[conspire] More Firefox Addon problems - this tie from MS

[Ed Biow]

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Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 13:28:13 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: [conspire] More Firefox Addon problems - this tie from MS

> I've been meaning to check that.  The information is also needed on
> a period basis for updating
> http://www.svlug.org/farm.php#local-vendors, which is likewise in
> my care.
>
> Anyone know who currently sells retail Linux distributions,
> locally?
I went by Fry's over the weekend and noticed that the only operating
system in the OS department was Windows 7. One retail possibility is
to buy a Linux distro book which will generally include the most
recent release at the time the book was published (and hence is
probably a bit dated). Of course those books are pretty pricey, ~$50.
Another retail-store option is to buy a copy of LinuxFormat magazine,
I've seen those at the local Barnes & Noble for ~$20.
> I'm actually thinking of just recommending Sidux, for that niche.
> It really _isn't_ running sid; adding stability is pretty much one
> of the cornerstones of what Sidux is about.
I tried installing sidux on a machine I gave to my atheist-son (being
a non-believer I can't really have a God-son).  It wasn't a good call,
IMO. Updating the system requires dropping to init 3 with apt-get
dist-upgrade, which is not going to be easy for a new user.  Even for
regular package management the sidux guys recommend using apt-get.  I
don't recall that Synaptic or any other GUI tool is even installed by
default.

http://manual.sidux.com/en/sys-admin-apt-en.htm#apt-cook

"Use whatever you like to search for packages, but stick with apt-get
for actually installing/removing/dist-upgrading.

Package managers like adept, aptitude, synaptic and kpackage are at
the least, non-deterministic (for complex package selection), mix that
with a quickly moving target like sid and even worse an external
repository of questionable quality (we don't use or recommend those,
but they're a reality on your user systems) and you will be courting
disaster.

The other item to note is that all of these types of GUI package
managers need to run in init 5, and/or, in X, and in doing a
dist-upgrade in init 5 and/or X , (or even an 'upgrade' which is not
recommended), you will end up damaging up your system beyond repair,
maybe not today or tomorrow, however in time you will."

The sidux folks recommend a "DU" every week or two, with a month or
two being the maximum safe time between apt-get dist-upgrades. Because
there is so much package churn in sid that means download many
hundreds of MB per month (vs. Stable which might require 50-100 MB).

With my friends' sidux computer they never got it together to upgrade
it. I would try to upgrade it when I visited but there was so much to
be downloaded that it would never finish a "apt-get dist-upgrade -d"
with their limited bandwidth by the time my spouse wanted go home (I'd
installed every game I could find for the kid, so the / partition is
huge).  I finally had to take the machine home to upgrade it.  Since
it hadn't been upgraded for 2 years the DU didn't go smoothly, I had
to use quite a bit of command-line-fu to rescue the install (including
completely removing X and reinstalling it).  I would have just
formatted and started over with something more suitable, but my little
10 year old "nephew" was addicted to many of the bountiful games I'd
installed & I didn't want to figure out which ones he played or hose
his scores and settings. As far as I could tell he hadn't used the
email or IM, saved or written a single document or even used the
browser, though. Ah well, he's getting older, maybe he'll start
exploring the other stuff.

One reason I installed sidux on that box was because of the great
scripts which helped keep it updated (and also helped install various
non-DFSG bits like proprietary drivers).  Unfortunately, this spring
the sidux developers started deleting all reference to the scripts
from the forums and kicking anyone who mentioned the scripts from the
IRC channel.  The result was a nasty split in the community. Lots of
very helpful, active long term users abandoned the distro and the
current community is not nearly as pleasant or useful a place to seek
support as it once was. BTW, you can still use smxi, sgfxi, svmi,
exoodles, etc. with sidux, just don't mention in on irc.oftc.net #sidux.

Regards,

Ed








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