Alpha Core Directions

[William H. Magill]

On 21 Dec, 2004, at 18:23, Jeff A. wrote:
> My point is, the systems are getting a little too far away from each 
> other.
> There is "freedom" and then there is "mess because everyone is doing 
> their
> own thing."  Someone else said it... why do we need 35 different text
> editors?  The same thing will have an entirely different name on 
> another
> machine, and that's assuming you even found it to install in the first
> place.
>
> I'm sure some of you are familiar with this thing...
>
> http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Better than nothing, except for the fact that it is full of errors:

Ultrix: An early DEC Unix, superceded by Digital Unix (now Tru64).
FreeBSD: Derived from 4.4BSD-Lite and 386BSD.

Missing lots of information, and it lumps all distributions of linux 
together.

> Hooray for Unix.

No, "Hooray for Unix Marketing."

Unix never was what the marketing folks claimed it was -- the same thing
on every platform.
Oh, it was (or could be) for the end user. You could have both SystemV
and BSD versions of the commands and your choice of shells, but for the
SysAdmin, other than BSD, Ultrix and SunOS (NOT Solaris), there have 
never
been multiple Unix variants close enough to each other to allow one to 
switch
from one box to another without doing "something nasty," as in "oops!"

> I can make the SRM console
> boot my linux install, but I don't really know what any of the other
> settings do.  The assumption is that I know ahead of time why I am 
> setting
> certain paramaters.

Blame DEC for this one. The SRM was/is proprietary and never documented,
at least to the outside world.  However, there is (or was) a fair 
amount of
information around on the SRM which would allow someone with a System
Administration background to intuit what much of it did.

The same problem exists with the so-called "Open Firmware" used by Sun, 
Apple
and others. There is quite a bit of documentation on it, and Forth is a 
"well
known" language, but there are still significant and important parts 
that are
proprietary to each hardware vendor.


> As far as compiling things goes, you can follow everyone's instructions
> perfectly, and something may still be missing.  Then you try to 
> compile the
> missing piece and it won't compile.  Barely-technical people like 
> myself
> won't know why.  For example, I tried to complile xine on Alpha.  
> Well, it
> said something was missing, go get it here.  So I did.  Then that bit
> wouldn't compile.  I think it was pkgconfig or something?

This is the difference between DarwinPorts and Fink on OSX. DarwinPorts 
is
oriented at Mac users trying to use Unix -- Fink is oriented at Unix 
users
trying to use OS X.

> You can install linux on *any* architecture,

Actually this is not a true statement in and of itself -- it's just 
like the
"Unix marketing" statement of yore. You CAN install some version of 
"Linux" on
any architecture, but you cannot install "Linux" on any architecture.

> You click on a program in the launchbar thingy,
> it sits there for a while rumbling the hard drive, then nothing 
> happens.  No
> reason, no warning, nothing.  NOTHING HAPPENS.  You run a command from 
> the
> command line.  It sits there thinking for a while.  THEN NOTHING 
> HAPPENS.
> What's going on?  How am I going to know?

This is part and parcel of the Unix philosophy. It's described in the 
early
documents by K & R -- "We don't tell you that you did something stupid, 
because
you already know what you did wrong and are just waiting to type it 
over."

> I know all about OSX.  It doesn't matter what OSX is *based* on... 
> it's what
> they've turned the final product into.  What the final product is is a
> bloated mess of Apple.  If you've ever installed it, you know all 
> about the
> barrage of "give us your personal info, your parents, a cookie and your
> first born child" screens.  You know the, "Hey!  You can't have the 
> hardware
> support we promised you we would give you a long time ago!"  No, you 
> can't
> use that video card with this update because we said so.  No, you 
> can't use
> that network card, we don't want you to.  No, you can't install me on 
> an old
> machine... that interferes with us owning your lifestyle.

This is no different than any OS or Hardware vendor. A modern OS simply 
will
not run on old hardware.

> See?  I don't know what I'm doing!  Mostly because I can't get the
> information I need.

RTFM.  It really is all out there, you just have to find it.

Linux is NOT the MacOS any more than OSX is the MacOS ... yet that 100% 
vendor
controlled and dictated environment is what you are really looking for.

Simply BECAUSE Linux runs on many platforms, it is complex and full of 
options.

And despite all the evangelical marketing hype to the contrary,
Linux is not ready for the desktop! Especially for users like yourself.

Linux is a classic 90% problem -- 90% of the work takes 10% of the 
resources;
the remaining 10% of the work takes 90% of the resources.

Sadly, that last 10% involves the packaging and documentation. And the 
more
"bullet proof" those are to be made, the more work it requires.

Look at it this way, it took the automobile almost 60 years to get to 
the point
where "almost anybody" could simply sit behind the wheel and go. ... 
but if you
rent cars regularly, like I do, you quickly discover that the 
differences between
models by the same manufacture, let alone different manufacturers, are 
quite different.

This one puts the key slot on the dashboard, this one on the steering 
column.
This one locks the steering column so that you have to pull the wheel 
to insert
the key, that one doesn't. Then we have the "comfort controls,"  argh 
... turn
on the defroster and the AC starts up, not the heat. (yeah, I know, but 
it didn't
use to work that way.)



T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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