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The bug was that after installing Fedora on a system with Windows XP, the master boot record would be corrupted and you couldn't boot Windows XP anymore.

This is the bugzilla entry. It was present in Core 2.

115980

Comment 161 says it is also present in Fedora Core 3. I guess it does not affect everyone who installs Fedora on a system with Windows XP on it.

The author, Aron Hsiao, describes his book this way:

"I wrote this book to help real people learn to use Red Hat's Linux products in real situations; I have tried to write with current Windows or Mac OS users in mind. There's minimum of fluff or unnecessary technical jargon; instead, I try to give clear, concise instructions in step-by-step format for performing common tasks in Linux . . ."

You may want to check out Fedora News and The Fedora Project.

yea, all the autotools were tough for me to get into, but the documentation isn't bad.
There is a whole book available online to help:
The Goat Book (GNU Autoconf, Automake, & Libtool)

It's just macros anyway.. :)

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Engine blueprints are not like software and tt is not always in the best financial interest of a company to charge for traditional products.

You mentioned:
This is like saying GM should open-source the blueprints for all their car engines. It's ridiculous. Valve put untold millions into HL2 development, and there's absolutely no incentive for them to just open the source, and there's a strong disincentive...

But then you turned around and said:

To ignore the economic constraints of development is breathtakingly naive.

Form those of us who've actually developed software and taken classes on economics, these statement are very naive. For all projects, the return on investment varies throughout its lifecycle. This contraint is often overlooked by shortsighted money grubbing middle management in the pursuit of next-quarter's margins. As mentioned in the article, which you obviously did not read, game software that once garndered much money for each small (post-release) investment reaches a point at which few profits can be obtained with even large investment.

With your competitors producting higher quality engines (for which you are getting zero royalties) and using newer storylines, you product cannot compete. In this situation, it makes sense save yourself the cost of distribution while ensuring people see your logos and discover the quality of your work. Corner isle loss leaders at supermarkets are the same idea. In the case of software, you are getting free adversiting, marketing and publicity from an existing product by releasing the source code.

If you had read the article, you would understand that companies such as Valve are moving away from selling cars like Half-Life 2 to renting fleets of vehicles with systems like steam. For GM, keeping a blueprint seceret is not possible since the engine has to pass safety inspections. Very few peices of software have such mission critical natures. GM pays an engineer to make and sign off on their blueprints, but so do software companies that make 911 telecom software. Once built, it is very easy to reverse engineer a car engine. For the purposes of patents and publishing rights, the detailed methods of engine operation may be widely published with only a working prototype. Binaries of game software are easily encrypted and copy-protected. Usually such protection is kept until it interferes with enough of the customer base and generates enough bug reports to warrent removal.

According to modern studies 95% of all in-house software fits the criteria for F/OSS release policy. Those fortunate enough to adopt service models, like content distribution via Valve's Steam or support offerings like RedHat's Enterprise Linux, are getting continual revinue which scales very well. (I'd much rather pay the taxes on $0 million in sales now and $4 million in income over the next 5 years than $500k from sales now with nothing to show for the next 5 years.)

You can pay good money for this and get some free games with it.

From Redhat's release notes for the update 2 to RHEL3.

Software IOTLB -- Intel® EM64T does not support an IOMMU in hardware while AMD64 processors do. This means that physical addresses above 4GB (32 bits) cannot reliably be the source or destination of DMA operations. Therefore, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 kernel "bounces" all DMA operations to or from physical addresses above 4GB to buffers that the kernel pre-allocated below 4GB at boot time. This is likely to result in lower performance for IO-intensive workloads for Intel® EM64T as compared to AMD64 processors.

See for yourself:

Redhat.

Better fix.

The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?

Another question is: now that MS is dropping Windows for Itanium, will Intel contribute more free development tools for ia64 Linux and make more "investments" in Linux for Itanium? Since 1998, Intel has made many contributions to Linux for x86 and Itanium - I'm assuming much more than Alpha and MIPS have.

But even if they do, will enough Linux developers choose to develop for expensive Itanium workstations when cheap x86 workstations are "good enough." I think we'll see a lot more Itanium-specific Linux investments from Intel, but I don't know if Linux developers will invest more time in Itanium.

