1: Ubuntu [1 16.67%] √
2: Debian [1 16.67%] √
3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] √
DaiTengu wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
By: Gamgee to on Wed Jun 05 2024 07:25 pm
1: Ubuntu [1 16.67%] √
2: Debian [1 16.67%] √
3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] √
These probably could have been combined into one like the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora one is (I assume
Rocky/Alma/Oracle/Scientific/etc fall under this)
I run CentOS on my main BBS Box, and it's in desparate need of an
upgrade. (CentOS 7 reaches EOL at the end of the month). I'm
considering moving it to Gentoo, which is what I've run for over
a decade on my home devbox (and also what hosts my SEXPOTS dialup application).
In the end though, I'll probably just wind up moving it to CentOS
9 Stream or Possibly Rocky or Alma 9. Maintaining one Gentoo box
is plenty. :)
Cool, and an interesting mix there. Quite different. I was once a fan of the Redhat heritage, even ran Redhat for a short while before it went commercial, and then Mandrake after that (still RPM package management). I
guess I've never tried CentOS, but have installed Fedora a few times, but found it too Gnome-focused. I actually liked Gnome back in the early days with RH and Mandrake, but it's evolved into.... something I don't like any more. Finally settled on Slackware (w/ XFCE desktop) and been there ever since.
Haha, yes I have tried Gentoo also, LONG ago, and while fun for a while, was too much work. Good way to learn about Linux, though.
I run CentOS on my main BBS Box, and it's in desparate need of an
upgrade. (CentOS 7 reaches EOL at the end of the month). I'm considering
moving it to Gentoo, which is what I've run for over a decade on my home
devbox (and also what hosts my SEXPOTS dialup application).
Cool, and an interesting mix there. Quite different. I was once a fan of the Redhat heritage, even ran Redhat for a short while before it went commercial, and then Mandrake after that (still RPM package management). I guess I've never tried CentOS, but have installed Fedora a few times, but found it too Gnome-focused. I actually liked Gnome back in the early days with RH and Mandrake, but it's evolved into.... something I don't like any more. Finally settled on Slackware (w/ XFCE desktop) and been there ever since.
Very rarely do I use a GUI on Linux. All of my linux boxes are headless.
I run Windows on my main PC, which hosts an X-server, where I can run graphical applications remotely if I need to.
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your
flavor?
By: Gamgee to DaiTengu on Thu Jun 06 2024 11:14 am
Cool, and an interesting mix there. Quite different. I was once a fan of the Redhat heritage, even ran Redhat for a short while before it went commercial, and then Mandrake after that (still RPM package management). I
I tried Mandrake years ago (maybe around 2001 or 2002), and one
thing I ran into was that it worked well on my PC in one version,
but when I tried to install the next version, some things (such
as its graphics hardware detection for X) wasn't working well
anymore, etc.. I had seen that with some Linux distros back
then, where one version would work well but the next version
wouldn't. It was odd, as it was like things would sometimes
regress with newer versions.
guess I've never tried CentOS, but have installed Fedora a few times, but found it too Gnome-focused. I actually liked Gnome back in the early days with RH and Mandrake, but it's evolved into.... something I don't like any more. Finally settled on Slackware (w/ XFCE desktop) and been there ever since.
I also liked earlier versions of Gnome, and I don't like the
newer versions (which is one reason I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu,
as I recall it using a recent version of Gnome by default).
Haha, yes I have tried Gentoo also, LONG ago, and while fun for a while, was too much work. Good way to learn about Linux, though.
Yep, I used Gentoo for a while on a laptop, around 2004. I had
it configured to build all packages, and things like XFree86 and OpenOffice would take hours to build (I'd leave it overnight to
install those).
DaiTengu wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your
flavor?
By: Gamgee to DaiTengu on Thu Jun 06 2024 11:14 am
I run CentOS on my main BBS Box, and it's in desparate need of an
upgrade. (CentOS 7 reaches EOL at the end of the month). I'm considering
moving it to Gentoo, which is what I've run for over a decade on my home
devbox (and also what hosts my SEXPOTS dialup application).
Cool, and an interesting mix there. Quite different. I was once a fan of the Redhat heritage, even ran Redhat for a short while before it went commercial, and then Mandrake after that (still RPM package management). I guess I've never tried CentOS, but have installed Fedora a few times, but found it too Gnome-focused. I actually liked Gnome back in the early days with RH and Mandrake, but it's evolved into.... something I don't like any more. Finally settled on Slackware (w/ XFCE desktop) and been there ever since.
Very rarely do I use a GUI on Linux. All of my linux boxes are
headless. I run Windows on my main PC, which hosts an X-server,
where I can run graphical applications remotely if I need to.
In the end though, I'll probably just wind up moving it to CentOS 9
Stream or Possibly Rocky or Alma 9. Maintaining one Gentoo box is
plenty. :)
I may give CentOS a try one of these days as I've always heard great things about it, but my servers will most likely always run Arch.
