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I haven't recompiled the kernel, and I have also found that configuring Linux is easier than configuring Windows. I also checked the cygwin home page, and it does not list TeX or emacs as components. Nor python, perl, php, apache, . . More choices of what? Proprietary software? cygwin

You missed saying that FC4 will upgrade you from previous versions of Red Hat (from 7.x, 8.0, 9 and FC1, FC2 & FC3), but only hinted at in the release notes. I think that this, retaining your $home directory and other preferences is easier than a total reinstall.

I suspect that Disk Druid isn't a stand-alone application because of the dangers of allowing people to alter the partitions of disks in use. The source is in the srpms (here, particularly anaconda-10.2.1.5-2.src.rpm ), and it shouldn't be too hard to hack it out of there and disallow access to either drives mounted or disallow access to the drives supplying important mount-points -- Fedora uses LVM2, so any drive can be mapped into /.

You missed saying that FC4 will upgrade you from previous versions of Red Hat (from 7.x, 8.0, 9 and FC1, FC2 & FC3), but only hinted at in the release notes. I think that this, retaining your $home directory and other preferences is easier than a total reinstall.

I suspect that Disk Druid isn't a stand-alone application because of the dangers of allowing people to alter the partitions of disks in use. The source is in the srpms (here, particularly anaconda-10.2.1.5-2.src.rpm ), and it shouldn't be too hard to hack it out of there and disallow access to either drives mounted or disallow access to the drives supplying important mount-points -- Fedora uses LVM2, so any drive can be mapped into /.

You missed saying that FC4 will upgrade you from previous versions of Red Hat (from 7.x, 8.0, 9 and FC1, FC2 & FC3), but only hinted at in the release notes. I think that this, retaining your $home directory and other preferences is easier than a total reinstall.

I suspect that Disk Druid isn't a stand-alone application because of the dangers of allowing people to alter the partitions of disks in use. The source is in the srpms (here, particularly anaconda-10.2.1.5-2.src.rpm ), and it shouldn't be too hard to hack it out of there and disallow access to either drives mounted or disallow access to the drives supplying important mount-points -- Fedora uses LVM2, so any drive can be mapped into /.

(redundant, but concise)

Most of your out of the box solutions will do well for you. If you're under budget constraints, or just want the reliability of an "appliance" (after it's all configured and running) any of the downloadable *nixes will do you well. Debian (my pref), Fedora, or *BSD, for example, include postfix for the SMTP portion, a selection of IMAP and POP3 services to choose from, various web-mail interfaces, etc... right out of the box (or I guess ISO).

If it were me (and it has been), I'd go with Debian/postfix/courierIMAP, then once running, add things such as Webmin for easy browser-based management. Then add something like squirell mail to get the oohs and ahs from the users. From here, you can choose from a multiple of providers for an e-mail "Store-n-forward" service to get and hold your mail if you have an outage. If ~they~ have an outage, you're the primary MX so you won't notice. If you're both out... well, that's a bigger problem.

The safety net here is that if your storage provider of choice decided that they don't want to be a company anymore, you change providers, the users are not involved. If you have catastrophic failure, your mail is being held (and may be accessible) until you put "something" online to start your service again. You will also be able to setup and run your local e-mail, then shop for the outside provider.

Here's a few you might have heard of:

1. Mac OS X (duh)
2. FreeBSD
3. NetBSD
4. OpenBSD
5. Yellow Dog
6. Fedora (RHL)
7. Debian
8. Gentoo

9. MS Windows

Sure, because code taken straight out of linux and dumped into win32 land works just peachy. (Once you spend thousands of hours hacking away at it.)

Maybe the developers grandparent mentions were uninformed about what Linux is, remember most people think that Red Hat is Linux. I do not believe I am reaching here, but perhaps the Microsoft developers he was referring to meant open source code, not Linux.

