• For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?

    From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to All on Wednesday, June 05, 2024 19:25:23
    POLL
    • For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    • 1) Ubuntu
      7
    • 2) Debian
      5
    • 3) A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other)
      2
    • 4) Redhat/CentOS/Fedora
      4
    • 5) Suse and variants
      0
    • 6) Slackware
      1
    • 7) Arch and variants
      3
    • 8) One of the BSDs
      0
    • 9) AIX/Solaris/HP-UX ;-)
      0
    • 10) Something else
      0
    •  
      You cannot vote on this poll.
  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Gamgee on Thursday, June 06, 2024 10:01:59
    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%] û
    2: Debian [1 16.67%] û
    3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] û

    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. :)

    DaiTengu

    ...Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to DaiTengu on Thursday, June 06, 2024 11:14:00
    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%] û
    2: Debian [1 16.67%] û
    3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] û

    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)

    Yes, I thought about that, but I knew there would be more folks using
    the above distros and wanted to be a little more granular on the choices
    for those. I know they are all Debian offspring, but they are different enough to get an individual listing. :-)

    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.

    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. :)

    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.

    Thanks for the feedback.



    ... Windows 3.1 - From the people who brought you EDLIN.
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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Thursday, June 06, 2024 10:41:24
    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).

    Nightfox

    ---
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  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Gamgee on Thursday, June 06, 2024 12:34:05
    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.

    DaiTengu

    ...Life is a hereditary disease.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com
  • From Digital Man@VERT to DaiTengu on Thursday, June 06, 2024 13:43:00
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: DaiTengu to Gamgee on Thu Jun 06 2024 12:34 pm

    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.

    Same here.
    --
    digital man (rob)

    Rush quote #9:
    One likes to believe in the freedom of ... baseball!
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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Thursday, June 06, 2024 18:14:00
    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.

    Yes, I also recall fairly frequent problems with Xwindows and graphics
    cards back in those days. I liked Mandrake quite a bit and then
    something happened to them and it morphed into something else.
    "Mandriva" maybe? That's when I moved full time to Slackware, probably
    around 2003.

    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).

    Yes, it does use the newest Gnome and I also dislike it. Feels very
    "dumbed down" to me.

    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).

    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.



    ... Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know.
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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to DaiTengu on Thursday, June 06, 2024 18:16:00
    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.

    That's cool. I have several headless things running here too, but my
    daily driver (this ThinkPad laptop) uses the XFCE desktop. There are
    only two windows computers in the house - my work laptop, and my wife's desktop. :-)



    ... Honk if you love BBSing!
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to DaiTengu on Thursday, June 06, 2024 19:25:12
    On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 15:01:58 -0500, you wrote:

    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. :)

    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!

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Accession on Thursday, June 06, 2024 18:52:10
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to DaiTengu on Thu Jun 06 2024 07:25 pm

    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.

    Nightfox

    ---
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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to DAITENGU on Thursday, June 06, 2024 16:33:00
    1: Ubuntu [1 16.67%] û
    2: Debian [1 16.67%] û
    3: A Debian variant (Mint/MX/other) [1 16.67%] û

    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)

    They probably could have been, but I would have been reluctant to vote on
    an option that included Ubuntu. It may be based on Debian, but IMHO Debian
    is much more stable, especially when it comes time for a release upgrade.

    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.

    Installed the relative Debian version instead and viola, it just worked.


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  • From Denn@VERT/OUTWEST to Dumas Walker on Thursday, June 06, 2024 22:32:09
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops opera
    By: Dumas Walker to DAITENGU on Thu Jun 06 2024 04:33 pm

    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.

    I run a mystic BBS on raspian, and several game servers on Ubuntu.

    I really like Ubuntu.

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    þ Synchronet þ the Outwest BBS - outwestbbs.com or outwest.synchro.net
  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Accession on Friday, June 07, 2024 00:38:43
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to DaiTengu on Thu Jun 06 2024 07:25 pm

    Shit, plenty? Maintaining one Gentoo box is an exercise in futility. :)

    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 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.

