Slashdot Mirror

If you want to try SuSE inexpensively, you can buy a 7.3 version CD for $4.99 from CheapBytes.

I realize that you are being sarcastic, but I don't think RH relies on the sales of their single-user products to make much money.

There is more money to be made in support contracts and RH enterprise products, which is why RedHat is pushing products like their RH Advanced Server.

And I say more power to them. If RedHat keeps making money, the benefits will trickle down to the rest of the OSS movement.

I'll be getting my RH9.0 via Cheapbytes without much guilt. For $12, it's cheaper to buy it through them then to wait for the damn ISOs to download, even with this fancy-dancy new protocol; and spend the time burning them onto CD, etc.

Cheapbytes has excellent prices on distributions.

You can get the disks shipped to you overnight for under $30 if you want them that fast and want to spend the extra money for express shipping. Or under $15 if you get it shipped 2 day express.

If you are really insistent on spending $70, you can order Red Hat, Mandrake, and a third, fourth, and fifth distro of your choice, and have everything shipped overnight, and probably have some coin left over.

Check out CheapBytes, who have been selling cheap Linux CD's for probably almost as long as Red Hat has been in business. They're prohibited from using the Red Hat name on any of their products but they have cleverly named 'equivalent-generic' products cheaply available. Red Hat in particular has been one of the Linux Vendors who has made the most noise about CheapBytes selling their ISOs.

Is that a rhetorical question?

What's a record company supposed to do with an artist whose album has a slim chance of even going gold?

1) Make copies
2) Sell copies
3) Profit!

If it takes RIAA members 1,000,000 copies to make a profit, something is way off... that's $15,000,000 gross profit at today's CD prices... Maybe half is lost to retail markup, but still! There is no way in the 21st century that it should cost even 1/100th that much to set up a production run of CD's. Perhaps the record industry needs to take a lesson from cheapbytes.

Exactly, that is why no one can *cough* sell linux besides Linus himself.

Seriously, Linux is not restricted. I can buy a box of RedHat at a store and make as many copies, sell em if I want and still be within my rights.

Howcome I can buy Mandrake 9 at Cheapbytes.com for $6.99, but I *hafta* buy the manual and pay $39.95 if I want RedHat 8. Either RedHat is smarter and makes sure that their stuff doesn't get given away, or...>insert imagination here>...

cheap bytes has a copy of "pink tie" linux which is the redhat iso's burned to disc for you. these cost $7.00 and you can install them on as many computers as you want:

pink tie

if you are in the united states, it looks like shipping is $5.00. so you can essentially get redhat for $12.00 for as many computers as you want. if you have some friends you can each chipin and bring the cost down to $4.00 per person. while this cost is greater than zero, to businesses this is what would be called essentially zero.

CD prices are extaordinarily high given the cost of production. Look at how many CDs AOL pushes out, or how much cheapbytes sells CDs for. If I could get CDs for $1 or $2, which is still 100% more than the cost of production for a big lot of CDs (I don't care about the artwork, just give me the CD in an envelope), I would buy a lot more CDs.

Another example... look at Emusic.com. It's a great service. Fast, reliable. They give me a quality product, I give them what I feel is a reasonable amount of money.

And when record companies work somewhat like cheapbytes, producing bulk CDs, selling for $2, and giving back the artists $1, they won't have money to hype Boy Band of the Month, and will instead focus on lifting up good music that people want to listen to, music that sells itself.

Check out this site, it should do what you want.

As far as installing Redhat dual boot I'm pretty sure you will have to reformat your drive. However there are tools that can shrink your partitions without destroying all the data. Partition Magic by powertech comes to mind, but there may be freeware utilites avaiable as well. Check out This HOWTO for a little more information. I would also encorage you to look around metalab and read as many of the docs avaiable for your paticular choice of linux/BSD before you attempt to install. Good luck if you decide to do it.

Justin

It's come in handy a couple of times, like when my hard drive flaked out. I talked my non-techie wife through setting up KPPP and KMail over the phone so she had internet access. (Fortunately, it was just a loose cable)

I've used DemoLinux before that, as well as the SUSE demo CD, but Knoppix is much nicer. The only feature I miss is DemoLinux's ability to anchor part of the file system to the hard drive...

All in all, a very nice distribution.

