[nflug] The Ultimate Distro

[matt donovan]

I have been looking at Ulteo and I don't see anything about it that is
really good well beisdes it's like ubuntu pretty much.

On 12/29/06, Wolfe, Robert <robert_todd at adelphia.net> wrote:
>
> Found this in the Jan 07 edition of Linux Journal:
>
> The Ultimate Distro
> By Glyn Moody on Wed, 2006-12-27 08:48.
>
> The name of Gaël Duval's new distro, Ulteo, with its hint of the word
> "ultimate", smacks of a certain ambition.  But Duval probably means it in
> the sense that it is the last distribution you will ever need to install,
> because thereafter it will "self-upgrade automatically," as the announcement
> of the alpha release put it.  Ease-of-use has been a constant theme in
> Duval's work.  When he launched his first distro, Mandrake, in July 1998,
> one of his stated goals was "to provide a working and easy-to-install
> linux-distribution to people who don't want to spend too much time in
> installing and configuring their Linux system : just install it and USE IT."
>
> But if the vision has been steadfast, the path to achieving it has proved
> somewhat stony.  First Mandrake acquired Conectiva to form Mandriva, and
> then, in March 2006, Duval was "laid off", as the euphemism has it.  If
> you're interested, you can read Duval's comments on the whole affair, as
> well as those of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva, and decide for
> yourself what really happened.  But looking at the bigger picture, what's
> interesting about the Mandrake/Ulteo saga is that it recapitulates so much
> of the recent history of free software, as new distros have continually been
> created in an attempt to resolve the perceived shortcomings of existing
> offerings.
>
> In the beginning, Linus created two floppy discs, called "boot" and
> "root".  As Lars Wirzenius, Linus' Helsinki friend and someone who had the
> privilege of being present at the birth of Linux, explained to me a few
> years ago:
>
>    The boot disk had the kernel.  When that booted, it asked you to insert
> the other disk, and that had the whole file system for the Linux
> system.  All the stuff that these days would be put on a hard disc was on
> that floppy.  But it was a very, very small file system, very few programs,
> just enough to be called an independent Unix system.
>
> Copies of these discs were placed on a server at Helsinki
> University.  They were soon mirrored around the world, for example at the
> Manchester Computing Centre (MCC), part of the University of Manchester, in
> the UK.  It was probably here that, in the nicest possibly way, the distro
> wars started.  The MCC decided it could do something a little better than
> Linus' basic two discs, and put together the MCC Interim distribution, which
> first appeared in February 1992, barely six months after Linus had revealed
> Linux to the world.  Shortly afterwards, other distros appeared: Dave
> Safford's TAMU (Texas A&M University) and Martin Junius' MJ collections,
> followed by Peter MacDonald's famous SLS release.
>
> It was SLS that prompted a rather remarkable diatribe in the very first
> issue of Linux Journal, dated March 1994, that pinpoints the fundamental
> challenge facing any distro-maker:
>
>    Many distributions have started out as fairly good systems, but as time
> passes, attention to maintaining the distribution becomes a secondary
> concern.  A case-in-point is the Soft landing Linux System (better known as
> SLS).  It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux
> distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most
> popular.
>
> The author of these strong words was a young Ian Murdock, explaining what
> prompted him to create his own distribution, which he named "Debian" after
> his wife and himself - Deb+Ian.  As he told me in 2000: "I regret how harsh
> I was, because the guy was just trying to do something good."  They may have
> been typical young man's words, but they are also symptomatic of a feeling
> that seems to have welled up time and again within the free software
> community: that the current distros just don't do their job well enough -
> and that something better is possible.
>
> There's a nice graphical representation of this constant sprouting and
> growth, and it's interesting to note that Murdock's Debian has proved a
> strong stock for new shoots of the distro tree.  But this shows only a tiny
> part of the total richness: the indispensable Distrowatch lists over 300
> distributions in its main listing .
>
> This is one of free software's greatest and least-appreciated strengths:
> the fact that it can continue to evolve in an almost organic fashion,
> untrammelled by constraints of economics, or even feasibility.  It is this
> fecundity that drives free software forward unstoppably, and that
> distinguishes it from the sterile code monster that is Windows, which,
> trapped within the carapace of its closed source, only slouches towards
> Redmond to be born every five years or so.  And it is precisely because of
> this ever-present, irrepressible urge to trump what has gone before, and to
> create the ultimate distro, that there will never be one.
>
> Glyn Moody writes about free software at opendotdotdot
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