Slashdot Mirror

RedHat is showing itself to be a less reliable distribution vendor
How? FC1 had a snag with my soundcard but thats cause my motherboard came out the same month as FC1 so I had to use alsa drivers.

by canning one distribution (free RedHat) and unleashing the unstable Fedora betas
This is a troll, everyone knows by now what happened, FC1 had twice as much testing as any previous red hat release except enterprise.(check release times) "unstable betas" Think about that for a second would you?

Fedora betas which one day will become a product which you must pay for.
Mind posting a link please? Didn't think so.
I've got a link for you here though. Take a look at the three NON objectives peticularly:
1. Slow rate of change.
2. Enabling commercial support, particularly Service Level Agreements.
3. Being a dumping ground for unmaintained or poorly designed software.

Here you can read complete story about 4KSTACKS


Maybe you got it to set up now but if you read posts you can see what I
talked about

The schedule is public and easy to find.

One annoying thing with Cygwin is that they expect you to install it from the Internet, which can be slow depending on your connection. They don't tell you how to install it from a CD, but it is possible. I finally found out how to do it (bookmark this link -- for me it was very hard to find, even with Google! :). After discovering how to do this life is much more pleasant.

There's a good book on the auto[blah] part of that - it's GNU Autoconf, Automake, and LibTool.

It gives a good overview, as well as some extras - i.e., chapter 21 - "Writing Portable Bourne Shell".

It really depends on your location, so I think tools are irrelevant:
Jobs for VB programmers , mostly Northeast and Southwest, as you can see
RedHat is hiring Linux developers in Mumbai and Bangalore

So depending on where you live you should update your skill set.

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.

Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is

If you can tell me where the errata pages are for older versions I'll shit a brick, 'cause they don't seem to be indexed by the search engine and if they're there, they're buried somewhere.

Well, let's see.... At the very end of Red Hat's Errata Page you will see the following text:

Advisories for unsupported products

Errata that have been previously released for unsupported and End of Life Products are also available.

In that text, there is a link to this URL:
http://www.redhat.com/security/archives.html

So get to shittin.....

If you can tell me where the errata pages are for older versions I'll shit a brick, 'cause they don't seem to be indexed by the search engine and if they're there, they're buried somewhere.

Well, let's see.... At the very end of Red Hat's Errata Page you will see the following text:

Advisories for unsupported products

Errata that have been previously released for unsupported and End of Life Products are also available.

In that text, there is a link to this URL:
http://www.redhat.com/security/archives.html

So get to shittin.....

Unfortunately, these changes are not a part of the 3.4.0 release of GCC/GCJ and will only be available from 3.5.0 (or 4.0.0, as the case might be).

You can get that here:

Natively Compiled Eclipse

Newt is a toolkit for making text mode user interfaces. It has C, TCL, python and perl bindings.

It's a RedHat thing but it's apparently become popular (available on Debian, FreeBSD, well anything that has ncurses). It supports UTF-8 which is nice.

That'd sort of be your toolkit (ala GTK). So you're halfway there.

How about Red Hat Linux WS? Or even Fedora, remember?

- Do I invalidate my license by running a non shipped kernel?

- When will they ship 2.6?

However, the support people will also not be able to help you with those. At the moment 2.6 is a good kernel, but it's still too rough around the edges to give to paying customers. After all, they pay for something they know that works, not for something that'll most likely work. Once 2.6 works for sure it's a good time to start shipping it as a supported product, not before that.

This is my personal opinion. Other people may disagree. With sufficient courage, they may even run 2.6 on their server. Isn't open source beautiful?

RedHat explain it here, and as a paying user of RHES3.0 in an enterprise environment, I think this is a good approach for them to have. The features they have left out feel to me to be the more risky sounding things that aren't essential like the new IO sub-system and scheduler tuning, while the things they have taken seem to be more applicable to the apps they may expect users to run e.g. O(1) scheduler, native POSIX library and Huge TLBFS

Interestingly on their page they also list 2.6 as not having Hyperthreading support, while their 2.4 does.

