Slashdot Mirror

I used to be a big RH fan until my personal subscription was cancelled early around the end of RH9 days. I struggled with Fedora for a while, but it was always flaky and updates seemed to break more than they fixed. I moved to Slackware... which I liked for the same reasons I really liked Gentoo -- it was easy to install packages from source; however neither of those distros is as easy to manage in a commercial setting as other more popular distros.

Then a colleague mentioned CentOS and I have not looked back. CentOS3 is still 2.4 kernel based and would be a good replacement for the older RH7x/8x/9x versions. CentOS4 is 2.6 kernel based and a great distro. I have moved everything I had from RH to CentOS and not looked back.

I even use CentOS4 on my work desktop with the KDE-RedHat repository and the Dag Wieers repository supplying packages for software that RH/CentOS do not.

I think I am going to revisit Kubuntu in the near future though, because I do like apt, I simply cannot stand Gnome (no offense - I simply prefer KDE).

Very nice and based on my favorite distro as well CentOS.

However, for someone posting with such a low UID, I would have expected a link. Your /. user card is in serious jeopardy of being revoked :)

Nope. I get GPL... even publish some software under it.

Lawyers aren't for keeping everything above the law. They are for harassing your competitors into oblivion. I would give you very good odds that RedHat lawyers sends nasty letters to the likes of Centos. Check out:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.ph p?id=2

Notice the fuzzy language: "CentOS 2, 3, and 4 are built from publically available open source SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." The old web sites use to use say right out that they are derived from RedHat.

God, I hate lawyers.

I would very much like it if I could continue using Windows (because I run other programs that are not available on Linux) but it can't match the simplicity of Ubuntu.

Wikipedia says Red Hat has 1,200-1,300 employees. Of those, I suspect a few hundred are going to support.

Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)

If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.

So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS and Oracle support take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.

After a little research, I find this article that supports what I've heard.

A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.

So, yeah, there's a reason every is critical of PHP.

I'm on the other side. What is it about a language that makes it *EASY* to consider the problem at hand, and doesn't make you worry too much about implementation details?

Using PHP, you don't have to worry about things like memory management and/or memory type translation. A "1" becomes a 2 when you add a 1 to it.

Arrays and hashes are the same. Any array can be accessed as a hash, any hash is also an array. Makes it easy to define data in memory, then do loops/recursion on it to get whatever result you want.

Simple!

Time spent solving customer problems rather than implementation problems is time spent making money instead of wasting it.

I've written some really big projects with PHP. (EG: over 50,000 lines in 3+ years, with NO HTML CODE) It's done a magnificent job. It scales nicely and easily with it's "share nothing" approach, and is highly reliable. In the 6 years that I've been actively developing with PHP, the number of times that there was a bug/problem with the language I could count on one hand, with 4 of the fingers peeled down. It's reliable and scalable enough that Yahoo uses it as their preferred development language.

And, as far as security, the vast majority of issues have been with idiots writing insecure scripting, which can be done in any language. (Yes, I'm thinking of you, SPAW editor!) And, if you're using a decent operating system with an update mechanism (EG: yum) then updates to fix found security issues is a no-brainer.

With PHP-GTK you can write quick, powerful, cross-platform GUI applications with ease and speed - I've done so, managing a distributed database application among some 70 school districts with many hundreds of users - and it works marvelously.

PHP may have it's warts, but it's a damned fine tool. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

This is defenitly on of my favorite support stories.

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

if you have everybody who realise they're wrong withdraw because of their own perceived stupidity, you'll just be left with the people who weren't capable of realising their errors. Learning is doing mistakes; people who never do mistakes are just good at shifting blame.

Which leaves us with people like Tuttle Oklahoma's City Manager, Jerry Taylor.

There's always CentOS.

I remember when tech websites were clamoring over the latest Fedora release as much as they're clamoring over Ubuntu now. Red Hat almost got it right, except for one thing.

Fix your package manager!

I am sick of downloading packages from weird websites, version conflicts, and typing this stupid and overly long command into the shell over and over, hoping - nay, praying - that RPM won't spit out another conflict error this time. YUM seems tacked on, and I've never gotten it to work properly.

I have worked with both dpkg and rpm, and there is no question: rpm is vastly superior to dpkg, when it comes to building packages, checking what package a file belongs to, or verifying the installed software (can't do it with dpkg).

