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But bring your own lube!

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

1. Microsoft products must be as extra-cost options in the purchase of new computers, so that the user who does not wish to purchase them is not forced to do so. If I choose to not use Microsoft's products, then Microsoft should not get a cut of my money.
2. The specifications of Microsoft's present and future document file formats must be made public, so that documents created in Microsoft applications may be read by programs from other makers (in addition to the APIs, already part of the settlement).
3. Any Microsoft networking protocols must be published in full and approved by an independent network protocol body. This would prevent Microsoft from seizing de facto control of the Internet.

In addition, I would add that the pricing for Microsoft's products must be strictly based on volume (to prevent Microsoft from "punishing" vendors who sell competing products) and to make their agreements with resellers public (to prevent secret agreements from damaging the public).

I'm not anti-Microsoft.. I just want to make sure that there is opportunity for competition. Capitalism, to work effectively, requires competition.

weird side note to this story the Digital Millennium Rape Act parody has a mention of Osama Bin Laden "Consider the reports that an Islamic terror master, Osama Bin Laden, was distributing instructions over the Internet and via CD. There was a lot of coverage, and in the back of the minds of many was registered the notion that something ought to be done. The precedent having been set -- that we don't deal with criminals directly, but instead fart in their general direction -- the idea of a system like Carnivore didn't rouse much public outcry. After all, it's there to protect us, right?" The parody is here http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/36 42/1

Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?

And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?

I grew up in the rural South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.

If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.

I dunno dude, these weirdos may have a different interpretation of "slower machines" than you and I.

dep's quote: "I admit that this is on a low-end machine, an Athlon 1.2-gig with 768 megs of memory and a G-400 vid card with a paltry 32 megs."

I am shocked, shocked, so see that /. wasn't voted Favorite Time-Waster.

TANJ!

Details of how they use Linux.

Indeed they are, Linux Planet did an article on the BBC many moons ago.

If you're inspired to become a gadfly to those who think they can turn you into a consuming conforming ruminant:

First off, check out Dennis Powell's advice on responding to the DOJ's attempt to give the Internet to MS.

Never let your senator or congressperson do anything that concerns you and your liberties without hearing from you.

I've never seen Common Cause mentioned here, but they are a real lobbying group who deserve your support and dollars, have done so for decades.

Here's a quick explanation of a journaled filesystem, courtesy of LinuxPlanet.com:

The term "journaled" means that the filesystem maintains a log or record of what it is doing to the main data areas of the disk, so that if a crash occurs it can re-create anything that was lost.

...

The idea is that the system can crash at any point in this process but that such a crash won't have lasting effect. ... So when the system reboots, it can simply replay the journal entries and complete the update that was interrupted, or it can back out a partially completed update to restore the file's previous state. In either case, you have valid data and not a trashed partition.

Basically, it means no more long disk checks at startup after a crash or power outage. :) And it virtually eliminates disk fragmentation too, I believe. Hope that helps.

Not a direct interview but here is an interesting article...
Glimpses of a Guy You'd Like to Know

Of course this took a little bit of effort to read the linux kernel mail list. Interesting start the first paragraph is
The chances are that you've seen an interview or two, in print or on television, with the fellow who a decade ago had the sheer audacity to sit down and start writing his own version of Unix. If you have, you've probably been impressed with a polite and self-assured young man who was probably giving rote answers to the same questions that are asked in every interview.

Hmmm... seems to backup my point, maybe it is a time for a slash interview and see what the /. crowd can come up with

Funny article on LinuxPlanet regarding VA's proprietary "extensions" to Sourceforge:

A week ago, VA Linux announced that it would sell a closed source, "Enterprise Edition" of its SourceForge software. Eric S. Raymond, a member of the VA Linux board of directors and a leading open source advocate, flew to the company's defense, saying that companies don't like open source software, so this was just a move to "throw a sop" to the "managerial underbrain."

