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tal-home writes "Newsforge has a story about the decision Dreamworks made to port ALL of their front-end servers and workstations to Linux. Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' which will hit the theaters in late May, was created in a 100% Linux enviroment, unlike older movies like Shrek and Lord of the Rings that used IRIX servers as a rendering farm. It's a good time to mention that this move by DreamWorks also includes porting the artists workstations to Linux, in addition to the servers. Redhat and HP helped out in the switch." Word has it that Adobe may be pursuing unix versions of it's toolset as DreamWorks isn't the only shop switching.

Nat Friedman often seems to live in the shadow of his famous coworker, Miguel de Icaza, but today it's his turn to shine. You asked Nat questions last week. This week he answers, in detail, with lots of links, touching on subjects ranging from Gnome's future directions to how Microsoft is dealing with Linux as a competitor to Windows. 1) Exchange Like Product
by Kaypro

Currently the Exchange Connector seems to integrate quite well, are there any plans to create a standalone server with similar capabilities to Exchange Server?

Nat:

There are no plans today, but it's a really appealing idea.

Ximian's goal is to enable corporations to deploy and use open source-based desktops. One of the major barriers to this happening today is interoperability with the rest of the corporate computing environment. In the world we all inhabit, that means interoperability with Microsoft products.

When we were doing some product planning and market research early last year we found all these cases in big companies where people had to have two computers on their desk: a Unix machine for their real work -- development, CAD/CAM, 3d rendering, etc -- and a Windows machine so that they could speak all the protocols and file formats that the rest of the office speaks. And we were like: this just ain't right.

In many of these cases, when we asked people, they said that what was keeping that Windows machine on their desk was not, as we expected them to say in all cases, Word or Excel or Powerpoint, but it was actually in many cases Outlook. What happens is that the IT department will proclaim from on high that Exchange is the corporate scheduling standard, and if you ever want to coordinate a meeting or to schedule time in a room or with a projector or any other resource, you have to use Exchange, or you're simply out of the loop.

So this was a situation where providing this functionality under Linux eliminated the need for that Windows machine. This is a clear financial win for the customer and a clear win for the open source desktop. Basically, the Connector was a really obvious product to build.

Will we ever build a collaboration server of our own? It is something we've had some requests for before, and of course we're always listening to our customers and users, but we have no plans to build one today. Tell you what, if you would be interested in paying for such a thing, send email to sales@ximian.com and let us know. :-)

2) Microsoft and Mono?
by zoward

Have you gotten a sense of how Microsoft views the existence of an open source alternative to .NET? Do you think that, over the long term, Microsoft will grow to love, ignore or loathe (and perhaps seek to undermine) Mono?

Nat:

Open source software is a threat to Microsoft's business model, and it is a competitor which they cannot attack with their traditional maneuvers. At the same time, the events of the past seven years, especially the emergence of the web, Linux, Java and XML, have shown Microsoft the marketplace power of open standards. For these reasons, Microsoft's posture toward Mono and similar projects can be hard to gauge.

But the fact is, Linux and other open source efforts are a source of competition for Microsoft, and that is why they are investing 25 million dollars with Unisys to discredit Unix: they are once again facing competition, but this time there is a united front of users and companies around the globe that opposes them. Open source has given the world a common ground.

At the O'Reilly Developer Conference last year on a panel with Michael Tiemann, Tim O'Reilly, and others, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's CTO of Advanced Strategies and Policy, said (I am paraphrasing): "The thing Microsoft does not like about the GPL is that it creates a closed community." Yes, he actually said this, and while the entire audience sat stunned and struggling for oxygen, I remember Tim O'Reilly did not miss a beat, responding with "But so does Microsoft!"

Mono is an open source implementation of the C#, CLR and CLI cross-platform development framework that have been submitted to ECMA for standardization. We are implementing this framework because we believe it is important technology, and that the world should have a free, standards-compliant version of it.

Microsoft wants the ".NET platform" to be adopted, which is why they submitted it to ECMA. Whether or not Microsoft will change their minds, retract their submission, and decide that they do not like Mono is not something I can predict, but if they do, we are ready to adapt to the change and ensure that this technology is available to the world.

3) Core Gnome technologies
by wrinkledshirt

Despite its relatively short lifetime, Gnome's been really great about embracing all sorts of different technologies -- gtk, ORBit, bonobo and now Mono. However, it's sometimes difficult trying to figure out how this all ties together (if it's supposed to at all). Generally speaking, if someone's going to want to develop for Gnome in the future, how should they prepare themselves? What should they want to learn?

Nat:

Actually, the goal of the infrastructural work in GNOME is to abstract all of the underlying technologies away from you so that you can focus on writing your application. We want you to feel the joy of being able to sit down and easily build something, not to hand you a whole bunch of new stuff to learn.

Nowadays GNOME application development can be done rapidly and easily using Python or Perl and the Glade GUI construction tool.

For a lot of people, these languages and tools are the best way to build an application. The GtkPerl site has an example of a GNOME panel applet written in just 60 lines of Perl (and I'm sure it could be done in less). Not everyone knows that Anaconda, the Red Hat Linux installer is actually written using PyGtk.

Using Glade to create your user interfaces not only frees you from the arduous task of manually doing all of the widget creation and packing, it also makes your application more flexible because the GUI layout is loaded at run-time from an XML file. For the GNOME project this has been really helpful, since it means that a lot of UI design and prototyping work can be done without the need to even touch the code.

If you want to learn more, developer.gnome.org has a pretty good overview of the GNOME architecture.

All of the GNOME technologies that you've heard about work under the hood to provide consistency, configurability, and scripting features that you, as a programmer, only come into contact with if you need them. The goal, to steal directly from Larry Wall, is to make the easy things easy and the hard things possible.

For example, you might (or might not) have heard of Atk, Gail and at-spi. These are accessibility ("a11y") technologies that are in GNOME 2 to make it possible for applications to be used by people with various kinds of impairments. But you do not need to be exposed to any of the details of CORBA in order to use them, and in fact, some of the a11y features come for free just from building your application using GNOME 2.

By the way, I happen to think that accessibility is a killer feature in GNOME 2. At GUAD3C, Marc Mulcahy gave a great demo of how a sightless person can navigate the desktop using a screen reader. And we have been working on a set of accessible icons for GNOME 2 as well. There are cool side effects too: Because GNOME's accessibility infrastructure is done programmatically and at the widget level, you can actually attach to a remote running application and introspect and act on its widget tree. This may make it possible for us to eventually have a very high-quality automated UI testing tool.

Check out the GNOME Accessibility Project web page for more information.

As for Mono, it is still a technology under development, and the GNOME project has not made a decision to adopt it in any way yet. Work on C# bindings for Gtk is progressing, however, so you will be able to write Gtk and, eventually, GNOME applications in C#.

4) Usability research
by nakhla

One of the big problems facing GNOME and other open-source software is that of ease-of-use. Microsoft and Apple spend millions of dollars when developing new operating systems or UIs in order to ensure that their product is easy to use for the non-geek end user. What kind of useability studies has Ximian conducted? What is Ximian doing to correct any problems that the research has brought to light?

Nat:

Ximian and the GNOME project have learned from standard, existing industry practices for building usable software. In short this means designing for usability, performing formal usability testing on real users, and treating usability problems as first-class bugs.

The GNOME Usability Project is a nice central resource for a lot of the usability work that has gone into GNOME. Recently the project has been making a lot of progress on the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, a set of UI rules that will help GNOME achieve much better consistency in its user interfaces. The results of the comprehensive GNOME desktop usability study that Sun performed last year are worth a read, too, even if we've already overcome a lot of that stuff in GNOME 2.

In the course of the design of Evolution 1.0 and 1.2 (due out this summer), Anna Dirks, our UI designer, performed many dozens of usability tests on various parts of Evolution, using a wide variety of people with varying degrees and types of experience using computers. Anna delivered a nice talk on the usability testing process at the GUADEC Conference

An application's usability is directly related to the ease with which a user can predict its behavior when he gives it input. This is why usability testing is a productive activity. In its basic form, it goes like this:

1. Create a prototype of the interface you are designing. In some cases prototypes are created using "scripting" languages or "RAD" tools, and sometimes they are just printed onto "paper." This last type is called a "paper prototype," the name deriving from the "paper" on which it is printed, and the fact that it is a prototype.

2. Coerce an appropriately representative set of individuals into participating in the usability test. The use of lethal force may be necessary.

3. Ask the user to perform a certain task, using the prototype.

4. Observe and record the steps the user takes, with particular attention to his mistakes.

5. Rinse, lather, repeat.

The fundamental premise of the usability test is that the user has certain expectations of how a given interface will behave, and the thing that a designer must do is to identify the places where his interface does not conform to those expectations, and to fix them.

At Ximian we've gotten subjects for our usability tests from a variety of places; there's a movie theater downstairs from our office and sometimes we'll hang out there and offer people free movie passes to participate in usability tests. So we get a pretty broad audience.

All usability issues that arise during a usability test are filed as bugs in bugzilla alongside other issues, and of course the subject's comments inform the revised design of the interface in question.