Microsoft uses open source packages commonly found on Linux distributions. For example zlib is one, when a zlib vulnerability is discovered you will always find Microsoft's name as one of the vendors contacted.

http://ecoustics-cnet.com.com/Microsofts+borrowed+ code+may+pose+risk/2100-1001_3-860328.html

The zlib is licensed in a BSD-esque license. It's fine for Microsoft to use it legally. My question was strictly with regards to the GPL licensed software.

Microsoft using open source is not an isolated incident as shown below with a quick Google.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html
Internet Explorer [Microsoft] (Mac PPC, Mac OS X) - version 5.0 and later; read-only; full alpha support (screenshots), though broken for tiled page- and table-background images smaller than 64x64 (switches to binary transparency for performance reasons [should be fixed in one of next two versions]; can work around bug by manually tiling image to be larger than 64 pixels in at least one dimension); full gamma support; full sRGB and ICC profile support; progressive display of interlaced images (replicating method); broken default handling on OS X for standalone PNGs (versions 5.1 and 5.2 save to disk rather than view due to QuickTime bogosity; see Matthew Rothenberg's Mac OS X Hint for simple fix); uses libpng and zlib; freeware. (Note that AOL 5.0 is apparently built on MSIE 4.5 or earlier, so it has no PNG support at all. No word on later versions.)

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119666,0 0.asp
Microsoft also criticized Core Security Technologies of Boston for publishing a proof of concept for a hole in an MSN Messenger component called "libpng," which is used to display PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=159304
iDEFENSE has confirmed the existance of the vulnerability in version 5.1.2600.2180 of the Microsoft Telnet Client, the telnet client included in the Kerberos V5 Release 1.3.6 package and the client included in the SUNWtnetc package of Solaris 5.9.

... but in case someone is confused by your post:

If you want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in one of three flavours ) then you'll get full support and a long, steady release cycle.

If you want a completely no-cost OS then you can use Red Hat Fedora. It has a quick release cycle, lots of exciting add on packages maintained by the community in the Extras repositories and a very aggressive incorporation of new features.

Don't go confusing RHEL and RH Fedora.

Unlike SuSE, Red Hat has always been scrupulous about releasing under the GPL all their code for the distro (with the exception of the build-system). They've never had proprietary tools like YaST. I'm glad to see that SuSE is now fuly embracing the path of openness. Hopefully it will mean that there'll be real competition between two fully Free distros with nothing distinguishing them except technical merit.

... but in case someone is confused by your post:

If you want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in one of three flavours ) then you'll get full support and a long, steady release cycle.

If you want a completely no-cost OS then you can use Red Hat Fedora. It has a quick release cycle, lots of exciting add on packages maintained by the community in the Extras repositories and a very aggressive incorporation of new features.

Don't go confusing RHEL and RH Fedora.

Unlike SuSE, Red Hat has always been scrupulous about releasing under the GPL all their code for the distro (with the exception of the build-system). They've never had proprietary tools like YaST. I'm glad to see that SuSE is now fuly embracing the path of openness. Hopefully it will mean that there'll be real competition between two fully Free distros with nothing distinguishing them except technical merit.

This link will show you how to start a shell under the SYSTEM account.

I wrote about this earlier today on bitsofnews.com. I'll save you the click and paste my thoughts here.

I am not sure how MS expects to keep pushing this down people's throats.
Most people don't want to be treated as thieves, and I can see some general backlash coming to MS from this.

I really don't see how this will, in the long run, benefit MS. Most people in the 1st world buy a computer from a major distributer, and use the (usually) legit copy of Windows from that. I'm guessing that that one-third number includes nations like India and China, where people can't afford the 1st world pricing scheme of Windows.

Oh, wait, silly me, why don't these poor people just use XP Starter Edition? Right. That's the ticket.

Do they seriously think this will decrease piracy in the 3rd world? All they've really done is cripple their product. They now have several issues to deal with.

This "Genuine Advantage" program is tantamount to legitimizing "pirated" XP. To many, I suspect it sends the message: "Ok, use pirated XP if you want, we'll just give special benefits to those who pay us." It's almost like a "shareware" model of distribution. Seeing how they are trying to push "XP Starter Edition", I seriously doubt this is their intent -- but it looks like they've emasculated that product entirely.