And for those who can spare a few pennies for a distro, there is always CheapBytes.

But the author does have an interesting point. Kind of like the question: Why did someone pay me $1010 USD for the Eaglehorn bow a week after the Diablo II xpack was released? ;)

This is all just proof positive that the real wealth resides in the human mind, not in a few flipping bits.

we have cheapbytes among others. here you can get pink tie linux-which is redhat 7.3-for $5 + shipping. they have all of the major linux distros, and the nice thing is that when the cd's get there you can install it on as many computers as you want.

we have cheapbytes among others. here you can get pink tie linux-which is redhat 7.3-for $5 + shipping. they have all of the major linux distros, and the nice thing is that when the cd's get there you can install it on as many computers as you want.

1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection.

One gigabyte, divided by 5 kilobytes per second (average effective downstream rate for "56K" dial-up given line noise and TCP overhead), equals 200,000 seconds, or just under 56 hours. At that rate, an online DVD store would have already shipped the package.

CheapBytes: the fastest way for dial-up users to get an OS distro.

I get my Red Hat CDROM sets from CheapBytes, even though Red Hat doesn't allow them to call it Red Hat Linux anymore. They sell the same thing, but it's only about $5.

Spread the word.

So now you're talking about economic sabatogue. Actively working to screw up Microsoft's online gaming site.

Hey, I know. Let's fuck up Red Hat and Mandrake.

Everybody, let's put stickers advertising Cheapbytes on the Red Hat boxes at Best Buy and WalMart!

Same sort of thing.

Why not just call it "pink tie"?

I enjoy sneaking stickers with the Cheapbytes URL on them into CompUSA. I put them on all the various Linux box sets in the store.

One of the sales clerks, who for some reason has a vendetta against Linux*, once saw me doing it and now helps me by 'covering' when I do it.

(* I think he has a vendetta because usually the Linux customer never comes in and buys a piece of software at the store again.)

Nope. The price cited has to be the CheapBytes price. If not available from CheapBytes, it has to be the Original Manufactuer price.

Red Hat is in deep shit because of this.

---------

Sticker as many Red Hat and Mandrake box sets as you can with this cool Cheap Bytes sticker . Sock it to the fucking man (the suits at the Linux slaughterhouses)

With all the expenses that you list, it's a wonder at all that CheapBytes can sell so many Linux/BSD Distro CDs for under $5 apiece.

Thats the BAD part about BSD releases, alot of people dont have high speed Internet access, and an update ISO is needed. The ports tree alone should be on a seperate cd set, and updated monthly. The ports need audited badly, alot of stuff that wont compile, leaving a bad taste on people new to BSD.

The non-offical OpenBSD ISOs are trustworthy. Cheapbytes offers an ISO for 4.99.

We did just fine BEFORE there were shrinkwrap licenses. What makes anyone think we will do worse if they were gone again?

Think about it. How many times did DOS crash and how many times did you call up your lawyer and sue?

As for open source software: If you pay $3.00 at Cheapbytes or some other place then, as the lawyers in most places will tell you - "You're getting what you payed for."

I think that, as long as someone can limp by they will do so more often than asking for their money back. Not that that is a good thing. It's just that that is how things seem to work. People don't sue - they just work around the problems in the software or they go buy something else to do their work with.

For a home user, I agree. I did a dist-upgrade on one of my machines, the other I just downloaded the rescue, root and driver floppies and just installed woody over the network (love my cable modem!). Doing a dist-upgrade over a per-minute dialup could be tough. Then again, can't you get a woody snapshot from cheapbytes or something? Yeah, I just don't see hordes of ppl waiting for CDs to become available when woody releases.

For production, it is probably a bigger deal. I would imagine there are shops that keep close tabs on what version is running and may allow only 'stable'. There are no doubt SAs out there that have a test box or two running woody waiting for the day it goes to stable so they can start upgrading the production machines.

First of all, there is no way Microsoft can enforce conditions upon the implementation of a standard (read: "standard"). Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.

The above sentence is meaningless. First of all what do you mean by "standard"? A defacto standard like Flash, a standard ratified by a standards body, an industry standard (like Java), or something else? Secondly, regardless of what you meant if MSFT has patents on technology they are well within their rights to license it however they see fit.

