[Tfug] linux no longer for amateurs

[Bexley Hall]

> I know nothing about it. I just thought
> you mis-interpreted one of the previous posters.

Zack said:

= Since then, I haven't deviated from distro releases.  There's a reason
= that we have them, and not just a kernel with separate userland - none
= of the BSD's or any other commerical unixes do it the linux way.

Frankly, I didn't know if that was praise for Linux or derision.
I erred on the side of assuming there was a reason *why* Linux
does things "the linux way".  I asked if he would care to
explain *why* this was "better" (though he could just as easily
have explained why it was *worse*!).

The fact that he mentioned userland implies some ties between
the two that I can't fathom.

As I said, kernel building under NetBSD is almost a nobrainer.
Take a config file from a kernel that basically works; remove stuff
that you don't think you need; add stuff that you *do* and then
run make(1).

I have one machine currently that emits an error/warning when I
try to do "shutdown -p now" -- something about an unrecognized
APIC ID (or something like that) -- *but* it shuts down as
expected, anyway... so, why dick with it if it seems to be working?
<grin>  I suspect there is some sort of identifier read from
some bit of hardware that doesn't match one of the ones
"known" by the power sequencing hardware.  So, perhaps it doesn't
know if it is supposed to do anything "special" for this
particular hardware and just does the *nominal* set of things...
which manage to shut the machine down in an orderly fashion
anyway!

I don't consider it a good use of my time to chase down the
error message in the sources as I probably wouldn't be able to
research what is "so special" about this particular ID.