Spark Linux – Arch beauty and minimalism all in one

A while ago, an Obarun user, Dr Saleem Khan (1) urged me to try Spark Linux and it was the first time I heard of it.  It must have been during some real busy period and it was since forgotten.  While I was trying to clean up the list of linux distributions without systemd the name came up again.  Thanks, Saleem.

By no means do I think this is for entry level users to try as a distribution with a full desktop, but for minimalists who are accustomed to arch this is an exercise of how minimal can you get with a ready off the shelf arch base on which you can build from ground up.

The project is severely undocumented, although there is not much to document for an experienced user. Spark (by Jack L. Frost) uses sinit as its init system and ssm which is an inhouse Simple Service Manager by Spark founder.

Sinit according to its source suckless (they suck less) is:

sinit – suckless init

sinit is a suckless init, initially based on Rich Felker’s minimal init.

sinit is considered complete and no further development is expected to happen.

Relevant links sinit + daemontools-encore

sinit was created by Dimitris Papastamos and was “finished” in 2015, that I believe is a year after runit was finished as a frame of reference.

How can Void be best the one day malware the next?

How can someone here, defend Void’s honor from a tremendously sloppy and unjustified criticism by the corporate rag (as in the piece of cloth used to wipe genitals after corporations take a crap, and they do all the time, especially on May Day and when strikes and mass protests are taking place around their headquarters) “distrowatch” ….  and the very next day attack void as being the worst form of malware that has hit the open and free software world?

Basically we are not a “fan club”, defending anyone as being god, or hating someone as being the antigod.   Criticism, for those that understand the term within rational thinking, has to and must be objective, to the best reasonable effort (that is all we human can do).  Only then can there be a dialectical agreement about reality, our best interpretation of it.  Despite of how many of you here, feel like they are finding a home at this systemd hate club of hooligans, enjoying braking knee caps of their opponents.  No, it is all objective criticism at something that is gradually becoming a “social danger”.  It is the Trojan Horse (and damn the damn Greeks for inventing this strategy to defeat the peace-loving Thracians and take over their land and resources, which they did, that is not Homer’s mythology but a historic fact) that is used by mega corporations to swallow and end this industry of open and free software, running on non-open and non-free hardware in lack of an alternative, which should be a social goal.  In this respect open and free software is an industry from those below against the interests of those above, a miracle or a mistake by those that rule and dominate.

Which browser to choose for privacy and anonymity and which “free” email?

Cynwulf1 in a comment about waterfox left an advise to not trust so much a “popular browser fork” just because it has become popular “saying” it is safer and more private than the original.  After some discussion with friends and associates a couple of links came up as appearing to be telling some truth about why some are really bad, some are equally bad, some not so bad, but all with rational arguments and explanations on how they draw those moral conclusions.

As all things published on the internet, by a variety of portrayed experts, should ultimately be taken under a critical eye, “who is publishing this and why do they want me convinced”,  these two links below may answer a common question:  What browser is “safer” to use, what email provider respects my privacy and anonymity?

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/email.html

Waterfox is sold out officially, it is part of the corporate world

We had dedicated much energy in the past,  2 years ago, to advocate for Palemoon and you should at least read the piece about the NoScript parody, and how we gave up on it for specific suspicious reasons (still holds unchanged, Palemoon has branded NoScript as “dangerous” because it breaks pages).  We had seeked refuge at Waterfox, retaining some old firefox functionality and ensuring us it is blocking all of Mozilla tactics of robbing you of private data and feeding it to “who knows who”.

Waterfox officially was sold by mr Alex Kontos to System1, a UK payperclick ad company, which it would be absurd to believe that it wouldn’t utilize the browser’s ability to feed their other interests with private data.  Or why else would they buy to promote their own browser, to make all others break while they are getting robbed?

Thank you Alex for your sincere efforts and sleepless nights of coding, all these years, it has been a great ride, and it is too bad it had to crash in such a bad time for browser variety and period.  Goodbye and good luck for all that you had done up to now.

Trident + void + zfs one step closer to 1.0

Trident project released a beta image following their alpha releases in the past two months.

For those who missed this developing transition, of Trident leaving its TrueOS/FreeBSD base and moving to linux using Void as its base, here is a summary of what you are missing.  It has been a common story for a distribution being fed-up with linux development, developers being consumed to modify their software around systemd-functionality, and have moved to some form of a BSD-unix base.  As far as we know there hasn’t been an effort to leave BSD to come to linux.  So Trident is drawing its own path making it now a 2 way street.  Here are a couple of juicy quotes of their late announcements:

2020 OS Migration

2019-10-14

…Currently, Project Trident is based on FreeBSD and uses the TrueOS build framework. Over the years, we have accumulated multiple long-standing issues with the underlying FreeBSD OS. Issues with hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users…..

How does systemd prevail if it is so crappy?

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.
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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.

Arch Linux 2020 – what’s there to be happy about?

Happy new year facebook fans and Arch friends (friends of who? we don’t know, not us, not on facebook, not in the past and not in the future, but you must have friends amongst yourselves).

Some of you may have taken the previous post about abandoning Arch as a joke, since most of what we do recently is promote Obarun, an Arch based distribution with s6 and 66 init and service management.   When we published that article we knew nothing of what Hyperbola was planning to do (we assume it was discussed within the community) or whether they were going to give-in to the pressure and incorporate arch’s pacman and packaging methodology change into their distribution.  (Note: Hyperbola may be based on Arch but has its own separate repositories and rebuilds everything on their own to ensure everything is Free).  All of their free packages, as far as we can tell are still compressed with xz.  The bomb was set and it will go off soon (in open/free software tradition of timing kind of soon).  Hyperbola is not just leaving Arch, it is leaving linux, for OpenBSD.  But this is not about hyperbola, it is about Arch….     or skip to here if you are in a rush!