Simply, Pirated XP Home/Pro is still less crippled than XP SE. So for the 3rd world market, it's a choice between paying for a highly crippled OS, or getting a slightly crippled OS for free. I don't see many people paying for the privilege of less features.

This is also a potential gold mine for alternative OS's, such as the newer GNU/Linux systems pushing ease-of-install; Ubuntu, Mepis, Mandravia, Fedora spring to mind immediately, and there are many others.

Given the choice of a super-crippled SE, a somewhat-crippled XP Home/Pro, or a fully-functional GNU/Linux, GNU/Linux becomes an increasingly "no-brainer" solution.

If you don't mind forking to run external tools, instead of running in the same VM, you could use the native build of ant using gcj as sponsored by Red Hat.

I'll say it again. Fedora will always be buggy, unstable and untested. That is what it was designed to do, serve as a community testing ground for products and services that may or may not make it into the commercially supported enterprise editions.

Redhat themselves are very clear about this on the Fedora project page

Stop complaining about Fedora and get a tested, 'stable', desktop focussed distribution. Most importantly, stop encouraging those new to Linux to try it.

Cygwin is not free. From http://cygwin.com/faq.html

The company, whom I work for, develops and sells closed source software. I contacted redhat for the details. The "buy out" license is prohibitively expensive. We ended up using a proprietary package because it was cheaper.

I use a lot of open source at work. cygwin, inkscape, Gantt Project, umlet, and dia to name just a few. But I use open source at work only as a consumer. I do not package any of the code in the company's products. At work, I use open source as a user, not a developer. Home is a different story. I code to plenty of open source there. None of that goes into work, however.

Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 powers spreadfirefox.com:
Response Headers - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:01:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Red Hat doesn't make an advanced server, redhat makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, ES & AS.

Also RHEL 3 ships with Apache 2.0.46, RHEL 4 ships with 2.0.52.

According to Red Hat's site, the vulnerability for php has been patched as of July 7, 2005. My guess, lazy admin.

RHEL3:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

RHEL4:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 powers spreadfirefox.com:
Response Headers - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:01:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Red Hat doesn't make an advanced server, redhat makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, ES & AS.

Also RHEL 3 ships with Apache 2.0.46, RHEL 4 ships with 2.0.52.

According to Red Hat's site, the vulnerability for php has been patched as of July 7, 2005. My guess, lazy admin.

RHEL3:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

RHEL4:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

http://www.redhat.com/

It is clear you haven't used Linux in years. why on earth you are compiling applications I don't know.

My sister, someone who hates computers, hated Windows, and simply hates Linux less, types the keyword of the kind of package she wishes to install in 'kpackage' and then hits the elusively titled 'Install' button to.. you guessed it.

Recently, after 2 years of Linux use she asked "what is the command line?", having heard about it from a friend. When asked how she's going with Linux she replied "i like the way i don't have to go to websites to install programs." That's her experience of Linux, in it's would be blazing, crippled complexity.

Secondly, why are you doing using redhat's experimental, sandbox OS, one even they admit is purely there as a public laboratory for testing developments that may or may not make it into their stable, supported, enterprise software.

Interesting this was also the case for the vacuous author of the original article.

Frankly I couldn't care either way, Linux is fun, free, powerful and flexible. Since when have computers not been about learning something.

Is that open source?

Yes

The page makes it look like it isn't.

You're correct, RH's page is pretty misleading (maybe because they want you to buy a support contract from them?) - I had to hunt around for quite awhile before I found the source.

Is this the reincarnation of Netscape Directory Server?

Yes, although it's now known as "Fedora Directory Server"

They have a wiki for the project here

Is that open source?

Yes

The page makes it look like it isn't.

You're correct, RH's page is pretty misleading (maybe because they want you to buy a support contract from them?) - I had to hunt around for quite awhile before I found the source.

Is this the reincarnation of Netscape Directory Server?