    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 Linux is now built the exact same way that CentOS was, downstream from RHEL. Redhat moved CentOS to be the "upstream" distro, and now RHEL is built from it. It's sacrificing a bit of stability and a lot of support. Rocky is the same as RHEL line-for-line. It's just missing the proprietary Red Hat things. Alma on the other hand, does take some liberties and will go ahead and fix bugs or upgrade things here and there that aren't part of the RHEL releases their release is based on.

    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.

    DaiTengu

    ...Advertising is legalized lying.

    ---
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  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Nightfox on Friday, June 07, 2024 00:40:22
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Nightfox to Accession on Thu Jun 06 2024 06:52 pm

    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.

    DaiTengu

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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Friday, June 07, 2024 08:37:00
    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. ;)


    * SLMR 2.1a * Most political jokes get elected
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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to DENN on Friday, June 07, 2024 08:39:00
    I run a mystic BBS on raspian, and several game servers on Ubuntu.

    I really like Ubuntu.

    I liked it and thought it worked fine so long as I didn't ever try to upgrade to the next release. ;)


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  • From fusion@VERT/CFBBS to Gamgee on Friday, June 07, 2024 12:54:00
    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.

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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to DaiTengu on Friday, June 07, 2024 10:02:25
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: DaiTengu to Nightfox on Fri Jun 07 2024 12:40 am

    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.

    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?

    Nightfox

    ---
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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to fusion on Friday, June 07, 2024 13:34:00
    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 :)

    Ahhh yes, now that you say it I remember that too. Defining "modelines"
    and refresh rates for certain resolutions. Fun and annoying all at the
    same time. :)

    on the OS/2 side we just bought from a list. not on the list? too
    bad :)

    I never got aboard the OS/2 train. Straight from DOS to Win, and
    eventually Linux.

    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.

    SCSI.... yes there's another big can of worms. Don't remember having to
    do anything with that in Linux, but surely did on a CDROM disk changer (Panasonic, maybe?) under MSDOS that I used on my BBS in the 90's - had
    to play with a lot of command-line switches and memory stuff. Loading order
    of drivers in autoexec and config.sys, and the like. Pretty satisfying
    to get all that working after a lot of effort. I miss those days. ;)



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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Friday, June 07, 2024 13:35:00
    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. ;)

    That's funny, as I actually still use (and prefer) cfdisk... Hahaha



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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Friday, June 07, 2024 15:27:34
    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

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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Nightfox on Friday, June 07, 2024 18:54:06
    On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 23:52:10 -0700, you wrote:

    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.
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to DaiTengu on Friday, June 07, 2024 19:11:28
    On Fri, 7 Jun 2024 05:38:42 -0500, you wrote:

    Shit, plenty? Maintaining one Gentoo box is an exercise in
    futility. :)

    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. :)

    I think once the main Gentoo guy left and Funtoo started, I started messing with Sabayon a little bit (Gentoo with a binary package manager? It was like a dream come true). Eventually, moved to Archlinux.

    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

    Rolling releases have been super popular. I'm surprised they haven't done anything like this sooner, to be honest. I get it, keep your flagship "rock-solid super-stable enterprise-grade OS", but it almost seems now like it's a little too late.

    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.

    I mean, why not? They only did it to themselves. :)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Nightfox on Friday, June 07, 2024 20:14:34
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Nightfox to DaiTengu on Fri Jun 07 2024 10:02 am

    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?


    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.

    One of the early CentOS founders went off and founded Rocky Linux, named for the original CentOS founder that died in 2004 at the age of 30.

    The idea is to take the place of what CentOS was, it's a 1:1 line-for-line clone of RHEL, with the proprietary bits stripped out. Rocky 9's EOL isn't until 2032.