1: Ubuntu [1 16.67%] √
2: Debian [1 16.67%] √
3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] √
These probably could have been combined into one like the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora one is (I assume Rocky/Alma/Oracle/Scientific/etc fall under this)
I run Debian, Devuan (a Debian variant), and Raspbian here. Used to run Ubuntu on one sbc because I thought I had to. Just like the other time I tried out ubuntu on another machine, when it came time for the next release upgrade, I followed the directions and wound up with an sbc that didn't
work any more.
Shit, plenty? Maintaining one Gentoo box is an exercise in futility. :)
I may give CentOS a try one of these days as I've always heard great things about it, but my servers will most likely always run Arch.
Whatever you're comfortable with, I say go for it!
Considering CentOS is being end-of-lifed soon (as of June 30), there probably isn't much point in trying it now.
Yes, I also recall fairly frequent problems with Xwindows and graphics
cards back in those days. I liked Mandrake quite a bit and then
I run a mystic BBS on raspian, and several game servers on Ubuntu.
I really like Ubuntu.
Yes, I also recall fairly frequent problems with Xwindows and graphics cards back in those days. I liked Mandrake quite a bit and then
Been there, too. Haha, yeah that stuff was painful. I used to even configure and compile custom kernels (on Slackware), thinking I could squeeze out more "performance"... Maybe it did, and in those days I was on fairly weak hardware so it helped, and was a lot of fun actually.
But also a lot of work, and I don't bother with that any more.
Considering CentOS is being end-of-lifed soon (as of June 30), there
probably isn't much point in trying it now.
CentOS 7 is. CentOS 8 Stream and CentOS 9 Stream are not. You've got a few years on 9, and a year or so on 8.
The "Stream" distros though have swapped places with RHEL proper. CentOS used to be built from the RHEL distros. Now RHEL is built from CentOS.
fusion wrote to Gamgee <=-
On 06 Jun 2024, Gamgee said the following...
Yes, I also recall fairly frequent problems with Xwindows and graphics cards back in those days. I liked Mandrake quite a bit and then
i remember configuring XFree86 came with a giant warning about
how it could damage your monitor.. spent an awful lot of time one
year tracking down the exact specs for some chinese 19" monitor
to attempt both 1600x1200 and 75hz (iirc) paranoid i might damage something.. that and.. the video card driver was compiled into
the X server itself? something like that. weird times :)
on the OS/2 side we just bought from a list. not on the list? too
bad :)
Been there, too. Haha, yeah that stuff was painful. I used to even configure and compile custom kernels (on Slackware), thinking I could squeeze out more "performance"... Maybe it did, and in those days I was on fairly weak hardware so it helped, and was a lot of fun actually.
But also a lot of work, and I don't bother with that any more.
i used to have to do that for an IBM server i had.. for the SCSI
raid controller.. that whole machine was a giant waste of
electricity. did feel cool the one and only time one of the power
supplies failed and i hot swapped it out. but yeah, i think i
studied the kernel config options for a while before deciding to
just use the slackware one as a template and then add the extra
stuff.
Dumas Walker wrote to GAMGEE <=-
Yes, I also recall fairly frequent problems with Xwindows and graphics
cards back in those days. I liked Mandrake quite a bit and then
That was how I landed on debian. It took a little more knowledge
to set up than the ones with the more automated installers, but
it was the only one that got my graphics card right.
Now, it did also come with cfdisk set as the default partitioning
program back then. Removing it and replacing with fdisk fixed
any issues. ;)
I never got aboard the OS/2 train. Straight from DOS to Win, and eventually Linux.
I may give CentOS a try one of these days as I've always heard great
things about it, but my servers will most likely always run Arch.
Considering CentOS is being end-of-lifed soon (as of June 30), there probably isn't much point in trying it now.
Shit, plenty? Maintaining one Gentoo box is an exercise infutility. :)
Meh, I've been using Gentoo for probably 20 years at this point. It
has its quirks, but no distro has taught me more than Gentoo has.
modern CentOS (The ones labeled "Stream" ) are a far cry from what it
used to be. It was designed to be a rock-solid super-stable enterprise-grade OS. Rocky Linux has taken its place, literally. Rocky
Whatever you're comfortable with, I say go for it!
Pretty much. I'll still make fun of people who use Macs, though, any chance I get.
CentOS 7 is. CentOS 8 Stream and CentOS 9 Stream are not. You've got a
few years on 9, and a year or so on 8.
The "Stream" distros though have swapped places with RHEL proper. CentOS
used to be built from the RHEL distros. Now RHEL is built from CentOS.
Ah, I've heard something about that. I had the impression that CentOS as we know it will be discontinued. Wikipedia even says CentOS is a "discontinued Linux distribution". It sounds like CentOS Stream won't be much different than the current CentOS?
Meh, I've been using Gentoo for probably 20 years at this point. It has
its quirks, but no distro has taught me more than Gentoo has.
I used it for about 5 years when I first started. I actually _chose_ to use it when I wanted to learn and transition to Linux. Boy was I a glutton for punishment, back then.
