Slashdot Mirror

but IBM (the company that has made billions in revenue off GNU/Linux)

if you are going to make up number, at least make then sound believeable! how would they make billions off linux? they resell redhat, they make their own servers, how???? even redhat doesn't make billions, in fact it gets about 27m sales for Q4. that now thats how much money people gave them, you have to take out how much it cost them to make that money, like paying the boys at the : RHAL

now ibms Q4 servers divion got 4.2b, and you'd be a fool to think any signifigant number of that was *solely* due to their support of linux. And lets not forget that IBM's OS are a darn site better in the server space than linux is going to be in the next year(s). And I shouldn't need to say this, but, revinue means nothing, gross profit is where it matters.

Sure cheep linux clusters are good at some things, but they are not anywhere near stuff like IBMs Blue Gene

As much as i dislike capitist america, you can't just throw your toys out of the cot when a large company like ibm embraces linux, AND whats more PLAYS BUY THE RULES, even donating code to the kernal, and the community.

riki

set up a Paypal account for Red Hat

Nah, just go to RedHat and buy a Hand Over the Code t-shirt.

The Open Source Now fund predates the SCO case by at least a year if not more.

"For more information please e-mail opensourcenow@redhat.com" from redhat

gcj is no silver bullet, but there are definitely classes of useful programs that run almost three times faster with gcj than with the latest IBM JRE. The Eclipse java compiler is a good example of one (and this is after factoring out the fast start-up). Look here for a version you can check out and build with gcj.

How can BSD be dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!

You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she make you hard? I know this little hottie floats my boat! 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 cock teaser. Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you will have people queuing up to buy open source products. Look! This guy can't get in there fast enough with her in the doorway! Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

How can BSD be dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!

You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she make you hard? I know this little hottie floats my boat! 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 cock teaser. Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you will have people queuing up to buy open source products. Look! This guy can't get in there fast enough with her in the doorway! Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

SuSE is also non-Free, so what do you expect? They're allowed to get away with things Red Hat can't, being a 100% Free Software distro.

Also, the "too old/too few packages" problem is now on its way to being solved.

Finally, it doesn't take a "professional" to desire a sane distro. ;-)

... note that this guy at redhat is tracking the test releases with redhat-installable RPMs, over RH9.

If you try it, note that you must upgrade modutils and some other packages given in the link. Many modules have changed names, like usb-ohci.o -> ohci-hcd.ko so you will need to do some screwing around. I have been running test1 then test2 for a couple of weeks from the link on top of Redhat 9 and it has been working very nicely.

There's a small company called Red Hat offering free upgrades for Windows 98 users. I can't see it catching on though.

You have 5 months support life for RH 7.3.

He said the goal was to learn 'what can you do and how can you do it' using open-source software in a competitive analysis.

You can find the new revised feature set for Longhorn here.

XP Home: http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3063039
XP Pro: http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3063019

Apple doesn't do "upgrade editions". Every time they sell a copy of their OS, they sell it as a full retail purchase. It's a bit of a bummer, but considering that their full retail price is a little over half what XP Pro full retail costs, and less than twice what XP Home Upgrade Edition costs, (XP Home is so neutered! Who'd want it?) it's clear that OS X is a bargain.

And, mais bien sur, Mandrake Linux, a worthy competitor to either one, is available for free download or $54 for the Powerpack Edition 7 CD-ROM set or 1 DVD-ROM set. Red Hat, for those who are conscientiously objecting to anything French, can be had without support in the basic pack for $40. For those who don't like Mandrake but do like KDE, SuSE is at the exact price point.

There is also ample evidence, even without MacOS X's liberal use of the codebase, that BSD isn't dying, exaggerated reports to the contrary.

Nope, sorry to mislead you - I misread the references to Mauve. At one stage they thought they were going to get access to the JCK and made some announcement to that effect, now a developer or user has to pay to join the JCP to get this.

Basically we're left with the specifications open / code closed situation as with the rest of the Sun's products.

i have heard these quotes before; but since 2.6.x is on its way, i noticed that the kernel (and glibc) can have Native POSIX Threads support, which apparently run much faster than before. does anyone know if/why the kernel teams views have changed? and if, as the name suggests, we are indeed getting POSIX compatible threads?