For GNOME 2, we decided to revamp all of the GNOME stock icons to improve their consistency, usability and to brighten up the style a bit. Ximian has contributed all of these new icons back to GNOME; you can check them out on developer.ximian.com.

Havoc recently wrote a nice piece which covers UI design in free software, and in GNOME in particular.

5) Conflict of Philosophies
by polyphemus-blinder

I would like to know:

What is your take on the apparent paradox resulting from:

1. the goal of uniformity on the Linux desktop, and

2. the many, many, groups who have this as their own special goal?

Mandrake and RedHat work toward this on the OS level, and Gnome and KDE battle it out on the desktop integration level, and many others espouse some sort of a "grand unification theory" of Linux.

Do you subscribe to the theory that less is more, or that multiple groups with a common goal will result in the goal's earlier acheivement?

Nat:

In any large-scale human endeavor, consistency is a very difficult goal. I once heard a senior Microsoft project manager express the goal of consistency in software thusly: "A program should look as if it were written by one person." This is a thing that everyone struggles with.

To give you a short summary of my answer:

(1) Consistency is hard.

(2) Decentralization and parallel development are inherent to open source software.

(3) Open standards and making an effort to work together are key. Let's try to do more of that.

Consistency in software applications means fewer surprises, a gentler learning curve, and being able to get your work done without tripping over an application's special quirks along the way. This is especially true of the interfaces that the application exposes.

For human interfaces, consistency means that the elements of the application do what the user expects them to do, and that the interface, consequently, does not get in the user's way. This means that a dialog's Close button is always in the same place, the menubar always appears at the top of the window, and Ctrl-Q always quits. Usability flows predictability which flows from consistency.

For programming interfaces, or APIs, consistency means that the methods you invoke have predictable characteristics: similar naming, the same memory management semantics, the same return values in an error condition. This means cleaner code, less time spent hunting through documentation, and fewer bugs.

So we can agree that consistency is a good thing. Two things are needed to achieve it: a standard, and a way to enforce that standard.

In more centralized environments, such as companies, these things are easier to do. It is naive to think that any company, even Microsoft is fully centrally controlled, but it is certainly much easier to enforce a single standard on people when you are paying them, and when you have editorial control over the final product.

But even with a single, documented standard and even if you are paying people's salaries, consistency does not come easily, even in the most centralized environments. At one point Microsoft had at least nine separate internal implementations of SOAP, and only recently have these all been consolidated...into four.

So how on earth do we achieve consistency in a decentralized environment? Given that starting your very own open source "project" is a matter of a few clicks on sourceforge, how do we "prevent" people from creating applications that do not adhere to some common set of ideas as to how they should behave? Given that there is no central control of what happens in the open source desktop world, how can we even create a standard that we all agree on?

I remember when Mac OS X first came out, people asked a lot of similar questions: How can we ever create an interface that is as consistent as this in our weirdo free code, free love, gift economy, bazaar-inspired noospheric environment?

This question can be considered at different scales: how can consistency be achieved within a single project, and how can it be achieved in the open source world in general.

And this issue of decentralized development comes up in other guises as well. In addition to bemoaning a lack of consistency, people talk about duplication of effort and fragmentation. They say things like: "If only we could focus all of the energy that has gone into producing all of the IRC clients in the world on building just one IRC client, think how awesome it could be!" People really say this sort of thing. I have heard them.

And, of course, there are those in the press and on the mailing lists who see this very same pattern in what they call the "GNOME vs KDE wars" or "the desktop wars." This is the "How many Linux distributions can you count?" conundrum.

Many people who are much smarter and better looking than I have responded to this question at various times.

Linus has said that he believes that in the Linux development community today, there is a "psychological barrier to fragmentation," and that this barrier is the learned result of the Unix wars of the 1980s.

Alan Cox has said that implementation fragmentation is not important, as long as care is taken not to break interface compatibility. The important thing, quoth Alan, is the existence and adherence to open standards. And Eric Raymond has pontificated at length about how it is the nature of the open source community, when confronted with a problem to solve, to try "all solutions at the same time." That is, I think Eric would tell you, the nature of the open source world, and, in many ways, its greatest strength. And of course, Eric is right. Seriously, I love that guy.

If on an iron-gray fall day you have looked up and seen a dark spot moving against the sky and changing shape and size but still moving smoothly in one direction and then it came closer and when you looked you could see the individual birds flapping their wings and shifting forward and back in the formation and alternately turning against and away from each other but still somehow moving all together as one mass, I think you have seen something that resembles the greater open source development community, if there can be said to be such a thing.

The thing that the birds are doing is called "flocking," and today the problem of flocking is still an interesting issue in algorithmic circles. The basic scenario is that, with each element in the flock making its own individual movement decisions based on its own individual and unique sensory input of what is happening immediately around it, the flock must somehow move along a single path, as a whole. The analogy of the Boids flocking algorithm actually runs deeper than you might expect; check it out sometime.

What is important in open source software is doing the actual human work of getting people together and creating the open standards that will allow us to function as a group, and to move in the same direction. And the way to do that is through open, shared standards.

I'm not talking about a kind of abstract standards process where an aesthete group of monks argues for centuries in the thin mountain air about file system standards before descending with etched tablets, but a process where implementors agree on good-enough standards of existing practices in the places that matter, today. Standardization is a way for us to align our directions, maintain implementation distance, and follow a common flight path, not an end in and of itself.

The thing to recognize is that the problem of creating a consistent desktop experience and the fact that our approach is a multi-pronged, decentralized, evolutionary one do not have to be at odds with each other. The key to consistency is to work toward it.

6) As a business
by Fizzlewhiff

Is it frustrating to see potential revenue lost due to offering the same products for free? Do you ever run the numbers to see what your income potential might be if you stopped giving away the same software you sell or do you believe that the Linux community, as a whole, cannot and will not support companies who only sell Linux software?

Nat:

If in the last two years we hadn't put out approaching 2 million lines of GPL'd and LGPL'd code, we would not have nearly the success that we have today.

If you're going to run those kinds of numbers, you should also calculate:

1. How much extra would you have to spend on development in order to compensate for the fact that you will no longer have the help of a large community of testers, translators and hackers?

2. How much do you have to spend on marketing to even reach the same level of name recognition you can achieve by being a responsible, active open source software development company? Would you have the same amount of credibility?

During the several months that preceded Evolution 1.0, we averaged around 10,000 daily downloads of the Evolution snapshots, and many of the downloaders were actively reporting and fixing the bugs that they found. How much would it have cost us to manually test Evolution against the wide variety of IMAP, LDAP and Palm devices that the Evolution codebase was exposed to by this army of users?

This kind of thinking may sound cold and not particularly ideological, but if you're going to perform one kind of calculation, you gotta do them all. I have actually heard of open source companies sitting down and working out the second, marketing calculation, and including it in their business plans as a rationale for writing free code.

7) Co-existance of Red-Carpet and up2date/RHN
by yusufg

Hi, Red-Carpet seems to offer functionality similar to up2date/redhat network. However, there seems to be a very substantial lag between packages made available via Ximian's redhat channel and up2date.

An example being (till now, RPM 4.0.4) is not available via the Redhat 7.2 channel. Is Ximian going to ever make a policy statement as to what is the maximum duration their userbase will be diverged from receiving the latest updates of their respective distributions.

If there are specific packages which are likely not to be made available via red-carpet, can their be an official statement on this so that users are aware of the pros/cons of using multiple update mechanisms?

Nat:

Our policy is that all distribution and third-party updates are made available through Red Carpet as soon as they can reasonably be pushed without breaking other software for the user.

For example, with security updates, these are always made available as soon possible, often within just a few hours, always within a day.

With something like the RPM 4.0.4 update, however, sometimes we have to lag behind the upstream provider, in order to ensure compatibility. This does not mean that we hate Red Hat or that we do not care about users, or that we are lazy.

In the particular case of RPM, new releases of RPM often break binary or database compatibility with old versions (this was true with 4.0.4), and so we are cautious about making these available to users until we have first ensured that Red Carpet will continue to work on your system. I am not trying to pass the buck to Red Hat here. They are great people. Our userbase, in running Red Carpet, just happens to have a different set of needs than Red Hat's, and this is what, in the case of RPM 4.0.4, created the delay you noticed.

To answer your second question, as long as the packages that are shipped by the upstream providers are open source, and as long as we can legally redistribute them, we will make them available via Red Carpet.

8) Lack of documentation for GNOME internals
by Tet

Are there any plans to increase the amount of documentation on GNOME internals? While GNOME seems to have plenty of trivial documentation (such as the GNOME User's Guide [redhat.com], there's virtually nothing that explains what's going on underneath. Are there any plans for a "GNOME Administrator's Guide"? I'm thinking of something that documents usage of files in $HOME/.gnome, what session management is and how it works, what controls the contents of the GNOME menu, and so on. For example, when GNOME fails to correctly save session information, I'd like to be able to check the documentation to see what should be being written to .gnome/session. At the moment, I just have to guess. Some of it is reasonably obvious from context, but it's the sort of thing that really needs formally documenting.

Nat:

So, for a lot of the stuff you're talking about, the documentation is out there. If you want to learn about the session manager and how to configure it, check out the man pages for "gnome-session" "default.session" and "save-session". There's also a white paper covering a lot of the configuration files, though it is out of date. Collecting and updating all of these things into a single "GNOME System Administrator's Guide" sounds like a great idea for a project for someone :-).