However, I agree with you there, as far as no distro has taught me more than Gentoo, also. All the sleepless nights fixing what 'emerge -avuDN world" did to me after compiling all night (and sometimes half of the next day, too) to install and/or upgrade packages. :)
Yeah, basically. The rage over it is from enterprise customers.
CentOS stood for "Community Enterprise Operating System". It's entire focus was around stability, and moving upstream of RHEL potentially
reduces some of that stability.
That doesn't mean things can't be upgraded. There are many official,
and even more unofficial repositories that install newer versions of programs, but users potentially sacrifice stability when that's done.
Fun fact, Gentoo now offers binary packages. This is a thing they did recently.
one of my co-workers also runs Gentoo, but he's a bit more insane than
I am. he just did an update with the latest profile and it completely
hosed his system.
I'm still running a Gentoo profile from 2017 I think. I got a
notification the other day that I need to update my profile to something newer, but you better believe I'll be using some kind of clonedisk or something first just in case :D
Now, it did also come with cfdisk set as the default partitioning program back then. Removing it and replacing with fdisk fixed
any issues. ;)
That's funny, as I actually still use (and prefer) cfdisk... Hahaha
Dumas Walker wrote to GAMGEE <=-
Now, it did also come with cfdisk set as the default partitioning program back then. Removing it and replacing with fdisk fixed
any issues. ;)
That's funny, as I actually still use (and prefer) cfdisk... Hahaha
I fat fingered something once and somehow wound up with two
partitions that overlaped and eventually caused a lot of system
errors, forcing a complete reinstallation of the whole system.
When I reported it as a bug in cfdisk, I was informed that is
should allow you to make such mistakes and not even warn you
because that was "freedom."
When I told them I was pretty sure that fdisk wouldn't let me,
and I knew that M$'s FDISK wouldn't, they got real mad.
That was when cfdisk went bye-bye. ;)
That was when cfdisk went bye-bye. ;)
To be fair... it wasn't so much cfdisk's fault... as it was the jerkoffs giving you a hard time about it. But I hear ya. ;-)
Ah, I've heard something about that. I had the impression that CentOS as we know it will be discontinued. Wikipedia even says CentOS is a "discontinued Linux distribution". It sounds like CentOS Stream won't be much different than the current CentOS?
Fun fact, Gentoo now offers binary packages. This is a thing they did recently.
I take it you mean, "officially", or something? I remember there being side projects that tried to introduce it, especially when Sabayon Linux was popular. But to be honest, Gentoo is Gentoo. Binary packages kind of defeats the entire purpose and meaning of Gentoo. :)
One of the reasons why I think the BSDs rock is precisely because you
can install binary packages if you are in a hurry, but if you want to install something after adding a custom patch yourself or do some nifty tricks, you can use the ports trees and build a package (with its dependencies) tailored to your system.
In fact, one of the big pluses of Slackware is that it has ports-like
tools that allow you to build your stuff as you see fit without needing
to go the wacko-crazy way of building absolutely everything from the
ground up :-p
I usually do non-distro related compiles and custom patching on stuff I install to a src directory straight from github. If I'm using 'pkg install' on BSD, or 'pacman -S' on Arch, I usually tend to stick with that route. Not sure how it is these days, but I would assume mixing the two could lead to dependency issues or whatever else.
1: Ubuntu
2: Debian
3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other)
4: Redhat/CentOS/Fedora
5: Suse and variants
6: Slackware
7: Arch and variants
8: One of the BSDs
9: AIX/Solaris/HP-UX ;-)
10: Something else
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it. --
nelgin wrote to Gamgee <=-
On Wed, 5 Jun 2024 19:25:23 -0500
"Gamgee" (VERT/PALANTIR)
<VERT/PALANTIR!Gamgee@endofthelinebbs.com> wrote:
1: Ubuntu
2: Debian
3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other)
4: Redhat/CentOS/Fedora
5: Suse and variants
6: Slackware
7: Arch and variants
8: One of the BSDs
9: AIX/Solaris/HP-UX ;-)
10: Something else
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
DaiTengu wrote to nelgin <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your
flavor?
By: nelgin to Gamgee on Wed Jun 26 2024 07:48 pm
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
Ubuntu works, poorly. It's a bit bloated and you're forced into
using quite a few things. It's the Linux version of OSX.
Performance on older hardware can be problematic, and there are
far better distros out there that don't suck up precious memory
and/or CPU cycles that are needed elsewhere.
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
Ubuntu works, poorly. It's a bit bloated and you're forced into using
quite a few things. It's the Linux version of OSX.
It's very bloated, and I might even up that ante and say it's the Linux version of <cough> Windows.
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
Well.... it works for some. Certainly not everyone. :-)
And suggesting that "everyone should use it" seems a bit odd. There
are a lot of Linux distros, and Ubuntu isn't the only one that
Synchronet works well with.
Dumas Walker wrote to GAMGEE <=-
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
Well.... it works for some. Certainly not everyone. :-)
Ubuntu worked fine here, until I tried to upgrade to the next release.
