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Ecce Lennart

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millpond
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Ecce Lennart

#1 Post by millpond »

OK. SystemD is here in Debian.
So is systemd-shim, which throttles it, and drags it along like a dead siamese twin. Unlil Leatheface shows up with a chaninsaw.

Now the question which i havent seen answered, or more appropriately, whose answers i do not know where to look for - is : Are there any guides to keeping Debian, while at the same time fully spelling out the consequences of shim, and how things are affected by it, and how to get things working back to our fairytale 'normal' (which we havent seen in years ).

The system here boots with kdm, yet Mate fires up fine. I seem to have lost LXDE.

If we need to circle the wagons and pass the ammo in the cyber-alamo we really should have access to spec sheets for the reaming RedHat and Santa Lannart
have in store for us. And hopefully, palliative scripts for the survivoors.

If it doesnt work without systemd, how to make believe its there, after all its a bloody init system. Since when does a program *care* what fires it up, and signals should be hijackable... right?

+-

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thanatos_incarnate
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#2 Post by thanatos_incarnate »

1. Dial back the Bible Belt pathos in your posts.
2. Contribute to Devuan. For instance, by contributing in their forum, so you can at least rant where it's relevant. Debian has moved to systemd, there isn't going to be a coming back (or at least not without a lot of effort and pain), unless you're willing to stick to Squeeze LTS/Wheezy.

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Re: Ecce Lennart

#3 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

deadbang

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golinux
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#4 Post by golinux »

thanatos_incarnate wrote:2. Contribute to Devuan. For instance, by contributing in their forum, so you can at least rant where it's relevant.
You can post there but nobody will read it as that forum has ZERO activity. If you want to interact with Devuan, join the mail list or hang out on IRC at freenode #devuan or #debianfork.
thanatos_incarnate wrote:Debian has moved to systemd, there isn't going to be a coming back (or at least not without a lot of effort and pain), unless you're willing to stick to Squeeze LTS/Wheezy.
Beware . . . recent squeeze-lts updates have screwed up the suspend/hibernate functions on my machine. That after getting regular kernel failure messages for many months. I posted to their mail list and the finger was pointed to the nVidia driver. In other words, passing the buck. Very disappointing after many years of rock-solid stability.
May the FORK be with you!

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thanatos_incarnate
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#5 Post by thanatos_incarnate »

golinux wrote:Beware . . . recent squeeze-lts updates have screwed up the suspend/hibernate functions on my machine. That after getting regular kernel failure messages for many months. I posted to their mail list and the finger was pointed to the nVidia driver. In other words, passing the buck. Very disappointing after many years of rock-solid stability.
Sad to hear that. But to be honest, there's little Debian devs can do with regards to nvidia proprietary driver updates and their backwards compatibility to almost deprecated releases like Squeeze. Nvidia won't care and I guess Debian lacks the wo/manpower.

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keithpeter
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#6 Post by keithpeter »

golinux wrote:Beware . . . recent squeeze-lts updates have screwed up the suspend/hibernate functions on my machine. That after getting regular kernel failure messages for many months. I posted to their mail list and the finger was pointed to the nVidia driver. In other words, passing the buck. Very disappointing after many years of rock-solid stability.
Well there is always Centos 6 with the elrepo repository installed and the nvidia drivers from there. Stella Linux is a CentOS 6 'remix' with all the multimedia installed - handy to have on a USB stick as a bootable live image. Support until 2017 with application updates (Firefox/Libreoffice and all) then security only until 2020. My (limited, amateur, possibly incorrect) understanding of Squeeze LTS was that it was aimed at server type use cases.

somebodyelse
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#7 Post by somebodyelse »

^Indeed. I think Squeeze LTS is really meant for servers.

CentOS 6 is still very useable and actually has more in EPEL than CentOS 7. To the point that I suspect that even CentOS admins are not all over the moon about systemd. But it feels very solid four years after its release and it has comparatively modern versions of things like Firefox, Thunderbird and Geany. I would probably use it as a daily driver but a) I'm systemd agnostic b) it's the past e.g. it has Python 2.6. Gnome 2/MATE is still the best. When I use Gnome 3, I give it a chance and conclude it's not all that bad. When I use MATE, I just use my computer. Tells you a lot really. I think with Gnome 3 they were trying to beat everyone else to a paradigm that never materialised. Oh well. Don't worry, in Gnome 4 there will be no close buttons or icons since systemd will determine when a program should start or stop.

millpond
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#8 Post by millpond »

thanatos_incarnate wrote:1. Dial back the Bible Belt pathos in your posts.
2. Contribute to Devuan. For instance, by contributing in their forum, so you can at least rant where it's relevant. Debian has moved to systemd, there isn't going to be a coming back (or at least not without a lot of effort and pain), unless you're willing to stick to Squeeze LTS/Wheezy.
Someone said that Debian was *init agnostic*.
Were they lying?

I would like to believe not.
The system is mostly working, so systemd is mostly harmless when dead. As long as the corpse is not removed.

For Arch there is this:
http://systemd-free.org/config.php

There are parts of it I dont understand.

Is there anything that seems incompatible with Jessie, aside from Pacman???

