
> for that matter) I go for Sarge. Of course, it is possible to upgrade
> from woody to sarge, but sarge being so close to release (well, at
> least on Debian time) I'd just grab a netinstall cd and skip woody.
I have had bad experiences with the 'testing' version. Don't know how
the last few months have been, but my impression was that it
was sort of a stepchild. It didn't get security updates in time
(they arrived first for woody and then for unstable, if at all
relevant for unstable). It had a completely FUBAR tetex package
for a long time, which I only managed to repair through some
serious hacking which took me at least two days worth of work.
I've been much more happy since I switched to unstable!
We run woody on all our servers, though. LispWorks 4.3 works
excellently on woody, except for the GUI, woody's openmotif is
too old. The only problem we have with this, is a few
woody workstations that run a customer care application written
in LW. We could have tried to install a newer openmotif on those,
but, somewhat conservatively, we deliver the CS app. with LW 4.2.
So my advice is: unstable for workstations (until the stable version
is more up-to-date), woody for servers, at least the mission-critical
ones.
--
(espen)
Ingvar wrote:
> ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
>
>> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
>> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
>> I don't know which one I should pick.
>>
>> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
>> Why is that?
>>
>> All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
>> from the little bit that I used it.��Incredibly�tedious�hand-picking
>> hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
>> Did I miss something?���What's�Debian's�package�/�distro�system
>> called? And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
Dselect can be rather ponderous to use. It has been around a long time
and it shows its age. However, it is the most bulletproof of Debian's
package tools. Given time and patience it can repair a very damaged
system. It is worth getting acquainted with for that reason if no
other.
That said, I think most debian folks these days use one of the newer
package tools based on apt. There are several, ranging from a simple
and convenient command line app to some very nice GUI apps.
IMNSHO, RPM isn't even in the same league as any of the Debian package
tools. Most people who've never tried anything else thing RPM is
pretty nice. Anyone who has moved from one of the RPM based distros to
Debian wonders how they ever survived.
>>
>> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to
>> install. I think I can just type some incantation and get all the
>> updates to it. But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out
>> someday. When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how
>> would I go about doing that?��Is�it�some�massive�starting-all-over
>> exercise, or just type something at the net and come back the next
>> morning? Is Gentoo better about that?
>
> Upgrading is a matter of editing one file (/etc/apt/sources.list says
> my memory) and replace each and every occurence of the Debian version
> you are currently running ("woody", "stable", "unstable" or any other
> debian version that happens to be in there).
>
> After that, you type:
> apt-get�update
> apt-get�dist-upgrade
>
> After a long time of downloading and, possibly, answering
> configuration questions (this can be handled by command line options
> that have currently escaped my mind, "-y", I think), you will be
> running a new version of Debian. Bear in mind that jumping more than
> one step at a time will probably leave you with a system taht wobbles
> and falls over a lot.
I actually dist-upgraded from potato to woody a couple of years ago. As
I am on dialup, it took a very long time. The dist-upgrade process
aborted several times on failed dependencies. I just re-ran it each
time and each time it would pull in a few more packages. After several
iterations, it sorted out all the dependencies and ran to completion,
and I had a totally new version of Debian. I was quite impressed.
Before Debian, I ran SuSE for a couple of years. SuSE is a very nice
distro and the maintainers are very conscientious, but I do not think
such a feat would even be possible with RPM.
As always, YMMV.
--
ignorant bystander
budr at netride net
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
I tried Debian Woody, and then switched to Slackware. This blog entry
explains my personal reasons for this preference:
A farewell to Debian
http://www.paoloamoroso.it/log/041030.html
But right now, my main issue with Debian is that politics
(fundamentalism?) is getting in the way of technical decisions.
> Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system called?
I guess it's called APT (Advanced Packaging Tool?).
> But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
The delay of Debian Sarge was my main motivation for switching to
Slackware...
> How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
LispWorks doesn't work under Woody, at least out of the box.
> Let the flaming begin!
To gather more information and opinions, I suggest that you check the
"Front" and "Distributions" sections in back issues of Linux Weekly
News:
http://lwn.net
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools (see also http://clrfi.alu.org):
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
> But right now, my main issue with Debian is that politics
> (fundamentalism?) is getting in the way of technical decisions.
Please don't say things like that. Since the politics are
the main reason for debian, it's a non-sequitur. Witnessing
the recent IP-related nightmares, it's pretty darn nice to
have a 100% safe/secure (IP wise) distro. If that's not your
cup of tea, fine, but please don't call their very conscious
choice "fundamentalism".
> The delay of Debian Sarge was my main motivation for switching to
> Slackware...
... while others greatly value the stability of debian. They don't
release a stable distro until it's... well... stable.
[which is why I run the "unstable" branch, but even that seems
to be amazingly rock solid].
>> How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
>
> LispWorks doesn't work under Woody, at least out of the box.
LispWorks works for me under unstable, however. I may have
had to fetch a missing Motif lib, I can't recall.
Also, "synaptic" is a nice GUI front end to the debian
packages, and "apt-get dist-upgrade" is a nice way of
keeping up to date in a 1 line command.
Finally, I understand why cstacy might want to ditch Red Hat;
I've run it from versions 3 til 8, and it never once successfully
did a distribution upgrade without messing something up.
Debian, OTOH, has never ever messed up (so far, knock wood).
Finally, as advice to a choice, I'd say you have to be fairly
unix and linux savvy to run debian. If you are not, I'd suggest
you also check out Suse.
Gentoo is for those who want to compile everything from source.
It's tedious, but it does have the advantage that you never get
a broken distribution due to incompatible libs. At this point,
I just can't be bothered, debian seems to do a reasonable enough
job maintaining the core system and I can always manually compile
those packages which are broken or missing in unstable.
Alain Picard <············@memetrics.com> writes:
> Gentoo is for those who want to compile everything from source.
> It's tedious, but it does have the advantage that you never get
> a broken distribution due to incompatible libs. At this point,
It is time-consuming on a slow system, but not tedious. You can use
binary packages, if you like.
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
>
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
It's probably the best there is! Our sysadmins swear by (and
occasionally at) it, and I remember Erik Naggum declaring
Debian/unstable more stable than Red Hat.
However: being a long time RH user and not being a Linux guru, I
switched to Fedora Core 3 from RH 7.3 recently. It has its warts, but
not more than a usual RH version, and after a week or two of tinkering
with it I had a usable system. All the lisps I care about (CMUCL,
SBCL, ACL, LW, ABCL) work and I found yum much more approachable than
up2date for package management. Just say
yum update
to have your packages up to date and
yum install <package-name>
to install packages (together with the ones they depend on, of course).
Sure, you won't be able to install CMUCL this way, but that's what
/usr/local/ is there for.
And yes, of course it comes with Gnome and KDE, but I can't comment on
them, because I don't use any desktop environment, just a vanilla
fvwm-1.24.
Andras
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
>
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
I've ben using debian on my desktop for about 8 years, and it is IMO the
best development desktop available.
>
> All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
> from the little bit that I used it. Incredibly tedious hand-picking
> hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
> Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system called?
> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
dselect is old and tedious to use.. i don't use a graphical package
manager at all... apt-cache and apt-get are all you need. For Example:
(this is on my destop which runs 'unstable').
········@merlin:~$ apt-cache search sbcl
cl-clx-sbcl - An X11 Common Lisp client library for SBCL
cl-irc - Common Lisp Internet Relay Chat Library
cl-modlisp - Common Lisp interface to the Apache mod-lisp module
cl-uffi - Universal Foreign Function Library for Common Lisp
sbcl - A development environment for Common Lisp
········@merlin:~$ apt-cache show sbcl
Package: sbcl
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Installed-Size: 51532
Maintainer: Kevin M. Rosenberg <···@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1:0.8.17.20-1
Provides: lisp-compiler
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4)
Pre-Depends: common-lisp-controller (>= 4.2)
Suggests: ilisp
Filename: pool/main/s/sbcl/sbcl_0.8.17.20-1_i386.deb
Size: 12907700
MD5sum: 2119534b78479937873efa30c7a3d374
Description: A development environment for Common Lisp
SBCL is a development environment for the ANSI Common Lisp language.
It provides a native-code compiler and an integrated debugger, as well
as all the features in the ANSI specification.
[... snip ...]
·····@merlin:~$ sudo apt-get install sbcl
Password:
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
sbcl
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 485 not upgraded.
Need to get 12.9MB of archives.
After unpacking 594kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://mirror.cpsc.ucalgary.ca unstable/main sbcl 1:0.8.17.20-1
[12.9MB]
Fetched 12.9MB in 35s (364kB/s)
It upgraded SBCL to the latest version (as i already had a previous
version installed). You can also see how out of date my unstable install
is (i need to upgrade some 485 packages. this machine IS behind a
firewall, so i tend to only upgrade when out outward facing service has
a hole, or when i need a new package).
> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
I don't use redhat for the same reasons i don't use windows or C++.
There are better solutions out there.
>
> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
> I think I can just type some incantation and get all the updates to it.
> But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
> When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
> go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
> or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
> Is Gentoo better about that?
I use woody on my servers, with some modern packages from
backports.org... and i wouldn't have it any other way. On my desktop i
have always run unstable (sid), and rarely had a problem (not for years),
Debian uses a 3 phases release system : stable/testing/unstable.
Stable : is just that... stable. old, but reliable. Solid for a server,
but a little bit out of date for a desktop. When i deploy a lisp app on
stable i don't use the debian packages, but i use the sbcl binaries and
install any packages i need from source.
Testing : Testing is what will become the new release when the anal
release managers decide it can. It is more 'stable' then any other
distro i've used, and is your best bet if you want a modern yet reliable
system.
Unstable : Bleeding edge, latest releases. Can Hose Your Dystem
(although i have not managed to break it severely in years). I use this
on my desktop, and have been for years. There is no better GNU/Linux.
to upgrade, you simple point apt at the newer distro's repository and do
an apt-get dist-upgrade.
sometimes this works better then others. and yes, you will have to
download every package. usually takes a few hours here.
It's best to install testing directly using a netinstall then to install
stable and upgrade. although the latter is what i usually end up doing..
sometimes it takes a trick or to and a lot of "apt-get install
--fix-missing".
> One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
Debian leaves /usr/local alone .. completely. dpkg will not touch it. I
put all my custom software there and use it alongside packaged wares
without a problem.
>
> I guess there's some special support for cmucl or clisp under Debian?
> How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
>
sbcl, cmucl and clisp are all apt-gettable. Debian uses the
common-lisp-controller so you can install a debian package (say cl-sql)
and it will operate in all your installed Lisp environements. Very cool.
> I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
> want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.
yup. 'cept maybe acrobat (try non-free)
>
> Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
> to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed parts
> of the system.
you just add security.debian.org to your /etc/apt/sources.list, so an
apt-get upgrade, and voila, c'est tout.
Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
> of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
> environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.
Everything that is Free Software is available, and i dare say better
supported then any other distro i've used.
Java you'll have to get from Sun .. but i have it running and it works.
>
> I'm going to run GNOME, I guess. Isn't that what you're supposed to run?
> They all look the same to me.
>
i use Ion3 ... does not look like gnome. No rodent support needed (i
usually keep the rodent as far away as i can .. prefering the keyboard
for it's speed and carpal-tunnel friendliness).
> My machine is a low-end tower system without any fancy or exotic hardware.
my main desktop is an AMD k6-500 with a shiteload of RAM. I also use a
laptop (p-150. 32m) running stable as an X terminal. No problem running
here.
I recently installed Ubuntu on a friends AMD3200+ .. wow .. gnome can be
fast!
> I would, however, as a secondary concern, like a system that could also
> be easily deployed on servers with little LCD front panels, laptops,
> and maybe even embedded systems. I do have a server I would eventually
> like to put it on, with RAID disks and all that crap.
I also have stable on all my top of the line co-located servers :). I
don't know about LCD's, as the front panels of these boxes are halfway
across the world from here... but fancy RAID and all that junk applies.
>
> I looked over all the Linux distro home pages last night; that didn't help.
> The obvious candidates are:
>
> Fedora - maybe too bleeding edge? what special benefits?
> I always found RedHat very easy to install and use.
I stopped using redhat for anything about 6 years ago, so i can't be of
big help, but if you though fedora was easy, debain should seem like a
walk in the park (asuming some technical know-how here).
> Debian - is it flexible enough?
the most flexible GNU/Linux Distro there is. runs on more systems in
more ways then anything else i've used.
> is it just popular for political reasons?
If anything, it's popular in spite of the politics. The make the best
Linux Distro there is. They also happen to have strong values.
> how do packages and updates really work?
apt-get update;apt-get upgrade. never had a problem.
> Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to recently
> was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely incoherent).
> Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
> and I don't understand what their point is.
http://funroll-loops.org/ . Gentoo is for Ricers. ;)
>
> Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?
Lilo is a little older and more cryptic. GRUB has superpowers. LILO is
fine for most, GRUB is when you need it.
> An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.
cfdisk is not idiot-proof enough ? it even makes you type "Y-E-S" to
write your partition table, asking you "are you really really really
sure you want to do this".
If the politics of debian are not to your liking, try Ubuntu. It is a
real debian distro, with some added desktop features, and is more up to
date then testing. (it is built from testing and unstable .. like a good
desktop should be).
There is also Xandros or Linspire, both are debian based as well.
or knoppix .. heard god things about mepis too. They are all debian, and
can all be turned into eachother through creative use of apt...
Feel free to drop me a line with any debian/lisp related questions you
may have.
>
> Let the flaming begin!
well ... ok ... it is almost 4:20 here... where are those rolling
papers. ;)
</vancouver joke>
drewc
drewc <·····@rift.com> writes:
>> Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to recently
>> was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely incoherent).
>> Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
>> and I don't understand what their point is.
>
> http://funroll-loops.org/ . Gentoo is for Ricers. ;)
This is actually funny in the sense that the authors of this page had
probably flamed Windows some years ago...
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
Julian Stecklina wrote:
> drewc <·····@rift.com> writes:
>>
>>http://funroll-loops.org/ . Gentoo is for Ricers. ;)
>
>
> This is actually funny in the sense that the authors of this page had
> probably flamed Windows some years ago...
Even funnier when you realize that the people the authors are flaming
were probably running windows last year :).
I hear that gentoo is a great way to learn about how linux/unix works.
For an unexperienced user, it could be a great learning experience.
Those of us who have been using linux for ~10 years already have a good
idea how to use GCC and configure init... so we just want a system thats
stable, up-do-date, well supported, easy to upgrade/maintain, and can
install a gnome desktop in less then 18 hours on a low end machine.
For me this system is debian, because of dpkg, apt-get and
security.debian.org. YMMV.
drewc
drewc <·····@rift.com> writes:
> Those of us who have been using linux for ~10 years already have a
> good idea how to use GCC and configure init... so we just want a
> system thats stable, up-do-date, well supported, easy to
> upgrade/maintain, and can install a gnome desktop in less then 18
> hours on a low end machine.
>
> For me this system is debian, because of dpkg, apt-get and
> security.debian.org. YMMV.
For me this is FreeBSD which allows me to use binary packages on my
low end router and compile from source on my main workstation.
Besides: Gentoo was the first Linux distro I tried after about 3 years
of using FreeeBSD almost exclusively. And not counting the setup
procedure it is a very nice thing, but quite a culture shock to most
people. But then again, using Debian might be a culture shock to
me. ;)
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
I'm not recommending Gentoo, but its what I use. Installation is
somewhat tedious, but you learn a lot by doing it, and it is not
difficult, due to the excellent documentation. Its lisp support is
probably almost as good as debians, since it seems most of the ebuilds
(gentoo packaging thingy) seem to be based on the debian packages. Now,
I don't know this for sure, but it looks that way. Gentoo is bad
because you have to wait for things to build before you can use them.
Its good, because you can configure the crap out of it. Tedious things
in gentoo include removing gnome and all of its dependencies (although
its probably easy to do... I just don't know the procedure, and don't
care enough to ask). Another annoying thing about gentoo is that most
of the lisp packages are "masked," gentoo's way of saying a package
might not be stable. So you have to go through some hassle to install
them. Like I said, I'm not recommending it. But I wouldn't use
anything else.
Andrew wrote:
> Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
>
>> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
>> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
>> I don't know which one I should pick.
>
>
> I'm not recommending Gentoo, but its what I use. Installation is
> somewhat tedious, but you learn a lot by doing it, and it is not
> difficult, due to the excellent documentation. Its lisp support is
> probably almost as good as debians, since it seems most of the ebuilds
> (gentoo packaging thingy) seem to be based on the debian packages. Now,
> I don't know this for sure, but it looks that way. Gentoo is bad
> because you have to wait for things to build before you can use them.
> Its good, because you can configure the crap out of it. Tedious things
> in gentoo include removing gnome and all of its dependencies (although
> its probably easy to do... I just don't know the procedure, and don't
> care enough to ask). Another annoying thing about gentoo is that most
> of the lisp packages are "masked," gentoo's way of saying a package
> might not be stable. So you have to go through some hassle to install
> them. Like I said, I'm not recommending it. But I wouldn't use
> anything else.
I wouldn't use anything else either. Gentoo rocks. I agree with some
of the difficulties listed above, but the strongest thing for me was how
much I learned about Linux in general by doing a Stage 1 Gentoo install.
Tremendous documentation in the handbook.
After you're up and running in Gentoo, your life is so easy !! If you
want a package, like SBCL, just type:
emerge -a sbcl
(-a is for ask, and will list dependencies and verify that you want to
install everything.) There are three dependencies, but I forget them
now. common-lisp-controller and others...
If you want to install mod_lisp, just type
emerge -a mod_lisp
And it will tell you that Apache (and maybe more) package(s) are
required. If you type yes, everything will be installed the Gentoo way,
tested with other packages, and working just fine once you're done.
It really is a treat. It's the closest thing to BSD Ports in the Linux
world.
Cheers,
Brad
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I use Debian because of quality of
the packaging, and the ease with which you can install/upgrade/remove
packages.
> All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
> from the little bit that I used it. Incredibly tedious hand-picking
> hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
> Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system called?
> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
Ugh - I don't like dselect; at least when I last used it (a couple of
years ago), it made a complete mess of the dependencies. But dselect
is just one frontend to the packaging system; when I want that sort of
thing, I use a program called `aptitude'. But what people are usually
talking about when they refer to debian's packaging system is 'Apt',
which is the level below any graphical frontend.
It sounds like the main thing that you missed is that you don't have
to tediously go through the packages one by one. If you want to
install something, then you you just have to select the appropriate
package, and it will[1] automagically sort out the dependencies for
you.
For example, if you want to install some of the lispy stuff, then:
$ apt-get install cmucl sbcl clisp ilisp
push enter a couple of times, maybe answer a couple of configuration
questions (depends on whether or not you want to be bothered by those,
or are prepared to accept defaults), and its all set up. [Most of the
Lisp library packages start with the prefix "cl-", for example
"cl-ppcre".]
And when you want to upgrade everything, then:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get dist-upgrade
Will get the lastest version (for whatever you are using:
stable/testing/unstable) of all of the packages you have installed.
Actually, a while ago people made a version of apt that works with
RPMs, so its technically possible to do this stuff with Redhat as
well. The difference is that availability of packages, and the
quality of the packaging:
1) Debian has far more `official' packages available than Redhat.
2) The packages are available from numerous mirrors online; just point
apt at the closest one and download away. After the initial
install you generally don't bother with a CD, and update your
system as often as it suits you.
3) There is a community built up around the packaging system and a set
of guidelines about where packages are allowed to install stuff and
whatnot, so the (official) packages are generally of a higher
quality than a random RPM from somebody's website.
[1] Almost always -- admittedly things do sometimes break, although
usually only if you are running 'testing' or 'unstable'. (Unstable is
the absolute newest of everything, testing is halfway in between
stable and unstable.)
> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
> I think I can just type some incantation and get all the updates to it.
> But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
> When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
> go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
> or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
> Is Gentoo better about that?
Just point apt at the repository you want (configuration in
"/etc/apt/sources.list"), update and then dist-upgrade. Occasionally
you might have to uninstall something, but usually the
update/dist-upgrade is enough.
I havn't used Gentoo, so I can't comment much on it, but I understand
that has a similar system to apt ('emerge'). Gentoo is supposed to be
based on the idea of 'compile everything from source'; supposedly it
can take several days to install KDE. In theory this is supposed to
make everything faster, as you can use the compiler flags specific for
your machine, but the benefit of this has been disputed.
> One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
$ apt-get install cmucl cmucl-source apache postfix
$ apt-get source apache postfix
> I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
> want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.
$ apt-get install openoffice.org samba mozilla-firefox
I think Acrobat is in the `non-free' section, but I don't currently
have that included in sources.list, so I can't check.
> Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
> to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed parts
> of the system. Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
> of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
> environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.
For security patches, include:
deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free
in your sources.list, then update/upgrade.
Java is a bit of a pain to install because the license prevents it
from being included in the repositories, so you have to download it
from Sun's website.
> I'm going to run GNOME, I guess. Isn't that what you're supposed to run?
> They all look the same to me.
Meh - I just use a window manager without a desktop environment. But
if you insist:
$ apt-get install gnome
> Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?