The GNOME Documentation Project and the individual efforts of developers and users have produced a large amount of documentation to date. In addition to the GNOME User's Guide that you mention, there is the user's manual work that Sun has been doing. There is also a lot of developer documentation on developer.gnome.org, including some useful tutorials and white papers.

With all of the large vendors that are shipping GNOME on their workstations, I think it's a safe bet that the components of an administrator's guide will come together in the near future. I know that, inside Ximian, we have recently written for a customer some documentation specifically focused on issues that would be interesting to system administrators, and naturally we will be working to release this to the community at some point soon.

Of course, if you or anyone else out there wants to join up with the GNOME Docs team and start assembling such a guide, you would be welcomed with open arms :-). If you don't have time to do that, you can contribute by filing bugs in bugzilla.gnome.org whenever you find problems or missing pieces and by contributing fixes to the individual projects. Check out the gnome-doc-list mailing list for more information on how you can help.

9) Why subscribe?
by JThaddeus

I was considering subscribing in order to improve the performance of downloads (which have gone to a snail's pace since the subscription program began) but two out of three of my last update attempts have ended in file not found errors. This type of error doesn't give me confidence in how well RedCarpet setups are tested. So why shouldn't I just forget about subscriptions and go with KDE?

Nat:

Without more information, I can't say exactly what the problem is that you were experiencing. That type of issue can sometimes happen if you're updating from one of our mirrors that is in the process of syncing from our master site.

I can tell you that we do directed testing on all updates that are pushed to Red Carpet, on every single supported platform, before an update is released. Additionally, we pay close attention to the bug reports that our users file in our bug tracking system, and make an effort to address all of those as quickly as possible.

Just last week we released a new channel in Red Carpet called "Untested," which contains the pre-QA versions of all of our Ximian GNOME updates before they hit the main channel. Similar to the Mandrake Cooker or Debian unstable, this is a way for the update junkies of the world to get an early glimpse at new packages and versions before they hit the official channel. And of course, this is a way for us to get broader user testing and resolve problems earlier.

Also, by the way, the bandwidth we've allocated to our free public Red Carpet servers has been steadily increasing since the launch of the subscription program. If the servers have gotten slower, it's because the user demand keeps increasing.

But whatever your experiences with Red Carpet, they should not be brought to bear on your choice of desktop. Red Carpet is a software management service that is independent of your choice of desktop or web browser or editor or whatever. And because the Red Carpet client is statically linked, you don't even have to have GNOME installed to use it. In fact, about 20% of Red Carpet usage is by people who want to get updates to the packages provided by their distribution, not Ximian GNOME.

10) External Compatibility
by dspeyer

What plans do you have to improve compatibility with the non-GNOME world?

For example, do you think it's practical to implement Xaw as a front-end to GTK? That would get OpenOffice integration real fast, among others. What about a unified theme format with KDE? Or a common protocol for copy/paste?

It seems like this sort of stuff would be really helpful -- what's actually in the works?

Nat:

Compatibility actually has less to do with an application's choice of drawing toolkit than you might think. Of course, there's nothing to prevent you from running a non-GTK application in GNOME, and it's not necessarily the case that the user experience is hugely degraded if you do. I know of a lot of KDE users who started using Evolution in the last couple of months, because the functionality is so rich, which is great.

GNOME and KDE have had drag-n-drop and cut-n-paste interoperability for quite a while, and we also use the same .desktop file format to store launchers and menu items. You can track a lot of this stuff at freedesktop.org.

Open Office does not use Xaw. That being said, it would be great if OpenOffice used the Gtk drawing primitives so that OpenOffice would be theme-compatible with GNOME. It would not be a total integration, and the behaviour might still be different, but it would help the desktop to look more like a single unit. In fact, it would be possible to get Qt to use Gdk as well, which could make shared themes possible there too.

Another step would be to adopt a common set of icons; baby steps like this can improve visual harmony a lot, even if the "compatibility" is only at a very superficial level. These first steps could be followed by deeper integration, like a working bridge between Bonobo and Uno, the OpenOffice component system.

A unified theme format with KDE would probably be difficult, having a theme or set of core themes for GNOME and KDE which looked and felt the same on both would be a nice step toward making the desktops more compatible to the user. There have been noises made recently that this kind of thing is a possibility, and Ximian would be fully supportive of that.

Though these surface integration steps would be nice, the area where inter-project compatibility is most badly needed is configuration. If someone is running a mixture of GNOME and KDE applications, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and older Xtk-based programs, they need to be able to make configuration changes that are reflected in every application. Having to go to N different places to set your default URL handler, theme, or MIME type bindings is a real usability problem. Jim Gettys talked about this a lot at the most recent GUADEC. Keith Packard's recent fontconfig work is an excellent example of this.

jferg was one of the first people to write about the coverage in today's Observer in regards to the latest business happenings at Red Hat. The article touches on the launch of RH Advanced Server, but one of the most telling statistics was "Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."

Just saw in Red Hat's FTP's - Redhat 7.3 (codename:skipjack) is available for download. There aren't lots of changes there, but you'll find that RedHat 7.3 comes with KDE 3.0 (rc3 is on this beta), you'll need to remove the Ximian Gnome before upgrade, and in general - read the release notes before testing this release. As always, don't try it on your main Linux partition, and use the mirrors. Annoucment is here (thanks to Linux Weekly News)

hezron writes "Red Hat VP, Howard Jacobson, sent a mass email explaining their acquisition of ArsDigita's assets. Here is the press release concerning the acquisition." The press release is actually a quick FAQ about the purchase - Howard does a good job of explaining the purchase and the reasons for it. Howard's a smart guy, and I hope that the purchase of AD will mean a longer life then how AD's past management was handling it.

hezron writes "Red Hat VP, Howard Jacobson, sent a mass email explaining their acquisition of ArsDigita's assets. Here is the press release concerning the acquisition." The press release is actually a quick FAQ about the purchase - Howard does a good job of explaining the purchase and the reasons for it. Howard's a smart guy, and I hope that the purchase of AD will mean a longer life then how AD's past management was handling it.

Steve Cowan writes "According to an article at MacCentral, Red Hat has announced that they will produce a GNUPro toolchain and cross compiler for AltiVec-enabled PowerPC processors (such as that found in the Power Mac G4). It will be interesting to see just what kind of performance gains this will bring, because many believe that the full potential of AltiVec is far from tapped."

sparrow_hawk writes: "One of Linux's strengths has always been the wide variety of older/obsolete hardware it supports. However, most modern distributions seem to assume that the user has a brand-new machine with processor and RAM to spare. Linux Journal reports on the RULE project (Run Up2Date Linux Everywhere). They are trying to come up with a low-resource-requirement, easy-to-use Linux installation for use on older hardware, intended as an option when you install Red Hat Linux. The FAQ has more information."

Mr.Intel writes: "CNN released a story reviewing LinuxWorld and Linux's progress since last year. They mention new hardware and market niches coming to light in 2001. Mike Balma, a Linux strategist at HP, said 'The move to an increased array of outsourcing, migration and porting services that have been traditionally available to Unix customers is part of the continued rollout of the operating system within HP's product line. Previously, HP had informally offered such integral service and support only to its best Linux customers. But as the operating system gains momentum, more customers are seeking more services.' I hope this means as installed customer base increases, companies like RedHat will start making real money." Archie Steel writes "Interesting news for the Linux Desktop: Open For Business have an article on the partnership by HP and MandrakeSoft announced at the current Linux World Expo." Update: 01/30 16:56 GMT by H : Just a quick note: Rob is gonna be in the Golden Penguin Bowl, while I'm going to be doing a presentation with the Boston Consulting Group about the demographics of open source developers - if you are interested, it's tomorrow (Thursday) from 4:00 - 5:15.

Outland Traveller writes: "A few months ago I sent some feedback to RedHat concerning their then $30/month RHN subscription service. I asked them to consider offering a $5/month low end version more suitable for home users with multiple computers. I'm sure that a plenty of other people offered the same suggestion, but I was still surprised when I opened my email this morning and found that the exact service I asked for is not only being offered, but that fast access to iso images has been added as well, among other improvements. I guess I now have to put my money where my mouth is :) Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."

Outland Traveller writes: "A few months ago I sent some feedback to RedHat concerning their then $30/month RHN subscription service. I asked them to consider offering a $5/month low end version more suitable for home users with multiple computers. I'm sure that a plenty of other people offered the same suggestion, but I was still surprised when I opened my email this morning and found that the exact service I asked for is not only being offered, but that fast access to iso images has been added as well, among other improvements. I guess I now have to put my money where my mouth is :) Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."

Outland Traveller writes: "A few months ago I sent some feedback to RedHat concerning their then $30/month RHN subscription service. I asked them to consider offering a $5/month low end version more suitable for home users with multiple computers. I'm sure that a plenty of other people offered the same suggestion, but I was still surprised when I opened my email this morning and found that the exact service I asked for is not only being offered, but that fast access to iso images has been added as well, among other improvements. I guess I now have to put my money where my mouth is :) Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."

