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Release NOTES

Presuming you're not trolling...

But we will be hosting lots of servers for our customers with some RHEL4-based distro.

I want to make sure that when an update comes out from the source, that I am not wholly dependant on a middle man that not be able to or capable of a prompt update release.

I'm still testing our recompile version. If it works out, then great. Otherwise, I'm confident now that even running a non-North American Enterprise Linux Vendor version of RHEL4 I can always compile and distribute the errata udpates I need. (Well maybe except for a few kde packages, dbus and iproute which are spitting out heinous c++ errors at the mo).

Just been poring over the new RPM versions...

I see FC4 includes MySQL 4.1.10 a nice wee jump up from 3.23. Apparently RedHat are now happy with the MySQL licensing terms.

It has Eclipse 3.1, dovecot, bash 3 (with debugger), Tomcat 5 (but only 5.0, not the declared stable 5.5.7), Xen 2. And that is about all that caught my eye.

Having just been recompiling the RHEL4 sources I'm struck by how similar the versions all are. I'm presuming that rhel4 split off fc4 or vice versa a month or two back. I'd be curious how/if they co-ordinate all the patches and source code between the two different brands.

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FC3 (now!) and RHEL4-based (soon!) VPSs

Just been poring over the new RPM versions...

I see FC4 includes MySQL 4.1.10 a nice wee jump up from 3.23. Apparently RedHat are now happy with the MySQL licensing terms.

It has Eclipse 3.1, dovecot, bash 3 (with debugger), Tomcat 5 (but only 5.0, not the declared stable 5.5.7), Xen 2. And that is about all that caught my eye.

Having just been recompiling the RHEL4 sources I'm struck by how similar the versions all are. I'm presuming that rhel4 split off fc4 or vice versa a month or two back. I'd be curious how/if they co-ordinate all the patches and source code between the two different brands.

--
FC3 (now!) and RHEL4-based (soon!) VPSs

Just been poring over the new RPM versions...

I see FC4 includes MySQL 4.1.10 a nice wee jump up from 3.23. Apparently RedHat are now happy with the MySQL licensing terms.

It has Eclipse 3.1, dovecot, bash 3 (with debugger), Tomcat 5 (but only 5.0, not the declared stable 5.5.7), Xen 2. And that is about all that caught my eye.

Having just been recompiling the RHEL4 sources I'm struck by how similar the versions all are. I'm presuming that rhel4 split off fc4 or vice versa a month or two back. I'd be curious how/if they co-ordinate all the patches and source code between the two different brands.

--
FC3 (now!) and RHEL4-based (soon!) VPSs

Yes, well let's see: there's Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse... who else? I can see how difficult it is for *all these people* to contact me - man, how could I ever manage the time to talk to them all?

You have it the wrong way around. If those distributors had to contact every single person who had contributed graphics/sound/documentation/code, they'd spend the next ten years making phone calls.

The open-source community thrives on free redistribution without having to grant permission on a case-by-case basis. A lot of the money Redhat makes goes straight back into developing open-source software.

Seriously, check out Red Hat. I havent used Sun's product extensively, but I have used Novell's a good deal and I can honest to god tell you that Red Hat is the better choice. Read this post for someone else's view on it. If price is a concern, you'll hear alot of FUD about Red Hat being more pricey. The truth is its not, and the proof is in the pudding. You'll notice that both companies offerings are very similar in cost per year and that in some cases one company will slightly beat out the other, but in other cases roles reverse. After using the management utilities Red Hat offers as compared to Novell, I could never see myself going back to Novell regardless of cost, the price savings is just a nice side effect:)
Regards,
Steve

P.S. In case you don't know Red Hat's prices.

is that they're busy working away (especially Thomas Fitzsimons) on GNU Classpath to make sure that with that and gcj there's a full Free/Libre java environment

It comes with Samba 3.0 for SMB/CIFS, Active Directory authentication and a Microsoft Exchange connector.

Citrix and Acrobat Reader, OpenOffice2.0 etc

Hmm.. what else... NUMA support for multi CPU (also a lot of multicore enhancements)...LVM2 for easy disk addition, removal....

RHEL4

Linux is going to add modules for WinFS as well. There's already plenty of development underway. Take a look at this post over at Redhat's mailing lists for a recent status update.

...Right.

Nobody actually financially benefits from open source.

