VL is looking good

[tripleRsystem]

Sorry for the error

[tripleRsystem]

Since tripRsystem has raised the same issue in two threads I'm posting my response in two threads.  My apologies to those who've read this already...

Sorry, but I just don't see the point in thinking in terms of marketing and conventional business strategies.  Vector Linux makes exactly zero dollars if one new user downloads and installs VL or if a million do.  Yes, a few more people might by SOHO if it's more popular and I suppose that's good.  Most Linux companies make their money selling support and consulting services.  Marketing the new support offerings to businesses makes sense.  Worrying about if we're ranked 15th or 23rd on Distrowatch makes no sense and IMHO simply doesn't matter.

I'm a Linux professional and I would *NEVER* recommend Vector Linux to one of my customers for use either on the desktop or in the server room.  Why not?  When known security issues crop up sometimes someone gets a new package to fix the problem out.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it happens eventually, and sometimes it never happens at all.  If a security fix is packaged does it get tested and moved to the repositories promptly?  VL's history says no, absolutely not!

Do we inform users of security issues?  Sometimes yes, mostly no.  We have the mechanisms to do it in the forum, on the website, and via RSS.  Everything is in place and it's rarely used.  Look at the website -- no security news since July yet in August both DoS and buffer overflow vulnerabilities were discovered in xine-lib.  The good news is toothandnail did make a new package.  The bad news is that it just got into the patches repository a few days ago.  No information about it was ever disseminated to the users.

If VL wants to be taken seriously it needs to get its act in order when it comes to security.  That probably isn't going to happen on a volunteer basis.

You make an excellent point with regard to VL deficiencies.  Truly VL must address its short comings in these areas to be taken seriously to garner the respect Vector desires.  However, addressing problematic areas should not necessitate shutting down all other areas of VL to address such problems.  VL is an excellent product as it stands and can be promoted on its positives while negatives are taken under advisement and corrected.  Granted, negatives need be quickly addressed and corrected as soon as possible. 

There seems to be some disconnect wherein I'm suggesting VL should be run as a business, this is not the crux of my input, I simply suggest more focus on planning and less on happenstance, managed like a business if you like.

Community perception of where VL takes an equilibrium in ranking is important, how many nebbish want a distro ranked number twenty when just up the road number one is available.  Perception:  It's a strong multiplier when it comes to selling a product, (and I'm not talking about dollars and cents here.)  and if selling VL to the community is not what this is all about, then I give up. 

[caitlyn]

Well... there is serious Linux community resistance to any distro deemed to be "commercial" so talking about VL in business terms won't help there.

As much as I like VL the only reason I can run it is because my work forces me to keep up on security issues and I patch whether VL does or not.  IMHO no distro can be called "excellent" if it doesn't allow users to easily keep it secure.  VL doesn't and that is a HUGE shortcoming IMHO.  Zenwalk has the same shortcoming, FWIW, and they are the other Slackware-based distro that could conceivably challenging the majors if they got their problems squared away.

So... I disagree with you when you say #1 is available.  It isn't.  I've called Vector Linux "very promising" for years.  I've said it's 90% of the way to being able to challenge the major distros for both 5.8 and 5.9.  Until it gets security right and until it has the packages and tools necessary to make internationalization/localization easy it won't move up the rankings much.  As some of our non-native English speakers how much work it takes to localize VL and you'll know what I mean.  It's dirt simple for me to setup a system en français for example in Ubuntu or Fedora/CentOS/RedHat or Suse or Mandriva or Debian.  It's a pain in VL despite the fact that VL hails from a country that is officially bilingual with French as one of the languages.

I volunteer, both in the areas of packaging and now repository maintenance.  I do my part to make things better.  So do many other users.  It still isn't enough.

[tripleRsystem]

I never implied #1 was available to VL, I did state, however: #1 is available to the community when community members choose a distro. 

Again;  I never suggested VL become commericial. However, I am suggesting that VL think outside the box and simply apply proven commerical principal where it can be applied.  I just want  VL to take a look at what makes the Brown Distro and others such a success, or pick their brain if you like, and then take the meat from that success and apply what ever small measure works to VL; reverse engineering is no stranger to Linux.