With LILO you have to remember to do the magic incantation when you
recompile the kernel. (Hey, you arn't really running Linux unless you
have custom-compiled your kernel, right? ;-) ):
$ lilo
With GRUB you are supposed to not have to do that; maybe there are
other benefits as well. As far as I am concerned, they both do the
same job, and I am used to how the LILO config file works, so I use
that.
> I've been putting this off for a while now, but I somehow accidently
> trashed my Linux system last night while plugging in a new disk drive.
> Most of the files I cared about seem to be on an intact ext3 partition,
> so I just have to be very careful not to blow that away when I install
> a new operating system. I installed Debian on a small partition, just
> to poke around at things, but will need to do a complete re-installation.
> An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.
This should be easy enough from the Debian installer; it uses cfdisk,
which I have never had a problem with.
Iain
On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:59:35 +1100, Iain Little <······@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Java is a bit of a pain to install because the license prevents it
> from being included in the repositories, so you have to download it
> from Sun's website.
The procedure described here worked quite well for me on several
servers:
<http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/DEV/Java+on+Debian>
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Iain Little <······@yahoo.com> writes:
> I havn't used Gentoo, so I can't comment much on it, but I understand
> that has a similar system to apt ('emerge'). Gentoo is supposed to be
> based on the idea of 'compile everything from source'; supposedly it
> can take several days to install KDE. In theory this is supposed to
> make everything faster, as you can use the compiler flags specific for
> your machine, but the benefit of this has been disputed.
The greatest advantage of a BSD-like ports system is that you can
customize the software you install. You want SAMBA with printer
support? without? Gaim with SILC and encryption? You need neither? You
get the idea.
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
Up spake Iain Little:
> Ugh - I don't like dselect; at least when I last used it (a couple of
Aptitude is much better. For some reason hardly anybody knows about it.
> Actually, a while ago people made a version of apt that works with
> RPMs, so its technically possible to do this stuff with Redhat as
> well. The difference is that availability of packages, and the
> quality of the packaging:
Mandrake uses urpmi. Fedora uses yum. OS-X uses fink (unofficially).
Someone else (SuSE?) uses apt-rpm.
Unfortunately, poor-quality metadata in RPMs (especially third-party
RPMs) is still prolific.
> 2) The packages are available from numerous mirrors online; just point
> apt at the closest one and download away. After the initial
> install you generally don't bother with a CD, and update your
> system as often as it suits you.
More importantly, you never need to buy $vendor's next `version' of
their distro, because the upgrade process is gradual and continuous. Of
course, Debian isn't the only distro that does this.
> > Is Gentoo better about that?
...and Gentoo is one of them. I suspect BSD's ports system is the same.
> > One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> > not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> > I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> > like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
>
> $ apt-get install cmucl cmucl-source apache postfix
For some applications, I package .debs from the CVS head. This is
mostly a matter of applying the Debian patch and running
dpkg-buildpackage. http://twb.ath.cx/~twb/src/debian/
> I think Acrobat is in the `non-free' section, but I don't currently
> have that included in sources.list, so I can't check.
Correct. The package name is "acroread".
> Java is a bit of a pain to install because the license prevents it
> from being included in the repositories, so you have to download it
> from Sun's website.
Blackdown? I'm afraid I only have my local mirror written down:
deb ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/java-linux/debian/ unstable main non-free
It has debs of Sun Java (1.)4
> > An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.
I recommend the one provided by the Mandrake installer (I use cfdisk).
1) Accept all defaults until you get to the partition step.
2) Use the point-and-drool GUI partitioner. Apply changes.
3) Hit the reset switch and remove the Mandrake install CD.
--
-trent
<foo> Not a single original thought in my mind.... I should write a book.
<bar> And sell it as a notepad?
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
>
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
Hello from Istanbul, Turkey!
I'm writing this message using gnus, running on GNU Emacs,
running on Debian (unstable) to which I connected using
ssh ran by PuTTY (on my office Win2K machine).
I'm using Debian GNU/Linux for more than 2 years, I've
started with Woody and when I had ADSL connection I upgraded
to unstable by issuing a simple command line. It was a good
feeling! :)
As the others stated apt-get or synaptic or aptitude handles
your package management in a quite smooth way.
I was also glad to see that the distribution of my choice
had very good support for anything related to Common Lisp.
Besides purely technical reasons, also the support is
very well, both my local Turkish Debian users group
and international Debian community include some very
knowledgeable/wise/talented/experienced users/developers
so even if I sometimes dive into deep waters it doesn't
take more than a few minutes to find a helping hand,
the quality of this support is very important for me.
If you follow the guidelines of experienced users/developers
about what kind of Debian setup will be the best for
your home/development machine I think you'll have
a very good and comfortable computing environment.
Cheers,
--
Emre Sevinc
eMBA Software Developer Actively engaged in:
http:www.bilgi.edu.tr http://ileriseviye.org
http://www.bilgi.edu.tr http://fazlamesai.net
Cognitive Science Student http://cazci.com
http://www.cogsci.boun.edu.tr
Hi Christopher C. Stacy,
> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
I strongly advise against doing this. Just grab the latest mini ISO
(netinst CD). Only 100-odd MB, the rest you download from the Internet at
install time: <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/>
Regards,
Adam
From: Adam Warner <······@consulting.net.nz>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 12:49:42 +1300
Hi Christopher C. Stacy,
> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
I strongly advise against doing this. Just grab the latest mini ISO
(netinst CD). Only 100-odd MB, the rest you download from the Internet at
install time: <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/>
I tried that, but the installer is unable to use my network.
It finds the device and configures it, but it always fails when it
tries to use it (as if the device were totally malfunctioning).
This is just some generic box. It says:
eth0 VIA VT6102 Rhine-II ...
MII PHY found at addr1...setting full duplex...
I think this is a driver problem in the netinst version of the system,
because I can still boot a base Woody (installer earlier from CD) from
another hard drive, and it comes up and uses the network just fine.
I'm going to try downloading the Sarge DVDs.
Hope the network problem will somehow go away after I install from DVD.
Otherwise, I'll just go with my original plan of installing
the original Woody distribution from CDs and upgrading over
the net from there.
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I tried that, but the installer is unable to use my network.
> It finds the device and configures it, but it always fails when it
> tries to use it (as if the device were totally malfunctioning).
>
> This is just some generic box. It says:
> eth0 VIA VT6102 Rhine-II ...
> MII PHY found at addr1...setting full duplex...
Strange. The installer offers some virtual terminals (alt-f2) which give
you root access to the running installer. You could try to manually
bring up the interface with ifconfig, or at least do a dmesg so you'll
have some idea what is failing
> I'm going to try downloading the Sarge DVDs.
> Hope the network problem will somehow go away after I install from DVD.
i don't know if that's going to be worth the bandwidth for you, as it
likely has the same problem. What i can suggest is using knoppix or
mepis as a starting point (Mepis has better support for installing the
OS to your HDD, but knoppix is more popular and easy to find).
> Otherwise, I'll just go with my original plan of installing
> the original Woody distribution from CDs and upgrading over
> the net from there.
This is probably your best bet at this point, barring a successful
ifconfig. Infact, there really is no need to upgrade the entire system..
you can just upgrade the packages you need (and their dependencies).
If you install just the very base woody (don't do tasksel or choose
anything with dselect), the upgrade will be much simpler then if you
install the whole shebang and try to go from there (In particular i
always manage to mung my X doing this upgrade).
Given that ou are having troubles with sarge, i'm sure the debian
develpers would be more then happy to help you out. Try #debian or one
of the mailing lists. If it is in fact a bug, it should be noted and
entered as a debian bug.
(at this point i went to google to find out more..)
It seems there are known problems with the via_rhine module. A good
place to start would be:
http://stack.dnsalias.net/~dphelan/archives/000323.html
But i personally found this thread (which is < 30 days old) to be
helpfull. To save you reading it all, the conclusion is that that
particular driver seems to work best when compiled into the kernel, and
is flakey when used as a module (perhaps this is the difference btwn
woody and sarge?).
The driver is located at http://www.scyld.com/ethercard_drivers.html if
you want to dig deeper.
http://stack.dnsalias.net/~dphelan/archives/000323.html has some good
pointers too.
My google search was for "VIA VT6102 Rhine-II debian" if you REALLY want
to dig deeper.
drewc
drewc wrote:
> But i personally found this thread (which is < 30 days old)
doh. forget the URL:
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-29347.html
sorry 'bout dat.
drewc
On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 03:39:52 GMT,
Christopher C. Stacy <······@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
> Otherwise, I'll just go with my original plan of installing
> the original Woody distribution from CDs and upgrading over
> the net from there.
I do advise taking a look at Mepis. It's Debian, and only one CD to download
and install. After that, it's all apt-get or synaptic, etc.
rajat
Hi Christopher C. Stacy,
On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 03:39:52 +0000, Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> > I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
>
> I strongly advise against doing this. Just grab the latest mini ISO
> (netinst CD). Only 100-odd MB, the rest you download from the Internet at
> install time: <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/>
>
> I tried that, but the installer is unable to use my network.
> It finds the device and configures it, but it always fails when it
> tries to use it (as if the device were totally malfunctioning).
>
> This is just some generic box. It says:
> eth0 VIA VT6102 Rhine-II ...
> MII PHY found at addr1...setting full duplex...
You poor thing. It may be a Linux kernel bug.
If you booted with a 2.6 kernel try linux24 this time. Otherwise try
linux26: <http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apas03.html>
(these are boot parameters that you can enter at the initial boot screen).
Regards,
Adam
>>>>> "Christopher" == Christopher C Stacy <······@news.dtpq.com> writes:
Christopher> What's Debian's package / distro system called?
The package system (the one that is equivalent to rpm) is DPKG (Debian
Packager, I guess). One uses the `dpkg' tool to install and remove
packages (extension is .deb).
Apt is a collection of tools to bring packages onto the machine. The
tool 'apt-get' is a commandline tool that knows about Debian archives
available over the net or on CD or whatever; the tool 'aptitude' is a
ncurses frontend that allows you to browse the different sections and
read package descriptions and so on.
Christopher> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?
For ordinary package maintenance, I don't think that rpm is that much
worse than dpkg. The fact that I have a terrible time remembering what
options to use to do anything usefull is not really rpm's fault, I
think :-)
There may be some internal mechanism sort of problems in either one of
the systems relating to dependency management, version guards and the
like, but it is not something I know of or I think is experienced in
real life.
The qualities of the various packages are a whole different ballgame
of course. My impression (and note here that I am a many year Debian
fan) is that most of the commercial distributions works rather well
for the stuff that is part of each release, but the amount of software
available in a typical SuSE or RedHat release is miniscule compared to
all that is in Debian unstable and the average quality of a package in
Debian unstable is much higher than the average quality of add-on
software to the rpm based distros.
