Discuss list

[Ariën Huisken]

Is anyone still reading this list?

In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.

Ariën

[Matthias Šubik]

On 18.08.2007, at 11:16, Ariën Huisken wrote:
...

Post by Ariën Huisken
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.

see it positively,

the community consists of busy bees working all the time.
I hope the community is not drifting away since trustix still does
what it should for me,
it is a server distro that is updated without downtime (and without
intervention).

I hope to find more time in my work to maintain more packages in a
similar manner in contrib.
But that'll stay a wish until fall, when the holidays of other office
workers are over.

matthias

[Ariën Huisken]

Post by Matthias Å ubik

Post by Ariën Huisken
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.

see it positively,
the community consists of busy bees working all the time.
I hope the community is not drifting away since trustix still does what
it should for me,
it is a server distro that is updated without downtime (and without
intervention).
I hope to find more time in my work to maintain more packages in a
similar manner in contrib.
But that'll stay a wish until fall, when the holidays of other office
workers are over.

Ok, but the fact I've not received one posting from Morten in august,
is a bit odd/scary.

I'm instaling new systems with CentOS 5 these days, because for me a
stable 2.6 kernel version (TSL 3.2 or so) takes way too long (hardware
support issues).

I hope TSL is not ending very fast for the updates I need for all my
2.2 installations, before I have a chance to migrate them..

Thanks anyway for the replies!

Ariën

[Morten Nilsen]

Post by Ariën Huisken
Ok, but the fact I've not received one posting from Morten in august,
is a bit odd/scary.

I'm flattered.. :)

I've gotten a job now (developer), so I don't have quite the same level
of free time to make posts on the list.. Besides, there is little to
post about, it seems like everyone is having their TSL work just fine,
for the most part..

[knetknight]

My .02 is that I'm still using 2.2 quite a bit. I've tried some other
distros because I want to know what my options are if the TSL rug is
pulled out from under my feet but the bottom line is that I can't find
anything that I can slim down and make as fast as TSL 2.2. OpenSUSE is
my desktop distro of choice and my mode of operation for servers is to
install a basic openSUSE on the physical box and then run several TSL
virtual machines under VMWare Server for the actual services. I've
tried CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu as VMs, and they do work
well, but all of them are slower and/or are markedly more resource
intensive than TSL 2.2. It's small, fast, and runs wonderfully. I
haven't posted for quite some time because 2.2's been around so long
it's stable as a rock and I know how to do virtually anything I want
with it. Some of the package versions in 2.2 are a bit long in the
tooth but patches are released and I don't feel that the security of
my systems are fundamentally at risk. I should be more resposive to
posts but it seems someone almost always beats me to the punch with a
better answer than I'd give anway and I'm not one to post just to see
myself in print. :-)

The silence of the discuss list is disturbing at times but then no
news is good news of sorts since I'd expect to see something here
pretty quickly if Comodo ever pulls the plug.

Perhaps this has been discussed, but if Comodo did pull the plug on
Trustix is there community enough to rebirth Tawie?

[Oystein Viggen]

* [knetknight]

Post by knetknight
Perhaps this has been discussed, but if Comodo did pull the plug on
Trustix is there community enough to rebirth Tawie?

There's always TinySofa ;)

Øystein

[Rolf Deenen]

Post by Oystein Viggen
* [knetknight]

Post by knetknight
Perhaps this has been discussed, but if Comodo did pull the plug on
Trustix is there community enough to rebirth Tawie?

There's always TinySofa ;)

No, there isn't :-( ,

"tinysofa classic server 2.0 will reach end-of-life on 31st March, 2007"

Post by Oystein Viggen
Øystein
--
When in doubt: Think again.
_______________________________________________
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

Rolf Deenen

[William Kern]

Post by Oystein Viggen
There's always TinySofa ;)

It looks pretty dead.

The EOL'ed their 2.0 release in Mar 31 2007.

Unfortunately that was their CURRENT release per the website

http://www.tinysofa.org


-bill
pixelgate networks

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by Morten Nilsen
I've gotten a job now (developer), so I don't have quite the same level
of free time to make posts on the list.. Besides, there is little to
post about, it seems like everyone is having their TSL work just fine,
for the most part..

Or maybe there aren't any users left :-) I suspect, as the previous
postings in this threads say, most of the users may have some TSL
systems left, but are using other distros for new systems...

Danny

[Oystein Viggen]

* [Morten Nilsen]

Post by Morten Nilsen
I've gotten a job now (developer)

Cool, congratulations :)

Post by Morten Nilsen
Besides, there is little to post about, it seems like
everyone is having their TSL work just fine, for the most part..

Lack of user questions can signify a number of things. Off the top of
my head:

1. The distribution is perfect, flawlessly doing everything everyone
wants.

2. Linux admins in general have more experience these days, so they can
figure out most things on their own.

3. Low influx of new TSL users, so the ones that use it already had
their questions answered.

4. Low amount of users overall, so fewer issues to discuss.

5. Most TSL usage is in business where people install a distribution
that fits and then go on to care about something important instead.