Outland Traveller writes: "A few months ago I sent some feedback to RedHat concerning their then $30/month RHN subscription service. I asked them to consider offering a $5/month low end version more suitable for home users with multiple computers. I'm sure that a plenty of other people offered the same suggestion, but I was still surprised when I opened my email this morning and found that the exact service I asked for is not only being offered, but that fast access to iso images has been added as well, among other improvements. I guess I now have to put my money where my mouth is :) Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."

keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.

keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.

Paul Coe Clark III writes: "I caught Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, in Washington yesterday and grilled him about the DMCA, the SSSCA, the Sklyarov case and the future of Linux."

kengreenebaum writes: "Webtechniques has a short but interesting article on HP's approach to a secure but expensive LINUX distro. Basically they started with RedHat 7.1 and added compartments; an extension to the age-old chroot jail concept where the processes representing major services run. Kernel extensions allow HP (or the administrator) to specify which compartments can access which kernel resources including individual files, network stacks, and each other. HP has Technical Product Brief as well as other material online. Interesting to compare HP's approach to that of the NSA's Secure Linux projects. These concepts sound like a solid way to prevent buffer overflow type security holes in individual services from compromising the entire machine. At $3000 HP-LX is too expensive for many to experiment with but the NSA's code seems to be more readily available. Anybody have experience with these distributions or with similar approaches to Linux security?"

Several folks have e-mailed about the formation of Tungsten Graphics, which is composed of quite a number of ex-Precision Insighters. Linuxgames is carrying a bit of a conversation with Frank LaMonica, the CEO of the new company. They've got a contract with Red Hat already in place. Frank's statement summarizes what they are doing well: "The work we are doing involves Mesa ^? and XFree86, including both 2D and 3D multi-screen technology, and we are working very closely with the OpenGL ^? ARB to maintain the integrity of the OpenGL API. We believe that OpenGL 2.0 needs more industry support, so we are working to help generate that support. DRI ^? technology is still in its infancy, and TG plans to help bring it to full fruition. Our first step in that goal is to significantly improve the existing open source DRI driver for the Radeon chipset. That driver is tentatively scheduled for release in late spring or early summer of 2002. "

jeffy124 writes: "Red Hat and Lineo, the major spearheads of Embedded Linux, have said that Microsoft's recent white paper comparing Linux and Windows XP embedded is full of inaccuracies, false facts, and overall distorts the value of Linux in general. Lineo has gone as far to say it flat out lies about Linux. ZDNet has Lineo's response, Red Hat comments, and a summary article." Updated by HeUnique: LynuxWorks has also wrote a response (only this one is a bit more detailed).

You can't help but know that Microsoft and the Department of Justice (plus several of the states that joined in the suit) are attempting to settle their antitrust dispute. The rest of the states are holding out for a settlement with more teeth, or a continuation of the case. A few links from the past few days: The LA Times looks at the states still opposing Microsoft. Microsoft defended the settlement before a Senate committee, which was crippled by political maneuvering (see also the NYT story). The speech given by the CEO of Red Hat is online. Microsoft filed a brief with the court, unsurprisingly urging the court to accept the settlement. The Register has a story on the proposed settlement, which is available at the DOJ Antitrust website. Linuxplanet has some advice for people who want to comment on the settlement - you've got 60 days from November 28. Finally, Microsoft has named two people to help it comply with the proposed settlement.

One of the most-heard complains from people who use distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake or SuSE is the "dependency hell" problem. You want to install an RPM and bang -- you have a dependency problem. There have been a few attempts to overcome dependency problems: SuSE with their YOU (Your Online Update), Mandrake with URPMI, and Redhat with their UP2date program. There is also a solution from Aduva called Aduvizor, but it's not supporting the latest distributions yet. Read on to learn about another interesting solution ... One of the solutions is Ximian Red Carpet (which is available to most of the distributions, freely or by subscription for increased download speed), however Red Carpet has one big problem -- if the package is not on Ximian Red-Carpet servers (like, umm, KDE packages), you're (again) on your own.

Then there is another solution from Connectiva in Brazil, which has made something called APT4RPM -- basically an APT wrapper around RPM database on your machines, so you can use all of Debian's APT features (sans DSELECT feature) to upgrade your packages, or your entire distribution. (So now you can use your favorite distribution AND APT to update it.)

Two open source developers have improved Connectiva's solution to work with ANY RPM-4 based solution, and the [not finished yet but seems pretty stable solution] is at APT4RPM project pages in sourceforge. I have decided to give a test on my Redhat 7.2 machine. I installed the binaries, edited the /etc/apt/sources.list (just remove the # from your distribution's mirror), typed "apt-get dist-update," crossed my fingers -- and lo and behold, 48 new packages were installed, 7 were upgraded, and I only had to press "enter" to start the ball rolling!

So, for those of you who want to test it -- the URL is above (and if you could help with creating mirrors for your favorite distribution - that would be very helpful, thank you), you might want to try it. Just don't forget to read the FAQ before doing anything, and report bugs to the authors. Note: although the binaries are for Red Hat, the SRPMS are right there so you can just recompile it on your favorite distribution. Enjoy.

gnudot writes: "Red Hat announced this morning that they have entered into an agreement with IBM to provide support services for the entire eServer product line. This includes zSeries, iSeries pSeries in addition to the xSeries (What no qSeries? or 7Series?) which is already supported. Here is the story on Yahoo."

JoeGee writes: "According to this article on ZD Net, more and more companies born from open source projects are beginning to move towards closed source products as a source of revenue. Version 5 of GFS will be closed source, and even SuSE's director of sales Holger Dyroff has a quote that seems to disparage the service model of revenue. The one company that refuses to change its operations is, surprisingly, Red Hat. Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann says 'We believe the Red Hat brand stands for open-source.'" Yes, this is a dupe. Bad Tim! *whack*

Uttles asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on my machine at home and as a Linux Newbie I have been having trouble getting all of my hardware to perform correctly. The Mandrake distribution comes with a config tool called HardDrake but I have not found it very useful. It displays every piece of hardware, but it doesn't give you the option to install or configure drivers for that hardware. In fact, the only functionality it has is a "run config tool" button that for some devices launches a configuration application. I have been told that Red Hat and other distributions have similar tools, and none are very powerful. So now I am asking Slashdot: What is the best hardware configuration tool, either GUI or text based, for Linux systems?"

Reader samjam sent in an interesting piece about his dream handheld PC, sort of a cross between a subnotebook and a wireless web pad, with the kitchen sink thrown in. Mmmmm, light-emitting polymers. I can't decide if this kind of thing is right around the corner or just a fantasy - after all, normal notebook computers sell, and at a nice high premium - and web pads are less than successful - why would anyone spend the money to develop a device like this? samjam writes: "My dream handheld is not available though some things come close. The technology is becoming available.

Though it may take a few months, here is what I would put together if I had the chance. Including Bluetooth, IButtons, solar panels and light emitting polymer screens...

For links to other linux handhelds, try linuxdevices.com.

My ideal handheld is the size of an A4 pad of paper, so I have to hold it on my left forearm with the fingers of my left hand curled over the end. A4 gives me plenty of screen space for watching real TV, reading real books, writing real emails, browsing real web pages and doing some real showing off.

The front cover is a solar panel, but I can't decide if the cells should be on the inside or the outside to help charge it while I use it or while I'm not using it. Hard one that.

The screen is not heavy-breakable LCD but LEP (brief technical primer, more on Google) or perhaps Xerox Electronic Paper seemingly available under the name Gyricon, pictures here and slight details here.

The choice of processor doesn't bother me much; I'd like to think there are many versions available of my handheld by many manufacturers (to drive the price down) and so many processors will be available but let's pretend the first release will run on a Transmeta just to keep excitement running high.

60 GB or so should be plenty of disk space, 2.5" IDE to keep weight down.

Input via stylus or sticky finger of course, with support for Graffiti, as used on the Palm and many others, also Quickwriting as featured on Slashdot as well as regular handwriting recognition (take your pick) and other pluggable input modules with popup keyboard for those times when you just can't manage to input a tilde (~) or backtick (`) properly.

Connectivity will be provided via a multitide of USB ports (where real keyboards can be plugged), Bluetooth (useless link) in action (good link), wireless ethernet as well as perhaps as many as 4 PCMCIA slots for things that change a lot like GPRS adaptors &c, or radio and TV tuner cards. Yeah! Why not add some Compact Flash while I'm at it? And boring 100 base T ethernet.

In fact I'm going to use the mobile phone card, along with my sound system to make the whole thing into a mobile phone for voice, not just data access. Talking of phones, the built in web cam can be used for video conferencing with (for example) Gnophone.

Better stick some firewire ports on there, too, for good measure, along with a few IRDA ports pointing in a few different directions for those more subversive inter-classroom networks as well as controlling my grannies telly to show off. And talking to my old non-bluetooth mobile which I can't afford to upgrade cos I spent it all on my handheld.

It will have integrated Ibutton support for security and authentification, maybe even built into the BIOS.

What more do I need? Oh yes, an Operating System. Pick your own.

I shall be running Linux with Ximian Gnome because it looks cool (and Bill Gates was nearly right, eye candy counts for a lot if only not to distract you by means of ugliness). I will be running redhat because I find up2date (or redhat channels of RedCarpet) invaluable effort-free way to remove those exploits, and I will finally get round to playing with Rebol.