For the near future, it looks like Itanium workstations have Debian 3.0 and Red Hat Enterprise WS.

As I wrote in the comment to another KernelTrap story, using the term "GNU/Linux" (referring to the GCC and glibc essential role in the system) is totally misleading.

Both GCC and glibc are in the current state despite the RMS and FSF efforts. For GCC, remember the situation from the 2.8 times, when an independent team (egcs) had to fork GCC, because the FSF-managed development of GCC was dead. In the same way remember years of work that H.J.Lu invested in Linux libc, because GNU libc was unmaintained and unusable. And of course the work of Ulrich Drepper, who took GNU libc2 and developed it into a form usable in Linux-based system. Ulrich considers none of his work on glibc to be a part of a GNU project (details here, see the bottom part of the text). And it looks like even the present situation in the GCC development is the same (anonymous comment at KernelTrap).

So I can say run GCC/glibc/perl/X.org/TeX/etc/Linux system, but it has nothing special to do with GNU and FSF, and I just prefer the short name "Linux" (named after a single biggest, always-running, and essential component of the system).

Redhat Enterprise ES, not sure about the IT/CRM/BZ number, this is our company account number with Redhat, right?

No, those are support system numbers. BZ == bugzilla.redhat.com (but you shouldn't be working with BZ directly, you probably use something off: https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/

Yes flat group file (the default /etc/groups and gshadow).

While still bad, that's a little more understandable. Most people use NIS or LDAP for any non-simple installation, so the flat file code isn't in production as much for "large" data sets like yours.

Apart from that nothing looks abnormal with your installation.

Sounds familiar.

They point out that they indemnify end users by paying out money to companies suing over patent infringments.
Last I checked it was Microsoft that was sued for infringing, not me, not you, Microsoft. We can't infringe if we didn't know the code was in there. They sure as hell better pay when they get sued and lose. No individual user is going to be sued for Microsoft's patent infringement. This is called covering your own ass and pretending that it is for the benefit of your customers. The theory of deepest pockets also comes into play.
Their TCO studies (commissioned by Microsoft) put the price of a *nix environment higher than a MS Windows environment, by counting the cost of moving from MS Windows, without considering the cleanup and patching costs of running MS Windows... or more precisely the lost productivity from the network/workstations/servers being down. They also don't consider in the Windows TCO the cost of moving from a *nix environment.
They call it a "bad thing" when customers buy RHEL, Suse Pro and customers are locked into older versions of software comparing Apache 1.3 to 2.0 on RH without pointing to the fact that bugfixes are backported and support for updates is listed at at least 5 years and without pointing out that with them you will either be buying a new OS or paying for the privilege of buying a new OS without one actually coming out within the subscription period (Software Assurance).
All in all no better than an infomercial.

I think Red Hat is up to only 2.4.21. They backport a lot of patches though. The bug report I originally found applied to Red Hat 9, and was marked Closed WontFix because Red Hat had discontinued support for 9. Some fixes and patches were suggested. I also found a Fedora Core bug report that ended saying the problem was greatly lessened in 2.4.24 and fixed in 2.6.6.

I just found this RHEL3 bug report which states that the bug has very recently been patched.

If none of that helps, maybe you could make a cron job to empty the cache every hour or so.

I think Red Hat is up to only 2.4.21. They backport a lot of patches though. The bug report I originally found applied to Red Hat 9, and was marked Closed WontFix because Red Hat had discontinued support for 9. Some fixes and patches were suggested. I also found a Fedora Core bug report that ended saying the problem was greatly lessened in 2.4.24 and fixed in 2.6.6.

I just found this RHEL3 bug report which states that the bug has very recently been patched.

If none of that helps, maybe you could make a cron job to empty the cache every hour or so.

No company that shoots to make a profit is going to be 100% open source.

I'm guessing you're not familiar with a little company called Red Hat, for one?

Now for the application stack. I prefer using Novell's eDirectory as opposed to Microsoft's Active Directory. It'll run on Linux so that's one less Windows server right there. The price is based on a per user basis which comes up to $2 per user! Not a bad price. Tie that in with all your Linux services such as Samba, IMAP server, Postfix with eDirectory using the LDAP protocol. Their password self-service option is pretty enticing as well.