Why run G6 when there's G7?

I'm no thread programmer, but I think that NPTL (The Native POSIX Thread Library for Linux) may solve your problem.

The scheduler in 2.6 is still having some problems with interactive programs; XMMS skips frequently when switching desktops or running a CPU intensive program in the background. Ingo Molnar put together a patch which seems to fix this nicely, I highly recommend patching the kernel before using it if you're running linux on the desktop. the patch is available at http://people.redhat.com/mingo/O(1)-scheduler/sche d-2.6.0-test1-G6

The GNU GPL is, in many ways, the ultimate "cross license." When the German government wants a few more features in KDE, it pays for exactly those features. If you feel the need to stock up on more traditional IP ammo, just make sure you own all the copyrights, like Trolltech, or file some patents, like Red Hat.

So Linux goes a long way to having a nice standard base system for portability. Is this another game released as a "Linux" game, but really meaning "Linux on x86" game?

Red Hat is a Linux on x86 distribution; it would hardly be fair to hold game manufacturers to a higher standard than their largest commercial target.

This is not to say that supporting many available hardware platforms is not a good thing to do. Only that many of the distribution organizations are incapable or unwilling to provide the support that would make these hardware platforms a viable target.

There has to be some lowest common commodity platform to target; in many cases it's limited to Red Hat, or at best, Red Hat, Suse and Debian (the latter most notably available on almost all Linux platforms). Unless the targets are across multiple platforms, the games will surely never be across multiple platforms.

Look at what RedHat does - Get the OS for free, then encourage people to pay for their services.

There's a subtlty about Rehat that many havent' grasped, even though it was reported (here, among other places), at the time: the support horizons for their 'free' and retail releases has been dramtically shortened. For example, RH9.0 expires in April 30, 2004. After that,don't count on using up2date or getting RPMs from redhat for security or bug fixes. See http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/ So, your options are:

1. Upgrade to the next retail release every year (except that they've stopped making a retail release - wonder when they will also stop having new ISOs to download?)
2. At the end of life or sooner, fallback to downloading patches/updates from the develpoers and compiling from source (unless omseone else packages these in RPMs). Compiling form source isn't (usually) rocket science, but it is definitiely more time consuming (quick, what is the ./configure option for OpenSSL to cause it to rebuild the libs that OpenSSH uses? Or is int OpenSSH?).
3. Pony up what Redhat wants for their 'enterprise' relases, which start at something like $179 US (for a "workstation" version that shows up w/ apache and samba, lacks other servers) and ranges up to $1400 for the support of large memory or more than 2 or 4(I think) CPUs. I can't find the support pricing for the updates services

Why pick gzip over BZip2? BZip2 is patent-free, seems to have a significantly higher compression ratio, and libbzip2 is released under a BSD style license. AFAIK, libbzip2 is portable, (I'm using a port for WinCE).

Am I missing something?

And even without that, you can manually update each rpm. It's a pain in the ass, but possible.

I guess people cant think out loud anymore? Not like RedHat does anything like this (*cough* http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/offerings/). I dont think they plan on charging for what you have in mind, people. MS isnt hurting for money that bad.

I don't believe it's fair to blame Microsoft if they chose to charge customers for certain updates. After reading the article I can't find any intention to charge for critical security updates, only for small bugfix and minor improvement type updates.
Howevar this is not so bad, certainly better than Red Hat who's up2date tool requires subscription for all updates, even security ones. Red Hat are celebrated as hero's of open sores, because they have found the magic business model, yet there are worse than Microsoft!
Debian zealots will say that apt-get is the solution, but it does not offer signed packages, which is vary important to enterprise customers who do not have time to check every MD5sum. Even for the home user, md5 is not secure!

Microsoft charging for Windows Updates is analogous to Ford charging their customers

Yep. Or RedHat charging to use its RedHat Network. Ricidulous and unheard of.

http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_rhletter2.html

I know of this page because of a recent email (that presumably went to all customers), so it's not like they just put it up in an obscure location and didn't tell anyone.

