Hello,

i would like to start a thread where everyone posts his solution for
removing HAL or says why "nanny-features" like HAL shouldn't be enforced
in Linux.

Disable HAL in Xorg on Debian / Ubuntu

http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/341.html

Disable automatic polling of CD/DVD-ROM drives to save power (and time)

http://blogs.koolwal.net/2009/07/24/tip-disable-automatic-po[..]

I wonder why people who need "nanny-features" like HAL refuse to just
use windows instead.

Dirk

* Dirk <noisyb*******> [2009 Aug 01 06:06 -0500]:

To be complete you should also disable and remove udev.

A new month, a new troll?

- Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more:  http://n0nb.us/index.html

Hmmm ... convenience?

If you push such thought, ...  Why even have X ... we can edit
everything by ed command.  No vi(m), no emacs, .... and few essential
packages only will get to use Debian.  

Have fun.

Osamu

And bash: go back to the bourne shell.  No ethernet, either: tty to
an ADM-3A...  But who can forget the "convenience" of a modern
processor?

I say Minix on an XT clone with 1 floppy drive!!!

--
Scooty Puff, Sr
The Doom-Bringer

Luxury, punch cards and line printers :)

--
1 Billion dollars of budget deficit        = 1 Gramm-Rudman
6.023 x 10 to the 23rd power alligator pears    = Avocado's number
2 pints                        = 1 Cavort
Basic unit of Laryngitis            = The Hoarsepower
Shortest distance between two jokes        = A straight line
6 Curses                    = 1 Hexahex
3500 Calories                    = 1 Food Pound
1 Mole                        = 007 Secret Agents
1 Mole                        = 25 Cagey Bees
1 Dog Pound                    = 16 oz. of Alpo
1000 beers served at a Twins game        = 1 Killibrew
2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
2000 pounds of chinese soup            = 1 Won Ton
10 to the minus 6th power mouthwashes        = 1 Microscope
Speed of a tortoise breaking the sound barrier    = 1 Machturtle
8 Catfish                    = 1 Octo-puss
365 Days of drinking Lo-Cal beer.        = 1 Lite-year
16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone            = 1 Rod Serling
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies    = 1 Fig-newton
    to 1 meter per second
One half large intestine            = 1 Semicolon
10 to the minus 6th power Movie            = 1 Microfilm
1000 pains                    = 1 Megahertz
1 Word                        = 1 Millipicture
1 Sagan                        = Billions & Billions
1 Angstrom: measure of computer anxiety        = 1000 nail-bytes
10 to the 12th power microphones        = 1 Megaphone
10 to the 6th power Bicycles            = 2 megacycles
The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship    = 1 Millihelen

All joking aside, I do still pine for green bar and line printers.
It made my programming much more efficient...

--
Scooty Puff, Sr
The Doom-Bringer

* Osamu Aoki <osamu*******> [2009 Aug 02 01:46 -0500]:

Dirk has exchanged a couple of emails in private and it seems he
equates convenience with "nanny-features" and that those of us
comfortable with such software should just use MS Windows.  This being
the third such themed thread he has thrust upon us in recent months,
his refrain of his sentence has grown a bit tiresome.

I can appreciate his desire that X not depend on HAL.  Sometimes
"scratching that itch" involves removing those aspects we don't like as
well as creating something new.  Perhaps the easiest way to accomplish
that is to get the last Xorg packages that did not depend on HAL from
snapshot.debian.org and once they're installed put them into the 'hold'
status.  I suggested that he may be using the wrong distribution and
that another may suit his needs better.  Perhaps a BSD would be more to
his liking.  What he seems to fail to understand is that with Free
Software he has the power to make the system *exactly* how he wishes
unlike the proprietary system he suggests some of us should use.

- Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more:  http://n0nb.us/index.html

Kids and their toys. In my day, we had rocks, both ways uphill, and we
liked it that way: http://xkcd.com/505/

--
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il

Did this, I even ported ed to a 6809 OS whose name I can't recall
(i.e. not OS 9) to replace a wordstar style editor just for the sake of
editing with regex power ("?^{?-1,.p" still being the string I type.

In the old days Debian had as a maxime differentiating it from other
Linux distributions: all configuration is handled via simple text
files.  If this has been withdrawn, I might as well switch to say
Ubuntu where I know they are using gconf (?) to configure e.g. gdm.

Were we talking about Linux or about unixoid OSes?

