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They also place restrictions on what you can do with the GPL'd software. For one, they disallow you to install one copy on multiple machines. Rather, you must pay for five copies if you intend to run five copies. This is independent from the service agreement.

Read the EULA. It's all there.

I have read the EULA. Now cite the specific paragraph.

They also provide Cygwin. What does "ability to distribute customer's applications without being bound by the GPL" mean? Is this gem the reason they were surprised by Richard Stallman's words?

FYI, SuSE produces Knoppix-like bootable CD called "SUSE LINUX for i386 Live-Eval". I revieved a copy via a magazine. It is kinda slow and not the best for using from the CD-ROM, but it provides a good intro and demo of SuSE Linux without having to install it to your hard drive.

Notes: I recommend that you try it if you have enough memory - 256MB isn't enough,but 512MB or 768MB should work well (since it has to be loaded into RAM with no HDD install). I perfer Fedora Core 1, but my advice should give you an easy way to try SuSE.

There's an entire discussion on Corel's news server about this. Unfortunately, the dynamic linker from glibc 2.3.2 and later has a bug discussed here that prevents this from working with pre-2.3.2 versions of the library (on which the Corel software depends); of course, an old dynamic linker can be explicitly installed and called, but then you need an entirely separate set of libraries from glibc through X and termcap on donward, which has indeed been the fix to at least get the software to launch (i.e. maintain tens of megabytes of system libraries and an old linker in /usr/i586-libsforcorel or something).

Unfortunately, the resulting command line is quite long and because the process spins of a number of children without using this technique, the children processes don't launch properly, so things like printing don't work. And of course it eats memory, etc.

It's a mess.

Of course, all it would take from Corel is an update and recompile of their Wine fork against glibc-2.3.2, but they haven't released so much as a single service pack, ever, for Corel Draw 9 for Linux or Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, and both products are now discontinued. :-(

• Autotools -- autoconf, automake
• pkgsrc
• cfengine

It's still a smart move if you're building from source. Just package your source. Then you can build the sources under the control of a package manager (like RPM), and install the resulting packages. You get the full benefits of build-from-scratch and the full benefits of using packages.

This is exactly the approach I use. In fact, I'm a bit more strict about it: My policy is that I don't install any software that isn't packaged. If I need to install something that isn't packaged, I'll package it first. If I don't like the way a packager built an already existing package, I'll repackage it.

The bottom line is that creating your own packages (or fixing packages you don't like) is much easier than maintaining a from-scratch, unpackaged installation. Or ten of them.

To get you started, here a couple of RPM-building references:

• The fight, my first attempt to make a readable rpm package building introduction.
• Fedora's RPM Building Guidelines

Don't give up the benefits of source. Don't give up the benefits of packaging. Have them both.

For me, it was important to demonstrate to management that linux builds were consistant and good quality as well as not increasing the system management cost. I think they would have not gone for linux had we said that we would be building each one from source code. You've got to remember that these guys read Gartner reports that say the Linux distros are "fragmented" and no matter how many times i explain it; they don't get Linux versioning. "So is SUSE 9.1 newer than RedHat 3.1? Which one is Linux 2.6?" ... arg!

rd

If you want some help with Fedora, join the community at fedoraforum.org

Gates is right. Programming in the future will be visual. When he says this, though, he's just mimicing others, including myself, who have been maintaining this for, well, more than 20 years.

I once engaged Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat and doer of many of GNU things, on the subject of visual programming and he refused to even concede that it is possible.

Well, to Michael and all of you who scoff, I say first: "You will not be among those who make it possible or who will benefit from it"

We have begun to create, to learn to manipulate and to use as building blocks of new formal symbolic systems (languages), the graphic equivalents of phonemes and morphemes, words, syntax and grammar. If we can build civilizations on sounds, then we can build extensions to civilizations and things as yet undreamed with graphic symbols.