    If super-stability isn't that important. Fedora might be a good option. New Fedora versions come out about every 6 months or so. Every once in awhile they fork Fedora to create the next version of CentOS. CentOS 9 Stream (and RHEL 9) is based on Fedora 34 The current version of Fedora is 40, which was released in April.

    Fedora 34 was released 3 years ago.

    That doesn't mean CentOS 9 is an exact snapshot from Fedora 34 that will never be upgraded, but they try to keep libraries and things consistent/stable. The kernel stays around that version (5.11 I believe), and glibc really only gets bugfixes / security patches if required. Basically major "new features" aren't generally introduced. Most major updates/changes are bug fixes, security patches and support for hardware.

    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.

    DaiTengu

    ...All turtle thoughts are of turtle.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com
  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to Accession on Friday, June 07, 2024 20:25:03
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to DaiTengu on Fri Jun 07 2024 07:11 pm

    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. :)

    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

    DaiTengu

    ...Death is hereditary

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com
  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to DaiTengu on Saturday, June 08, 2024 07:52:56
    On Sat, 8 Jun 2024 01:14:34 -0500, you wrote:

    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.

    All of this is has been a worry for XCP-ng users as well, apparantly. I had installed it on Virtualbox to test it out recently, and had read a lot of articles where the developers were swearing up and down that while they were using some upstream CentOS stuff, they were still basically running their own OS, and could pick and choose what went into their updates to keep it stable. However, I'm sure it still kept (and is keeping) current and possible future users of it on their toes.

    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.

    "Stability" has come a LONG way in the last, say 10 years, though. Even rolling distributions are doing more behind the scenes testing before pushing things through. At least that seems to be my experience with Arch. As I said before, I've been live updating my server, rebooting into a new kernel, etc. whenever I feel like it since I re-installed it in 2017. Speaking of which, looks like linux-6.9.3.arch1-1 is out, so time for another. :)

    There may have been a couple times over those years, where after updates there would be a note saying something didn't work with some version of something else, so I had to head to the forums and figure out what to do to undo it (which wasn't a big deal at all). Then keep an eye out and/or wait like a week for the fix to be pushed, and re-update. Never had any breakage or downtime, though.

    Definitely had *way* more breakage and downtime with Gentoo, but that was probably 10-15 years ago. It has probably gotten a lot better since then. However, my Gentoo days are over. I'd rather spend my free time working on the BBS stuff, or testing new packages, etc.. than battle my OS for some time to do all that.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to DaiTengu on Saturday, June 08, 2024 08:04:28
    On Sat, 8 Jun 2024 01:25:02 -0500, you wrote:

    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 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.

    For some reason, I'm starting to have a case of deja vu. lol

    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

    Even back when I used Gentoo, *most* of the normal stuff was usually fine, and wouldn't break your system. It usually wasn't until you had X and whatever desktop environment of your choice installed where your graphics drivers needed to be re-installed a certain specific way or everything was trashed. Then you would have to go through and make sure every trace of the old driver was gone, in order to maybe successfully install the new one.

    It was a pain in the ass, but that was across all distros at that time. However, definitely worse off for the Ubuntu kids that couldn't log into their systems because of their login managers (mostly just because of lack of know-how). Ah, those were the days. :)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Saturday, June 08, 2024 10:29:00
    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. ;)


    * SLMR 2.1a * All of the stars are to be found only up in the sky.
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Saturday, June 08, 2024 18:33:00
    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.

    Oooof. That doesn't sound fun.

    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.

    Yeah, that seems a little silly on their part.

    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. ;-)



    ... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Sunday, June 09, 2024 08:44:00
    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. ;-)

    Pretty much that and the fact that cfdisk would have allowed me to make
    such an error in the future and never stop to warn me about it. Sometimes
    my fingers work faster than my brain so I could not risk it. :D


    * SLMR 2.1a * Directory of Z:\
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Sunday, June 09, 2024 16:06:49
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Nightfox to DaiTengu on Fri Jun 07 2024 10:02 am

    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?

