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Slashdot puked on your link. here is a good one.

Go fuck yourself troll

My work environment (not entirely my choice):

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh8-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh73-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh72-errata.html

I'm locked behind a pretty ironclad firewall so I choose not to run all the security updates, but I laugh when I fire up up2date.

Go fuck yourself troll

My work environment (not entirely my choice):

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh8-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh73-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh72-errata.html

I'm locked behind a pretty ironclad firewall so I choose not to run all the security updates, but I laugh when I fire up up2date.

Go fuck yourself troll

My work environment (not entirely my choice):

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh8-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh73-errata.html
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh72-errata.html

I'm locked behind a pretty ironclad firewall so I choose not to run all the security updates, but I laugh when I fire up up2date.

Thank you for pointing out Linux is perfect. http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/eol/

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.

Additional link; Erik Von Hippel.

Everybody knows that people buy Linux servers just so they can install pirated versions of Windows on them!

I would like to share my 2 cent concerning my experience in Linux mandrake recently.

The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one
man, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. Since
these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up
to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux
has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic
downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing
policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft
Windows.

While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including
BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network)
server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the
same level of media attention as Linux. Linux Mandrake is just the
latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux.
Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm
and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT
preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint
at its zany nature.

My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image"
from the Mandrake-Linux web site. But don't worry,

this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware,
meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by
the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a
major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and
self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.

Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the
documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for
me in the "required configuration" section of the hocked to learn that
Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes
of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore,
a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although
the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their
chosen operating system and deride the
"bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are
blatantly incorrect.

Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that
Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer
hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?

Of course not.

Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my
many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake
reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity
applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web
browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best
efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to
encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of
Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to
recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.

Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used
software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to
learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus
Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer
for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the
most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of
software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are
mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their
commercial counterparts.

Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked
by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses
are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software
is available for Linux. To add insult to i

step 1: move all that stuff into cvs / source control system of your choice.

step 2: install cygwin on all the machines (http://sources.redhat.com/)

alternately: use ms's unix system services (go digging on the m$ website) theoretically this will give you a "real unix" running inside windows.

at least this way you don't have to spend as much effort porting your old tools.

• Mepis
• Debian
• Fedora

That should take care of things and you can spend the rest of your client's time showing them new and better software instead of fixing old crap.

BTW, I recently had a less-than-stellar experience with RedHat Enterprise WS; I ended up downloading a lot of packages from Debian and converting them with Alien just to get decent functionality.

--
DLL

Don't forget about Suse's YAST installer. Last I checked it was slightly more user-friendly that RedHat's Anaconda because YAST can resize NTFS partitions using ntfsresize, while RedHat has opted to leave out that functinality, citing safety concerns (which I admit, are warranted, but it doesn't make Anaconda any more user-friendly).

I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.

It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.

He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.

I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough. Where have we heard this before? :)

Linux kernel requires closedsource BitKeeper for development and violates GPL as some drivers require closedsource firmwares. MySQL 4.0+ is no longer GPL and therefore Red Hat still has to use the obsoleted MySQL-3.x in its recent GNU/Linux releases What about some famous Stallman's packages such as GCC or Emacs?

Microsoft Replaces Your Pirated Windows, For Free

There's another group offering to replace your copy Windows, no questions asked! Check out the free downloads. And there's no limit of five free replacments. Replace as many copies of Windows as you want!

This may not be a big step for Linux as a whole, but it is a huge step toward a Linux that is viable for corporate desktop users. In the past, Linux vendors seemed to believe that a full Linux install (everything but the kitchen sink) was fitting for any sort of desktop install. Increasingly, though, we see the sort of features like real manageability and simplicity that are necessary for large deployments.

Red Hat started moving in this direction, but their corporate desktop distro, Red Hat Desktop, was very (IMO) half-assed both in implementation and the way they marketed it (or failed to market it).

Sun's JDS is a nice corporate desktop Linux distro, but it will most likely only find a home with current Sun customers, unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have a beef with Sun's treatment of Linux like I do).

(Emphasis mine) You did exactly what you should not do. Finding and retrieving the correct package is the job of your package manager. The problems you experienced are exactly what apt, yum, urpm, emerge, YaST and the other package managers solve.

Judging by what the description of your problem, I can pretty much infer that you actually never used, and/or don't know exactly what is meant by "package manager".

I don't know about other distros, but when I tried to use CIFS to mount in Fedora Core 2 instead of SMBFS, I got a bunch of kernel errors. AFAIK, it's still an open bug: bugzilla.redhat.com.

It will not run though!

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc3/x8 6/#id850167

This is surely bad news as far as encouraging the curious to examine the kernel source?

This move has a fair rationale, but must disuade newbies slightly; it does not serve the goal of free software. Surely it's better to swallow the inconsistency?

I may not be a huge fan of Redhat, but it looks like you can get a free Tivo with RH certification.

