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Re: Horrifying suggestion



On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 06:04:52PM +0100, Peter Hugosson-Miller wrote:

> That depends on whether you consider you can trust helixcode or not. 
> "arbitrary" to me means "selected at random", but that might just be 
> my bad English, I suppose.

read my original message, trusting helix is a very small part of the
equation.  do a traceroute to go-gnome.com, its 19 hops for me, do you
trust each and every one?  its much easier to intercept and hijack a
little shell script then it is to modify a binary.  afterall you only
need to slip a rm -rf / in there to cause disaster.

also do you trust your DNS servers? etc etc

> Sure, but where does that fit into the scenario? Newbie doesn't know
> about chmod yet. Maybe this is something helixcode should consider?

microsoft likes to keep their users in the dark, and their
administrators not too much brighter. -- James Bagley Jr.

my point is they need to learn chmod eventually might as well make it
now.  

> I did use tasksel, chose the gnome desktop, then followed the exact
> steps outlined in my previous posting. It was installed OK, just not 
> configured. When I ran go-gnome, I first backed out the few changes 
> I had made to XSession, so it would be a fair comparison.

what?  something is REALLY borked about your install then, all that is
necessary is the alternatives being configured properly.  which
happens at install.  if you had to fix /etc/X11/Xsession something is
very broken, i use WindowMaker and i don't have to mess with that
file.  (except to add resource limits...)

> <sarcasm> Nothing, other than the fact that it works. </sarcasm>

proven otherwise on debian-devel, debian gnome works fine.

> OK, I can buy in to that. If you feel so strongly about it, maybe
> you should mailto:distribution@helixcode.com and suggest that they 
> modify the instructions on their download page. I, for one, don't
> know how to download that file using the command line, so to be as 
> useful as before they would have to describe that step too.

kmself saved me the trouble ;-)

> I can't answer for popular belief, only my own experience. I'm sure
> the debian gnome install can easily be fixed with some slight 
> modifications. Just ask those guys at helix what they did that was 
> so special.

add lots of helix logos?  ;-)

really that is all anyone could really see for differences between a
standard debian gnome setup and a helix setup, helix logos (which
apparently helix might not allow distribution of, but won't confirm or
deny, that alone prevents it from going into debian) and a lighter
color scheme.  maybe a newer version here and there, but if you want
the newest you use unstable.  

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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