Perhaps I'm not reading your post correctly, but it seems to me your guaging your entire argument on the enterprize  fraility of VL and not on the community at large.  Many distros, more succesful than VL, suffer many of the same VL faults you post here.  VL users currently participating on this forum must suffer from these VL delinquents, and yet somehow enjoy the VL model and experience.  I suggest there are many more like us in the community that simply need awaking to the possibilities of VL. 


   

[caitlyn]

With all due respect, anyone who fails to keep their system secure is playing with fire. In most cases it's ignorance.  To suggest that security is just for the enterprise, well... the first time your system is cracked by someone malicious for no good reason you'll think otherwise.  If your credit card info or your identity is stolen you may really regret not keeping your system secure.  Keeping a Vector Linux system secure should be easy.  As I pointed out earlier we have all the necessary tools and mechanisms in place to make it so.  Right now it's anything but.

Similarly internationalization and localization is not just about the enterprise.  Read through the forum and see for what percentage of our users English isn't a first language.  That number is quite high.

There is an old joke:

What do you call a person who speaks three languages?  Multilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages?  Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language?  An American.

Most people outside the U.S. and a fair number here in the States are multilingual.  I have family all over the world.  Lots of users would like their systems to work in multiple languages and many prefer their menus, help, dialogs, etc.. in their native language, whatever that is.

There is a lot to like about Vector Linux.  If that wasn't true I wouldn't be here, would I?  Understanding where the weaknesses are is the first step towards improving things.  I also believe the issues I raised are huge ones, not little ones.

[M0E-lnx]

I have to agree with caitlyn on this one... Security and localization are serious deficiencies that should be addressed.

[Joe1962]

Do we inform users of security issues?  Sometimes yes, mostly no.

Once upon a time I took upon myself to check the main security sites daily. Then I would weed out the issues that were relevant to libs and apps included in VL isos and repos, also some of the more popular ones not on the repos. I posted them on the Security Advisories subforum, with some relevant links, mostly within 24 hours, barring a few weekends when I wasn't online. At some point, however, my work and non-work related development tasks made it impossible for me to continue this. I posted asking for new volunteers to take over the task, but never got any. Just checked now and it seems this post has been lost or pruned though.

[caitlyn]

Hi, Joe, and everyone else,

If you give me access to post to the security topic I'd be happy to help with that one.  I don't check everything every day but my work does force me to keep abreast of things.

Also, we have a few packagers (rbistofi and toothandnail immediately come to mind) who've been packaging security fixes.  It would be great to announce those there as well as in new package announcements. 

How do we get such announcements to feed to the news section of the new website?  That site is really making VL look bad at the moment by showing security issues but none since July.  It actually makes things look far worse than they really are.

Again, this is one area where I can probably help some.  Ideally there should be one person responsible for this who is knowledgeable but that is difficult in a volunteer/community environment.

-Cait

[rbistolfi]

Cait, I am the one updating the website with the security patches information. I have built about ~10 security patches since the last announce there, but for some reason they were not being moved, until uelsk8s kindly moved them to patches. By the time the patches were actually moved, I was too busy to update the website, and decided was more important to make the patches available for the users  concerned about security than the announce itself, so I used my time in that direction.
I  would like to point that even is true that one announce involving about 10 packages was missing, all the patches are available from the repository for the user. I will try to update the site for this weekend, and maybe I could write some code to do it automagically from the repo announcement.

[caitlyn]

Thanks, Rodrigo! 

FWIW, I've been helping out with repository management.  You've probably noticed that testing doesn't have much in it at this point, only recently built packages and a couple with issues, and everything else is now in patches or extra where it belongs.  I'm going to try and keep it that way at least until exeterdad reappears.  After that I'll work with him.

[Joe1962]

If you give me access to post to the security topic I'd be happy to help with that one.

I made you moderator on that board, normal members can only reply to existing posts there. Let me know if you have any problem.

[caitlyn]

Thanks, Joe!