You all can scoff, laugh, snort milk out your nose and, like Tiemann, bury your vision in the deserved pride in your own accomplishments, but that won't stop the development of new languages based upon graphics. And I don't mean just new programming languages. I mean languages.

This will be done by children who will be unaware of your own self-imposed mental handicaps and defeatest attitudes, children who scoff at your scoffing, who have disdain for your disdain. Your world of text programming languages is passing, and will one day be a mere footnote.

It doesn't matter if you understand this or not, if you like it or not, if you do it or not.

Back in the day (96'), I actually bought my first Linux distro that included 5 disk (~5 or ~10 bucks wasn't bad for dialup days) from Slackware and it included the best tutorial to date about how to install Linux. Yes it was hard because you had to follow directions and read but now, I can install any Linux distro from that knowledge. You will not fear what you understand.

If starting out and you really want to know Linux then try the slackware installation then moving onto compiling your own kernel distro. If you just want to run linux than Redhat is quite easy to install.

But the thing is that with Linux, you can always back out to Windows, which in this day and age, is just a fine choice. So if I'm gonna install Linux, then be presented with 13 web browsers, 3 desktops, and 5 office suites, I'm much more likely to throw up my hands and say "fuck it" and re-install windows, then to try to deciper everything in Linux.

I think you had the wrong approach when learning Linux. I just recently switched almost exclusively from Windows to Fedora Core 1, and it isn't that bad! You simply can't expect to learn how to do things the "UNIX" way in a day or two. It's just different enough from MS Windows to be confusing.

In contrast to a "cold-turkey" approach, I viewed my transition as learning a new skill. I read the first three or so chapters of few books, magazines, and TLDP tutorials before even installing the operating system. That way, I had a pretty good overview of the big picture. Things like the command line, shell scripts, and configuration .files weren't unexpected or scary. (Note: that dot is not a typo.) I knew about the limitations in hardware support by googling in advance for the documentation and user experiences. Thus many of the nuances and differences - like the unusual clipboard behavior - wasn't unexpected and allowed me to determine a fix or solution in advance. I understood Linux's inability to reliably write to NTFS partitions and planned my partitions accordingly. Then I partitioned, installed, and tried to break Fedora Core. I tried corrupting configuration .files and databases. I tried manually changing settings and installing hardware. I attempted uninstalling and reinstalling software. I played with dangerous uses of the root account and command-line tools (dd, rm, fdisk, etc...). I tried mixing parts of different desktop environments. I tested examples from my books and notes. In essence, I learned Linux before switching.

Granted there were a lot of things to learn, but I planned on a long transition period. The process never ends, but in about two months I learned a heck of a lot. At least it was enough to understand both the big picture and also the little details needed to accomplish routine tasks. Proper preparation was worth it too: I previously tried changing "cold-turkey" to Linux (over a year ago) and gave up after only two days!

There's a point to my previous three paragraphs other than to document another Linux switcher's success story. Instead of a confusing array of options, I looked at the 13 web browsers, 5 desktop, 3 office suits, 30 text editors and 101 dalmatians as a chance to evaluate my preferences with this new approach. There was time to try out each one and get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. I previously had no preferences by definition - being new to Linux. This helped me settle in with Fedora Core and enjoy its benefits compared to MS Windows rather than be annoyed by its differences.

It's all about attitude and approach!

In Ulrich Drepper's paper on writing shared libraries, there is a discussion of why it takes so long to start up. Debian lets you use prelink to speed up the dynamic linking time. I dunno how much speedup you get.

From Drepper's paper:

With the knowledge of the hashing function and the details of the string lookup
let us look at a real-world example: OpenOffice.org. The package contains 144 separate DSOs. During startup about 20,000 relocations are performed. The number of string comparisons needed during the symbol resolution can be used as a fair value for the startup overhead. We compute and approximation of this value now.