While we're on the topic of Novell and moving away from Windows on servers, look into GroupWise as a messaging server instead of MS Exchange. Again, it runs on Linux as well a bunch of other platforms and has cross platform clients so you're not limited to Windows for end users either.

Yes, and I just got back from the pub, where I was talking with a friend who claimed you don't need to bother applying security updates if you have a good firewall - in fact, he said, it's best not to because stuff might break. And this is with a huge amount of effort put into things like SP2 by Microsoft. He isn't the first person I've met with that attitude.

I work for Codeweavers and in fact this Windows 3.1 app (it was for a hospital) now runs quite well on Linux.

Here's a simple experiment to try. ...

But which is dominant? I think you'll find it's Windows.

Sure. Stability and backwards compatibility don't matter much when you're selling a product that just has to serve web pages, or route mail. Everything you need comes out of the box. If stuff breaks it can be fixed by the distribution provider. The same is not true on the desktop which has a much less homogenous set of software in use.

SELinux is awesome, truly awesome in its power to secure.

Bono los servicios mi nia kuniatera interior? On a gremos escouta et thalio y preferencias de particionamiento. Anaconda (http://rhlinux.redhat.com/anaconda/, la grado pik mit la fumbo) configurar las particiones e coco a coupa automático. Entente cordiale el "hardware probing" concordia del Detect les Debian, o Kudzu les RedHat?

Nikko fuerto tippo magico mucho scorchio. Mi volta nos molto kinagraphos y deep massago MoLinux sportsero.

Bono los servicios mi nia kuniatera interior? On a gremos escouta et thalio y preferencias de particionamiento. Anaconda (http://rhlinux.redhat.com/anaconda/, la grado pik mit la fumbo) configurar las particiones e coco a coupa automático. Entente cordiale el "hardware probing" concordia del Detect les Debian, o Kudzu les RedHat?

Nikko fuerto tippo magico mucho scorchio. Mi volta nos molto kinagraphos y deep massago MoLinux sportsero.

There is not such thing as "Red Hat" webserver.

Yes there is. It's based on Apache software, but the Apache software license forbids Red Hat from abusing the APACHE mark on derivative works.

are you sure no-one else sells GPL'd code ?

Compare:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/

with...

http://www.redhat.com/about/mission/enterprise.htm l

Yes, those are very similar. However, I don't think there's anything sinister in that... remember back in the day when those Amazon-style folder tabs were all the rage? Well, Amazon surely wasn't the first site to ever come up with the concept, and it wasn't the last. Like fashion, site designers adopt what's considered the latest and greatest design style... rounded borders on the top menu, list of links on the left.

At first glance, it reminded me a lot of RedHat's website. I wonder if they 'borrowed' XHTML and CSS code from them...

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/#download points to http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/ which hosts the fedora torrents.

Only 2 million copies of Redhat Enterprise Linux for zSeries, and we're there...

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/index .html

People often whine that Red Hat doesn't upgrade often enough and has too many patches in their RPM's. This is why. Taking a conservative approach, RH back-ports security changes to older releases rather than forcing users to upgrade to potentially incompatable new upstream versions.

Those who want to live on the bleeding edge are free to selectively build and install their own RPM's for the latest versions.

(Now if they'd just get some RPM's turned out to address this issue....)

Meanwhile, here's a bugzilla link to track.

Yeah, Novell/Suse and Red Hat couldn't possibly sell Linux and OSS for money!

Unfortunately, it is neither quick nor a link.

Try this instead:

http://people.redhat.com/davidz/bootchart.png

Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.

They are taken from here.

Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.

They are taken from here.

Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.

They are taken from here.

Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.

They are taken from here.

Try reading David Zeuthen's analysis of the FC boot process (with charts) over on the fedora archives. Very interesting - among other things, nearly 200 MB of files(!) are buffered while starting GNOME - quite a footprint - and apparently by putting those files on a separate (non-fragged) partition he sped process by nearly 30 seconds and reports OOo and Firefox start times of around 3 seconds.

There are some charts linked from a post here.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

Yet, people who complain about TCO tend to know that there's something missing. They're right too.

This is one amazing example of how to go beyond basic TCO.

The link is to Michael Tiemann's talk on TCO, process, and product improvement. While he lays out an open source view of the world, there's nothing in what he says that requires open source at all. The same things could be done with or without software at all -- open or closed -- if you spend a little time thinking about it.