Yes, although it's now known as "Fedora Directory Server"

They have a wiki for the project here

Swoosh.

Since it isn't possible for one article to explain how to configure identification, authentication, and authorization for all systems, the article contained links to more information.

That's because you often have to learn about things in order to do them. With flexibility comes a price, and that price is work. Luckily, they pay you for that, if you do it well enough.

Or maybe he should have published a GUI along with the article? Sorry for being flippant, but I think you're expecting too much hand-holding.

Fed up with Windows systems management? A Linux conversion may be your ticket away from the daily hassles...

Flame me for this, but Windows is a hell of a lot easier to learn and manipulate for the regular Joe users. In windows, if you want to change settings, you hit Start, Settings, Control Panel and you just select what you want to play with. In Linux, you actually have to know (very well) what you're doing and how to do it. Now compare this. What will common users choose? Ease of use and user-friendliness, or painful, long and extensive research (read: understanding how it works first, then understanding the 3rd party softwares to administrate it, then learning how that one works, then learning the command syntax) before typing shit out in a console?

Pretty thin article- if you were expecting a detailed argument for why OpenLDAP is better/easier to manage than ActiveDirectory, you'll have to look somewhere else.

He basically just summarized the history of NIS and OpenLDAP, then gave us a link to some documentation for setting up OpenLDAP. Have fun editing slapd.conf, kids!

I was expecting that he'd at least mention Redhat Directory Server, which is the most interesting recent development as far as easy-to-manage Linux identity servers go.

For a system like this, I'd use a parallel filesystem. If on a budget, I'd go with GFS.

Just when exactly did you check this? Because if you check Red Hat's System Configuration Limits it clearly shows that any release older than version 4 supports 1 TB file sizes whereas version 4 lets you have 8 TB files. I don't understand why people just don't fact check when making claims rather than hide behind the "last time I checked" line.

Download the latest versions of RHEL here and try them for yourself. They are pre-build inside a VMware WS5 environemtn. This allows you to try both at no charge. It does time out after 90days though.
https://www.redhat.com/solutions/partners/rhrp/vmw are/

You mean that WS used to stand for workstation. In fact, they changed it from "workstation" to WS because they wanted the product to be for more things than just workstations. For example, cluster nodes.

Regardless, SLES (despite the name) is Novell's enterprise code base and goes beyond servers. In fact, Novell Linux Desktop is based on SLES.

According to this article, OpenBSD 2.6 has been released, despite still being dead. Linus Torvalds has publicly accused Microsoft of resorting to bully tactics, but Richard Stallman has built a beowulf cluster of supercomputers in Soviet Russia, which promises to defend all our base.

Crosses fingers and eagerly waits for "story accepted" confirmation...

An foreign gaming site won't help him with his spyware problems. Try http://fedora.redhat.com/ for the real deal.

We all know that means Red Hat 8.0+. Quit complaining, not everyone knows that much about linux.

Well, crap! I guess we have a long wait then, since the current version of Red Hat's operating system ... you know, "The corporate Linux standard" ... is only version 4.

I did an upgrade. I should have looked in the logs, but was really frustraed and just upgraded this weekend. After looking in the logs I googled that message and found it is a bug, but their is a work around.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-J une/msg03525.html

not really but if you hit http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html you can download yourself a free set

No need. You can package up all the shared library files you need, and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your launch script so that they are used at runtime.

You can even statically link to everything except glibc, if you are careful about it.

There you have it, a one-size-fits-all, generic package for any Linux system.

.. it's Redhat's little experiment to see if the community can sustain development of a distribution whose parts or whose sum may become useful in their enterprise editions later. it has no primary project of maintaining an easy to use desktop platform. their own site makes this quite clear.

and so i wasn't suprised that all my encounters with Fedora prove it's far more suited to very interested enthusiasts than new users. this seems due to the Redhat association; as though being tagged with such a name brand it has proven itself to be ready for widest distribution.

