syslog-ng how long have logs being accessible by your sys-admin?

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Interesting discussion taking place in a r/joborun thread about building syslog-ng without systemd and telemetry!

What is interesting is that the author of syslog-ng took notice of the article and responded himself defending his choice.

This may continue so visit the link directly but here are the first two responses to the article:

https://www.reddit.com/r/joborun/comments/16x7u8o/users_of_syslogng_beware_telemetry_is_coming_not/
users of syslog-ng beware …. telemetry is coming! Not from skarnet
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Venom Linux no systemd or elogind from scratch

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On our strict list “sysdfree strict list of distros without any part of systemd” there are complete distros that can run without systemd or elogind (Obarun, joborun, antiX), and by complete we mean thousands of packages to choose from, and are some minimal base systems that you will have to build yourself software that will run on those bases.  Kiss, chimera, sabotage, mere, can all boot and can all build software.   (links to Venom to be found in the end of the document)

Venom is one that is becoming more and more gray, it has a base, it can boot with sysvinit scripts or with runit-init as pid1, you can have a desktop, browser, office type of apps, icons, fonts, themes, menus, all functional and ready for work.  It does provide choices of what essential parts to have or not.  We will not be judgemental of the choices, but it is surprisingly growing.  It is not also a conservative base system built with stable and tested build tools of 3-4 years in age, just because it needed to work, it is pretty close to cutting edge of upstream tools.

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Arch No-Systemd … yes but how? Is systemd so different than ALL the other inits?

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Hypothetically speaking, let us take Arch, and rebuild nearly all of it, without systemd.  What does this mean?

On any particular core, extra, community package, the minimal environment needed to build a package, incorporates systemd and its libs.  It is part of Arch base.  So systemd is present even when it is not required.  Some packages from source incorporate utilities based on systemd/libs and will utilize those in their package when present.  Sometimes it is evident, sometimes not so obvious.  So the hypothetical task is to build everything (except systemd and parts themselves) in a systemd-free environment.  See when errors arise due to the lack of it, disable systemd/logind utilities where we can, and see what arch would be like without systemd.

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Myth busted: Can you run sway/wayland’s i3 without systemd or elogind?

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For those who want to skip the discussion and get right to it follow the steps at this README

For a while, we have heard this justification, among distributions that have refused systemd as init, that elogind was adopted as a necessity for running wayland which is the future of graphical desktops.  Some future this is, but anyway.  For Artix it was a day one decision, for Void and Adelie it has been a year or more, for Slackware a few months.  But it is only a handful of distros at this point that have totally refused the use of elogind and stick to consolekit2 (which was recently upgraded upstream unlike common myth that has it abandoned).  Consolekit2 can handle logind functionality but can’t provide seat management.  So there is seatd, a daemon that just does this.  So count the different functions, unrelated to each other, that systemd provides all in one huge blob. Continue reading →

Why was Nutyx dropped from our lists

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logo_nutyx_120NO PUBLICITY IS BAD PUBLICITY

In our initial review of Nutyx, more than a year ago, we did not see a distro struggling for identity, we applauded their effort to make a linux system work without components of the pest (systemd, pulseaudio, gnome, wayland, etc.) but independently using the “stable” consolekit2, sysvinit as tried and refined for decades, and their very own tool for package management, cards.  Revisiting it now, after comments on our list of linux distributions without systemd, we were both disappointed and curious on why and how they did such a thing.  We have seen others go, but they were more like forks of a system than an independent distribution.  Like ArchBang, the fleadog of flea dogs. Continue reading →

Ataraxia and the need for a stricter list of distros

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A while ago someone I didn’t know contacted me in reddit about the list of distributions without systemd, suggesting I should add ataraxia linux.  Ataraxia Linux was very similar to kiss-linux, source based, musl, but featuring an array of init and service supervision systems available to choose.  A few weeks ago, someone (turns out to be the same person) added a comment to this blog to this more precise list of “linux distributions without systemd” and suggested I should add Ataraxia to the list, and I did.

Then a comment comes in by someone who is really going through the list of distributions and also has been reviewing the narrow list of distributions, or systems, built on musl instead of glibc.  He alerted me to the fact that Ataraxia is now using systemd as its default init system.  It didn’t strike me as odd in the beginning, even though I had recently given it a try.  I was under the impression, never tried, that systemd couldn’t be built on musl as it wasn’t even written in C.  So I asked that same guy, who turns out to be the distro owner of ataraxia, how has he  achieved this, and I got a single word response:  “patching”. Continue reading →

2 How to remove systemd from Debian Buster

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As mentioned in the proposed topics of July2nd2020 this is article 2 from that list.

This came from a community member as a proposed topic.

How to remove systemd from Debian Buster

older-pig:  A guide for removing systemd from Debian Buster and fixes for some issues which may occur because of that
https://gitlab.com/older-pig/buster-nosystemd Continue reading →

5 Does the “typical linux user” have anything to gain over traditional scripts?

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This is article 5 from the latest proposed list of topics

Probably the most valuable content this community has produced was condemned by immaturity and lack of organization (on our part) to set the parameters of the procedure within which a productive debate can occur.