AC

• Analogises the crime of copyright infringement with the crime of rape.
• Analogises the prosecution of people for copyright infringement with the wholesale massacre of Jews.
• Wastes half of its length on a boring anti-gun-control rant utterly unrelated to the topic, and
• Destroys the entire case for freedom of information by claiming that hackers should be seen as analogous to mobs killing each other in Chicago (I am not making this up -- the fool's argument is that if hackers want to break the law they will do no matter what the law, therefore they should be allowed the tools to do so)

I always wondered whether there was a site out there with worse journalistic standards than Slashdot. Michael's found it, and he's linked to it. Congratulations.

It says it all:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/35 89/1/

I say : As a maintenance tool for low end boxes.

(Such as, say, the old PPC I use as a gateway to the net. 3 years old, 180 MHz, 32 meg RAM.)

On such a machine, you need something to

1. Browse local help pages;* **
2. Search the web for code and rpms;
3. Download these onto the machine.

* Bonus if it can read man and info pages, (like gnome-help-browser).
** Double bonus if it supports find string on page (unlike g-h-b).

Skipstone is nice (uses gecko and fewer gnome libs than galeon), but I found it still memory hungry and a quite bit slower than g-h-b, or legacy Netscape for Mac on the same hardware.

(The one I tried compiled against Mozilla 0.9. Although there may be good progress since, I wonder if gecko may just not be lean enough... Moz 0.9.2 is still a big memory hog on my other machine -- like 50 meg after a little browsing, where legacy Netscape would stay around 30.)

Encompass uses gtkhtml instead. Can anyone comment on it? Will it do (1), (2) and (3) above? I still need to figure out exactly what dependencies it needs to compile. Anyway, it seems promising -- see this review and some more recent news.

I just don't get Suse, the company. Their YAST and YAST2 programs are under their own, non-GPL license. I believe the distribution as a whole is under a funny license as well. They refuse to release installation iso's for 7.0 or 7.1 for x86. If you frequent LinuxIso.org you know what I'm talking about. But Suse released "live evaluation" iso's of 7.0 and 7.1. You can install Suse from ftp. You can even download installation iso's for every other arcitechture that they support. But not for x86. It just baffles me.

Linux Central just recently added a Suse 7.0 disc to their Linux Cental CD-Roms selection. But not 7.1. I know I could roll my own and stuff, but the new Redhat, Conectiva, and Debian beckon to come and try them out as well. Rather waste my time messing with getting Linux From Scratch working, than trying to get Suse installed.

I know. The patent answer is "It's business, stupid", but that argument doesn't make much sense when *all* of your competition is offering 'free samples', but you're not. As a dumb American, what's the reason for going with Suse instead of Redhat or Mandrake, or even Storm or Progeny? I just don't get it.

One other thing, if anyone can help me. One of the most annoying things right now for me is the lack of good fonts in web pages under Konq. Do the boxed distros include fonts that aren't included in the download versions? I haven't bought a boxed distro in almost six months and it's about time to get one. I'll definately get one sooner than later if I can get some better fonts.

And finally, I feel the need to pimp some of the very cool distros I've come across. I've haven't been able to try these out yet (doh. got to get a cd burner.) but they do look cool. First, Caldera has released a beta for their upcoming 3.1 workstation release. Their is a review of it at Linux Planet. The coolest transistion distro I've found is Redmond Linux. Tries to focus on the destop and do away with the need for the command line. There is also Demudi. The Debian Multimedia Distribution. The name says it all. Then there's a few of the more hardcore, hacker type distros: Rock Linux, Stampede Linux, and Linux From Scratch. And last, but not least. The most vaporous of them all. Microsoft Linux.

I just don't get Suse, the company. Their YAST and YAST2 programs are under their own, non-GPL license. I believe the distribution as a whole is under a funny license as well. They refuse to release installation iso's for 7.0 or 7.1 for x86. If you frequent LinuxIso.org you know what I'm talking about. But Suse released "live evaluation" iso's of 7.0 and 7.1. You can install Suse from ftp. You can even download installation iso's for every other arcitechture that they support. But not for x86. It just baffles me.

Linux Central just recently added a Suse 7.0 disc to their Linux Cental CD-Roms selection. But not 7.1. I know I could roll my own and stuff, but the new Redhat, Conectiva, and Debian beckon to come and try them out as well. Rather waste my time messing with getting Linux From Scratch working, than trying to get Suse installed.

I know. The patent answer is "It's business, stupid", but that argument doesn't make much sense when *all* of your competition is offering 'free samples', but you're not. As a dumb American, what's the reason for going with Suse instead of Redhat or Mandrake, or even Storm or Progeny? I just don't get it.

One other thing, if anyone can help me. One of the most annoying things right now for me is the lack of good fonts in web pages under Konq. Do the boxed distros include fonts that aren't included in the download versions? I haven't bought a boxed distro in almost six months and it's about time to get one. I'll definately get one sooner than later if I can get some better fonts.

And finally, I feel the need to pimp some of the very cool distros I've come across. I've haven't been able to try these out yet (doh. got to get a cd burner.) but they do look cool. First, Caldera has released a beta for their upcoming 3.1 workstation release. Their is a review of it at Linux Planet. The coolest transistion distro I've found is Redmond Linux. Tries to focus on the destop and do away with the need for the command line. There is also Demudi. The Debian Multimedia Distribution. The name says it all. Then there's a few of the more hardcore, hacker type distros: Rock Linux, Stampede Linux, and Linux From Scratch. And last, but not least. The most vaporous of them all. Microsoft Linux.

By the way, I've also been a beta tester of the system. The account is a full virtual hardware environment, with root access to your virtual machine. The whole thing runs under IBM's VM operating system which acts as a hypervisor like VMWare(tm) but with extremely low overhead because the S/390 CPU has better virtualization support in hardware than Intel does.

They are using SSH with hostkey authentication in addition to the login/password authentication. This is so that they can safely allow a direct root login remotely. You can (and will, if you're smart) also use IPCHAINS to create a personalized firewall on your virtual machine. Isolation from vm to vm is extremely good because of the hardware-assisted virtualization.

IBM would be the first to admit that the raw MIPS numbers of a mainframe, even a big one, don't compare to a huge cluster of RISC or Itanium boxes. The forté of a mainframe is I/O bandwidth and security, and they are marketing it as such. Big companies are finding that running Linux on the S/390 concurrently with their traditional mainframe applications allows a best-of-both-worlds integration that is otherwise very cumbersome and difficult. By the way, there is an internal bus-speed network within the mainframe chassis that carries TCP/IP traffic from vm to vm at gigaBYTE per second speeds. So if you have a few dozen virtual Linux servers communicating with one another and with OS/390 or VM/ESA mainframe apps via IP, network bottlenecks are seldom a problem.

IBM's engineers have been very responsive in fixing bugs and listening to suggestions, and they've set up a discussion e-mail list with several of their engineers lurking and posting. This is a very new thing for IBM, and there will inevitably be glitches, but give it half a chance. As for the coolness factor, that's certainly there but it's not what IBM is pushing. It's not fair to judge this offering based on whether it does a great job of running seti@home or Quake. Judge it on whether it's useful as a porting lab for Open Source applications and for IBM to learn about hosting huge numbers (tens of thousands) of simultaneous Linux instances. They have kernel gurus working on performance issues and are contributing what they learn back to the kernel team.

Incidentally, for those who have the IBM == big_company == bad_motives mentality, you might be surprised to learn just how many internal hoops had to be jumped to make this happen. Those hoops were jumped by a team of mainframe geeks who think Linux is way cool. Companies are made of real people, and they aren't all selfish jackasses just because they work for a big company. Does IBM hope to sell iron? You bet. Just like any other business. And while they're doing it in this particular way, they are causing some enormous customers to quit ignoring Linux and take us all seriously. How is that a bad thing?

Note: This post is my personal opinion, and I don't speak for IBM or for my current employer.

So why wasn't this interesting when Scott Courtney wrote about it at LinuxPlanet two weeks ago? Suddenly a press release comes out and it's interesting? Hey folks, go over and read Scott's article - it hasn't been sanitized by Corporate Communications types, and it's still positive!

2001-05-09 03:21:40 IBM Provides Open-Access Linux/390 Playground (articles,news) (rejected)

IBM is in the midst of a major Linux push this year, with CEO Lou Gerstner pledging to spend $1 billion on the operating system in 2001.

Brian Proffit responded in his own Linuxplanet column that just targeting what works for some other system is selling Linux short. Rather than trying to recreate what's working on Windows, the really exiting developments occur when someone decides to make an app that lets people do something totally new.

And I personally believe that the distribution houses could benefit a lot more from pumping developers into nutty cutting-edge projects than into StarOffice or anything that has a "K" tacked uncerimoniously onto the front of its name.

Not that I have some brilliant idea in mind, of course, but in addition to the dozens of productivity-oriented app projects that are out to mimick what everyone in the Windows world already has on their computers, there are forward-looking projects like video editing (ie, Broadcast2000) that are aiming for markets that haven't been commoditized already.

I think Apple has already thought about this. That's why they're focusing on "tomorrow's" killer apps, in media, rather than today's, in documents. So it's not "you should get a Mac; they can do everything a PC can do... but they're not a PC", instead it's "you should get a Mac, they can do all sorts of neat stuff a PC can't do." That wouldn't be a bad thing for people to say about Linux, would it?

Nate

Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie

Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?

Our crack interviewing team cornerned Parns in his home, where he was conspicuously not combing through the text of Mundie's remarks, just as he had not been in attendance at NYU's Stern School of Business on May 3 to hear Mundie speak. What justified this weird behavior?

"I really think there are enough rebuttals already, " said Parns. "I mean, have you even read all those things? "

Eric S. Raymond, whose two preemptive rebuttals sparked the craze, was pessimistic about the chances for a Parns rebuttal in the future. "Obviously, we can't force him to write a rebuttal to Mundie's wrong-headed remarks about open source," said Raymond. "However, it's possible that my new paper, 'How I Rebutted Craig Mundie's Wrong-Headed Remarks About Open Source In Copious Detail--And How You Can Too' will give him some ideas. In fact, there's sort of a little form rebuttal in Appendix C which he can sign his name to and get it linked from Linux Today."

"As a full-time programmer, my day is pretty busy," said Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Software Foundation, whose anti-Mundie remarks were picked up by Infoworld. "Yet even I managed to stop by Mundie's speech and make a few remarks to the press. I don't think this Parns is even trying. I mean, even Steve Ballmer published a 3000-word Mundie rebuttal. Sic transit gloria Mundie, I guess."

Even Parns' neighbors have begun to notice this gap in the open source ranks. "The way he helped me with my Red Hat install, I was sure he was some sort of hot-shot free software advocate," said Millie Leman, a local dominatrix and mother of two. "But I haven't heard one word from him about this Mundie thing. It makes a person wonder."

"Look, it's spring, my son's about to graduate from junior high, I'm trying to get KCron to 1.0," said Parns, shooing this reporter out his front door. "Just leave me alone."

Will Parns rebut? Already, rebuttals with his name on them have begun showing up, though he denies authorship. Watch for the rebuttal signed with Parns' Gnu Privacy Guard key, and keep reading Segfault.org for complete coverage of every Mundie rebuttal ever written.

Tomorrow: An in-depth look at the rebuttal that Mark Billings of London saved to ~mark/mundie.txt, but never showed to anybody.