Part of my previous /. comment;

1. Go watch it and if you're curious, read on. If not...that's good too as I'm only going to ramble a bit;

   What I take from it is that the developer should reject the impulse to build everything from scratch and build just the core tool kit for others to use. After all, you can't know what other people are thinking or what they want...even if they tell you.

   Along those lines, I look for projects like Plone that build on the work that preceeded it (Python to Zope to Plone) and make it easy to design extentions (Plone Products) that interoperate with the lower levels. I avoid monolythic projects that don't seem to be flexable enough to incorporate other toolkits. This is not pre-made integration, though. Quite the opposite.

   Having the lower levels available and modifiable (Python source of Zope and Plone) means that you're not locked into one and only one way of doing things if you need to make changes. The vendor or core developer(s) don't dictate what you do or how you do it. Yet, along the chain each part works well with the levels above and below it.

Quite honestly most any GNU/Linux distro will slow them way down (assuming their not using a hardware keyboard capture device). If they get get physical access to your machine you're screwed reguardless of the OS.

Stripped down? I use XP Home on my laptop and develop software for a living. The only thing you cannot do on Home that you can on Pro is localhosting of web-apps. I see no need since I have development servers to host them on (plus if my laptop gets stolen I don't have to worry about what HIPAA related data might have been on it).

OEM is the same as buying it retail from Best Buy. No support. Additional hardware can be something as cheap as a $1.49 ATA Cable

If you need support you certainly shouldn't be installing an OS yourself. Xandros offers 60 Days for the Deluxe version and 30 Days for the Standard version. This support is INSTALL SUPPORT ONLY. Microsoft offers the same OEM or Retail (you pay).

My comparison was primarily on cost. How the hell can you simply program a few interfaces for things like VPN take 10's of thousands of hours of someone elses work and charge the same as the Evil Empire? It doesn't make sense to me.

BTW Ubuntu is comparable and it's free. Like Fedora... and many more

Call their sales and ask.

I have called them on three different times and have been told the same answer.

I am sorry did you say java and compile to native.... That is NOT a JVM.

Yeah, and I also said GIJ, which is NOT native-compilation but a JVM.

There are several other VM's out there, Kaffe, JamVM and SableVM, which all use the GNU Classpath library and thus also benefit indirectly from Red Hat's work.

What about Blackdown? It's not open source. Period. It's under Sun's license.

Look at the abomination they did to get Eclipse to run.

Yeah, sure. I've seen it. Have you?
Note particularily the line: No Eclipse changes are needed.

how about IBM's JVM for linux

They have several. What about IBM JVM? It's not open source either. They do have one though which is, JikesVM. And It has GNU Classpath as its library. IBM hasn't contributed any code at all towards the runtime.

(And the class library is the major issue with Java, not the VM. VM's are small by comparison)

Redhat all but hates Java.

Yeah, which is why they hosted an open-source Java summit as recently as two weeks ago.

The only thing they want with Java is the ability for it to be compiled to "their" OS.

Which doesn't quite explain why they're contributing by writing cross-platform Java library code, does it?

I agree that RedHat does do some development, but are you seriously saying that they do anywhere near what Sun or Microsoft do?

No. Nobody said that. You were the one saying Red Hat doesn't contribute to open source software. Now you've suddenly changed this to doing as much development as Sun or Microsoft??!

I do say this: They contribute a hell of a lot more code to the community than either Sun or Microsft does, despite having far smaller resources.

Yes. Red Hat charges a lot of money for support. So does Microsoft for their Enterprise solutions. You are making the stupid mistake of comparing consumer products with enterprise products. These are completely different things. Rest assured that Windows with enterprise support isn't cheap either. Nor is AIX, or Solaris or anything else.

I suggest you stop commenting on stuff which you obviously don't know much about.

The subject of the primary article is "Red Hat needs to lower prices". My reply is about a lower priced version of RHEL. That seems relevant to the original article.

The only "handicap" of Professional Workstation is that it comes with a shorter period of tech. support. It is exactly the same software as RHEL WS. It uses the exact same updates as RHEL WS. As far as software maintenance goes, it seems just as well supported as RHEL WS. And they continue to offer support renewals.

