China subsidizing Linux

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Scott <sclewin at sgaming.ca> wrote:

> I tried Puppy Linux recently and love it.  I love how Puppy Linux saves
> everything to RAM so the whole operating systems runs amazing fast.

The snag with Puppy is an absolute doozy, though. Everything runs as
root; there is no out-of-the-box support for ordinary non-privileged
users. Result, Windows-95 like levels of protection. It's about as
robust and secure as a wet paper bag.

The creator came from Windows 95 and sees nothing wrong with this. In
other words, he is dumb. Smart enough to create a very clever little
product - it's very impressive - but not smart enough to listen to his
elders and betters when they tell him that what he is doing was
discovered to be a Very Bad Idea 30Y ago. Unfortunately, he is
arrogant and dumb enough to tell them - and his users - to FOAD.

http://www.puppylinux.org/manuals/puppy-40/english/security/root

This is so stupid that any half-credible Unix type, when I tell them
this, looks at me with utter incredulity and instantly loses any
interest whatsoever in the product.

I think a lot of the world would be able to use and benefit from a
very very cut-down Ubuntu or Debian that required the same level of
system spec as Puppy, but with proper installability, upgradability
and security. Several projects have tried, but ultimately didn't
attract enough support to fly:

http://u-lite.org/

http://rule-project.org/ - now essentially dead, they recommend U-Lite.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508