From: caywood@wyvern.wyvern.com (John Caywood) Subject: Re: WHAT'S THE POINT? Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 02:58:23 GMT
Yonik Christopher Seeley (yseeley@leland.Stanford.EDU) wrote:
: In article <733561611.F00007@remote.halcyon.com> Ray.Messier@f52.n203.z1.fidonet.org (Ray Messier) writes:
: >Recently I found Linux on a local BBS. Being anxious to run a Un*x box
: >
: >for some time I quickly dl it. After reading all the FAQ's and the Docs
: > [more stuff deleted]
: [stuff deleted]
: That's funny, did you download an SLS distribution? I downloaded
: SLS1.0 and got it running in less than an hour. The SLS readme....
Yes, the readme is good, but it was a good thing I've worked with UN*X
for a long time because /bin/touch was missing and logging in was
impossible. /usr/bin/touch was there, and since I knew what to look
for the fix was quick: it only took me a few days to figure out what
was missing.
This is not a complaint -- I was amazed at how easy the SLS installation
was. However, the "freeness" of the whole of linux cuts both ways:
yes I can get it free, but the person I got it from may have munged
one thing or another. For instance, huge chunks of /usr/man are missing
in the distribution I got.
With commercial software, someone is paid to make sure all the pieces
are there; with linux, it takes some looking to find all the pieces,
and you have to have a pretty good idea what pieces there are. This
aspect of linux is one that bothers me, and it's one that I would like
to be able to contribute to resolving.
DON'T FLAME ME -- THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT
Suppose a case like Y.C. Seeley might have encountered: a friend gives
you a stack of floppies, says "Here's Linux -- just boot from a1 and
away you go!", and promptly leaves himself. The friend had 0.99pl1,
added a few things to it, deleted a few things, changed a few permissions
in an "unsuitable" way, then dup'd his system. A computer literate DOS
user uses fdformat to create a novel partitioning scheme (because as
a DOS user, he or she might have no idea what traditionally goes into
the root partition versus what goes into /usr). Now the partitioning
breaks hard links that sysinstall expected to make, and linux never
comes up.
Or, some utilities were compiled with libc.so.4.1 and others with ...4.2,
but the friend never happened to hit thos utilities that would break.
Perhaps farfetched, perhaps not....
If I ever get to the point of believing that I understand what it takes
to know when I have a completely coherent and complete linux (all the
libararies match all the binaries, all the man pages match all the
commands, ...), I'll gladly post a checklist or something. If anyone
can help me to compile such a list, I'll gladly collect and repost.
Meanwhile, maybe the Yggdrasil CD-ROM should be recommended to
yseeley@leland.
Thanks for your patience.
--
"If you've always done it that way, it's probably wrong"
--------------------------------------attributed to Edward Kettering
John Caywood, aspiring Linux S.A., ! caywood@wyvern.wyvern.com
vi bigot, and wine drinker ! J.S.Caywood@LaRC.NASA.GOV