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How do you apt-get dist upgrade with Fedora? --Don't ask.

Wierd since, Fedora decided to copy Debian's mistaken policy of offering three software troves called stable,testing and unstable.

When are they going to learn, users want ONE package tree, with the ability to migrate between versions and patches.

SURE, you'll say. Fedora is just Red Hat's loss leader product to wedge people into RHEL.

But wait until someone who has a superior understanding of the marketplace comes along and evaporates RH's marketshare. Then they will wish they'd had a better view of the market than 'per-ass proprietary enterprise linux'.

Otherwise a solid release from the folks at RH. Release Notes.

The dissapointing thing is how often Fedora major releases come out. Makes the lives of those of us who have to keep up with it quite difficult. We just got used to FC2 and now FC3's out! :-)

Six months. It's always six months. You need to download them sooner, perhaps. ;)

OK, the simple place to start in assessing your claims was to google for "NPTL Scheduler Activations".

The first link that comes up has an interesting disclaimer at the top:

http://people.redhat.com/drepper/glibcthreads.html

I could continue my investigation by googling for "Ulrich Drepper", but I'm sure that would only lead to more interesting disclaimers.

Because Fedora Core 3 hasn't been released yet. If you go to the Fedora website, you'll see Fedora Core 3 Test 3 and Fedora Core 2. So...how do these people have Fedora Core 3, given that it doesn't exist?

Get Your Red Hot source Code! Only 24k for you

Want Red Hat source code? I can beat your price here.

Not exactly matching it, but one of the reasons people look at RHEL is because it does support vaguely VMS-like clustering out-of-box via distributed lock managers etc - see

http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/

So I've browsed the Red Hat FTP sites and they seem to have source RPM packages for each Red Hat Enterprise Linux release and its updates. My question is: isn't SUSE obligated to provide SRPMs of SUSE Linux Enterprise as well? Could someone please shed some light on this?

If you want something informative, there's the old reliable Distro Watch and if you want something funny, try:

• Funroll Loops
• Fedora fun
• [add your link here]

You should give Fedora Core a whirl. It's composed entirely of F/OSS software (nothing else makes it in to the Core distro, although non-F/OSS stuff can be added from 3rd party repositories), and is a technology preview of what will eventually make it into RHEL. We use Fedora on our desktops so we can get to know what will be coming down the pike for our servers which all run RHEL.

No one uses Apache 2 in production. I guess all those sites don't have a clue about security.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fedora

fedora
n.

A soft felt hat with a fairly low crown creased lengthwise and a brim that can be turned up or down.[After Fédora, a play by Victorien Sardou.]

A RedHat Linux distribution http://fedora.redhat.com/

Not trying to bash on linux ..

All of the major Linux vendors and distributors (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell [SUSE and Ximian] and Red Hat) have begun charging hefty premiums for must-have items such as technical service and support, product warranties and licensing indemnification.

Ballmer mentions licensing indemnification because (as he mentions elsewhere) Microsoft recently removed the liabiliy cap on their products. I'll leave it to you to decide how relevant this feature is for other platforms.

He also makes it sound as thought charging for technical support (et al) is a new development they've only just discovered since their last impartial analysis.

But in case you haven't seen done this before, let's look at a couple of product pricing and technical support models:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Support Options and Pricing
This chart shows subscription rates for various Red Hat server products.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Assisted Support Options
These pages describe prices of phone, e-mail, and direct support only. The prices do not include the actual cost of products from the Windows Server 2003 family.

Windows Server 2003 Pricing
Prices in USD for Windows Server 2003 products and CALs.

The offending fedora-redhat.com page includes the graphic http://www.redhat.com/g/chrome/logo_rh_home.png to lend an official air to their site. Why doesn't Redhat simply change that image to say something like: "Notice from Redhat: this is NOT an official Redhat page. The download on this page contain malicious code. DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT. Please consult www.redhat.com for official details." They could even just check the referrer so it'll only give the message when loaded from fedora-redhat.com.

I've also seen various phishing emails that use graphics from the websites of the banks they're masquerading as (Citibank, SunTrust). Simply changing these would cut down on scams and trojans like these.

Going to the site, The use of Redhat logo and Redhat name itself is in clear violation of the trademark guidelines. I am guessing it will not be too long before this site and domain is taken down.

My question is: can these a**holes get away with using the 'fedora' name instead?

ps. I am not affilated with RH in anyway.
Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved. Redhat is a registered trademark of Redhat (only). No soup for you.

MP3 is the only thing I know of that will play on every device and every computer, period

Not if you use Fedora Core. It is not included by default because of licensing and patent issues. Obviously you can go out and get it, but this just shows what an advantage free (as in beer) software can be, and what a PITA proprietary software can be.

