RE-Linux

The Liturgist · May 10, 2025

By the way, anyone who loves Linux should try Illumos (OpenIndiana being the most end-user friendly version) and the BSD variants. I particularly like FreeBSD and OpenBSD; OpenBSD has the advantage of integrated networking software which one would otherwise only find in high end routers and layer 3 switches, or in add-on software for Linux (there is a Linux program that does BGP and OSPF and another that emulates a Cisco 7200 series router, but openbgpd and openospfd have an interesting and elegant style of configuration file that uses the same syntax as all other configuration files on the OpenBSD system. DragonFlyBSD has an interesting filesystem design. NetBSD runs on a plethora of interesting hardware and is also well put together. Doing embedded systems programming, one encounters BSD fairly frequently among existing systems aside from Juniper routers and switches and NetAPP Network Attached Storage Systems, and MacOS (which used to use a fairly standard FreeBSD userland but has since moved away from this, with each new release being less comfortable in terms of its UNIX facilities in my opinion), one also finds these operating systems on a plethora of consumer electronics and industrial applications.

MINIX version 3 in the 2010s was thought to have the largest installed base of any PC operating system, since all Intel CPUs used an extremely stripped down version of it to run their management engine. But one can also get MINIX fully functional.

I quite enjoy playing with the other open source OS projects as well, for instance, Haiku, which sadly did not have the resources to keep pace with web development, so whereas in 2009-2010 Haiku’s pre-alpha preview was remarkably stable, limited mainly in hardware support, and was capable of being used as a web surfing and e-mail system, this slipped a bit, but perhaps they have caught up since 2020. The GNU Hurd kernel is finally at a state of reasonable functionality. Then there is PureDarwin, an important project intended to hold Apple accountable by ensuring that an open source operating system using the open source code in Mac OS remains available (this ceased to be the case for many years when the OpenDarwin project was shut down in late 2006 IIRC).

Finally there are some embedded real time operating systems which are open source and actually useful, such as eCos. While limited compared to VxWorks or QNX, it is still a pretty good lightweight hard real time system, and there are a few others where it came from.

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

The Liturgist said:
I used to really like SuSE but since they migrated to systemd and other architectural changes I find them disagreeable. I do like that it provides more options in terms of filesystems than RHEL/Fedora/CentOS and clones.

I like PCLinucOS as a rolling release, and am not starting to work with their debian edition

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

The Liturgist said:
By the way, anyone who loves Linux should try Illumos (OpenIndiana being the most end-user friendly version) and the BSD variants. I particularly like FreeBSD and OpenBSD; OpenBSD has the advantage of integrated networking software which one would otherwise only find in high end routers and layer 3 switches, or in add-on software for Linux (there is a Linux program that does BGP and OSPF and another that emulates a Cisco 7200 series router, but openbgpd and openospfd have an interesting and elegant style of configuration file that uses the same syntax as all other configuration files on the OpenBSD system. DragonFlyBSD has an interesting filesystem design. NetBSD runs on a plethora of interesting hardware and is also well put together. Doing embedded systems programming, one encounters BSD fairly frequently among existing systems aside from Juniper routers and switches and NetAPP Network Attached Storage Systems, and MacOS (which used to use a fairly standard FreeBSD userland but has since moved away from this, with each new release being less comfortable in terms of its UNIX facilities in my opinion), one also finds these operating systems on a plethora of consumer electronics and industrial applications.

MINIX version 3 in the 2010s was thought to have the largest installed base of any PC operating system, since all Intel CPUs used an extremely stripped down version of it to run their management engine. But one can also get MINIX fully functional.