It is true that Red Hat does not promote Professional Workstation much in the U.S (although it is still promoted on their European site. Perhaps they are concerned about cannibalizaing higher priced RHEL WS support subscription sales. But the fact remains that a lower priced, supported version of RHEL is widely available.

The subject of the primary article is "Red Hat needs to lower prices". My reply is about a lower priced version of RHEL. That seems relevant to the original article.

The only "handicap" of Professional Workstation is that it comes with a shorter period of tech. support. It is exactly the same software as RHEL WS. It uses the exact same updates as RHEL WS. As far as software maintenance goes, it seems just as well supported as RHEL WS. And they continue to offer support renewals.

It is true that Red Hat does not promote Professional Workstation much in the U.S (although it is still promoted on their European site. Perhaps they are concerned about cannibalizaing higher priced RHEL WS support subscription sales. But the fact remains that a lower priced, supported version of RHEL is widely available.

An example of why paid support gets you nowhere is the current disastrous RHEL 3 kernel for anyone who has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller that uses the aacraid driver - RHEL 3 will actually crash on an "insmod aacraid" during boot most of the time ! The Bugzilla entry shows that a fix was posted in mid-September, the bug was marked Priority: High, Severity: High and yet the latest RHEL3 kernel that was released on 2nd December did not roll in this crucial fix.

I phoned up Red Hat Support and the guy really didn't offer anything "extra" above what Bugzilla did (in fact, the workarounds are all mentioned in the Bugzilla bug listing) and even suggested I ran a beta kernel on a production server, which I politely declined. With Bugzilla open to the public, I really cannot see the reason anyone would pay for phone support !

An example of why paid support gets you nowhere is the current disastrous RHEL 3 kernel for anyone who has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller that uses the aacraid driver - RHEL 3 will actually crash on an "insmod aacraid" during boot most of the time ! The Bugzilla entry shows that a fix was posted in mid-September, the bug was marked Priority: High, Severity: High and yet the latest RHEL3 kernel that was released on 2nd December did not roll in this crucial fix.

I phoned up Red Hat Support and the guy really didn't offer anything "extra" above what Bugzilla did (in fact, the workarounds are all mentioned in the Bugzilla bug listing) and even suggested I ran a beta kernel on a production server, which I politely declined. With Bugzilla open to the public, I really cannot see the reason anyone would pay for phone support !

damnit. updates

download

updates

You're paying for 2 things: precompiled binaries of GPL software; support for those precompiled binaries. You can download and compile the source to the whole RHEL line of products and every update for them, for free. So maybe you could STFU.

The prices are a little bit on the high side, but you are buying support not the software for the most part and they are certainly not higher that Windows Server 2003 which they are setup to compete with.

Windows Server 2003 prices are here.

The RedHat recommended version for a small business webserver is here.

Microsoft policy is that business products will be supported for a minimum of five years (10 for hotfix security support) after they are released.

Windows Server 2003 Web Edition is $399. Per year that's $79.80 for 5 years or $39.90 for 10 years.

RHES for x86 is $349 per year for updates, installation help, and support with a 2 day response time. Over 5 years you're paying $1745 total. Over 10 it's $3490. These figures also assume that RedHat does not raise the prices higher in the future and does not change the contract.

My problems have been mainly involved with patching systems and having that break systems completely. We patched a few systems with an autofs patch on RHEL 3.0 and found that when they decided to fix some bugs, they just upgraded from 3.x of autofs to 4.x. This caused automount maps to stop timing out and any changes we made to the NIS maps wouldn't get fixed until autofs gets restarted. Here is the bugzilla This problem has existed for weeks and I don't even have an ETA on the resolution.

In the end, the service they provide for their cost isn't worth it. If I was choosing an server OS, I would go elsewhere. The only thing they bring to the table for us is Oracle support.

Um...RedHat's software is all Free (as in Freedom)/Open-Source. In fact, their EULA specifically says (and the GPL and other open-source licenses guarantee) that you can redistribute the source code for their products, so long as you remove their trademarks and logos and whatnot. In fact, this is what White Box Enterprise Linux aims to do: be binary compatible with RH EL by rebuilding and distributing RH's source RPMs. Or you can always check out The Fedora Project...