[tripleRsystem]

Thank you for the kind words. My problem is Vector has been around longer than Ubuntu, mint or even pclos. In fact we are older than than 90% of the distros on distrowatch but still people do not know vector and still think its a new distro much of the time. We get usually five reviews per release all generally good to excellent
and yet no respect............what are we to do .............after 10 years I am out of ideas.............so new ideas would be good!

Vector

Originally this threads' purpose was to garner new perspectives on solving Vectors' problem as set forth in his post.  Vectors' statement is quite clear i.e.; "People still do not know vector and still think it's a new distro."  I have tried to channel and to keep our dialog relevant to vectors post, however, I have failed.  This thread has degenerated into the nuts and bolts of vl, or, if you like, to the Linux Professionals level of discourse.  Where in the final analysis, nothing new has been put forward.  A continual rehash of technical problems that begin at the beginning of vl and will still be there at the end of vl is not going change the communities perspective of vl.  Nuts and Bolts are important, however, they are always going to be there.  I find the same narrow focus in our organization whenever technical staff are involved because it is difficult to get them to think out of the box and to realize there are possibly problems and solutions different from what they represent.  I see a great number of people on the board with seemingly a great deal of experience with vl.  I simply ask, Why are the nuts and bolts so poorly maintained?  After all vl is your distro not mine.         

[waynev]

Thank you for the kind words. My problem is Vector has been around longer than Ubuntu, mint or even pclos. In fact we are older than than 90% of the distros on distrowatch but still people do not know vector and still think its a new distro much of the time. We get usually five reviews per release all generally good to excellent
and yet no respect............what are we to do .............after 10 years I am out of ideas.............so new ideas would be good!

Vector

Originally this threads' purpose was to garner new perspectives on solving Vectors' problem as set forth in his post.  Vectors' statement is quite clear i.e.; "People still do not know vector and still think it's a new distro."  I have tried to channel and to keep our dialog relevant to vectors post, however, I have failed.  This thread has degenerated into the nuts and bolts of vl, or, if you like, to the Linux Professionals level of discourse.  Where in the final analysis, nothing new has been put forward.  A continual rehash of technical problems that begin at the beginning of vl and will still be there at the end of vl is not going change the communities perspective of vl.  Nuts and Bolts are important, however, they are always going to be there.  I find the same narrow focus in our organization whenever technical staff are involved because it is difficult to get them to think out of the box and to realize there are possibly problems and solutions different from what they represent.  I see a great number of people on the board with seemingly a great deal of experience with vl.  I simply ask, Why are the nuts and bolts so poorly maintained?  After all vl is your distro not mine.         

What happen to victors were new and unknown, or are we now known and old, or is vl just sloppy maintainers?  btw I'm finally on vl soho-preview (wireless) and here i am.  I know I said i would buy SOHO when that happened but geez if vl is as bad as catelyn says i don't think so.  I think I'll take a look at ubuntu.

[caitlyn]

I never said Vector Linux is "bad".  Where do you get this stuff?  I never said it is "poorly maintained" either.  It's way ahead of many (if not most) smaller distros.  We certainly seem to have fewer bugs than Ubuntu does which is one of the main reasons I run this distro.  It's reliable and Ubuntu, for example, is not.

Nuts and bolts?  Not hardly.  Security is one of the basics.  You want us to reach a larger community?  So do I.  It might be nice if we could reach the majority of people in the world for whom English is not a first language.  Those were my points.  If you fix those things you reach a larger community.  The idea that nothing has been accomplished is one that I certainly don't agree with.  The first step to making something, anything better is to identify the problem.  This discussion did shake a few things up and good things are happening as a result.

You want to run Ubuntu instead of SOHO?  Fine.  On my hardware Ubuntu + KDE (Kubuntu) is slower than molasses running uphill in the wintertime.  VL SOHO with KDE runs pretty darned well.  I can use my system with KDE running Vector.  I can't with Kubuntu.

You asked what needs to be done to bring more people to VL.  You didn't like the answers.  They weren't what you expected so now you're ready to throw stones or in waynev's case to jump ship.  Pardon me but I just don't get it.

Huge clue:  there is no perfect operating system.  They all have issues.  The best way to attract new people is to solve issues and to make the OS better.