I quite enjoy playing with the other open source OS projects as well, for instance, Haiku, which sadly did not have the resources to keep pace with web development, so whereas in 2009-2010 Haiku’s pre-alpha preview was remarkably stable, limited mainly in hardware support, and was capable of being used as a web surfing and e-mail system, this slipped a bit, but perhaps they have caught up since 2020. The GNU Hurd kernel is finally at a state of reasonable functionality. Then there is PureDarwin, an important project intended to hold Apple accountable by ensuring that an open source operating system using the open source code in Mac OS remains available (this ceased to be the case for many years when the OpenDarwin project was shut down in late 2006 IIRC).

Finally there are some embedded real time operating systems which are open source and actually useful, such as eCos. While limited compared to VxWorks or QNX, it is still a pretty good lightweight hard real time system, and there are a few others where it came from.

Bsd is very reliable operating system, but can be very tricky in regards to getting set up on wireless networks

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

barefootNH said:
I started experimenting with Linux since the 2009 time-frame. I'm heavily into technology, but not a super computer-user so it had to be relatively easy: Ubuntu or one if its variants seemed the way to go. I tried many different distros and settled on Ubuntu Mate.

If one of my computers came with Windoze I'd dual-boot with it: since I paid for the Windoze license I might as well keep it for those times when I'd need it. I recently got a great deal on a couple of used enterprise-grade laptops, so I bought a hard drive for each and installed Ubuntu Mate on them; my (non-techie) wife is very comfortable with it.

For quite a few years (since 2012?) I've been using Linux almost exclusively at home, and it has actually helped me at work. It has also helped me with other people's computers when they have a problem, such as their filesystem went corrupt, or something they tried to do went sideways.

FWIW, the founder of Mint is a racial bigot, proud of it, and was unrepentant last I did research. Before I knew that I did try Mint, but eventually discarded it: I, and others have noted that it can be a little 'odd.' YMMV

Never heard that about the Mint founder?

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

Anthony2019 said:
Hi Jesse
The distro is OpenSuSE. It comes in two variants - OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (which is rolling release, and gets all updated packages that have passed their QA process). and OpenSuSE Leap which is a point release and binary compatible with SuSE Enterprise Linux. I use Leap for day to day stuff due to it being very stable - but I keep my eye on Tumbleweed to see new features and updates.

To me, their Yast application always was harder to use fully then those in distros such as Ubuntu, and Mint

The Liturgist · May 12, 2025

YeshuaFan said:
Bsd is very reliable operating system, but can be very tricky in regards to getting set up on wireless networks

Indeed; that said if you use the laptops the developers of OpenBSD use (historically, they preferred ThinkPads) you can be assured of success.

The Liturgist · May 12, 2025

YeshuaFan said:
To me, their Yast application always was harder to use fully then those in distros such as Ubuntu, and Mint

I found it easy when I was first transitioning from Windows NT, VMS and OS/2 workstations and, before I learned how to properly admin a modern Linux system from the command line (I had some experience with Solaris and CDE, but it was a different experience). Now I find it gets in the way. But back in the mid 2000s, after being acquired by Novell as a replacement for the extremely dated legacy Netware OS (Novell ported the Netware file and authentication server from IPX to IP with Linux replacing their old cooperative multitasking OS, which was bootstrapped using the MS-DOS clone DR-DOS, like how DOS was used to load non-NT versions of Windows*, which Netgear acquired along with the rest of DigitalResearch). SuSE had the best desktop experience, particularly with their Linux Enterprise Desktop.

*Windows 3.1 and 3.11 used less of DOS, and Windows 9x was a single user pre-emptive multitasking OS that could use DOS drivers as a last resort, except I think in the short-lived Windows ME, which used DOS only as a bootloader. But Win95 and especially 98 were better if operated with native drivers only, with which they could provide a pretty decent user experience; Windows 98 is particularly remembered with fondness by gamers, and indeed many of my favorite games like Sim City 3000, The Sims, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Caesar 3, and Sim City 4 were developed on or were backwards-compatible with Windows 98 SE.

