110 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
110 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta title="Linux, UNIX and FOSS users: there is light on the horizon"]]
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Good morning reader. It is Easter Friday, 2018. Great timing for
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writing a blog article in the mountains of Switzerland, next to the
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fire.
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## TL;DR
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Read the whole thing.
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## Introduction
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I hope I got your attention and you have a warm gut feeling already. If you are
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like me, using Linux (or "unix alike" for that matter) for about 20
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years, you have seen a lot of changes.
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Some of the changes I have been observing include:
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- Linux getting attention from a much broader audience (developers, users, corporates)
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- Operating system choices have become less important ("people care about higher level stuff")
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- The Free and Open Source movement has lost its traction
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- Linux (stacks) ha(s|ve) become much more complex
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In this article, I want to point you, old greybeard, to some hope at
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the end of the tunnel: Devuan.
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## Devuan
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So let's start with a self-centric, barefaced advertisement so that you don't
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claim I wrote this article to subconsciously lead you to [[!devuanhosting]]:
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Go to [[!devuanhosting]] and get yourself a Devuan VM, if you like Devuan.
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Now, back to the real topic of the post: You might see Devuan as a
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"Debian of the retarded people who don't accept the existence of systemd".
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Fair enough.
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However, you should look a bit more closer, even if your opinion is the former.
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Devuan creates a choice. It gives you the choice to run Linux without systemd.
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Just for the sake of the argument before, ("people care about high level stuff"),
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it is actually important that this is about an init system at the core of your
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computer. Yes, it is low level. Yes, most people don't care and most people probably
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shouldn't care, because they don't even understand why there is an
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init system, nor why it can be programmed very simple (i.e. compare
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with [[!cinit]]).
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What is important here is that a group of **volunteers** spending
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their free time and resources commits themselves to fight for the
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right to have a Linux without systemd.
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"Why is that important", you might ask. And the answer is very
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similar: without these people, we would all still be using a DOS based
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operating system with a broken GUI on top of it.
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Yes, exactly. If there weren't such volunteers (or even "lateral thinkers")
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before, there would not be GNU/Linux distribution for you at all.
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## The light on the horizon
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So why is there a light? Today I migrated my notebook from Arch Linux
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to Devuan, because
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[systemd crashes my system on suspend](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58001).
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First of all, I do have the choice to change, because of the great
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work of the Devuan community. But what really opened my eyes, were a
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few things that I had to "manually configure":
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Compared to Arch Linux, I needed to install **acpid** and **pm-utils**
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to handle suspending. Furthermore I needed to configure acpid to
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suspend on lid close as follows:
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root@line:/home/nico/Downloads# cat /etc/acpi/events/suspend
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event=button/lid LID close
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action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend
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Yes, exactly. It takes 3 commands to install this property of your
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system. It is a very clean separation of concerns, and debugging this
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setup is as easy as starting acpid in the foreground and showing the
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events.
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While this, as well as the logical naming of devices (eth0, wlan0),
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is just a minor thing, I see that something changed:
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There are again people, who fight for their right to do things "the
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right way".
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## Call to action
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If you agree to what I wrote above and you also see the light on the
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horizon, I would like to ask you to be active:
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It is not necessary to start developing code to support the Free and
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Open Source Software movement, to support freedom.
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For us, it is necessary to be seen and move forward as a community,
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may it be Linux, BSD or FOSS in general.
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So instead of staying abstract like this, I ask you to do 2 things:
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- Spread the word about this article on IRC, Twitter, or social medium
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of your choice
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- Get yourself a good drink of your choice, sit down and say out
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aloud: I am supporting freedom of choice and will fight for it.
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Thanks for reading, enjoy your time!
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[[!tag foss unix]]
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