Indicative of these differences is that a commercial distro typically
chooses one variant of a tool, say GNU Emacs or Xemacs, and only fully
support that. Then add-ons such as the GNUS newsreader or ILISP either
works only for one or isn't available at all. In Debian there is a
wealth of add-ons and both for Emacs and Common Lisp and there is an
infrastructure that attempts to allow different runtime environments
to coexist. Thus you can, with Debian, install both CMUCL, SBCL and
PPCRE and have PPCRE work automatically in both environments.
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian ··@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- ·······@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
After using various flavors of Linux since Jan 1995, I finally got
tired of broken upgrades, random reconfigurations of the /etc,
/include, and /lib directories, repeated problems with binary
incompatible glibc versions, inconsistent config file locations, and
incomplete man pages[1].
Now I think I understand Jamie Zawinski's comment about Linux: "It's
like a love-hate relationship, without the love."
So I started using an operating system that "just works", NetBSD. I
highly recommend it. FreeBSD or OpenBSD are also excellent. I think
that FreeBSD may be the best of the three for Lisp specifically.
The FreeBSD ports system and the NetBSD pkgsrc system are both minimum
headache ways to keep your system up to date and working.
Lispworks 4.3 works nicely for me under NetBSD in Linux binary
emulation (I assume 4.4 would also). sbcl works natively on NetBSD,
but without threads. clisp runs perfectly on NetBSD. That's all I
really need.
Even though it's not my own personal cup of tea, Debian does seem to
be taking over as the best Lisp development platform, with the cclan
project and all that.
-russ
[1] I probably should have stuck with Slackware all those years, but I
wasn't smart enough to know this.
Russell McManus wrote:
> After using various flavors of Linux since Jan 1995, I finally got
> tired of broken upgrades, random reconfigurations of the /etc,
> /include, and /lib directories, repeated problems with binary
> incompatible glibc versions, inconsistent config file locations, and
> incomplete man pages[1].
>
> Now I think I understand Jamie Zawinski's comment about Linux: "It's
> like a love-hate relationship, without the love."
>
> So I started using an operating system that "just works", NetBSD. I
> highly recommend it. FreeBSD or OpenBSD are also excellent. I think
> that FreeBSD may be the best of the three for Lisp specifically.
>
I agree with that judgement. I run FreeBSD and have LWL, CMUCL and
clisp running on it. FreeBSD seems to have a better human orgranization
behind it, providing a more coherent (single) distribution. How many
Linix distros are there?
Wade
Marco Parrone wrote:
> Wade Humeniuk on Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:42:30 GMT writes:
>
>
>>I agree with that judgement. I run FreeBSD and have LWL, CMUCL and
>>clisp running on it. FreeBSD seems to have a better human orgranization
>>behind it, providing a more coherent (single) distribution. How many
>>Linix distros are there?
>
> ^^^^^
>
> I think you meant the Linux kernel or the GNU/Linux OS.
Maybe. But many of the Linux distros seem to offer (or are
strong at) different application software. In some cases these
applications seemed customized for the distro. An example
would be Redhat's desktops, which come configured to essentially
promote Redhat.
>
> How many *BSDs are there?
>
There is one FreeBSD, one NetBSD, etc., etc. They do
not pretend to be the same. When I choose FreeBSD I do
not have have to choose from between 30 different
vendors.
> How manu Unices are there?
>
> How many Lisps are there?
>
Wade
Wade Humeniuk <····················@telus.net> wrote:
+---------------
| Russell McManus wrote:
| > So I started using an operating system that "just works", NetBSD. I
| > highly recommend it. FreeBSD or OpenBSD are also excellent. I think
| > that FreeBSD may be the best of the three for Lisp specifically.
|
| I agree with that judgement. I run FreeBSD and have LWL, CMUCL and
| clisp running on it.
+---------------
Here's another recommendation for FreeBSD, which I run on both
my web/mail/DNS servers and my laptop, with both CMUCL & CLISP
(and Apache & PostGreSQL & Postfix [instead of sendmail!]).
One nice thing: FreeBSD's Linux emulation libraries are *very*
good at running most Linux binaries (e.g., Acroread, Mozilla),
useful when there aren't pre-built FreeBSD native binaries handy.
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock <····@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607
····@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) writes:
> Wade Humeniuk <····················@telus.net> wrote:
> +---------------
> | Russell McManus wrote:
> | > So I started using an operating system that "just works", NetBSD. I
> | > highly recommend it. FreeBSD or OpenBSD are also excellent. I think
> | > that FreeBSD may be the best of the three for Lisp specifically.
> |
> | I agree with that judgement. I run FreeBSD and have LWL, CMUCL and
> | clisp running on it.
> +---------------
>
> One nice thing: FreeBSD's Linux emulation libraries are *very*
> good at running most Linux binaries (e.g., Acroread, Mozilla),
> useful when there aren't pre-built FreeBSD native binaries handy.
NetBSD's linux binary emulation also rocks. It runs every linux
binary I've ever tried, most importantly LWL!
-russ
Russell McManus <···············@yahoo.com> writes:
> After using various flavors of Linux since Jan 1995, I finally got
> tired of broken upgrades, random reconfigurations of the /etc,
> /include, and /lib directories, repeated problems with binary
> incompatible glibc versions, inconsistent config file locations, and
> incomplete man pages[1].
Debian is similar to FreeBSD in that it also sets out to resolve these
issues through written policy. That's one of the things I like about
it. Package maintainers are supposed to follow the rules regarding
placement of different kinds of files. All documentation goes into
/usr/share/doc/<package>/, all configuration into /etc/ and
user-changed _conffiles_ are not to be modified by package scripts,
binaries in /usr/bin/, libraries in /usr/lib/, etc... the dependency
system is supposed to prevent library versioning problems, and it does
to a much larger extent than in Redhat. When I used Redhat I gave up
on the package manager, because it was completely useless at
preventing these sorts of conflicts. And before that I started out
with Slackware (around '95 too).
I started playing around with both Debian and FreeBSD about 5 years
ago and ended up sticking with Debian because it seemed more inviting
to potential contributors, which I eventually became. I brought some
CL packages into Debian, and still maintain a few.
--
;; Matthew Danish -- user: mrd domain: cmu.edu
;; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> Fedora - maybe too bleeding edge? what special benefits?
> I always found RedHat very easy to install and use.
> Debian - is it flexible enough?
> is it just popular for political reasons?
> how do packages and updates really work?
> Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to recently
> was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely incoherent).
> Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
> and I don't understand what their point is.
I personally use FreeBSD (yes, that's no Linux, see www.freebsd.org)
and Gentoo. Both are very useable operating systems, though FreeBSD is
generally more coherent and robust than Gentoo is. Both have a
superior ports system to install software easily and
customizablely. Both portage (Gentoo's ports system) and the FreeBSD
ports contain all the CL environments you get to run on an UNIX-like
system.
The one and only big minus for Gentoo is its arcane installation
procedure.
> Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?
Because IMHO GRUB is way friendlier to use.
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 13:19:14 GMT,
Christopher C. Stacy <······@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
>
> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?
If Debian is what you want to use, take a look at Mepis. It is Debian-based,
and installation is a bit easier. The website is www.mepis.org
Once you've got it installed, apt-get install synaptic. Synaptic is gtk-based
and simple to use. Installing it in the first place is the only time you'll
need to use the command line apt-get.
rajat
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
[...]
> When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
> go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
> or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
> Is Gentoo better about that?
Gentoo upgrading is incremental, thus you should never need to
start-all-over. Most of the time you don't notice your machine moving
between releases. As I understand it, releases are mostly provided for
improved live CD support and universal CDs containing popular software
pre-compiled (useful for dial-up users) for various architectures.
> One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)
I think this is one situation where Gentoo is handy. If you're used to
managing your own builds of software into /usr/local or /opt, then you
know it can get messy.
In Gentoo you can extend the portage tree to include your own "ports".
This is called an overlay. Since ports are familiar bash scripts and
take the same form of the typical fetch/unpack/compile/install sequence
you would have to do manually, it is very easy to maintain your own
builds on your Gentoo system.
If you take the time to use an overlay (which is not much longer than
manually building and installing), you can leverage portage features
such as:
* sand-boxing (prevent upstream build systems installing into
locations you would not want them to install into)
* configuration file protection (allowing for easy merging)
* unmerging installed software cleanly
* the portage dependency resolution system
* automatic fetching source from CVS
The format of Gentoo ports (ebuilds) is described here:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1#doc_chap2
A template ebuild (perhaps it gives a better idea) can be found here:
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/skel.ebuild?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
> I guess there's some special support for cmucl or clisp under Debian?
> How well does Debian support Lispworks and Franz?
In Gentoo, there is support for CMUCL, SBCL and CLISP with the Common
Lisp Controller (CLC). There is initial support for GCL 2.7 (CVS) with
the the CLC. There are ports for GCL 2.6 and ECL which don't use the
CLC.
There is no support for LispWorks or Allegro.
What is the CLC? Its just a useful binding for REQUIRE which looks in a
well known locations for ASDF or defsystem3 files and provides a handy
interface for distribution maintainers to compile for multiple Lisp
implementations simultaneously. The user's view of CLC is something
like:
(require :cl-ppcre)
(require :aserve)
(require :clsql) etc.
Where all of the modules listed as REQUIRE arguments are maintained
Gentoo ports. The Gentoo CLC is based on the Debian CLC.
A list of Common Lisp related ports can be found here:
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-lisp/
Most of the ports try to use Debian naming conventions.
> I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
> want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.
There are ports for all of those. You could search for other ports
using the web interface here:
http://packages.gentoo.org/
> Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
> to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed parts
In Gentoo, the command is "emerge". "emerge --sync" refreshes your
local portage tree with upstream, and "emerge -u world" would be the
command which updates anything requiring updating.
> of the system. Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
> of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
> environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.
Gentoo has some nice GCC and Java support. You can have several GCC
profiles and switch between them. You can have several JDKs and JREs
installed (Sun, Blackdown, IBM etc) and multiple versions of each (1.2,
1.3, 1.4, 1.5 etc.) and switch between them easily. Ports for Sun,
Blackdown and IBM Java implementations are available, as well as
SableVM, GCJ, Kaffe etc.
There is some J2EE related support. JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty and the
reference implementation etc. A list of Java related ports can be found
here:
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-java/
There is support for building classpaths easily.
[...]
> My machine is a low-end tower system without any fancy or exotic
> hardware.
I wouldn't use Gentoo with a slow machine, unless a faster machine was
compiling binary packages for it. Personally, I use a 933MHz P3 w/
512MB RAM.
[...]
> Gentoo - don't know anything about it...someone I talked to recently
> was all hyped and excited about it (and also entirely incoherent).
> Gentoo home page makes it sound rather unfinished,
> and I don't understand what their point is.
Someone already mentioned the option system ("USE flag" system) for
describing how your software should be built. I think that is one of
the more significant differences.