Now I think 1 is a bit unlikely, so I suspect the low traffic is a
result of a mix of points 2-4, and I'd like to think a bit of 5.

Note that 3 and 4 may as well be a result of 2, if the linux admins are
no longer dazzled by the prospect of "Secure" in the distro name and the
ability to save maybe 100MB disk space (the two main features of TSL
compared to, say, Ubuntu server, and I'm not too sure about those
100MB).

Øystein

[Morten Nilsen]

Post by Oystein Viggen

Post by Morten Nilsen
I've gotten a job now (developer)

Cool, congratulations :)

Thanks!

Post by Oystein Viggen

Post by Morten Nilsen
Besides, there is little to post about, it seems like
everyone is having their TSL work just fine, for the most part..

Lack of user questions can signify a number of things. Off the top of
1. The distribution is perfect, flawlessly doing everything everyone
wants.

For my part, that has been true for quite some time ;)

Post by Oystein Viggen
2. Linux admins in general have more experience these days, so they can
figure out most things on their own.

I know I do.

Post by Oystein Viggen
3. Low influx of new TSL users, so the ones that use it already had
their questions answered.

This is probably true, at least in comparison to the overall sector..
Red Hat, Ubuntu and friends are quite the titans..

Post by Oystein Viggen
4. Low amount of users overall, so fewer issues to discuss.

Compared to the sector, most probable.

Post by Oystein Viggen
5. Most TSL usage is in business where people install a distribution
that fits and then go on to care about something important instead.

Given that TSL has a relatively small userbase, and has been around for
several years, it seems pretty sane to assume that most users have
gotten all their issues cleared up by now..

Post by Oystein Viggen
Now I think 1 is a bit unlikely, so I suspect the low traffic is a
result of a mix of points 2-4, and I'd like to think a bit of 5.
Note that 3 and 4 may as well be a result of 2, if the linux admins are
no longer dazzled by the prospect of "Secure" in the distro name and the
ability to save maybe 100MB disk space (the two main features of TSL
compared to, say, Ubuntu server, and I'm not too sure about those
100MB).

I installed some version of Ubuntu on my desktop because I needed to get
my Trustix back up after Windows XP nuked my /boot partition without
asking.. As per usual with me, I got annoyed with Ubuntu straight away,
but I don't recall why, as per usual.

These days, unless one is building an embedded system, space is not at a
premium.. And the embedded folk likely use uclibc or something similar
anyway.

[Vidar Tyldum Hansen]

Post by Ariën Huisken
Is anyone still reading this list?
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.

I have personally moved on to Ubuntu.
The major reason is that I have come to realize how vulnerable a distro
like Trustix is. It is very dependant on key developers and can be
killed instantly at some board meeting. That said: the remaining devs
are doing a pretty good job in releasing updates.

I recommend big community based distros (Debian, Ubuntu) or the major
commercial ones (RedHat, Suse).

[Arne Brodowski]

I'm still reading the list and still use Trustix on a bunch of servers,
and I also install it on new server.
I'm aware of the problems with the development model and the small
community, but Trustix is just a great Distro and fits my needs perfectly.

-arne

Post by Ariën Huisken
Is anyone still reading this list?
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.
Ariën
_______________________________________________
tsl-discuss mailing list
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

[Björn Enroth]

I am still reading this list, and I contribute when I can. I still use
trustix 2.2 on a lot of production systems, and this distro is still my
favourite.

I agree with Ariën that this distro is very vulnerable, which means that I
need to get use another distro as well. The other distro I use is CentOS,
which do a good job as VMware host system.

I really hope this small and attractive distro stays, and I think you devs
have done a really good job so far. Please continue with trustix, and I am
looking forward to a stable distro with a 2.6 kernel (3.2?)


Regards
Björn

Post by Arne Brodowski
I'm still reading the list and still use Trustix on a bunch of servers,
and I also install it on new server.
I'm aware of the problems with the development model and the small
community, but Trustix is just a great Distro and fits my needs perfectly.
-arne

Post by Ariën Huisken
Is anyone still reading this list?
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.
Ariën
_______________________________________________
tsl-discuss mailing list
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

_______________________________________________
tsl-discuss mailing list
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

Kind Regards/Med Vänliga Hälsningar

Björn Enroth


~"~
{@ @}
( ( ) )
---o00o---TTT---o00o---

Björn Enroth
Comnia Internet AB
Phone [phone]

The instructions said:
Requires Windows 98 or better, so I installed Linux!

Linux is like a wigwam:
No Gates, no Windows and always a little apache inside!

Computers are like air conditioners:
They can't do their job properly if you open windows!

"Cogito Ergo Sum"

[Kyle Bresin]

Still here.