As late as 2007 or 2008 one could surf the web on it using Firefox 2 or Opera, which I did on a VMware Server 1.0.7 VM. VMware Server was a wonderful product, usable for a wide range of applications, not suited to heavy datacenter use like ESX/vSphere, but still quite good, but all of VMware has been ruined by Broadcom, since vSphere is no longer being updated to keep apace with the competition, so that the only increase with version numbers is the pricetag and only existing enterprise deployments are sticking around, although the final releases of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion are available as free downloads without support.

The tragedy is that VMware was the most innovative virtualization company, introducing to x64 features previously available only on IBM’s mainframe hypervisor z/VM, and some still unmatched anywhere else like memory compression and deduplication and live storage migration. Now HyperV, KVM and Xen and so forth are the dominant full hypervisors.

I am not happy with the implementation of Docker and want to develop a system which can work with Linux Containers, Illumos/Solaris Zones, and FreeBSD Jails (which were the first systems of this type), using ZFS and btrfs copy on write to clone the containers rather than how docker does it.

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

peaceful-forest said:
I'm using Zorin. It has its pros and cons. It's the first Linux OS that I have used on a regular basis (other than Android, but should Android still be considered Linux?). I have little experience with Ubuntu from a college course I took years ago.

One of the best linux for window users to migrate over into as very similar to what they are used to in layout

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

The Liturgist said:
Indeed; that said if you use the laptops the developers of OpenBSD use (historically, they preferred ThinkPads) you can be assured of success.

Used for awhile a BSD think called BSD desk top, very easy to set up and use, especially if coming over from windows, but that disto went away

The Liturgist · May 12, 2025

YeshuaFan said:
Used for awhile a BSD think called BSD desk top, very easy to set up and use, especially if coming over from windows, but that disto went away

GhostBSD and OpenIndiana (based on Illumos, the open source fork of Solaris) are your best bets outside of Linux for easy installation since the end of PC BSD and the migration of TrueOS to a Linux kernel. That said, while the OpenBSD installer might be fairly called “confronting”, it is extremely easy once one understands it; indeed, it requires very minimal input compared to most operating systems since the default configuration is extremely sane; likewise the default FreeBSD installer sysconfig (which may have been replaced; they were talking about revamping ore replacing it) makes a number of installation and configuration tasks very easy; I haven’t recently done a new FreeBSD install as I’ve been focusing on OpenBSD lately, but i always found sysconfig to be particularly easy, even thought it is text mode (indeed, perhaps because it is text mode).

YeshuaFan · May 12, 2025

The Liturgist said:
GhostBSD and OpenIndiana (based on Illumos, the open source fork of Solaris) are your best bets outside of Linux for easy installation since the end of PC BSD and the migration of TrueOS to a Linux kernel. That said, while the OpenBSD installer might be fairly called “confronting”, it is extremely easy once one understands it; indeed, it requires very minimal input compared to most operating systems since the default configuration is extremely sane; likewise the default FreeBSD installer sysconfig (which may have been replaced; they were talking about revamping ore replacing it) makes a number of installation and configuration tasks very easy; I haven’t recently done a new FreeBSD install as I’ve been focusing on OpenBSD lately, but i always found sysconfig to be particularly easy, even thought it is text mode (indeed, perhaps because it is text mode).

Too bad PC Bsd died off, as that would be the closest Bsd to being ran pretty much linux, the Bsd equivalent to linux Mint

The Liturgist · May 13, 2025

YeshuaFan said:
Too bad PC Bsd died off, as that would be the closest Bsd to being ran pretty much linux, the Bsd equivalent to linux Mint

Ghost BSD is like PC BSD and is still extant.

YeshuaFan · May 13, 2025

The Liturgist said:
Ghost BSD is like PC BSD and is still extant.

Have you ever tried it, or something called dragonfly Bsd?

Seraphim . · Sep 23, 2025

This will probably be considered a very silly post/question, but BSD seems to prominently feature the devil as its logo and I know all *nix stuff uses "daemons" which function as services in the background (I'm using OSX, its kernel is based on FreeBSD I believe and it uses "daemons" too).

