Relax, it's just Ubuntu 15.04. AARGH! IT'S FULL OF SYSTEMD!!! Systemd is here. It’s arrived in Vivid Vervet, the latest, just-released distro of Ubuntu – 15.04. Most users will notice very little overall difference in this latest Ubuntu release, but it’s this change that packs the biggest punch. There are a couple of new things that make 15.04 worth the upgrade from previous versions, …
One of my greenhouses runs on CP/M. Has for three decades or so. It works, so why change it?
The messaging system at the barn has been running on a Heath H11A since 1979.
Inventing stuff purely to invent stuff is good. Foisting it off on clearly deluded, technology impaired consumers as "this is the newest, bestest, holy cow you have to have it NOW!" is exploitation.
"30-year old electronics."
No. These days, it's run by an aging[1] headless Slackware laptop running a CP/M emulator. The original control code has mutated slightly, as I've had to replace hardware in the trenches over the years. I have the original hardware, it might still boot, but I'm planning to bring it up gradually in a restoration.
[1] HP hardware, circa 2003. Pre bad-capacitor HP.
"Pics or it didn't happen."
The LSI-11 is running in emulation. Today, the Heath is sitting on a plinth in a place of honor in a corner of the office, and my one major dust-catcher. She's the first "modern" computer I built from the bare copper-covered fiberglass boards, complete with an actual GlassTTY. She still runs on power-up, which happens rarely. I've heard quieter dragsters ...
"'sabout now the EPROMs (if any) start dropping the odd bit."
I have an EPROM burner, and know how to use it.
Systemd doesn't bother me too much, though I dislike the concept. It's Unity itself which gets up my nose; it's no doubt all very wonderful but it's not a patch on, for example, Cinnamon - or even Mate, though I note that's now an option.
The Amazon connection doesn't strike me as The Way Things Should Be[tm] and seeing adverts for paid software in the software centre was something of a surprise, too...
That said, if the guys from Crouton could see their way to getting an installation for Ubuntu Mate onto a chromebook, I'd give that a go. (Trying to get Mate onto a 12.04 Crouton installation is tricky; I can't see how to start the damn thing!)
>Mate + Compiz = best DE ever
Lumina + Compton is assured to be systemd free for years to come (still a bit rough to use but getting better all the time) so that's what I use but Mate being based on gtk2 only should be able to be ported to other better *nix for quite some time to come as well.
"The Amazon connection doesn't strike me as The Way Things Should Be[tm] and seeing adverts for paid software in the software centre was something of a surprise, too..."
While I don't like the intrusive Amazon search, I have no problems with the Software Centre listing or advertising paid-for software (and other things such as magazines). It's both heartening to see how many vendors consider it's worth porting/building for the platform, and if it earns Canonical commission then why not? Someone has to pay for the software development and I'm sure Mark Shuttleworth's is not infinitely wealthy. I see it as a welcome step towards the mainstream.
"I have no problems with the Software Centre listing or advertising paid-for software"
Soon you'll see ads for Windows 10, blue pills, and dating services elsewhere on the OS.
Is there a way to turn it off, or can I install an "Adblocker+ for Software Centre" (from the same SW Centre of course)?
Actually, no, MMX came with Pentium refresh (P55C revision, to be precise).
http://www.cpu-museum.de/?m=Intel&f=Pentium-MMX+%28P55C%29
First Pentium II did not bring anything new on that level, it was Pentium III which brought the first version of the SSE instruction set.
"So how is Steam working on your BSD?"
Evaporated before birth. I use computers as tools, not time-wasting toys.
"And how is your Slackware phone doing?"
For mobile use, I use a 15 year old Nokia 5185. Likewise, the telephone at my elbow as I type is a 1950s Western Electric model 500. All I want a telephone to be is a telephone.
(The Nokia is about to permanently lose service, alas. Not sure where I'll go after that. The WE will last until $TELCO decides to kill pulse dialing ...)
Steam is a hot mess on Linux anyway. Half the games aren't available and the performance still doesn't come close to matching Windows for the vast majority of them. You would probably be able to get nearly as many to run using the windows client under wine on BSD probably with better performance than the linux native. If you plan on doing any serious steam gaming you are still going to have a windows boot partition sadly.