A little birdie told me that they want you to read Red Hat Magazine, but stay away from Fedora Core. It will EAT YOUR BRANE.

The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.

If SELinux is not good enough for secure U.S. government work, then why was it developed? Of course it is not a trusted operating system. It is not an operating system at all, but rather a set of kernel patches and user-space programs. Operating systems are typically put through the expensive rigors of trusted operating system testing for commercial benefit, and thus the NSA would have no need for such official tests. I am sure that the NSA has its own version or revision of Linux that it has cleared for its own use with the SELinux extensions.

MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) are a big change from the normal user-group-other permissions that Linux has had for years, but it appears that Red Hat is very interested in adding SELinux, as it has shown with its integration of SELinux into Fedora.

The latest iPods (mini, click-wheel, limited edition and photo) have problems getting mounted on Linux. The issue is discussed here. The fix, is to disable EFI partition support in the kernel and recompiling it.

They don't even guarantee API compatibility within major releases so I can't even update machines without testing the updates first.

Really in RedHat Linux or in RedHat Enterprise Linux? They do if Fedora, but Fedora is a known broken tool (it's a shiny nifty looking tool, but broken as far as using for Enterprise quality Linux distros). I'd really like to see any anecdotes or documentation showing that RH broke the API/ABI inside the same series. As a matter of fact, they do support an ABI (which is a stronger guarantee then an API), ABI's are a binary compatibility, where as API's are a source level compatibility, except for incredibly exceptional circumstances where the security fix cannot be implemented short of changing the ABI (think somebody figured out how to factor big numbers in O(1)). You know like the RPC problems that Windows had in NT 4.0 that MS just refused to fix because there was no compatible way to fix the security flaw. RedHat backports security fixes to the version of the software they released.

If you are making a reference towards RH not supporting a single ABI inside of the kernel and breaking 3rd party modules, that's accurate. However, that's a fundamental issue with the kernel (not, it's not a problem, just an issue). I never use binary only drivers with the single exception of the nVidia drivers for home desktop machines. If that is what you are making a reference towards, even Debian can't solve that.

I've never known RH to break an ABI or API inside of the same major release series, let alone inside of the point release. That is the beauty of RH updates. They can be upgraded with a high confidence they won't break the ABI. In fact, the old rule was that if the ABI changed they incremented the major version (which is why 8.0 didn't have any point releases). It's why they always release the 7.x RPM's when they release security fixes. (glibc and the kernel being the major components of the ABI).

With only a single exception, I've never seen a RedHat RPM break anything if installed on the version of RH it was packaged for. The single exception, was the bind-chroot package. If you upgraded the bind package and you had installed bind-chroot, it moved the original configuration files and installed the default ones again. All you had to do was go move the configuration files back and it was fixed. I believe that was a total of ten minutes of downtime for me. That's in about 5 years of running RedHat as the core of our enterprise, and about 3-4 years before that (I've been running RedHat regularly since the 5.x series, but I know I ran a 4.x series that came with a RH book I picked up ages ago).

Read up on RedHat's backport policy

I'm highly curious to hear what your experience is with this. I've never used Debian, mainly because all the problems I've had with RedHat over the years have slowly been fixed. Debian only had one serious advantage in that apt-get was an easy way out of RPM hell. Now I just use White Box Enterprise Linux, it has yum installed. I'm happy as a clam. We run it for all of our non-Oracle machines. We save a ton on licensing, and have very few problems (all of which are problems that would have existed if we purchased RHEL).

Kirby

Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.

Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.

Actually, the Fedora Core Linux kernel is relatively minimally patched. Check out the source, or look at this thread for analysis. I haven't looked at the RHEL beta kernels, but it's my understanding that they're fairly similar. (That's the whole point of Fedora Core, after all.)

There's legitimate things to criticize about Fedora Core, but this is just unsubstantiated mudslinging -- probably more out of laziness than malice, but either way, it's not helping anyone.

Your other objections ("*proffessional* experience") seem like complaints about RHEL, since you talk about "their commercial server products", but the actual things you mention, like lack of API compatibility within major releases, don't apply (such compatibility is in fact guaranteed (with a reasonable exception for security problems) in RHEL). It's not in Fedora Core, but your complaints don't really apply very well there.

Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.

Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.

Actually, the Fedora Core Linux kernel is relatively minimally patched. Check out the source, or look at this thread for analysis. I haven't looked at the RHEL beta kernels, but it's my understanding that they're fairly similar. (That's the whole point of Fedora Core, after all.)

There's legitimate things to criticize about Fedora Core, but this is just unsubstantiated mudslinging -- probably more out of laziness than malice, but either way, it's not helping anyone.

Your other objections ("*proffessional* experience") seem like complaints about RHEL, since you talk about "their commercial server products", but the actual things you mention, like lack of API compatibility within major releases, don't apply (such compatibility is in fact guaranteed (with a reasonable exception for security problems) in RHEL). It's not in Fedora Core, but your complaints don't really apply very well there.

