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http://www.linuxcare.com/

Chrisd

There are plenty of companies which specialize in support for Linux and Open Source.

I mean really, you don't need to pay millions of dollars for support, though it is more difficult to find 24x7x365 support with 4 hour turnaround when you're talking $10,000/year instead of $250,000.

Then again, does your company really *need* that level of support? I would venture to say that they probably don't. If you build redundancy into your systems, you should be able to get by in most cases, albeit under heavier load. For 24x7x365 support, expect to spend $$$$.

No, I don't work for them, but Linuxcare has a professional looking website using the CEO-lingo that might comfort the big-wigs you need to convince. There are other companies that support Free Software too, check out Red Hat's Support Services. A site called OpenEnterprise looks to have a ton of resources on exactly what you're asking for.

Also, take a look at IT Management's special report on Linux. It offers a lot of ammo to you in making a presentation. You can point to the other heavy-hitters that are using Free solutions and have concrete examples of success.

The same site even has an article entitled Selling the 'Suits' on your IT project which looks to have some good advice for you.

Linux Care Bootable ToolBox, Knoppix, and a dozen of small diskettes distros...

Back when Linuxcare was still growing, they were producing these cards like mad. If you liked Linux, they would give you a dozen for free (To pass out at Lugs and geek-parties... "FOR THE REVOLUTION!" they said). I have given a bunch of them away to friends, and keep a copy at home and at work.

I really like small tools that have multiple uses, and this Linux CD fits well. I keep one in my mini-toolkit, right next to a Leatherman Multitool and Pocket Ref.

And yes, I have actually used it when I upgraded my RH6.2 to 7.2 (The GRUB install failed miserably), and to recover data from a friends partition.

I won a competition for this story I wrote a couple of years back.

A lot of people get too caught up in his philosophy and overlook the fact that he's a coding god. I liked this article that sheds some light on his coding abilities.

Here is her e-mail address by the way:

cercen@linuxcare.com

Try LinuxCare for tech support on open source applications: here is the link to the "Advanced Support" page

Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox

It will fit on one of those oddly cut business card sized CDs, so will of course fit on a 3 inch CD. Enjoy!

Well, I use a SUSE version of LILO for cool animations at bootup. I have a few kernels in the startup menu - the version installed by Debian, and various versions of 2.2 & 2.4 (in case the new one, say, doesn't properly load sound, apm, or pcmcia drivers). But I do tend to keep a rescue cd or two around anyway.

I spent 18 months at an Open Source company, and never spent a single hour during company time in 18 months working on anything Open Source, including my own Open Source projects. I was certainly "expected" to put in 10+ hour days on the weekends though, without any additional compensation "for the good of the company".

Many Open Source developers are unemployed right now and still looking for work (259 days and counting for myself), and still contributing 100% of their time to their projects, while the "industry" at large continues to fire and lay off more and more qualified developers in the interest of "quarterly revenues". Trust me, nobody is getting more than half of their income from any company for working on projects that are given away gratis as the above slides lead you to believe.

I also reject the assertion that Sourceforge is leading the way in this regard. Sourceforge has been drifting for quite some time, and thousands of developers are leaving Sourceforge for want of better services every week. You don't see that on the surveys though, do you?

There was a similar article several months ago with a run down on the various floppy / cd based systems. It is probably well worth your while to check out that previous thread. I've seen a couple of good CD based ones around, especially the ones arranged such that they fit on a business card sized CD-R and hence provide you with the ability of a nice in wallet rescue disk. Checkout linuxcare's offering

I really hope that somebody'll develop a file browser for Windows kind of like this. I think I'd work a hell of a lot faster if my hard drive looked like a star-map instead of climbing a tree.

