| Ask Linux.com: Redistributing a distro, running non-native apps, and forum guidelines |
| From: linux.com read times: 92 |
Provided by yangyi at 2008-05-02 19:44:49 |
In addition to answering questions on the Linux.com forums, in the past week we have been having some useful discussions as well. Here's a peek at some of them, along with a few forum guidelines you can follow to help keep the forums clean and get you speedier responses. User userid605 joined the forums wondering if it is legal to redistribute Linux on his Web site. Forum member proopnarine asked him to clarify what exactly he wanted to redistribute, and suggested that if it wasn't his own distribution, he could just as well maintain a mirror. Since userid605 insisted on hosting popular Linux distros, user Ante joined the discussion wondering why he would "want to host several 700MB to 4.xxGB files from your server?" He advised following proopnarine's advice. Ante also raised a valid question regarding security, saying "you'd also need a lot of street cred for someone to download an OS from you." When userid605 said he runs a general software freeware hosting site, proopnarine explained how providing freeware is different from hosting a distribution. "This [hosting a distro] is best guaranteed by the distribution developers themselves. You should simply link to those sites, or go through the proper process of contacting the developers and becoming a mirror site. Remember that the source is available for this software, and can therefore be altered for malicious or purely unfortunate purposes. I never download system software from a site that I don't know or cannot trust implicitly." Ante further suggested other methods of supporting distros, such as writing reviews and seeding torrents. If you have other suggestions for userid605 to put his bandwidth to good use, please join the discussion. Every now and then, the forums see questions from users who want to run non-native applications over Linux. User otrix was looking for success stories regarding Ableton Live, a music sequencer. Shashank Sharma suggested using one of the good free software alternatives, like Rosegarden or Ardour. If instead otrix was keen on running Ableton Live, Sharma pointed to Wine. Meanwhile, otrix's request for a success story was fulfilled when user alienprdkt reported success in running Ableton Live 6 with Wine on Kubuntu 8.04. ...... Please access the below link to view the full content. Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/134... |