"Christopher C. Stacy" schrieb:
>
> I've been running RedHat for years, but now I am
> going to switch to a different flavor Linux.
> I don't know which one I should pick.
Well, when you know RedHat, it will be better to use a RH follower like
Fedora.
For me I can say: do not use Debian. From all Linux Versions I saw, this
is the worst case (just like Microsoft). Others may write you the
opposite of this here. (i.e. Woody-CD can't find my HD). This is just
that kind of story than say here: do not use emacs. :) Do not use it.
Else:
SuSE is now named Novell-SuSE and the 9.2 Live-CD means: below 256MB Ram
nothing will work. Looks like a Mandrake hardware-consumer, better than
win.xx ever was. But suse 8.2 is nice.
Since 2 Years I have Aurox running. It is ok for me and I installed Wine
in case a *.exe comes along.
On the Gentoo DVD there is clisp 2.23.bz. Nice, Aurox runs this at once,
after compile.
You need a good Internet connection for the hype called online-update,
with a 56k modem this can take 20h and all you see is stupid scripting.
So, when you what something different, choose BSD. Thats real fun. But
when you want more fun, use a Knopix CD and let it play Windows, many
many hackers trapped in.
Ahja, there are many Icon-Artists out there, kde seem to be the biggest,
but when you look around, you will find fine small gfx. Really great.
stefan
uuoh, don't forget the libs.
Well, I tried Gentoo.
It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
what I should have done in the first place.
Up spake Christopher C. Stacy:
> Well, I tried Gentoo.
>
> It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> what I should have done in the first place.
ITYM Ubuntu, which is essentially a *recent* (i.e. this year) release of
Debian, and can be upgraded piecemeal to Debian testing or unstable with
apt-get.
People who don't enjoy Gentoo probably won't like upgrading from woody
to sarge. For example, the woody installer defaults to a 2.2 kernel.
--
-trent
<foo> You haven't lived until you've chugged a bottle of rubbing alcohol.
<bar> You probably haven't died until then, either.
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> Up spake Christopher C. Stacy:
> > Well, I tried Gentoo.
> >
> > It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
> >
> > I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> > what I should have done in the first place.
>
> ITYM Ubuntu, which is essentially a *recent* (i.e. this year) release of
> Debian, and can be upgraded piecemeal to Debian testing or unstable with
> apt-get.
>
> People who don't enjoy Gentoo probably won't like upgrading from woody
> to sarge. For example, the woody installer defaults to a 2.2 kernel.
I did not enjoy the fact that the installation procedure
was very buggy, such as...
* after it knew I was in English, occasionally asking me critial
questions (of the sort, "shall I format this disk partition?")
in languages so foreign that I could not even recognize them,
and could only wildly guess from context what the question was,
and just hoping that "yes" was the button to the left of "no"
* selecting download mirrors based on some obviously bogus test,
such that it mostly picked ones which did not work (always
giving 403 Forbidden, Network Unreachable, and other errors);
not remembering that these didn't work, so trying them over
and over for every single file; having no way to switch to
a known working mirror, etc.
* making me manually zillions of stupid commands, and even entire
scripts and config files, which could have all been totally
automated
...and after about 9 hours of this kind of torture,
and having carefully followed all their directions:
Gentoo simply did not work. It crashed while booting,
just froze up about halfway through.
I've been using (system programming, administering, etc.)
Unix-based systems since the late 1970s, and so would classify
myself as an experienced user.
My considered opinion is that this Gentoo thing is a pile of dog shit
that I would wish on my worst enemy.
YMMV
Maybe it will get better someday.
start quoting Christopher C. Stacy :
> Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
>
> I did not enjoy the fact that the installation procedure
> was very buggy, such as...
>
> * after it knew I was in English, occasionally asking me critial
> questions (of the sort, "shall I format this disk partition?")
> in languages so foreign that I could not even recognize them,
> and could only wildly guess from context what the question was,
> and just hoping that "yes" was the button to the left of "no"
>
Huh?
Gento never asks you any questions at all, and certainly not in a foreign
language. In fact, I've yet to succeed in making it use any other language
than English. (Well, C, actually, but...)
I wonder just what you wandered into.
> * selecting download mirrors based on some obviously bogus test,
> such that it mostly picked ones which did not work (always
> giving 403 Forbidden, Network Unreachable, and other errors);
> not remembering that these didn't work, so trying them over
> and over for every single file; having no way to switch to
> a known working mirror, etc.
>
Shouldn't do that. The mirrorselect script attempts to download a moderately
small file, timing that, and obviously won't get a positive result if it
can't get the file. That said, I tend to enter (ok, copy) the mirror line
manually.
There are issues with files that can't be in the main Gentoo archive (due to
licencing issues, etc.), yes, but having a dozen fallbacks there is just a
way of avoiding other's ineptitude. In any case, such files should in no
way be needed while bootstrapping. (Except perhaps for Java.)
> * making me manually zillions of stupid commands, and even entire
> scripts and config files, which could have all been totally
> automated
>
There are reasons for that, mostly along the lines of "educating the luser".
Not that I agree with them, but I haven't found it to be much of a problem.
> ...and after about 9 hours of this kind of torture,
> and having carefully followed all their directions:
> Gentoo simply did not work. It crashed while booting,
> just froze up about halfway through.
>
Uh huh.
Now, depending on what "crashed" and "froze" means, this could indicate that
you used an experimental kernel, wrongly configured your own, or otherwise
broke the system. I have a theory, but try genkernel next time, or maybe
just try disabling acpi.
> I've been using (system programming, administering, etc.)
> Unix-based systems since the late 1970s, and so would classify
> myself as an experienced user.
>
It has been a problem in the past that people who believe themselves to be
experienced don't follow the installation guide step by step, which is
generally only safe if you've actually installed Gentoo (successfully)
before. I'd have to suggest you try it again.
> My considered opinion is that this Gentoo thing is a pile of dog shit
> that I would wish on my worst enemy.
Wishing Gentoo on anyone is a horrible thought. Having them pick it out
themselves somehow works, though.
> YMMV
>
> Maybe it will get better someday.
ASS, AHS, and Gentoo is merely the best of many bad choices for me.
Svein Ove Aas <·········@aas.no> writes:
> It has been a problem in the past that people who believe themselves to be
> experienced don't follow the installation guide step by step, which is
Occasionally, even wizards do have problems:
linux usability
...or, why do I bother.
by Jamie Zawinski
http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools (see also http://clrfi.alu.org):
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
> Occasionally, even wizards do have problems:
>
> linux usability
> ...or, why do I bother.
> by Jamie Zawinski
> http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html
And in response to "get a Mac", he has this:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/bittybox.html
It's contrary to my recollection about getting GCC to work and stuff.
Ok, I did have to register with ADC to get the latest Xcode. My
current wget is from Darwin Ports.
OpenMCL is actually pretty cool though. Back on topic from left field
;-)
--
An ideal world is left as an excercise to the reader.
--- Paul Graham, On Lisp 8.1
In article <············@services.kq.no>,
Svein Ove Aas <·········@aas.no> wrote:
>
> Wishing Gentoo on anyone is a horrible thought. Having them pick it out
> themselves somehow works, though.
>
You don't pick the distribution...the distribution somehow picks you. ;)
Damo
On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 02:43:29 GMT, ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:
> My considered opinion is that this Gentoo thing is a pile of dog
> shit that I would wish on my worst enemy.
Cool. One person was too dumb or too arrogant to read the manual and
install Gentoo and now Google will make sure his "considered opinion"
that it's a "pile of dog shit" will be available for the next umpteen
years. And you're still wondering why so many people "know" that Lisp
is old, slow, only interpreted, hard to install and understand, and
generally, er, just a pile of dog shit?
Hmm...,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Edi Weitz <········@agharta.de> writes:
> On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 02:43:29 GMT, ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:
>
> > My considered opinion is that this Gentoo thing is a pile of dog
> > shit that I would wish on my worst enemy.
>
> Cool. One person was too dumb or too arrogant to read the manual and
> install Gentoo and now Google will make sure his "considered opinion"
> that it's a "pile of dog shit" will be available for the next umpteen
> years. And you're still wondering why so many people "know" that Lisp
> is old, slow, only interpreted, hard to install and understand, and
> generally, er, just a pile of dog shit?
I followed the installation manual to the letter.
If people are going to newgroup respect my report of trying
out Gentoo more seriously than they're going to respect the
people championing Gentoo, that's not my problem.
Fuck off.
On 8977 day of my life Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> I've been using (system programming, administering, etc.)
> Unix-based systems since the late 1970s, and so would classify
> myself as an experienced user.
Dear Unix god! I have tried to install Gentoo Linux at different
computers, but every installation works OK. What do I do wrong?
--
Ivan Boldyrev
"Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind."
Ivan Boldyrev <···············@cgitftp.uiggm.nsc.ru> writes:
> On 8977 day of my life Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> > I've been using (system programming, administering, etc.)
> > Unix-based systems since the late 1970s, and so would classify
> > myself as an experienced user.
>
> Dear Unix god! I have tried to install Gentoo Linux at different
> computers, but every installation works OK. What do I do wrong?
There are several different paths you can take through the
installation procedure, depending on how much you want to
use their pre-assembled stuff (eg. which "stage" files).
There is also the difference in which version of all the
files you happened to receive on a particular day.
Then of course, there's the fact that you probably have
slightly different hardware than I do. There are probably
other variables, but those are the obvious ones.
What's wrong with Fedora Core 3? Or better, what do other distros have
that FC3 lacks?
--
ed
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> Well, I tried Gentoo.
>
> It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> what I should have done in the first place.
······@yahoo.com wrote:
> What's wrong with Fedora Core 3?
Mu.
Or better, what do other distros have
> that FC3 lacks?
* apt-get + dpkg
* security.debian.org
* common-lisp-controller
* stable/testing/unstable/experimental
* Community built and supported
* Very easy to build .debs from upstream CVS, or from source .debs.
And, most importantly :
* kmr (maintaineur extrordinaire)
drewc
>
> --
> ed
>
>
> Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
>
>>Well, I tried Gentoo.
>>
>>It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>>
>>I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
>>what I should have done in the first place.
>
>
On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:59:31 +0000, drewc wrote:
> ······@yahoo.com wrote:
>> What's wrong with Fedora Core 3?
>
> Mu.
??? Note sure what this means.
> Or better, what do other distros have
>> that FC3 lacks?
Not that I want to start a flamewar or something, but FC3 actually has
equivalents for most of this. Note that this is not to say Debian isn't a
good distro also, just correcting any ignorance of enhancements that have
gone on with Red Hat since Fedora came out.
> * apt-get + dpkg
yum
> * security.debian.org
····················@redhat.com
with updates via yum
> * common-lisp-controller
yup, you got me there, though I use ASDF myself and that seems to work
fine. Not familiar enough with common-lisp-controller to know what,
exactly, I'm missing there.