Yes, even if it means to back out X's dependency on the almost dead
HAL.  I'm not yet fully decided, but I might even be inclined to help
him forking a more back to the roots Debian (without bash essential).

Don't get me wrong, IMHO Ubuntu is going the right way to reach
Joe.Luser and I tend to see it as kind of a fork of Debian
addressing a certain clientel.  What I don't like to see is
Debian following the same route by depriving a sysadmin of his
freedom to decide which daemons to run.

Thanks for listening
  Siggy
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*** Snip*

The point he's making is simply that the BSD's might be a better way to
go.
having been a BSD'er I can relate to the comment - I chose to move
away from the weekly ritual of having to upgrade, fix, test, tweak,
sigh, recheck, and maybe get to spend some time relaxing on that
Friday night with a few hours left before sun-up.



Curious way of viewing that. If the admin still has the ability of
REMOVING (in this case, HAL) then how is this viewed as a deprivation
of freedom?!

To me, the freedom is still there. I now have the freedom of either
removing it or leaving it. The choice is still mine.

--
Best regards,

Chris

()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments

    "There's no place like 127.0.0.1"

FWIW, removing bash from the list of essential packages (replacing it by
dash) is one of the release goals for squeeze [1]. It might be more
worthwhile for all of us, if you help debian to achieve the goal instead
of yet another fork. ;-)

Cheers,

Johannes

[1]  http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090730

Not really, the goal for squeeze is to install dash as /bin/sh by
default.  Making bash non-essential is a different (and harder) task.

This will take at least one more release cycle, more likely two, if it
is ever accomplished.  It is very hard to remove functionality from the
set of essential packages.

Sven

I know, that's the 2nd reason for my VAXstation not running.

Propably I got his argument wrong; for me it reads: instead of driving
others to ${unnameable} go to BSD yourself, please view my response in
that light.
  

Thanks for improving my english understanding, I had to look it up to
learn curious can also mean weird or peculiar :).  People who know me
in person are accustomed to unconventional views of mine.

I am concerned about X's dependency on HAL.  Years ago I was using my
SGI Indy with a superb SGI Monitor and US keyboard (brackets and
braces at the right places) to have up to 6 xterms onscreen; the
machine is too slow to do real work.  I didn't yet recover far enough
to know for certain, but planning to run current sid on that box you
might hear my curses over the ocean when I find out I have to run HAL
or use ancient X.

We'll see, my choices are: current X, no HAL.

Regards
  Siggy
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* Siggy Brentrup <debian*******> [2009 Aug 02 11:15 -0500]:

Chris understood my point and interpreted it correctly.

The OP clearly does not want a non-unixoid OS, so giving him options he
might not have considered seemed a kind thing to do.

= Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more:  http://n0nb.us/index.html

Thanks for clarification. I probably didn't follow the relevant
debian-develop threads carefully enough ;-)

So probably still better to help speed up that process instead of forking.

Cheers,
Johannes

It's really nice to see Debian people still jumping on asides, gives
a nice comfortable @home feeling after 5 years of absence :).

If you really want me to help on Debian, nag DAM to reopen my account.

  Siggy
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5 years with 2 release cycles didn't change much apart from removed
bashisms.  It's still uncertain whether another 2 cycles will be
enough to achieve that goal.  I'm beginning to doubt mainstream Debian
will have bash out of essential in my lifetime (63yo).  A possible
solution is a new set of essential packages, implying a fork.

The point of my aside you kindly jumped on was while doing a fork
don't forget to remove bash from essential.

Thanks
  Siggy
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*lol* Thanks for this one, Dotan, it made my day :)

Siggy
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* Siggy Brentrup <debian*******> [2009 Aug 02 11:54 -0500]:

Please enlighten me as to why removing Bash from essential is
important.  My understanding was that Bash was the defacto standard
shell these days.  I understand that Dash is smaller which means it
could be useful.  Is Dash so much smaller/faster that it offers a real
performance advantage over Bash on smaller systems like netbooks?  Or
is it something else?

- Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more:  http://n0nb.us/index.html

Hi list,

I'm reluctant of following up to start yet another fruitless discussion
on bash vs. dash on this list,  if you are really interested cf at least
3 recent threads on that subject in debian-devel.

Please don't let us hijack this thread only because someone jumped
on an aside I'm already regretting in view of this OT subthread.

[ snip ]

The point is not banning bash or neglecting it's de facto standard
status, the point is enforcing system and maintainer scripts starting
with '#!/bin/sh' to be POSIXLY_CORRECT and thus portable.

