Unerstand time part!!! You let me know and I will find a machine, and we will both install Gentoo
and compare notes.
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In any activity that has mission-critical aspects (I was in pharmceutical R&D), every renewal or modification of equipment including computers and software entails hugely expensive and time-consuming exercises for validation (in some fields the term is ‘qualification’), user training, and re-writing operating procedures. Computers and OS have always been a nightmare in this respect: one big and expensive laboratory instrument I operated was installed in about 1988 with Hewlett-Packard’s implementation of UCSD Pascal for control and data processing. By the time it was passed on to a university (2002), it had to be migrated to Unix, then Windows 3.11 and finally Windows 2000 (or something like that). I won’t talk about its predecessor of 1979 that had a DEC PDP8 which, with its disk drives, required very frequent maintenance and repair visits.
Continuity is also a major factor in decisions taken by the Emmabuntüs collective that redistributes on a large scale old computers within France and abroad. They have standardised on Debian, mainly because Ubuntu and others no longer support 32-bit Linux, which (not too well documented) is needed also for 64-bit machines that are short on RAM. I have usually been installing Mint, but it drives me crazy with constant changes including all those disputed ways of installing software. Windows has always been dreadful, and they still keep making unnecessary changes to the user interface, even within a version, requiring changes to habits and operating procedures (e.g. copy-paste is no longer available with a right-click). Those people have still not learned that not every computer user is a geek or even interested in computing.
Most of the Emmabuntüs site https://emmabuntus.org/a-propos/ is in French but there are a few items and links in English: https://emmabuntus.org/category/english/ with a nice handbook for beginners https://lescahiersdudebutant.arpinux.org/bullseye-en/index.html
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Agree,
The less computer literate the users, the bigger the problem.
I have experienced your ‘nightmare’ in scientific labs.
I spent years of my life converting files to new formats.
I have been thru rewriting mission critical software in new languages.
When Unix finally came on the scene it was a breath of fresh air
Now you are telling me the current flavour of Unix, which happens to be Linux, is falling into the old upgrade traps. I tend to agree, although seeing it as a retiree is somewhat different.
If Emmabuntus does something for continuity , then it is doubly worthwhile. The charitable objective is one good thing, but if it also flattens out the upgrade steps that should give it a wider future. I think Debian is a sound base.
There is an introduction to emmabuntus here
Why dont some of us give it a try?
It could do with some discussion and constructive comment.
Regards
Neville
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I apologise for a bad error there: the site offers in fact in 15 languages. I missed that because the language button is, unconventionally perhaps, at the bottom of the screen and some of the links to other sites explicitly mention English versions. I live in France and the Emmabuntüs site came up in French.
A propos, we discussed the language question for IT’S FOSS a year ago. Do you think we should make It's FOSS articles available in other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian etc?
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There is a firefox addon called “Translate locally for firefox”
It is mentioned in the topic “Linux services tutorial” in the first article by @Rosika
and there is some subsequent discussion.
Would this be suitable for use with the itsFOSS site?
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I checked it. Yes I can read it in English.
Thanks for correction
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There are many alternatives, but this one has the privacy advantage of not using an online translator. I tend to connect to the Reverso site, which also offers a software download. Google’s may possibly have an advantage if it makes use of their extensive artificial intelligence facilities. However, as we discussed earlier, automatic translation can be unsafe unless you know the 2 languages involved, because it may distort or even invert an intended meaning. That may not matter for informal exchanges on social media, nor too much with the present thread. By contrast, a professional translator I know won’t even take on a serious job if the subject matter is in a specialised field he isn’t familiar with.
Emmabuntüs don’t say how they manage all those languages (apart from French to English); perhaps we could ask them.
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CERN was where the WWW was created (on NeXT’s BSD based UNIX)…
Anywway - I’m going to try out Alma - 'cause I’ve never looked at it before - and - one of my employer’s customers is tossing up between RHEL 9 or ALMA 9.
I can’t imagine Alma will be much different from RHEL, OEL or CentOS - and probably still FOIST a GUI installer (this is why I prefer Ubuntu’s server offering - it’s ALL done on a TTY console!) on the user during the install (yeah I know there’s a way to do a TTY install of RPM distros- but it’s ugly and clunky).
And selection of Security profile is the SAME as in RHEL 9 or CentOS 9 Stream - my colleagues in cyber security [real ones, not ersatz “on paper” specialists) are pushing CIS2 security profile - which makes the install more painful - i.e. like instead of nearly everything on one partition, there’s like EIGHT or NINE! I HATE divvying up partitions that you’ll have to live with long term (interesting anecdote : the partitioning utility in SCO UNIX was called “divvy”).