> * stable/testing/unstable/experimental
Not as fine of granularity, but released/updates/updates-testing/devel.
Fedora moves a lot faster than Debian, however, and so one's definition of
stable, etc., may need some calibration. That said, I have used both FC1
and FC3 extensively and things have worked out quite well. Any hiccups are
typically right after a release and are usually cured by a simple "yum -y
update".
> * Community built and supported
Ditto. Key thing here is that Fedora Extras is merging with official
Fedora, which will help expand package support greatly over time. This is
new, however. Debian has a far more expansive list of packages.
> * Very easy to build .debs from upstream CVS, or from source .debs.
I don't know enough about .debs but .rpms are also pretty easy to do the
same. I guess it depends on one's definition of "easy."
> And, most importantly :
>
> * kmr (maintaineur extrordinaire)
Agreed.
Anyway, yum has solved a lot of the "rpm hell" that used to plague Red
Hat. It makes it basically as easy to install a package along with
dependencies as apt-get.
start quoting Dave Roberts :
> On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:59:31 +0000, drewc wrote:
>
>> ······@yahoo.com wrote:
>>> What's wrong with Fedora Core 3?
>>
>> Mu.
>
> ??? Note sure what this means.
>
It means "the question is based on an erronous assumption".
It's generally useful to answer questions along the lines of "Have you
stopped beating your wife yet?"; in this case, it's being used because the
question assumes that *something* is wrong with FC3.
Which may be correct, but the reasonable phrasing is still "What, if
anything, is wrong with FC3?"
Up spake Svein Ove Aas:
>>> Mu.
>>
>> Not sure what this means.
>
> It means "the question is based on an erronous assumption".
Actually, it literally means `no' in Chinese (or so I'm told). The
usage you describe was popularized by Zen koans such as the following,
seen in the Gateless Gate:
Q: Has a dog Buddha-nature, or not?
A: No.
(Note that the bit after the comma is often omitted, which (I think) is
a mis-translation.)
--
-trent
Stop the room, please, I'd like to get off.
Trent Buck wrote:
> Up spake Svein Ove Aas:
>
>>>>Mu.
>>>
>>>Not sure what this means.
>>
>>It means "the question is based on an erronous assumption".
>
>
> Actually, it literally means `no' in Chinese (or so I'm told). The
> usage you describe was popularized by Zen koans such as the following,
> seen in the Gateless Gate:
Actually, the character 'Mu' or 'Wu' can translate as 'none' or 'is
without' 'has-not' 'absence' or 'nothingness'. (and is japanese).
>
> Q: Has a dog Buddha-nature, or not?
> A: No.
This should actually be translated as :
A: none. (or 'not').
which changes the meaning somewhat.
The english speaking world tends to use Mu to mean 'Unask the Question'
or the earlier posters phrase. In this sense it is used to convey the
idea that because the question is flawed, any answer possible will be
flawed. Which, when you unthink about it, is close to what Zhaozhou was
trying to convey to that student oh so long ago.
drewc
Dave Roberts wrote:
>>
>>>What's wrong with Fedora Core 3?
>>
>>Mu.
>
>
> ??? Note sure what this means.
It is a japanese word which means 'none' or 'nothing'. It also means,
due to it's assocation with Zen, that the question is flawed. (see later
in this thread if you want more details about MU)
There is nothing 'wrong' with fedora, AFAIK. i don't use it.
>>Or better, what do other distros have
>>that FC3 lacks?
>
>
> Not that I want to start a flamewar or something, but FC3 actually has
> equivalents for most of this. Not that this is not to say Debian isn't a
> good distro also, just correcting any ignorance of enhancements that have
> gone on with Red Hat since Fedora came out.
I don't want to start a flamewar either, so if my next stream of
comments come off as being from a smug debian asshole, i don't really
mean it that way. I'm actually quite curious to see how far redhat (or
whatever) has come.
>>* apt-get + dpkg
>
>
> yum
I don't know anything about yum, but i've heard it works somewhat. the
real problem (or so i've heard) is that rpms from different repositories
don't track eachother, and that is still a big mess. is this still true?
i won't get into the technical merits of dpkg vs rpm, but i hardly think
there is any doubt the debian has the superior package management. If
redhat is playing catch-up with yum, it is certainly a good thing for
it's users.
>
>>* security.debian.org
>
>
> ····················@redhat.com
>
> with updates via yum
is this the same thing? i have a line in my sources.list file that
points to security.debian.org. only critical security patches go to that
repositry.. any other updates (bugfix, whatev) is kept in main.
What that means is that security patches have only a minute chance of
breaking a running system. on my servers i have a cron job that runs
nightly to keep my system patched.. i never worry about it, just check
my logs once a month or so.
>
>>* common-lisp-controller
>
well, it was explained earlier in this thread, but essentially it allows
you to install a .deb of a lisp library and have it work with every lisp
you have installed automatically. so you install cl-sql once, and it
works with Allegro, LW, clisp, cmucl and sbcl (and probably gcl as well,
i've never tried it).
>
>>* stable/testing/unstable/experimental
>
>
> Not as fine of granularity, but released/updates/updates-testing/devel.
(*cough* rip-off *cough*) ;). and you've inspired my first law :
"any sufficiently complicated GNU/Linux distribution contains an
ad-hoc, bug-ridden implementation of half of debian".
>Fedora moves a lot faster than Debian, however, and so one's
definition >of stable, etc., may need some calibration.
I have trouble believing this, because debian moves so fast, so lets
compare a few things.
what version of the following packages do you have in the fedora repos?
Package Version in Sid
sbcl 0.8.18
cmucl 19a-release-20040728
linux kernel 2.6.9 (though 2.4 and 2.2 are supported)
emacs 21.3 (xemacs21 and emacs20 are also available)
there could be newer versions in experimental .. but that is not for end
users at all. i don't think i want to use anything newer than what is in
unstable for the most part.
>>* Community built and supported
>
> Ditto.
I was under the impression that Fedora was a cast-off of redhats because
they no longer wanted to support end-users as such.... i wasn't aware
that it is independant. Does it have a constitution like debian? or is
it at the mercy of its developers (and who are these developers?).
> Key thing here is that Fedora Extras is merging with official
> Fedora, which will help expand package support greatly over time.
I don't know anything about this, but i assume its something like
contrib? that is the repository where debian packages that are not part
of debian proper hide.
>This is
> new, however. Debian has a far more expansive list of packages.
Which is, if you don't mind, something 'wrong' with fedora :).
>>* Very easy to build .debs from upstream CVS, or from source .debs.
>
>
> I don't know enough about .debs but .rpms are also pretty easy to do the
> same. I guess it depends on one's definition of "easy."
i mean easy. when i want to use a cvs version of something that is
packaged for debian i check out the source, apply the debian patch, then
build the package. 99% of the time it works like a charm. there are also
various utils to quickly hack a package together from source that is not
already in debian.
i use .debs to package all my custom software as well.. all my servers
point to a local apt repository and i install/upgrade all my software
that way.
and, if you use perl, dh-make-perl generates a .deb from CPAN. i use it
all the time to keep things in sync on my servers.
>
>
> Anyway, yum has solved a lot of the "rpm hell" that used to plague Red
> Hat. It makes it basically as easy to install a package along with
> dependencies as apt-get.
>
Windows has a firewall now, and Java has garbage collection, but that
doesn't mean i'll start using them. While there may be nothing
technically wrong with these platforms, there are better alternatives.
If i may ask .. what ties you to Fedora? what does Fedora have to offer
(from a technical view .. i don't care for gui installers or colour
'ls') that is not available for debian?
drewc
Up spake drewc:
> I don't know anything about yum, but i've heard it works somewhat. the
> real problem (or so i've heard) is that rpms from different repositories
> don't track eachother, and that is still a big mess. is this still true?
According to my boss (who uses FC3) this has gotten a lot better
recently but is still a problem, especially with third-party packagers
(e.g. a sourceforge project that makes its own RPMs).
> I don't know anything about this, but i assume its something like
> contrib? that is the repository where debian packages that are not part
> of debian proper hide.
I thought contrib/ was mostly for packages that were themselves free,
but had non-free dependencies? E.g. basilisk2, zsnes, microcode.ctl...
> If i may ask .. what ties you to Fedora? what does Fedora have to offer
> (from a technical view .. i don't care for gui installers or colour
> 'ls') that is not available for debian?
Vendors like vmware and citrix still build for it? I tried to make a
vmware private beta go on my Debian/unstable box last week -- it was a
bloody nightmare (kernel too old, gcc too new, /bin/sh wasn't bash...).
It sis allegedly good at other enterprise things, like building
customized SOE. I can't say as I haven't tested that stuff personally.
I wouldn't run FC on my home machine, but I might consider it for a 5000
desktop site.
--
-trent
It is possible to cause a Mac to fail to boot by corrupting preference
files. Sometimes, the Mac does this for you. The MacOS is robust only
in the sense that a 400-pound lard-arse pro wrestler can be described as
`robust'. -- Rodger Donaldson
Trent Buck wrote:
> Up spake drewc
>>I don't know anything about this, but i assume its something like
>>contrib? that is the repository where debian packages that are not part
>>of debian proper hide.
>
>
> I thought contrib/ was mostly for packages that were themselves free,
> but had non-free dependencies? E.g. basilisk2, zsnes, microcode.ctl...
yeah, i was glossing over that bit, as it's all kind of new to me. it
used to be that contrib was the easy way to get a package into debian..
but now with apt you can just host a repository, and with the new
testing dist it's a lot easier to get things into unstable then it was.
so contrib is now more like semi-free now.
>>If i may ask .. what ties you to Fedora? what does Fedora have to offer
>>(from a technical view .. i don't care for gui installers or colour
>>'ls') that is not available for debian?
>
>
> Vendors like vmware and citrix still build for it? I tried to make a
> vmware private beta go on my Debian/unstable box last week -- it was a
> bloody nightmare (kernel too old, gcc too new, /bin/sh wasn't bash...).
that is a good point. hopefully with ubuntu and userlinux things will
change. that being said, i've been using debian so long that i know how
to fix things like that... but if i was running a vmware server, i'd
probably go with RedHat as well. (well .. no, i wouldn't.. but i
recommend it to someone else if they asked).
vmware workstation works fine for me here, but i usually use qemu. slow
as hell, but Free.
> It sis allegedly good at other enterprise things, like building
> customized SOE. I can't say as I haven't tested that stuff personally.
> I wouldn't run FC on my home machine, but I might consider it for a 5000
> desktop site.
'allegedly' being they key word here. If i was doing a 5000 desktop site
i'd consider a lot of things, but FC would probably not be one of
them. a little too bleeding edge for my tastes. I'd take a hard look at
Suse, or RHEL but end up using debian stable and backporting the newer
packages as i needed them.