Here's the argument that Microsoft and other anti-GPL nutballs are making: "You're not making any money off this, so we want to steal your intellectual property, violate the hell out of your license, and make money from our criminal activities." The underlying, unstated argument is, of course, that unless you're in it for profit, you have no intellectual property rights. This is utter bullshit, of course, and serves only to show what basically unethical and indecent people we're dealing with.

Interesting, I am curious as to what MSFT literature you read that made you come to that conclusion. From what I've seen of the anti-GPL rhetoric that has come out of MSFT, they are primarily against Richard Stallman's political agenda that comes with the GPL. They see nothing wrong with altruistically giving away code (which is what the BSD license and its ilk are about) but licenses like the GPL that attempt to devalue the cost of software are anathema to such people. The GPL drives the cost of software to 0 or at worst the cost of distribution media (just take a look at Cheapbytes for a living example of this). This means that any entity that produces GPL software most augment their income in some way be it through moonlighting, consulting, support, selling hardware, etc. This is not a mere side-effect but was an explicit goal of the GPL which can be garnered by reading Richard Stallman's early writings especially the gunk about software developers should work as waiters so that we can afford to give our software away.

Since the GPL makes it near impossible for an entity to simply produce and sell software as its core business, it is unsurprising that the world's largest software company would be wary of doing anything that encouraged the spread of this meme. What is surprising is that most observers find it difficult to realize this and instead of applying Occam's Razor, resort to conspiracy theories about how MSFT wants to steal their code. Then again this is the same website where people bitch about Slashdot's responsibility to slashdotted webservers and how The Great Slashdot Whine Out will strike a blow for Freedom so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised after all.

Disclaimer:This post reflects my opinions and does not reflect the opinions, strategies, thoughts, plans or intentions of my employer

If a boxed redhat could be picked up for less than CDN$30 at Compucentre with plenty of CDs full of nice extra applications, I would buy it instead of downloading forever on my blazing slow 28.8 dialup connection.

Looking for CDs containing the downloadable version of the XXX XXX Linux distribution? Hint: The name has to do with an article of clothing to keep your head warm.

We can't call it by it's real name due to trademark law. Our president will be providing a statement and information at a later time regarding this subject. Please be informed about this matter prior to jumping to any erroneous conclusions.

Why bother downloading 8 images when most of the stuff isn't going to be used?

Even some of us "Linux"-heads are still hancuffed to modems. I'll have to wait for CheapBytes to get 'em and go from there. 50 meg of KDE3 overnite isn't a big deal. A gig or two....

RedHat 7.2 Professional is selling for $199.99

Yes, we here know that you can download ISOs of various distros for "free", but that's not a valid comparison. Consumers as a whole are not going to do that

I can get a full version of RedHat 7.2 from Cheapbytes for $3.99 plus shipping and Handling. Granted I don't get phone support or a nice printed manual, but this is balanced by the shear amount of software I get. Developement tools, Mail/Web/FTP/Telnet Servers and clients, alot of other stuff as well that cost extra from Microsoft.

Now, many of those formerly compelling reasons have evaporated:

IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.

email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.

nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.

Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).

Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today. It was half a function of cheap trading, but also half a function of stocks where you could actually make money.

Nobody can afford to host anymore, so people's websites are either overrun with popups or they're very small, and hosted on very slow hardware, and anyone posting material of any worth has been shut down due to copyright concerns.

Anything interesting or non-mainstream is either impossible to find now, or shut down.

I recently went through my bookmarks.html list, of 500k, accumulated over the past 8 years or so - and a good 70% of the URLs were dead. Making me regret not saving the content to my local hard drive. (and I have saved a great deal anyway).

Free Music - the age of napster is finished.

Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez. Right or wrong, it was one major compelling reason people got onto the internet.

The only compelling things left I can see are: email/im - despite the fact that they're not what they used to be, they're still very useful, but there's no need for broadband here.

Corporate Software websites - where you can usually get up to date drivers and updates. Most of the time, broadband isn't required.

Free Software - If you're a Linux-head - you still need broadband for downloading those isos.

Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend, and a very compelling reason to get broadband, or even a T1. That is, until everyone who has signed up for the internet in the past 3 years finally realizes that there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap, and drop the service.