It seems like it runs Linux as they are claiming that it will use the Global File System for clustered FS operations.. unless their Global File System is different.

free but not Free X11R6.5.1 server for Windows

Latest version released August 1, 2004 as freeware, but identical to previous 2002 commercial version...

old, buggy, no longer maintained, but Free, DirectX 6.1-based port of R6.5.1.

I'm half considering attempting to merge the diffs from that port into Xorg 6.8... I started the other day on a lark, told myself that if I got it to compile I'd create a sf.net project for it... Don't hold your breath though, coz I've got a billon other projects demanding my time just at the moment...

I was upgrading a laptop from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2 and encountered a problem with Fedora's support for the ATi Rage Mobility.

I remembered that with the install of Core 1 that text installation was needed as graphical installation would fail. Fortunately though, video would work after installation. Unfortunately, Core 2 wasn't so kind.

I grabbed my trusty Knoppix disc and copied the working video driver over and restarted X. Problem solved and with framebuffer support even.

It was much quicker than trying to find working drivers on-line, downloading, compiling, and then installing them. It may not have been the "correct" method, but it worked and is still working.

Here you go: http://www.redhat.com/fedora/

But you should note, the virus is entirely run by the users. There is no exploit, or automatic running code.

The user HAS to manually download and choose to run it.

Not necessarily, but it is a nice reason to move away from Microsoft Windows.

Linux Anyone?
SuSE (Novell)
Red Hat
Mandrake
GenToo
Slackware
And get others from Distrowatch

I didn't see a link in the announcement.

Release Notes

Not that much in the release notes have changed since Test2.

According to diff:
Kernel and e2fsprogs support for online growing of ext3 file systems.

C++ and TCL bindings are no longer contained in the compat-db package.
Applications requiring these bindings must be ported to the
currently-shipping DB library.

Fedora Core 2.92 Test 3 has switched from a static /dev/ directory to one
that is dynamically managed via udev. This allows device nodes to be
created on demand as drivers are loaded.

I know what you mean. I'm 15, I took a while to work it all out.

I read "Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours", which worked fairly well for me, and directed me towards the appropriate *nix utilities, as well as Windows.

If you haven't already tried it, have a go with Linux. Maybe start with Knoppix and then move to Mandrake or Fedora. And then, if you're feeling adventurous, try Gentoo.

Setting up with Linux taught me more about working with computers than anything else.

Experience is better than any book that I've read.

My employer produces a large-ish software package, with 10 years of history and a small, 2-3 people, development team. Since I joined we have made massive strides in automating the build process, include some unit tests, and a few smoke tests in an automated process.

Well, the effort paid off. Before we supported one version of HP/UX, and one release of Linux, now we support HP/UX (still a pain), and 4 looking at going to 6 Linux version/distributions and it is less work to produce a release now than ever just a year ago.

Tools like automake, autoconfig, libtool, cvstrac and of course cvs have made my life bearable.

Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi)....Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works.

Unless your time is worthless you would have been better off putting some money into a decent laptop with a wireless card from a vendor that doesn't solely provide windows-binary drivers and no specs as Broadcom does. Especially if linux was the goal of the hardware.

It's hard to buy hardware with no linux support from a linux-hostile vendor and be surprised when linux is hard to get working.

I've heard good things about IBM and Toshiba laptops, though I use an Apple myself (who unfortunately uses Broadcom in their newest wireless cards). Mandrake and Redhat have searchable databases if you want actual recommendations.

Your very wrong :) The subscription is for support for the server and clients (in certain instances), and its, as far as I know, unlimited for the entire subscription period? If something breaks or just doesn't even run how you'd like it to, you call Red Hat tell them whats up and they will take care of it. Red Hat's support is one of the best in the industry, up there with Dell and Veritas. Also, the cheapest RH server is $350 and is capable of doing everything that the cheapest Exchange server can do (typically goes for around $1200). You can run your RH server for nearly 3 and a half years before it cost as much as an Exchange Server. Keep in mind that the RH server has unlimited support for that whole time. If you call Microsoft 5 times over that 3.5 year period (assuming you go with the 5-call pack option they have to save money) because of an issue or two, it will cost you $1225, you've more then doubled the cost of your server. Keep in mind that with RH if you don't want the support after the first year, you don't have to resubscribe to keep your software or be able to install updates (although it becomes slightly more difficult). Also, exchange doesn't scale well. If you run a large shop, Red Hat will save you thousands, if not tens of thousands, a year. I could go on for much longer explaining reasons why it is cheaper, but I have to cut it short. Red Hat is cheaper comparing price to price with Microsoft, Microsoft admits this. That is why they try to claim other things like Exchange has a lower total cost of ownership, because Exchange admins typically get paid less and over time it saves you more, they use a number of other excuses also, most of which are highly arguable, oppinionated, and biased. Then again, what else is the marketing department for? Microsoft I don't believe has ever tried to argue that the cost of Red Hat vs. Exchange exlcuding other associated costs is cheaper. It just blatantly isn't. It is also very nice for sysadmins to just be able to call someone else whenever the shit hits the fan, or you just have a question or curiosity. Companies need support like that, they need to know that if something goes wrong and their own IT department can't fix it, that someone will. In this case, both MS and RH will help you, but RH in most cases is significantly cheaper.
Regards,
Steve