I love my trustix 2.2 installs, and by the list of updates that keep
popping up in swup, it is definitely being supported to suit my needs.

But as others mentioned, I had a lot of problems getting trustix 3.0.x
working. And, it's not apparent to me, from this list, that a lot has
happened with trustix 3.0 in the last 2 years. Maybe that's an inaccurate
impression, but it's the one I currently have.

If trustix 3.1 was released, I'd certainly try it, and if I liked it,
would begin putting it on new servers.

But as is, I either install tsl 2.2 if it'll serve the purpose, otherwise
CentOS 5.

kyle.

Kyle Bresin

Post by Ariën Huisken
Is anyone still reading this list?
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.
Ariën
_______________________________________________
tsl-discuss mailing list
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

[Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Post by Kyle Bresin
Still here.
I love my trustix 2.2 installs, and by the list of updates that keep
popping up in swup, it is definitely being supported to suit my needs.

Seems to me that's the only part Nived (the sole TSL developer) really
has time to do. And since 2.2 is the current stable version of TSL
(since November 8. 2004), he has no choice. The 3.1 release should have
been released 6 months after 3.0, which would have been January 2006.

However, in Jan-06 I had my last month of employment with Comodo. Before
that Erlend found himself a new job, and so did Oystein. And with my
departure, all that was left was three fairly fresh Trustix developers:
Nived, Bipin, and Ajith, in India. As far as I can see, only Nived has
been working on TSL for the last year or so.

Just to clarify:
Erlend Midttun was THE original developer of TSL.
Oystein Viggen joint the team at a very early stage, I'm guessing
somewhere at the time of TSL 1.1.
I joined the team in October 2001, just after TSL 1.5 was released in
August.
After that, a lot of community work was done to make 2.0 a reality. I'm
totally scared to mention names, as I don't want to forget anyone, and I
grateful and respectful of these guys. Anyway... you'll find their names
in the announcement:
http://www.trustix.net/doc/history/2.0-announce.txt

Take a look at the names, and try to find any of them on tsl-discuss the
last couple of years. You'll find Danny, but not saying anything that
can be interpreted as positive towards TSL. :)

Post by Kyle Bresin
But as others mentioned, I had a lot of problems getting trustix 3.0.x
working. And, it's not apparent to me, from this list, that a lot has
happened with trustix 3.0 in the last 2 years. Maybe that's an
inaccurate impression, but it's the one I currently have.

There has been updates to 3.0, as there should be. However, 3.0.5 has
taken a long time. Not to blame Nived. Being only 1 developer on a
distribution is very challenging.

The main difference between 3.0 and 3.0.5 is the re-introduction of
Anaconda as the installer, instead of Viper, which was introduced in 3.0.

The main reason for developing Viper was that the Comodo management
wanted Trustix to differentiate itself from other distributions, in a
more visible way. No real technical reasons, although we managed to come
up with a few, to keep the effort interesting for everyone involved.
People need to rationalize, you know.. ;)

The only reason for reintroducing Anaconda in 3.0.5 was that everyone
that developed the closed-source Viper installer, was by then fired.

The main problem with TSL is not that it's vulnerable to whatever the
Comodo management decides, although this is also true. The main problem
is that it's a distribution developed by one person, with an active
community of about 15 people, and an ever changing user mass.

We, the original TSL developers, measured the download rate of 2.2 and
3.0 before we left the sinking ship in late 2005/early 2006. The amazing
thing about the results was not the great amount of downloads each
month. The interesting part was WHO downloaded TSL.

What we found was that of the ~3000 ISO downloads each month, about 90%
never downloaded swup updates. About 95% never downloaded the iso more
than once. Which mean that either:
1) Only a very small minority of the people that tested TSL actually
ended up using it.

2) The vast majority of downloaders had their IP address dynamically
changed via DHCP, hardly the choice of IT professionals.

If you include the stats for the tsl-discuss mailing lists,
(http://christht.tihlde.org/tsl-discuss-stats-2.txt) you find that the
activity of the community has gone down from an average of ~400 postings
each month in late 2003 and early 2004, to an average of ~60 postings
from late 2006 to present day. That's a significant reduction.

So the only real answer to Ariëns question is:
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.


Thank you for reading this, and both Ubuntu and CentOS are decent
alternatives to TSL.

c

[William Kern]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.

I still like TSL and have several machines running it.

I also have a lot of machines running CentOS/RedHat for clients and they
work fine, but I find that
I miss the nice lightweigth TSL distro. It gave me everything I need
without having to go in and
disable/remove the extra crap.

Certainly there is a need for a 'TSL' like distro in the linux community.

-bill
pixelgate networks.

[Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Post by William Kern

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.

No, it brings up the question as to whether TSL is relevant in todays
distribution marketplace.

The answer to that question is "No", and has been "No" for quite some
time now. It was "No" a long time before the last of the original
developers left.

What does Trustix Secure Linux have, that sets it apart from the other
distributions, even today:
1. The word "Secure" in its name.
2. No freedom to include a lot of tested, supported prebuilt packages.
3. I'm at loss.

Trustix Secure Linux has NOTHING. Ohh, yeah, I forgot.. SWUP. Well, I
rewrote most of SWUP to it's current codebase, and probably know the
code better than anyone else today. SWUP isn't relevant. We tested SWUP
on CentOS, it didn't work. We tested SWUP on Mandriva, it didn't work.

Guess what: The only reason SWUP works is that the rpm packages
generated at Trustix has undergone great scrutiny to be 100% correct, so
that SWUP can handle them. And SWUP works because there are extremely
few packages. More packages forces SWUP to become extremely slow.

SWUP and rdfgen forces the rpm package developers to do everything as
good as they can. But no distribution needs that. in most cases, 80% is
enough. When was the last time your heard anyone having problems with
dependencies between supported prebuilt binary packages? RPM-hell is a
relic of the past. SWUP is irrelevant, because there are other tools out
there that outperforms SWUP any day of the week.

SWUP could have been much more relevant, had it undergone continuously
development over the years. Take a look at the SWUP source rpm. Read the
Changelog... "2005-08-12 - SWUP version 2.7.15" This was the date I
added the latest changes to SWUP. The only change was to add a cgi to be
able to use swup as a search engine for trustix.org:
http://www.trustix.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,67/

Irrelevant. :)

Post by William Kern
I still like TSL and have several machines running it.

Cool you still like it. Too bad your stuck with those machines.

Post by William Kern
I also have a lot of machines running CentOS/RedHat for clients and they
work fine, but I find that
I miss the nice lightweigth TSL distro. It gave me everything I need
without having to go in and
disable/remove the extra crap.

Try installing Ubuntu Server. You get nothing you don't absolutely need,
just like TSL. Same way with most other distributions today. TSL
identified that as a problem early on, and dealt with it. The others
came around, and since TSL haven't evolved since then, it's not needed.

Small distros that takes the technology further is always needed. TSL
haven't been innovative for the last many years.

Post by William Kern
Certainly there is a need for a 'TSL' like distro in the linux community.

All major distributions are equal to or better than TSL at everything
TSL tries to be today.



c

[William Kern]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Try installing Ubuntu Server. You get nothing you don't absolutely
need, just like TSL. Same way with most other distributions today. TSL
identified that as a problem early on, and dealt with it. The others
came around, and since TSL haven't evolved since then, it's not needed.

Actually, we do have servers running Ubuntu Server 6.xx LT

I still prefer TSL, primarely because if it Redhat origin and feel.
Thats why Centos4/5 (and paid copies of RHES4/5) comprise
most new installs.

That being said, we do have customers asking for Ubuntu.

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Small distros that takes the technology further is always needed. TSL
haven't been innovative for the last many years.

Post by William Kern
Certainly there is a need for a 'TSL' like distro in the linux community.

All major distributions are equal to or better than TSL at everything
TSL tries to be today.

TSL was/is good at being a nice lightweight server distro. There
certainly are not a lot of choices there.

-bill

[Ariën Huisken]

Post by William Kern
TSL was/is good at being a nice lightweight server distro. There
certainly are not a lot of choices there.

Since this is a discussion list, I'd like to say whats important about
TSL for me.

1 - Easy light installation. This is true for TSL, but after working a
few weeks with CentOS, it's not so different. The reason for me TSL is
very easy is because I used it for many years and installed hundreds
of servers with it. Installing CentOS takes about 20% more time for
now, but that's not so important after all and just a matter of time.

2 - Secure. Ok, security for me is that I don't have to look at all
there servers because they get updates automatically. When you look at
it this way, TSL is completely NOT secure! Swup hangs on 50% of all
systems frequently, having me to login, kill swup and start it
manually.. :( This takes me many hours every week. I dont like yum on
CentOS very much, but it works without intervention!

3 - Active development to support new hardware. This is really
important, because hardware is changing fast. New CPU's, more cores,
different chipsets, and so on. With new systems I have to be really
careful what to buy, so TSL 2.2 can run on it. We also hit limits like
md raid set, they can be only 2Tb on a 2.4 kernel, and in most new
servers we have to go past the 2Tb. CentOS has a stable 2.6 kernel and
solves most of these issues.

4 - An active community to solve problems. The reason I posted this in
the first place was not to start a new "what distro is better"
discussion, but I really thought everyone was gone. This list is for
me the most important resource of getting answers to my questions.
Nobody knows everything (not me, for sure). I posted two very
important (for me) questions this month and got not a single reply on
it. The CentOS mailing list is very active and full of users who have
a lot more knowledge of this stuff than me.