    It seems to me that IBM/Red Hat wanted to offer a free-tier RHEL that wasn't a real clone (such as CentOS used to be). The existence of a free RHEL is something that generates lots of indirect business and free marketing, but I bet they could not allow the free alternative to be a 1:1 clone.

    CentOS Stream is a bit like a RHEL "Debian" Testing offered free of charge. If you just want to try the distribution or are a non-enterprise customer you can get the non-production ready code and roll with it for free. If you want to run the production-ready version you buy RHEL. It is the same business model Proxmox is based on, actually. The only problem is IBM/Red Hat is quite ineffective at preventing the creation of additional 1:1 clones of their flagship distro.


    --
    gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Sunday, June 09, 2024 16:14:16
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to DaiTengu on Sat Jun 08 2024 08:04 am

    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. :)

    Distributions and Operating Systems that have an integrated way of dealing with both binary packages and source ports are the best man-made thing ever, I swear .

    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


    --
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Arelor on Sunday, June 09, 2024 18:59:00
    Hello Arelor,

    On Sun, Jun 09 2024 21:14:16 -0500, you wrote:

    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.

    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.

    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

    If you have the time to spend on your distro, by all means go ahead and compile everything. However, I don't. :)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Thursday, June 13, 2024 06:55:43
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to Arelor on Sun Jun 09 2024 06:59 pm

    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.


    On OpenBSD -stable you are very unlikely to break dependencies by mixing packages and ports as long as you don't mess with core libraries. If you mess with core libraries you can actually survive anyway because it will only break stuff if you make api/abi breaking changes.

    On -current it is a different matter entirely, because stuff changes all the time.
    --
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  • From nelgin@VERT/EOTLBBS to Gamgee on Wednesday, June 26, 2024 19:48:26
    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.
    --
    End Of The Line BBS - Plano, TX
    telnet endofthelinebbs.com 23
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  • From DaiTengu@VERT/ENSEMBLE to nelgin on Wednesday, June 26, 2024 23:45:53
    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.

    ...RAM = Rarely Adequate Memory

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to nelgin on Thursday, June 27, 2024 07:35:00
    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.

    Well.... it works for some. Certainly not everyone. :-)



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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to DaiTengu on Thursday, June 27, 2024 07:37:00
    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.

    It's very bloated, and I might even up that ante and say it's the Linux version of <cough> Windows.

    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.

    100%.



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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Thursday, June 27, 2024 09:03:41
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Gamgee to DaiTengu on Thu Jun 27 2024 07:37 am

    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.

    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.

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Friday, June 28, 2024 10:57:00
    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).


    * SLMR 2.1a * The well resolved mind is single & one pointed
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Nightfox on Friday, June 28, 2024 18:25:11
    On Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:03:41 -0700, you wrote:

    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.

    Besides that, there's not many linux distros that Synchronet *doesn't*
    work well with. :)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin)
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Friday, June 28, 2024 21:30:00
    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).

    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.

    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).

    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.



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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Gamgee on Saturday, June 29, 2024 07:22:36
    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.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Saturday, June 29, 2024 13:14:00
    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.

    Yes, I would agree with all of that. Graphics drivers almost certainly
    the cause of such problems, and many others.

    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.

    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.

    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).

    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 just have no need for a full GUI Linux desktop system at this point,
    so I stick with Arch.

    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.
    :-)

    Regards,
    Dan



    ... Clones are people two.
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
    þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL
  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Saturday, June 29, 2024 16:42:04
    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.

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Saturday, June 29, 2024 20:19:00
    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.


    ... She sells unix shells by the sea shore.
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
    þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL
  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Saturday, June 29, 2024 19:55:58
    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).

