Comment Re:TFA missed some stuff (Score 1) 181
Arklinux automatically sets up a user called arklinux who has no password and essentially root privileges.
The user does not have any "dangerous" privileges - please see the description on how the security system works.
While it diverges quite a bit from traditional Unix, this is part of what makes Ark easier on the average user than most of its competition (except for the "autologin as root" ones, which are actually scary).
Oh, and the reviewer is lucky he used the System Install rather than going down the Expert path. The version of qtparted they used seems to be broken. See the Arklinux forum.
The version of qtparted we're using is good, but there has been a typo in the post-parted handling code that caused the installer to format some partitions on complex layout with the wrong filesystem.
This has since been noted and fixed (in the snapshot versions -- there will be a bugfix release soon too).
Trying to start Celestia and Stellarium (and Dog only knows what else) causes X to buckle
On some graphics cards. There has been a bug in DRI (the 3D drivers) that caused the X server to restart as soon as an application makes use of 3D functions.
This problem has not shown up in any of our own testing because we happen to be on hardware that doesn't show this (one of our primary problems is lack of test hardware -- keep in mind that Ark Linux is run on a $0 budget by (mostly) poor people).
The bug has been reported and fixed since -- the fix is in the current snapshot release and will also get into a bugfix release soon, right now you can fix it by running "apt-get update; apt-get -t dockyard-devel install xorg".
It seems like if you put all the developers together from some of the smaller but very promising distros, say, Frugalware, Arklinux, Ultima, and Vectorlinux Soho, for Slackware-derived up-to-date KDE-centric Linices, you could come up with a really kickass operating system.
This is true to a certain extent (Ark is not slackware derived by the way) - but there are some points the developers of those distributions could never agree on, e.g. package management (Ark will not give up rpm and apt-get, the others will probably not give up tar.gz), edge vs. older stuff, default browser (see the flamewar here ;) ), ...
Some of those points could be addressed by simply making a couple of different versions that build on the same base, but since some of those issues are rather deep inside the system (package management...), that would be rather tricky to do.
That said, we're certainly open to cooperating with others -- if any other distributor is reading this and interested in cooperating on some things, please drop us a note!
The user does not have any "dangerous" privileges - please see the description on how the security system works.
While it diverges quite a bit from traditional Unix, this is part of what makes Ark easier on the average user than most of its competition (except for the "autologin as root" ones, which are actually scary).
Oh, and the reviewer is lucky he used the System Install rather than going down the Expert path. The version of qtparted they used seems to be broken. See the Arklinux forum.
The version of qtparted we're using is good, but there has been a typo in the post-parted handling code that caused the installer to format some partitions on complex layout with the wrong filesystem.
This has since been noted and fixed (in the snapshot versions -- there will be a bugfix release soon too).
Trying to start Celestia and Stellarium (and Dog only knows what else) causes X to buckle
On some graphics cards. There has been a bug in DRI (the 3D drivers) that caused the X server to restart as soon as an application makes use of 3D functions.
This problem has not shown up in any of our own testing because we happen to be on hardware that doesn't show this (one of our primary problems is lack of test hardware -- keep in mind that Ark Linux is run on a $0 budget by (mostly) poor people).
The bug has been reported and fixed since -- the fix is in the current snapshot release and will also get into a bugfix release soon, right now you can fix it by running "apt-get update; apt-get -t dockyard-devel install xorg".
It seems like if you put all the developers together from some of the smaller but very promising distros, say, Frugalware, Arklinux, Ultima, and Vectorlinux Soho, for Slackware-derived up-to-date KDE-centric Linices, you could come up with a really kickass operating system.
This is true to a certain extent (Ark is not slackware derived by the way) - but there are some points the developers of those distributions could never agree on, e.g. package management (Ark will not give up rpm and apt-get, the others will probably not give up tar.gz), edge vs. older stuff, default browser (see the flamewar here
Some of those points could be addressed by simply making a couple of different versions that build on the same base, but since some of those issues are rather deep inside the system (package management...), that would be rather tricky to do.
That said, we're certainly open to cooperating with others -- if any other distributor is reading this and interested in cooperating on some things, please drop us a note!
