No matter what distribution I download, I have to spend a fair amount
of time customising and tweaking and (especially) patching and getting
the latest binaries in order to do what I need to do. In the most
recent case, that involved settings up a (fairly secure) non-routing
gateway that would provide SMTP, POP, a squid proxy, and SMB access to
the machines on our LAN. Its not a tall order - but it involves at
least the download or squid and samba separately, and a lot of effort
on the /etc directory to make the system look even vaguely like a
locked door. Also, Slackware (for one) typically enables a bunch of
(mostly unnecessary) daemons such as the sun RPC mapper (fine if you
use the stuff - but who does these days? Maybe I'm just in a different
environment).
What I'd really like to see is a secure minimal base system, which you
install before any "distribution". The put the distribution on top,
according to the machine's function. For example, a 'server'
distribution
would get samba and squid (okay, I'm biased ;p ), and a 'workstation'
distribution may get some nice KDE stuff.
I'm also sick of the distributions getting as bloated as an NT
installation -
I use maybe 20% of the *essential do not attempt to remove* binaries
regularly - and about 40% I never use ; sure they're there for
historical
reasons, and I can accept that as a good excuse for a Solaris or HP-UX
system, but this IS the 90's and we are talking about a system which
hopefully is progressive ... after all, if you need backwards
compatibility to that extent, why not get a 'back-compat' package ...?
Linux has a very promising future IMHO, but unfortunately it can't cut
it as an effective answer to MS at the moment (much as I hate to say
so).
Although as a server it far outstrips anything else (also IMNSHO), it
does lack the ease of use required for a small company (without a
dedicated administrator) to use it. Also, the lack of application
support for critical tasks (such as, a decent wordprocessor or
spreadsheet - and I mean graphical and preferably free [leech]) makes it
ineffective as a workstation.
But back to the original topic...
I think debian (or slackware or redhat or whatever) could be greatly
improved if there existed a base, miminal, secure 'generic Linux'
system - say just a kernel, X Server (not manager, etc), libraries and
essential tools like a compiler and some scripting language (which
naturally would have to be PERL [I'm biased here too]). The compiler
of course would be optional ... but the idea being that there would
exist a standard base which all distributions would work off. The
specific package install method, binaries offered and interface would
then be package dependant ... but there would be some sort of guarentee
that all systems had certain binaries and certain tools/compilers/
scripters that were common.
Anyway, I'm waffling now ... okay, had my say, time to get back to
work (anyone know how to get Qt to compile on HP-UX when the X headers
are missing...? ;( )
Twylite
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu