Many Updates To Xfce - Will xubuntu 11.10 Update To Them?

[Mișu Moldovan]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 14:37, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:32:51 +0200
> Mișu Moldovan wrote:
>
>>> I would argue that Gentoo is closer to the spirit of BSD.
>
> If you could, I'd be interested if you could explain why Gentoo is
> closer to BSD than Arch?
>
> Is it just because FreeBSD encourages building, BSD in general doesn't.

You could be right. My Arch experience was very short and unfortunate
while most of my BSD-related time was spent with FreeBSD. I was also
thinking of the genesis of Gentoo Linux and Portage.


>> Don't want to derail this discussion so I will stop at pointing out
>> that Gentoo also supports binary packages
>
> Sorry to continue the derailment but I was under the impression that
> Gentoo only provides binary packages for a few large programs like
> office and firefox. Is it possible to run hardened Gentoo without
> compiling?

Of course it is possible, to some extent, especially when you have
lots of similar machines using the same architecture (say amd64). You
compile once and deploy everywhere.


> Making this mail even slighlty xfce related, xfce is great but
> xfces mixer and pulseaudio don't work with the grsecurity kernel patch.
> So I'm using gnome-mixer with Alsa on xfce.

I've quit using gentoo-hardened on a desktop long ago, but it's
refreshing to know that these are the biggest issues when running
Xfce. I wouldn't even count PulseAudio, I rank the -pulseaudio flag
closely after -qt4, -gtk3, -gnome, -bonobo and the likes.

These Gentoo flags make it possible to produce a mostly pure Xfce
desktop in which there is no trace of gconf and friends. On my desktop
some packages like gvfs and gnome-disk-utility have crept in over the
years but at least I don't have two settings daemons running at the
same time (xfconf and gconf). That's not easily attainable in Debian
and I'm inclined to think the same of Arch.

So, it seems a distro-war was unavoidable! :)

-- 
mișu