From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: Question and Observations Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 00:37:10 GMT
>About your `gripes' section; I too have the same feeling about
>SLS distribution, but this is certainly _not_ the problem with
>linux itself. We should send bug-reports and suggestions to
>people (person?) at SoftLanding so that the next release will
>have more reasonable configuration. From what I've seen in
>c.o.l, about 30% of newbee questions and gripes wouldn't have
>been posted in the first place if SLS release did things right
>(e.g. "/etc/passwd not being readable by everybody" comes to
>mind). It is a trivial, but a tad tedious task to fix all the
>ownership and permission bits and such, but SLS release has so
>much influence to those naive linux users with little or no unix
>experience, we should urge and help SLS to provide more
>reasonable and easy to manage system configuration. I think it
>would benefit us, too; we wouldn't have to be bothered by trivial
>questions every time somebody finds out his users get error
>message from `who' command, for example.
Welcome to beta software land. Let me set the record straight
about the /etc/passwd problem: SLS has just gone to shadow
password support. This is absolutely necessary to provide
real security for those that need it, given the advent of
the networking stuff. Of course there were bugs in the
otherwise excellant package, which sopped up 50 hours of
my time debugging.
I made a mistake when I put together the shadow.taz package:
I should not have included /etc/passwd in it.
Anyways, these kind of traumatic changes are occasionally
necessary, particularly as we are nearing 1.0, after which
such major changes may not be viewed so charitably.
I am doing the best I can with SLS. I can't help the fact
that minor errors on my part result in extra postings on
the internet. A hazard of the trade. What you don't see
are the countless hours I spent collecting and configuring
the tcpip system, shadow passwords, the install scripts, etc.
Please be patient and you will be rewarded. But if you need
a finished product now, try SCO or DELL.
Peter