Apt-get has been available for RPM for years, it works perfectly, it contacts the repo and installs whatever you need. And, there are other similar systems like yum, smart, and rhupdate. All are actively developed. If you can't get YUM to work it says more about your ability fo manage a system than it does of YUM and RPM. All you need to do is to edit one configuration file. And "tagged on"??!?? YUM is no more "tagged on" that apt-get. It's Unix, everything is "tagged on"!

The big advantage of Debian (and Ubuntu) is that they have a centralized repo of thousands of packages (I think ~12000), and a set of strict guidelines for packagers to follow. Redhat does not distribute many packages (2000-3000), so you have to rely on third party repositories to go outside Redhat's vanilla selection. For example RPMforge.

Wrt, Fedora, it is meant to be a playground for geeks who want to play around with the newest bleeding-edge versions of all the major packages. It is not for amateurs. It's for people who enjoy getting into the latest stuff and solving the problems that are there. So it's kind of silly to critizise them for not being completely without wrinkles! Having said that, it runs surprisingly well out of the box. If you want something really stable and well tested, you should go for CentOS or any of the other RHEL rebuilds.

I've run Workstation and GSX (Server) on Windows and Linux. The best performance by far was Linux with XFS. Ext3 does not cut it (regardless of writeback option used). XFS support is a little tricky to find in VMWare supported distros. For less critical servers, I prefer Centos 4 with the Centosplus kernel (see the Readme). Centos isn't supported by VMWare but Red Hat is.

VMWare Server supports Ubuntu as a host. It's a little easier to setup XFS and VMWare on Ubuntu. VMWare server claims experimental support for Ubuntu Dapper. I am running it on two servers for testing and it is performing very well. As Ubuntu gains popularity, the choice may be clearer. For right now, Google University has more help for VMWare on Red Hat^W^WCentos than Ubuntu.

If your system is AMD64/EM64T, you may be tempted to load a 64-bit OS. Resist the temptation. VMWare now claims official support for x64 host operating systems, but in practice these are more trouble to get working than they are worth (MUI, authentication, and even stability can be problematic IMO). With hardware that supports 64-bit virtualization (many new Pentiums and Opterons), 64-bit guests can be run on both 32- and 64-bit hosts. Determining whether your CPU supports it is so difficult, VMWare made a tool to do it for you called the processor check utility. (It's about halfway down this page.) Down the road when 4GB+ is standard on laptops, VMWare's x64 support will probably be a lot better.

Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. ... I actually have a nice shell script for that ... ask me and I'll post it online for you.

Yes, please post it or email it ... I've got a dozen or so Debian servers that could benefit from it regardless of the new storage box. Thanks in advance.

I run this from a bash script /etc/cron.daily/apt-update which delays 30-60 minutes and then runs the main script. Note that $RANDOM, and the hash function need bash and won't work in dash/sh. The cron script's code looks like this: sleep $(($RANDOM % 30 + 30))m && /usr/local/sbin/apt-update -m ... I'm not even going to try to put my apt-update script here as a slashdot comment.

This is my first public release of apt-update, released under the GPL. Also note there are other similar solutions, like apticron and cron-apt, both of which are in the Debian stable repository, but both of which seemed more code than is needed (and they are primarily for actually performing the upgrades, which is dangerous).

On RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, and other APT-capable distributions, this script will work fine. There is one snag; the script searches for "security" in the dry-run install ... DAG/Dries/RPMForge, FreshRPMS, CentOS, and ATrpms don't have a specially reserved source for security the way Debian does, so this won't work. Also of note, Axel Thrimm's atrpms package for most Fedora/RHEL derivates includes a script called "check4updates" which was the inspiration for my script. ... it is a bit more basic, but it uses what it can find of up2date, yum, apt, and smart.

http://www.centos.org/
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

That same kinda thing happened here for me. I downloaded the images, and burned them to CD, with the intent of using it on my old Dell C640 laptop. Guess what? I couldn't get past the LILO part.

I have been a RedHat fan since 4.2, followed them right through Fedora. *Never* had a problems installing RedHat on any system, unless it had bad hardware, or badly burned disks. In the case with FC5, I was stumped. Seriously stumped. What did they do?

Now, I use CEntOS, and works like I expect.

Sounds like you chose the wrong distro... use CentOS instead.