If you are interested in GNU/Linux laptops, you can narrow the search quickly via
Linuxcare Lab's certification reports. As usual, GNU/Linux-related docs are useful descriptive than the manufacturers'. =-)

-Paul Komarek

...for non-Windows systems. IBM used to offer them, but stopped because the demand was so low. It's my understanding that if you buy a Notebook with Windows, but do not accept the Windows EULA, uninstall it and install another OS, you can get your money back for the unused Windows OS. I don't know how one goes about this, but I've heard that it's possible...but may be more trouble than it's worth.

On another note, if you want to run LINUX on your notebook, IBM's the way to go. Most ThinkPads are certified for almost any release of LINUX.

First you must make sure the laptop is 'Linux-Ready'. Take a look at the Standard Certification at LinuxCare. So that you can see whether your favourite Linux distro fits with your laptop of choice. Then proceed to google for the linux support for the rest of the devices.

First you must make sure the laptop is 'Linux-Ready'. Take a look at the Standard Certification at LinuxCare. So that you can see whether your favourite Linux distro fits with your laptop of choice. Then proceed to google for the linux support for the rest of the devices.

Wow! It looks like cburley is guilty of the kind of FUD Distribution that the linux-o-philes hate.

If you're not going to fully support the software you make, there are plenty of jobs at Target to fill your "free" time.

"free, ad-hoc" support. What a joke. Ad-hoc support is always inconsistant, frequently self-contradictory, and usually way over the help-seekers head.

cburley seems to be hopelessly engrained into thinking that software support=source code access

If cburley's attitude was taken to the process of changing the air-filter on my car, I'd be an expert at rebuilding Honda engines by now - which is NOT what I want to do with my time; I want my system to work, reliably, with little fuss, and not have to learn Linux Kernel programming to keep my system working.

One thing that's interesting about the analogy is that while all cars are more or less equally complex, in the same general ways, operating systems (and by extension, distributions) actually compete in areas like ease of installation, ease of use and ease of administration.

"Choice D" is what everyone who buys commercial software products does. You PAY for the product (!= free, as in speech OR Stolen Beer) and get support from that company, if at all. Software support for choices A thru C is shotty, unreliable and teduous at best.

SCENARIO 1: 1) Linux Distributions that are "free" (as in your friend's Beer) do not come with support, but you can give it away.
SCENARIO 2: 1) Big software company gets someone into a management position who is a rabid Linux user/coder/penguine fetishist and convinces the company that they should have a Linux Distro
SCENARIO 3: 1) Group of Linux coders/penguine fetishists get together and form a company to make and distribute their own brand of Linux

Your second scenario has only one example that I know of--Corel. They failed, but who cares? Xandros might yet succeed, and the Debian project is still chugging right along, providing "orphaned" Corel Linux users with all the updated software they need.

The third scenario, in which a bunch of geeks form a company to create an incompatible distribution, is just one example of how companies can naturally fail in an open, free, non-monopolistic market. Incompatibility is a bad idea for a young company--if they go that route they probably deserve to fail. If you're early on the scene, like Red Hat and Slackware were, you have the chance to create de facto standards that other vendors adhere to. Wow, capitalism at work!

Support for open-source products is so poor, inconsistent and unreliable that one should consider it virually non-existent.

In conclusion; if I use something that someone has made, whether I paid for it was given to me as a gift (as open-source is), I would expect that "someone" to help me fix it, and in a manner that I would understand.

There have been some comments/summaries about BitKeeper and efficiency on the Kernel Traffic. If you don't have time to read the linux kernel mailing list Kernel Traffic is wonderful.

I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.

My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy :-)

Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.

-me

Have you looked at the Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox? It's a distro that can be used on a credit-card sized CD. I only found out about it a couple of days ago, and I've been pretty impressed so far. Here's some linkage: http://lbt.linuxcare.com"

Wow you saved me having to write a post about this :) There is another great one i use called lbt (linuxcare bootable toolkit - which was the precursor of LNX-BBC) and you can find it here: http://lbt.linuxcare.com/. The other distribution is demolinux which needs a 700meg cd, but contains a whole operating system including KDE and Gnome that runs off the cd.