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Gamgee on Saturday, June 29, 2024 23:20:04
    On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 18:14:00 -0500, you wrote:

    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.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
    --- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderb
    * Origin: _thePharcyde distribution system (Wisconsin) (723:1/1)
    þ Synchronet þ _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin)
  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Nightfox on Saturday, June 29, 2024 23:24:48
    On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 21:42:04 -0700, you wrote:

    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).

    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).

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
    --- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderb
    * Origin: _thePharcyde distribution system (Wisconsin) (723:1/1)
    þ Synchronet þ _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin)
  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Accession on Saturday, June 29, 2024 23:01:39
    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.

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Digital Man@VERT to Nightfox on Saturday, June 29, 2024 23:44:46
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
    By: Nightfox to Accession on Sat Jun 29 2024 11:01 pm

    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.

    Your Linux system circa 2003-2007 was definitely using sysvinit to start-up, run services/daemons, etc.
    https://www.computernetworkingnotes.com/linux-tutorials/differences-between-sysvinit-upstart-and-systemd.html
    --
    digital man (rob)

    Sling Blade quote #17:
    Charles Bushman: A shovel just makes too goddamned much racket.
    Norco, CA WX: 67.1øF, 76.0% humidity, 0 mph N wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Sunday, June 30, 2024 08:40:00
    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.

    No doubt. I am a combat-wounded veteran of the Nvidia Wars. ;-)

    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".

    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 guess I'm all for moving forward as long as it doesn't take away from the original goals.

    Hard to argue with that - although I've always believed the Unix
    philosophy was (paraphrasing) "Each tool should do ONE job, and do it
    well." I feel like systemd wants to "Do all jobs, and sort of do them
    well enough". Haha! Not completely accurate but you get the idea.

    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.

    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.

    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*

    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).

    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.

    Nice, and no argument here about Linux gaming. It's come a long way but
    not yet (and likely never) will it catch all the way up.

    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.

    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.

    R/
    Dan


    ... Users come in two types: Those who have lost data, and those who will.
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
    þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Sunday, June 30, 2024 08:44:00
    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).

    Yes, I get that, but... as I said above I don't always want it starting
    the BBS automatically when I bring up (or reboot) the computer. Also if
    I want to take the BBS down for some maintenance or tweaking, it seems
    much easier to just stop it, do the work, and then just start it again manually. I know you can stop/start stuff with 'systemctl' but somehow
    I find that awkward. Maybe I'm just set in my ways... Haha.



    ... I was wondering why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
    þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL
  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Accession on Sunday, June 30, 2024 09:15:42
    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.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
    --- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderb
    * Origin: _thePharcyde distribution system (Wisconsin) (723:1/1)
    þ Synchronet þ _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin)
  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to ACCESSION on Sunday, June 30, 2024 09:59:00
    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.

    (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 spit out some messages about packages (with names I didn't recognize as important) no longer being available that, if I didn't know better, would make me think ubuntu was purposefully removing them to get people to move get
    $$$ out of people. Those packages ARE available in other non-ubuntu deb-based releases, so it is not a case of them being unsupported.

    apt under Debian and Devuan spits out no such messages. They "just work"
    like they are supposed to.

    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.

    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.


    * SLMR 2.1a * My other vehicle is a Galaxy Class Starship ...
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to NIGHTFOX on Sunday, June 30, 2024 10:00:00
    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.

    You can run things daemonized (i.e. in the background) without systemd.


    * SLMR 2.1a * Something Amiss? Hi, I'm Something Amister.
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to ACCESSION on Sunday, June 30, 2024 10:02:00
    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.


    * SLMR 2.1a * Salesmen do it with their tongues.
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Gamgee on Sunday, June 30, 2024 11:37:20
    On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 13:40:00 -0500, you wrote:

    No doubt. I am a combat-wounded veteran of the Nvidia Wars. ;-)

    Same here, it was definitely a rough time. Then once one figured out how to remove the old driver and all of it's remnants *before* installing the new driver, things worked much better.

    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.

