CentOS Stream

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:03:57 +0530

Listening to me bitch and moan about the new direction ~~CentOS~~, CentOS Stream, is now going in, someone sent me this post to tell me why this was a good thing.

It’s a lovely post and I agree with most everything the author says.
But I do believe, he talks past the main reason folks like me use CentOS. (and the main reason, Rocky Linux now exists.)

CentOS came into existence because sci/tech folk wanted a base to build on and became popular, because old harried sysadmins like me wanted to support small shops, who did not have the budget to run servers and wanted to get out of the ever tightening thumb of Microsoft.

Both of the above ends require a stable base and RHL/RHEL was just the ticket.
Without the err … Red Hat bits.¹

CentOS powered supercomputers and small and medium businesses with equal ease.
So what’s the bit that I believe missing in the post?
The target audience.
While I am sure the sci/tech community can prop up another distribution at will, the big reason CentOS is so popular, is because CentOS machines sit silently in tiny dusty corners at millions of offices, chugging away, serving files and documents and tiny intranets and enabling developers to work on an enterprise OS.²

What we needed and still need is the ability to have the engineering that goes into a stable release (backed by a major corp), so that we can get on with life.
Also yes, telling folks Yes!, this is Red Hat without the branding, gave folks the confidence they needed to come aboard the Linux ship in the early to mid 2000s.
And that’s what we are looking for.
A 100% bug-for-bug compatible distribution.
We want, what Red Hat provides. Not what they might put in or stuff that is under consideration.
Not the latest and shiniest.
Just the boring, and stable and working.
That’s what we want. And what we mourn.
And that is something Red Hat no longer seems interested in supporting.
They are well within their rights to do so, but now it leaves this large segment, scrambling.

One may argue, that all that is now changing and everyone is moving to the cloud, and that Red Hat is just moving with the times and such stuff is probably moot.
But the outcry and the search for alternatives and new distributions to take its place, proves such a need still exists.
We need something to take the place of CentOS.
And CentOS Stream, for all its advantages, isn’t it.

via Wikipedia ↩︎
That last audience might just be served with this. ↩︎

linux-firmware

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 09:10:34 +0530

That long winded message was what greeted me this morning when I did my morning update the computer routine.

E: linux-firmware: installed linux-firmware package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2

Nothing like a bug that sticks in your craw and prevents you from starting the day.
And then leads you down that crazy path of figuring out what the error is.
And then going down the rabbit hole of realising that this error happened because that went wrong.
And then tracking it all down.
And then going batshit crazy.
And then trying to figure whether updating Linux was a good thing to do in the first place.
And then wondering if even installing it was a good thing?
And then questioning your life choices in general.

Am I even a good person?

But I’m getting good at this, after close to twenty years of using the darned thing.
This message was what greeted me yesterday too, and I resisted, successfully, trying to fix it, because this forty two year old has adult life shit to do and the computer is supposed to help me do it, dammit.
I got through a whole day of work.
Mint is pretty good at keeping me sane, ever since I started using it and it hiccoughs only rarely.
This being, one of those few instances.
And even here, it just spat that error and keep the machine running, so I could do all the things.

A new day today and this crazy shit pops up again.
So I did the other adult thing, I learnt.
I gave myself 10 minutes to quickly look all of this up and only if there was an non-invasive, uncomplicated fix, would I go and do things.
This led me to this led me to this led me to wondering hmm! … What if all it was, was that I had too many kernels lying about and the boot partition was full to choking or something?
Now if this were a sane, logical, in the spirit of science post, I’d be df -hing away to high glory and documenting before and after and then taking backups and then slowly doing one thing at a time and making observations.

Ain’t no time for that shit.
I have bills to pay and a job hunt to do and a break coming up, before which this fucken thing needs to be fixed, so I can do all that.

So I figured, I’ll just delete all the old kernels I have lying about.
That was the least invasive thing I could do.
And worst case scenario, I do have backups. (Please don’t let it come to that.)
So I went ahead and did just that.(a la kazaam and poof! 6 old kernels vanish!)
And what do you know?

We’re back in business!
More rants for another day then.
Ciao, you lunkheads.

Rants on Janusworx

CentOS Stream

linux-firmware