ZDNet recently posted this interesting story about LinuxCare.

Instead of a floppy, why not use a cdrom? It can hold alot more, has faster load times, and many other features.
PLAC - Portable Linux Auditing CD

LNX-BBC

LBT

System 1 (with the 2.2.17 kernel) has never stayed up for more than 55 days. It hard crashes without anything informative being written to the logs, and obviously required the reset button to be pressed.

Of course it's crashing all the time; it's 2.2.17! You mention the logs, but not the console (don't expect syslogd to work when the kernel is in trouble). Does the console say something like "VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed"? See Kernel Traffic #99. That bug sucked, and, paradoxically, is one reason why I still haven't gone to 2.4 (after seeing all the VM trouble 2.4 had).

Upgrade to at least 2.2.19 or maybe apply Andrea Arcangeli's VM-global patch.

This is how open source works. Welcome to the fold. Linux didn't get where it is today because of any commercial funding. In fact, NO company has yet financially contributed to the development of Linux itself by paying people to work on it. Sure, they donate hardware, rack time, stuff like that, but it's for their own benefit; PR or product work. Development funding for Linux and Linux applications is never given away gratis, ever. This needs to change if people expect professional quality work out of competent developers who are clearly capable of delivering it. These developers do it in their spare time, because the rest of their time is spent earning a living, providing for their families, and working day jobs.

Let's not forget the other side of your argument... who is going to make these micropayments? Certainly not other developers, otherwise we get back into the same rut, where the same amount of money is just changing hands.

Companies sure aren't going to make the micropayments, because most companies do not believe in Open Source, and certainly don't believe in it enough to fund it's development, without something else coming back their way to put their own ledgers in the black.. trust me on this one, I just resigned from my employer and this was one of the major reasons for my departure. They believe in Linux,as long as it makes them rich, but they do not believe in returning back to the community that gave them their name, their mission.

It baffles me why commercial companies continue to rape the Linux and Open Source community in this fashion. We need stricter licensing that forbids this. I'm not on the side of stricter licensing, but..

Back to the issue at hand. Commercial companies aren't going to fund Linux unless it hits their bottom line.

Developers aren't going to fund Linux development or applications because they need that money to eat and survive and pay rent.

Users aren't going to fund the development, because they will (barely) want to send money even if the product is finished, polished, and in a shrinkwrapped box with a manual. They do not want to pay for the development up-front.

Lastly, Linux is not out to make money. Sure, it makes money for lots of people, but I'm sure I side with Linus, Alan, and hundreds of other Linux developers when I say that we are here to do some cool and interesting stuff. If nobody uses it, oh well. If it's useful, great. If it advances the technology or pushes the envelope, we've done our job.

The features of the first link is that it uses a 2.4 kernel and Xfree 4.1 (and more).

The selling feature of the second is that you can rsync/cvs its development tree, and thus insert your own tweaks into the card.

I'm not screamingly familiar with these versions, but the older BBC they gave away at LinuxWorld really rocks. Not just you're booting the Linux OS from CDROM, but it will handle networking, windowing, and webbrowsing. (And it has repair tools that I thankfully haven't had the need to demonstrate.)

They need a placeholder for all these bootable live cdroms I keep on seeing everywhere now. They are great for quick recovery jobs, and its always handy to have a linux distro that fits in your wallet.

LBT from Linuxcare
LNX-BBC
Portable Linux Auditing CD

Wonder if you can burn a (small) ISO or other bootable CD on 'em?

According to Greg Lehey, Linuxcare also provides FreeBSD support.

Huh? What? I got a pile of "Linuxgruven" stickers from the Linux World Expo shows, but they most certainly didn't come from the "Linuxgruven" that's being sued - they all came from the people at http://www.linuxcare.com Which stickers are *you* talking about?

This will be a great opportunity for someone to examine their code looking for GPL'ed code.