The main issue is if I want to continue using TSL, I have to wait for
a stable 3.X release. When it comes out, I know I can´t migrate easy
from 2.2 to it, I have to do a reinstall. We have to test his, modify
bits of software, test it more, and put a lot of hours in it. I
concluded that it takes the same amount of time to do the migration to
CentOS, so for me it comes down to a big question: Is TSL really
better than CentOS? No, not for me.

I respect all the work Nived puts in maintaining this distro, but I
can't let me, my company and all my customers depend on one guy in
India! What if he gets fired, or worse? This is the really big
insecure part of TSL. In the past when my company was just one person
(me), this was always the big complaint of my customers ("You're a
nice guy who knows what he does, but what if.."). Now I have more
people working for me and this has gone, but if one of my customers
googles around to see what TSL is really like, he will start
complaining again about the "one person development".

So i was happy to hear form Christian again. I know he doesn't like
TSL, I can understand that, knowing his background as a former TSL
employee, and I do not expect a complete objective answer form him,
but he knows the facts, and these facts scary me too: 1 developer, 15
community members... He was I think the most skilled member here and
has helped me very often. I take his opinion very seriously. One of
his suggestions some time ago to me was to look at CentOS. I did and
starting to like it.

Morten I wish best luck in his new job and I hope he stays here on
this list as a very active member. If you have plans to move to the
Netherlands, please let me know :)

I still hope TSL will solve all this problems, but I don't think so
and it's not very realistic to expect it.

All that said, many, many thanks to all remaining 15 people on this
list and I hope TSL will stay here for a while to support all the
remaing 2.2 installations.

Greetings,

Ariën

[Morten Nilsen]

... get updates automatically. When you look at
it this way, TSL is completely NOT secure! Swup hangs on 50% of all
systems frequently, having me to login, kill swup and start it
manually.. :( This takes me many hours every week.

That is easily enough dealt with, just don't use any ftp mirrors..

[Morten Nilsen]

Post by Ariën Huisken
Morten I wish best luck in his new job and I hope he stays here on
this list as a very active member. If you have plans to move to the
Netherlands, please let me know :)

Heh, is that a job offer? :)
Seriously though, I have no plans of leaving Norway.. at least not until
the next Ice-Age arrives.. or something else equally drastic happens.. I
like it here, ya know :)
I might go there on a vacation or two, though..

Post by Ariën Huisken
All that said, many, many thanks to all remaining 15 people on this
list and I hope TSL will stay here for a while to support all the
remaing 2.2 installations.

I fully intend on staying subscribed to this list and answer any
questions I can..

That being said, given several recent threads surrounding TSL, I am
going to evaluate CentOS in the near future.. primarily for use at work,
for now.

The one and only reason I'm a die-hart TSL fan, is the feel of the
distro.. any other distro that I've tried have given me some kind of
annoyance, driving me right back to TSL .. I'm sure some of that is just
due to me being used to TSL.
Also, another point that was raised about perfect rpms, I like that.. I
thrive with perfection in the minor details.. Joe User or even Joe
Developer and his cousin Joe Admin might not care, but having crisp,
clean spec files gives me a special, good, feeling deep down..
Feel free to call me a bit strange.. ;)

And let me just say, I got genuinely happy when I heard "TSL64" earlier
in this thread :)

[Carlo Florendo]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes

Post by William Kern

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.

No, it brings up the question as to whether TSL is relevant in todays
distribution marketplace.
The answer to that question is "No", and has been "No" for quite some
time now. It was "No" a long time before the last of the original
developers left.

As is obvious from your previous years' post, you are very bitter. Really
bitter at leaving Comodo. If you can't say anything nice, may I
respectfully request you to please shut up. You are not doing anything
constructive to this list nor to TSL. You may have contributed to TSL
before but that was before. Since you've got nothing, and absolutely
nothing to do with TSL now, you've got no right to brag about your being
the author of swup nor about anything you've done to TSL.

Thank you very much.

Best Regards,

Carlo
--
Carlo Florendo
Softare Engineer/Network Co-Administrator
Astra Philippines Inc.
UP-Ayala Technopark, UP Campus Diliman
1101 Quezon City, Philippines
http://www.astra.ph

--
The Astra Group of Companies
5-3-11 Sekido, Tama City
Tokyo 206-0011, Japan
http://www.astra.co.jp

[Ariën Huisken]

Post by Carlo Florendo
As is obvious from your previous years' post, you are very bitter. Really
bitter at leaving Comodo. If you can't say anything nice, may I
respectfully request you to please shut up. You are not doing anything
constructive to this list nor to TSL. You may have contributed to TSL
before but that was before. Since you've got nothing, and absolutely
nothing to do with TSL now, you've got no right to brag about your being
the author of swup nor about anything you've done to TSL.

He may not be completely objective, but the facts speak for
themselves. I personally don't agree with Christian, because I think
there are less than 15 members left... :)

Btw, did we scare this list? I'm not getting emails anymore.