Is this a good indication that human technology is largely corrupted and not of God? I had read that when they simply installed telephone lines in Mount Athos, the devil appeared to them and started mocking the monks saying how this was laughable..

I'm just interested in what people think, of course I'd be a hypocrite if I completely thought that – typing this out on a computer and connecting to the internet and what not..

Freth · Sep 23, 2025

Seraphim . said:
This will probably be considered a very silly post/question, but BSD seems to prominently feature the devil as its logo and I know all *nix stuff uses "daemons" which function as services in the background (I'm using OSX, its kernel is based on FreeBSD I believe and it uses "daemons" too).

Is this a good indication that human technology is largely corrupted and not of God? I had read that when they simply installed telephone lines in Mount Athos, the devil appeared to them and started mocking the monks saying how this was laughable..

I'm just interested in what people think, of course I'd be a hypocrite if I completely thought that – typing this out on a computer and connecting to the internet and what not..

I remember when I was still in high school and learning programming. It is embarrassing to admit, but if you go back and look at my code and the names of the files, you will find vulgarities throughout. I was young, and the world was influencing me in ways I didn't comprehend at the time.

Linux is an operating system. Daemons perform the functions of the operating system. Yes, the name is unfortunate, but I don't consider the OS to have satanic influence. (By the way, there is a lot of hate coming from the Linux developer community, which is what I would attribute to satanic influence. See Bluesky.)

Have you ever looked into some of the icons for the built-in apps included in the Android operating system? The Google "play" logo looks eerily like the sigil of Lucifer. The Google Chrome icon looks like it has 666 hidden in it. The Google gmail icon looks like a Masonic apron. Apple's iOS is not immune. The app store icon is a compass and square, similar to the masonic symbol.

Here's one that'll blow your mind. Taco Bell's previous design for their logo has three sixes in the bell. Restaurants that had this design had three bell logos on the side. One in front and two on the sides; 666.

I have no doubt that these things are on purpose. Satan is ruler of this world, for now. His influence is everywhere. You can't escape it, but you can be vigilant and let the Holy Spirit guide you.

linux.poet · Dec 23, 2025

Big relief: got my kubuntu machine out of its update hole and on 24.04 LTS. VLC and Discord are running too.

The next step is to get myself a live kubuntu USB, a data purge/backup, and re-partition the drive. It needs more /boot/ space, and not having enough space there has caused me endless time wasted and pain and suffering. Get at LEAST 1 GB boot partition space for ubuntu machines, and probably 2 GB is best.

The Liturgist · Dec 24, 2025

Seraphim . said:
This will probably be considered a very silly post/question, but BSD seems to prominently feature the devil as its logo and I know all *nix stuff uses "daemons" which function as services in the background (I'm using OSX, its kernel is based on FreeBSD I believe and it uses "daemons" too).

OpenBSD uses a pufferfish, if you prefer that. But the idea FreeBSD and Linux are demonic is absurd; actually the meaning of daemon in the sense of UNIX like OSes doesn’t even refer to the Judeo-Christian concept of the fallen angel, but rather refers to the Greek concept of underlying entities that in their polytheistic religion were responsible for causing routine functions to work. Microsoft calls them services.

I would note that there are several Christian developers on Linux and other UNIX like operating systems, for example, Theodore T’so, developer of the ext4 filesystem, which is a very good filesystem (I prefer XFS, JFS and btrfs on Linux, but ext4 is a very good filesystem for routine operations, a huge improvement over ext3, and also has some intercompatibility with btrfs, and prefer WAPBL, FFS with Soft Updates and ZFS on the BSDs). Another famous Christian programmer who exercised outside influence on the UNIX system is Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who was a devout Lutheran and an organist with two pipe organs in his house.