Shell scripts using bash extensions to POSIX must start with
'#!/bin/bash' and packages with maintainer scripts using bash
should declare a (Pre-)?Dependency on bash.  With bash being
essential, the last requirement can't be enforced.

Now the technical differences:

% ls -lh /bin/[bd]ash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 709K 2009-03-01 10:31 /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  83K 2009-02-16 15:51 /bin/dash

% ldd /bin/[bd]ash
/bin/bash:
    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f8f000)
    libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0xb7f3f000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7f3b000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7ddb000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f90000)
/bin/dash:
    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7fcf000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7e52000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fd0000)

There is also a noticeable difference in performance, but with current
machines it sums up to the boot sequence being <10s slower when
/bin/sh -> bash compared to /bin/sh -> dash.  With slow machines
like my beloved SGI Indy R5000 the difference is more important:
iirc >1m (measured in '04).  

Apart from the boot sequence a lot of shell scripts are run in
succession when upgrading a system.  Same performance penalty here,
it's only relevant on slow boxes.

Back in '04 you had to point /bin/sh -> bash to be sure no maintainer
script broke on upgrade, implying the performance penalty.  Manoj and
others assured me on d-d, that this is no longer necessary.
  
The biggest problem in making bash non-essential are all those scripts
/bin/sh -> dash the default as Ubuntu does, you can hear a great
moaning all over the world: "Debian broke my system!".

IMHO it was a fault to make bash essential in the early days of Debian
which nobody saw - with dash not yet available and shell functionality
required.

Hoping this lengthy discourse answers your questions
  Siggy
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* Siggy Brentrup <debian*******> [2009 Aug 03 01:45 -0500]:

Thanks for your explanation.

Indeed, however, had a choice been made to keep scripts POSIX
compliant, the use of Bash wouldn't have been an issue.  In other
words, running Bash as a POSIX compliant shell would have allowed the
use of another POSIX compliant shell.

Yes, thanks.  Sometime after posting my message it dawned on me that
POSIX compliant startup scripts and performance are the drivers of this
effort.

- Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more:  http://n0nb.us/index.html

In case you didn't hear me:
ARRRRRGS THIS @#%$§*@ XORG STUFF NOT ONLY DEPENDS ON HAL, moreover
HAL forces me to install usbutils.  USB 1.0 specs were released
one year after this fine box was built!

Where's my freedom, I'm stuck with ancient X if I don't want to
run otherwise unused SW?

no thanks
  Siggy

going to pin X to stable <grrrrr>.
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Siggy Brentrup:

I really don't want to upset you even more, but allow me the question:
where's the problem in running ancient software on even more ancient
hardware? Is there anything you really need from squeeze on this
machine? Do you really need security support?

J.
--
I have never been happier than I am now; a fact which depresses me
immensely.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
                 < http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html> >

You don't upset me with this question it's a good one.

In the past my Indy has been open to a handselected group of DDs who
wanted to investigate FTBFS bugs on mips implying the box tracks
current unstable.

I'm planning to continue this service as soon as everything is up to
speed again.

Thanks
  Siggy
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Your freedoms:
0. Run the software for any purpose.
1. Study the software and tell others what you've discovered.
2. Modify the software in it's preferred form for modifications.
3. Distribute the software and your modifications.

You don't have any of these with Xf86, Reflection/X, or many of the other X
servers out there.[1]  You do with the packages Debian provides from main.

You can exercise those freedoms to reduce or remove Xorg's dependency on
Hal.  It may take some resources, but anything worth doing usually does.  

The Debian maintainers for Xorg do not feel using their resources toward
that goal is not the way to maximize value to Debian users.  Luckily for
them, you don't have the power/"freedom" to force them to use their
resources the way you want.

If you feel you are lacking the required resources to make the change, you
may want to look for others with similar goals and pool your resources.  If
you have the wrong kind of resources, there is a fairly open market for
exchanging time+skill (services), currency, and goods.
--
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                ,= ,-_-. =.
bss*******               ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy      `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/                  \_/

[1] You also don't have this right with VirtualBox (non-OSE), VMWare,
Oracle, MS SQL Server, IIS, MS IE, Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat Reader,
etc., etc.

Siggy Brentrup:

Dang, I couldn't have imagined an answer better than that. ;-)

J.
--
When driving at night I find the headlights of oncoming vehicles very
attractive.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
                 < http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html> >

With this statement you drove me away from your proposal that I
otherwise was in favor of.

  Siggy
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