As far as workstations go, it doesn't really matter. i tend to trash any
distribution i have on my workstation in about 6 months. Debian is the
quickest to get up and running with everything i need installed and
working.
Actually, i installed debian on a new workstation today. after doing a
minimal install, i just typed:
# apt-get install x-window-system ion3 vim emacs21-el sbcl cmucl clisp
cl-sql mozilla-firefox irssi sudo screen lynx wget
...and i was ready to start developing. (i keep all my config files in a
darcs repository, and basically check out my /home and parts of /etc)
As far as distro choice, its mostly preference. i've just never seen a
good reason for using anything but debian. YMMV.
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> Up spake drewc:
>> If i may ask .. what ties you to Fedora? what does Fedora have to offer
>> (from a technical view .. i don't care for gui installers or colour
>> 'ls') that is not available for debian?
FWIW, debian has the same 'ls' as any other GNU/Linux distro. (Not that
I know of any non-GNU Linux distros.)
> Vendors like vmware and citrix still build for it? I tried to make a
> vmware private beta go on my Debian/unstable box last week -- it was a
> bloody nightmare (kernel too old, gcc too new, /bin/sh wasn't bash...).
All simple to fix.
1. Install the kernel you want. kernel-package lets you do that using dpkg.
2. Install and use the gcc you want. I see 2.95, 3.0, 3.2, 3.3, and 4.0.
You can install all of them and use the -V flag to gcc to pick the one
you want.
3. /bin/sh isn't supposed to be guaranteed to be bash. In fact, I think
bash has different default settings if it's invoked as /bin/sh. If
vmware wants /bin/bash, it should just call that, but you can always
uninstall ash.
--
Rahul Jain
·····@nyct.net
Professional Software Developer, Amateur Quantum Mechanicist
Up spake Rahul Jain:
>> Vendors like vmware and citrix still build for it? I tried to make a
>> vmware private beta go on my Debian/unstable box last week -- it was a
>> bloody nightmare (kernel too old, gcc too new, /bin/sh wasn't bash...).
>
> 1. Install the kernel you want. kernel-package lets you do that using dpkg.
>
> 2. Install and use the gcc you want. I see 2.95, 3.0, 3.2, 3.3, and 4.0.
> You can install all of them and use the -V flag to gcc to pick the one
> you want.
The vmware script doesn't know this. Actually it wants to compile the
vmware kernel module with the exact same version of GCC that compiled
the kernel, so building my own kernel SHOULD fix (1) and (2).
> 3. /bin/sh isn't supposed to be guaranteed to be bash. In fact, I think
> bash has different default settings if it's invoked as /bin/sh. If
> vmware wants /bin/bash, it should just call that, but you can always
> uninstall ash.
The vmware scripts should call /bin/bash or have their code corrected.
Uninstalling (d)ash is *not* a solution, it's a kluge.
> All simple to fix.
Fixing the former requires building a new kernel. I don't consider that
trivial. Fixing the latter (correctly) requires changing the bang path
of the vmware install script. Another obvious problem is that the
installed files wont be tracked (yes, I tried alien).
The point isn't that these problems can't be resolved. The point is
that generally commercial applications are designed and tested against
Red Hat / Fedora, so users of that distro SHOULDN'T experience ANY
problems installing them. The OP asked for a reason to run a
$NOT_DEBIAN distro; that is the only one I know of.
--
-trent
In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon.
On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:00:46 GMT, Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> wrote:
> The point isn't that these problems can't be resolved. The point is
> that generally commercial applications are designed and tested
> against Red Hat / Fedora,
or SuSE
> so users of that distro SHOULDN'T experience ANY problems installing
> them. The OP asked for a reason to run a $NOT_DEBIAN distro; that
> is the only one I know of.
But it's a good point. Although I also generally prefer Debian or
Gentoo they simply might not be an option if you rely on support from
a commercial vendor.
This applies to well-known companies like Oracle and it did apply to
the commercial Lisp vendors but has been relaxed a bit in the recent
past.
LispWorks was Red Hat only IIRC but now their website says "Also
Mandrake and SuSE Linux with kernel 2.2 or later on Pentium-compatible
CPU." (Still no mention of Debian or Gentoo.)
AllegroCL also was a "Red Hat shop" but now they simply say
Linux (x86-64) with glibc 2.3
Linux (PowerPC) with glibc 2.3
Linux (x86) with glibc 2.2
which seems very liberal to me. I remember Franz Inc. had a Linux
poll on their website in 2004 - I wonder what came out of it...
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Edi Weitz <········@agharta.de> writes:
> LispWorks was Red Hat only IIRC but now their website says "Also
> Mandrake and SuSE Linux with kernel 2.2 or later on Pentium-compatible
> CPU." (Still no mention of Debian or Gentoo.)
Note that Mandrake and SuSE recently became commercial products, like Red Hat.
On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 11:33:05 GMT, ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:
> Note that Mandrake and SuSE recently became commercial products,
> like Red Hat.
SuSE has always been a commercial product and I think Mandrake also.
You could (can?) download Mandrake for free but that was also true for
Red Hat.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Edi Weitz <········@agharta.de> writes:
> LispWorks was Red Hat only IIRC but now their website says "Also
> Mandrake and SuSE Linux with kernel 2.2 or later on Pentium-compatible
> CPU." (Still no mention of Debian or Gentoo.)
>
> AllegroCL also was a "Red Hat shop" but now they simply say
>
> Linux (x86-64) with glibc 2.3
> Linux (PowerPC) with glibc 2.3
> Linux (x86) with glibc 2.2
>
> which seems very liberal to me. I remember Franz Inc. had a Linux
> poll on their website in 2004 - I wonder what came out of it...
On FreeBSD you can choose which linux base to install. ;)
> ls | grep linux_base
linux_base
linux_base-6
linux_base-8
linux_base-debian
linux_base-gentoo-stage1
linux_base-rh-9
linux_base-suse-9.1
(linux_base{,-6,-8} are RH)
Regards,
--
____________________________
Julian Stecklina / _________________________/
________________/ /
\_________________/ LISP - truly beautiful
Julian Stecklina wrote:
> On FreeBSD you can choose which linux base to install. ;)
And it runs the Linux version of LispWorks 4.4 Personal Edition, too.
--
Fred Gilham ······@csl.sri.com
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: the right not to reproduce, no matter what else
you do. PLANNED PARENTHOOD: an organization that helps you plan to
avoid becoming a parent.
I wrote:
> And it runs the Linux version of LispWorks 4.4 Personal Edition,
> too.
That is, among many other things, such as, for example, Franz's lisps
since version 4.3.
--
Fred Gilham ······@csl.sri.com
Do you know how it feels to be evil? It feels *normal*. A
conscience is so easily seared. -- "Nick"
>>>>> "Edi" == Edi Weitz <········@agharta.de> writes:
Edi> This applies to well-known companies like Oracle and it did apply to
Edi> the commercial Lisp vendors but has been relaxed a bit in the recent
Edi> past.
Often vendors tends to state the requirements on the safe side.
Back when we were running Allegro at work, it did say Redhat for x86
and Yellow Dog linux for the powerpc, but I did not have any problems
running it with Debian on either platform, other than being carefull
about not prematurely upgrading libc, of course.
It is not that I cannot understand that vendors will only promise that
their application will only run on the distros that they have tested
it with, nor that users will insist on running the
recommended/supported solution, but in practice there are not that big
a difference between the different distros, it is after all still
Linux and GNU.
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian ··@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- ·······@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> Up spake Rahul Jain:
>> 1. Install the kernel you want. kernel-package lets you do that using dpkg.
>>
>> 2. Install and use the gcc you want. I see 2.95, 3.0, 3.2, 3.3, and 4.0.
>> You can install all of them and use the -V flag to gcc to pick the one
>> you want.
>
> The vmware script doesn't know this. Actually it wants to compile the
> vmware kernel module with the exact same version of GCC that compiled
> the kernel, so building my own kernel SHOULD fix (1) and (2).
Well, that's the kernel itself that wants modules compiled with the same
compiler as the kernel, but ok. But shouldn't it use $CC as the C
compiler?
>> 3. /bin/sh isn't supposed to be guaranteed to be bash. In fact, I think
>> bash has different default settings if it's invoked as /bin/sh. If
>> vmware wants /bin/bash, it should just call that, but you can always
>> uninstall ash.
>
> The vmware scripts should call /bin/bash or have their code corrected.
> Uninstalling (d)ash is *not* a solution, it's a kluge.
>
>> All simple to fix.
>
> Fixing the former requires building a new kernel. I don't consider that
> trivial.
You consider wrong, then. :)
apt-get build-dep kernel-image-2.4.XX
apt-get -b source kernel-image-2.4.XX
dpkg -i kernel-image-2.4.XX*.deb
It's just a matter of learning how to use the package management tools.
> Fixing the latter (correctly) requires changing the bang path
> of the vmware install script. Another obvious problem is that the
> installed files wont be tracked (yes, I tried alien).
You can somewhat easily make a debian package out of vmware, depending
on how demented their install procedure is.
> The point isn't that these problems can't be resolved. The point is
> that generally commercial applications are designed and tested against
> Red Hat / Fedora, so users of that distro SHOULDN'T experience ANY
> problems installing them. The OP asked for a reason to run a
> $NOT_DEBIAN distro; that is the only one I know of.
Fair enough, but the problems are rather a non-issue, and if enough
people cared about vmware anyway, there would be some sort of installer
package that would build a package from the upstream package. If it's an
RPM, it's possible that all that's needed is a patch in
/usr/share/alien/patches that has the correct stuff in it to package it
according to debian standards.
--
Rahul Jain
·····@nyct.net
Professional Software Developer, Amateur Quantum Mechanicist
Up spake Rahul Jain:
>> Fixing the former requires building a new kernel. I don't consider that
>> trivial.
>
> You consider wrong, then. :)
> apt-get --build source kernel-image-2.6.x
Oh, well if I don't meddle with .config, then it's trivial :-)
> [...]
You're right, if I cared enough about making vmware go under Debian, I
could probably make it go. I don't care enough, so I still use qemu.
My original post was about why *novice* *users* might choose !Debian. I
think we both understand that, and this is rather off-topic, so I shall
say no more.
--
-trent
How much to buy this book?
This is a library, not a bookstore.
Alright, what happens if I lose it?
You have to pay for it.
Alright, I'd like to borrow this book. Oh! Where did it go?