Any time I have tried to upgrade to the next release, on any machine,
it bricks the machine until I freshly install something else on it (usually Debian).
Debian, the distro that Ubuntu is derived from, does not give me that issue. It just works. Devuan, another Debian derivative, also does
not give me that issue (although I have found on some hardware it is better to install it as a cli-only OS).
Interesting - I haven't heard of that happening. I've not used Ubuntu for more than a few minutes at a time, and not long enough to upgrade it.
I need to give that Devuan a look one of these days. Debian without 'systemd', sounds like a winner. I've been a Slackware user for a couple of decades, and
still am, mostly; although I'm starting to use MX Linux on a few machines, including this new Framework laptop I'm on now. Really like it a lot, it's another Debian descendant without systemd.
Accession wrote to Gamgee <=-
On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 02:30:00 -0500, you wrote:
Interesting - I haven't heard of that happening. I've not used Ubuntu for more than a few minutes at a time, and not long enough to upgrade it.
I'm not sure that's a recent thing, any more. It was back when Linux
devs couldn't get their heads around proprietary graphics drivers (and maybe still can't). Now that they've gone mostly open source with
those, the chances of that happening is far less than it used to be.
I need to give that Devuan a look one of these days. Debian without 'systemd', sounds like a winner. I've been a Slackware user for a couple of decades, and
still am, mostly; although I'm starting to use MX Linux on a few machines, including this new Framework laptop I'm on now. Really like it a lot, it's another Debian descendant without systemd.
Not sure what you have against systemd. I gladly switched over when it
was introduced, and have never had an issue. A lot less scripting involved, that's for sure.
Anyway, the other day I was bored and installed Manjaro (Gnome) and Manjaro (KDE) in a couple Virtualbox VMs, to see how that distro as
well as the latest and greatest from the two most popular desktop environments were getting along these days. It was a much nicer
experience than I remember back when they first started (Manjaro, that
is, obviously KDE and Gnome are much older than that).
I just have no need for a full GUI Linux desktop system at this point,
so I stick with Arch.
Not sure what you have against systemd. I gladly switched over when it
I guess it's mostly the (assumed) philosophy that "let us manage all your startup processes the way we think is best, and you don't worry about the details". I know that isn't quite accurate, because you can of course tweak systemd like most anything else, but that's as close as I can come to a reason. I like to know exactly what's happening and have as much control over that as I can. Another claim is that systemd does things "in parallel all at once" and thereby reduces boot time. I don't care one little bit about that, as I don't reboot often and don't care if it takes 12 seconds, or 14 seconds.
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
By: Gamgee to Accession on Sat Jun 29 2024 01:14 pm
Not sure what you have against systemd. I gladly switched over when it
I guess it's mostly the (assumed) philosophy that "let us manage all your startup processes the way we think is best, and you don't worry about the details". I know that isn't quite accurate, because you can of course tweak systemd like most anything else, but that's as close as I can come to a reason. I like to know exactly what's happening and have as much control over that as I can. Another claim is that systemd does things "in parallel all at once" and thereby reduces boot time. I don't care one little bit about that, as I don't reboot often and don't care if it takes 12 seconds, or 14 seconds.
How do you normally run Synchronet on your system? When I moved my BBS from Windows to Linux a couple years ago, for a little while I was just directly running sbbs from a command prompt, but I later set it up to
run with systemd. I think one of the advantages of the systemd setup is
it runs in the background, and I think I wouldn't even have to log in
for it to be running. Also, systemd can monitor and restart processes
that have crashed. On Windows, every so often I saw Synchronet crash, seemingly randomly, and at one point when doing some debugging, it
looked to me like the crash was caused by something in the Mozilla JavaScript library. I didn't bother to debug further (I'd probably
have to compile the JS libraries in debug mode), but I was using
something for Windows that would monitor whether Synchronet was running and re-start it if it wasn't. I feel like it's good that that feature
is built-in with systemd.
I just run it from a terminal window while in the /sbbs/exec directory,
with './sbbs syslog' . I have several other terminals open tailing
several logs, and another terminal for checking on things like
backlogged mail or system load, etc.
I do not want it starting automatically when the computer is booted up, because perhaps I'm going to do something with the computer such as OS/security updates, or BBS updates, or tweaking of some kind; before
the BBS starts. When I'm ready for it to come up, I bring it up. Doesn't take much effort or time. That way I also get to see that it did indeed start properly, ports are opened/listening, etc. I like to pay attention
to the small details to make sure all is running smoothly.
Yes, I would agree with all of that. Graphics drivers almost certainly
the cause of such problems, and many others.
I guess it's mostly the (assumed) philosophy that "let us manage all
your startup processes the way we think is best, and you don't worry
about the details". I know that isn't quite accurate, because you can
of course tweak systemd like most anything else, but that's as close as
I can come to a reason. I like to know exactly what's happening and
have as much control over that as I can. Another claim is that systemd does things "in parallel all at once" and thereby reduces boot time. I don't care one little bit about that, as I don't reboot often and don't care if it takes 12 seconds, or 14 seconds.