Obvious:

CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise, with a :s/RedHat/CentOS/g on the code. They download the RHEL Source RPMs and compile and release it. FYI.

Not so obvious:

They also recompile for additional arches, most notably Alpha (I have a couple of faculty members who don't want to be rid of their Digital machines; this makes a great alternative to paying $1000+/year for a True64 license to HP who hasn't looked at the code for 4.x since they bought it).

Get it here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.ph p?id=13
There are a LOT of mirrors, and being on the listserv, I see more and more being added all the time. Including lots of tier 1 mirrors at Universities, if you're on Internet2. There are also lots of local mirrors around the world, so if you're not a USAian, check for one in your locale; you may get better speeds than a general mirror.
Best mirror? http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ =)

~Will

I heard that some files on the RHEL distribution CDs contain trademarks, and you cannot redistribute those trademarks. However, you can remove the trademarks and distribute the rest for free like CentOS does.

How difficult is it to do any of the following?

1) dpkg -l "*" | grep -i mailman

2) blindly do apt-get install mailman and see what happens

3) search for mailman on the Debian website http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages If you put mailman in the searchbox it tells you where you can download it for 11 different computer architectures.

4) search for mailman on the web using google. The first link is http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html where you can download the source and look at the above average documentation on the site.

5) be a power user, and do a google search for debian mailman and the first link is http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/mailman

Maybe I'm a Linux snob because I can install software on a Linux machine and know how to type keywords into google. But I believe that with 5 easy and well known methods of installing a very common and popular application should be enough for any competent computer user can handle. I believe that it is people like you that give Linux a bad name. Kinda like this bozo:

    http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

Not saying you didn't made a good choice but there are free enterprise grade Linuxes. Centos is a redhat enterprise recompile.

Can you compile the source code provided by Red Hat to equivalent binaries without using Red Hat's private keys. If the answer is 'yes' full coresponding source code has been provided.

Microsoft has had just about enough of CentOS blocking access to websites and has taken matters into its own hands.

Seriously. I want OSX on my Dell laptop. This isn't rocket science, people. Even operating system development isn't rocket science -- it's computer science. If some guy on the Internet can put OSX on a generic PC, why won't Apple? I would pay $200 to put OSX on my Dell, maybe even more if it comes with all the extra bits. And if not? I'll still use Centos, if Apple doesn't want me as a customer.

I have been a big redhat fan ever since 4.2. A fried turned me on to it. "Look," he said, "you can just download it, and it works!" I was psyched. And this has pretty much been my career over the last 10 years -- download Redhat, install it, and it works. It has always worked, and been a reliable brand in operating systems.

I was okay when they split off Fedora from their Enterprise package. I went with Fedora, seemed to work okay. I wanted to try out FC5 when it came out a few weeks ago, on my recent purchase of an old Dell C640. Oddly enough, It wouldn't get past the lilo prompt on any CD I burned. So, I tried out CENTOS.

CENTOS seems to be just like Redhat's flavored GNU/Linux. It has everything I want, except for PINE and windowmaker. It makes an okay workstation, and I am already used to the file locations, package management, and general 'feel' for the environment.

Now that Redhat is abandoning Fedora, there's no reason I should use it anymore. Kudos to the CENTOS crew, you've made a convert.

Here's the email I just sent:

To: citymgr@cityoftuttle.org
CC: mayor@cityoftuttle.org
Subject: Apologize to CentOS

Mr. Taylor,

I'm writing in response to your recent letter to The Register [1]. I am appalled to learn of your continued hostility to the Johnny Hughes, the CentOS Team, and the open source community as a whole. I am a member of this community.

You wrote that you "only got help after threatening to contact the FBI" [2]. That's a misleading statement without also mentioning that you threatened to contact the FBI prior to describing the problem or asking for help. I quote from your initial email: "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!"

Most organizations would have immediately directed you to their legal department and cut off all other contact. CentOS stuck with you through your lengthy email exchange and resolved your problem despite your threats and ingratitude. That shows a level of dedication and professionalism that you could never achieve. Even more so when you consider that they are volunteers and that you are not a paying customer. They are not obligated to help under even the best of circumstances.

After CentOS provided you with the publicity you welcomed, you apparently discovered that the open source community has no respect for those who abuse our movers and shakers. Realize that an apology is a necessary first step to repair the damage you have done to your city's reputation.