The first thing I will need to develop is some network scavenging software to grab internet connectivity where it can for syncing imap folders and news, updating "offline web pages" [yikes! MS concept there]. Code to hi-jack available SMTP relays (*cough*). Does this smell a bit like Jini or something like it? I'll need to register my changing location for Gnophone so callers can find me. Perhaps the first thing for company visitors in the future will be to checkin their Ideal Handheld to the company network.

I will load all my favourite books into it as well as the entire classical Mormon works, copies of conference talks Doctrines of Salvation, Journal of Discourses etc, along with the Bible, Book of Mormon, and all of Project Gutenberg.

What will you do with yours? Have I missed any gizmos out? Or gadgets even?"

Reader samjam sent in an interesting piece about his dream handheld PC, sort of a cross between a subnotebook and a wireless web pad, with the kitchen sink thrown in. Mmmmm, light-emitting polymers. I can't decide if this kind of thing is right around the corner or just a fantasy - after all, normal notebook computers sell, and at a nice high premium - and web pads are less than successful - why would anyone spend the money to develop a device like this? samjam writes: "My dream handheld is not available though some things come close. The technology is becoming available.

Though it may take a few months, here is what I would put together if I had the chance. Including Bluetooth, IButtons, solar panels and light emitting polymer screens...

For links to other linux handhelds, try linuxdevices.com.

My ideal handheld is the size of an A4 pad of paper, so I have to hold it on my left forearm with the fingers of my left hand curled over the end. A4 gives me plenty of screen space for watching real TV, reading real books, writing real emails, browsing real web pages and doing some real showing off.

The front cover is a solar panel, but I can't decide if the cells should be on the inside or the outside to help charge it while I use it or while I'm not using it. Hard one that.

The screen is not heavy-breakable LCD but LEP (brief technical primer, more on Google) or perhaps Xerox Electronic Paper seemingly available under the name Gyricon, pictures here and slight details here.

The choice of processor doesn't bother me much; I'd like to think there are many versions available of my handheld by many manufacturers (to drive the price down) and so many processors will be available but let's pretend the first release will run on a Transmeta just to keep excitement running high.

60 GB or so should be plenty of disk space, 2.5" IDE to keep weight down.

Input via stylus or sticky finger of course, with support for Graffiti, as used on the Palm and many others, also Quickwriting as featured on Slashdot as well as regular handwriting recognition (take your pick) and other pluggable input modules with popup keyboard for those times when you just can't manage to input a tilde (~) or backtick (`) properly.

Connectivity will be provided via a multitide of USB ports (where real keyboards can be plugged), Bluetooth (useless link) in action (good link), wireless ethernet as well as perhaps as many as 4 PCMCIA slots for things that change a lot like GPRS adaptors &c, or radio and TV tuner cards. Yeah! Why not add some Compact Flash while I'm at it? And boring 100 base T ethernet.

In fact I'm going to use the mobile phone card, along with my sound system to make the whole thing into a mobile phone for voice, not just data access. Talking of phones, the built in web cam can be used for video conferencing with (for example) Gnophone.

Better stick some firewire ports on there, too, for good measure, along with a few IRDA ports pointing in a few different directions for those more subversive inter-classroom networks as well as controlling my grannies telly to show off. And talking to my old non-bluetooth mobile which I can't afford to upgrade cos I spent it all on my handheld.

It will have integrated Ibutton support for security and authentification, maybe even built into the BIOS.

What more do I need? Oh yes, an Operating System. Pick your own.

I shall be running Linux with Ximian Gnome because it looks cool (and Bill Gates was nearly right, eye candy counts for a lot if only not to distract you by means of ugliness). I will be running redhat because I find up2date (or redhat channels of RedCarpet) invaluable effort-free way to remove those exploits, and I will finally get round to playing with Rebol.

The first thing I will need to develop is some network scavenging software to grab internet connectivity where it can for syncing imap folders and news, updating "offline web pages" [yikes! MS concept there]. Code to hi-jack available SMTP relays (*cough*). Does this smell a bit like Jini or something like it? I'll need to register my changing location for Gnophone so callers can find me. Perhaps the first thing for company visitors in the future will be to checkin their Ideal Handheld to the company network.

I will load all my favourite books into it as well as the entire classical Mormon works, copies of conference talks Doctrines of Salvation, Journal of Discourses etc, along with the Bible, Book of Mormon, and all of Project Gutenberg.

What will you do with yours? Have I missed any gizmos out? Or gadgets even?"

Jacek writes "Looks like GSL 1.0 is finally out! Look here. I've been using it in my research for the las few years and I really liked it! Thanks to all developers for the great job! Jacek"

Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.

My first priority was the speed and scale of the machine. I knew that I wanted to build a machine that would be able to play games very well, and look nice, but since I didn't want to totally break the bank on doing it, I decided to go with some lower-cost components in part. So, without further ado:

• The Case: This was the easiest decision to make. Thinkgeek has by far the the cooler and easiest case around to get. I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine. This case frickin' rocks. Thumbscrews for everything, the drive bays, motherboard array and everything else slides out intelligently - this is the first case I've ever had where I'm *happy* to be working on the internals of the machine. However, I did replace the fans.

• The Fans: Rather then use the stock fans, I ordered the Silencer Fan from PC Power and Cooling. Three of them to be exact -- and they are as quiet as the Stereophile comment implies. Very very quiet (20 Db), and does a great job of keeping the internals cool. The fans are the standard size for an ATX case, so swapping was a breeze.
• Power Supply: In keeping with the keep-it-quiet theme, I went with the Ultraquiet 400 ATX. It's got ample power, and is incredibly quiet. Very, very nicely done.
• The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious, I went with the AMD Athlon. I got the 1.2 Ghz variety, as the cost difference, at the time, between that and the 1.4 were considerable, for what I saw to be very little extra additional speed. It was also at this point that I made the choice to go with a single processor machine, rather then a dual. Since I was going to be a lot of gaming on here this machine, in addition to work, and the gaming would be in a Windows 98 environment (Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims) there was very little reason to go with a dual processor machine. So, with that in mind, I ordered my single Athlon 1.2 Ghz.

• Processor Heatsink/Fan: I replaced the stock processor heatsink, and went with the ultraquiet one from PC Power and Cooling -- replacing it was no problem, and while when the case is closed, the noise difference is inaudible; when the case is open, you can definitely hear the difference between the two fans. Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt - e.g. Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, and my little contribution to Team Slashdot, that's the temp. Running with just the OS is about 58 C. I just used the heat-sink compound that came along with the new fan to wipe down the CPU.
• The Motherboard: Originally, I was planning on going with the MSI-6380 motherboard. Tom's Hardware recommend it -- but what I quickly found out was that there was a nationwide shortage on those boards -- or at least that's what multiple vendors told me. Luckily, the folks at Teacco, who I had ended up ordering through recommend the Asus A7A266. This uses the ALi Magik 1 chipset, versus the Via KT266 Pro chipset, which the MSI board used. My assumption is that the Via chipset was in short supply. I still think the MSI was a better board, but sometimes you have to deal with shortfalls - and frankly, the Asus supported the 266 FSB, and the RAM that I wanted to use. Availability won -- and I've veen happy with the A7A266.
• The DDR RAM: Obviously, if speed is the goal, you want to get good, and a goodly amount, of RAM. Having talked the various RAM manufacturers over with ChrisD, I finally settled on the Corsair Micro CM73SD256R-2100. It had a 266 Mhz bus, and Corsair makes a good RAM chip.
• Hard Drive: My last machine had two hard drives, one SCSI and one IDE. Since the motherboard I had purchased had two ATA-100 boards onboard, I decided that rather then go through and purchase a SCSI controller, and get a SCSI drive, I would just get a ATA-100 IDE hard drive. Also based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so. I also wanted to get a drive that was quiet, and reliable -- and I had been very happy with my last IBM drive, so I got the Deskstar 40GV. Heh -- good thing I didn't get the 75 GXP. With ATA 100, I'm getting around the same practical throughput as SCSI, without having an additional controller. Also, with the Deskstar, I can use my SilentDrive sleeves. More on that in a moment. But, with 40 gigs, I was making a choice not to have this be a MP3 box or anything. That's alright, because the other machine has a crapload of space, and can handle that role, easily.