Ariën

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by Carlo Florendo
As is obvious from your previous years' post, you are very bitter. Really
bitter at leaving Comodo. If you can't say anything nice, may I
respectfully request you to please shut up. You are not doing anything
constructive to this list nor to TSL. You may have contributed to TSL
before but that was before. Since you've got nothing, and absolutely
nothing to do with TSL now, you've got no right to brag about your being
the author of swup nor about anything you've done to TSL.

He's just speaking his mind, so what? He has some very good points, and
instead of attacking him maybe you could come up with some arguments of
your own about what he (and I for that matter) say...

The fact is that TSL 2.2 is _way_ old. Modern (current) hardware is
getting more and more difficult to run with TSL. Most of the TSL users
are running an (inofficial) 2.6 kernel on it to get it to work at all.
Most of the packages from TSL 2.2 suffer the same aging problem as the
kernel does.

Don't read this as a rant - its just the truth. And its no ones fault -
TSL is just showing its age. And there is no point in denying that the
stable TSL 3 version is overdue. Or that there is just one guy left
keeping it running.

I worked in a company once which used an inhouse distro, so I think i
know the Nived job. If you're just one guy having to read all the
security lists, keeping track of all packages, backporting fixes to your
anciend program versions, verifying if your versions are vulnerable at
all etc - you just don't have time left for anything else.
Same goes for the super secret guy developing the new stuff.

Back in the good times if there was any TSL related problem all it took
was a mail or a irc query, and you got a fix instantly. Now major parts
of the distribution system can break for more than a week and no one
notices (as stated on the list before... several times...)

Go figure. Again, no offense ment - the day has just 24 hours, and Nived
wants to go home once in a while :-)

So, whats the point in choosing TSL for new systems anyway? Christian
made some very good points about that before. I realize that there are
some, but very few... And all of them are void if you take just a peek
at for example CentOS and see how much of your knowledge you can use
there, and how easy the transition is...

There are just three things that made TSL special back in the old days...

1. Swup. A really great tool back then, better than anything else for
software management (with RPMs)

2. Small footprint. The last remaining TSL box i'm responsible for is a
486-200 with 48 MB Ram.

3. "short ways" to contact the developers, and fast solutions to problems

Whats left of that today?

1. There is yum for example. Does everything swup does, but is faster,
better supported and more reliable.

2. You can get other distros to run on that too, though it might involve
more work (eg. removing some parts you dont need and which TSL simply
didnt install in the first place). With kickstart or similiar tools you
can automate that very good, making this point invalid from todays point
of view too

3. Well, just read the list :-)

I migrated a TSL based appliance to CentOS in a matter of days. A very
small number of days. Including internal install servers, rewriting all
scripts from swup-usage to yum etc. It's really easy, just a handfull of
"chkconfig foobar off" and "rpm -e foobar" lines in the kickstart file
and you're set.

Migrating running servers is more complicated, but as i said, TSL 2.2
systems are showing their age everywhere, so it might be a good idea to
think about new hardware, or a reinstall anyhow...

Danny
- --
There is infinite time. = http://www.cyberdelia.de
You are finite. = ***@cyberdelia.de
Zathras is finite. =
This is wrong tool. = \o/

[Oystein Viggen]

* [Carlo Florendo]

Post by Carlo Florendo
As is obvious from your previous years' post, you are very bitter. Really
bitter at leaving Comodo.

Do you think he would have said the same things while employed by
Comodo, even if he felt the same way?

Speaking out in public against the product you're currently working on
isn't a good idea if you like to receive a salary :)

Øystein

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
What does Trustix Secure Linux have, that sets it apart from the other
1. The word "Secure" in its name.
2. No freedom to include a lot of tested, supported prebuilt packages.
3. I'm at loss.

:-)

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Trustix Secure Linux has NOTHING. Ohh, yeah, I forgot.. SWUP. Well, I
rewrote most of SWUP to it's current codebase, and probably know the
code better than anyone else today. SWUP isn't relevant. We tested SWUP
on CentOS, it didn't work. We tested SWUP on Mandriva, it didn't work.

Well, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora etc have yum. Debian Stuff has apt. Gentoo
has emerge. Who needs swup today?

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes

Post by William Kern
I still like TSL and have several machines running it.

Cool you still like it. Too bad your stuck with those machines.

One TSL box to go, the replacement hardware is standing next to me,
gentoo is installing as we speak... write... whatever :)

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
All major distributions are equal to or better than TSL at everything
TSL tries to be today.

Ack.

Danny

[Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Post by William Kern

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.

No, it brings up the question as to whether TSL is relevant in todays
distribution marketplace.

The answer to that question is "No", and has been "No" for quite some
time now. It was "No" a long time before the last of the original
developers left.

What does Trustix Secure Linux have, that sets it apart from the other
distributions, even today:
1. The word "Secure" in its name.
2. No freedom to include a lot of tested, supported prebuilt packages.
3. I'm at loss.