The average chain length for unsuccessful lookup in all DSOs of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 release on IA-32 is 1.1931. This means for each symbol lookup the dynamic linker has to perform on average 72 x 1.1931 = 85.9032 string comparisons. For
20,000 symbols, the total is 1,718,064 string comparisons. The average length of an exported symbol defined in the DSOs of OpenOffice.org is 54.13. Even if we are assuming that only 20% of the string is searched before finding a mismatch (which is an optimistic guess since every symbol name is compared completely at least one to match itself) this would mean a total of more than 18.5 million characters have been loaded from memory and compared. No wonder the startup is so slow, especially since we ignored other costs.

In Ulrich Drepper's paper on writing shared libraries, there is a discussion of why it takes so long to start up. Debian lets you use prelink to speed up the dynamic linking time. I dunno how much speedup you get.

From Drepper's paper:

With the knowledge of the hashing function and the details of the string lookup
let us look at a real-world example: OpenOffice.org. The package contains 144 separate DSOs. During startup about 20,000 relocations are performed. The number of string comparisons needed during the symbol resolution can be used as a fair value for the startup overhead. We compute and approximation of this value now.

The average chain length for unsuccessful lookup in all DSOs of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 release on IA-32 is 1.1931. This means for each symbol lookup the dynamic linker has to perform on average 72 x 1.1931 = 85.9032 string comparisons. For
20,000 symbols, the total is 1,718,064 string comparisons. The average length of an exported symbol defined in the DSOs of OpenOffice.org is 54.13. Even if we are assuming that only 20% of the string is searched before finding a mismatch (which is an optimistic guess since every symbol name is compared completely at least one to match itself) this would mean a total of more than 18.5 million characters have been loaded from memory and compared. No wonder the startup is so slow, especially since we ignored other costs.

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 set of programs and utilities that make your computer run. Some other common operating systems are Unix (and its variants BSD, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and o

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 set of programs and utilities that make your computer run. Some other common operating systems are Unix (and its variants BSD, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and o

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 set of programs and utilities that make your computer run. Some other common operating systems are Unix (and its variants BSD, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and o

So, have they fixed bug 29555, which has been around since RedHat 7.1? You get part way into the installation, and it hangs on loading the aic7xxx SCSI driver.

I don't mean to be picky, but this seems pretty basic. It worked in 6.x, and stopped working in 7.1 (or maybe 7.0). It was still broken in Fedora Core 1.

Now, if you read the bug report, you'll see they blame all sorts of things, and have all sorts of workarounds that don't seem to actually work. The very same machine has had Windows NT, FreeBSD 4.8, FreeBSD 5.2 and some old version of OpenBSD on it, all of which worked fine.

Before you complain and say that I must be using some weird piece of hardware, this machine has an Intel L440GX+ motherboard with a built in aic7xxx controller. The L440GX+ was relatively common in low-end servers (including those sold by VA-Linux).

So, is it fixed yet? 'Cause I'm not wasting my time on one more Linux install that can't get past loading the SCSI driver.

(Yes, I'm bitter.)

if you have a cd burner grab boot.iso from here. It's about 4 MB and will boot the installer with support for all network based installs.

As for FAT, from what I've read the patent (patents?) doesn't cover the way Linux uses a FAT filesystem.

To get a good idea with what's happening in current development for fedora you could lurk on the fedora-devel mail list for a while. Or check out the archives

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!

3) Lack of roadmap

Lack of roadmap, huh. Tell that to mozilla or open office or MySQL or Gnome or perl or
Fedora I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Of course, I prefer a different term than "roadmap" -- vaporware.

There are few available around, free (beer/speech). My favorite is Fedora Core 1 (2 coming out soon).

Surely there's a way you can express your displeasure with MS products to your friends with a little more tact?

U
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E

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This shouldn't surprise anyone

I wonder how the guys currently on the IBM & HP sponsored Redhat World Tour will field this one... Anyone going to one of the remaining shows?

