OSNews

Services

I have a confession to make: I dislike this whole business of runlevels. I know why they are there and why they can be useful but I don't really need them, so I see the associated maze of links and scripts as just an unneccessary, headache-inducing nuisance. That's why I was delighted to find that Rubyx dispenses with the concept of runlevels altogether. Instead it is either Go or No-Go, and that is just fine by me because that is all I ever need. Frankly, I think that is all that 99% of users will ever need! If a service has its 'enable' flag set to 'yes' in its configuration file which can be found in /pkg/pkgname.version/etc/pkgname/pkgname-enabled, then it will be started by init script, and that's all there is to it. Services can be also managed at any time with start, stop, restart and reload commands. It doesn't get any simpler than that, yet it is all that I ever wanted on my boxes... finally, I'm happy.

Practical issues

One would expect a system built from source optimised for the target machine to be fast - and it certainly is. Add to this no services running by default, no runlevels, no fancy splash screens, and you get a system that will boot quickly as well. One would also expect a system built by one person to have small selection of packages - and this is also true. There is KDE and Gnome, but many supporting applications are missing, or not too fresh: for example Firefox and Thunderbird are both available but behind current versions. The kernel is current though - 2.6.8, and there is X.org instead of XFree. As for other needs, it will be hit and miss, I'm afraid. There is Xine, but no mplayer. There is Apache, PHP and MySQL, but I don't see Java or PostgreSQL, though I could swear it was contributed by one of the users... I guess the situation will really improve only if there are more developers contributing packages - there's only so much one person can do. And this also means that as far as development and the mailing list goes, there are bursts of activity, then periods of silence, when the real life takes precedence.

Conclusions

Rubyx is a great tool for those willing to invest some time and effort into the installation and initial configuration. Its "less is more" approach makes a refreshing change from the general trends that seem to favour complexity. It is solid and fast, easy to run and maintain, and I think from the technical standpoint it could be an excellent, reliable system for many users, both on the desktop and as a server. The only shadow of doubt lies in the fact that for now it depends totally on one person, and its distribution model while currently performing well is really untested - there is no way of knowing how White Water is going to scale up without getting more people to actually use it. Also, it depends on the goodwill of the community members prepared to provide bandwidth, and should that community grow, it remains to be seen whether this model is workable. Then again, if it takes off, perhaps Rubyx will be able to afford hosting.

About the system

I installed Rubyx on AthlonXP 2000, Gigabyte motherboard with 512MB of RAM and nVidia GeForce2 MX 440. It takes about 12 hours to run "rubyx --install Kde-all" on this system.

About the author
The author (also known as Ferrix on some forums) lives in Australia. Besides Rubyx, his computers currently run Yoper, Arch and Ubuntu, and one (very old) machine double-boots Syllable and SkyOS. But he has never owned a system running Windows, nor does he ever intend to.