If you think you have a better solution to these problems, how about proposing them, and actually DO something about it. Complaining here on Slashdot is not a guarantee that things will change.

Linux is not RedHat.
RedHat is not Linux

There are many other distributions out there (e.g. Slackware, Debian, SUSE, and others.) If something happens to the RH distribution that makes it undesirable, people will simply buy their Linux CDs from somebody else. And if RH is dissolved, their engineers will almost certainly continue working on Linux in some other venue.

Furthermore, I'm sure AOL is aware of this. Despite what everybody would like to think, they are not stupid. If they want to destroy Linux, they certainly know that they can't kill a single distribution to do it. It makes absoltely no sense to buy and destroy a company whose primary business is distributing free software.

Now, I don't know what their actual reasons might be, but I think we can all be fairly certain that AOL/TW wants something from RH (software, developers, support network, or maybe something else) that they feel they could not get with an ordinary license.

For all you know, this whole deal may be over the name "RedHat". Note how CheapBytes was prohibited from using the name "RedHat" (and currently calls it "XXX XXX"), even though they are selling CDs made from the same RH images that you can download yourself. If AOL/TW wants to use the RedHat name in their distribution, they may have concluded that the only way to avoid lawsuits is to buy the company. Depending on what RedHat is actually worth, and what it can be bought for, this might not even be a bad deal.

I'm more than willing to wait and see what happens, because I think the impact on the Linux community will not be disastrous even if RH goes the way of Netscape.

Well seeing as though you can find 4.4 on cheapbytes I'd be quite sure anyone could sell them. I guess the idea is that these are Official CDs from the originators and hence spending the extra $27.01 will get you the happy feeling of knowing you have substantially supported the FreeBSD project.

Following the advice of seasoned users

Be careful about people who call themselves "seasoned users", they often don't know what they're talking about.

upgraded to kernel 2.4.13, which required stuff from "unstable"

Adrian Bunk has prepared packages to run 2.4 kernels on stable, available here

a) download the files to my desktop Mandrake system over a slow phone line, following dependencies by hand while trying to remember what I had already downloaded to not duplicate effort

.
.
.
FWIW, I gave up on Debian last night and am installing Mandrake, which, yes, I was able to walk into a store and purchase off the shelf, and which I've installed on other systems before.

Allow me to tell you a parable:

A man wished to purchase a car. He had to choose between an offering from Ford and an offering from Mitsubishi. (no reason for choosing these, they're just the first car companies that spring to mind)

So, in search of expert advice, he went to the house of his friend Fred, the amateur mechanic. Fred put his own cars together from spare parts all the time, and the man knew that he would have the answers. He found Fred in his garage, tinkering with some unidentifiable piece of metal in an engine.

"Fred," the man said, "should I buy a Ford or a Mitsubishi?" Fred paused, wiping some grime off his face, and said, "well, my last couple cars were Fords. You can get 'em real cheap if you buy the spare parts the factories would throw away anyway. Got my last car that way, and she's a beaut!"

So the man headed off to the local car factory, planning to buy the parts. He faithfully bought each part on a list Fred had made. This was very hard, because he had to buy each part from a separate factory, and he had to carry the parts home by hand, not having a car. Worse, he had to return several parts when he bought the wrong one.

After spending much time and money, he finally decided that Fred was wrong. Going to a local car dealer, he walked in and said, "I want a Mitsubishi." The dealer was helpful and cooperative, and an hour later, the man drove away in his new Mitsubishi, vowing never to purchase Ford again.

Now, one would think this man did not do the most wise thing possible -- after all, who would try to buy a car in parts, then compare it to buying a car from a dealer? But that sort of comparison is exactly what you're making.

If you've got the laptop set up, you should probably just leave it. But in the future you might want to do some simple research, including finding vendors who sell CDs of Debian. I understand that CheapBytes is particularly popular.

You might consider waiting, however, until Woody is released, as it will be a major step forward in terms of included software. Currently, it looks like Woody will be released sometime in December or January...but don't quote me on that.

Daniel

I bought Slackware 8.0 just last week from CheapBytes.

The only problem was I couldn't find anybody else in the office who wanted to place a CheapBytes order at the same time. So I paid $5 for the Slackware 3-CD set (a good deal, even compared to downloading the ISOs and burning to CDR) and $5 for shipping.