(This 'story' was first shown at Segfault.org here, and was written by Leonard Richardson)

Oh, that's crap. As I understand it, one way to troll is to completely go off the handle without bothering to address the substance of what you're objecting to. From that vantage, I don't see how "This argument is crap and I stopped reading" is any less trollish than unloading on RMS and his penchant for insisting that others follow his semantics. People are allowed to think that RMS's opinions are wrong. They are allowed to say so in very strong (even offensive) terms, and simply doing so doesn't make them trolls.

More to the point, if you'd read the entire article you would have hit some interesting stuff. While a good part of it is tiresome KDE vs. Ximian Gnome partisanship, there's also a perfectly reasonable call for the FSF to release information on their finances.

Point is, just screaming "troll" isn't a good enough argument against Powell's article. It fails to contest, for example, Powell's claim that

it is absolutely undeniable that the FSF has thrown its support behind a desktop controlled by two for-profit companies, one of which has an officer who sits on the FSF's board; the same company has purchased advertising aimed at confounding those who are seeking a desktop that is truly free in every rational sense of the word; and the other company has suggested that users can assist its product in surviving but help it avoid paying its bills by donating to the Free Software Foundation, or else an officer of that company has flung down and danced upon his fiduciary responsibilities by saying, in a communication that is part of his corporate function, that people might want to send money to the FSF instead of the company.

I mean, when you look at it that way, it reeks. If the FSF wants to represent the interest of hackers and geeks in the public sphere, I think it's perfectly reasonable that us hackers and geeks call them when they're out of line (or, as is the case here, when there's enough going on to make them look like they're out of line). Just because they're not the RIAA doesn't mean they're saints. If they're not doing anything wrong, the only thing releasing information would do is completely exhonorate them.

Lastly, let's not forget that they're a Foundation, not an individual. Organizations, whether foundations or corporations, can't (or at least, shouldn't be allowed to) claim the same rights as individuals.

Before you go off on me, here's my line of thinking: if you give an organization the same rights as an individual, the organization will have greater rights in a de facto sense. They have resources (time, money, personnel, etc.) to fight when their rights are infringed that individuals simply don't have. I mean, I don't have a legal team to fight for me when I say something that pisses someone off and they take me to court, but major corporations and organizations do. They, by entension, have more real free speech than I do simply because they can defend what they say and I can't -- this holds true even though we technically have the same rights.

The US Supreme Court made a huge mistake when it decided that corporations have personhood. Extending that outward, I think we have every right to see the finances of a corporation or organization, and every right to want to see them when that organization claims to represent us. It's always a good idea to be a little wary of anyone who claims to speak for anyone else, even if they're the FSF, even if they're right most of the time. Just because everything they did yesterday was good doesn't mean we can assume everything they're doing today is all peaches.

• UNIX - AIX

They pretty much tried to rewrite UNIX from scratch with a bunch of mainframe stuff tacked on. Their intent was to create the best of both worlds (IBM-Mainframe/UNIX). I think that the initial version was more like the worst of both worlds. (I pronounced it "aches").

The more recent idea of running Linux under VM is probably far closer to the ideal. I'd love to get hold of a box where I could play with it.
--

Your ignorance is really showing through. The linux usage on mainframes isn't to maintain or increase uptime. It's to increase productivity.

ok, lets say you're running a 500 node linux hosting service on a mainframe. One of the nodes could crash (linux is less stable than mainframe). If it crashes, your hosting mainframe process quickly restarts the linux node in less than 10 seconds.

ok. lets say you're running a 499 node linux hosting service and you want to add another 4 nodes for a customer running web/database/other services. it would take about 10 seconds to create all 4 nodes. And the bandwidth in between nodes (say database and web) would be on the order of 10GigaBytes per second. Sorry. Your sun server farm just doesn't do this kind of thing

Everything you want to know about linux on mainframe. Its history, its purpose, its future. All from the horses mouth. The originator of linus on s/390.