Sincerely,
Scott Lamb

[1] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_ema il/
[2] - http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

My note:

To the Honorable Lonnie Paxton and members of the Town Council of the City of Tuttle,

You may want to consider hiring a new town manager, replacing Mr. Jerry A. Taylor who recently earned the City of Tuttle worldwide embarrassment with his legal threats against Centos.

Mr. Taylor claims to have been a "Computer Systems Engineer" with 22 years of experience. However, upon discovering an extremely simple problem with the City of Tuttle web site, rather than proceeding to work with the hosting company responsible for the management of the City of Tuttle web site, Mr. Taylor chose to publicly harass and attempt to intimidate the developers responsible for designing a free operating system called CentOS.

What is CentOS? Like the well-known Microsoft Windows, it is an operating system. More specifically, CentOS is a FREE operating system built by volunteers, largely based on the also-free GNU and Linux projects.

Transcripts of the Mr. Taylor's juvenile threats toward CentOS are posted publicly on the Internet, and those transcripts underscore Mr. Taylor's utter incompetence, unwillingness to accept FREE help from folks who provided a FREE operating system, even though the CentOS developers have NO responsibility whatsoever to clean up Mr. Taylor's mess.

When Mr. Taylor FINALLY agreed that the Centos folks had nothing to do with the misconfiguration problem (the problem is actually due to two parties: the company hosting the City of Tuttle web site, and Mr. Jerry A. Taylor himself) he not only was not apologetic, but downright insulting in his response.

The City of Tuttle has earned worldwide ridicule in the face of this issue, and the dated and sophomoric appearance of Tuttle's now-well-publicized web site has earned widespread harsh criticism and ridicule as well.

Please consider replacing Mr. Jerry A. Taylor. Many of us feel sorry for the City of Tuttle as we believe that there are many people more deserving of his salary and who can perform a much better job were they given the opportunity to fill his position. Jerry A. Taylor's salary is money wasted right now.

Here are some of the web pages covering this story that you may wish to check out:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_cen tos/
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/ 135221&tid=133
http://www.digg.com/security/Why_every_city_counci l_needs_at_least_one_geek_=%5D
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_ema il/

Mr. Taylor's outbursts and threats toward the generous CentOS folks may be seen here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

As you will note, Mr. Taylor's outbursts are unbecoming of a city official and earn little respect for the City of Tuttle. Even after realizing that the CentOS representatives were not to blame, but he and his web hosts are, and even after having received hundreds of emails from kind folks all over the world who are attempting to explain to him that the CentOS developers are not to blame, he is insisting that the CentOS folks would only help him after he threatened to contact the FBI. This is not only patently false, but downright slanderous and such statements could earn a defamation of character suit from CentOS. I know if I were that developer I would consider filing suit against Tuttle over such false statements made to the media.

the guy still thinks that they (the evil hackerorrists) `helped' him after he threatened them with the FBI -- which is total bullshit, as anyone who read the email exchange can clearly see.

FTA: "I asked for the strange website to be removed because it blocked my City web site and I could not post public information. I only got help after threatening to contact the FBI."

so yeah, i think an apology from his part is highly unlikely.

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/comment_new.php ?com_itemid=127

Please read this fully then reply to this message saying sorry.

-- Your fellow geek

CentOS the slowest Is CentOS not the slowest of RHEL rebuilds according to this post on the CentOS mailing list?

CentOS did not change the boiler plate after this happened. That server was not updated with the latest version of apache for CentOS. We changed the wording of the boiler plate on 5 Jan 2006 in this version of apache: http://vault.centos.org/4.2/updates/i386/RPMS/

Maybe I should have been more precise in the original post. Can the kernel be recompiled using xconfig or gconfig.

I finally got around installing Centos 4.3 I was refering to this problem:
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1133. I see the comments and sugestions... problem has to be fixed upstream... but as of today the problem hasn't been fixed.