Some people can't handle the truth.

[...]

The products to be acquired are derived from the Netscape Enterprise Suite and include Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. Red Hat plans to start marketing these products as part of its Open Source Architecture over the next 6 to 12 months

[...]

"We believe the acquisition of these Netscape assets has tremendous long-term strategic value for the open source industry and Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers," said Matthew Szulik, Chairman and CEO at Red Hat.

[...]

[...]

The products to be acquired are derived from the Netscape Enterprise Suite and include Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. Red Hat plans to start marketing these products as part of its Open Source Architecture over the next 6 to 12 months

[...]

"We believe the acquisition of these Netscape assets has tremendous long-term strategic value for the open source industry and Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers," said Matthew Szulik, Chairman and CEO at Red Hat.

[...]

Mods: Don't mod me up if you feel the urge to, this is the 3rd time I've said this.

It's Red Hat's policy to open source everything they have. This also is true for their patents which are able to be freely used without fear of infringement by any free software project.
Regards,
Steve

Everything Red Hat has, does, or buys becomes open source. This is equally true for their patents (which are aquired for defensive reasons). Here is their patent policy. In short, it states that any patents they hold may be used by any free software project without fear of any infringement.
Regards,
Steve

Then this is definitly for you. Red Hat, as with all things, will open source this. A lot of people say bad things about Red Hat, but they do alot for the community, they just don't try to take the spotlight. I mean how cool is their patent policy? Any patent they get ( which is always for defensive purposes) can be used by any free software project without worries.
Regards,
Steve

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

Not only does Red Hat open source *everything* they make, but they also allow any patents that they have to be freely used by any open source project free of royalties or any kind of legal penalties or infringments. Read their patent policy here. They come right out and say how they don't like patents and they have made several attempts (and continue to do so) to fix the patent situation in the US. They are also active in this fight in Europe and on a petition. They are honest and say that the reality is however we must have a few patents for defensive purposes, but to avoid hindering innovation, if your a free software project you may use it without anything to worry about. Now I personally think that rocks, especially considering all of the work they do and innovations they put into linux everyday. Look around sometime at projects like gnome (or better yet, just go to Fedora people under blogs.redhat.com) and see all the stuff they do. Whats even cooler is that they do all this without ever trying to hog the spotlight.
Regards,
Steve

How does a new user stand a chance installing a spanking new Debian/GNOME/Evolution desktop?

Debian is great and all, for servers, and hard-core advanced users, but why in the HELL would a "new user" be using Debian?!?!

I would recommend new users that want Gnome 2.8 and Evolution 2.0 wait for Fedora Core 3 to be released, or if they are daring, try the test release.

How does a new user stand a chance installing a spanking new Debian/GNOME/Evolution desktop?

Debian is great and all, for servers, and hard-core advanced users, but why in the HELL would a "new user" be using Debian?!?!

I would recommend new users that want Gnome 2.8 and Evolution 2.0 wait for Fedora Core 3 to be released, or if they are daring, try the test release.

Yes, IMO the short supply of qualified linux admins is the real problem. This underscores the need for a widely recognized certification in linux. I deride MCSE's as McSoftware Engineers, but that certificate does require a certain level of competance with that given software: a company hiring an MSCE guy can be assured that he can do basic MSCE stuff with Windows. To MS's credit, this is a good thing. I realize that there are linux certifications available (e.g. http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/courses/, http://www.suse.com/us/business/services/training/ certification/index.html, http://www.lpi.org/), and that's great. Businesses should be aware of this, and should require some level of certification in linux--otherwise, it's like the wild west.

Heh for a good time read this. Red Hat has done some things that may have angered a few for one reason or another, but I'm loving them more and more everyday.
Regards,
Steve

If we are going to post Suns blogs shouldn't we post the Red Hat exec's Blog defending against Sun?