• The Silent Drive: In sticking with my goal of trying to be as fast and quiet as possible, I picked up some Silent Drives from New England Digital Computer. The SilentDrive is made by Molex; it's pretty cheap, and really cuts down on hard drive noise -- and since I've used them in my other machine, I don't have much concern about them cutting the drive's life. Besides, the aim of this machine is not to be a server, but more of a gamebox, so I'm willing to live with a slight risk anyhow.
• CD-RW: Obviously, a machine is going to need some sort of CD/DVD format input device. I had already decided to forgo a floppy drive, because the motherboard will support booting from CD-ROM, and I wanted to see if it can be done. Yes, it can be done, easily. Moving files around is much easier with scp than with floppies anyway. *grin* I debated between the DVD or CD-RW, but decided to go with the latter, because I'm going to hold out for a while, and then purchase a DVD-RW for the machine. No sense in getting a DVD Drive and decoder board now, when the DVD-RW is only a few months away. I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud. When it's got a drive it's working on, this thing makes a huge ton of noise. So, my solution is that I don't have disks in there, and when I'm doing something with it, I just put up with the noise. Nonetheless, in the long run, this will be replaced with the DVD-RW, and thus, I'm not too concerned about it.
• Cabling: With all of these parts coming in, I had to start wiring it all up, right? The rounded EIDE cables were great. I've got two, and am happy as a clam.
• Video Card: Since this rig was being designed for gaming, my choice was pretty simple on this one -- the The GeForce 3. For all the hype out there about this card, this thing is totally worth it. I got the AGP version, of course, but one nice thing about the change in motherboards was that the Asus can handle AGP Pro, so when a good AGP Pro videocard comes out, I'll switch over, and eBay my old video card.
• Sound card: As above, with gaming in mind, as well ultimately hoping to do some home movie editing for burning to the yet-unpurchased DVD-RW drive, I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 & .25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want. The front slot is also where you can a lot more inputs and outputs, versus the normal 4 inputs on the soundcard. It even has an optical in and optical out, so that you can do some PS2 gaming on the computer if you want. Very very impressive -- but getting the cable running from the external control slot to the sound card wasn't very fine, because: 1. I had a hard time getting the cables fitting together and 2. The flat grey ribbon cable ruined my esthetic of the black EDIE rounded cable. I know, an artistic argument, but dammit, this is my mega system.
• The Network Card: Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100. Good network card; I don't use any of the remote management stuff, but it sends and receives packets. That's enough for me.
• The Mouse: CowboyNeal had been singing the praises of the Logitech Mouseman Wireless. system for a while, and I decided to take the leap. It's a remote system, but probably the first remote system that I've used that truly works. The latency between mouse and display is remarkably low, and that latency has been my major complaint of other remote keyboards/mice. I'm not sure that the mouse is appropriate for a FPS or other instant-reaction game which might expose problems at the finest levels, but it does just fine for games like BG2/The Sims. Slightly sluggish for Diablo II, but not lethally so. I recommend it, with the above reservation about FPS/faster paced games.
• Keyboard: This was one of two instances that I simply reused components from before. The keyboard that I'm using is the Microsoft Internet Keyboard. Yeah, yeah -- it's a M$ product. Whatever. The reality is that the keyboard has a good tactile feedback, comes with two built-in USB ports on the keyboard itself, supports PS/2 and USB for output, and is a full keyboard. Oh, I got it free through some promotion at CDW.
• Monitor: This is the second instance of reusing old components. In this case, I had purchased the Sony Trinitron G400 about eighteen months ago, for use on my first gaming machine. It's a great monitor -- 19", so it fits into almost any desk space, has a flat screen, and great color depth. It's been a very dependable monitor, and while other monitors have come out, I saw no reason to spend the several hundred dollars on getting a new monitor. So, I've decided to just stick with this. Maybe if flat screens or something get really cheap over the next year, I'll upgrade, but for right now, I see no compelling reason to do so.
• UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems -- the system is on a APC BackOffice UPS, and the monitor is on a USB. I've used the BackOffice UPS's output to plug into COM2 on the system. Powerchute is APC's software hook-in. I've got the Windows version that came along with the software, and am also playing with getting the Linux version working, although it seems to be compiled against RH -- at least the version I have is.

The machine came together fairly well -- by reusing a couple components, I was able to keep the price under $2000 -- and the same system should be even cheaper now, since RAM is so cheap that we should throw away hard drives and just have RAM *grin*. Of course, then you'd better hope your UPS system works.

The point of this machine was really to create a platform for gaming and it serves that "need" admirably -- it's been a pleasure to play games on. With the prices on CPUs continuing to drop, I'll probably upgrade this to a 1.4 Athlon in the next six months, and throw in another half gig of RAM, but for the time being, I've happily created a nice, fast -- and quiet machine. Really, this thing is incredibly quiet: I don't have my decibel measuring device anymore, but my old Vaio laptop's fan is louder then this machine. Louder, and with 1/4 the computing power, and 1/4 the RAM. I consider this an improvement.

Spirit writes "Red Hat has anounced the release of Version 7.2 distribution with Gnome 1.4 and Nautilus, default ext3 fliesystem and according to ZDnet migration from LILO to GRUB" Updated by HeUnique:There are some issues to note before upgrading: The kernel that comes with the RH 7.2 is heavily patched 2.4.7 and has been tested quite heavily on fully loaded Linux boxes - so the recommendation is to use it

If you're upgrading from the previous Red Hat 7.1 and you're using Ximian GNOME, then you might want to erase all Ximian GNOME RPMS (use the command: rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i ximian` --nodeps to erase the RPMS). Red Hat's GNOME RPMS has been more tested then Ximian's one and there is a conflict between them. You cannot use Red-Carpet on Redhat 7.2 as it will fail with the RPM libraries.

These are the most critical notes about Redhat 7.2. You might want to read the README & the Release-notes which appears on the 1st ISO image.

Oh, and if you already installed it - then have some fun with the new un-official RPMS from Enigma's section of FreshRPMS

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

Readers have sent in quite a few links to stories wrapping up this year's LinuxWorld. The most interesting thing I saw was the HP MP3 stereo component which looks a lot like a tivo, but for sound. I'm not sure if they're going to get it right, but it looks close. Hopefully the code will be available. If it is, I'm buying one. Hit the link to read a bunch of other links related to the show compiled by Timothy.

Sharon Machlis writes: "The Linux operating system celebrated its 10th birthday this month, but as that milestone was lauded here this week at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, founder Linus Torvalds and other open-source gurus offered very different ideas of what will come next. In a lively panel discussion, Torvalds gathered with fellow Linux leaders before a packed house to debate the present state of the open-source movement . . . "

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Here's Rick Lehrbaum's "traditional" wrap-up of the embedded side of LinuxWorld from this week's show in San Francisco. He says the turnout overall was disappointing, but the showing for embedded was quite strong. Lots of good detail on what was there, plus some pictures too. Sounds like PDA & set-top boxes are the next big conquest for Linux. Worth a read!"

Jonny5 of LinuxLookup writes: "The third and final installment of my expo coverage has just been posted on LinuxLookup.com. Check it out here"

pnelson talks about Red hat CEO Matthew Szulik's keynote address at Linux World in SF. Szulik said "I'm here today to challenge the open source community. To ask you to join together to promote open source in our schools, and to protect open source in our government." Szulik highlighted the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project and ended with, "as we work as a community, we can fight as a community. And through the grassroots power of the Internet, together we can advance the cause...""

David A. Wheeler sent in linkage to his extensive analysis of the true size of Linux. There's an amazing amount of information in here, and although it focuses on Red Hat 7.1, it still has tons of interesting bits of information about the code that makes up the distribution. Break downs include languages, licenses, cost estimates, and stats that in no way clear up the legendary GNU/Linux debate that will undoubtably be engraved on tombstones somewhere.

Cycon writes "Red Hat has just announced that they have finally achieved a positive cash flow! Today they announced that in the quarter ending May 31, 2001, they have seen $25.6 million in revenue, with an adjusted net income of $600,000. Congradulations to everyone at RHAT!"

Cycon writes "Red Hat has just announced that they have finally achieved a positive cash flow! Today they announced that in the quarter ending May 31, 2001, they have seen $25.6 million in revenue, with an adjusted net income of $600,000. Congradulations to everyone at RHAT!"

AntiNorm asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.0, and after taking much time to get it working, I found that the free version of WordPerfect 8 would not install. The same thing happened under Redhat 7.0, although it installed and worked fine under RH 6.2. It appears that the binaries (wpinstc and wpinstg) that are called by the installation scripts are unable to find a particular file or library that they need, but I haven't been able to figure out anything beyond that. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, is there a way to get around it?" Update: 05/10 04:27 PM by C : Another similar question hit the bin, today, except this one is about Wordperfect 2000. Are the same problems from WP8 inherited in the latest version? Read more, below.

eadint asks: "I've been using Linux since 1996 and about a year and a half ago when Corel Office 2000 for :inux was released I finally got rid of my Windows partition and started using Linux as my sole operating system. Recently I upgraded to Red Hat 7.1 and I haven't been able to install it on my computer. I'm hoping for some advice on this and also hoping that I don't have to downgrade my OS. I can definitely notice a difference in speed with 7.1"

AntiNorm asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.0, and after taking much time to get it working, I found that the free version of WordPerfect 8 would not install. The same thing happened under Redhat 7.0, although it installed and worked fine under RH 6.2. It appears that the binaries (wpinstc and wpinstg) that are called by the installation scripts are unable to find a particular file or library that they need, but I haven't been able to figure out anything beyond that. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, is there a way to get around it?" Update: 05/10 04:27 PM by C : Another similar question hit the bin, today, except this one is about Wordperfect 2000. Are the same problems from WP8 inherited in the latest version? Read more, below.

eadint asks: "I've been using Linux since 1996 and about a year and a half ago when Corel Office 2000 for :inux was released I finally got rid of my Windows partition and started using Linux as my sole operating system. Recently I upgraded to Red Hat 7.1 and I haven't been able to install it on my computer. I'm hoping for some advice on this and also hoping that I don't have to downgrade my OS. I can definitely notice a difference in speed with 7.1"

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

"How are the LSB and the FSSTND affecting consistency between distros? What about RPM and APT? What tools are there available for developers of software to ensure that their software runs on the widest variety of systems? Is there some software development or packaging tool to assist developers in making distribution-independant software, so they can create files in dpkg, RPM and tgz formats for any distribution without much additional effort on their part? What about tools to test their software installation on individual distributions, and assist with the resolution of problems? Should this be up to the individual distributions, or should be have a unified approach?"

