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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: KDE Linux/BSD distribution
From:       Christoph Wiesen <chris () deadhand ! com>
Date:       2004-10-26 19:45:42
Message-ID: 200410262145.42514.chris () deadhand ! com
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I have a whole lot of respect for everything you are doing with ark. Sure I 
disagree on some elements, but that's just what makes me personally not use 
ark. The way root access is accquired is one of the things that made me not 
use ark longer when I tried it (some month ago now) - it's highly subjective 
and I don't remember everything well enough to really debate on  this. Don't 
think that's necessary - it's your system and your choice.
It's just a bit too much of a drop-in windows replacement so that users don't 
get to learn new usefull things like the knowing use of the root account. 
That said i'm a windows admin myself and can see the use of the system and 
appreciate all the great work beeing done - after all it's KDE and you even 
created a QT installer.

I still honestly think Debian is a better choice, with all the work already 
being done by thousands of other people. Even with the inability to change 
some fundamental things yourself because you depend on another groups work - 
like the samba package maintainers.

But I think most good changes can and should make it into the upstream 
projects after all - so working in that direction might be better (depending 
on the  problem at hand of course) than working around a problem yourself.

Mmmh, I do sound far too negative again. Still I have a lot of respect for 
your work and thing diversity is good. 

Cheers :)



Am Tuesday, 26. October 2004 21:19 schrieb Bernhard Rosenkraenzer:
> On Tuesday 26 October 2004 21:00, Christoph Wiesen wrote:
> > Sure I would like to say that Ark Linux or something similar would be the
> > way to go, but reinventing the wheel over and over again can be a very
> > overwhelming task.
>
> We never reinvented the wheel (unless the installer is the wheel, which was
> necessary -- there was no other installer that met our demands back when we
> started (Dead simple to use, Qt based, works on pretty much all hardware))
> - and even if we did, we're done with the wheel now ;) -- now that we're
> mostly done, starting an effort with the same goal is more like reinventing
> the wheel ;)
>
> > I don't think ark is bad by any means (though it has
> > it's controversies like the thing they do (did?) with root because of the
> > Windows-like nature)
>
> Common misperception. We never did anything evil with the root account.
> Our root account is locked by default, and there's a PAM wrapper that
> launches GUI config tools as root without the user noticing -- can't be
> exploited by evil scripts because the GUI config tools require clicks to do
> harmful things.
> And of course if you don't like the config tools running as root you can
> configure it using the included kapabilities tool.
>
> > All the necessary desktop components would come from the Kalyxo specific
> > CD and the user still can use thousands of well tested server like
> > packages from debian - like samba and nfs and so on, that are of use on
> > most home desktops as well but don't have to be re-done by the same team
> > that does the desktop).
>
> We thought about that when we started Ark, and decided not to take that
> route because it comes at the cost of not being able to tweak the stuff. We
> want to be in control of the whole system because some stuff obviously has
> interdependencies - e.g. if you wish to hack Konqueror to have a
> right-click-on-directory -> "Share using Samba" option or something, you'd
> better have a preconfigured smb.conf that doesn't set any options that
> prevent this from working -- also, there's always the tradeoffs server
> centric and workstation centric distributions get "wrong" for the home
> desktop and vice versa (e.g. linking virtually everything to openldap, nis,
> kerberos etc. for network integration vs. saving valuable space).
>
> LLaP
> bero
>
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> >> unsubscribe <<
 
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