Fedora needs alot of work to be a sensible productivity platform for Jane Sixpack. Ubuntu or Mepis are far more suitable for new users, out-of-the-box. given the choice of all three, nearly all of my students dropped Fedora for the Debian-based Mepis and Ubuntu distributions.

administrators shouldn't be so easily swayed either. Fedora is difficult to maintain and install compared to that of Mepis or Ubuntu. it took 2 of us 4.5 hours to install Mepis on 30 dell workstations, all just worked with absolutely *no* after-the-fact configuration. Fedora Core 4 took 3 people 2 full days to get to that state on the same number of machines.

Fedora, as a would-be flagship of Desktop Linux for so many, gives a bad first impression. Fedora users promoting the project should read the distribution home page before reccommending it to uncle Keith.

then again, it seems uncle Keith has already decided.

Apple is not the first one to use flash memory, and of course there are already filesystems that use wearleveling, JFFS2 for instance,

Any advice? Solutions?

• JDS
• Sunray
• RHEL
• ClamAV and ClamWin
• Fedora
• Debian
• etc.. etc.. lots of other virus-free OSS solutions out there.

Pick one or more of the above natural remedies for your MS related affliction...

Any advice? Solutions?

• JDS
• Sunray
• RHEL
• ClamAV and ClamWin
• Fedora
• Debian
• etc.. etc.. lots of other virus-free OSS solutions out there.

Pick one or more of the above natural remedies for your MS related affliction...

Go look up the defn of grandstanding, you stupid moron.

You do realize that the compiler and OS are not "variables", they should be made to have as little influence as possible, the system architecture is highly CPU dependent, and spec removes the effects of the time and expertise of the tester by allowing as many tests for say, an Opteron, as anyone cares to submit.

>QED less well than intels compiler in the previous sentence
Are you really that stupid? If "Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86." was refering to Intel's compiler, why do they use x86?

So now you're trying to use spec to show the G5 isn't crap, yet you seem to have missed the freakin disclaimer

Standardizing of compilers would be a scientific method IF the goal was to test the performance of a machine running GCC code, instead of the maximum performance possible. Firstly, Linpack is one type of test compared to spec's 26, and secondly, it's a test of SUPERCOMPUTERS, not CPUs - get that through your thick skull.

And now with Altivec is a "more capable vector unit" delusions. If it was superior, why isn't the G5 faster? Oh yes, because no compiler auto-vectorizes. That would seem to have been a crappy design choice, thereby making it less capable, in effect, crippling itself.

Hand coding - let's see, one example from over 4 years ago, one quote that ignores "Modern compilers (particularly those designed for large supercomputing machines) will automatically identify parallelizable blocks and run them independently.", a suggestion that it may be better to hand code, and some more evidence of the G5's crappy design. I didn't realize that the defn of frequently changed to include suggestions of something happening, and one case in the past 5 years.

And now, for the 4th time, I'm still waiting for evidence of "SPEC is subject to all kinds of problems.", why Apple doesn't use your "benchmark" to advertise their products, these supposed Intel optimizations (in stock GCC mind you), evidence of why spec isn't accountable, why I am "blinded by marketing", why I "have no idea how compilers, CPU architectures, system architectures are designed", and "people are still smarter than compilers (the fact that compilers miss some things doesn't count)".

"SPEC is subject to all kinds of problems."

All benchmarks are subject to problems. If you are testing for the CPU, somehow you must control for variables of compiler, OS, system architecture, and the amount of time and expertise of the tester.

Uh, how exactly do you get "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised than Intel's" from "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86"?

Sigh. read: "Dell's own figures were calculated using different compilers and host operating system: Windows XP Pro, Intel's own C++ and Fortran compilers, and the MicroQuill SmartHeap Library 6.01. Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86." QED less well than intels compiler in the previous sentence

GCC for PowerPC is not as mature: "The gcc scheduler is not really designed ideally for a processor like the 970 and the Power4...that was one of the things that we're continuing to work on to try to get the best performance out of the processor."

GCC on intel is far more mature with a long history, read a little of the history: "...When Intel released the Pentium some of their team produced a version of gcc with enhancements which gave 30% speed improvements on some benchmarks..."

