"Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first certification authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine." One of the more interesting quotes: "With Ubuntu, it's still too early to say we've been successful. My personal goal is to make the distro sustainable - then there will be a team that pays its own way and can focus on producing the best free software desktop on the planet without my interference!"
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Member since:2006-01-02
What difference does it make if some distros use different package management systems? If you can always get most of the software through your distribution's package management system (which is generally really easy, point and click in Synaptic, for example), then who cares? Third-parties can either take the extra time to build RPMs alongside DEBs or use something like autopackage or klik to package their software. Some, like Java and other big third-party software titles have their own installers that work like in Windows. And finally, third parties don't have to target every little distribution. If they hit Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu/Debian and Mandriva, they've covered most everybody. People using more obscure or difficult to use distros like Gentoo are already savvy enough to do the tricks necessary to install software meant for another distribution.
People like to bitch and moan about different package formats, but in reality, it's not a problem.
Member since:2005-07-13
Member since:2005-10-20
I was referring to different package format from the point of view of a new user, but its amazing that an experienced user like you finds gentoo "Obscure" ( it is in top 10 on distrowatch) and difficult to use when you yourself write
"I can also easily try out very experimental software, even through portage (which is a real plus). It doesn't always work, but I find it's easier to deal with the resulting breakage on Gentoo than on other systems. "
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=13361&comment_id=87591
Please decide if you find gentoo easy to use before posting.
Member since:2005-07-06
Compare Windows to a distribution not to Linux in general. Suse is a different OS than Ubuntu, kernel comes from the same source but has been built differently, packages come from the same source but are built and installed differently, directory structures are different (not sure on this).....
A program designed for Suse 10 will work with Suse 9, same way a program designed for Windows XP will work with Windows 2000 (most of the time, there are exceptions in both camps).
Member since:
2005-10-20
Autumatix --
It even installs Firefox 1.5. I have it.
That apart
Though I feel that due to the lage number of Linux distributions present, no single distro would become a sole representation of Linux and eventually pose a big threat to MS. All major distributions have mutually incompatible packages, well we can install rpm in debian, but still it is not recommended. Some other prominent formats like tar.gz (slackware and Arch) are totally incompatible with Debian (including Ubuntu & Mepis) and rpm based ( Fedora,SUSE, Mandriva etc).
Also users of each distribution like their own format ( Is is easy to convince a gentoo fan to use Mepis ? ).
Compare this with Windows were MS is the only player. All the programs made for windows have a single install and run mechanism, and they all do their assigned task, very little configuration is required.
No doubt Ubuntu is good and newbie-freindly, but to say the Ubuntu will reach a level where windows is and that MarK S will be the next Mr. Gates is a little too much.
Lets just stick to our short term goals and make linux as usable as possible and indeed Ubuntu is a good effort in that direction.