Note : the installer is IDENTICAL to the Graphical Installer for RHEL9.
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That is what OpenBSD does.
I wonder if CIS2 comes from there?
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No - CIS2 comes from Red Hat… CIS1 and CIS2 are hardening profiles…
To install with one of those profiles - you have to have
/boot
/boot/efi
/
/home
/var/tmp
/var/log
/var/audit
/tmp
in place (or going to be put in place during partitioning) to install with a CIS1 or CIS2 profile.
And I think even /dev/shm has to be a separate filesystem… And then whatever capacity you arbitrarily chose, you’re stuck with - then you get hideous things like 3 am callouts 'cause your 4 Gb /var/log/ partition filled up!
And then you get stuff like - the software you want to install won’t run, 'cause it has “noexec” mount option - on a filesystem the third party software needs to execute stuff from - so you then effectively have to break CIS1 / CIS2 hardening to disable noexec on that filesystem!
I installed Alma (9) without any hardening profile - there’s about 12 or more choices of hardening profile when installing Alma / RHEL / CentOS Stream.
I just went without a hardening profile and ended up with 2 partitions - which is how I prefer things :
[root@soulmach-00 ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 4.0M 0 4.0M 0% /dev
tmpfs 888M 0 888M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 356M 5.0M 351M 2% /run
/dev/mapper/almalinux-root 17G 1.3G 16G 8% /
/dev/sda1 960M 227M 734M 24% /boot
tmpfs 178M 0 178M 0% /run/user/1000
Even my desktop systems only have 2 or 3 partitions - I don’t like having separate partitions for everything - as mentioned previously - all my volatile data is replicated with ResilioSync and things like ~/bin, ~/Documents, ~/Music are symlinks to my Resilio shares…
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There was once a time when it was done to help with backups, or to spread an OS over multiple small disks.
I dont see how it helps security.?
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I think the idea is that it prevents things being executed where they shouldn’t - e.g. /var/tmp is usually 777 - so some malicious code could be plonked in /var/tmp and run from there… but if /var/tmp is a separate partition and it has “noexec” on mount - then “everybody” can plonk files there, but not even root could execute them from there…
It does seem like overkill…
I’m a BIG believer on servers installing their binary files and databases on a dedicated partition (e.g. /opt) - but divvying up all those subfolders of /var/ is a headache down the road when you run out of space… Sure - splitting them up e.g. /var/log as a separate partition from “/” should hopefully stop a disk full crashing a system - however - the system always preserves enough space (refuses to completely fill all blocks) to stop a crash happening…
I haven’t seen a full partition crash a system for over 10 years now - and I think when I did used to occasionally encounter it - it was on Solaris UNIX, not Linux. Generally the fix was boot with access to the console, run in single user mode - do some housekeeping and reboot. One thing that REALLY grinded my gears is colleagues would delete all the man pages to save few K of space… FFS! Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
Note : I just went to install neofetch on Alma - and it wanted to install a TRUCKLOAD of X11 libraries and binaries / libraries for sound! THIS IS A HEADLESS SERVER!
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf install neofetch
which I then shitcanned - then did a
sudo dnf clean packages
and fastfetch also wants to install 224 packages!
So - I guess I just go with
cat /etc/os-release
if I don’t want all that rubbish…
We’re spoiled for choice anyway… I remember a time - e.g. RHEL 5, and Oracle Linux 5, and earlier made it tricky to figure out the distro and version, as there was no /etc/os-release file - but sometimes there was an /etc/redhat-release (but this file could also be found on Oracle Linux, and CentOS) - you mostly had to have lsb-release installed and type :
lsb_release -a
To figure out what kinda Red Hat system you were on (a big clue is always the “el” string output in “uname -r” command - will usually indicate its in the Red Hat family) :
[x@soulmach-00 ~]$ uname -r
5.14.0-427.13.1.el9_4.x86_64
(“el9”)
[x@soulmach-00 ~]$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version: n/a
Distributor ID: AlmaLinux
Description: AlmaLinux 9.4 (Seafoam Ocelot)
Release: 9.4
Codename: n/a
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That makes some sense., but I imagine if malicious code has entered your system, it has already found somewhere to plonk its binary.
libraries for sound! THIS IS A HEADLESS SERVER!
All it takes is one app to want to make a beep, and that triggers install of the entire sound system.
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