Many people have sumitted that Red Hat has announced the release of 7.1. I don't see it on the ftp site yet, but, if I don't post this, I'm gonna spend all morning deleting this submission *grin*. The new features include a 2.4 kernel, USB, Updated XF86, and assorted other stuff of varying importance.

Many people have sumitted that Red Hat has announced the release of 7.1. I don't see it on the ftp site yet, but, if I don't post this, I'm gonna spend all morning deleting this submission *grin*. The new features include a 2.4 kernel, USB, Updated XF86, and assorted other stuff of varying importance.

Bob Young prefaces his answers to your questions by saying, "You may notice I've ducked some of the answers below - there is a reason for this. My role at Red Hat these days is as Chairman of the board. Matthew Szulik is Red Hat's CEO and will be a better person to answer some of the specific issues that these questions raise.... "I have been spending more of my time recently working with Laurie Racine and her team at the Center for the Public Domain, www.centerpd.org. The Center's goal is to help improve the quality of the debate on Intellectual Property issues in the public arena. Our support of ibiblio.org (formerly Sunsite and Metalab) is just one example of the kinds of things we are doing to improve the ecosystem that makes up open source in specific and the public domain of knowledge generally.

"My answers will not be "official" Red Hat policy (that would be Matthew's job), or even the Center's official positions, but rather my personal take on the answers to your questions."

------------

Do you think a recession will help RedHat/Linux?
by donturn

Bob,

We had an Ask Slashdot a few days ago wondering whether a recession will help Linux or not. Since you're the CEO of RedHat, you probably have a better idea as to what effect a recession will have on RedHat and Linux. So, do you think you will gain more market share during a recession than you would otherwise?

Bob:

As above, I haven't been CEO of Red Hat for quite a while now (which is why Red Hat Inc is doing so well - but that's another story ;-) but here's my take on that question:

Back in the early days of Red Hat we used to sit around debating how we were going to get MIS directors to take us seriously, when one of our directors, Frank Batten Jr (now involved with open source database company Great Bridge) would insist that we shouldn't be trying to sell the MIS directors at all. He insisted we should focus our sales efforts on the CFOs (Chief Financial Officers).

His logic was simply that the open source price/performance ratio was simply so much better than the proprietary software vendors that the CFO's would eventually override the MIS dept's preference for the safe, tried and true, binary-only proprietary software model they were used to, and require that they consider open source alternatives.

In a strong economy the CFOs were willing to fund the MIS directors budgets. In a slowing economy CFO's start to scrutinize every expense much more carefully. The existence of the lower cost open source alternatives are going to be very attractive to many companies who are currently paying millions of dollars of royalties to software upgrades they really would rather not have to purchase.

Who decides what goes in and how?
by Can

I'd like some insight on how the decision is made to include something in Red Hat Linux, how quickly to roll in new releases of software, etc.

For example, I've seen pre-releases of KDE get included and updated in rawhide (and I believe in actual Red Hat releases) rather often, but even the individual GNOME components are almost never updated until well after a full stable release is announced. There are other examples, but that's the main one that comes to mind.

There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in Red Hat to this day. So, I'm just curious how you make these technical decisions.

Bob:

There is no one method. It varies depending on which component of Red Hat Linux is involved, and what the development community around that component's advice to us is. Ask Slashdot to arrange an interview with one of our engineering leaders and you'll get better answers than I can give.

But... "There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in Red Hat to this day" .. is a -much- smaller issue than it used to be. It was only a few years ago that we used to ship beta code as part of our official releases simply because there were so few alternatives.

Today the primary reason we ship any beta code is so that the community of users who rely on Red Hat get more insight into where our technology is going and more opportunity to help influence what it does, how it does it, and how reliable future releases will be. Keep in mind that a big percentage of Red Hat users and developers still, to this day, do not have reliable high speed access and rely on CD-Roms as the source of the sources.

Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
by update()

I'm a Linux enthusiast and contributor but I still don't see where it's "ready for the desktop" as I would understand that phrase.

Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could you in good conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?

Bob:

Er, -I- am that non-technical friend, and I use a Red Hat Linux-based desktop exclusively.

The real answer to your question goes like this: No one (other than maybe some Slashdot reader) buys operating systems. People buy applications and then chose the operating system that best runs those applications. If you need to do desktop publishing you may go into a CompUSA store, find a copy of Aldus Pagemaker and then read on the side of the box that it runs on Windows or MacOS so you buy a computer with one of those OSes to run your app.

If you work as I do: on the net (Netscape) including all the net-based apps that I can run from my browser, reading email (exmh), and printing the occasional Word file (Applixware), you can do all these things on a Linux box every bit as easily and a great deal more reliably than on any of the 1980s legacy OSes. On the other hand if you need some application that only runs on Windows you may have problems with a Linux-only computer.

Fortunately, the future of the desktop is not in the 1980s applications that required you to load the application yourself, run it, back it up, and otherwise play sys-admin to your own computer. The future of the desktop will be using Internet appliances where the applications will sit out on the net (or your corporate Intranet) and you just download the small pieces that allow you to use those applications without having to take responsibility for them. Your sys-admin will not have to walk down the hall to have hands-on access to your machine. He or she may be in Australia and will support your machine remotely. This model requires a "real" operating system and will spell the end to a lot of the OS lock-in that all the Windows 95 and 98-based apps on the shelves of CompUSA represent.

Why invest in RedHat?
by Merk

RedHat has the biggest name recognition of all the Linux distributions. To many non-tech types Linux == RedHat. And you are now breaking even, yet despite that RedHat's stock went from $80 a share to less than $5 and there doesn't seem to be a sign of that turning around.

What do you say to people who ask why they should invest in RedHat? Also, as a high-tech company I'm sure employees got stock options, how are they dealing with the crash in share prices and how do you convince them their options are still worth something?

Bob:

As I've been preaching to anyone who would listen since long before Red Hat went public, Red Hat is a good investment if you believe that the proprietary binary-only software model as practiced by most of the software industry today is broken.

It is broken in that it does not conform to what customers expect from suppliers in free-market democracies, namely that the customer is normally in control of the customer-vendor relationship. It is only in the software industry, as this industry has evolved over the last thirty years, where the vendor is in control of his customers in an almost feudal way.

In the middle ages the feudal system was based on the ruling classes keeping the population under absolute control by not giving them any insight into the laws they were governed under. In effect you could be thrown into jail for breaking a law, and the policing authority did not have to tell you what law you broke or why it was in place.

Software users today are prohibited from making any changes to the software that they are building their organizations around, whether to add features their users desperately need, or stop their servers from crashing unexpectedly, or to patch a security hole, completely arbitrarily. In fact they can be thrown in jail for improving the systems they are using. If you don't believe me just read any shrink-wrapped proprietary software license.

Changing this industry is not going to happen overnight. So buying a portfolio of open source companies stocks, including Red Hat, may not pay off in the short term, or it might -- I'm not an expert on the stock market. But open source is solving a major structural problem in the software industry on behalf of the consumers of the products of that industry. The companies who enable this change to occur on behalf of their customers are going to be good investments in the long term.

Your impressions on the recent MS Interview
by Amoeba

[Earlier] on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux that caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My question to you is, would you skim through Doug's reponses and provide us with your counterarguments or comments?

Bob:

Doug Miller and I go way back. All I can say is how disappointed I am that Doug has joined the "dark side". He is a really decent human being.

He used to provide the exact opposite answers to the ones he provided in that interview and he did so with much more conviction.

(Sorry Doug.)

Also see 9 below.

Mandrake
by Xenex

Linux-Mandrake started off simply as basically a copy of Red Hat Linux with KDE installed (which was the most advanced desktop environment at that time). However since 'growing' from Red Hat, it has become a distibution of it's own, with a incredibly simple install, more features/applications (ReiserFS, more intergrated Gnome/KDE menu...), Pentium optimised applications, and generally is more 'bleeding edge'.

How do you feel about the fact that Red Hat Linux was 'the womb' of what would now have to be considered one of the strongest Linux distros for the desktop, and a major competitior to Red Hat on the desktop with it's claimed "99% Red Hat compatibility"?

Bob:

Mandrake is a great example of why open source is so valuable for the user of software.

The software using marketplace is not a simple single market. It is a vast collection of markets. Software developers who need good C and Java compilers are as different from dentists who need good dental office billing systems as two markets can get.

If Mandrake do their job properly they will serve some market(s) better than Red Hat does.

So for all those potential Linux-users who might not use Red Hat Linux because it does not include some application that they need, or support in a language Red Hat does not offer, we can point them to Mandrake.