    You'll probably be surprised at how simple it really is. But I completely understand not being super excited to break away from something you already know all too well. :)

    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.

    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 with K3b, for example.. if you want to use it and you're using Gnome, you end up installing half of KDE and most of it's libraries just for that one app. They're definitely not meant to be standalone applications to use anywhere, that's for sure.

    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

    That is the one I'm using, and while messing with it last night, it never told me I had updates available, until this morning I manually clicked "Check for Updates". Now that both versions are updated, the XFCE variant's kernel is 6.9.6-1, and the Fluxbox variant's kernel is 6.1.0-22.

    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).

    Yeah, definitely not as behind as it first seemed. Also realized that XFCE has a right click application launcher menu just like Fluxbox does. Learn something new every day. Honestly, I don't have a lot of experience with XFCE as the default look was always off-putting for me. But slowly widdling away at it to make it easier on my eyes I'm finding a lot of unexpected things (so far, all good things).

    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.

    Hah. That's basically exactly how it's been going for me, too. :)

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Sunday, June 30, 2024 12:55:00
    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).

    Yes, I also change up the theme/cosmetics some, but it's not too bad to
    tweak up the way I like it.

    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.

    I've always found Flux (and similars like blackbox/openbox) to be a
    little more minimalistic than I prefer.

    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 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 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.

    You may be right, but I don't see nearly as much "extra" in MX as I have
    seen in other distros. Glad you gave it a look.



    ... Bug free, cheap, on time, works. Pick two.
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Dumas Walker on Sunday, June 30, 2024 11:53:46
    On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 14:59:00 -0500, you wrote:

    (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.

    I would hope that may be more specific to Ubuntu, then. I guess I haven't really heard of that happening anywhere else, and I've definitely heard about the woes of upgrading Ubuntu plenty of times in the past.

    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 one 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. :)

    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.

    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.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Dumas Walker on Sunday, June 30, 2024 11:55:50
    On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 15:02:00 -0500, you wrote:

    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.

    True, we're probably talking nanoseconds here at this point. There was a much bigger difference (at least noticeable) in boot times between BIOS and UEFI, though.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Accession on Sunday, June 30, 2024 12:30:35
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
    By: Accession to Gamgee on Sun Jun 30 2024 11:37 am

    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

    Years ago, I read that KDE was initially designed to be user-friendly for people who are used to Windows.

    These days, I tend to like Cinnamon (which I think is also supposed to be familiar for people who are used to Windows), and I also think Xfce is pretty good too. There are editions of Linux Mint (my current favorite Linux distro) that come with Cinnamon or Xfce. I've been using Linux Mint on a secondary PC (which I mainly set up to run Plex Media Server) since about 2015 and generally it just works and has been very stable. I was running my BBS in a Windows VM on that until a copule years ago, when I moved my BBS to run in the Linux Mint host OS.

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Sunday, June 30, 2024 12:33:11
    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..

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to nelgin on Sunday, June 30, 2024 17:40:07
    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.


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Accession on Sunday, June 30, 2024 17:55:29
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
    By: Accession to Gamgee on Sat Jun 29 2024 07:22 am

    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 like bootup scripts.

    The real problem with systemd is not how it manages booting. The problem is it was conceived from the get-go as a tool from the Red Hat ecosystem to take over strategical userspace components of the Linux sphere (such as sudo, syslogd, the myriad seat managers, you name them). Since it was a political tool it was used politically and many software projects started adopting it as a required dependency well before they had technical reasons to do so (such as when Gnome announced it would classify it as a blessed dependency).

    SystemD is like the Seamonkey web-browser: a semi-modular solution that incorporates lots of functions not related to its declared purpose at all. Sometimes that is exactly what you need, and that is fine. 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.


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Gamgee on Sunday, June 30, 2024 18:00:32
    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 :-)


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Sunday, June 30, 2024 18:04:44
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
    By: Nightfox to Gamgee on Sat Jun 29 2024 07:55 pm

    You can do that when running it with systemd by monitoring the logs (which you can do in real-time if you want).