Salix is much better than Slackware - all the BSDs have integrated package management, and its omission in Slackware by default is just too painful. The use of lilo instead of grub is unusual these days, as is the fact it boots without an initrd, but the use of mbootpack enables even complex Xen configurations to boot.
I did have to terminate Networkmanager with extreme prejudice - I'm sure it must be possible to get a bridge working reliably on startup using it, but life is too short. It's also on a system which just runs a lot of VMs and will never run X, or add/remove physical network adapters (virtual is a different matter).
I tried a number of systemd-free distributions on virtual machines and servers (including Gentoo, Funtoo, Slackware, Devuan alpha, Manjaro-openrc, Voidlinux). The smoothest so far has been Voidlinux, a rolling-release binary distribution, with XFCE 4.12 as the default desktop, which also works on a Pi2. Previously this distribution was an early adopter of SystemD, when it was just an init system. But it has switched to runit, which makes SystemD unit files look like a complicated tangled mess. Some things need a little bit of work, e.g. occasionally there may be bugs in some less commonly used packages, and you have to write your own init file if you use Openvpn, but with runit, that is just one line long...
If it really is about "fixing" init, then there are numerous excellent alternatives that aren't invading body-snatchers with half a millions of lines of undocumented and uncommented code, and no specification, maintained by a closed community for whom bug-fixing is seen as a pointless distraction that has to be sacrificed on the alter to the one true goal of never-ending function creep.
[Some Debian SystemD apologists keep saying SystemD is only a default in Debian Jessie, and other init systems can be used, but the debootstrap program has a trivial bug that means it fails to read the non-systemd options. The maintainer refuses to fix this obvious bug because "SystemD is the default". And then there are random programs and packages that are configured to pull in SystemD and related crap rather than treat them as optional dependencies (CUPS and XFCE spring to mind). Hopefully Devuan will fix this, at least for server-based installations, and Voidlinux makes a fine replacement for Wheezy on the desktop.]
Having seen some of the garbage from the systemd developers - I will choose a distro without systemd (and if possible without pulseaudio as well).
Systemd seems to have been designed by people trained in the Microsoft tradition of "Embrace, Extend Extinguish".
The one of the biggest problems with systemd is its reliance on binary databases that are far more difficult to analyse and repair than plain text files. Init files can be manipulated by any text editor and can easily be corrected by booting from an alternative device (eg a USB stick) if damaged so badly that even a single user boot fails. If a systemd database is corrupted then to repair it requires either a recent backup or the rescue system needs a compatible version of systemd to allow the damaged database(s) to be recreated.
I wonder if any group will produce a distro based on the most widely used linux system - the linux in Android.
You obviously have no idea what systemd does or doesn't do. you've read too many negative posts and taken their word for it without checking to see if they are true.
What binary database does systemd rely on? the only binary bit is storage of journal records. all the config files are text in the "ini" file format.
I guess you believe that any corrupted file is magically recreated. if any file is corrupt, its back to backups (if possible)
I suggest you read up about systemd and its capabilities before you spout of complete crap otherwise it makes you look stupid or like a troll.
"What binary database does systemd rely on? the only binary bit is storage of journal records. "
Which, when shit hits fan, you WANT in human-readable format.
systemd attempts to make bootups much faster by parallelising the startup but on my systems it tripped over its own shoelaces quite a bit before I got it to behave and had I had to resort to a live CD, may not have been diagnosable.
"if systemd was tripping up, then its down to configuration by you or your distro."
As I hadn't done anything to it other than install, it might have been distro (ubuntu) but for whatever reason it had several dependencies mixed up and was starting processes in the wrong order, which resulted in "no networking" and failure to initialise ZFS amongst other issues.
If something is touted as a drop in replacement for SysV/BSDinit/upstart and gets installed as part of an upgrade procedure then it should WORK as a drop-in replacement, not require a bunch of tweaking.
I don't like systemd because of its Windows-esque design ethos. There are some good things about Windows, but the core design definitely isn't one of them. Meanwhile, Unix/Linux has been so successful because it prizes elegance and simplicity over all other design concerns, enabling it to slice through the complexity which is the enemy of all computer systems.
How's systemd managing the dreaded complexity ? Well, it is now over half a million lines...
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