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Website · by **Ice9** » Tue Mar 18, 2003 4:49 pm

Did somebody try that one yet?
Downloading the iso's right now, it seems pretty nice.

Edit:
Well actually, I don't know if it's gonna be that sweet, I just read that there is no user login process ...?
Does that mean you're logged in as root all the time?
I'll find out when it's donwloaded and installed on one of my spare boxes ......

by **Void Main** » Tue Mar 18, 2003 5:29 pm

Hmmm, looks a lot like Debian and KDE 3.x to me. There is a "Users and Passwords" button in the control panel so it appears to still be multiuser. Of course they could have done like Lindow$ and made it default to using root without a password. If so, shame shame.

Website · by **Ice9** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 6:22 am

Well, I can't really tell at the moment.
I tried to install 3 times and every time it froze in the last stage on the "optimizing applications" screen ......
The box I'm trying to install it on is pretty standard, PIII 450, Ati Xpert98 16MB on an Aopen MB, no sound card, no NIC and I already installed numerous distros on it (Lycoris, ELX, Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian), they all worked right out of the box excepts Debian for which I never could get X to work because KDE crashed when trying to initalize my mouse (M$ Intellimouse) .....

I'm now downloading the latest alpha 7.1 which wasn't yet available yesterday on the ibiblio ftp server and I'll give it another go

Edit: It looks like I'm still not gonna be able to tell, with Alpha 7.01 the install went smooth, the installer tells me to take out the cd and reboot ....
But when I reboot my box tells me that no active partition has been found on HDD.
That box still had Debian 3.0 running yesterday so I know there's nothing wrong with my harddrive.

by **Void Main** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 9:18 am

So in other words you might say that ArkLinux is not quite ready for prime time? :)

Website · by **Ice9** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 4:29 pm

Probably not

One thing I thought about is that I have two harddrives in that box and maybe the installer gets "confused" about which partition to activate?
I'll try and remove one of the drives and see what that does.

Website · by **Ice9** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 5:48 pm

Ok, it's definitely not ready for prime time!!!!
I removed the second harddrive and still no-go, no active partition found.
So I booted with Knoppix (what a fine option

) and started fdisk.

I was kinda surprised that:
- only 2 partitions had been created (swap and linux)
- none of the partitions had been made bootable

I quickly fixed that, wrote it to the partition table and rebooted the box.
Ok, this time Arklinux boots, looks really nice, it's KDE what could I say more

So I start up a few apps, everything is familiar, pretty much how I configured things with my RH8 box so that's nice for me.
But then I fire up a terminal window and wonder how I'm gonna do to install stuff, because at no point at all did the installer ask me for a root password or to create a regular user.
So I $ su just to see what would happen, and BAM I'm root .... just like that, without even being asked for a password or anything.
This is bad, really bad!!
By no means am I a seasoned linux user, but I've witnessed first hand how easy it is to mess up your system and being able to modify/remove system files without the warning of having to enter a password to do so is really scary.
Is this the linux made windows?

I'll update this thread if I happen to find other stuff that seems weird to me.

Edit: Yuck!!!!! I edited the user and the root account, no password was set for either one of them.
So I set a password for both users, rebooted to be sure everything was properly re-initialized and I still don't need a password to su to root!!!!
This is really really really bad!!

by **Void Main** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 6:42 pm

Yep, if that distro became as popular as Windows because of it's ease of use your other thread about Security would be very valid.

by **Calum** » Thu Mar 20, 2003 4:17 am

what so you enter a new root password and it still does not ask you for a password when you change to root? somebody should let lindows corp know about this... they might want to base their next release on it.

Website · by **Ice9** » Thu Mar 20, 2003 5:40 am

Well, it's an alpha, maybe we should take that into consideration too?
I messed a little more with the passwords and when I tired to change my password with the "change your password" icon I entered my old password and all I got was "Wrong password" ?!
Maybe the password stuff is still messed up and will be "fixed" in a later release?

But then again they state clearly that they target the Windows users who "just want it to work" and don't want to be bothered with passwords to enter.
And if the guys from Arklinux succeed in making the distro work out of the box for nearly every configuration Windows users might not be worse off with it.

I mean, what do they do now? There are probably tens of thousands of people re-installing Windows right at this minute because they fscked it up!
If they fsck up their Arklinux they will do the same, only it will be easier for them because it will install faster and they won't have to bother installing hundreds of drivers and patches and applications ...

I know for a fact that I never will use it, be it only for that "root without password" issue but Windows users don't care about such issues so it might not be a bad thing after all

I know most of you will disagree with me but if people are dumb enough to put up with a crap OS with security issues, wouldn't it be better if they put up with a better OS with only some of the security issues?
Some of them are bound to see the light someday and switch to a "real" distro .... and for those who stick with Arklinux it won't be worse than with Windows ...

by **Calum** » Fri Mar 21, 2003 10:15 am

no. if arklinux fscks up once, then they will not reinstall it. they will say 'fsck this linux oops' and then they will reinstall windows.

there's a narrow windows of opportunity here and in maybe 3 to 5 years time we will see if linux rose to the challenge of being idiot proof or if it continued to reach faster than its potential market share could tolerate, preferring beta releases to stable ones.

Website · by **Ice9** » Fri Mar 21, 2003 10:49 am

but surely, even if Arklinux fscks up once they will have seen the difference between a linux install and a windows install, we're talking about a couple of hours difference here, plus all that drivers install and plug and pray crap ...
So why wouldn't they re-install linux?

If they have a problem many of them will go to an online forum where others will tell them to get a "real" distro
Wouldn't that be a possibility?

by **Calum** » Fri Mar 21, 2003 12:19 pm

i hope so, but remember that "In this real world, then, the most successful products become standards against which all other products are measured, not for their performance or cleverness but for the extent to which they are like that standard." Robert X Cringeley - Accidental Empires, 1992

there's no pretending linux is like windows. if they try it for a couple of hours, people are just as likely to give it up and never try it again, especially if they can't get it to work.

i know a lot of people like this. they are often obnoxious about it, like they have something to defend but more often they are just indifferent. windows works for them, they tried linux, didn't like it, stuck with windows. they don't give a toss about the free software issue, it's "not their problem", and if linux doesn't even work when they try it then it has no future, except in the homes of geeks.

that includes my home, but most people are NOT geeks.

by **Void Main** » Wed Mar 26, 2003 2:48 pm

I (the Nazi censor) have deemed Arklinux to be unworthy of discussion on this forum. It as of this date is banned and this thread is locked.

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