There's an interesting article on Linux Planet interviewing David Boyes (the man who had 41,400 Linux images running on a single mainframe using System/390.


DILBERT: But what about my poem?

Remember when they used Linux for some of the FX in Titanic? And this article in LinuxPlanet discusses Linux in perspective with the history of computer-assisted special effects in the film industry--an interesting read.

i never could get into one.
i didn t use kde1 because it did crash my pc every session. i had not time to look for what was doing it nor for going into a "kde sucks" thing. so i used gnome a lot. i found it ugly but it worked well. i also used enlightenment alone a lot .
then kde 2. it is just wonderfull. simply wonderfull. there are a few bugs but ,with every compilationfrom cvs , i saw one or another leaving the scene on a daily basis.
their developpment rate is incredible. and they release good stuff!!
mozilla is still better than khtml but too heavy. i fire it only when i know konqueror won t do the stuff.
but i don t find myself going into a "kde rules" frenzy.
and i m sure gnome2 will be great when it s ready.
but there are discussions i lack which should happen here, on slashdot:
-in the kde world, the kompany is doing a great deal of fast and efficient work for the kde project. but at the same time it s releasing closed source programms in order to finance itself. In particular, they plan to release an outlook killer, keeping the server side closed.Also they are really sincere about giving to the community, just finding a way to fund themselves.
-in the gnome world, there seems to be a lot of effort put into tunnelling apps into the user desktop and deals between those entities: eazel, ximian and red hat . a lot of marketing ...which is, as we all know it, the real evil behind m$
the analogy between the difficulties that compagnies related to those projects face stroke me more than the differences .
I m sure such matters should be discussed here more often than , say, lego stories as there are plenty of solutions which could come from here to help all of them.

since no one has mentioned it I thought I'd dig up a few links I remember reading.

• From the PostgreSQL FAQ: "What is the maximum size for a row, table, database?"
• semi-old article on why not to use mySQL
• a comparison of mSQL, mySQL, and PostgeSQL: part 1, part 2, part 3
• and if your lazy: google search for "linux sql database"

From the PostgreSQL FAQ, linked above:

• Maximum size for a database? unlimited (60GB databases exist)
• Maximum size for a table? 16 TB
• Maximum size for a row? unlimited in 7.1 and later
• Maximum size for a field? 1GB in 7.1 and later
• Maximum number of rows in a table? unlimited
• Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column types
• Maximum number of indexes on a table? unlimited

If you couldn't tell I like postgres but as a business you should get what you think is best. From what I've heard Oracle on Solaris is where it's at if you can afford it. (I can't)

Leknor

since no one has mentioned it I thought I'd dig up a few links I remember reading.

• From the PostgreSQL FAQ: "What is the maximum size for a row, table, database?"
• semi-old article on why not to use mySQL
• a comparison of mSQL, mySQL, and PostgeSQL: part 1, part 2, part 3
• and if your lazy: google search for "linux sql database"

From the PostgreSQL FAQ, linked above:

• Maximum size for a database? unlimited (60GB databases exist)
• Maximum size for a table? 16 TB
• Maximum size for a row? unlimited in 7.1 and later
• Maximum size for a field? 1GB in 7.1 and later
• Maximum number of rows in a table? unlimited
• Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column types
• Maximum number of indexes on a table? unlimited

If you couldn't tell I like postgres but as a business you should get what you think is best. From what I've heard Oracle on Solaris is where it's at if you can afford it. (I can't)

Leknor

since no one has mentioned it I thought I'd dig up a few links I remember reading.