My company sells product to large enterprises, and most of them run one of the RedHat expensive-support options. We've seen few instances of other commercial or custom distributions.

For a list of the 2.6 features that have and have not been back-ported into 2.4 for the current RH Enterprise Linux release, look here.

Try the mailing lists.

6) Updates--the red hat subscription system seemed nice. But registration, etc, paying for services, isnt what people expect to see when using a free system.

That message is a bug - you don't need to register to use up2date in Fedora.
If you don't like up2date, try yum instead. (run "yum list updates")

Why don't you read that thread a little more thoroughly, especially this reply.

The responses in that thread point out that this isn't just a RedHat thing. It's also hardly the fault of kernel developers if binary-only drivers don't work due to enhancements in new kernel versions.. they're not going to stop making things work better just because it breaks something they're not allowed to fix.

There have been Windows updates that have broken drivers too... the solution is for the driver manufacturer to fix their code (or allow other people to fix it for them), not for the OS to hold back progress.

I hope the distros and vendors are watching this one!

As is evident in this thread among others, over at the RedHat/Fedora camp, it appears they couldn't care less about their users, let alone usability. There are some seriously arrogant replies here to a fairly fundamental issue for most users.

To summarise: there's a kernel change emminent that breaks all binary-compiled drivers. Fedora's attitude is that it's too good a change to even allow the option to be included in the kernel source. So users who know what they're doing, and want to change this 4k-Stacks option so they can use the binary drivers, have been given a good hearty "stuff you!" from the developers. It's the reason I migrated to Mandrake, and may yet consider switching back to Windows.

Way to go, "open" source.

It's a little late for the buffer overflow to be hitting Slashdot's Apache news. The fix was known and published back in December 2003.

Red Hat backported the fix into their custom 1.3.27 version in this errata, released 12/18:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2003-405.html

You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

This sounds like a good time to troll for votes for my Fedora Security Enhancement Bug. Without this enhancement, it's near impossible to verify a Fedora system from read-only media.

I don't know who to bother about getting this implemented but I assume someone at RH would have to adopt it. A few votes might get it recognized.

since Microsoft's Windows Update page is getting really bogged down you can download the patches from this Mirror.

Ben

Even better, how about some little thing built into the OS which goes and fetches the patches automagically, and asks if you want to install them. Then the user doesn't have to do anything except click "install" when prompted. I wonder when someone will invent that.

• Peanut Linux sounds pretty good
• Damn Small Linux
  This is a live linux distribution which means that it runs off the CD. It's supposed to be a little difficult to install try following these directions:

  To install Damn Small Linux to the HD...
  From the damn small desktop (no pun intended) ...
  Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to SU root outside X.
  Type "dsl-hdinstall" (a mod off Knoppix's knx-hdinstall)...
  Follow the prompts... (cfdisk, etc.......)
  I've done it & tested it -- works. --bosspacman

• Basic Linux might work but it might be difficult if you don't know linux very well.
• I hear RedHat's 6.0 distro is light weight too if you can find it.

But, why can't they provide an SRPM which has the pine source & the diffs that they may want to add & install from source?

Isn't that kind of pointless? There are plenty of people who have pine s/rpms for RedHat and/or Fedora, does it really matter if it's an "official" one?

See, it's on Red Hat's servers! Good enough?

First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.

Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet,
and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.isprime.com as one of the EFNet servers.

If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here.

About Lunix

Lunix is an operating system. An operating system is the basic

• an unprecedented level of (MS-related) virus alerts, or
• the fact that these viruses only affect one line of products from one manufacturer, or
• the fact that the press gives no coverage of platforms and applications that are immune?

Yes, OS X, BSD, and the various Linux distributions (i.e. Debian, Mandrake, SUSE, or RedHat ). All easy to install, all easy to maintain, all easy to use. OS X comes pre-installed by the OEM and an increasing number of Linux distros are, too.