One of the reasons people without bosses, authoritarian structures, fail to organize and formulate their own power structures is because they have been conditioned to be vicious aformalists (anti or non formalists in terms of organizational tendency).  Individuals born and raised within this patriarchal system of authority can only behave like spoiled children all their life.  Sorry cynwulf1 and mobinmob, but you used and abused your expertise to block all other possible participants and concentrated on your own duel of expertise competition.

The content of your expert testimonies may be of value, but next time something like this happens fungalnet is not going to be here and be nice, you will be moderated and either respect an open process discussion or you can take your dialogs somewhere else.  Imagine if in a Union meeting two characters, with very accute and experienced authoritative voices,  converted the meeting into a dialog where everyone else was forced to be quiet and listen,  Two people from within an amphitheater, can dominate nad hijack all discussion to what they think the object of the meeting is.  Not here, not again!

Fungalnet failed to set the rules of a debate, it occured in a totally unrelated subject, fungalnet let it go on, you both ignored fungalnet trying to present the case of “the average linux user”, and now the question still remains open.  Neither of you, consumed in your own expert testimony, were able to convince (we believe) for either or.

The question remains,  should we “average linux users” (who may use a workstation for editing text, browsing the net, manipulating images, video, or audio, or who may be an average linux admin hosting a home or small office network of file, mail, firewall, backup, print, and other servers).  Are scripts as found in Antix or Open/Free{BSD}, enough, or are supervision suites such as those of Void, Obarun, Adelie, Spark, Artix, a benefit to users?

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Coming up next the new sysdfree resurrection

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Just so when “some” were happy this is done and over with, POP goes the sysdfree community project again.  From now on, we will have a summary article of what is coming up next, and a series of articles discussing in detail the most worthy or note-worthy topics of interest.  Since  YOU haven’t been contributiong much to the community, it will be OUR topics of interest.

Why did we vanish for a little while?  After all this closure and prohibition to end the covid diaspora we have been burning some skinny road bike tires enjoying the end of spring and the starrt of a very HOT summer.  So now that it is getting hot, we will stay indoors again enough to write something up.  Yeeahhheee!!!! Or is it Yaaayyyy….!!!

1  Devuan:  Boring new stable release a year later  (you wanted an article .. go find one elsewhere).

2  Debian:  Script that runs and removes systemd and installs sysvinit and reboots to a systemd init free system.

3  Adelie (and Alpine) free and non-free independent repository

4  Black Artix, as if Artix wasn’t shady enough

5  Adequacy of traditions scripts (sysV or BSD inits) necessity of supervision suites (s6, 66, synit, minit, perp) or other alternatives such as OpenRC.

6  Split Linux, based on Void, security, anonymity, real firewalling, and more ….

7  Enough with supervising dry-cut monolythic services, the future is in modules (modular services and bundles of services).  If systemd was already burried and done with, this builds a pyramid on top, just so nobody will ever dear to open the mummy’s coffin.

8  Live streaming with Terry Barentsen on 2 wheels, no gas or dirty coal electric motors!

9  Kiss gets a new package manager

10  The shit (green energy environmental disaster) has to stop.  A documentary about the end of the planet’s ecosystem and who are the deceiving actors causing it.  It may be the most revealing 100′ of your life, or at least your recent world perception.

11  A song for our own resurrection:

            __________   –  “*”  –   __________ Continue reading →

PCLinuxOS the distribution for everyone without systemd

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You may think that we gave up and not “producing” anymore, but we haven’t.  We are still at it, but we are not under this “productive” insanity pressure most others live with.  If there is nothing interesting to report we will not waste your time.  When we try various distributions that we either disliked or found nothing of interest, just another tried recipe with a twist of personalization, we just scrap the installation and move on.  Then one day a couple of weeks ago we took on PCLinuxOS.  If that says something, we are still at it, on a HD installation.

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How does systemd prevail if it is so crappy?

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Is reddit’s r/linux just a front of IBM’s marketing agents?  Under what remote logic would an announcement for a 5 year old distribution be removed and how could it possibly violate r/linux strict code of ethics?

Obarun: New for December …. upgraded yes, new not at all.
Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/linux.
Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose

Those are the same tactics utilized across news-sites that appear to be “objectively” promoting linux in general, forums of systemd-only distributions, social media rooms and pages. The idea is to portray linux to new users inquiring about linux while on MSwindows, MACos, Android etc. as a systemd related operating system ONLY. Continue reading →

antiX – runit – brief stop and onto s6 and 66 : How to

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1st some history/background:
Back some time ago an alternative to sysvinit was developed called daemontools (look at sources below) and people liked it.   From “it” runit was cloned, very similar but started from scratch, to be as small, as light, as simple, and as responsive as hw itself.  Runit set some goals for its development, kept being refined and eliminating any bugs, it worked on as many architectures as people could get their hands on, and the chief runit man decided to put it to bed.  Runit has been frozen in time by its developer.  Don’t expect it to catch up with other system development unless Void decides to clone it and develop it on their own, which in some ways they already do, but it is more polishing up the existing runit.

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