What's this landscape stuff about?

[Siggy Brentrup]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 22:35 -0500, Chris Mohler wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Siggy Brentrup<ubuntu at psycho.i21k.de> wrote:
> 
> > I suggest you read "man motd" on any Unix system to learn what this
> > file is good for.  I happen to run Ubuntu, pure Debian, OpenBSD, Irix
> > and Ultrix, all of them agree in the essentials.
> 
> Why else would I mention fortune?  My only point is that you can
> change motd to display whatever you wish.  Nothing to get bent out of
> shape about IMO.

Thanks for hinting me at landscape-common which I indeed installed
from the main archive after reading it's long description - now it's
purged.  Nothing in this description by any means indicates that a
commercial product is involved; only in the long description of
landscape-client there is a hint that you need a landscape account to
use it but nothing indicates a permanent landscape account is only
available for a fee.  IMO that's stretching the intent of the main
distribution quite a bit.

As for motd: In almost 30 years of administering unixoid OSes (with a
long interruption due to illness since 2004) I always used /etc/motd
as a simple plain text file that's a convinient means for the sysadmin
to communicate important stuff to users.  I'm not happy with Debian's
decision to automatically create part of it because it takes away
screen space forcing me to use motd.tail instead of motd if I don't
want to loose my information.  Things change, but they can also change
compatibly e.g. by modifying login to display a newly introduced
prefix to motd instead of breaking existing scripts.

Again Canonical tops this Debian misfeature by displaying spam if you
install an innocent looking Ubuntu package.

> Why this header?
> Mail-Followup-To: Ubuntu Users <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>,
> 	info at canonical.com, support at canonical.com, sales at canonical.com

Mail-Followup-To: ubuntu-users should be obvious, the others have been
added by mutt automagically because they where in the Cc.  Blame
Canonical for not providing an appropriate email address on their
contacts page as I mentioned in my initial post.  I refuse to
duplicate work by entering my concern in a web form.  Moreover one of
these webforms didn't load but crashed my browser (iceweasel in this
case).


> Chris
> 
> [0] have a peek in /etc/update-motd.d/ for 50-landscape-sysinfo, which
> is provided by
> 
> [1] $ aptitude why landscape-common
> Unable to find a reason to install landscape-common.
> 
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