Was at the Brisbane show and the IBM guy sidestepped the 'So why can't I walk into a store and buy a IBM laptop with RedHat pre-installed' question pretty well. Basically stated something along the lines of - it was something they were watching but they weren't ready to provide support for mom and pop just yet, but that you could order it pre-installed if you bought in bulk...

Sounds like Novell may be gearing up to provide that support.

For what it's worth, some stuff in Red Hat *does* default to A4.

How is this different from eCos and/or Redboot?

I think I'm just a little unclear on the differences among bios/kernel loaders/boot loaders. I know that the linux kernel doesn't really use the BIOS (for the most part) when it discovers devices. As such, the BIOS is a moot point. How does this compare to embedded systems like Arm/XScale boards?

Can anyone clarify this for me/us?

How is this different from eCos and/or Redboot?

I think I'm just a little unclear on the differences among bios/kernel loaders/boot loaders. I know that the linux kernel doesn't really use the BIOS (for the most part) when it discovers devices. As such, the BIOS is a moot point. How does this compare to embedded systems like Arm/XScale boards?

Can anyone clarify this for me/us?

they've been using 2.0 with php since Sept. 30th 2002. They're pretty smart guys, real nice to. I trust em, So I've been using PHP with Apache2, no problems yet...

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!

> Tell that to the people who invested in RedHat's desktop products.

If they didn't actually invested and therefore just want something for free, there is Fedora and a host of other RPM-based desktop distros.

But if they actually invested, they already have received Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS "for desktop/client systems" or Red Hat Professional Workstation "Enterprise Linux for personal use".

In fact even if Fedora, Red Hat and every other RPM distro out there ceased to exist, even if SCO and MS had their way, still free software and open standards would make it easy to migrate to Unix or BSD. Now if MS folded where would its users go?

> Hence this article's topic

This article is a nice example on how we're safer: we don't hide dirt under the rug.

> a proven fact of how markets work

Are you trying to prove your economical ignorance? Markets don't inexorably tend to consolidation. There is always an exuberant phase in any market where it's fragmented, then it matures, but unless there is a strong network effect or monopolist practices unchecked it never kills diversity.

More than that, big corporations tend to senility, and new initiatives tend to carve niches or explore related markets. So it's more of a up-and-down movement than just consolidation.

> an account of some vaporous scheme to wire the third world

Are you claiming Sao Paulo's 100 Telecenters with 3000+ X terminals serving 300000 people are vapourware? And that the Brazilian governmental program to reproduce Sao Paulo's initiative is just a fake? That LTSP.org doesn't exist? BTW, it is not just the Third World, even First World schools and community centres are using this 20-years-old architecture.

> Let me know when you transition 120 million consumer PCs to dumb terminals running "GNU/Linux" and controlled from their ISPs central Brainiac super mainframe.

Actually by alternative platforms I was not referring to host-and-X-terminals as opposed to client-server, but to small and efficient RISCs as opposed to obsolete and bloated CISC.

> Tell that to the people who invested in RedHat's desktop products.

If they didn't actually invested and therefore just want something for free, there is Fedora and a host of other RPM-based desktop distros.

But if they actually invested, they already have received Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS "for desktop/client systems" or Red Hat Professional Workstation "Enterprise Linux for personal use".

In fact even if Fedora, Red Hat and every other RPM distro out there ceased to exist, even if SCO and MS had their way, still free software and open standards would make it easy to migrate to Unix or BSD. Now if MS folded where would its users go?

> Hence this article's topic

This article is a nice example on how we're safer: we don't hide dirt under the rug.

> a proven fact of how markets work

Are you trying to prove your economical ignorance? Markets don't inexorably tend to consolidation. There is always an exuberant phase in any market where it's fragmented, then it matures, but unless there is a strong network effect or monopolist practices unchecked it never kills diversity.

More than that, big corporations tend to senility, and new initiatives tend to carve niches or explore related markets. So it's more of a up-and-down movement than just consolidation.

