[clue-tech] Interesting sidux/smxi news

[Nate Duehr]

David L. Anselmi wrote:

>> and seeing how that group of people who LOVED Linux at RH 8/9 get
>> utterly PISSED OFF at being forced into hardware upgrades, so they
>> could keep getting reasonable security patches...
> 
> You can't claim that Linux requires hardware upgrades as fast as 
> Windows.  Be serious.

Agreed on the slowdown on the topic, no problem.  I can wait for Linux 
(as a whole) to have some brilliant ideas...

By the way, you DID touch on something I've always wondered about this 
industry since before I was in it... and it's not "picking on Linux" at 
all... but may belong on CLUE-Talk.  I dunno.

"CAN software ever be really great?", has always been my question. 
Having been "ruined" by learning computers from the "bad old days" of 
32KB of RAM and 8K of ROM for the OS, and being taught that they're just 
logical machines and do EXACTLY what someone programmed them to do... I 
always thought so.  But the modern computing world is WAY different than 
that world, because it's building exponentially on top of code that has 
bugs.  If the kernel has bugs, the OS has bugs, and the desktop has 
bugs, and the UI has bugs... the growth rate outstripped our ability to 
lower the percentage of bugs released in any system or sub-system many 
years ago, using the "modern" development techniques for desktop software.

But, than a few years ago I read up on how aerospace and others with 
mission-critical software do their development, and learned that it most 
certainly CAN... which was encouraging, but the process/procedure 
involved is so far removed from where desktop developers "live".

People don't die if my word processor crashes.  (Well, they might if I 
were working on a financial aid package for a starving country and the 
report was delayed by a day, but it's a lot harder to make the correlation!)

Anyway... I digress.  Going back to this hardware thing...

Just focusing on MAJOR Linux distros... the stuff we all hear and know 
about... YES, it does require hardware updates at the same RATE as the 
commercial stuff does... it just lagged behind for a while on where the 
cut-off started.

This project (www.irlp.net) was (and still is) built on Pentium I era 
machines.  Those machines are still operable, and many of the original 
users are still running them in this radio network.  The project started 
  around the time of RH 6.2.

The major "distro-induced" changes that happened:

RH 9 - WAY more bloated than RH 6.3, 7, or 8.  But ran pretty 
consistently on VERY old hardware.

Fedora Core - Sound changed (critical for an audio/radio network) and 
screwed up a lot of people's systems.  Hardware requirements for video 
and RAM went up by a factor of 2X.

CentOS - More required hardware updates.

So... yes... the "event horizon" of where things go into twilight is WAY 
further back in Linux, but the RATE at which the upgrades are necessary 
-- granted, using the same basic distro for the project and not 
switching to a specialized "lightweight" distro, since that part is not 
my call -- is starting to track with Windows... it's just a lot further 
back down the road.

This hardware still works and does the job, but most of the nodes have 
had to lock down all outside access, forego any semblance of security 
updates (now that Fedora Legacy and similar projects finally gave up on 
backporting stuff that simply wouldn't work anymore on the older OS's) 
and keep chugging away on old hardware as best they could.

Many could upgrade, and did... but had to learn "new and different" 
things about managing what to their eyes is just "Linux" as the core OS 
had to be revved to keep up with RedHat's choice to get out of the 
desktop market for their core business.

But others (there's over 3000 systems running this stuff historically -- 
and remember the MAJORITY of these folks are non-Linux end-users who are 
NOT all that interested in learning Linux, but are technical enough to 
get through an install and wire up some stuff from a radio to a PC 
running Linux) felt a bit hosed.

(Also remember, SOME of these folks are also still running Win 95/98. 
No, I'm not kidding.)

So that's just some of the "stuff" that's happened, supporting these few 
thousand end-users of Linux over the years...

People who don't KNOW Linux, just really don't like this type of change. 
  I used to argue for it, "Ah, but it's making things better for you" 
and then got realistic... no, it really wasn't.

Their Pentium-I sitting there doing a job day-in, and day-out just 
needed security patches, they didn't need an OS upgrade every 6 months.

Problem was, there was nowhere to get those patches for them.  Devs 
weren't interested, changes were too deep and ugly in the code for a 
mere sysadmin to figure out how to backport them, and generally -- we 
just threw up our hands and kept releasing newer versions of the 
stripped down OS CD's (where we removed the complexity and took the 
package list down to ONLY what was needed to run a radio linking 
system), and encouraging people "downstream" of us to keep up with 
upgrades.  We had no choice but to just pass that silliness downstream, 
without some brainiac devs who had time to manually merge security 
patches for RH 6, 8, 9, and 9 versions of Fedora, and now CentOS using 
the alternate kernel that puts OSS sound support back into the upstream 
RHEL, which broke/removed that too.

So... that's my "forced upgrade mess" story.  I know Linux supports 
things longer than other options, but that's like saying Windows 95 
supports old machines too.  REAL support for older stuff is long-dead, 
when it comes to security and other updates... if you're using a well 
known "brand name" distro, so to speak.

(I've long been an advocate that Debian would have been better for that 
project, but back when it started -- Debian's installer was atrocious 
and would have scared off 50% of the folks who could succesfully load 
RH.  We looked at things like Puppy and other well-known "mini-distros" 
too, but none really captured the attention the brand-name "Linux" 
distro did.)

Nate