Kernel hackers Jeff Merkey and Andre Hederick might be able to tell you where to start looking.

Check out www.peacfire.org you might also take a look at this.

Unfortunately the Linux kernel still does not comply with the principles of good kernel design highlighted in Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems Design And Implentation": the clean (and I do emphasize that that is important) implementation of a scheduler, memory managment aspects, IPC, device drivers etc.

You and Tanenbaum seem to share the belief that the architecture of the OS is the highest priority. Linus seems to focus instead on practicality and performance, although he does value architectural simplicity and elegance very highly too.

perhaps a CVS system instead of randomly throwing out tarballs....and a proper built-in kernel debugger. (Linus himself apparently dissaproves of things like this)

but in matters such as this perhaps it's time he was overruled, in order to take the kernel onto the next level

One of Linuxcares' services, Linux Traffic http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/latest.epl, didn't get updated for 12 days now. Normally it comes every week... Hopefully they have time for that again now, it's the best thing they do. Hopefully Linuxcares' services are more reliable in other areas, otherwise Turbolinux has made a bad deal.

..to the fact that there haven't been any new Kernel Cousins on linuxcare.com for 12 days..?

There are a number of problems that arise when a commercial entity tries to sell a free distribution such as Debian.

Selling what you could otherwise get for free..

What do you think is going through the mind of a Stormix or Corel customer? "Why am I paying Corel for Debian when I can simply install and maintain it for free by going directly to Debian?"

Commercial distributions (forks) often break packages

We saw this with Corel. They worked to create a commercial version of Debian, making custom packages that often break dependencies with packages from Debian proper. This makes it difficult to maintain an machine with packages that have cross-dependencies between the commercial entity and Debian proper. The helix-gnome packages are another example of this.

The thing these entities do not realize is that if they feel a package must be "updated", simply providing a Non-Maintainer Update or patch is often the fastest and easiest way to update Debian, rather than forking the distribution and trying to maintain compatibility between them.

The Debian Project has different goals than a commercial entity

When the roadmap that the commercial entity requires its product to be at a certain stage at a certain time, having a product that it does not maintain internally becomes largely problematic. A company may be willing to become an integral member of the Debian community, contributing its time, money, and resources to improving Debian proper. Yet, when the community does not agree or comply with the desires of the company, it's often a hard pill to swallow. What do you tell your customers and investors when you fail to move Debian in the direction you would like to go?

This symbiotic relationship requires a very open mind by the commercial entity. It has to be willing to accept the ebb and flow of Debian proper, and disregard what the company may traditionally view as a loss of time and resources. Instead they have to look at the glass as half-full, not half-empty, and make the best of the situation. Most companies are not willing to do that, and most investors do not like to see their money "squandered".

What commercial model "works" with Debian?

That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Perhaps taking queues from Progeny Linux would help in answering this question. Perhaps look at LinuxCare's support models. IMHO, Debian should be viewed as a centerpiece tool for support models rather than a focus for a product model. It simply will not integrate well as the latter, but can work quite well in the former. "Our Developers work as members of the Debian Project and the Open Source community to bring you the most reliable, stable, and useable distribution of Linux available. When we find problems or bugs, we will not only provide you with timely fixes, we will give these fixes back to Debian in that same prompt manner."

--

This was the same situation with the IRDA susbsystem as detailed in this Kernel Traffic thread. Linus dosn't like parge patches. If he gets 30 10K patches in seperate emails rather than one 300K patch, he can decide to merge 25 of them and ask questions about the other five and maybe later accept them or get them modified to fit his idea of the "right way" to do it. If Linus dosn't like a few lines of a 300K patch, he has no chouce but to reject the whole thing.

It has everything to do with the way that Linus works and nothing to do with the technical merit of the port.

Remember, it is Linus' kernel.

Yup, go read the linux-kernel mailing list archives; at least once every couple of months, someone tries to give Linus a 300K patch, and he rejects it. Linus wants *small* patches, which do specific things, or implement one new feature.