Trustix Secure Linux has NOTHING. Ohh, yeah, I forgot.. SWUP. Well, I
rewrote most of SWUP to it's current codebase, and probably know the
code better than anyone else today. SWUP isn't relevant. We tested SWUP
on CentOS, it didn't work. We tested SWUP on Mandriva, it didn't work.

Guess what: The only reason SWUP works is that the rpm packages
generated at Trustix has undergone great scrutiny to be 100% correct, so
that SWUP can handle them. And SWUP works because there are extremely
few packages. More packages forces SWUP to become extremely slow.

SWUP and rdfgen forces the rpm package developers to do everything as
good as they can. But no distribution needs that. in most cases, 80% is
enough. When was the last time your heard anyone having problems with
dependencies between supported prebuilt binary packages? RPM-hell is a
relic of the past. SWUP is irrelevant, because there are other tools out
there that outperforms SWUP any day of the week.

SWUP could have been much more relevant, had it undergone continuously
development over the years. Take a look at the SWUP source rpm. Read the
Changelog... "2005-08-12 - SWUP version 2.7.15" This was the date I
added the latest changes to SWUP. The only change was to add a cgi to be
able to use swup as a search engine for trustix.org:
http://www.trustix.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,67/

Irrelevant. :)

Post by William Kern
I still like TSL and have several machines running it.

Cool you still like it. Too bad your stuck with those machines.

Post by William Kern
I also have a lot of machines running CentOS/RedHat for clients and they
work fine, but I find that
I miss the nice lightweigth TSL distro. It gave me everything I need
without having to go in and
disable/remove the extra crap.

Try installing Ubuntu Server. You get nothing you don't absolutely need,
just like TSL. Same way with most other distributions today. TSL
identified that as a problem early on, and dealt with it. The others
came around, and since TSL haven't evolved since then, it's not needed.

Small distros that takes the technology further is always needed. TSL
haven't been innovative for the last many years.

Post by William Kern
Certainly there is a need for a 'TSL' like distro in the linux community.

All major distributions are equal to or better than TSL at everything
TSL tries to be today.



c

[Björn Enroth]

Couldn't agree more...

Today I have about 15 production installs running. Most of them as
VMware guests, and all of them are swup'ed continously. I would really
miss TSL. No other distro makes it so easy and lightweight. Please
continue developing TSL...

//Björn

Post by William Kern

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.
I still like TSL and have several machines running it.
I also have a lot of machines running CentOS/RedHat for clients and they
work fine, but I find that
I miss the nice lightweigth TSL distro. It gave me everything I need
without having to go in and
disable/remove the extra crap.
Certainly there is a need for a 'TSL' like distro in the linux community.
-bill
pixelgate networks.
_______________________________________________
tsl-discuss mailing list
http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by William Kern
I guess that brings up the question as to whether TSL can be 'restored'
to a more active status.

I doubt you'll find the manpower for it, since there are other distros
quite suitable for what TSL did...

Post by William Kern
I also have a lot of machines running CentOS/RedHat for clients and they
work fine, but I find that
I miss the nice lightweigth TSL distro. It gave me everything I need
without having to go in and
disable/remove the extra crap.

Well, just install CentOS once as minimal install, take the resulting
kickstart file, modify what you need, like or dont like, and there you go...

Danny

[Steve Root]

I still use trustix, i still scan my trustix email folder from time to
time in case something significant is happening.

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
What we found was that of the ~3000 ISO downloads each month, about 90%
never downloaded swup updates. About 95% never downloaded the iso more
1) Only a very small minority of the people that tested TSL actually
ended up using it.
2) The vast majority of downloaders had their IP address dynamically
changed via DHCP, hardly the choice of IT professionals.

Hmm, reminds me, my tsl box is still running and I haven't swupped for
over a year..... probably will start with a fresh server when Vista
desktops are forced upon me :-)

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Thank you for reading this, and both Ubuntu and CentOS are decent
alternatives to TSL.
c

[Nived Gopalan]

Hi Guys,

Reading through this mailing list does confirm one thing, TSL is still
considered important and there still are some die hard fans of it. Ok
there may be reasons to be dying die hard fans too, maybe your just
plain stuck or you actually like what you see here.

From the developer perspective, there have been no mails from my end or

'our' end which you have noticed. This reason is we are quite in
shrinkage of resources and time, and I have given my priorities to
keeping TSL active with the latest updates to TSL 2.2 and 3.0 and 3.0.5.
And i intend to keep on going with them.

From the management perspective, we are yet to get some added support,

but rest assured I still am here. Which means we are not yet un-pluggin
something as important as TSL. Support for the existing TSL versions
will be continue.

So all those who still are running this good looking distro, I dont
think there is much to worry. All over, its community that makes this
distro what it is. So all your contributions, regular interactions on
the mails and mailing list would suffice, Right?