The last stage of my booutup has a clear message that all three of my hard drives are being set to 20 minutes spindown, which kinda leads me to believe that upower is working, but as they dont spin down, it leaves me to believe it isnt.
root@hp2100:~> ps aux | grep upower
root 5924 0.0 0.2 40040 3788 ? Sl 15:31 0:00 /usr/lib/upower/upowerd

root@hp2100:~> /usr/lib/upower/upowerd status
(upowerd:12795): UPower-WARNING **: Failed to acquire org.freedesktop.UPower
(upowerd:12795): UPower-WARNING **: Could not acquire name; bailing out

dbus-send --print-reply --system --dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "Suspend" with signature "" on interface "org.freedesktop.UPower" doesn't exist


With ubuntu there are instructions like:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2219403

Dbus is clrarly activated at startup.

Edited to add...
Something, during the posting of this corrupted the file system - could it have been the dbus-send command???

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swirling_vortex
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#9 Post by swirling_vortex »

CentOS 6 is getting a little crusty at this point due to it being 5 years old. If you really want to stay away from systemd and use linux, then you're kind of on your own as almost all of the core distributions have now incorporated systemd and seem to have no problems with it. The only distro that's still holding out would be Slackware.

Otherwise, you can run FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Windows, OS X, Haiku, or some kind of Unix variant. But I think you're really missing out on a lot of the things systemd fixes such as solving service dependencies (you can't mount network drives or start web servers until the network is ready first) and making sure they started cleanly.

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thanatos_incarnate
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#10 Post by thanatos_incarnate »

millpond wrote:systemd is mostly harmless when dead. As long as the corpse is not removed.
This is what I don't get -- you and a lot of others here just waste time and energy with this pathetic emotional language. You sound almost like right-wing rednecks. Imagine what you could do if instead you invested into e. g. making systemd-less distros like Gentoo, Devuan, Slackware et al. work better instead of always regurgitating this inflammatory rhetoric like a Bible Belt village pastor.

And by the way, yes, Debian is init agnostic, but only one init system is supported by default. If you want to use the others, you're on your own AFAIK.

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Re: Ecce Lennart

#11 Post by edbarx »

This fixation about defaults, is a mystery to understand, as anyone having some experience with Debian's package management tools, should be able to revert to other OS-initialisation systems. The OP can easily remove systemd and all its libraries provided dependencies are satisfied. Software is essentially a collection of subroutines, implying if you can remove or substitute what you don't want, you can run what you want. The problem starts when one expects others to do what one deems should be done. Currently, there is Devuan trying to get rid of systemd, although let us face it, what tomazzi said in one of his latest posts, confirms that Lennart Poettering is NOT the monster he was publicised to be. He cooperated with tomazzi and admitted, that under certain circumstances, systemd, which, by the way, is Poettering's masterpiece, can have unpredictable behaviour.

What appears illogical, especially in the world of GNU/Linux, is when the truth is obliterated with untruths: this does far more harm than good. Admittedly, I was carried away, but I continued to be open for the truth, whatever that happened to be. Accepting criticism of one's own masterpiece is a corroborate that there is good will.
Debian == { > 30, 000 packages }; Debian != systemd
The worst infection of all, is a false sense of security!
It is hard to get away from CLI tools.

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keithpeter
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#12 Post by keithpeter »

swirling_vortex wrote:CentOS 6 is getting a little crusty at this point due to it being 5 years old.
I mentioned Centos 6 in reply to golinux who is using Squeeze, so (s)he is fine with software of that vintage I think. CentOS 6 does get updates to Firefox and Libreoffice versions until 2017 but I take the point made up the screen about the age of the scripting languages e.g. python.
thanatos_incarnate wrote:Imagine what you could do if instead you invested into e. g. making systemd-less distros like Gentoo, Devuan, Slackware et al. work better [...]
I'm posting this from my test Thinkpad X61s with Devuan installed from the alpha2 netboot .iso. To the casual user, this system is indestinguishable from a Debian Jessie install with xfce4 as the DE with the one exception that it uses Wicd to manage network connections. All working. Main repository based on Debian's. The devuanistas seem to hang out on their mailing list....

tomazzi
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#13 Post by tomazzi »

@edbarx:
Thank You for understanding.

Perhaps some people here just don't know (especially newcomers), that I really like the idea behind systemd - I just can't accept the fact, that it's still too Young / too buggy - so it shouldn't be accepted by Debian as a default init system. Especially, I'm really pissed off due to a reasons why it was adopted - I'm totally convinced that it was a political, not a practical/techical decision.

But, it's far too late for whining about the adoption of systemd - now, for people who do understand what the problem is, the only reasonable way to go is to either fix it or fork it.

