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The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

blog.ngas.ch

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Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#3

Post by darklajid »

I really would like to understand/get feedback (if the author is reading here as well or someone agrees with the rant)

- what 'services' on a server really depend on NetworkManager

I cannot imagine that a server would actually need it (although, on my _desktop_ I most certainly want it and love it).

From my vps (granted, not LTS. But did they actually _remove_ a dependency here? I highly doubt that):

  darklajid@neuland:~$ apt-cache policy network-manager
  network-manager:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: 0.9.1.90-0ubuntu5.1
    Version table:
       0.9.1.90-0ubuntu5.1 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates/main amd64 Packages
       0.9.1.90-0ubuntu3 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/main amd64 Packages

  darklajid@neuland:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
  DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
  DISTRIB_RELEASE=11.10
  DISTRIB_CODENAME=oneiric
  DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 11.10"
In fact, the Debian package description (couldn't find something for Ubuntu or RH, but the former is probably using the very same thing) says this: "NetworkManager attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. It is intended only for the desktop use-case, and is not intended for usage on servers." [1]

- why you'd have a hard time configuring it

If you install it anyway it comes with some tools [2] called nm-tool and nmcli. The latter [3] is, while the man page admits that it isn't meant to replace the applet, described as "The main nmcli's usage is on servers, headless machines or just for power users who prefer the command line."

At this point we have the following: The author of this blog posts writes up some evolutionary history of the linux desktop technologies (arguably unrelated? Is he really missing Corba or Orbit?) and then ends with a giant rant about network-manager (which I should've proved as being unnecessary and which, contrary to what he says, _comes_ with a tool to configure it) while punching dbus every now and then.

The title is link-bait and - well - weird. The article has no real point. I'm confident it took me a lot more time to write this comment and provide the relevant links than the whole 'problem' of setting up a network connection on a more or less recent Linux system can possible take.

If it takes so long - don't blame the tools.

1: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/network-manager

2: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/amd64/network-manager/fil...

3: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man1/nmcli.1.htm...

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#4

Post by asto »

I've never done any systems programming on Linux (or any other OS for that matter) so I can't comment on most of the article but I HAVE configured a network on a Fedora box on many occasions and it's simpler than the author's making it out to be.

On my fedora computer, I can just run system-config-network from the terminal and have a GUI pop up where I can configure network devices and DNS addresses with no need for X11 whatsoever. This is enough for a stable internet connection with no further action from the administrator of the computer such as "periodically calling ifconfig and ip route add until you finally managed to fetch all the data before NetworkManager would mess it up again."

Of course, if your router issues the configuration via DHCP, then you don't even need to do this much. You can just boot in on install and access the internet. I believe RedHat and CentOS work the same way. Contrary to his perception, configuring a network is not really a big deal on a Linux computer! :-D

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#5

Post by sagarun »

This is factually wrong: Then you try to figure out how to configure NetworkManager from the command line. There's no tool in the entire distribution which lets you do that

nmcli lets you configure network manager through command line http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/nmcli.1.ht...

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#7

Post by marbu »

Having network manager on the server just doesn't make sence in most cases. I'm running CenOS 6 (community rebuild of RHEL 6) on my vps without network manager and don't see any problems with this setup. I also don't know any service which would not work without network manager, I'm aware only of the opposite ones (eg. Red Hat cluster suite won't work with networkmanager). Moreover I'm quite sure that you can install RHEL, Fedora or Debian in headless mode.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#8

Post by jakobe »

While I don't quite understand the specifics the author describes, I can relate very well to the general problem: Open Source software often depends on packages that are common on the Linux Desktop. This quickly gets you into dependency hell if you try to compile the program/library on a different platform.

An example I was recently confronted with was libmdb, a library that reads Microsoft Access databases. For some reason it depends on glib2, which in turn depends on a few other libraries. In the end I needed to compile 5 different libraries because libmdb uses hash tables and arrays from glib2.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#9

Post by jiggy2011 »

Network manager is particularly annoying. It doesn't seem to like static IP addresses at all, sure the GUI will allow you to assign them but it doesn't actually seem to affect the system at all.

I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find an easy way to do that without NM (I tried wickd but had other issues with that).

The upshot of this is that I have to use NM with some bash scripts that run on login to overwrite some of it's settings.

Don't get me started on sound..

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#10

Post by FooBarWidget »

asto wrote: post #4

I've never done any systems programming on Linux (or any other OS for that matter) so I can't comment on most of the article but I HAVE configured a network on a Fedora box on many occasions and it's simpler than the author's making it out to be. On my fedora computer, I can just run system-config-network from the terminal and have a GUI pop up where I can configure network devices and DNS addresses with no need for…

I suspect that the author is used to the old interface, involving manually writing shell scripts that call ifconfig and friends. And now he's pissed off because he can't do that anymore and concludes that the system must suck, or that his "freedom" is in jeopardy because his old way is no longer supported.

Well I see things differently. Users should be free from interference from ancient and non-user-friendly cruft. Yeah so some /etc scripts don't work anymore, but the new way allows displaying GUI dialogs which the old way didn't allow so there are legit reasons supporting the new way.

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