    And you can also do that using a system hacked together with runit and busybox. That does not mean a runit+busybox frankenmonster is superior to a traditional init.


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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Sunday, June 30, 2024 17:42:00
    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..

    Sounds very similar to what I'm doing. Slackware with XFCE, and
    multiple xfce-terminal windows open. One where I started the BBS and
    therefor has the log and "controls" (keypresses) available at the bottom
    (like 'Q' to exit the BBS). Then I have a window tailing sbbs.log
    (using the 'lnav' utility which rocks); another window tailing
    sbbsecho.log with lnav, and another tailing with a grep for any 'tickit' activity. Then one more open 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 do most anything I need to do at a
    CLI interface, it is sometimes nice to use a GUI file manager or even
    Firefox to check the Wiki or something. All seems to work well for me.

    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. :-)



    ... If it weren't for Edison we'd be using computers by candlelight
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
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  • From MRO@VERT/BBSESINF to Arelor on Sunday, June 30, 2024 19:30:44
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Arelor to nelgin on Sun Jun 30 2024 05:40 pm

    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.

    when was this? wasn't linux magazine done in the 2000s? or is linux magazine back?

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Arelor on Sunday, June 30, 2024 19:10:00
    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.

    Hahaha! Yes, I guess that would be possible. But worth the effort?

    I mention this because the point of computers is doing stuff
    automatically :-)

    That's the point, to a point. ;-)




    ... If it weren't for Edison we'd be using computers by candlelight
    --- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Arelor on Sunday, June 30, 2024 19:59:26
    On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 22:55:28 -0500, you wrote:

    I like bootup scripts.

    I didn't mind them either. They did their job (and still do) well. I just ran into systemd when it was introduced into Archlinux, and kept going with it. I didn't go out of my way to go back to sysvinit, that's all.

    Otherwise, I don't worry too much about politics in general, especially Linux politics.

    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.

    I do remember when all of this went about. I don't really know if "jumped the gun" is the best description, or if they just "followed suit" because everyone else was doing it.

    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.

    Looks as though FreeBSD forums are already discussing something similar to systemd, if not already in the ports tree. MacOS already has something called "launchd" which is similar. So, who knows what they're doing.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Gamgee on Monday, July 01, 2024 04:58:15
    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?


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to MRO on Monday, July 01, 2024 05:02:06
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: MRO to Arelor on Sun Jun 30 2024 07:30 pm

    when was this? wasn't linux magazine done in the 2000s? or is linux magazine back?

    Dude, Linux New Media had not stopped paying me last time I checked :-P

    Linux Journal crashed and burned around 2010 or so. Linux Voice sold itself to Linux New Media to avoid bankrupcy maybe two or three years ago. Linux Magazine still marches quite strong because we are borging all the failed magazines in.


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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Arelor on Monday, July 01, 2024 08:00:00
    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.

    True enough, would be easy to do. It doesn't change the fact though,
    that I basically *never* want the BBS to start automatically at bootup.
    So at least for me, it's not applicable. I don't mind starting it
    manually, and in fact want to do it that way. ;-)

    And fun is the main reason why people keeps hobby home labs,
    isn't it?

    Indeed.


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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to ACCESSION on Monday, July 01, 2024 08:11:00
    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. :)

    On the box in question, I replaced the broken ubuntu upgrade with debian.
    I am running devuan on two other systems, though. One is older, the other
    is an sbc that does not have the x-server installed (cli only). It seems
    to be as stable as debian, once you get it installed and tweaked.

    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.

    Could be, but devuan (without GUI) on the same hardware does not random
    reboot. I suspect that not running systemd *might* make it a little less memory intensive, but I could be 100% wrong.


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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Monday, July 01, 2024 10:19:53
    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 :)

    Nightfox

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Monday, July 01, 2024 22:05:00
    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.