Yes, I've toyed with Manjaro a few times and liked it OK. I suppose
those are the two most popular desktops, with Gnome only being there because of Ubuntu, IMHO. I used to love Gnome but it became so
dumbed-down looking (I think it looks like a Fisher-Price toy) that I
moved (years ago) to XFCE and love it. Kind of Gnome-ish but light and fast, and very configurable.
Next time you're bored, spin up a VM with MX Linux (xfce desktop) and
see what you think. It's about the only one I like any more.
I use Linux as my daily driver, on mulitiple desktop/laptops, so it's important to me. Servers/BBS run on Slackware, and even my daily laptop has been Slackware for many years. Transitioning to a new laptop and decided to go with MX Linux, as it's just less work. The only two
Windows computers in the house are my work laptop and my wife's desktop. :-)
How do you normally run Synchronet on your system? When I moved my BBS from Windows to Linux a couple years ago, for a little while I was just directly running sbbs from a command prompt, but I later set it up to
run with systemd.
You may have missed all the great years of sysvinit if you just jumped ship somewhat recently. Everything was scripted (and still is, if you choose a distro that doesn't use systemd and still uses it).
You may have missed all the great years of sysvinit if you just jumped ship somewhat recently. Everything was scripted (and still is, if you choose a distro that doesn't use systemd and still uses it).
I've used Linux tor a long time, but for other things. I dabbled woth Slackeare in the mid 90s and used SuSE a bit around 2000, and worked in a fully Linux environment at a job from 2003 to 2007.. I remember seeing sysvinit but I don't remember if I made mudh use of it.
Accession wrote to Gamgee <=-
Yes, I would agree with all of that. Graphics drivers almost certainly
the cause of such problems, and many others.
Proprietary graphics drivers, to be specific. This was before there
were any open source drivers out there. When open source drivers were introduced, there were problems at first, but then most of the graphic related problems went away.
I guess it's mostly the (assumed) philosophy that "let us manage all
your startup processes the way we think is best, and you don't worry
about the details". I know that isn't quite accurate, because you can
of course tweak systemd like most anything else, but that's as close as
I can come to a reason. I like to know exactly what's happening and
have as much control over that as I can. Another claim is that systemd does things "in parallel all at once" and thereby reduces boot time. I don't care one little bit about that, as I don't reboot often and don't care if it takes 12 seconds, or 14 seconds.
Yeah, I don't care about losing a couple seconds on boot time,
whatsoever. I make just about every one of my systemd startup scripts myself, so in a sense, I'm pushing the 'what to do', and systemd takes care of the "how to do it".
I guess I'm all for moving forward as long as it doesn't take away from the original goals.
Yes, I've toyed with Manjaro a few times and liked it OK. I suppose
those are the two most popular desktops, with Gnome only being there because of Ubuntu, IMHO. I used to love Gnome but it became so
dumbed-down looking (I think it looks like a Fisher-Price toy) that I
moved (years ago) to XFCE and love it. Kind of Gnome-ish but light and fast, and very configurable.
Gnome is definitely different from how it used to be. Once they began catering to tablets and touchscreens, I lost interest. However,
nowadays, they definitely still do that, but have relaxed the focus
they used to have on that a bit to continue to do actual desktop environment kind of stuff.
I didn't mind it, and to be honest, I may have liked it a little bit better (aesthetically) than whatever direction they went with KDE. The bouncing icon next to the mouse pointer was cool 10 years ago, not now. The default window borders aren't all that exciting. However, programs like Konsole I like better than Gnome Terminal, Konversation for IRC, KTorrent, K3b, Kate, and a couple others are better than the Gnome variants, if Gnome even has a variant of some of those.
Next time you're bored, spin up a VM with MX Linux (xfce desktop) and
see what you think. It's about the only one I like any more.
Thanks for the heads up, I've downloaded the XFCE as well as the
Fluxbox (brings back memories) variants, and will give them a shot in
the morning and get back to you.
The only issue I see is that it's Debian based. The first thing from Debian that turns me off is that it's usually so far behind the times
(I get it, their main focus is stability, but damn). For example, MX
XFCE 64bit uses a 6.6 kernel, and here on Archlinux I'm using 6.9.7 currently, and it's rock solid stable. *shrug*
I use Linux as my daily driver, on mulitiple desktop/laptops, so it's important to me. Servers/BBS run on Slackware, and even my daily laptop has been Slackware for many years. Transitioning to a new laptop and decided to go with MX Linux, as it's just less work. The only two
Windows computers in the house are my work laptop and my wife's desktop. :-)
Understood completely. My main PC here is Windows, just because I have
a Steam library that would cripple most people here. I still like to
play AAA games, and Linux just hasn't convinced them to port their
stuff just yet.
Anything BBS/FTN/server related though, goes straight to my server machine, running nothing but Linux. I may have a 'tinkering' FreeBSD VM just to mess around, but it will most likely never go further than
that.