One example?

What about the whole friggin' Wall Street companies?

RedHat + Oracle are running many critical parts of Merryl-Lynch, First Boston-Credit Swisse...

Also, the German Parliament runs with Linux servers.

And Banco do Brasil as well.

And many, may others, including the US Army and the Hong Kong's HSBC

What else do you need?

Peace

CBN: "Redhat Linux 9"

By the time the election rolls around (November) that platform will be outdated.

Also worth adding.. Red Hat offered a response to this just a few days ago, and that can be found here - quite short, but an interesting read, and a good effort at making their customers feel a little more relaxed.

FWIW, RedHat still has their 1.0 distribution on-line. It's based on kernel 1.2.10.

Altogether, I think that they still need to make boxed sets. And that if they don't then they'll regret it. But this isn't the same thing as paying stores to carry it on their shelves.

Q: How will the Red Hat Linux project be made available to the public?

A:Red Hat Linux releases will be available as ISO images for both CDs and DVDs, and will also be available through other channels such as online sales of physical media; distribution at Linux User Groups, included in magazines and in books, and maybe even handed out at trade shows. The bits may be actively pushed into content sharing networks such as BitTorrent. (Not all mechanisms will be used for each release, except that ISOs will be freely available for each release.)

A sample of this, in perfect "Management-Speak":

* Do I need to buy a SCO license?

SCO has not demonstrated that any infringement exists, nor has it established that it owns derivative works in UNIX. Nothing has been proven to establish that such a license is needed.

Which, translated into English says:

* Do I need to buy a SCO license?

Not at all

You go, RedHat!

Peace!

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 for the complaining home user. it's more important for

http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_rhletter2.html

"Below, we've provided answers to questions that may help clarify Red Hat's position. If you have additional questions that aren't answered below, please email us at legal@redhat.com."

Cambridge

* July 21 2003 - Beta 1 release
* August 8 2003 - Stop Ship Mode starts (only StopShip bug fixes after this point)
* August 18 2003 - Beta 2 release
* September 15 2003 - Beta 3 release
* October 6 2003 - General Availability

Cambridge++
No dates set yet, but a driving goal or defining characteristic will be the 2.6 Linux kernel -- unless the 2.6 Linux kernel takes too long to arrive. That is, we'll shorten the schedule to accomodate an earlier release of the 2.6 kernel, but not lengthen it to accomodate a later release of the 2.6 kernel.

----- end of copy ------

Here they are calling it Cambridge rather than Severn (even at the beta stage of the schedule), but I guess moving to the 2.6 kernel would justify incrementing the major version number :-)

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# pwd
/var/ftp/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i386

[j roysdon@r2 i386]# ls
MD5SUM shrike-i386-app.iso shrike-i386-disc1.iso shrike-i386-disc2.iso shrike-i386-disc3.iso

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# cat MD5SUM
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

400c7fb292c73b793fb722532abd09ad shrike-i386-disc1.iso <--- compare original md5sum
6b8ba42f56b397d536826c78c9679c0a shrike-i386-disc2.iso
af38ac4316ba20df2dec5f99091 3396d shrike-i386-disc3.iso
0727c51ab359dafa9ab31e0c509 58aa6 shrike-SRPMS-disc1.iso
2ddd8e6a8502869cd2e78d4759 0b9be1 shrike-SRPMS-disc2.iso
f378cf68b22c3b9a64c86b5067 511630 shrike-SRPMS-disc3.iso
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE+if+TIZGAzdtCpg4RAj MIAJ0elBUoTiBACMZtAdMgWgMEHsVRuwCdHgVn
9bCHYDdTJ+ 1z4w5EYOWRj+M=
=Pwjy
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[jroysdon@r2 i386]# md5sum shrike-i386-disc1.iso
400c7fb292c73b793fb722532ab d09ad shrike-i386-disc1.iso <--- with download md5sum

If you look at the directory structure, there is a clear difference between all previous versions before "9". All others did include a ".0" version even if marketing didn't hype dot-oh (most companies don't like to talk about the dot-oh part of a new release):

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

The most important thing that happened today is that the way most popular distro is developed has been heaviliy structurally changed.