Regards.
Odi profanum vulgus

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buntunub
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#14 Post by buntunub »

swirling_vortex wrote:CentOS 6 is getting a little crusty at this point due to it being 5 years old.
What's with the age discrimination? This notion that just because a software version is older than another makes it somehow taboo or bad is just nonsense. Yes, CentOS6 is older, but it is also much more stable, much better tested, and has a much more robust repo backing it up. In my book, this makes it far superior to anything else out there right now other than Squeeze, which is now in LTS status and is arguably less well supported. The same thing can be said about SysV.

somebodyelse
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#15 Post by somebodyelse »

It is also CentOS 6.6 (soon to be CentOS 6.7) and not what was released (as RHEL 6) in November 2010. The differences are not major but they are perceptible.

somebodyelse
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#16 Post by somebodyelse »

I'm totally convinced that it was a political, not a practical/techical decision.
How so? The TC comprised (as it does today) independents and a couple of Canonical people who wanted Upstart. Political in what sense? Who had a political motivation for systemd? Was it to annoy Canonical?

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Re: Ecce Lennart

#17 Post by golinux »

somebodyelse wrote:
I'm totally convinced that it was a political, not a practical/techical decision.
How so?
Never read this, huh?
May the FORK be with you!

somebodyelse
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#18 Post by somebodyelse »

Yes I have. In fact, I read it yesterday. And concluded that the organisers of the GR erred by not making it a binary choice, thereby allowing some people to get confused. I don't see any substantiated politicking. It's more along the lines of it it was so half-arsed, it must have been a set-up/inside job.

Yesterday, I saw on the news that a British Lord has been involved in a sex scandal with prostitutes, cocaine, and tax payers' money.
  • 1. It's good to see that the old stereoytypes still hold and that the organism functions as expected.
    2. He was caught on film, with his bra on, making racist/sexist statements and boasting about shafting the tax payer.
His career is over because of what he did, as proved by the film. We know that he did it. There is evidence.

With the Debian GR, there is a lot of insinuation and people drawing conclusions.

Was the Debian GR successful in practical terms? No. But then who creates a poll requiring people to manage three dimensional vectors in space? It should have been more binary as a choice. I do agree that avoid is clearly negative. It's the insinuation that there is something sinister behind all this when all the evidence shows is that the poll organisers asked the questions in a non-fool-proof way.
  • Should Debian have systemd as default? I honestly don't know.
  • Does Debian have systemd as default? Yes.
  • Did Debian's decision to have systemd as default (by the TC and possibly by the GR) to adopt systemd as default break the social contract or any of the other promises/contracts? No
tl;dr - I don't see any evidence of political wrong-doing, only errors in the organisation of the GR. Debian is still Debian, with only free (as in freedom) software in main.

tomazzi
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#19 Post by tomazzi »

Actually, my opinion is based on technical points, which I've tried to show long before Dasein have wiriten that brilliant post, and long before the TC have made its decision.

Every single point listed on Debian wiki as a feature of systemd is at best a questionable, half-truth, and some of them are simply lies (that is, they are wishes, not actual functionalities).
Few <simple> examples:
Systemd uses control groups to ensure that any service, regardless of its state, can be shut down properly.
Just a lie - it can't.
Systemd’s centralized service startup and monitoring makes it much easier to setup high-availability using software like heartbeat or pacemaker.
Lie/half-truth - systemd can fall into totally unmanaged state if the dbus will fail - then the whole OS becomes completely non-controllable. And this happens from time to time.
Systemd is moving strongly in the direction of configuration-less system (i.e. “empty /etc/”). So /etc/fstab might be empty on a system with a GPT partition table, with partitions mounted in appropriate places based on their type id.
Half-truth: it was possible - for years - to properly mount any kind of partition using its UUID in fstab.
Systemd can trivially add security settings to a service without any need to patch it: user/group change, chroot, private network, private /tmp, read-only access to parts of the tree, tcp wrappers, filtering system calls, (...)
Half-truth, and amazing bullshit:
It was trivially easy to run an isolated service in a chroot, in the pre-systemd era - what systemd offers, is a buggy, not fully tested environment, with at best questionable ability to filter system calls.

...etc

Moreover, if You assume that people in the TC are clever, then the fact, that the poll was so badly designed only makes the whole case stinking for a mile...

...But, i'm not going to use systemd (well, I'm using it only in a VM for testing compatibility of interfaces with my own init software) - so I just don' care about its future.

Regards.
Odi profanum vulgus

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buntunub
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Re: Ecce Lennart

#20 Post by buntunub »

somebodyelse wrote:Yes I have. In fact, I read it yesterday. And concluded that the organisers of the GR erred by not making it a binary choice, thereby allowing some people to get confused. I don't see any substantiated politicking. It's more along the lines of it it was so half-arsed, it must have been a set-up/inside job[/i


With this summary of garbage you give the old DPL far, far too much credit. You apparently think the GR was some kind of mistake. It was, in fact, not. It was setup that way on purpose to give the Debian Devs an easy way out without having to face the music of actually being forced to make a choice and a real up or down vote. It definitely looked as if the GR was going to swing in favor of removing systemd as the only viable init system by forcing them all to ensure that all accepted packages were alternate init capable and ensuring that users would always have their own personal choice of being able to run whatever init system pleased them. It was then that the old DPL decided to add the way out option to the GR vote.

The end result of it is that now users no longer have a viable choice of init systems, and the Debian devs ensured that users won't even have the choice of window managers going into the future unless they run systemd. It was a sellout of epic proportions, and an end-run around the hard work of ensuring user choice in the future.

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