• From the PostgreSQL FAQ: "What is the maximum size for a row, table, database?"
• semi-old article on why not to use mySQL
• a comparison of mSQL, mySQL, and PostgeSQL: part 1, part 2, part 3
• and if your lazy: google search for "linux sql database"

From the PostgreSQL FAQ, linked above:

• Maximum size for a database? unlimited (60GB databases exist)
• Maximum size for a table? 16 TB
• Maximum size for a row? unlimited in 7.1 and later
• Maximum size for a field? 1GB in 7.1 and later
• Maximum number of rows in a table? unlimited
• Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column types
• Maximum number of indexes on a table? unlimited

If you couldn't tell I like postgres but as a business you should get what you think is best. From what I've heard Oracle on Solaris is where it's at if you can afford it. (I can't)

Leknor

I agree with your comments and I, also, am not sure this is a bad thing, but take your first paragraph and apply it to the company we all love to hate ;) I think the biggest problem here is that Windows is *so* widespread, when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen. When the latest NT Server bugs hit...

Yes. One of the reasons for the success of ILOVEYOU was that so many people were running the same software-- it's simpler to attack a uniform population than a heterogenous one. So also with bugs in BIND.

Perhaps the solution is not to have any One True Name Server. Maybe we need an effort to build a competitor to BIND using completely separate sources?

M

I have been using Slackware since 1995. I have worked through 4 iterations of the product(3.0, 3.1, 4.0, and 7.0). In the meantime, I have installed Red Hat 4.0, 5.0, 6.2 and SuSE 6.1.

Of these distributions, I had the fewest installation problems with Slackware. My Slackware boxes are easy to configure. Unlike Red Hat, Slackware is a more conservative distribution that releases about every 6 months. The result is that "the latest and greatest" beta code is released in the /contrib area rather than just added to the main distribution. The Slackware guys keep out unproven, unreliable versions of software until the bugs are worked out. This is their philosophy - Check out Slackware.com for details.

In my experience in using Slackware and the other distributions, Slackware has far fewer updates (or 'errata' as RHAT likes to call them) than other distributions.

No I don't have actual "number of bugs per distribution" to support my hypothesis. What I do have is 6 years of Linux experience and the failures of trying to install and configure Red Hat and SuSE. In fact, of the other distributions I have installed over the years only Red Hat 6.2 went off without a hitch.

Finally, many newbies think that Slackware is easy to install. For example, read Andrew Chen's review of Slackware 7:

"Of the several Linux distributions I've tried, I feel that Slackware Linux 7 has presented me with one of the cleanest, most usable desktops, very suitable for anyone from a Linux professional to the casual desktop user switching from Windows."

This is why I prefer Slackware. Later.

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."

The BBC have been using KDE + Netscape for when they demo webpages on TV for sometime now, I've seen it used on Tomorrows World quite a bit. Linux is used around the corperation quite a lot apparently.

Miguel,
Evan's article was flamebait, and didn't include all the facts available at the time. However, you really aren't the best person to speak about GNOME's relationship to AbiWord, given your statements about Abi in this LinuxPlanet article:
http://www.linuxplanet.c om/ linuxplanet/opinions/2310/1/
where you say
<quote>AbiWord, yeah. It's fairly larval.</quote>
Needless to say, this sort of thing, combined with the statements coming out of Sun at the time, didn't inspire confidence in us AbiWord developers that we were even on your radar screen (despite being on your web page).
Sam TH

As we all know, Red Hat ties the name of one version to the next. Fitting "Guinness" is a little difficult.

Linux Planet had an article in which they claimed the version after "Pinstripe" would be called "Winston".

At first, I had difficulty finding a tie-together between "Pinstripe" and "Guinness", but with "Winston" as an in-between, we have the Winston Fabrics which has a pinstripe product, and Winston's Restaurant in Colorado which serves Guinness, or Winston Agaba, who is a brand manager for Guinness, or Winston Churchill and Alec Guinness were both knighted.

Upon further examination, however, I discovered there is a red ale called "SKA Pinstripe", which seems to be a much cleaner tie-together with Guinness.

I'm still wondering about that "Winston" that Linux Planet mentioned.

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The home page for Eazel here.
...and their latest screenshots are here...

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The home page for Eazel here.
...and their latest screenshots are here...