Furthermore, the layered structure of the OSes and separation of privileges means that these are resistent to future viruses as well as immune to those available today. Yes, apologists and astroturfers like to ignore that as well as blame users. But even if, and that's a big if, market share has more effect than design flaws, it will take quite some time for the virus activity to shift and during that time, businesses and users have come out ahead. Right now, die hard ideologs who refuse to drop a defective product are costing billions of dollars per quarter, a not insignificant number when you think how many jobs could be kept rather than downsized or outsourced in these increasingly bad economic times for the U.S.

How about a little focus? The title should have been "An Unprecedented level of MS Virus Alerts" and steer users off of the hamster wheel. From easy to hard, these are just a few of the many options:

Can *can* download RH Enterprise for free. Have a look at their website sometime.

Oh? Where at?.

lspci

/proc/pci

cat /proc/pci

/etc/lilo.conf

/boot/vmlinuz.old

lspci

/proc/pci

cat /proc/pci

/etc/lilo.conf

/boot/vmlinuz.old

It's not like you can go buy a box set with RHEL WS in it for less than $100 or anything...

How many people whining have even really looked at the options instead of just repeating what they read on Slashdot.

For example, KMail crashes. Constantly. I unload and reload KDE, it works. One time. Then crashes. Constantly.

Sounds like it might be a prelink issue. Have you checked bugzilla?

Here's another one: yum -y update frequently fails to find dependencies, and I haven't installed a single RPM except via yum.

Irrelevant unless you mention what yum repos you are using.

abrupt license changes

Yeah, announced just over a year in advance...

I spoke with RedHat several months ago about this issue and here's the deal. You are free to place RHEL on as many machines as you'd like without even violating your l license.

I don't think that this is correct... I hope you got it in writing from your RH contact ;)

From the RHEL FAQ on the RH site, Questions #5 and #6:

Q [#5]: How are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux products delivered, in terms of services and prices?

A: The basic delivery model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is unchanged from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are sold on an annual subscription basis. As mentioned above, under the terms of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage agreement, a subscription is required for every system on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed.[...] (emphasis mine)

Q [#6]:You mentioned licensing - what does this mean? I thought Linux was free.

A: Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time.[...]

5) (...)As mentioned above, under the terms of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage agreement, a subscription is required for every system on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed.(...)

6) Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time (...)

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/

although you can technically share the software the reasonable way to do so is prohibited . . .read the actual license at here

Where can I download the ISO images of the real RHEL Linux?

Q: You mentioned licensing - what does this mean? I thought Linux was free.

A: Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time. However, Red Hat does not provide free access to the binaries . . . .

Read the EULA. It's all there.

You link to the wrong license agreement. RedHat uses the nice license for the software, and the nasty license for the support contract. Of course, RedHat will only sell you the software with a support contract, so the support contract terms apply to anyone wanting to purchase RHEL.

The support contract plainly states: "If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement."

The end result, of course, is that you can't buy RHAS without giving up rights the GPL explicitly gives you.

Read the EULA. It's all there.

You link to the wrong license agreement. RedHat uses the nice license for the software, and the nasty license for the support contract. Of course, RedHat will only sell you the software with a support contract, so the support contract terms apply to anyone wanting to purchase RHEL.

The support contract plainly states: "If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement."

The end result, of course, is that you can't buy RHAS without giving up rights the GPL explicitly gives you.

I know RedHat contributes, but I prefer to use Debian nowadays.

Things are going from bad to worse - first the Redhat->Fedora transfer and now Sun is in bed with Mickeysoft.

"Red Hat Professional Workstation... Enterprise Linux for personal use"

The above quote is from redhat.com

Seems they're rethinking their corporate focus after the backlash from the RHL screw up. So which is it RH, enterprise or personal? Thought you guys didn't want personal users? You've lost my business for good... business & personal.

If you would take your own advice and actually read RedHat's "EULA", which is actually not a EULA, but a subscription agreement, you might notice that Appendix 1, section 1 specifically notifies the agreeing party of their right to copy and redistribute the component software under the individual licences of much of the component software in RHEL, further RedHat is quite specific that the agreement does not restrict or limit the customer's rights in any way with respect to those rights granted by the licences of the individual component software which makes up RHEL. Indeed the preamble of Appendix actually grants the agreeing party a licence under the GPL to the collective work.