I wonder how this new commitment to more frequent releases and more "community involvement" will square with RH's recent RHN strategy, and specifically new releases being released to subscribers first. We now see that the emphasis on "instant isos," embargoed releases, RHN marketing blitz and subsequent discounts were a desperate last try to replace the retail channel-- which was doomed in the long run-- with something that would still leave an end-user revenue stream in place. This pretty obviously didn't work, because if it had this project business probably wouldn't ahve happened. If RH could have turned a profit on the slower development cycle + RHN revenue, there would be no "project."

Perhaps more importantly, it sounds like RedHat, although emphasizing retention of "editorial control," is showing some intent to hand editorial decisions over to outside developers:
In general, you will see much more aggressive change to the distribution. Red Hat will incorporate more external contributions of code and documentation. Some changes we don't yet know -- we can only assume that the community of users and developers will make recommendations for changes we have not yet envisioned or considered.

Along those lines, if others outside of RedHat are to begin working more, and releases are to be more frequent, it stands to reason that RPM-- at least RPM in the absence of apt-- has finally been dealt a body blow. RPM is made for RH's old, slow development cycle. Compatability hell that goes along with a faster development cycle may finally force some significant changes to RPM that people have been requesting for years, maybe even a distributed distribution network that will displace previous efforts of RedHat to emulate something like Debian (see rhn above). No one likes downloading and burning three CDs every nine months, let alone every four.

These are just my first impressions, I'm sure there are many more implications here yet unexplored.

planning a release with the 2.6 kernel this October.

I found this page. Doesn't mention a date for the 2.6 kernel though.

The goal of the Red Hat Linux project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.

Browsing through Package List for Severn non-free software like Acrobat Reader and Sun Java is not included.

However, Apache Webserver and Tomcat is not included either, so does this imply that Redhat Linux is targeted towards consumer market in order to have less competition for their other commercial products?

The goal of the Red Hat Linux project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.

Browsing through Package List for Severn non-free software like Acrobat Reader and Sun Java is not included.

However, Apache Webserver and Tomcat is not included either, so does this imply that Redhat Linux is targeted towards consumer market in order to have less competition for their other commercial products?

No, Linus has just stated that he won't pursue such violations of the GPL. But even that doesn't apply to SCO. No matter how you look at it, they're in GPL trouble.

If you look at the Web page, Red Hat Linux X (Cambridge) will not include 2.6. The first version with 2.6 is Cambridge++.

the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project.

Q: Will Red Hat Linux be sold in retail?

A:The Red Hat Linux releases will not be sold through the retail channel as a shrinkwrapped box; the design of the project, with the potential for short release cycles, less certainty in release date, and so forth make it a poor match for the retail channel. Further information on the retail product line will be forthcoming closer to the product launch plan this fall. Red Hat Linux releases will be available as ISO images for both CDs and DVDs; will be sold online as physical media; will be distributed at Linux User Groups, in magazines, in books, and at trade shows; and will be actively pushed into content sharing networks such as BitTorrent. Not every distribution mechanism will necessarily be used for ever release; for example, not every release will show up at a trade show. However, each of these is a candidate, and some, including online ISO images, will be available for all releases.

If you are a corporation, though, you can still buy their over-priced Enterprise Version and have cess to SLAs and support contracts.

Visit mirrors to find a site close to you.

The release notes list package gcc32 (which is version 3.2.x). The Package List list gcc and gcc32 as packages. gcc is listed with version 3.3 and gcc32 as 3.2.3, so I can only assume that you can have both. Probably configure which on using gcc-config, though that doesn't look like it is listed in the package list.

The release notes list package gcc32 (which is version 3.2.x). The Package List list gcc and gcc32 as packages. gcc is listed with version 3.3 and gcc32 as 3.2.3, so I can only assume that you can have both. Probably configure which on using gcc-config, though that doesn't look like it is listed in the package list.

Not sure if they will work with the beta.