To sum up, clearcase is very good but very expensive. I have been searching for a version control system for my private use, and I have not found anything where branching, merging and labeling is as easy as in clearcase (if possible at all!).

Granted I have used clearcase for years now and know it quite well. But many of the other version control system at best provides shadows of what I want and expect a version control system to do. The last system i looked into was monotone and as far as I can see it only supports merging from the head (LATEST in clearcase). When it cannot merge from an non-head element it is useless for me.

What I really, really, really want to do is the following:

Put the Linux kernel source into version control. The main, "official" version from Linus I would put on a branch named "linus". Then I would subbranch this with other branches, for instance "fedora" for the kernel provided from Fedora, "planetccrma" for the kernel provided by Planet CCRMA, and probably some other branches for things like swsusp.

When checking in a new official kernel I want to attach a label, say "LINUX_2_6_9". I then want to be able to use this label as a reference when merging. The swsusp project is fully up to date with regards to kernel versions, but say that the last patch from then only was for kernel version 2.6.5. I then want to be able to subbranch the swsusp branch with "myswsusp" and try to merge from LINUX_2_6_9. Of course the version control system should find out which version is the common parent, remember if any merges has been done previously and assist as much as possible in a 3-way merge.

If any of you readers have a suggestion for a free system capable of such a scenario, please make yourself heard. I know I have looked into Arch a very long time ago, I guess I will look into it again now.

• Matthew J. Szulik
• Jack Messman
• François Bancilhon
• Stuart F. Cohen

So basically you're saying that FC is useless for enterprise usage, aren't you? Have you read their "about" thing on the FC site?

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.

FC is a general purpose linux distro, great for desktop and great for enterprise (although I'm a gentoo boy).

Of course it will never be widely used on a normal production environment, as it happens with gentoo, where software updates should only be done to fix bugs, and major software update (eg, an upgrade) should be made from time to time.

You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.

Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.

Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.

For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.

A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.

You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.

Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.

And for the record, here are some large companies and sites heavily using mod_perl.

Want more?

You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.

Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.

Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.

For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.

A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.

You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.

Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.

And for the record, here are some large companies and sites heavily using mod_perl.

Want more?

Things licensed as Open Source do better on "just the facts" vs hype. Maybe it's because their audiences would take them to task if they did otherwise, but description of things such as GCC, Wikipedia , the Linux kernel, the GIMP, to name just a few, are completely factual. Not entirely free of marketing but tolerable are the Linux site's description of Linux, OpenSSH, bzip2, Project Gutenberg, and an XWindows organization X.org.

Particularly note Wikipedia and Google. The description of Wikipedia was made and chosen by the users. I can't think of a better testament that what users really want is just the facts. And Google understood that the last thing a person wants to do when anxious to find something quick is be forced to wait for a bunch of pointless graphics and generic ads to load. Really aggravating when on dial-up. Before Google, I got to where I knew just when to hit the stop button when loading Yahoo's main search page so I'd get the text input line and search button and miss all the extra crap they used to put on their main page.

Of course open source isn't totally above marketing. FreeBSD, Mozilla Firefox, KDE, Apache, OpenOffice all lay it on. They can point to all kinds of statistics to justify their hype, but the hype is still irritating when it catches my attention. These are easy to accept in spite of the marketspeak because I've heard from elsewhere that they're good.

Bad though some of those are, Microsoft is worse. Maybe what MS does should be called extreme marketing? In a few moments of searching, I was unable to find even a badly overblown description of just what Windows XP or MS Office is and during the search was wading through hype about MS's latest whatever: "Try the new digital music experience from Microsoft. You'll love it!"

As for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I will spend a little time trying not to do that, but when it does happen I hope it clues the promoters in to realizing they made the waters too murky. Accepting something in spite of murk is not the way to persuade them to clean up. I like to tell them about it too. You never know when commentary might actually be heeded. I'm sorry if a good thing gets short shrift, but when time is limited, books will be judged by covers. People are often asked to try to word emails so spam filters will pass them. I feel I'm not asking too much of marketing to do the analogous.

uummm.....http://fedora.redhat.com/
Front page news.

GCC 3.4.x - Precompiled Headers (Speed up) and C++ improvements (and more coming)
Kernel 2.6.8
KDE 3.3 - which includes a much improved KDE PIM groupwhere packages.
X.org x11 6.8 - with translucency & Drop shadows
GNOME 2.8 - New Admin stuff and a lot of other features
Evolution 2.0 - Offline IMAP & WebCal support
SELinux
IIIMF - Standardized Asian character input
Wow!. Torrents are available

Solution: Take your business (and your balls) away from Microsoft.