Site Faq

Submitted by marc on Sat, 2006-12-09 13:39

As usual these frequently asked questions have never been asked by anybody!

Who wrote this
Name: Marc Zonzon
Sex: male
Year of Birth: 1953
Year of Death: not known at the time this is written
may be known at the time this is read
Work: Computer science teacher in "iut lannion", university Rennes1
Residence: Saint Quay Perros, Brittany, France
For who is it useful?
Except myself I have never been told of somebody finding anything useful in these pages. Sometime I imagine that among the billions of beings one may have some common interest with me, and she or he may encounter a few of the obstacles I use to bump into, and may chance upon a pointer on some answer in these pages. I must say this is just a fancy.
How are selected the links?

They point to the subjects on which I work, and I don't try to put every link I find, but only those that I want to visit from time to time when working, on this subject. I don't want to have a lot of links but the right links, of course right for me, may be not for you!

Why are you giving only links to UNIX/GnuLinux stuff?

Because I know only this system, of course in the past I have worked on other systems but they are over now, it seems that there are not much systems apart Unix these days, some light embedded systems that I don't know well.

There is also this thing we find on a lot of computers. It seems it has replaced words by gestures, evolution from man to monkey cannot succeed without learning how to replace words by gestures. But even with gestures, I have found no kind teacher to explain me how I can do my usual git diff or even diff -ua text-old.tex text-new.tex when I have these .doc things on windoze.

Younger people told me that they easily replace all the boring git commands by a mouse click on the integrated version control of their text editor

They say that they get what they see, but I feel that all these fragile assemblages of components which make a word, a program, a being or a world, means more than we can see.

Why do you omit the great desktop software, gnome, kde, and the new generation of language java, mono ...?

The answer is quite close to the previous one. Condensed in one short sentence who was the title of a book of one of the wise people to understand quite soon after the second world war, how the planet resources exhaustion was increasing at an exponential curve, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: Because small is beautiful.

All these desktop and big environment are very expensive and greedy, they eat all your resources, and ask for more. We get used to find useful all these useless things only because we can afford them. We just buy a more powerful computer, and during the lapse of a finger snap we can dream we are powerful too!

Sometime it seems that some people in the Free software world want to imitate windows, bring up to linux all the windows habits, that they call features

Some of them say we must bring this to Linux because windows is easy to use, or successful. But if you think so, why not just use windows.

Before jumping on anything because it's shiny, it moves, it makes sound, it is better to think twice on it's nature, and the need we have for it. Both the hunter, the fisherman, and your desktop use a lot of theses dancing, singing, flashing gadgets, but it's a trap.

Why only free software

I give some explanation in this page (french) and also links to answers to this question.

Why do you omit to give the license of many pieces of software you link to?

I try to slowly fix it. These links were first private, and as all the stuff I use is some free software, I did not find useful to put everywhere "Free Software", later on also thanks to the activity of all the patent proponents, I understood that to be free is not sufficient, and we have to be very careful of the software we use, and also that a Do what you want with this software is less than a LGPL and itself is a lot less than a GPL, so it is definitely better to give the license, it will avoid to welcome the one who lend you for free his software, until you have swallowed the hook.

Why this site is called MZ Linux, there are few things from MZ, almost none on the Linux Kernel, and everything is Gnu?

I use my initials because they can help to identify this site, of course I could take the sha sum of the content as title, but it would mask some continuity that make it appear as the same site, even when the content is changing.

I agree that I could better add Gnu to Linux, and only this continuity concern refrain me to do so.

I do use Linux, but have never made any development on the kernel, but I'm a Gnu software and Gnu philosophy adept. I have a great feelings to these great Gnu people as the visionary Richard Marie Stalmann who forecast years before it happen, what issues will follow from the use of a proprietary SCM system for a GPL product. And also Linus who headed a small team that developed in an incredibly short lapse of time, the best SCM never written, uniting power ans simplicity. The true spirit of Unix, which rejected useless complications to achieve a greater power, by combining small, well conceived, easy to maintain pieces of software, is there alive in Git.