At any rate, I would note FreeBSD is the only BSD OS that uses a stylized demon as its logo (a daemon, named Beastie, not the devil), and this was always an inside joke; OpenBSD has Puffy the pufferfish, NetBSD has a boring flag symbolizing their boring nature, DragonFlyBSD has a dragon, Linux has Tux the Penguin, and other projects have their own mascots, GNU HURD being a GNU (by the way the D in HURD stands for daemons, referring to the fact that GNU is a microkernel that like all microkernels offloads its functions as much as possible to server processes - on UNIX like OSes such as GNU referred to as daemons, so that if one crashes it doesn’t take out your entire system). Windows at present, and all previous Windows NT variants (NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, 2000, XP ,Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10, for example) is a hybrid kernel, it started out aiming to be a microkernel, but performance pushed it in a monolithic direction; Windows 9x (95, 98, ME) were very odd 32 bit monolithic kernels (vmm32. vxd), highly compromised; on reading this article about its architecture one sympathisizes with those fanatically loyal to alternatives like the Amiga, IBM OS/2, and BeOS, which were vastly superior.

Now, this also extensd to some extent to MacOS, which provided a UI preferred by some, and managed to be slightly more reliable than Win9x due to monoculture meaning very little malware targeted it, and that combined with tight hardware integration and testing meant a much more controlled experience; technically, MacOS Classic was actually inferior in nearly all respects, being a cooperative multitasking system without a watchdog process, which means, like with Windows 3.1 and 3.11, a rogue process, that is to say, a virus or a malfunctioning non-malicious program, if it crashes, will hang the entire system (which is the architecture used by the original CIsco IOS operating system for routers and switches; it is semi-cooperative in that each running program has to relinquish control of the CPU, except there’s a watchdog monitoring in the background, and the system is semi-real time in that if a particular component doesn’t relinquish the often very limited CPU of the routers or switchees (most of the work being done in hardware on the more high end products and switches; on other products like the Cisco 7200 there was a lack of clean control plane / routing plane separation, something Juniper liked to brag about, of course Juniper had their own hardware based router, the J series, but claimed that since they used a virtual machine to partition the routing code from the control code, that somehow made it All Better; I do love Juniper and Cisco but qualitywise their products are usually comparable. With Mac OS X, Apple switched to a UNIX based, hybrid kernel design comparable in functionality to Windows; and MacOS gets its UNIX subsystem from FreeBSD (for a time OS X was Certified UNIX), but has a different kernel and a GUI system distantly derived from that of MacOS classic.

By the way, Windows also runs daemons, as part of various emulation layers like Services For Linux and older third party compatibility layers like cygwin (which is basically a distinct UNIX like OS, a port of GNU that runs atop Windows; now decreased in popularity since using HyperV, or not using HyperV, Windows can run various Linux operating systems, not unlike “CoLinux” back in the day. Also a Windows service is literally the same thing, just with better branding.

And of course squemish marketing departments have tried to de-emphasize the word “daemon” in the UNIX operating systems, but alas its so deeply ingrained in the system. But Ken Thompson, the principle architect, who is still with us, and Dennis M. Ritchie, memory eternal, who wrote C, in which Ken rewrote the system, were not Satanists by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed many of their colleagues were Christians, they were part of the culture of Bell Labs, and were connected to a larger OS and systems development community that also gave us the Internet and several other innovations, and which in turn owed a large debt to the early mainframe OSes of the 1960s such as Buroughs MCP and IBM OS/360 (which was released behind schedule and spectacularly over budget, the devout Protestant program manager for OS/360 wrote a book about his experiences trying to run the project called “The Mythical Man Month” which is required reading for anyone studying computer science.

The Liturgist · Dec 24, 2025

linux.poet said:
Big relief: got my kubuntu machine out of its update hole and on 24.04 LTS. VLC and Discord are running too.

The next step is to get myself a live kubuntu USB, a data purge/backup, and re-partition the drive. It needs more /boot/ space, and not having enough space there has caused me endless time wasted and pain and suffering. Get at LEAST 1 GB boot partition space for ubuntu machines, and probably 2 GB is best.