I'm sorry, I guess I didn't quite catch what you meant. Run that by me again?

(Ubuntu) Which is based on Debian. FYI.

Fedora Core 4 (FC4) will have it and be out by June 6 according to their schedule.

So what has Redhat produced? Not used, but produced? The answer is: not much.

Are you kidding? Redhat contribute to a lot of high-profile open source projects. They also provide hosting to many projects.

So what has Redhat produced? Not used, but produced? The answer is: not much.

Are you kidding? Redhat contribute to a lot of high-profile open source projects. They also provide hosting to many projects.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

Nearly ALL of the "good" installation and configuration software out there is developed by RedHat.

Do you let your linux install autodetect your hardware? Guess who wrote Kudzu? Use something better than xf86config for setting up X?

In addition to their contributions to installation and configuration, they pump a lot of money and resources into other projects which they list here.

• C++
  • jEdit is a Java programmer's editor with excellent C++ support. I do development on Linux, Win32 and MacOS X, so it's very nice for me to have one editor I use on every platform. jEdit's not as featureful as, say, Emacs, but it's considerably more friendly to use.
  • Boost. If you're writing C++ and you're not using Boost, you're committing a crime against yourself.
  • Python. With Boost's Python library, it's easy to make your C++ applications scriptable. Write the heavy lifting parts in C++, then make those parts callable from Python. Do the rest of your development in a far safer, more sane language. You get almost all of the speed of C++, and far fewer headaches.
  • SWIG is another tool that's excellent for creating scriptable C++ applications.
  • Subversion for your version-control needs. Nothing else will do.
  • Doxygen for all your documentation needs. Learn it, love it. Your code's not done until every public part of the API has been doxygenated.
  • The GNU Autotools are really, really awful. They're also far better supported than Scons or pick-your-Autotools-replacement. Get ready to feel the pain of m4 macros. Sorry. :(
  • The GNU Compiler Collection started getting a good C++ compiler around version 3.0. I've been quite favorably impressed with 3.3, and I'm looking forward to 4.0. I don't recommend it for Windows, but for Solaris and x86 Linux it's beautiful.
  • I haven't found a good C++ unit testing framework yet. If you find one, please let me know.
• Java
  • Eclipse is an excellent Java IDE. jEdit also fits the bill nicely, if all you want is an editor. I use both frequently, and am quite pleased with both.
  • Subversion again for your version-control needs.
  • jUnit for unit tests. Your code's incomplete unless you've written unit tests for it.
  • Javadoc for documentation. I would recommend Doxygen, but it's quite possible you'll be deploying your applications on machines that don't have it installed.
  • Ant for all your build needs.

It is pretty safe to say that any proprietary OS maker can be anti-Linux but why speculate. We know that their is at least 1 and that is Microsoft. The other could be Sun, even though the Java Desktop is based on Linux, but that doesn't really matter much. To some degree with all of the different distros, even they can do enough to hurt Linux' chance of gaining in the market. With Red Hat being one of the most commonly recognized distro's, I can't help but feel that it was a mistake for them to pull the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Fedora. Even MS argued that they weren't a monopoly by brandishing a copy of Red Hat http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/timeline.htm l/ during the Anti-Trust trials...

What contributions of code, exactly?

Lots of them. They are pretty easy to find actually. pick a project and look through its changelog.

Can you give me some examples?

There are several here. Not including the projects RH employees contribute to which they don't host.

Interestingly, from a while back, there's this blog by Tiemann. And this report of the blogwar (Red Hat opens losing propaganda offensive against Sun) With Sun being one of the biggest contributors to open source, Red Hat being the biggest commercial linux distro, and OSI well... well at least it's not run by esr anymore... it would be nice to see the opensource/sun feuding end.

I'm not sure if that was a compliment or an insult to Red Hat, but regardless, Michael is a good guy with a good head on his shoulders. If you've ever seen his writings or hear him talk you'd know what I mean. Afterall, he did write the first GNU C++ compiler. He recently also did a little video thing for Red Hat magazine showing the benefits of open source. He truly is an innovative and important guy in the community. Congratulations to him. For those who don't know, Red Hat has many individuals like this that are just as influential and important in the OSS world (i.e. Alan Cox), don't let one bad marketing decision make you hate Red Hat. Without them, who knows where we'd be, even OSS programmers have to eat.