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
I just run it from a terminal window while in the /sbbs/exec directory,
with './sbbs syslog' . I have several other terminals open tailing
several logs, and another terminal for checking on things like
backlogged mail or system load, etc.
I do not want it starting automatically when the computer is booted up, because perhaps I'm going to do something with the computer such as OS/security updates, or BBS updates, or tweaking of some kind; before
the BBS starts. When I'm ready for it to come up, I bring it up. Doesn't take much effort or time. That way I also get to see that it did indeed start properly, ports are opened/listening, etc. I like to pay attention
to the small details to make sure all is running smoothly.
You can do that when running it with systemd by monitoring the logs
(which you can do in real-time if you want).
Next time you're bored, spin up a VM with MX Linux (xfce desktop) and
see what you think. It's about the only one I like any more.
Thanks for the heads up, I've downloaded the XFCE as well as the Fluxbox (brings back memories) variants, and will give them a shot in the
morning and get back to you.
Interesting - I haven't heard of that happening. I've not used Ubuntu for more than a few minutes at a time, and not long enough to upgrade it.
I'm not sure that's a recent thing, any more. It was back when Linux devs couldn't get their heads around proprietary graphics drivers (and maybe still can't). Now that they've gone mostly open source with those, the chances of that happening is far less than it used to be.
Not sure what you have against systemd. I gladly switched over when it was introduced, and have never had an issue. A lot less scripting involved, that's
for sure.
How do you normally run Synchronet on your system? When I moved my BBS from Windows to Linux a couple years ago, for a little while I was just directly running sbbs from a command prompt, but I later set it up to run with systemd.
I think one of the advantages of the systemd setup is it runs in the background, and I think I wouldn't even have to log in for it to be running. Also, systemd can monitor and restart processes that have crashed. On Windows
every so often I saw Synchronet crash, seemingly randomly, and at one point when doing some debugging, it looked to me like the crash was caused by something in the Mozilla JavaScript library. I didn't bother to debug further
(I'd probably have to compile the JS libraries in debug mode), but I was using
something for Windows that would monitor whether Synchronet was running and re-start it if it wasn't. I feel like it's good that that feature is built-in
with systemd.
I liked it, it did what I needed it to do. I just migrated to systemd when my >OS of choice did the same, and it works just as well (for me, anyway).
No doubt. I am a combat-wounded veteran of the Nvidia Wars. ;-)
That's cool, and I could live with that. Perhaps some of my resistance
is the lack of time/motivation to learn enough about it to be able to do that. I'm only a few years from retiring, so maybe I'll get there then.
I've never been able to stand using KDE. Not sure exactly why but I
just don't like it. Maybe it reminds me of Windows a little. I have always used and loved K3b for burning discs though, but that's the only
app I like.
Ahhhh, yes it is Debian-based, but is NOT the same as Debian-stable.
Forgot to mention - there is a version of MX called "AHS" (for advanced hardware) and that's what I'm using. After installation and a routine update, 'uname -a' reports this:
Linux rivendell 6.9.6-1-liquorix-amd64 #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT liquorix 6.9-5~mx23ahs (2024-06-25) x86_64 GNU/Linux
So... not bad. That's probably the version you want, assuming fairly recent hardware (and I've run that version just fine on 7-8 year old hardware).
Same... I've always felt like I "should" learn/use a 'BSD, and have
gotten various flavors running, but eventually said "OK, now what?".
"What does this do that I can't already do on Linux?". "Why put any
more effort into this?". And that's the end of it.
Accession wrote to Accession <=-
On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 04:20:04 -0500, you wrote:
Next time you're bored, spin up a VM with MX Linux (xfce desktop) and
see what you think. It's about the only one I like any more.
Thanks for the heads up, I've downloaded the XFCE as well as the Fluxbox (brings back memories) variants, and will give them a shot in the
morning and get back to you.
Following up on this, both versions are snappy, and installation was a breeze. However (and this has been long-standing), I would have to
spend a good amount of time changing themes, icons, window borders,
etc. because the stock ones that come with XFCE and Fluxbox are old, plain, blacked out, squared corners and just flat out ugly, to me
anyways (always have been).
The Fluxbox version is on an older kernel (6.1 compared to 6.6) than
the XFCE version, which they tout as their flagship. I have always had
a place for Fluxbox, though. And it looks like now you're able to have
a decent dash to dock type thing like Gnome uses in there as well. I've always liked how you can right click anywhere on the desktop and pull
up a nice, straightforward application launcher menu. Again, though, default window borders and icons leave something to be desired.
Besides my anal retentiveness on how things actually look, it seems to operate nicely, and that's the important part. If I were to ever go
with a GUI on Linux, it would probably either be a slimmed down version
of Gnome (if there's still some kind of gnome-light version or
whatever) in order to try and keep it fast, or I would have to
completely change up the aesthetics of a default XFCE or Fluxbox
install.
