[RULE] Linuxjournal article, continued

[M. Fioretti]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 13:32:04 PM +0100, Liam Proven
(lproven at gmail.com) wrote: 
> Don Marti has got back to me again. He's really concerned about
> updates. He says:
> 
> «
> Liam,
> 
> >> Althought recent "official" kernels are often compiled with
> >> optimisations for 686-level processors, as I understand it, all
> >> or virtually all the actual binary packages are merely compiled
> >> for i386/i486 and so will run on virtually anything.
> 
> Likewise, sorry about the delay.  I'm curious about the "virtually
> all" part though.  Could I break something by downloading an update
> to get a security fix?

*if* I understand the question, the answer is "not more than if I were
running standard FC3 on an officially supported machine". That's the
beauty of it: on a RULE machine you'd have no power to compile kernels
by yourself anyway, so you would depend from binary updates coming
from outside. Outside here means "you do it yourself on some more
powerful HW, spending a lot of time" or "you use the same stuff of a
lot of other people, stuff that is supported and fixed often, so
you're better off"
 
> >> I suspect the main use of RULE is for building client machines
> >> rather than servers, though, so it's not so critical as for a
> >> directly Internet-connected host.

If it really is a mission critical server, on which a fault would cost
you a lot of money, it must be *new*: no old parts that may broke
tonight, without hope to get equal ones in a hurry. So it doesn't need
to run RULE.

> 
> "client systems don't need security updates" is why I get so much
> spam -- and maybe why all those perfectly good old machines getting
> converted to Linux got thrown out in the first place.  If it has a
> browser it's slurping down untrusted stuff.

Right. In this other case, with RULE you are just as safe as the guy
next door running FC3 on its brand new, 1GB of RAM, PC. As long as you
both update frequently. If you always need to surf heavy, all-Flash
websites, you need more CPU and RAM. Period. It doesn't matter if you
compile or write the browser yourself for the maximum efficiency, if
the background itself is more than your physical RAM. RULE or anything
similar are not (cannot be) intended for these uses, they are for SOHO
scenarios: read, write, calculate, email, normal surfing.

So the update problem happens only when there are no more any email clients
or browsers in your distro compiled to run on 486 or P1. Judging from
the attitude of Fedora developers towards the oh-so-cool-686-optimized
distros, 486 and P1s are going to break before this does become a problem.

In one sentence: I don't think that long-term updates are so a concern
for real world RULE usage as Don worries.
I have started to work on the mini-kde piece, so if I will hear
similar concerns from him I'll let you know. Liam, what is the exact
subject of your piece anyway?

> I don't want to be too obnoxious, but I'm not hearing "install a fix
> and it will keep working" -- and putting Linux on an old machine is
> a lot of people's first exposure to the OS.

I'm not sure what this last sentence means. Some more context, please?

Ciao,
	Marco

-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

Preserve the old, but know the new.

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