There is always the availability of CDs via Cheap*Bytes

All three CDs (two install and the supplemental) including shipping for $10 US

Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.

There exists such a distribution of GNU software compiled for Win32, available in the UK. Too bad cheapbytes doesn't seem to sell anything similar. However, cheapbytes does sell this CD containing DJGPP (a 32-bit DOS C compiler) and "LLC" (LCC?) for Win32.

What you're really missing is a business model. AOL's model is to give away the bisks and sell the connection.

Are you crazy?

A Red Hat CD costs about $3 these days.

Unless you're a damn fool.

Use the money you save to get a good book on Linux or Unix administration.

Because the money that comes with people buying FreeBSD off-the-shelf is an important source of income, you should be glad that you can contribute some money to the project.
Alternative you could be help-your-selfish and parsimonious and just go to CheapBytes BSD section when 4.4 is there.

Do yourself a favour and buy the FreeBSD 4.4 off-the-shelf, it's an investment that will come back around full circle, and benefit you in the end.

One address:

http://www.cheapbytes.com

Old P1* boxes with OpenBSD make stunningly great firewalls. Throw a couple of good, well-known NICs in one of these and install either using the net (which works very well) or by buying a CD from CheapBytes for $4.99. OpenBSD uses IPFilter and IPNAT (at least for now, but I understand that's going to change soon - perhaps next release...) which I think use a much easier to understand syntax than IPChains/masq. Plus, OpenBSD is pretty damn secure right out of the box without any configuration.

GNU software doesn't require royalties. When you buy a
Linux CD you pay for the service, not for the system,
and you're also allowed to make as many copies you need,
to use them or give them around.
You also forgot that one can't do anything serious with
Windows without buying some other products to install
(Office, compilers, databases etc.).

If your company needs 10 new PCs to do networking,
document writing, software development, etc. You spend
less than $100 for one SuSE | RedHat box, and you're
done.
The windows choice would cost you from $4000 to
$6000 for 10 clients, much more for 10 servers (keep
in mind that Unix is a server), plus Office licenses, plus
Visual Studio licenses, plus database and web server
licenses, plus no knowledge of what is doing the system
you paid with your money and installed into your machine,
plus no freedom to look at it's internals and source
code to learn how it works or to fix a bug.

I honestly cannot see how the Microsoft solution could
compare to the free one in terms of price and reliability.

> Linux was a far more compelling upgrade when it sold for
> $20 at Best Buy. That was over two years ago, however.

Cheap Linux CDs are still available at Cheapbytes.

Or just order a cd, for example from CheapBytes

While linux is improving nicely, it still lacks heavily in any music reporduction,

Actually, there's quite a bit of music production software for Linux.

media interfaces

You mean like Shockwave and MP3s?

business applications.

Such as Excel and Word?

I'd rather pay 199.00 bucks for something that works out of the box and comes with lots of software then several hours downloading, burning iso's and then chasing down the latest versions of all apps waisting a whole entire weekend or business days (thus costing more then the 199.00 XP package).

So would I. Fortunately, if I want to run Linux, I can get a complete set of CD-ROMs from CheapBytes for less than fifteen bucks (including postage) and usually install or upgrade the whole system in about two hours, most of it hands-free. Most of these systems have a reputation for running smoothly "right out of the box."

Try Redhat 7.1 and/or Mandrake 8.0 out first. Make sure to create a /home partition during install if you just have one machine to use linux on. This will allow you to keep any work / files you have generated when you go to install a different distribution.

Head over to the HOWTO Index and peruse through any HOWTO's that interest you.

Open a terminal, and type 'man man' :)

After your comfortable using linux, or on a separate "test" machine try installing Debian 2.2 r3 and/or Slackware 8.0. You will now have some experience using linux and this will give you a chance to check out the more "advanced" distributions.

Ok, to know what is really going on try out linux from scratch

Seems like there are a million "how to setup linux" guides out there now, but I found this site here, TrinityOS to be very helpful years ago, and it still is.

Oh yeah, here is a great deal from Cheapbytes where I bought my first linux cd.

• MONDO Pack Edition 28 for $17.95.
• includes all 5 Redhat 7.1 cds, Mandrake 8, Slackware 8, and StormLinux 2000.
• Debian 2.2r3 3 CD set for $9.