I still imagine as far as speed goes, you're probably better off installing a base like Debian, or Archlinux, or Slackware, or whatever you're into, and then installing your desktop environment on top of
that. That way you control what else gets installed after that, since
most of these distros add their own apps and bloatware that you may
never actually need. Obviously, people pick these distros to avoid the extra work it takes to do all that, and MX definitely seems to be able
to compete with the rest of them.
(1) it happened here earlier this year
(2) it had nothing to do with graphic drivers, as best as I can tell,
as I could see the screen enough to know that the machine was not working.
I remember the graphic driver issue days and this didn't look anything like
the colorful mess you could wind up with after an install in those days.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with them being more "cutting edge." I also suspect it had something to do with the messages about certain packages no longer being available in the "non-paid support" release.
apt under Debian and Devuan spits out no such messages. They "just work" like they are supposed to.
There has been some recent noise about something else they have rolled into
systemd that was causing folks issues. Here, I found that on certain machines, installing a systemd based distro resulted in unrequested, random
reboots. Installing devuan made that stop happening on system #1 (a more critical system). System #2, the same hardware, required a GUI and Debian proper was left on it. It is not so critical and still reboots at odd times.
I liked it, it did what I needed it to do. I just migrated to systemd
when my
OS of choice did the same, and it works just as well (for me, anyway).
Aside from the aforementioned issues on a couple of boxes, that is also what I did. IMHO, they really don't seem to boot much faster, if at all.
I've never been able to stand using KDE. Not sure exactly why but I just
I agree, it definitely reminds me of Windows, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I guess. However, my biggest gripe is the dependencies. Even
I think Gnome only comes in the Bloatware size any more. There may be some variations though, as I recall in Mint Linux (I think) that you can choose between "Cinnamon" and "Mate" and the Cinnamon was almost tolerable for me. But it's been a while.
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
Not sure what you have against systemd. I gladly switched over when it was introduced, and have never had an issue. A lot less scripting involved, that's for sure.
I do not want it starting automatically when the computer is booted up, because perhaps I'm going to do something with the computer such as OS/security updates, or BBS updates, or tweaking of some kind; before
the BBS starts. When I'm ready for it to come up, I bring it up. Doesn't take much effort or time. That way I also get to see that it did indeed start properly, ports are opened/listening, etc. I like to pay attention
to the small details to make sure all is running smoothly.
You can do that when running it with systemd by monitoring the logs (which you can do in real-time if you want).
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
By: Gamgee to Accession on Sun Jun 30 2024 12:55 pm
I think Gnome only comes in the Bloatware size any more. There may be some variations though, as I recall in Mint Linux (I think) that you can choose between "Cinnamon" and "Mate" and the Cinnamon was almost tolerable for me. But it's been a while.
I like Linux Mint, and yes, there are editions with Cinnamon and Mate.
I tend to like Cinnamon, but I also like Xfce. And I know a GUI isn't really necessary on a computer running services, but I have the Mint
Xfce edition on my PC running my BBS (and I also run Plex Media Server
on that PC). With the GUI environment, I often like to have
Synchronet's umonitor running (to show my BBS node status etc.) and
also have a terminal window running to show the Synchronet log in real-time, etc..
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
By: nelgin to Gamgee on Wed Jun 26 2024 07:48 pm
Ubuntu, it just works. Everyone should use it.
I got an Ubuntu Bulgie DVD with Linux Magazine and, while it actually
brings
something new to the table, it doesn't feel very Linuxy to me. It certainly took more time for me to set it up as I liked than, say Devuan. Part of the issue I have with Ubuntu is that at this point they are trying very hard for everything to be a Snap.
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
By: Gamgee to Nightfox on Sat Jun 29 2024 08:19 pm
I do not want it starting automatically when the computer is booted up, because perhaps I'm going to do something with the computer such as OS/security updates, or BBS updates, or tweaking of some kind; before
the BBS starts. When I'm ready for it to come up, I bring it up. Doesn't take much effort or time. That way I also get to see that it did indeed start properly, ports are opened/listening, etc. I like to pay attention
to the small details to make sure all is running smoothly.
I think the elegant solution is to define a "maintenance" runlevel for when you want to boot up without starting all your user facing
services, rather than having your main runlevel start only the basics
and then force you to start your services manually.
I mention this because the point of computers is doing stuff
automatically :-)
I like bootup scripts.
Sometimes you only need a web browser and would rather use Netsurf. The problem is lots of software projects jumped the gun for no very good (official) reason and made it hard for everybody to use anything but SystemMonkeyD... current systemdless solutions that actually work exist
due only to massive effort from the FOSS community.
BTW there are enough pieces of circumpstancial evidence to suggest systemd's blessed side effect was to cripple the BSD ecosystem
explicitly. Not that it is working that well. The BSDs have a tendency
not to try to be Linux.
I think the elegant solution is to define a "maintenance" runlevel for when you want to boot up without starting all your user facing services, rather than having your main runlevel start only the basics and then force you to start your services manually.
Hahaha! Yes, I guess that would be possible. But worth the effort?
when was this? wasn't linux magazine done in the 2000s? or is linux magazine back?