Regards,
Steve

P.S. For a little blurb on Michael, read this.

While focusing on open source and Red Hat's take on it, the main concepts can be used so many places -- OSS or not. Watch it a couple times to really have it sink in; it's deceptively simple though the 'common wisdom' is to discard these ideas when 'reality' shows up (aka resistant managers who have gotten used to the status quo.).

Hey he looks like this guy.

Redhat alienated much of their loyal userbase with the introduction of Fedora Core. This is a step in the right direction for Redhat to get back to their roots and stop concentrating so hard on their commercial offerings that they leave their grassroots projects underdevloped and insufficient. Short bio. Interview from a few years ago
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play

From the article: Theimer said; "We want to be competitive with something like Red Hat."

That shouldn't be a problem. At these prices Windows 2003 is already cheaper. It's only when you start adding CALs that Microsoft gets more expensive and people won't be buying a lot of CALs for a supercomputing cluster.

If you don't want people linking to your material, don't put a site on the web. http://www.redhat.com/link to Red Hat

Oracle may have made Linux a supported platform,

Oracle made Redhat Enterprise a supported platform, and then it's only supported on RedHat AS/ES (Server versions), not on WS (Workstation version).

This is very different then saying that Oracle considers "Linux" a supported platform. Oracle on Debian or Suse is not well supported by Oracle at all.

And consider that Solaris has actually been cheaper then RHEL in many respects, and you'll see more reasons why Solaris is a common platform for Oracle in a large installation.

Maybe this has changed since 9i. If so, please feel free to enlighten me.

so a free product's revenue is up 35%. That's good news.

Umm... dude... Not all Linux is free.

Yes, I realize these are all "Enterprise" or "Proffesional" versions. But they are the ones designed for running high demand servers.

Hell, if we look at the fact that strlcat/cpy have been turned down for inclusion multiple times to the GNU libc because it would be "slower" when preventing a buffer vuln, if anything it's getting worse, and will continue down that slope.

strcpy(path, homedir);
strcat(path, "/");
strcat(path, ".foorc");
len = strlen(path);

strncpy(path, homedir, sizeof(path) - 1);
path[sizeof(path) - 1] = '\ 0';
strncat(path, "/",sizeof(path) - strlen(path) - 1);
strncat(path, ".foorc", sizeof(path) - strlen(path) - 1);
len = strlen(path);

strlcpy(path, homedir, sizeof(path));
strlcat(path, "/", sizeof(path));
strlcat(path, ".foorc", sizeof(path));
len = strlen(path);

The GPL version of open source is not going to work, especially if you want an entire system from thousands of different vendors to be 100% open source. It's hard enough to get industry-wide standards adopted WITHOUT requiring everyone to give their products away for free.

How does something that directly contradicts reality get modded insightful ?

The only thing that will work is to either reinvent the wheel from scratch, in your own country, under communism, and hope you'll succeed where no one else has. (China seems to be making progress).

The current scarecrow to throw at your enemies is terrorism, not communism. Please follow your times.

Also, if you meant that shared ownership implies communism, it logically follows that any company with more than one shareholder is communistic.

Come up with an open source license that doesn't take away control of finished products from companies who haven't yet had a chance to earn a profit from their work

AFAIK most open source projects are (or at least started as) the work of people, not corporations.

The GPL doesn't work, it requires immediate release of source that can be used by competitors or would-be customers, and eliminates the profit motive.

Um, isn't this exactly what the company releasing its code would want ? That anyone who distributes products based on the code must release any enhancments to the code under GPL as well ?

You do realize that just because you, the original author and copyright holder, released version 1.0 under the GPL, doesn't mean you that you are under any obligation to release version 1.0.1 under any license - assuming, of course, that you own the copyrights to all the code in version 1.0.1 ? Licenses are used togrant rights, under certain terms, to people who don't have the copyright to whatever is being licensed.

Or were you bemoaning over companies inability to take GPL'd code, add some features, and sell the result as their own proprietary product ? If so, keep on lamenting; you won't get any sympathy from me.

The SELinux approach sounds to me like a far better way to approach this, actually controlling the permissions of a process with some high degree of precision, down to what files it can use and what other processes it can invoke.

Anyone learned in this stuff care to give a non-flamed opinion of the two approaches strengths and weaknesses? Also, do or will the newer Linux kernels do anything similar regarding stack protection?