    That has happened here too (gtkmonitor fail to build after an update).
    When it happens I go to the gtkmonitor directory in ../src/sbbs3 and
    build it again there, and it has worked. I should probably switch to
    umonitor as well though, as everything else I'm doing is non-GUI.

    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 :)

    Linux helps people get along! ;-)



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  • From Amessyroom@VERT/TL-QWK to Nightfox on Monday, July 01, 2024 22:08:16
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops o
    By: Nightfox to Gamgee on Mon Jul 01 2024 10:19 am

    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.

    Thanks for mentioning umonitor. I had not read anything about it.

    I got gtkmonitor to work, but I'm running on a VPS so I have tunnel X11 back over SSH which is slow over the internet.

    I keep learning something everyday. Thanks for sharing.

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  • From Prowler@VERT/PROWLER to Nightfox on Monday, July 29, 2024 09:03:03
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Nightfox to Gamgee on Fri Jun 07 2024 03:27 pm

    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


    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.

    Prowler (Tom)

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  • From Prowler@VERT/PROWLER to Accession on Monday, July 29, 2024 09:06:12
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Accession to Nightfox on Fri Jun 07 2024 06:54 pm

    On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 23:52:10 -0700, you wrote:

    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.
    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.

    Prowler (Tom)

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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Prowler on Monday, July 29, 2024 09:34:30
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Prowler to Nightfox on Mon Jul 29 2024 09:03 am

    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

    That's cool that there was some use of OS/2 there.

    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.

    Yeah, I like the options we have today. And although I think it would have been nice to see things like OS/2 and Amiga continue on, we can at least run those through emulation and virtual machines.

    Nightfox

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@VERT/REALITY to Prowler on Monday, July 29, 2024 09:48:56
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Prowler to Nightfox on Mon Jul 29 2024 09:03 am

    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.



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    þ Synchronet þ .: realitycheckbbs.org :: scientia potentia est :.
  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, July 29, 2024 13:51:51
    Re: Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Prowler on Mon Jul 29 2024 09:48 am

    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.

    I feel like I may have missed the heyday of OS/2, which seems to have been the early 90s. My first computer, in 1992, was a hand-me-down 286 and I wasn't old enough to get a job yet - and I didn't get my first job until 1996, so in the meantime I don't think I had a PC that was really up to running OS/2. Before I got my first job and bought my own parts for a new PC, the fastest PC I had was a 386DX-40, which I think could have ran OS/2, but I don't think I had enough RAM (I think I had 4MB max at the time) and maybe not enough hard drive space either.

    Around 1994 or 1995, I bought a used copy of OS/2 Warp 3 at a used software store in my area (before they closed, I think due to legal reasons), and it was on floppies, and many of the floppies were bad.. Later (1996 or 1997), I bought a new sealed copy of OS/2 Warp 4 from my local Egghead Software (and I wondered if spending the $120 on it would be worth it), and I had my PC in a dual-boot setup with that and Windows for a little while. I think one of the things I tried that I thought was really cool was using Ray Gwinn's SIO driver for OS/2 to make my DOS-based RemoteAccess telnettable. But I only did that as an experiment; I continued running my DOS BBS in DOS/Desqview (and later Windows).

    Nightfox

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    þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com
  • From phigan@VERT/TACOPRON to Prowler on Tuesday, July 30, 2024 06:34:36
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
    By: Prowler to Accession on Mon Jul 29 2024 09:06 am

    CentOS 8's EOL is soon. CentOS 9
    just begun. :)
    years now since I've used it, but I'
    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?

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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to phigan on Friday, August 02, 2024 07:11:11
    Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating
    By: phigan to Prowler on Tue Jul 30 2024 06:34 am

    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?

    Long story short: CentOS Stream (the new CentOS) is only CentOS in name. The new plan is for CentOS Stream to be for Red Hat Enterprise Linux what Debian Testing is to Debian Stable.


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