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Sun Jun 30 2024 07:10 pm
I think the elegant solution is to define a "maintenance" runlevel for when you want to boot up without starting all your user facing services, rather than having your main runlevel start only the basics and then force you to start your services manually.
Hahaha! Yes, I guess that would be possible. But worth the effort?
Slackware's init system is so hackable that I think achieving
this is actually easy. If you have to manually launch your
services more than 6 times in the lifetime of your OS instance
then I'd think implementing this is actually worth the 7 minutes
it takes. Plus it will be fun for you to learn how inittab and
company work if you don't know already.
And fun is the main reason why people keeps hobby home labs,
isn't it?
apt under Debian and Devuan spits out no such messages. They "just work"
like they are supposed to.
That's a good thing. I take it you're using Devuan now? That may be another on
I might have to take a look at. I'm not really in the market for a GUI distro,
but it cures boredom at times. :)
Maybe I'm lucky then, but I haven't had a single issue with systemd in all the >years I've used it. Definitely never had a Linux distro randomly reboot on me, >which almost sounds more like hardware failure than anything else.
terminal for general looking around at stuff on the computer. Instead of umonitor I like to have gtkmonitor open, as it looks nicer. While I can
The cool thing about all this discussion lately is that it doesn't much matter which *distro* you want to use, in the end, the operation on Linux is nearly identical other than cosmetics. :-)
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
By: Gamgee to Nightfox on Sun Jun 30 2024 05:42 pm
terminal for general looking around at stuff on the computer. Instead of umonitor I like to have gtkmonitor open, as it looks nicer. While I can
I was using gtkmonitor for a while, but there was a point where I
updated the code and gtkmonitor failed to build. I asked Digital Man about it, and at the time I think he said gtkmonitor wasn't being
updated very often, so I started using umonitor instead.
The cool thing about all this discussion lately is that it doesn't much matter which *distro* you want to use, in the end, the operation on Linux is nearly identical other than cosmetics. :-)
Yep :)
I was using gtkmonitor for a while, but there was a point where I updated the code and gtkmonitor failed to build. I asked Digital Man about it, and at the time I think he said gtkmonitor wasn't being updated very often, so I started using umonitor instead.
Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
By: Gamgee to fusion on Fri Jun 07 2024 01:34 pm
I never got aboard the OS/2 train. Straight from DOS to Win, and eventually Linux.
I went from DOS to Windows too, but in 1996 I experimented a bit with OS/2 because I was curious about it. I could definitely see how it would have been nice to run a BBS in OS/2 (even a DOS BBS). I had also played a bit with Ray Gwinn's SIO drivers, which allowed telnet access to a virtual serial port.. I tried setting up a copy of RemoteAccess (BBS software for DOS) with those SIO drivers and was impressed that I could successfully telnet into it. I also looked into an OS/2-native BBS package that I thought looked interesting (AdeptXBBS) but never actually used it to run a BBS.
By that time though, Windows was the main OS I was using, and OS/2 was on its way out, with not much software being made for it.
Nightfox
On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 23:52:10 -0700, you wrote:I ran CentOS for a long time in a datacenter environment for headless servers. It was really just an alternative to RHEL at the time and I never regretted it from a security and ease-of-use standpoint. It's been a few years now since I've used it, but I'll have to check out 9.
I may give CentOS a try one of these days as I've always heard great
things about it, but my servers will most likely always run Arch.
Considering CentOS is being end-of-lifed soon (as of June 30), there probably isn't much point in trying it now.
CentOS 8's EOL is soon. CentOS 9 has just begun. :)
Regards,
Nick
... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
Your post really resonated with me. I really had big hopes for OS/2. While serving in the Navy we used Windows NT Server and Workstation primarily but OS/2 Warp made it's way into our internal network for managing building security (badging, door sensors, alarms). I wanted to
run BBS's on OS/2 but ended up using Windows instead. It's so nice now to have so many options all the way from CP/M and DOS all the way to Raspian, Debian, and some really cool distros. I've even got Mint installed on a spare laptop which is pretty decent and gives Ubuntu a run for it's money from a desktop perspective.
I never got aboard the OS/2 train. Straight from DOS to Win, and
eventually Linux.
I was all-in for quite some time. Worked with OS/2 1.2 and 1.3 in a IBM AS/400 and Lan Manager environment, then 2.0, then Warp 3 working with Netware - and then Windows NT 3.51 came out and it just *worked*.
Ran the BBS under OS/2 Warp 3 for a couple of years, loved that I could have a mailer, busy BBS and all the utilities running in an OS/2 console in the background of my desktop and not even notice it was there.
CentOS 8's EOL is soon. CentOS 9years now since I've used it, but I'
just begun. :)
have to check out 9.
Previous CentOS were all just copies
of RHEL with all the "RedHat" images
taken out. If I remember correctly, the
new CentOS releases will be based on
Fedora instead. Does that jive, or am I
misremembering?
| Sysop: | Xerxes |
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