Showing posts with label unix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unix. Show all posts

Sep 2, 2010

Ubuntu isn't Linux, What's a Beginner anyways?

Today Joel Spolsky announced The results of the poll of whether ubuntu SE and unix SE would be merged, they won't. In short the Unix community was in favor of it but the Ubuntu community was not. Joel had this to say:
So, Ubuntu, Linux, I get it, it’s clearly not the same thing. If you love Ubuntu, we have a site for you. If you love Linux and Unix, we have a site for you. A Stack Exchange can’t work without a community that loves a subject, and love is very… specific. Fighting human nature is hard: the factionalism and fork-happiness of the Unix world has been a hallmark of that community ever since BSD vs. System V, and Stack Exchange can no more bridge that gap than we can unite the Judean resistance.

I am horribly disappointed in this decision, this factionalism doesn't help the cause, this set's precedence that it's ok in the StackExchange community to be a separatist. Arch Linux's bash must not be the same as Ubuntu's or Fedora's, and of course they've made so many changes to upstream Gnome as to be unrecognizable as such.

The main argument in favor of this separatist movement is that Ubuntu is for beginners, if that's so then why isn't it beginner.unix SE? What's a beginner anyways?

I'd dare wager that 99.999% (POOMA) of all Linux users are windows Power users, veterans, and refugees. So what's a beginner? someone that doesn't know what Firefox is? No they probably do. Maybe they don't know where it is in the menu? I can see that... but I don't see how that can't be answered with a Screenshot and a Ubuntu tag on Unix SE. Maybe it's someone who doesn't know how to use the CLI? Well where do you define beginner from advanced? I realize someone reading there first shell programming Tut/Book/etc is a beginner, but are they no longer a beginner after that? how do you know you're not a beginner anymore? When you choose to move beyond Ubuntu? If I've been using Linux for 5 years and I choose to move to FreeBSD am I a Beginner?

Why is that the answer to a beginner from an advanced user isn't welcome? Is it good that beginner are exclusively answering other beginner questions?

In other news it looks like I may become a moderator ( temporary at least ) for unix SE.

Aug 3, 2010

Some Stack Exchange site's I'd like to see come to fruition

  • Unix & Linux: I think it'd be more used than Super User and ServerFault for some questions.
  • Outer Join: A place to ask questions about databases and queries
  • User Interface: because this is something we could all do better with.

Please consider following/committing. esp the unix/linux one (since I don't think Ubuntu should get to have its own, while leaving the rest of us in the cold.)

Aug 23, 2009

Adding a new group to an open shell without logging in and out

Most Unix users believe it's impossible to add a group that was recently added to your user account without logging in and logging out. If you're running X and need to give your gui new permissions (like dolphin/konqueoror) this may be true, for the most part. I don't know how to change it for those processes. However, if you need to change it for a shell prompt it's easy. You merely execute the command newgrp in an open shell prompt and that prompt will now be loaded with the new group. I believe it also changes the default group that shell is running as. So if you run newgrp http; touch test.txt your file will be created with the group http instead of whatever your default is. You can change your group back to the default by using the sg command.