>>>>> "Trent" == Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
>> You consider wrong, then. :)
>> apt-get --build source kernel-image-2.6.x
Trent> Oh, well if I don't meddle with .config, then it's trivial :-)
If all you want is to the same option as the distributed kernel, then
it can be as simple (and slightly different) as in:
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.9-1-686 kernel-source-2.6.9 kernel-package
cd /usr/src
tar xjf kernel-source-2.6.9.tar.bz2
cd kernel-source-2.6.9
cp /boot/config-2.6.9-1-686 .config
make-kpkg --initrd kernel_image
which will leave you with a deb package that you can then install. The
make-kpkg tool is really nifty and supports a wealth of options.
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian ··@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- ·······@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
>>>>> "Trent" == Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
Trent> Vendors like vmware and citrix still build for it? I tried to make a
Trent> vmware private beta go on my Debian/unstable box last week -- it was a
Trent> bloody nightmare (kernel too old, gcc too new, /bin/sh wasn't bash...).
I do not know about vmware, but the citrix clients i have tried out
works fine with Debian (not that I needed to build anything).
I have also had successesfully built the IBM Rational Clearcase 6.0
client on a Debian system against a 2.4 kernel. However, the recent
patch allowing the client to run against a 2.6 kernel is extremely
dependent on a very specific SuSE kernel (whose slew of patches I gave
up trying to baclport to the Debian kernel).
So your mileage may vary, but I have so far seen few problems with
mature add-on commercial software.
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian ··@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- ·······@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 07:31:35 +0000, Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> Well, I tried Gentoo.
>
> It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> what I should have done in the first place.
I've never had any major problems with Gentoo myself, so I'm curious to
know what went wrong. Never tried Debian though, so maybe it has things
that I don't miss simply because I've never seen them? My previous distro
of choice was Fedora (with apt4rpm installed). The only problem I had
with it was the distinct lack of Lisp packages, which Gentoo solves for me.
Cheers,
Bill.
William Bland wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 07:31:35 +0000, Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
>
>
>>Well, I tried Gentoo.
>>
>>It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>>
>>I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
>>what I should have done in the first place.
>
>
> I've never had any major problems with Gentoo myself, so I'm curious to
> know what went wrong.
Probably nothing. All the recommendations for gentoo sounded like
arguments in favor of using Windows. "Use Gentoo! By the time you get it
working you will be able to hand-wire a Pentium from scratch outside in
a driving rain blindfolded! Woo-hoo!" Had me hiding under the bed.
Mind you, I can see the arguments in favor of gentoo, but I am just an
application programmer so I got a huge kick out of the Knoppix CD (which
also allows a near-painless HD install as well as simply running from
the CD).
kenny
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 14:44:47 +0000, Kenny Tilton wrote:
> William Bland wrote:
>
>> I've never had any major problems with Gentoo myself, so I'm curious to
>> know what went wrong.
>
> Probably nothing. All the recommendations for gentoo sounded like
> arguments in favor of using Windows. "Use Gentoo! By the time you get it
> working you will be able to hand-wire a Pentium from scratch outside in
> a driving rain blindfolded! Woo-hoo!" Had me hiding under the bed.
>
People who can't install Gentoo shouldn't be allowed to own a computer
(*kidding*!)
Seriously, I wouldn't use Gentoo if it meant I had to know all the gory
details. If one follows the step-by-step installation instructions (which
I'll freely admit are long and tedious), one *should* wind up with a
system that just works, and for which administration is practically
non-existent (it's just a matter of remembering to run
"emerge sync; emerge -u world").
Cheers,
Bill.
William Bland schrieb:
> People who can't install Gentoo shouldn't be allowed to own a computer
> (*kidding*!)
For some years, when windows comes out with wizards I saw the same kind
of statements. Only "using wizard" has changed with "install gentoo".
Nice. Threads over here one can read "...zillions of commands that can
easy be automated.." unualy called script or wizard.
:) Have a look at your finger, it can be shorter after that.
> Seriously, I wouldn't use Gentoo if it meant I had to know all the gory
> details. If one follows the step-by-step installation instructions (which
> I'll freely admit are long and tedious), one *should* wind up with a
> system that just works, and for which administration is practically
> non-existent (it's just a matter of remembering to run
> "emerge sync; emerge -u world").
Now I have a look at the step-by-step text. It looks like a well
documented homework to write a pice of lisp and get a
lispy-gentoo-install-wizard. Isn't it?
lin
Up spake William Bland:
> > Well, I tried Gentoo.
> > It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I've never had any major problems with Gentoo myself, so I'm curious to
> know what went wrong.
I'd guess that, like Debian, it's a pain in the arse to set up, and is
pretty much OK indefinitely thereafter. (The `desktop' distros are the
opposite, IMO.)
> Never tried Debian though, so maybe it has things that I don't miss
> simply because I've never seen them?
I tried Sorceror, which is the spiritual ancestor of Gentoo. The
biggest differences are
1) Robustness. I bang on the package system *hard*; I've broken RPM
distros <<48hrs after an install. My Debian workstation (installed
from Knoppix 3.4) broke once; the fix was to delete a lockfile.
Dpkg can recover from interrupted operations automagically.
2) Gentoo defaults to compile-from-source. Debian defaults to
install-from-binary. Reversing the trend for individual packages
(e.g. the kernel) is trivial.
3) The sheer number of packages. For example, does Gentoo have the
unclutter package? It was in the contrib directory of X10 source.
Equally importantly, the maintainers are pretty anal about building
conformant packages, so stuff mostly integrates pretty well.
> My previous distro of choice was Fedora (with apt4rpm installed). The
> only problem I had with it was the distinct lack of Lisp packages,
> which Gentoo solves for me.
In the official Debian unstable repository, the following packages
provide `lisp-compiler' (a virtual package):
lw-pro-installer-43
lw-pro-installer
lw-per-installer
acl-pro-installer
acl-mlisp8
acl-mlisp
acl-alisp8
acl-alisp
sbcl
cmucl
clisp
(For some reason the `gcl' and `gclcvs' packages don't provide
`lisp-compiler'. Is that a bug?)
The lispworks and allegro ones will be scripts that download and extract
the tarball, then monitor the config files and stuff so they don't get
clobbered when you upgrade.
There are also about 120 common lisp packages that can be installed from
apt-get, such as ASDF, SQL and SDL. Theoretically they should drop-in
work with any of the above CLs, but I haven't tried that.
--
-trent
The light of the eyes is as a comet,
And Zen's activity is as lightning.
The sword that kills the man
Is the sword that saves the man.
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
[...]
> 3) The sheer number of packages. For example, does Gentoo have the
> unclutter package? It was in the contrib directory of X10 source.
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/x11-misc/unclutter/
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> (For some reason the `gcl' and `gclcvs' packages don't provide
> `lisp-compiler'. Is that a bug?)
No. They do not integrate with common-lisp-controller, so they provide
no way to compile systems with them in a compiler-agnostic way.
--
Rahul Jain
·····@nyct.net
Professional Software Developer, Amateur Quantum Mechanicist
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> Well, I tried Gentoo.
>
> It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> what I should have done in the first place.
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> Well, I tried Gentoo.
>
> It was an unmitigated rolling clusterfuck disaster.
>
> I'm going to download Debian now, which is obviously
> what I should have done in the first place.
Then in the second place you might want to look at Knoppix. In the third
place, there is the Lisp Resource Kit, a Knoppix CD plus some Lisp goodies:
http://common-lisp.net/project/lisp-res-kit/
kenny
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Up spake Kenny Tilton:
> http://common-lisp.net/project/lisp-res-kit/
Tee hee. I can do that in hours -- my current contract is remastering
Knoppix for schools. A simple changset would look something like this:
http://twb.ath.cx/~twb/src/scripts/mkknx.sh
http://twb.ath.cx/~twb/src/scripts/examples/mkknx/
--
-trent
My car can FLY thanks to the power of LIES!
Trent Buck wrote:
> Up spake Kenny Tilton:
>
>> http://common-lisp.net/project/lisp-res-kit/
>
>
> Tee hee. I can do that in hours -- my current contract is..
Pwua ha. The subtle difference is that Heow (of Lisp-NYC) /did/ do it
for free to help spread Lisp while you are bragging about what you could
do. Apparently for money.
Heow also burns CDs and does the Johnny Lispseed thing wherever he goes.
You seem to be posting links to shell scripts to a Lisp NG. Newbies love
those!
But if you can get over yourself and want to contribute your copious
skills to the Lisp resource kit, that would rock.
:)
kenny, Lisp-NYC Founding Drinker
ps. congrats, we get the first cll flamewar of 2005!
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Up spake Kenny Tilton:
> Pwua ha. The subtle difference is that Heow (of Lisp-NYC) /did/ do it
> for free to help spread Lisp while you are bragging about what you could
> do.
I am chagrined. O'course, I only *started* learning about Lisp about
three months ago, so I'm not exactly at the preaching level yet :-)
> Apparently for money.
I'm not famous enough to get food *donated* to me.
> You seem to be posting links to shell scripts to a Lisp NG.
I don't (yet) grok Lisp enough to do real things with it :-(
--
-trent
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature,
because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the
software engineer. -- Brooks
Trent Buck wrote:
> Up spake Kenny Tilton:
>
>>Pwua ha. The subtle difference is that Heow (of Lisp-NYC) /did/ do it
>>for free to help spread Lisp while you are bragging about what you could
>>do.
>
>
> I am chagrined. O'course, I only *started* learning about Lisp about
> three months ago, so I'm not exactly at the preaching level yet :-)
>
>
>>Apparently for money.
>
>
> I'm not famous enough to get food *donated* to me.
>
>
>>You seem to be posting links to shell scripts to a Lisp NG.
>
>
> I don't (yet) grok Lisp enough to do real things with it :-(
>
<heh-heh> I was also going to throw in that Heow is a Lisp newbie
himself, albeit mad enthusiastic and a proselytizer extraordinaire. Your
last excuse has been destroyed. Report for duty at Lisp-nyc at 8am.
:)
kenny
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
How about trying FreeBSD?
I tried various Linuxes a few years back but somehow didn't like the
"smell" and the proliferation of distributions and having to choose
and commit to one, then fondly remembered BSD 4.x from the
early 1980s and how it seemed to have the best (to me)
smell/aesthetics/man pages/pedigree/development model of all
the subsequent Unices that I have used, and so went with FreeBSD
and have been happy with it ever since. We run it on all machines
in the company---server and desktop, including laptop.
I still have to check though whether FreeBSD 5.3 will run
LispWorks for Linux 4.4 under Linux compatibility mode.
Can anyone confirm this?
On 1 Jan 2005 14:32:27 -0800, ·······@yahoo.com <·······@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I still have to check though whether FreeBSD 5.3 will run
> LispWorks for Linux 4.4 under Linux compatibility mode.
> Can anyone confirm this?
Coincidentally, I was just looking for this myself. Check out this page
(search for "Xanalys Lispworks") which describes the things you need to do.
http://wcp.sdf-eu.org/software/
rajat