I could still pop in once a while with the "I am here" notices just to
assure you :)

(Oh, there is one more guy out there who works in silence for TSL but
keeping a low profile for now - 3.1 and TSL64?? :D )

Well then back to the normalities of my work

- Nived

[Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Post by Nived Gopalan
I could still pop in once a while with the "I am here" notices just to
assure you :)

That's probably a good idea. ;)

Post by Nived Gopalan
(Oh, there is one more guy out there who works in silence for TSL but
keeping a low profile for now - 3.1 and TSL64?? :D )

A very, very low profile.

I just downloaded the 3.0.5 release, installed everything, and did the
following:

rpm -qa --changelog | grep ^\* > changelogs.

Then did some editing to fix errors, some sorting and re-ordering, and
the grand total of the changelogs are here:


http://www.tihlde.org/~christht/tsl-changelogs/changelogs-sorted.txt

So either the other guy is calling himself Nived, or he's Bipin, and
haven't touched the rpms since May.

Anyway. Take a look at the list, and you get a clue as to when, exactly,
different developers stopped working on the rpms that constitute TSL...

Interestingly I stopped doing rpms somewhere around 2005-06-30, although
I worked on TSL through January 2006, heavens knows what I actually did,
but I guess it was installer-related and swup, of course. :)


c

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by Nived Gopalan

From the management perspective, we are yet to get some added support,

but rest assured I still am here. Which means we are not yet un-pluggin
something as important as TSL. Support for the existing TSL versions
will be continue.

Read: Development for new versions is stopped, if you want something
up2date or modern don't use TSL.

Post by Nived Gopalan
(Oh, there is one more guy out there who works in silence for TSL but
keeping a low profile for now - 3.1 and TSL64?? :D )

Ok, so not stopped but almost stopped... Same result - and a developer
should be active in the community (if that community still exists) so
people can see that someone is working on it, and to see what people
want and expect...

Danny

[Oystein Viggen]

* [Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Oystein Viggen joint the team at a very early stage, I'm guessing
somewhere at the time of TSL 1.1.

I was hired to write the docs for 1.0[1], so probably some time between
0.8 and 0.9. A few weeks before 1.0 in any case. Didn't have much time
to do anything but documentation work at the time, so it would be fair
to say that 1.1 was the first TSL version where I made a significant
technical contribution. (I also submitted the first patch to the TSL
project -- Spelling fixes for the TSL mission statement ;)

I was away from TSL development for a little over 2 years, but I think
the only significant release I didn't contribute to was 2.0 (development
was a bit slow at the time, so it was 3 years between 1.5 and 2.2).


Øystein

[Daniel Meyer]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
Take a look at the names, and try to find any of them on tsl-discuss the
last couple of years. You'll find Danny, but not saying anything that
can be interpreted as positive towards TSL. :)

That just made me sound like a bad guy! :-) TSL was great, it was
(my|the) distro of choice a few years ago...

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
The only reason for reintroducing Anaconda in 3.0.5 was that everyone
that developed the closed-source Viper installer, was by then fired.

And the installer lacked some features IIRC, like kickstart. Correct me
if i'm wrong :)

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
The main problem with TSL is not that it's vulnerable to whatever the
Comodo management decides, although this is also true. The main problem
is that it's a distribution developed by one person, with an active
community of about 15 people, and an ever changing user mass.

15? :)

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
We, the original TSL developers, measured the download rate of 2.2 and
3.0 before we left the sinking ship in late 2005/early 2006. The amazing
thing about the results was not the great amount of downloads each
month. The interesting part was WHO downloaded TSL.

Nice stats.

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.
Thank you for reading this, and both Ubuntu and CentOS are decent
alternatives to TSL.

Yay. :-)

Danny

[Carlo Florendo]

Post by Christian Haugan Toldnes
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.

I've got 2.2 still working on production servers. TSL is vulnerable but we
manually patch the distro for our needs. TSL 2.2 is still great. I
guess there are still several people reading this list and since the
list-readers are, IMO, have experience, they don't need to post each and
problem every time.

Thank you very much.

Best Regards,

Carlo
--
Carlo Florendo
Softare Engineer/Network Co-Administrator
Astra Philippines Inc.
UP-Ayala Technopark, UP Campus Diliman
1101 Quezon City, Philippines
http://www.astra.ph

--
The Astra Group of Companies
5-3-11 Sekido, Tama City
Tokyo 206-0011, Japan
http://www.astra.co.jp

[Michal Vitecek]

hi,

Post by Ariën Huisken
Is anyone still reading this list?
In the past there where lots of posts, but recently it is too quit for
me here. I think the TSL community has gone away to other distros.
Ariën

i, too, am reading this list and plan to use TSL for all our servers in
the future - currently we're using it on 8 servers. it does have its
glitches (e.g. hanging swup) but it's imo fantastic for servers. if
there is a way to support TSL - both with volunteer work and
financially - i'd be happy to know and help.