Look at these redhat GCC 3.3/4.0 benchmarks. Notice how the 2-way PPC970 is twice as fast as the 4-way P4 on many tests and at close to par on the others. Now this is not the end all, am I'm sure you could come up with a different test that shows the P4 beating the G5, but certianly the G5 is not a "peice of crap".

You arguement about standardizing compilers is equivalent...

Standardizing of compilers is scientific method. Ideally you'd do a bank of tests, and unroll the variables: Standard compilers, standard OS, standard CPUs. Or you could tune each system to the max and then compare, that was LinPack and you didn't like that one either.

Hmm, does this appear to be vector processing done by a compiler?

Exactly my point! Intels compiler does auto-vectorization. GCC doesn't. If you test C code, P4+intel against GCC+G5, you are crippling the G5 by leaving out the altivec unit, which is a more capacble vector unit than SSE2

"hand coding...becomes completely out of reach for humans"

Hand coding is still done frequently on high performance algorithms:

• "I've also recently started hand coding the low level math kernels... P4, this gives a ~30% boost to performance on this particular MILC code."
• "However, once that level of optimization becomes necessary it's generally just easiest to hand-code the instructions, rather than jumping through a bunch of hoops to try to trick the compiler into doing what you want."
• "In some cases, complete vectorization is not possible and you may want to include hand coded SIMD instructions for the best possible performance"
• "Altivec requires hand-coding to exploit"

"SPEC is subject to all kinds of problems."

All benchmarks are subject to problems. If you are testing for the CPU, somehow you must control for variables of compiler, OS, system architecture, and the amount of time and expertise of the tester.

Uh, how exactly do you get "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised than Intel's" from "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86"?

Sigh. read: "Dell's own figures were calculated using different compilers and host operating system: Windows XP Pro, Intel's own C++ and Fortran compilers, and the MicroQuill SmartHeap Library 6.01. Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86." QED less well than intels compiler in the previous sentence

GCC for PowerPC is not as mature: "The gcc scheduler is not really designed ideally for a processor like the 970 and the Power4...that was one of the things that we're continuing to work on to try to get the best performance out of the processor."

GCC on intel is far more mature with a long history, read a little of the history: "...When Intel released the Pentium some of their team produced a version of gcc with enhancements which gave 30% speed improvements on some benchmarks..."

Look at these redhat GCC 3.3/4.0 benchmarks. Notice how the 2-way PPC970 is twice as fast as the 4-way P4 on many tests and at close to par on the others. Now this is not the end all, am I'm sure you could come up with a different test that shows the P4 beating the G5, but certianly the G5 is not a "peice of crap".

You arguement about standardizing compilers is equivalent...

Standardizing of compilers is scientific method. Ideally you'd do a bank of tests, and unroll the variables: Standard compilers, standard OS, standard CPUs. Or you could tune each system to the max and then compare, that was LinPack and you didn't like that one either.

Hmm, does this appear to be vector processing done by a compiler?

Exactly my point! Intels compiler does auto-vectorization. GCC doesn't. If you test C code, P4+intel against GCC+G5, you are crippling the G5 by leaving out the altivec unit, which is a more capacble vector unit than SSE2

"hand coding...becomes completely out of reach for humans"

Hand coding is still done frequently on high performance algorithms:

• "I've also recently started hand coding the low level math kernels... P4, this gives a ~30% boost to performance on this particular MILC code."
• "However, once that level of optimization becomes necessary it's generally just easiest to hand-code the instructions, rather than jumping through a bunch of hoops to try to trick the compiler into doing what you want."
• "In some cases, complete vectorization is not possible and you may want to include hand coded SIMD instructions for the best possible performance"
• "Altivec requires hand-coding to exploit"

As far as DTrace goes, linux has SystemTap. Linux scales large and has SELinux as well as quite a choice of other kernel patches or security options. Linux is arguably stable and has a very widely used license. Certain distros like Fedora and Suse come with nice (gui) management tools, and every distro comes with good cli tools. Linux is built with a server mindset. (For a little blurb on SystemTap and some other things Red Hat helps out with, read this from this month's Red Hat magazine.).