Dear Mayor Lonnie Paxton:

I am writing to formally complain about the abusive behavior of Mr. Jerry A. Taylor, one of your highest profile City Managers. As of this morning's publication of an Information Technology news service titled Slashdot (see links below), I can assure you that he (and, by association, your town of Tuttle, Oklahoma) is the topic of derisive conversations throughout the entire computing systems world. Quite frankly, Mr. Taylor's alleged "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation," his unwillingness to consider the advice of professional peers, his inability to comprehend simple systems documentation, and his hair-trigger willingness to contact the FBI whenever your town suffers WEB server configuration issues, cast great doubts in regard to both Tuttle's IT infrastructure, as well as your town's slogan: "The Place Where People Grow Up - Friendly!" This is very bad publicity, Mr. Paxton. Until this morning, it's true that hardly anyone outside of Oklahoma knew where Tuttle even was. However, now millions of people know about Tuttle for all the wrong reasons. As a consequence, I am only half joking when I state that I would hardly be surprised to see your town spoofed without mercy on an upcoming episode of The Daily Show, for example. This is THAT big an issue.

In any event, I must commend the representative from CentOS.org, Mr. Johnny Hughes. Time and time again, as Mr. Taylor become increasingly impossible to deal with, as Mr. Taylor's words became more and more threatening (at one point, Mr. Taylor went so far as to report that "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity" - a statement which I believe he will soon regret, if he doesn't already), Mr. Hughes remained both patient and calm and did everything he could -- and I can't state this with enough emphasis, even though this was clearly neither an issue with CentOS.org, nor Mr. Hughes -- to help resolve Mr. Taylor's problem.

I use CentOS on a daily basis and I am positively grateful for the philanthropic efforts of this superhuman organization. I am extremely disappointed with your office because Mr. Hughes clearly did not deserve Mr. Taylor's unmindful harassment. To resolve this injustice, at the very least, I encourage you to prevail upon Mr. Taylor to publicly acknowledge an admission of discourtesy toward both CentOS.org and Mr. Hughes himself, accompanied by a written expression of regret. Your town should consider itself fortunate that CentOS.org, to date, has not issued you an invoice for payment of software technical support.

Thanks very much for your attention. I sincerely wish that we could be communicating under much more favorable conditions.

For your reference, here are some links referred to earlier:
Original story posted on Slashdot:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/ 135221

What is Slashdot and how large is it's following in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

CentOS's coverage of the abuse:
http://wwwf.centos.org/127_story.html?storyid=127

What CentOS is:
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.ph p?id=2

What LINUX is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Yours Sincerely,

Dear Mayor Lonnie Paxton:

I am writing to formally complain about the abusive behavior of Mr. Jerry A. Taylor, one of your highest profile City Managers. As of this morning's publication of an Information Technology news service titled Slashdot (see links below), I can assure you that he (and, by association, your town of Tuttle, Oklahoma) is the topic of derisive conversations throughout the entire computing systems world. Quite frankly, Mr. Taylor's alleged "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation," his unwillingness to consider the advice of professional peers, his inability to comprehend simple systems documentation, and his hair-trigger willingness to contact the FBI whenever your town suffers WEB server configuration issues, cast great doubts in regard to both Tuttle's IT infrastructure, as well as your town's slogan: "The Place Where People Grow Up - Friendly!" This is very bad publicity, Mr. Paxton. Until this morning, it's true that hardly anyone outside of Oklahoma knew where Tuttle even was. However, now millions of people know about Tuttle for all the wrong reasons. As a consequence, I am only half joking when I state that I would hardly be surprised to see your town spoofed without mercy on an upcoming episode of The Daily Show, for example. This is THAT big an issue.

In any event, I must commend the representative from CentOS.org, Mr. Johnny Hughes. Time and time again, as Mr. Taylor become increasingly impossible to deal with, as Mr. Taylor's words became more and more threatening (at one point, Mr. Taylor went so far as to report that "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity" - a statement which I believe he will soon regret, if he doesn't already), Mr. Hughes remained both patient and calm and did everything he could -- and I can't state this with enough emphasis, even though this was clearly neither an issue with CentOS.org, nor Mr. Hughes -- to help resolve Mr. Taylor's problem.

I use CentOS on a daily basis and I am positively grateful for the philanthropic efforts of this superhuman organization. I am extremely disappointed with your office because Mr. Hughes clearly did not deserve Mr. Taylor's unmindful harassment. To resolve this injustice, at the very least, I encourage you to prevail upon Mr. Taylor to publicly acknowledge an admission of discourtesy toward both CentOS.org and Mr. Hughes himself, accompanied by a written expression of regret. Your town should consider itself fortunate that CentOS.org, to date, has not issued you an invoice for payment of software technical support.