Nice. I have to confess where possible I like to avoid a separate /boot filesystem as they have a nasty tendency to run out of space; this is of course in some cases inadvisable. Where possible I’ll often run one filesystem as / and a swap partition and that’s it, for the sake of simplicity (typically on CentOS or Fedora clients, that don’t require anything special, I’ll run ext4 and swap, that said for machines I’m doing anything serious with I’ll typically have three filesystems plus a separate /boot, the others being /, /home and /vm, for virtulalization, /vm usually being btrfs or sometimes ZFS, /home or /var being XFS (var has something called project quotas, which allow for space to be limited by quotas that apply to all users, not just an individual user or group, which is useful, and is also very performant) and ext4 or JFS for everything else (I rather like JFS; some distros have been threatening to remove it, but the bug they complain about was fixed; it is a niche filesystem and I don’t advise it for the every day user but I also don’t advise against it, for it is competently done; a good review of it can be found here: A Comprehensive Review of JFS (Journaled File System)). Ext4 works well for most people; the only filesystem I avoid is reiserfs, because, homicidal developer aside, ReiserFS has some nasty bugs, and its main benefit, fast access to lots of small files, making it useful for e-mail servers, is less relevant on modern hardware.

WIth at least some reiserfs images, if you have a crash and you’re running a virtual machine or have a binary image such as a backup generated with dd on the same drive as reiserfs, I’ve been advised that the fsck utility (filesystem check, which calls a separate program for each filesystem type, installed as part of the fsutils for that filesystem, such as xfsutils, jfsutils, reiserfsutils and so on, package names vary between distros of course), it can confuse the image of the filesystem with the filesystem being repaired, which will result in catastrophic damage (since the image of the FS repeats data structures that are in the file system it is residing on); most filesystems have precautions to prevent this problem, indeed I’m pretty sure even FAT32 doesn’t have this problem, and if you’re getting outperformed by FAT32 you know you have problems (also FAT32 is lower overhead than reiserfs, since it lacks a journal; performance being roughly on a par, maybe slightly faster than, ext2, the old Linux filesystem pre-journaling, a distant cousing of the UNIX Fast File System). The BSDs still use FFS but with Soft Updates, which are an alternative anti-corruption feature to journaling; in both cases, journaling and soft updates, the idea is to ensure the filesystem can recover from incidents like a power outage with only the most recent writes being lost.

The Liturgist · Dec 24, 2025

YeshuaFan said:
Have you ever tried it, or something called dragonfly Bsd?

Yes, I used PC BSD back in the day.

That said, I always preferred setting up my own GUI on FreeBSD.

DragonFlyBSD is more of a niche OS; it has some influences from the AmigaOS which resulted in the project forking from FreeBSD, it also features a very interesting cluster filesystem called HAMMER2. Its the smallest of the four major BSD communities, but is still in active development, probably not ideal for end user desktop scenarios due to limited driver support, but potentially a lot of fun to play with in a virtual machine.

linux.poet · Dec 24, 2025

@The Liturgist

I can't quote right now due to site tech issues. However, I have 12 ext4 partitions on this system, which I parted out due to a rather "beginner" disk partition scheme. The idea behind it was to allow me to reinstall the system "in place" without losing any of my data, or if the SSD started to fail, I could grab my data off the system before it bricked. It's a single 1 TB SSD and I'm barely using any of it. In practice, this whole thing is brutally confusing as the part names don't show up in Dolphin and I have to manually check all 12 to find whatever folder I wanted to get to.

So basically I want to move 2 GB from /home to /boot. I got over 550 GB free disk space on the /home part, hopefully I can move it.
Which means that I will likely need to backup /home data, because I will need to reformat it and /boot to move those 2 GB probably.

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RE-Linux

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Ο Θεός ιλάσθήτι μοι τω αμαρτωλώ

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determination is anger at will

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