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I can't say much about LabView and CE.NET, but I do work with VxWorks and it is easy to develop for and has a reliable performance. On the other hand, you pay alot for the licenses. We're doing R&D stuff and we just can't keep VxWorks in our budget (we just want to upgrade our processor board and it would run us something like $7k-$10k). We're considering other OS options and I would be interested in any other observations you have. If I am correct, one of the things that is appealing about QNX is that for our R&D work the license would essentially be very cheap or free (I think you don't pay until you want to use it commercially, if I recall correctly).

It is interesting to note that everyBSD software, including FreeBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.

It is interesting to note that everyBSD software, including FreeBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.

It is interesting to note that every NetBSD software, including NetBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.

It is interesting to note that every NetBSD software, including NetBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.

Wasn't quite an easter egg; it was both out in the open, and had a use. That was there first version of their installer that supported multiple languages. At that time, they didn't have translators to do a polished second language, so they came up with Redneck. I always installed in Redneck, and put them thar shiny thing in that fancy cupholder tray.

I doubt if "corporate" RedHat would do this now. I doubt if many folks shelling out $2500 for Linux would appreciate the beauty that is Redneck.

I've downloaded gigs and gigs of stuff.

Hey sort of like these operating systems ;)

None of the problems you describe are unique to linux- on windows boxen, you get those problems *plus* the windows-specific ones.

Not to mention that Outlook is an electronic Petri dish; Windows support contracts are outrageously expensive; many people are required to enter auth codes for winxp- I've never had to do this with linux even at install time; support-motivated upgrades for linux don't cost you extra, you just download and install the new version of the distro; and the 50 CD's are for all the software that doesn't come standard on Windows but does on modern linux distributions- why make your own when you can just download the free software version without having to worry about licensing issues?

That's the ultimate benefit of free software in my mind- the freedom to not have to deal with any licensing bullshit before installing my software. No license code entry, etc. Just download to any computer and install.

"Simple firewall script, anyone..."

Remember, this is focused on new Linux users. I, for one, have gotten a copy of RH8.1 but have yet to install it. How many days/months(/years?) will it be before I learn enough script to know what "simple" is?

I really am interested in switching, regardless.

... but we should really be debating how we get this right on an OSS platform. If I put RedHat9 next to Windows Server 2003 I have significantly more updates to apply to my Linux box.

I think most of the people don't mind updates/patches, but when it comes to stopping all the services, closing all connections and rebooting and doing all that few times, it becomes annoying. I though only use LFS based system on desktop stuff, not running any servers, but IIRC and AFAIK a restart of server/service (only matter of seconds) is needed with Debian, Redhat and others.

-rzei

Dude your soooo right!

Playing the Devils advocate here, but there are more costs to making a CD than just the $0.02 plastic...

-Marketing
-Band
-Production Cost
-Shipping
-Wages ... ..
.

They're obviously not too scared of SCO - they're hiring a paralegal to take care of everything.

Patriotic Americans and other good people who value democracy should be sending a strong message to France that their intolerance and hypocrisy will not be tolerated, by boycotting French goods. This includes Mandrake. If you are looking for computer operating systems, I wholeheartedly recommend Red Hat, a Linux distribution made in America and supported by freedom lovers everywhere. If you support and/or use Mandrake, as well as other French goods, you are sending the wrong message to France that we as good, freedom loving people, will tolerate French injustice and hypocrisy. So do the right thing and help boycott French goods. For more information on the French boycott, see here, and here.

There are 44 security fixes for RedHat 9 (https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh9-errata-security .html), still it does not look like they are planning any service pack.

Sounds like a solid plan...now to get a certificate signed for a decent price is the challenge.

Anybody here ever notice that Bind9 comes with support for DNSSEC?

It's much like a certificate, only issued by the name server, rather than some random third party.

The name server is responsible for telling the world how to get there - shouldn't it also be responsible for ensuring that you did?

Secondly, use smartctl to query the drives and check their present condition. If you're running smartd, you should get a pre-failure warnings, but it would be good to check what their current state is.

Do you have a third IDE controller installed as well? The presence of hdi and hdk implies this.

How long are your IDE cables? They should be no longer than 18" (maximum length as per the ATA spec) and some controllers have this limit shared between both channels (e.g. the CMD640 - its spec limits total cable length to 18"). Also, the devices jumpered as master should be at the far end of the cable, with slaves slightly further back. This is a pretty good guide to cabling ATA drives correctly (though plenty of vendors and users don't and feel they get away without any problems).

Finally, have you tried the errata kernels released by RH?

--

Alternatives for DR-DOS (it is not Doctor-DOS; DR here once stood for Digital Research, the company who originally wrote that MS-DOS clone) are FreeDOS, Red Hat's eCos, or uCLinux to name just three. There are many others.

I used apt4rpm to easily install 2.6pre4 yesterday.

mr.

I used apt4rpm to easily install 2.6pre4 yesterday.

mr.

You can find Redhat 9 rpms of the 2.6-test series at http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/RPMS.kernel/. There are also rpms for all the necessary packages that the 2.6 kernel requires. I've tried out 2.6test4 on my machine and it works quite well.

Yep, Linux is great on my laptop and at work, but why is it so great for embedded systems?

I assume that embedded systems don't need the Unix-like environment, and just run a single application. And how much of the Linux kernel do they actually use? Loadable device drivers are out, SMP is out, networking is probably out for a lot of them, filesystems may not be needed...

So what does an embedded Linux kernel look like? How does embedded Linux compare to things like, say, eCos (Red Hat's open source realtime embedded OS).

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald "The SCO Group said today it had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court."

At GROKLAW there is speculation that this is the start of an attempted defense to the Red Hat suit.

It's certainly an odd move, as only days ago, SCO said "We are in the process of contacting them about coming into compliance and taking a UnixWare license from us. If they refuse to do so, we will sue them directly and see them in court", and apparently claimed to have three groups working on identifying and approaching Linux users, plus were preparing to take a Linux user to court.

As this really does seem like the beginning of an attempted defense to Red Hat's law suit. It would seem like a good idea for the community to collect as many examples of SCO's legal threats as possible - especially to Linux companies and Red Hat in particular - and post them - as well as make Red Hat aware of SCO's latest PR spin, and all the contradictory evidence in their prior actions.

Here is a little problem with that. Red Hat, SuSe and the major distro actually *gasp* use their own products. In fact there have been informal surveys of web sites to see who actually "eats their own dog food" and most sites do. In fact here and look at the answer to the 6th question. 95% of of 600 is 570 so is SCO going to file 570 individual lawsuits. Is Red Hat going to get a bill for $398,430 dollars? Now you could say that that SCO can pick and choose who it is going to sue but I don't know that this is entirely true. If two groups or individuals A and B are both in clear violation and you choose only to sue A and not B then you do damage to your can and I believe it could even be thrown out if you can't show why A and not B. If A is the worst violator and B is small time then a judge might go along, but if a judge sees a company going after the small infringer and avoiding a suit of a clearly much larger violator then he will not be amused.

Link.

It exists out of the box, unlike certain others. Plus they do have nice resizing tools that can do NTFS partitions.

It also makes a decent server and the GUI tools are otpional. I think a minimal install weighs in about 60mb.

Patriotic Americans and other good people who value democracy should be sending a strong message to France that their intolerance and hypocrisy will not be tolerated, by boycotting French goods. This includes Mandrake. If you are looking for computer operating systems, I wholeheartedly recommend Red Hat, a Linux distribution made and supported by patriotic Americans and freedom lovers everywhere. If you support and/or use Mandrake, as well as other French goods, you are sending the wrong message to France that we as good, freedom loving people, will tolerate French injustice and hypocrisy. So do the right thing and help boycott French goods. For more information on the French boycott, see here, and here.

If you want a user friendly, awesome Linux, go use RedHat, SuSe, or Yellow Dog Linux.

YDL is the -best- Linux, IMO. It kicks some serious ass.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care fo

The FSEDU Project has been been founded to protect the students rights from predatory companies and universities.

We have developed a students bill of rights
here

1. You have the right to use free software instead of proprietary software for all school-related tasks. The school shall not impede this right in any way.

2. You have the right to demand open file formats:

2.1. Allow sincere choice of software/operating system

2.2. Openly specified and freely implementable

2.3. Work with completely Free systems

3. You have the right to publish your homework assignments as you see fit, for profit or gratis.

4. You have the right to publish what you learn, in your own words, for profit or gratis.

Not only Microsoft is taking away students rights, but also our beloved REDHAT as well

See my open letter to REDHAT here REDHATLETTER

and HERE

Little do people know but the Microsoft licenses
have clauses in them that require the schools to monitor the student and report them to microsoft if they suspect them of violating the EULA. This is probably illegal in Europe.

Here are some selections from the MS Student License Aggreement :
http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=CAStuden tOp tion
"
Perpetual Student Use Rights
Upon graduation, students licensed under the Student Option are granted
perpetual use rights for the selected Campus Agreement products.

All other students are only licensed to use the software for the
subscription term. These licenses are non-perpetual (meaning the
student does not own the license). Upon leaving the institution
(besides graduation) or expiration of the subscription term, students
are required to remove the software. Your institution is responsible
for communicating the appropriate use rights to students when
distributing the software. Guidelines for facilitating compliance are
outlined in the Master Campus Agreement Terms and Conditions. To the
extent that your institution follows these guidelines, you will not be
held responsible for students' failure to remove the software.
"
>
THis is the kernel of the problem. Now the university is the henchman
of microsoft.

The worst thing is that taxpayer money is being spent on taking the basic rights of the students way.

Actually, the current mplayer has a gtk frontend included with the source (gmplayer)

The next version of mplayer (G1), will _not_. It'll be a seperate tarball.

Same thing with xmms. Current version of based on gtk, but the next generation xmms2 will be based on Gtk and Qt, depending on the user's preference.

Right now we need strong language; we need people willing to put it on the line and kick business and government.

You're telling me this hotheaded rant is somehow a constructive contribution to the fray? I think I much prefer Linus' "smoking crack" comment (humorous, short, to the point) and the much more level-headed responses given by RMS and the FSF. I also very much appreciate Red Hat's contribution. ESR sounds like an angry 12-year-old.

Building a Custom Kernel.

enjoy!

i tried several times to compile a kernel on redhat until i realized that they have changed things a bit, and you need to follow their docs.

It looks like it's fixed in many Linux disributions and you don't have to downlad raw sendmail yourself. For example, ISS reports it's already fixed in updates from RedHat for 6.2 through 8.0 and presumably for 9.0 as it was released later. Other vendors have similar reports. Check out the ISS link.

Yes, Mark Cox of Red Hat answers your question here.

so there is no way to tell if you are running a patched version or not. Check the CVE references given in the errata announcements against the vulnerability report you're working to mitigate.

--

Did anyone notice the differences between the times on the screenshots from Sun and from RedHat (https://listman.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-lis t/2003-August/msg00117.html)???? The Sun's being around 4 AM and those from RedHat being 4 PM.....

Come on, what do you mean it's not clickable? what's so hard about gohere.com ?
Fine I'll do it myself: ;-)

https://listman.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list /2003-August/msg00117.html

I don't know about that guy... anyone that can look at a desktop that has this as a background is unhealthy.

Look, you don't have to be a pretentious dick about it. Worms can hit any platform including your relatively secure operating systems. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and frankly, major Linux distributions have more than their fair share of major security vulnerabilities. The only saving grace of Linux is that it's relatively obscure OS compared to other major operating systems like Windows or MacOS. I count 41 security vulnerabilities in Red Hat 9 alone since late March. Many of those could've been exploited by a worm or malicious trojan and spread if as many people used Linux as they do Windows.

So get off your high horse and realize that every one of those operating systems you're pointing out was affected by major security vulnerabilities in the last year. Even OpenBSD, that bastion of secure operating systems, had a MAJOR remote root exploit in the default install (OpenSSH). Nobody is immune to bad programming and just bad luck. Shit happens, that's why there are patches. The problem is lazy incompetent system administration and not patching systems when they become available.

*rant* And for Christ's sake people, SHUT OFF DAEMONS YOU DON'T USE! Does your Solaris box REALLY need to be running ANY of that shit in /etc/inetd.conf that comes enabled by default? The answer is NO. Solaris works just peachy with everything in inetd.conf disabled, RPC disabled, and practically every other daemon started in the init scripts disabled. I'm sick of coming upon workstations with all this shit turned on and trying to figure out why they're running it on a desktop. */rant*

Look, you don't have to be a pretentious dick about it. Worms can hit any platform including your relatively secure operating systems. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and frankly, major Linux distributions have more than their fair share of major security vulnerabilities. The only saving grace of Linux is that it's relatively obscure OS compared to other major operating systems like Windows or MacOS. I count 41 security vulnerabilities in Red Hat 9 alone since late March. Many of those could've been exploited by a worm or malicious trojan and spread if as many people used Linux as they do Windows.