> an account of some vaporous scheme to wire the third world

Are you claiming Sao Paulo's 100 Telecenters with 3000+ X terminals serving 300000 people are vapourware? And that the Brazilian governmental program to reproduce Sao Paulo's initiative is just a fake? That LTSP.org doesn't exist? BTW, it is not just the Third World, even First World schools and community centres are using this 20-years-old architecture.

> Let me know when you transition 120 million consumer PCs to dumb terminals running "GNU/Linux" and controlled from their ISPs central Brainiac super mainframe.

Actually by alternative platforms I was not referring to host-and-X-terminals as opposed to client-server, but to small and efficient RISCs as opposed to obsolete and bloated CISC.

I applaud efforts by Novell and another Linux vendor, expanding to India. As long as there are delusional fools in the US contributing their time and effort for free, helping both Novell and Red Hat to sell their hardware, they can continue outsourcing vital services in India and help local markets there. For an Indian developer a salary of $200 is enough to live by, for a US developer, according to what I've seen in open-source world, a $0 is just enough (must be living off untaxed corporate dividends, I assume).

The companies that never laid off a single American engineer and only use India for support will take a dive and hopefully disappear from the market entirely.

I applaud efforts by Novell and another Linux vendor, expanding to India. As long as there are delusional fools in the US contributing their time and effort for free, helping both Novell and Red Hat to sell their hardware, they can continue outsourcing vital services in India and help local markets there. For an Indian developer a salary of $200 is enough to live by, for a US developer, according to what I've seen in open-source world, a $0 is just enough (must be living off untaxed corporate dividends, I assume).

The companies that never laid off a single American engineer and only use India for support will take a dive and hopefully disappear from the market entirely.

Linux is great because it's free

Linux is great because it's free

Or you could just download the RPM's listed in the RHSA and install those.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.

Yep.

I have gotten it to install properly on ich5 after adding 'apic' to the kernel options. However, the DMA support you will get will be less than desirable, and upgrading to newer kernels doesn't really play nicely either because of all the reiserfs patches that suse has yet to merge upstream. Try out Fedora Core, which works beautifully with ICH5 SATA!

I can't be the only one who has noticed that major product version numbers are a) inflated, and b) the same (+- 1) as the competetors. For example, this is Suse 9.1, Mandrake has some 9.x stuff and even a 10.0, RedHat had a version 9. RedHat even stripped the .X like Solaris, which is at version 9 and a 10 is coming. Slackware is hovering around 9.1 as well. Of course more pure distros like Debian does not participate. Nor do the current owners of all things UNIX. Hell, even Apple's OS is in the 9/10 range.

This happened when there was competition with word processors (Word vs. WordPerfect), also this happened when there was competition with Web Browsers (Netscape vs IE). etc. Microsoft has surpassed the whole version number thing by appending 2 random letters at the end of their products, so I guess that is next for everyone else to do.

Just an observation.

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.

If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
By moderating this post as "Underrated", you cannot be Meta-Moderated! Please consider this.

. ________________________________________________
| ______________________________________._

Actually you're confusing the spoken language with the written language.

Most computer program uses the written language rather than the spoken language. After all, how often do you ran a program that had a southern accent...

But there are two versions of written Chinese-- they're called traditional and simplified. The latter was created in the middle of last century.

Unlike spoken Chinese, you don't have the numerous dialects to deal with. So it is a reasonable thing for Microsoft and RedHat to target just these two versions of written Chinese.

-cmh

My rants...

Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.

Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).

I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.

With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.

More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.

The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.

I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.

My rants...

Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.

Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).

I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.

With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.

More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.

The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.

I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.

I believe that is the intention.

They have been using the new file selector in the Fedora Core 2 test1 release, which was supposed to freeze today for the test2 release. Very nice. Hopefully this means GNOME 2.6 will stabilize and be release in time to include them both in Fedora Core 2.

Why choose uClibc when there's Newlib?