I plan on following them later this morning ...
I read this Yum Update Upgrade link above, and it says
"Before proceeding, please read Seth Vidal's post (Seth is the author of yum) to the fedora-test-list mailing list regarding upgrading from FC2 to FC3 using yum."

The message from the developer of Yum says (among other things):

* dev->udev upgrade makes it impossible to open a new terminal
* ...
* I'm sure there will be other problems.not be the time to try this new mechanism, if you're looking to upgrade a working system. The summaries I saw seemed to recommend anaconda.

Can't these people keep up with changing technology?

I found it relatively easy to get my Bluetooth mouse working with FC3. I documented that and a few other things here.

The one major problem I had: FC3 won't boot with a nVidia graphics card until you logon in text mode without rhgb (use the "a" option in grub to modify the kernal parameters, delete rhgb and add "3"), build the nVidia drivers, modprobe nvidia, and:

cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*

as documented here. That was true with both my notebook (GeForce 440 Go) and desktop (GeForce 6800GT). Maybe the nv driver work work too, I didn't check.

AMD64 power management works automagically now.

The upgrade was worth it to me for Bluetooth and power management.

I found it relatively easy to get my Bluetooth mouse working with FC3. I documented that and a few other things here.

The one major problem I had: FC3 won't boot with a nVidia graphics card until you logon in text mode without rhgb (use the "a" option in grub to modify the kernal parameters, delete rhgb and add "3"), build the nVidia drivers, modprobe nvidia, and:

cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*

as documented here. That was true with both my notebook (GeForce 440 Go) and desktop (GeForce 6800GT). Maybe the nv driver work work too, I didn't check.

AMD64 power management works automagically now.

The upgrade was worth it to me for Bluetooth and power management.

Yes, our boot-up is slow. :/
We're working on it.

Fedora brand Redhat has the legacy project for updates of older versions, and official Redhat you pay for has (RHEL) 12-18 month release cycle and 7 years support for each of the 3 versions. A clone to redhat proper is Whitebox linux.

It's no problem however if you follow instructions on this page.

Yes, by default you have fedora, fedora-devel, fedora-updates, and fedora-updates-testing.

In test3 you had to also install a package called fedora-release. I'm not sure why it wasn't in the dependencies.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/20 04-October/msg02593.html

A tiny bit of substance in the form of FC3 release notes can be found at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/3/i386/os/RELEASE-NOTES-en.html

Here's your monthly, "Microsoft Sucks", reminder from slashdot.

http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.redhat.com/
http://www.suse.com/

It's more like adventure (game we ran on PDP-11 along with star trek, gravity version).

Admin work:
Windows 98% 'knowledge of good practice'
unix 90% good practice plus scripting skills
linux 50% good practice, plus scripting skills and 40% reading debug output, finding workarounds, snipe hunting
FC3 megaraid driver no longer works with the 2000 vintage PERC2 card in my server. The driver was rewritten and the old hardware abandoned. So much for a quick upgrade on the Dell 2450. My laptop turns the ethernet port off with no cable and on again when cable is attached. This totally flumoxes qpplications and the kernel. Solution is to disable the 'feature' until I can find someones fix. A nit, yes, but annoying as hell to have to figure out what the hell was going on.
The more I mess with linux, the more i find myself running stuff with debug enabled and digging through source. This is NOT admin work.

UH, YES...

Fedora.us was the original home of the Fedora project, which started out as 3rd party packages for Red Hat Linux. I wouldn't them 3rd Party any longer now that RH has publically stated the projects are integrated.

Also, Red Hat uses it. They just call them 'Development, Test, Updates'. Look here.

So actually it is you who is mistaken.

The Suprnova post was for an RC released Oct-29. See this redhat.com link. If you dowloaded the suprnova torrent, erase it and start again from the official torrent site. If you're not sure, md5sum your results and compare them to the official ones.

The Suprnova post was for an RC released Oct-29. See this redhat.com link. If you dowloaded the suprnova torrent, erase it and start again from the official torrent site. If you're not sure, md5sum your results and compare them to the official ones.

Check the MD5SUM at the official website here http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

Yeah, you should. It has been known for a while . :)

Anyhow, it's not difficult to upgrade to Firefox 1.0 once it's released, so you'll just have to do that.

Is this what you mean?

here

Uh, no .... Have a look here and tell me where it mentions stable/testing/unstable. The official Fedora package set contains exactly one version of each application. Third party packagers like Fedora.us and Livna.org have adopted the stable/testing/unstable split, but they are separate entities from Red Hat, and are not official Fedora packages.

I'll readily admit that I won't use Fedora without adding Fedora.us and Livna.org to my yum/apt sources, but you're either mistaken in your understanding of the Fedora community or spreading FUD.

Well, it would be NICE if they had some (#*$*&#$* release notes to go along with their release so we would get a CLUE as to what they changed!

Still not updated.. grrr

Already! Announces here.

Already! Announces here.