[CS-FSLUG] PDL report

[Jonathan E. Brickman]

In no particular order:

   1. core.

         1. The core has to have absolute maximum hardware
            compatibility, and for a desktop OS for general use, it
            cannot require command-line arcana for hard drive
            installation or anything else truly vital.  This immediately
            cuts out all Slackware-based distros I have tried (quite a
            few), CRUX, and quite a few others.  Interestingly enough,
            it leaves in Gobo, as well as Mint and effectively all very
            popular distros.  I was at least somewhat wrong about Gobo: 
            its default install is very venerable-and-stable, but it has
            current versions and usually leading-and/or-bleeding-edge
            versions of everything also.  One unusual item:  Gobo does
            seem to be doing good TTF rendering in KDE 3.5.something, as
            well as keeping KDE 4.0.4 and 4.1.something available.  KDE
            is the default environment in Gobo, although it does appear
            to support Gnome too.

         2. I have (as others have, I know) routinely switched distros
            to find one which will handle whatever hardware I have,
            because hardware is so multifaceted, and this is a method
            which works.

         3. Since PDL does not necessarily need to be a distro, perhaps
            it would be most effective if it explicitly set out to be an
            adjunct onto several different cores.  This would fit users,
            mission, flexibility, and compatibility rather well.

         4. I now plan to support three 'core' distros as soon as there
            is code to distribute: current RH, current Mint (and Ubuntu
            and appropriate-versioned Debian), and current Gobo.  That
            gives us RPM, Deb, and wildcard, which is a very appropriate
            spread.  SUSE comes immediately after.

   2. app-set, security-set.

         1. ROX contains a desktop, filemanager and WM, all of which are
            very interesting.  I won't recommend them until I have
            certain additional data, which I am obtaining from their
            helpful support folks right now, and have tested them
            thoroughly.

         2. ROX uses something called 'zeroinstall' for its
            distribution.  zeroinstall, a separate project, is very
            neat:  it looks at (effectively) the 'core' of the machine
            it is running on to see if needed dependencies are present,
            and installs them if they are not -- but zeroinstall's
            installations are to its own-controlled trees, not putting
            anything at all into /usr, or /usr/lib, or even /usr/local
            or /usr/share.  Much safer approach; just right for PDL.

         3. In my experience, my Linux problem second only to hardware
            compatibility, has been WWW compatibility.  Over and over
            again there is just one plugin which is conflicting with
            whatever plugin is required to see whatever it is I am
            trying to see.  Mint has done this better than anything
            else; there are still a few exceptions, but I suspect these
            are rare cases where the only way is using a wine-based
            win32 wrapper, and I don't know much about this approach
            yet.  (I am going to use Mint as my archetype for plugin
            list, including order; I have seen the config files
            involved, and although they are arcane, they are also
            boilerplatable.)  There is no ROX package for Firefox or
            plugins at this time:  if ROX is the app-set delivery
            method, that will be a central part of the effort involved. 

         4. ROX does, very selectively, use and modify /var and /etc.  I
            think this is acceptable, as long as the PDL sets (three
            different app-sets, and the security-set) are referred-to as
            unique ROX packages.  This is very practical given the ROX
            architecture.

         5. When PDL app-set by ROX materializes, PDL security-set by
            ROX will be a slam-dunk, except kernel.  But kernel should,
            in my opinion, be handled at the core level.

   3. A wee bit of glibc version hope, perhaps.

      The 'autopackage' people ( http://www.autopackage.org/faq.html )
      say that their packages can install onto any distro.  If this is
      really true, they have to know something about glibc multiversion
      solutions.  I will try to find out.

J.E.B.