RedHat are not violating the GPL. You are allowed to copy RHEL, sans the small number of packages containing RedHat Trademarks. And RH even make this easy by seperating the Trademarked art work into seperate packages from the actual GPL'd packages which use those Trademarked images. Indeed the frupping RHEL subscription agreement even goes into detail on this in section 2 of Appendix 1. And you cant call the resulting distro RHEL or even allude to it being RHEL.

There are 0 additional restrictions placed on the RHEL user in terms of what they may do with the software components. The only thing you are not allowed to do as a RHEL subscriber is lie to RedHat about how many copies of RHEL you have installed, which relates to the support & subscription side of RHEL or copy their proprietary RHN server software (which isnt (AFAIK) part of RHEL), which is fair enough.

Whether you use RedHat or not, and you dont have to, there are plenty of linux distro's out there to choose from, you still benefit from the resources RedHat puts into bettering linux by paying people to work on it. Indeed, you can even download a free and unsupported version of a Linux distro into which RedHat invest a lot of engineering resources if you want to. Even if you dont though, you will still be benefiting from the work RedHat employees are paid to do on free Linux software. (as well as those IBM, HP, Sun, SuSe, Mandrakesoft, $whatever_corporation, etc.. etc.. employees who also are paid to work on Linux and linux related free software). If a subscription fee means RedHat can continue to work on contributing to Linux, then that is good, because we will _all_ benefit, regardless of which distro we use.

I wish the clueless "leet" kiddies would grow up, get a clue and stop the inane ill-informed RedHat-bashing, but I guess there's little hope when even long long standing members of the community (such as yourself, thanks for the bovine project ;) ) are on the bandwagon too.

In it, the user agrees not to install RHEL on machines not covered by a service agreement and that if they are caught doing so they may be charged penalties by Red Hat.

This Red Hat Linux Advanced Server and Services Agreement (the "Agreement" is between Red Hat, Inc. ("Red Hat") and any purchaser or user ("Customer") of Red Hat Linux Advanced Server or Services (as defined below).

BY USING OR PURCHASING RED HAT LINUX ADVANCED SERVER OR SERVICES, CUSTOMER SIGNIFIES ITS ASSENT TO THIS AGREEMENT.

If Customer is found to have underreported the number of Installed Server by more than five percent (5%), Customer shall, in addition to the annual fee for Service per Installed Server, pay a penalty equal to twenty percent (20%) of the underreported fees.

If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed Server.

Okay, I see your point. (License here btw, it would help your arguments if you'd link to the supporting documents)

It still doesn't strictly break the GPL since it's referring to a combined product that's an aggregation of GPL'd software, other free software, and proprietary Red Hat images that they are allowed to restrict. BUT I'd agree that I have great reservations about the approach they're using, it's rather reminiscent of what SuSE previously did with YAST which Novell has now stopped. Also, the claim that a license leaps into force when someone uses a product is dubious at best.

I just read the EULA and it specifically says,

Red Hat Linux itself is a collective work under U.S. Copyright Law. Red Hat grants you a license in this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License.

Nothing in the EULA says anything about not being able to copy the software.

Now, from browsing around their site I gather that what RedHat is charging for (and restricting on a per-machine basis, is a connection-to/right-to-use their update service. I wasn't able to see anything that said that you couldn't take one ISO of Advanced Server and put it on two machines. However, you would need to pay twice to be able to update both of them via RedHat's update system.

If you want to install RedHat AS and then compile all updates your self, it seems that you would be welcome to, but why then use RedHat?

This kinda actually makes sense as a business plan. If you have mission-critical servers, but not the expertise to admin them under Debian, *BSD, Gentoo, etc, buy a RedHat license and have it "just work"(TM).

redhat Server costs $350 a year and can be compared to, say, Microsoft Small Busines Server which is a snip at $1,250. Yet MS shops are undercutting you?

Redhat and SuSE both offer discounts to students.

Redhat

SuSE

Prices start at $25. Consider those facts before running your mouth.