Quoting H. Nikolaus Schaller (2019-05-21 12:02:06)
Hi Jonas,
Am 21.05.2019 um 11:00 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard jonas@jones.dk:
First of all, congratulations with the progress!
Thanks!
Quoting H. Nikolaus Schaller (2019-05-21 10:22:50)
BTW, here is another trick: You may (not) know that LetuxOS images created by makesd come rooted. This means you can simply ssh as root into the device without password check. This is quite helpful for developers and debugging.
A password-less network-accesible backdoor maybe unknown to the system owner sounds dangerous to me: I recommend documenting that very clearly (at least) everywhere passwords are currently menioned in documentation.
Yes, please feel free to document it in the Wiki.
Is the wiki the only place passwords are mentioned? There are no other places users could be helped get notified about this open access?
Suggestion: Add a notice in /etc/motd
On a very general view, we have achieved a lot, but still not enough to get the LetuxOS eco-system into a self-sustaining mode. What is lacking?
- users are missing because software is not good enough for daily use
- hardware is missing because potential users complain about missing high-quality software
- developers to polish the software are missing, because of missing
(new) hardware
You see the vicious circle? Ideas how to magically break it?
Contributing as certified OSHW your own work on designing hardware helps encourage developers contributing to getting the devices supported in mainline linux and u-boot.
Getting bootloader and kernel code mainlined encourage distributors integrate and maintain support the the devices in their distributions.
Having devices supported in distributions helps users prioritize the devices over other (lesser free) options available to them.
This seems to assume that LetuxOS is not itself a distribution.
No.
For comparison, I work on the Debian distribution and dearly want the Olimex Teres-I DIY laptop well supported there, which requires escaping a similar vicious circle. I have appreciated the efforts done in other distributions - concretely I work done in Armbian and OpenSuSE was instrumental in getting the device supported in mainline u-boot (likely included with 2019.07 release), which benefits all competing distributions.
So what do you think would help users to prioritize LetuxOS over other distributions?
LetuxOS being superior to its competitors, obviously :-)
My point is that that I firmly believe that to get out of the vicious circle we _first_ need to collaborate and only _then_ compete (if needed at all, but that's a different discussion).
- Jonas