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Toward a new kind of 'Linux distribution' (NewsForge)
NewsForge has an article by
Ian Murdock on how Linux distributions are built. "For the
commercial Linux-as-product distributors, it is a sensible strategy to
portray their distributions as monolithic wholes, as this allows them to
position the distributions as platforms unto themselves and, thus, pursue
traditional OS business models based on locking users in to a platform
(I've argued before this will be a losing strategy in the long run, but
that's another topic)."
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Toward a new kind of 'Linux distribution' (NewsForge) Posted Feb 28, 2004 0:29 UTC (Sat) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link] lots of "would it not be nice if your computer did exactly what you wanted it to do" but very little infomation how they solved that one. Could not find anything usefull on progenicy's web about it either. Anyone know what it's all about?
lock in Posted Feb 28, 2004 7:35 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link] Where does all this "lockin" crap come from? RHEL certainly doesn't lock you in. RH and othersmerely offer value that community distros don't. For example, at work, I want the ability to call the vendor and get immediate phone support; something only offered by stable companies for single-distro setups. Going through several different vendors (one for base OS, one for errata, one for management software, another for support) isn't something anyone wants to do. Too much book keeping, too many numbers, too much chance of one component going under. A solid company backing the entire platform from top to bottom to exactly what commercial customers get. And they get it from RH and others without any lockin threats; switching away is quite possible with skilled technicians. (No more skill needed than switching away from any other distro.) The model works great.
lock in Posted Mar 1, 2004 21:35 UTC (Mon) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] As the article says, many distros (Lindows' click-and-run, Xandros' file manager, SUSE's YaST2, etc.) have proprietary pieces which effectively lock the user into staying with that distribution or losing that feature. You can't get third-party support for any of these, because they're proprietary.OTOH, it's nice that market-leading RedHat has shunned such a strategy such that your comments hold true for that distribution. And it is nice that on nearly all Debian-based distros, one can point the apt sources.list file back at Debian, and a couple of commands later, be back to stock Debian, for which there is also quite a bit of third-party support available. But again, if you do that, you lose the special proprietary features which make Lindows, Xandros, Libranet, etc. what they are...
"componentized" ? Posted Feb 28, 2004 9:09 UTC (Sat) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link] Debian and Redhat have components too. The 'monolithic' part comes into play because the components must work together, which involves shipping them together and doing some QA on them, as a whole. It also involves a release, which means that all the packages have, as much as possible, been beaten into relative stability, as opposed to packages in debian unstable, which may well be in a transitional phase or under development.
Toward a new kind of 'Linux distribution' (NewsForge) Posted Feb 29, 2004 2:43 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] Ian implies that when you install RedHat or Fedora, you get one monolithic 'thing' that has everything under the sun in it. That's nonsense. The whole is broken down into hundreds of individual components with certain dependenies.I can't help but feel that this 'componentized' Linux is a solution in search of a problem. I *like* all the work that RedHat/Fedora does with respect to QA and interoperability of the packages. As to keeping their own patched trees that are difficult to maintain, appropriate patches are always pushed upstream. I like the fact that I can get a Linux *product* today. Ian seems to want Linux to forever be a hobbyist OS. Of course, there is no reason that it cannot be both. No need for all this "everyone else's way of doing things is wrong and we're right" stuff.
Toward a new kind of 'Linux distribution' (NewsForge) Posted Feb 29, 2004 13:51 UTC (Sun) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link] I think maybe the idea is that you can upgrade some components without upgrading others (where a component is a set of related packages), whereas with fedora N you either upgrade to fedora N+1 or you start recompiling the bits you want by hand.Maybe that's not the idea but it's what sprang to my mind when I read it. It's certainly not very clear from the article.
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