NetworkManager or netapplet might help with that.

Anyone can get a certificate, its just that it won't necesseraly be signed by someone thats implicitly trusted by your browser. (or whatever else your ssl-ing).
Self-signed certificates are definarly not new, you can do this with openssl on linux in about a handfull of commands or in windows on IIS (using the tool on page 2).

According to the author(s) of BZIP2, the "best available techniques" are a family of statistical compressors called PPM. Unfortunately, they're real resource hogs, so caveat emptor...

I have to confess that I had no idea that this even existed.

I wonder why I didn't know that...

Could it have been this:

"Enterprise has to do with RH's business side of things, the service and support of the product that customers buy. Free/consumer/community distribution is the same technology, but with no guarantee of support because it is for hobbyists. Companies may choose to use it in production but it is their responsibility to support it themselves, or hire others to help them."
-Warren Togami, 2003

Or maybe this:

Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base.

(From the fedora updates page)
Or maybe this:

The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.

The footer of the home page (and each page within) the Fedora site.

The original claim was that there is no official support for Fedora. That claim appears to have been well established in what was said when Fedora and Red Hat merged, and is corroborated at least once or twice a page in the Fedora website. If the claim is as weak as you say it is, then why is it plastered on every fucking page of the web site?

more importantly, we could always recommend the latest bits to newbies without any download hassle.

If you were doing that you were being irresponsible. The volume of updates that all major distributions push today means it's not feasable to use Linux on dialup and stay secure at the same time.

The security-critical subset of patches from any major vendor is easily dialup-friendly.

At any rate, who was talking about dialup? I was just talking about convenience. The current Fedora installation process involves downloading a bunch of CD isos totalling about 2.5GB, and then either burning them or loopback-mounting them. BTW, the insns say there's a DVD iso, but it doesn't actually seem to be there. Probably a good thing, since "Note: If you are using HTTP or FTP to download, some download clients cannot handle the DVD image because it is larger than 4 gigabytes." Of course, "Since the Red Hat FTP site can experience extremely high volume, you may have better success using a mirror site. Alternatively, you can join the torrent." Good luck, newbie. Heck, good luck me.

They don't want to do an apt-get upgrade and find a few hours later they've been locked out of their system by a busted PAM upgrade.

I've been running Debian unstable for more than 5 years now, and I've never had anything like that happen. Application breakage, sure, but never an unusable system. Distros like Ubuntu that actually try hard to manage these things are reportedly even better. On the other hand, I've had to wipe the root partition and try again after big-bang Red Hat upgrades several times in the past. Not very fun.

Now with FC 4, looks like there will be support [finally?] for Power/PowerPC systems [like the Mac mini mentioned in the article]. Guess this puts YellowDog's FC 2 based distro in jeopardy.

Has anyone tested the latest development of FC 4 for Power/PowerPC? Judging by the boot.iso in the images directory, it looks like it only works on NewWorld ROM based PowerMac and iMac systems...

On a side note, I've been running Ubuntu [Warty] on an older graphite iMac, and have been impressed by it's ease of setup and use...
But if this article is true, and after some testing of FC 4 for Power/PowerPC, Ubuntu might be replaced with FC 4.

If you read http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/COPYING.modules, you will see that if you write a binary module from scratch it is considered as a derived work from linux kernel, so it should respect the GPL license and be open source.

I am a bit disapointed to see a guy like fabrice bellard which have contributed to lot's of famous open source projects (ffmpeg for exemple) to choose a such decission.

The video covers Linux specifically, though the ideas can be used on just about any project. Very slick.

I think this will be of interrest to you : http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2004/press _neighbor.html

RH/Fedora has been doing that at install time for ages - apparently 6.1 or so. How well it works might be another matter - I've never had cause to use it, but it'd be worth a look for anyone who hasn't seen it and discounted it already.

The appropriate reference to the RHEL manual

RH/Fedora has been doing that at install time for ages - apparently 6.1 or so. How well it works might be another matter - I've never had cause to use it, but it'd be worth a look for anyone who hasn't seen it and discounted it already.