Thanks very much for your attention. I sincerely wish that we could be communicating under much more favorable conditions.

For your reference, here are some links referred to earlier:
Original story posted on Slashdot:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/ 135221

What is Slashdot and how large is it's following in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

CentOS's coverage of the abuse:
http://wwwf.centos.org/127_story.html?storyid=127

What CentOS is:
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.ph p?id=2

What LINUX is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Yours Sincerely,

Thanks for the email addresses. I will be writing a (polite) email to both these gentlemen, suggesting that in order to make reparations for wasting the time of the CentOS team, they should consider a donation to http://www.centos.org/donate/.

I've used CentOS for a couple years now to run various webservers. I've donated a couple times in the past, but this episode has just inspired me to send a little extra $$$ their way. Just seeing the sorts of things a successful FOSS project must put up with is making me feel generous today.

In fact, I'm also sending emails to Mr. Taylor at "citymgr@cityoftuttle.org" and the Mayor at "mayor@cityoftuttle.org" suggesting that in order to pay for the waste of time of the CentOS team in handling this, their town should make a donation as well to http://www.centos.org/donate/ .

"If you would like to let the administrators of this website know that you've seen this page instead of the page you expected, you should send them e-mail. In general, mail sent to the name "webmaster" and directed to the website's domain should reach the appropriate person."

It then goes on to say " CentOS is an Operating System and it is used to power this website; however, the webserver is owned by the domain owner and not the CentOS Project. If you have issues with the content of this site, contact the owner of the domain, not the CentOS project.

Unless this server is on the CentOS.org domain, the CentOS Project doesn't have anything to do with the content on this webserver or any e-mails that directed you to this site. CentOS is an Operating System and it is used to power this website; however, the webserver is owned by the domain owner and not the CentOS Project. If you have issues with the content of this site, contact the owner of the domain, not the CentOS project.

Unless this server is on the CentOS.org domain, the CentOS Project doesn't have anything to do with the content on this webserver or any e-mails that directed you to this site. "

I can see how that kind of message could be easily misinterpreted and can lead to the kind of confusion that Mr. Taylor experienced. The people at CentOS clearly expect unusually high levels of literacy (at least fourth if not fifth grade level) and unbelievably long attention spans of anyone who sees that page, and it's really no surprise that people don't bother with all that weasly fine print at the bottom. After all, it's in bold face and we all know that that means "This part isn't important, don't bother with it."

Thanks for the start Dave! Here's what I sent to the Mayor.....

Hi there,
have you seen this one?
The world seems to be laughing about your city administration...

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127 [centos.org]

Can you please either fire this city manager for making false
accusations, or at the least publicly censure him for his actions and
lame attempts at intimidation.

A donation to CentOS for wasting quite a bit of time of the lead
developer would be advised as well.

A reply would be appreciated, though be forewarned, if it is
derogatory, inflammatory, or dismissing, it will be posted to slashdot
for all the world to see.

-a

I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.

Oh yeah. Sure. What's that? 22 years of playing Choplifter on a Commodore64? No wait. You wrote "hello world" on a TRS-80 in the early 80's?

Yeah, I love how every script-kiddie who can insert a CD and install/run some canned software is a computer-support-tech and "Gee, wiz, I typed in foo.bas from Basic programming for Idiots and it ran, so I guess I be a computer system engineer."

That email exchange made me want to recomend Johnny Hughes for sainthood: while reading it I could feel myself sliding towards a BOFH attitude...

Oh. btw: anyone else notice that the City of Tuttle Seal looks like a view through a scope?

But wait! Is this the town named after "Tom Tuttle from Tacoma Washington?

Geez!

Hi there,
have you seen this one?
The world seems to be laughing about your city administration...

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

Cheers
Dave

After reading through the exchange on the CentOS site, I think he's going to regret making that statement. Normally, a dunderhead bureaucrat like this would try to sue or claim these e-mails shouldn't have been made public, but with this little statement on file...

I'd call the guy a "dumbass", but he's not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.

- Greg

Any tool to fix this problem? http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

But all the resources in the world couldn't help you if you had this guy as your boss: http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma proves to CentOS that they need a bigger "Internet Department". Read about it here. hehe

I love CentOS and thank god it ramped up when it did. RH9 support was over and I was concerned about an upgrade path. I looked at a bunch of distros but honestly, as an admin/programmer I don't want to deal with learning all the details about another distro since I've been using Redhat for years. So CentOS picked up speed (and users) and have been releasing a solid product for years (based off the hard work from Redhat and the OSS developers of course).