Okay so I'm not trying to start a war here, I'm just really looking for a reason to download Solaris, any other reasons? Does it have an improved package management system like yum or apt (does it have one at all)? Does it have binary compatibility with linux like my freebsd server does? Hardware support? I'm genuinely curious, I like trying new distros and unixes to see whats new out there, I keep settling back on linux (specifically fedora) for quite a few reasons (while still running one freebsd box for a very very specific reason). So can anyone else offer any reasons to use Solaris?
Regards,
Steve

• it sais MS on the press release
• they could have bought it but instead they're building it
• a port of a similar linux app. already exists for win32
• "It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver" ... ie. get out of beta

Fedora never has any updates or patches. Nope. Never Only Windows has patches.

Even Mac OS X doesn't have security updates.

From http://www.redhat.com/software/subscriptions.html ...

"Access support you can trust - Deploy confidently with the backing of Red Hat experts. Each release is supported for seven years."

I assume you are referring to this?

Fedora Core 4 is 100% unconditionally free. Free of restrictions.And, oh, yes, free of cost.

In a sense, you are correct. Public domain would be completely unrestricted. FC4 is still covered by copyright.

Browsing of Windows shares fails on Fedora Core 4 systems that have the standard firewall configured. This is most easily noticed in the failure of the desktop to display shares. The firewall disrupts the broadcast mode of SMB browsing, which is the default.

So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable! This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.

The bugzilla report makes it even clearer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=133478

Browsing of Windows shares fails on Fedora Core 4 systems that have the standard firewall configured. This is most easily noticed in the failure of the desktop to display shares. The firewall disrupts the broadcast mode of SMB browsing, which is the default.

So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable! This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.

The bugzilla report makes it even clearer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=133478

Looking over the release overview it looks like the only real interesting thing is that they now support the ppc platform, which is always nice for us i/power bookers out there but everything else seems a bit lack luster. Here are the new features straight from the website. # Support for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture. # GCC 4.0 # GNOME 2.10 # KDE 3.4 â" includes new accessibility features. You can manage these new features in KDS Control CenterRegional & AccessibilityAccessibility. # Native Eclipse 3.1M6 (part of a free Java stack) # MySQL 4.1 # PHP 5.0 # Xen 2 (virtualization to run multiple versions of an OS) # GFS 6.1-0.pre22 (cluster file system) # Evince 0.2.1 (universal document viewer) # GDM 2.6 - Includes early login capability # SELinux â" This release includes coverage for 80 new daemons by the targeted policy. There are changes to the handling of Booleans. The targeted policy is enabled by default. For more information, refer to: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq/ For This is the complete list of daemons covered by the targeted policy: This is all good and nice but mostly it's just new versions of apps that are comming bundled with it. Perhaps it's just me but I don't see what all the excitment is about. Enlighten me.

Standard Edition costs $299 for the version that you're quoting comprehensive support for. And that's the workstation version, not the server version. Also, that's $299 per year. With the $180/year version, you only get 30 days installation support. Compare to Windows XP Pro, which costs $180 Retail, one time charge.

For $350 (per year), you get RHEL "Basic Server", which comes with only 30 days of installation support. If you want to jump up to one with better support, it's $800 per year, and if you want 1 hour response, it's $2400 per year.

I'm not making this up, seriously.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/server /
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/client /

Standard Edition costs $299 for the version that you're quoting comprehensive support for. And that's the workstation version, not the server version. Also, that's $299 per year. With the $180/year version, you only get 30 days installation support. Compare to Windows XP Pro, which costs $180 Retail, one time charge.

For $350 (per year), you get RHEL "Basic Server", which comes with only 30 days of installation support. If you want to jump up to one with better support, it's $800 per year, and if you want 1 hour response, it's $2400 per year.

I'm not making this up, seriously.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/server /
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/client /