Kernel Traffic has summarized this numerous times, if you don't want to wade through the lkml. Essentially, the only reason NON-platform-specific stuff gets through faster is because it all goes to Alan Cox, who then stuffs them into his own tree (the -ac* patches). When he decides they're stable enough to pass on, he breaks them up into bite-sized pieces for Linus.

It sounds like the PPC maintainer isn't willing to do this, and so they're falling by the wayside.

1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.

http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010108_ 101.epl#7, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001127_ 95.epl#6

and especially: http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_ 87.epl#3, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001010_ 88.epl#7.

Have a good read. KernelTraffic Rocks.

-Chris

http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/os/

http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010108_ 101.epl#7, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001127_ 95.epl#6

and especially: http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_ 87.epl#3, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001010_ 88.epl#7.

Have a good read. KernelTraffic Rocks.

-Chris

http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/os/

http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010108_ 101.epl#7, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001127_ 95.epl#6

and especially: http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_ 87.epl#3, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001010_ 88.epl#7.

Have a good read. KernelTraffic Rocks.

-Chris

http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/os/

http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010108_ 101.epl#7, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001127_ 95.epl#6

and especially: http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_ 87.epl#3, http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20001010_ 88.epl#7.

Have a good read. KernelTraffic Rocks.

-Chris

http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/os/

from what i have heard (from linux-kernel) linus doesn't like to get huge patches. he likes to get small patches that do one thing, since that's easier to review.

the linppc folks have had a hard time accepting this. they want to send one huge patch to get the ppc architecture up-to-date.

it's not a new problem. see this bit on kernel traffic, which covers some of it. there was another thread, where linus flamed people for sending huge patches, but i can't find it atm.
--

With zerocopy, when you issue sendfile(), the kernel does the network DMA straight from the page cache, avoiding that extra copy. In the case where the network card is capable of doing the TCP checksum in hardware (as a lot of newer cards can), the kernel doesn't even have to look at the data between the disk DMA and the network DMA.

This is almost consumer electronics, after all; there's no such thing as a static product line anymore. Even the venerable 3c509b is being (has been?) phased out for a -c version; which almost certainly has nothing fundamentally new or worthwhile in the way of capabilities, but might be a cheaper design, and is just different enough to cause trouble with old drivers. See also backward combatability.

They are now a stronger company

After reading some info on the Linuxcare site, this merger is making more sense all the time.

From their Professional Services page:

Linuxcare Professional Services is ready to work with you through all stages of Linux deployment

Their services are a direct complement to any Linux distro. The entire point of this merger seems to be to get TurboLinux on more corporte desktops and servers. That is a huge plus both for TurboLinux and for the Linux community in general.

Check out their Professional Services page for more details.

They are now a stronger company

After reading some info on the Linuxcare site, this merger is making more sense all the time.

From their Professional Services page:

Linuxcare Professional Services is ready to work with you through all stages of Linux deployment

Their services are a direct complement to any Linux distro. The entire point of this merger seems to be to get TurboLinux on more corporte desktops and servers. That is a huge plus both for TurboLinux and for the Linux community in general.

Check out their Professional Services page for more details.

They are now a stronger company

After reading some info on the Linuxcare site, this merger is making more sense all the time.

From their Professional Services page:

Linuxcare Professional Services is ready to work with you through all stages of Linux deployment

Their services are a direct complement to any Linux distro. The entire point of this merger seems to be to get TurboLinux on more corporte desktops and servers. That is a huge plus both for TurboLinux and for the Linux community in general.

Check out their Professional Services page for more details.

Actually, they aren't the ones I was talking about. They are the strawmen generally set up when people don't want to admit bugs that are actually there. Look at these links:

http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010202_ 105.epl#5

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0102.0/0220.html

Maybe your 'summary' was really a strawman and the fact is that Linux is getting complex enough that no one person can fully understand it?