Try Redhat 7.1 and/or Mandrake 8.0 out first. Make sure to create a /home partition during install if you just have one machine to use linux on. This will allow you to keep any work / files you have generated when you go to install a different distribution.

Head over to the HOWTO Index and peruse through any HOWTO's that interest you.

Open a terminal, and type 'man man' :)

After your comfortable using linux, or on a separate "test" machine try installing Debian 2.2 r3 and/or Slackware 8.0. You will now have some experience using linux and this will give you a chance to check out the more "advanced" distributions.

Ok, to know what is really going on try out linux from scratch

Seems like there are a million "how to setup linux" guides out there now, but I found this site here, TrinityOS to be very helpful years ago, and it still is.

Oh yeah, here is a great deal from Cheapbytes where I bought my first linux cd.

• MONDO Pack Edition 28 for $17.95.
• includes all 5 Redhat 7.1 cds, Mandrake 8, Slackware 8, and StormLinux 2000.
• Debian 2.2r3 3 CD set for $9.

Let's see, in the last 7 or 8 years (since I started using Linux), I've spent aproximately the following $ on Linux:

$15 - CDs from CheapBytes
$15 - CDRs for distros that I've burned
$30 - stuffed Tuxes from ThinkGeek

In the same time, I've spent the following on Windows:

$0 - oh, that's right, I don't use Windows on machines I control.

And every computer I've bought since my very first 8088 has been in pieces & sans OS, so no MS-Tax there.

So that's $60 on Linux and $0 on Windows. So clearly Linux is infinitely more expensive than Windows.

Hmmm...Since Linux costs so much more, perhaps I should consider switching...

--

On the other hand, when I first tried Linux about 3 years ago, I bought the Red Hat box set because I wanted the documentation, wanted to support a company that I believe in, and because I didn't have the bandwidth to download a distribution. I wasn't aware of places like CheapBytes at the time. Since then I've purchased numerous CD's online through companies such as these who sell for a couple bucks each. Nowadays I have DSL and a CD burner so I download or write every bit of software I use.

A group of friends and I (about 12 of us total) made sure we got invited to the Win2k release party in Columbus, OH. Once our invites were secure, I got in touch with some people that work at cheapbytes.com (awesome place) and overnighted a 100 CD spindle for a very nice discount (I think I explained what they were for).

We walked into the expo center, scooped up all the free "gifts" we could, ate lunch on Microsoft, then proceeded to the AntiPiracy booth (don't think irony was lost on us...how can you pirate Freesoftware?), stacked the CDs up, and watched them fly. We were happy to explain to anyone who asked what they were there for, what Linux was, and in general promote the use of the OS. For a little while. Then, the Microsoftie lady came over and proceeded to escourt us out of there. We could have resisted, but we didn't.

I've often wondered about that day. What happened to all the discs we handed out...were they in use, are they coasters? What would have happened if we would have fought back, and made a scene? We wern't too keen on the idea of a lawsuit, but I just wonder. All in all I enjoyed the party...I even got a nifty Magic-Motion card out of it.

What is disallowed is a viral licensing fee, like that used by shareware authors ("You can try this program and redistribute it, but if you use it for more than 30 days, you owe me $20."). You can't require that anyone who receives the software (not necessarily from you!) has to pay you money. The difference is that you might agree only to send the software to someone if they pay you money (CheapBytes would quickly go out of business if they were required to give away CDs for free), but you can't control what they do with the software afterwards. Imagine what would happen if CheapBytes required everyone who redistributed code from the CDs they sell to pay them a fee for the privlege of doing so!

The GPL does not enforce that software be available at no cost, but the market forces inherent in free software do (would you buy a Red Hat CD for $50, without any manuals or support, if you could get the same for about five bucks with shipping or download it off the Net for pennies?)

I switched from RH6x to Mandrake Corporate Server last year. I find it excellent. One possible reason Mandrake are in financial trouble is that they didn't sell an english distribution of Corporate Server. Only a French one. So I had to get it from CheapBytes thus robbing Mandrake of revenue. (Yes, I know I could have downloaded it but I live in a third world country where 600Mb downloads are folly) I would gladly purchase a couple of copies of an English Corporate Server distro from Mandrake.

Cheapbytes also has a Helix Gnome disc listed.