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this is certainly not all you'll need, but will provide a starting point.

GCJ Eclipse

Dells work-around is to sell the machine without a OS installed.

Are these machines being excluded because they are "workstations" and supposedly not desktops? Isn't the low end Precision 360n close enough to a "desktop" to qualify? It starts at $849 uses the Intel 875P chipset (Pentium 4). The only thing about this model is you're forced to choose a "workstation" graphics card (Quadro or FireGL).

So in other words: A quick "/sbin/modprobe pcspkr" will fix the problem on the fly.

bug 124339 and bug 123689

So in other words: A quick "/sbin/modprobe pcspkr" will fix the problem on the fly.

bug 124339 and bug 123689

Sometimes up2date will crash because it is waiting for - ev - er for updates from the main Red Hat server, which, like most default-configuration servers, gets pummeled with requests. It is a better idea to use the mirrors, which are often much faster and more reliable.

How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box

How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box

Fedora Core is intended for enthusiasts, hobbiests and developers, and should not ever be used in a production environment. If you require a solution which is intended for production environment I recommend contacting Red Hat sales to inquire about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a Red Hat Network subscription. Fedora Core is a development platform which is bleeding edge, and tracks technology advances. It is not ever intended to be used in business production environments.

I was rather unimpressed with Fedora and felt justified in my switch to Gentoo when encountering this horrible bug with fedora and parted upon installing it on my wife's machine. The first time I've ever had Linux futz up a Windows installation. How could they be so careless.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Retail Price $199 (U.S.)

Microsoft Windows XP Professional - Retail Price $299 (U.S.)

RedHat WS Basic - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)

RedHat WS Standard - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)

Suse Personal - Retail Price $29 (U.S.)

Suse Professional - Retail Price $89 (U.S.) And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.

Usability is really defined by what you intend to use the sytem for. As a common system, it is probably missing some of the functionality you would find on a MS Win32 system. For most of the common desktop functions, it has most of the features. Where Linuz is suffering is the massive vendor support that MS Win32 systems have. This will change as Linux gains acceptance (recall the days where applications only ran on UNIX systems and eventually vendors started to add MS Win32 support). Drivers also suffer a similar fate.

As for the administrator cost, the TCO is debatable. The company I work for pays basically the same rates for administrators on either platform. This also applies to any of my previous employers (although skills with MS Exchange and Active Directory seem to demand higher prices than the equivilent skilled workers on UNIX systems).

Mainly wanted to back up your post.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Retail Price $199 (U.S.)

Microsoft Windows XP Professional - Retail Price $299 (U.S.)

RedHat WS Basic - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)

RedHat WS Standard - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)

Suse Personal - Retail Price $29 (U.S.)

Suse Professional - Retail Price $89 (U.S.) And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.

Usability is really defined by what you intend to use the sytem for. As a common system, it is probably missing some of the functionality you would find on a MS Win32 system. For most of the common desktop functions, it has most of the features. Where Linuz is suffering is the massive vendor support that MS Win32 systems have. This will change as Linux gains acceptance (recall the days where applications only ran on UNIX systems and eventually vendors started to add MS Win32 support). Drivers also suffer a similar fate.

As for the administrator cost, the TCO is debatable. The company I work for pays basically the same rates for administrators on either platform. This also applies to any of my previous employers (although skills with MS Exchange and Active Directory seem to demand higher prices than the equivilent skilled workers on UNIX systems).

Mainly wanted to back up your post.

A post from Stuart Chesire (Apple) on including Rendezvous in Fedora here.

but I keep reading these posts where people state they would gladly pay $38 for a copy of windows + office with less functionality. As some other poster mentioned, your $38 does not scale to their $38 (yearly mean income of Thailand is ~$2000 source)
Anyway, what I don't get is why would you want to pay $38 for Windows when really buying a linux distro is more expensive?
Now I know that it's bundled with tons of software and you can download Linux for free, don't get me wrong, but I think the end user doesn't have that much trust in that, and would rather buy a copy, especially if it says "support included" on the box. I know that these are the same people that just click on everything they see in IE but downloading and installing a complete operating system they don't know is frightening to them, and you can't blame them for that. Yes I know the installers have been getting better, but to a linux newbie a lot of things that are asked during the install are still power options. Take for instance your ISP connection. Well, the installer kindly offers you a few options: PPPoE, DHCP (including MAC spoofing) and whatnot. I wouldn't blame any newbie for not knowing this (hell, I don't even think half of /. knows exactly what these acronyms stand for), much less let them configure it properly.
Back to topic: I don't mind shelling out some $$$ for an operating system (I bought SuSe, now use Debian though), but I think the main point is that Microsoft's products are just blatantly overpriced (along with a slew of other big software packages eg. Adobe Photoshop). I think if they lowered the price to a more reasonable level, a lot more people would be willing to stop pirating and start paying. What they'll lack in revenue for the high price will be easily compensated by the sheer volume of sold licences. Just my thoughts though.

Red Hat's HA clustering software is also GPL but it doesn't run on other distros (and is not supported by Red Hat on other distros).

Of course Red Hat doesn't support other distros, but what makes you think the clustering software doesn't work on them? All the bits and pieces are available for download. If you find any "if (distro != RH) exit()" code in the fully GPL'd cluster toolchain, please feel free to remove them. There's no secret sauce to RHEL, it's all open source and everyone is free to copy and modify the code.

There's already one distro that includes the new GPL'ed GFS filesystem out as of today, Lineox. And Red Hat will be working to get GFS up to spec for inclusion in the official Linux kernel according to posts made to the kernel mailing list.

The code itself is open source, that is true, but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription [is] required"

This only refers to that point that Red Hat is not interested in selling to you unless you have a RHEL subscription. That $2,200 gets you GFS up and running on your RHEL cluster in a turnkey fashion, and it gives you the option to purchase further 24/7 one-hour response support contracts. You're free to assemble it all into a working system by yourself if you want.

Not to YOU of course, because you have no need for such things.

Remember, it's Free Software. That means you can pay Red Hat for it and get their support. Don't want that, fine. Now the source is available, so you can download and compile it yourself, or print it out and wipe your ass with it. Or maybe your favorite distro will download it, package it, enhance it, and include it in their next release.

SRPM's are availible, feel free to compile it on your system.

Or you can download the SRPM's here

Right here
Take a look and have some fun.

Just because its opensource doesn't mean you can download it for free.

It would be a little silly to sell a product when you distribute the source for it on your website.

I also haven't seen the problems with IMAP that I had with 1.4.5 in a long time. Many thanks to Ximian for fixing this.

For Fedora Core 2 users, get it via yum from Dave Malcolm's repo.

I use shapecfg to keep my bittorrent client from eating all of my upstream.

linky

It's not perfect, but it's easier (for me at least) than figuring out how to make my gateway prioritize traffic queues. (link for that?)

BUT....all these months later I have not found a different job as a Linux admin. I never see job listings asking for people who have an RHCE. What I see are job listings wanting people with 3-5 years Linux experience with [fill in the blank - Apache, sendmail, bind, etc.] These listings MIGHT say "RHCE preferred" if it even mentions a certification at all.

Well, they do provide trainig. They just don't give out certificates on those. :)

Get real!

If someone is worth their salt then skills learnt with one distribution will be transferrable to another. The days of rote memorisation being sufficient for passing are pretty much gone - it'd even be a challenge to pass a MS exam with zero understanding of what you had memorised. The days of any employer (or even client) being impressed solely by a certificate are also (thankfully) passed. Any cert is just another fibre in a CV bow that indicates a minimum achievment, which should be strenthened by experience in the field

Besides - last I heard Redhat pretty much followed the few standards that exist such as the FHS.

It's not as if redhat is the only distribution to have tools that it developed for itself

I have recently begun to work on it full time. I started the project and took care of the paperwork to incorporate and become tax-free. The look of the site is the work of one of our very kind volunteers. All the worthy success in what we do is the work of volunteers. There is a list, where you can track the progress of many groups and may find that there are some NC schools using thin-client labs. I don't know if any are rural vs. in the Triangle, but I do know that the rural schools are the one's that could benefit the most.

Don't be discouraged by existing contracts. If the school is not too crowded, it may just benefit from another lab. If you drum up the publicity, get a sponsor, and involve the Principal and the PTA, you can get a server donated and the clients and cabling to boot. If schools are not reachable, start with your Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, or other community center. You are the only limit.

SuSE will be at higher grounds if thay fully support personal distribution and it will take away some many users of (RH) Fedora

An RSS feed - very neat. I already check the FootNotes feed, now I have more GNOME goodies in my RSS Panel :-)
As for trying out gnome, the easiest way is to grab Fedora which has GNOME 2.6 on the CDs.
It's possible, but slow, to trawl through the sources at ftp.gnome.org, downloading all the necessary files. However, if you can find binary packages for your distro of choice then I'd go for them.

Where is my click and drool install security updates button?

Here.

Simple tray update notification applet should be insanely simple to make for Debian as well if it really doesn't have one.

• One good reason to think that they can do this right is their aquisition of the creators of RAV Anti-Virus last year. RAV was a great multiplatform (including Linux) Anti-Virus tool. Best configuration: external SMTP (MTA) using Postfix/Qmail with RAV Anti-Virus acting as a Gateway for internal-only Exchange 2000 server. I don't think that will be a config option with MSFT's "new" product, but whatever they got would surely be worth looking at.

• Then, of course, drop Windows and switch to Linux (SUSE, RedHat, or Xandros are places I'd recommend taking a look).

The question is, when will this patch show up on other distributions. People are sometimes not able to compile a vanilla kernel or a vanilla kernel can cause headache, e.g. SuSE 9.1 formats your filesystem with reiserfs and ACLs, but a vanilla kernel might not support this backported ACL feature.

Seen the kernel release from this point of view means, that the sistributions should hurry up to provide fixed kernel packages for their users.

...quite easily. Examine Red Hat's errata list for AS3, then look at OpenBSD's errata. I assume that you will see a rather conspicuous difference in the quantity of changes?

Granted, this list is not entirely fair, as many ports and packages have bug fixes, which would push up OpenBSD's count. However, OpenBSD includes a great deal in the base distribution (SSH, Apache, Sendmail, etc.) that comprises what they assert to be audited, secure code.

To me, the ability to deploy a server and then spend minimal effort with security patches is more important than SMP. YMMV.

Also, I remember the last company to say they would keep a product free, just fill out this form.

It's a subscription at a different price. Time vs. Money.

Looks like another blunder by shitdots editors. This was already seen on newsforge here
and also on redat for some reason right here

1) XFCE is a desktop environment not an XFree86 replacement. And, yes, Fedora still ships Gnome and KDE.

Fedora Core 2 includes Xfce 4, a lightweight desktop environment based on GTK+ version 2.

2) Fedora has switched to X.org from XFree86

Users new to the X.org X11 implementation should take note of a few differences between it and the XFree86.org X11 implementation which shipped in previous Red Hat operating systems.

quotes from http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/

And even with the non-commercial offerings... Well, Fedora Legacy is still providing updates for Red Hat Linux 7.3, and I'm confident there'll be no problems finding updates for Fedora Core 1 for at least another three years.

I agree that Red Hat did a shocking job of explaning what was happening when they changed their product line and started Fedora, though.

Danny.

I have always felt that Linux is a nice operating system (for hobbyists and geeks), but there are some areas where it is seriously lacking, especially when compared to its main competitor, Microsoft Windows.

* File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large
amounts of files available to third parties. Even early versions of Windows
automatically detected and made available all directories thanks to the built in
NetBIOS-powered file sharing support. But Microsoft has realized that this
technology is inherently limited and has added even better file sharing support
to its Windows XP operating system. Universal Plug and Play will
make it possible to literally access any file, from any device! I think
universal file sharing support needs to be built into the Linux kernel soon.

* Intelligent agents. With innovations like Clippy, the talking paperclip and Microsoft Bob, Microsoft has always tried to make life easier
for its customers. With Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft has built a framework for developers to create even smarter agents. Especially popular agents include "Sircam", which automatically asks the users' friends for advice
on files he is working on and the "Hybris" agent, which is a self-replicating
copy of a humorous take on "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves" (the real story!).
Microsoft is working on expanding this P2P technology to its web servers. This
project is still in the beta stage, thus the name "Code Red". The next versions
will be called "Code Yellow" and "Code Green".

* Version numbers. Linux has real naming problems. What's the difference
between a 2.4.19 and a 2.2.17 kernel anyway? And what's with those odd and even
numbers? Microsoft has always had clear and sophisticated naming/versioning
policies. For example, Windows 95 was named Windows 95 because it was released
in 1995. Windows 98 was released three years later, and so on. Windows XP
brought a whole new "experience" to the user, therefore the name. I suggest that
the next Linux kernel releases be called Linux 03, Linux 04, Linux 04.5 (OSR1),
Linux 04.7B (OSR2 SP4 OEM), Linux 2005 and Linux VD (Valentine's Day edition).
Furthermore, remember how Microsoft named every upcoming version of Windows
after some Egyptian city? Cairo, Chicago and so on. I think that the development
kernels should be named after Spanish cities to celebrate Linux' Spanish
origins. Linux Milano or Linux Rome anyone?

* Multi-User Support. This has always been one of Microsoft's strong sides,
especially in the Windows 95/98 variants, where passwords were completely
unnecessary. Microsoft has made the right decision by not bothering the user
with a distinction between "normal" and "root" users too much -- practice has
shown that average users can be trusted to act responsibly and in full awareness
of the potential consequences of their actions. After all, if your operating
system doesn't trust you, why should you trust it? (To be fair, Linux is making
some progress here with the Lindows distribution, where users are always running as root.)

With Windows XP, Microsoft has again improved multi-user support. Not only
does Windows XP come with a larg

He shouldn't. That's up to the people who package and/or sell the OS. Using "Linux" to refer to a UNIX-style system built with the Linux kernel, GNU tools, etc. has caught on. It may not be "proper", but it's certainly not illegal. In other words: who cares?

A very large number of Gnome 2.x users are on RH/Fedora based setups, where the menu editor still doesn't work (rh 81215 and a dozen other bugs on the same subject).

In a modern distro, such as Mandrake 10, SuSE 9.1 or Fedora Core 2 you will be SHOCKED how easy it is. You will be flamming people for spreading lies about Linux. Its true. The GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.2 GUI's are so easy to use you will wonder how you got on without them!

So, if you haven't tried Linux or are using an old version, get one of these distros right away.

Just avoid distros like Debian or Slackware, they are optimized for the geek sector, and thats why there is a mis-conception, because there are too many people trying the wrong version of Linux!

I am typing this from Fedora Core 2, and my experience with it is incredible. Stable, Fast, Easy, FUN.

Download fedora here
Go here to learn how to install cool stuff such as Flash, Java, MP3, etc

jffs2 is much more conscious about write behavior, so I'd strongly recommend it for anything on a flash filesystem.

Anyway, the main reason compact flash is rather slow is simply the fact that few people need high throughput. There are cards these days that sustain a throughput of 15M/s, but they're only meant for high-end cameras. While flash is slower than RAM, it's still considerably faster than mechanical devices, so I'd expect this number to go higher.

This is nothing new for RedHat.

RPM has been broken for years. It will regularly corrupt its own databases and then hang when trying to install packages, and its own rebuild options will hang too. The problem surfaced in RedHat 6, it's still there in Broken in FC1. Some releases are better than others; when I was running RedHat 7 it would crap on itself weekly, whereas FC1 mostly works in my experience.

RedHat knew about the problem well before RH7 and RH8, but have continued to make major releases with broken RPM anyway. Their answer is that the user should just drop to the command line, kill the hung processes, blow away the RPM databases and rebuild them.

Try explaining that to a newbie who just wants to install a piece of software he's downloaded.

Me, I got sick of going through the kill; rm -rf; rebuild process what seemed like practically every time I installed or upgraded something, so I moved my servers to Gentoo.

This is nothing new for RedHat.

RPM has been broken for years. It will regularly corrupt its own databases and then hang when trying to install packages, and its own rebuild options will hang too. The problem surfaced in RedHat 6, it's still there in Broken in FC1. Some releases are better than others; when I was running RedHat 7 it would crap on itself weekly, whereas FC1 mostly works in my experience.

RedHat knew about the problem well before RH7 and RH8, but have continued to make major releases with broken RPM anyway. Their answer is that the user should just drop to the command line, kill the hung processes, blow away the RPM databases and rebuild them.

Try explaining that to a newbie who just wants to install a piece of software he's downloaded.

Me, I got sick of going through the kill; rm -rf; rebuild process what seemed like practically every time I installed or upgraded something, so I moved my servers to Gentoo.

At a minimum they should have made the user aware of potential problems at the beginning of installation.
They did.

the problem was known to be a 2.6 problem since December
The bug was opened in February. The comment you are refering to was posted on the day of the release.

the FC2 dev's lame excuse of "didn't happen on our machines".
If you can't reproduce a problem, you cannot fix it. So that is certainly no lame excuse. If you carefully read Comment number 31 you will see, that they did try to fix the problem. And without any accurate bug report, and without a computer to test it on, they couldn't do any better than they did.

They may have belived the problem would only happen if the partition table was already incorrect before installing Fedora. And at that time they didn't know that some Windows installations was actually running with such an incorrect partition table.

A few computers unable to dual boot is not reason enough to hold back the distribution. I run Fedora Core 1 on seven computers, none of those have Windows installed. (I have my own reasons for not upgrading yet, but that has nothing to do with bugs or anything). If the timing hadn't been a bit unfortunate for me, I would probably have started upgrading my machines to Fedora Core 2 as soon as I had completed the download. In that case I would not have liked it to be delayed because of some bug in a Windows version that a few people wanted to dual boot with.

It's too bad RedHat won't do something similar. They have pitifully short product lifecycles.

• The release notes were not mentioned at all in the product announcement
• The release notes do not mention this issue anywhere

• The release notes were not mentioned at all in the product announcement
• The release notes do not mention this issue anywhere

Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro.

*I* have always recommended against RH/Fedora. However, there are plenty of *other* people who are touting it, and thus there will continue to be people unfortunate enough to try Fedora.

At any rate, while I agree that in practice Fedora is nothing more than RHEL Beta, *they* promote it otherwise. The Fedora objectives include "emphasiz[ing] usability and a 'just works' philosophy" and "produc[ing] robust releases."

Fedora gets the abuse because they knew about the problem and chose to let it sit. If it's a kernel problem, that information should have been passed on to the kernel developers. But virtually no buzz about this was made until after the Fedora release. If other distro maintainers knew of the problem as well, then shame on them, but we *know* Fedora dropped the ball.

Stick with FC1, which I have no complaints about whatsoever.