So get off your high horse and realize that every one of those operating systems you're pointing out was affected by major security vulnerabilities in the last year. Even OpenBSD, that bastion of secure operating systems, had a MAJOR remote root exploit in the default install (OpenSSH). Nobody is immune to bad programming and just bad luck. Shit happens, that's why there are patches. The problem is lazy incompetent system administration and not patching systems when they become available.

*rant* And for Christ's sake people, SHUT OFF DAEMONS YOU DON'T USE! Does your Solaris box REALLY need to be running ANY of that shit in /etc/inetd.conf that comes enabled by default? The answer is NO. Solaris works just peachy with everything in inetd.conf disabled, RPC disabled, and practically every other daemon started in the init scripts disabled. I'm sick of coming upon workstations with all this shit turned on and trying to figure out why they're running it on a desktop. */rant*

Sounds like it's time for some software developers whose code was misappropriated by a certain publicly traded company to start filing cease-and-desists against that company for violation of copyright

Did you really mean This company?

You have several options, ranging from $180 to $2,500. $2,500 gets you RHEL AS with premium support, which includes 24/7 phone support for critical problems. Most users will want RHEL ES with basic ($350) or standard ($700) support.

Red Hat doesn't make it easy to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without paying for support. You can get source RPMS from the FTP site, but you need Red Hat Enterprise Network with an RHEL entitlement to get ISOs and binary packages.

Someone with a subscription should be able to give you most of the packages, but possibly not the ISOs. The RHEL subscription agreement is kind of scary, so I haven't been that interested.

I'm disappointed that Red Hat has only RHEL, for which you must pay every year, and RHL, which only gets a year of updates. I'd consider paying a one-time fee of $100 - $200 for a Red Hat that had more than a year of updates. This may be feasible if you're willing to build the RHEL errata from source, but that means you have to satisfy all the build requirements (e.g., -devel packages).

LVM makes it practical to use separate file systems, and it supports snapshots. Since you've already got a separate /home file system, you may not want to bother migrating to LVM until your next full install.

Before LVM, I would just make /boot and / for maximum flexibility. With LVM, I can make /boot, /, /home, /opt, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /usr/local.

• /usr and /boot are mounted ro
• /var and /tmp are mounted noatime
• everything but / is mounted nodev
• everything but / and /usr (and possibly /opt and /usr/local) are mounted nosuid, for what it's worth

Snapshots make backups easier. It's not a cure all, but it beats backing up an active file system. Unfortunately, Red Hat has scarcely acknowledged a critical snapshot bug. To get a clean snapshot, you need to temporarily lock the file system. Red Hat's LVM doesn't do this, so you can't mount the snapshot. (Snapshots are read only, so you can't replay the journal when the snapshot is dirty.) You may be able to dump or dd the snapshot, but you can't mount it to use tar or cpio.

LVM makes me a little nervous, because it's one more thing that can go (and has gone) wrong. All in all, though, I'd hate to do without it.

If don't rely on their included servers... you can do your development on the Basic WS version for $179.00 a box.

As explained to me by RedHat, the only difference between ES and WS is the server software in the install.

Spelling $CO and Micro$oft only makes you look more the fool. M$ though I could understand as its a nice abbreviation...

As for comparing the prices of the two different companies, that is irrelevant.

I could just as easily say SCO and RedHat are up to something....

Redhat
Debian
SuSe
Apple
Linux-Mandrake
Gentoo
FreeBSD

How many times does it have to be said that RPM is not comparable to apt?

RPM is the package format, like dpkg (.deb). You should compare apt on Debian to up2date, Red Carpet, YaST, URPMI or even apt for RPM.

I am tired or Debian or (help us) Gentoo users raving about "RPM hell" out of ignorance. Debian with apt has some nice things going for it, including the amount of software available in "testing" and "unstable" (as compared to what is offered by RedHat through up2date or Ximian through Red Carpet). The same is true of Gentoo and portage. But please, people, give up this tired "RPM hell" argument.

Who do I now need to pay $699 to?

Am I right?

4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.
here

funny, I dont see that ANYWHERE in mandrake's license...

and nither did the companies lawyers who said that the redhat license is unacceptable and mandrake's was. (Psst, the lawyers also said that Microsoft's license was unacceptable.)