Also, don't forget to donate. While my company didn't pay for RH9, I was able to get them to fork out some cash for the CentOS team. I would have to do A LOT more work if it weren't for those guys.

--Ajay

From the CentOS about page:
CentOS-4 supports x86 (i586 and i686),

In other words, it won't run in a 386, I wouldn't want it if it was compiled so low as to be optimized for a 386. Please start using x86 something other than 386.

However, even the CentOS page is guilty (from another page on CentOS's site:
i386 - This distribution supports AMD (K6, K7, Thunderbird, Athlon, Athlon XP, Sempron), Pentium (Classic, Pro, II, III, 4, Celeron, M, Xeon), VIA (C3, Eden, Luke, C7) processors.

(Sorry, it just irks me)

From the CentOS about page:
CentOS-4 supports x86 (i586 and i686),

In other words, it won't run in a 386, I wouldn't want it if it was compiled so low as to be optimized for a 386. Please start using x86 something other than 386.

However, even the CentOS page is guilty (from another page on CentOS's site:
i386 - This distribution supports AMD (K6, K7, Thunderbird, Athlon, Athlon XP, Sempron), Pentium (Classic, Pro, II, III, 4, Celeron, M, Xeon), VIA (C3, Eden, Luke, C7) processors.

(Sorry, it just irks me)

they did, check this link :
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=118
from the front page:
The CentOS Project has developed a Geo-IP enabled system for our CentOS-4 yum updates that generates dynamic mirror lists based on two very important items:

1. The connecting location of the client.

2. The current freshness/staleness of the mirrors for that region.

This update system will allow us to read the connecting location of a client, look for fresh mirrors close to that client, and provide a list of ten mirrors for each CentOS repository that is included in the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo. The selection base is currently about 100 mirrors from around the world.

ummm ... there is PLENTY of added vaule (someone else mentioned the SPARC and ALPHA arches) ... there is also an installable i586 version of the kernel adding support for pentium, VIA c3 processors, etc. That is not upstream. PPC32 that works in CentOS ... not upstream.

There is a CentOS Extras repo and CentOS Plus repo that produce packages that are not upstream ... and work with both CentOS and RHEL.

CentOS submits MANY bugfixes and patches to Red Hat code back upstream.

There are also many other things out there based on CentOS as their core OS ... anyone heard of Asterisk@home, SME Server, openfiler, Rocks Clusters ... plenty more:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?story topic=11

Umm, didn't you notice that Fedora is the development testbed? It's supposed to update quickly so new things get tested before RedHat gives them to paying customers. If you're doing real work on Fedora, I feel your pain. Switch your servers to Centos, and save Fedora for playing on your desktop!
Centos + Dag Wieers' repo is a sweet setup. Dag, if you read this, thanks a lot for great packages.

That's what CentOS is for.

http://www.centos.org/

However, I'm using PostgreSQL now because I keep running into problems with the Oracle server. The listener isn't listening to the network, so I only have local access and I need to share the data with others.

Having tried to install Oracle on all sorts of operating systems over the years it has been my experience that it really helps to run OracleDB on one of the certified Linux distributions: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES. Oracle does not guarantee that an OracleDB will run smoothly on any random Linux distro. According to their latest installation guide they only test it on the above two although AFAIK some versions were also certified for United Linux. If you don't have the budget to buy one of those Enterprise Linux distros try to find one that is binary compatible with one of them such as Centos. Using Red Had Fedora or Open SUSE is not to guaranteed to result in a smooth installation and a stable OracleDB system. This is not to say that you can't install Oracle on your favorite uncertified distro sucessfully. You simply run the risk of running into problems that may take you a long time to solve and that you would be rid of if you used a certified Enterprise distro or an open source distro that is binary compatable with the SUSE or RedHat Enterprise Linux distros. Developers and researchers unlike hobbyists usually have better things to do than deal with problems resulting from software compatability issues.

The inevitable result of wave after wave of cost cutting is that we have a fraction of the manpower we need to do our work, so some things just don't happen. We used to have two DBA's locally and everything was efficient. Now we have part of one whose work hours rarely overlap with mine, so getting things done is painful.

Why does that sound familiar????