The appropriate reference to the RHEL manual

You've obviously never installed windows... I wish it was that simple. The only time it is ever that simple is if your using a vendor provided recovery disk. Otherwise you would boot to a nearly unusable system with absoultely no software other then a browser, media player and paint. If you want some functionality like a recovery cd install where you just pop in a disk and away it goes use Yoper. If you want something with more choice but still easy to use and install, get Fedora or Suse. (despite the distro wars, both are really nice) The Fedora install more or less consists of choosing whether you want to do a desktop install, server install, workstation install, or advanced install. Assuming you select desktop install, everything else is done for you other then a few quick questions (like name and stuff). Everything is autodetected (although you are asked to verifiy it and can change it if you so desire). The Suse install, while different, is just as easy. And regardless of your choice of distro, you'll be left with a freshly installed system that is secure, does not "call home" or have any ports open unless you specified differently and contains enough software that most users could probably get away with never having to install anything else ever. Not to mention an easy to use updating system that updates all of your software, not just select microsoft choices. As far as I'm concerned, Linux beats Microsoft and it is MS that needs to catch up and learn a thing or two from us.
Regards,
Steve

" And develop an easy-install linux that works on virtually every big-vendor box with a good GUI"

But that already exists ;)
Regards,
Steve

As far as I can remember, since Win95, I *always* had sound on first boot after installation. It might not have been optimized sound with the latest driver, but at least it had a generic driver.

If it would happen. What would you do?

I'd take the CD that came with the sound card and put it in the CD-ROM, and click on the big flashy "INSTALL DRIVER" button that pops on auto-run. I know it's not the OS there but the sound card company, but you asked me what made Linux not so easy to use.

What did you do when it did not work out of the box? Drop the ball?

I searched google, I read forums, I went to IRC channels. I got some pointers to an Alsa fix that didn't work (basically, it was "make sure Alsa doesn't mute the master channel"), and loads of RTFM. Having to RTFM isn't "easy to use", "Works out of the box" is.

What about purchasing RedHat and getting hotline support?

Ok... which one should I get now? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is said to be for power users (I don't want to be a power-user, I just want to use my computer), or the Red Hat Desktop, which is designed for general users, but costs over $2000? Isn't the whole point here to save money? I know the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, but Linux is being evangelized as being both. And even if it's only as in speech, I won't spend $2000 on an OS for my home desktop.

Now don't get me wrong. I am a power-user. I love Linux. I love open-source. Billy would say I'm a communist. I still use Linux every once in a while, and I'm always trying to convince my boss to switch the whole place to Linux (or at least Mac OSX). But even power-users don't always feel like reading through hundreds of pages just to get the sound working.

As far as I can remember, since Win95, I *always* had sound on first boot after installation. It might not have been optimized sound with the latest driver, but at least it had a generic driver.

If it would happen. What would you do?

I'd take the CD that came with the sound card and put it in the CD-ROM, and click on the big flashy "INSTALL DRIVER" button that pops on auto-run. I know it's not the OS there but the sound card company, but you asked me what made Linux not so easy to use.

What did you do when it did not work out of the box? Drop the ball?

I searched google, I read forums, I went to IRC channels. I got some pointers to an Alsa fix that didn't work (basically, it was "make sure Alsa doesn't mute the master channel"), and loads of RTFM. Having to RTFM isn't "easy to use", "Works out of the box" is.

What about purchasing RedHat and getting hotline support?

Ok... which one should I get now? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is said to be for power users (I don't want to be a power-user, I just want to use my computer), or the Red Hat Desktop, which is designed for general users, but costs over $2000? Isn't the whole point here to save money? I know the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, but Linux is being evangelized as being both. And even if it's only as in speech, I won't spend $2000 on an OS for my home desktop.

Now don't get me wrong. I am a power-user. I love Linux. I love open-source. Billy would say I'm a communist. I still use Linux every once in a while, and I'm always trying to convince my boss to switch the whole place to Linux (or at least Mac OSX). But even power-users don't always feel like reading through hundreds of pages just to get the sound working.

In the latest issue of Red Hat Magazine, SELinux is discussed. A PDF presentation about FileSystem Labeling and a whitepaper (registration required) about SELinux are available at the bottom of the page.

hmmmm...someone should tell Red Hat I guess http://www.redhat.com/

Copy code, slightly modify, provide for free. Not a term commercial software companies would agree with.

Perhaps you've never heard of IBM, Apple, or RedHat. More likely, you've confused the word "commercial" with "proprietary," especially since using "commercial" and "company in the same sentence is redundant.