The result is more choice in the marketplace. The customer wins, which is the whole point.

Security
by Rupert

Recently we've seen several worms attacking vulnerabilities in the default install of Red Hat Linux. What is being done to make the default installation more newbie-friendly from a security point of view? The average desktop user probably doesn't want or need BIND, do they?

Bob:

I have to duck this one. Security deserves precise and detailed answers and I'm not qualified to give them.

Other than to say the price of security is eternal vigilance.

Also, you should check out Red Hat Network. (www.redhat.com)

Competing against MacOSX
by banky

With MacOSX arriving as a desktop Unix (more or less) backed by a known, (sometimes) respected name, do you consider Apple to be a serious competitor, the same as Microsoft? Would Red Hat ever consider a PPC release to try and steer people away from MacOSX? Or, instead, do you think Apple will remain largely a niche player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose viability of Unix?

Bob:

"Apple will remain largely a niche player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose viability of Unix."

This is -exactly- what I think. Go to the head of the class.

Standardization
by milo_Gwalthny

Bob -

Doug Miller, a Microsoft executive, was recently interviewed for Slashdot. Many of the questions posed were regarding the competitiveness of Linux with Windows in the medium-term. To paraphrase, Doug said that there was no viable business model based on Linux, that the lack of standardization (ie. KDE v. Gnome) would be enough of an economic disincentive to commercial application developers to prevent them from venturing into the market.

On the face of it, he seems to have a point. What do you think? Does Linux need to be herded down the path towards a super-majority recognized 'standard' to be successful, or can the type of open-source movement to date provide enough tools and applications to drive Linux to dominance?

Bob:

Saying that there is no business model to open source is like saying there is no business model to democracy.

Miller's arguments are red herrings thrown to distract the debate from the real issues. The real issue is not standards or technical compatibility with specific pieces of binary-only software. In an open source world compatibility is not dependent on whether a binary-only supplier adopts the standard as written or not. Whoever is trying to achieve compatibility simply has to check the sources. So the games that the binary-only proprietary software vendors play with standards go away. The real issue is where are the innovations of the next generation going to come from. The Millers of this world think that their employers should have preferential rights on offering those innovations.

This control over future innovation is being assisted by the trend in our legislatures worldwide to expand Intellectual Property (patents and copyrights, otherwise known as government granted monopolies) rights. These enable corporations to maximize their profits at the expense of the citizens in our society and are not just bad for our democracy, it is bad for business.

Let me be clear: Intellectual Property rights (IP) such as patents and copyrights are good things. But like anything in life too much of a good thing no longer is good. Too little vitamin D and you get bone diseases. Too much vitamin D will kill you. IP can be useful to independent inventors to protect their invention from being copied and marketed by larger distributors without compensation to the inventor. But today IP is mostly used by the armies of lawyers employed by the largest technology and publishing companies to squash potential competitors who don't have access to equivalent legal resources.

Just one example: For the first hundred years of copyright, copyright terms lasted less than 20 years. In the last 40 years copyright has been extended to 70 years plus the lifetime of the author. How government granted monopolies, justified as a means for providing incentive to authors to create additional works, achieves that goal *70 years after the author's death* mystifies me.

Needless to say this change in the structure of the rules that govern our society was not promoted by authors. It was promoted by the people who truly benefit from the extended IP rules, namely the publishers. Why we as a society are so keen to reward global publishing companies at the expense of the authors, musicians, researchers, artists, software developers, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs is another mystery.

All of these groups, in fact our society in general relies on the public access to knowledge. For every Metallica who worries that they will not be well enough paid for their next album there are literally hundreds of thousands of musicians whose ability to create and perform is being gradually eroded by the additional IP rules being imposed on us by our elected officials in the name of supporting the technology and publishing industries.

(For more detail on this check out www.centerpd.org.)

Giving the major global publishing and technology companies ever-greater government granted monopolies on vast definitions of technology (think "one-click" patents on a website) is inconsistent with how free-market democracies are supposed to work. Then arguing, as Miller does, that any alternative model cannot be legitimate because it does not generate the monopoly profits his employer collects would be a joke - if were not for so many of our legislators buying this line of reasoning.

I don't want to discourage you from writing to your representative, or your member of parliament, they need to hear from you. But here's a more positive thought on this topic: The cool thing about free-market democracies is that the citizens are the consumers. So you can sometimes solve societal problems in the marketplace. This is where Red Hat's and the rest of the open source suppliers opportunity lies.

Linux and open source is succeeding simply because it works in the customers interest better than the proprietary binary-only model does. It gets around the innovation deadening impact of software patents. It avoids the creativity sapping effect of locking up knowledge and expression behind 70 year copyrights.

While open source may not be a business model any more than democracy is a business model, it is possible to use open source to serve your customers better than the competition. Matthew Szulik and his team have driven Red Hat from revenues of less than $15 million when we went public 21 months ago, to over $100 million today with gross margins in excess of 55%.

On one thing Doug Miller and I agree: serving your customers is how you build great companies. I just don't see how locking your customers into inflexible binary-only proprietary technologies over which they have no control can be defined as serving them. I guess we still have some work to do getting the word out that there is a more robust, reliable and economic way to use technology, it's called open source.

Red Hat Acquisitions
by Kostya

I noticed that while Red Hat was valued highly, Red Hat used its funding to purchase companies like Cygnus and C2Net. Escpecially with the purchase of Cygnus, you appear to be consildating the infrastructure that makes linux viable commercially. One could conjecture that you are trying to provide developer tools and resources, both as a product and as a way to build into Linux (as in the motto "it is the developers/ISVs stupid!"). Red Hat is currently valued much lower than it was at the top of the hype, but one could argue that these (and other) strategic acquisitions give Red Hat an edge over the competition or the chance at surviving the tech stock maelstrom.

Q: How do you see these acquisitions as helping Red Hat and its position in the market?

Bob:

In general the answer to the above is: yes. As in, yes we see the need to offer comprehensive and high quality development tools as extremely important to the future of the platform we are promoting.

The only point to be clear on is who we see as competition. Red Hat's success to date has been due to our focus on the real competition. When we started the whole Linux/open source market was not big enough to pay our credit card bills, much less the rent.

So we new we had to take customers from the established industry leaders. We knew we could do this by delivering benefits that those billion dollar competitors were not willing to offer their customers.

This benefit was the control over the technology we were asking them to invest in, that open source enabled us to deliver.

Which is why we don't see Mandrake as the competition. We have products and services we can sell to a Mandrake user. The same is not true of the big binary-only proprietary software suppliers.

Hardware support
by wowbagger

Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft because MS has the largest share of the market and they know it will pay to support MS with drivers.

Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver development for other forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other items (scanners, USB- IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.

Bob:

Yup, this has historically been a problem. Red Hat (and many of the other leading Linux distributors) has contributed drivers, and has contributed development resources to other device driver developers.

But more and more manufacturers recognize that they will sell more of their boards, add-ons, peripherals, and systems if they make the small effort of ensuring that it will run the latest Linux kernel and libraries. For example HP is now actively writing open source Linux printer drivers for the popular HP printers.

- 30 -

2001 does not look like a good year for computer and Internet businesses, but I expect 2002 to be decent, if not spectacular, for a number of reasons including IRS policies. I also predict that Microsoft's software leasing concept will be more acceptable to businesses than you might expect, as will Red Hat Network and other subscription-based software support schemes. But before we go on, let's accept the fact that 1998 and 1999 were unusually good, and that we're unlikely to see anything like those years again in our lifetimes. We not only had Internet companies popping up all over the place -- much faster than they should have, in my opinion -- but we also had a major pre-Y2K hardware and software buying frenzy.

Commercial Web Sites Will Make Money in 2002

Commercial Internet expansion will not stop just because some of the most-publicized early dot-coms were run badly and are now going broke. For every Amazon that goes down, there will be another company like J C Penney that expands its Web presence and turns it from brochureware into a complete online shopping experience, another airline like Southwest that decides to rely more on its Web site than on travel agents to sell tickets, and a whole new crop of online businesses that will be started by people who learned their lessons from the first burst of ecommerce and will be more hardheaded and profit-oriented than their predecessors.

There may never be as much venture capital looking for silly Internet schemes as there was before 2001, but so what? I started the limo business that gave me the "Roblimo" screen name without venture capital, and it is a lot more expensive to buy limousines than it is to make a Web site. I have many friends who own and operate small and medium-sized businesses they founded either with their own savings or with the help of friends and family, who are making excellent livings today and aren't thinking about going public or getting bought out. They take in more than they spend every month, expand a little at a time, and that's all they need to keep them happy. I believe we will see more of this thinking applied to Internet businesses in the future by both small-timers and big companies. The land-grab mentality is over. The Internet is now part of the business landscape, not something special.

Internet businesses will still come and go. The classic figure is that 80% of all small businesses fail in their first five years. But plenty of online businesses will grow and prosper, buy or lease server hardware, and hire programmers and Web designers. They aren't going to do it in frenzied end-of-the-20th-century style, and the days of workplace-as-playground are probably gone, but there will be more Internet jobs than ever once we get through today's shakeout.

Hardware Will Wear Out

Advances in hardware, especially desktop and laptop units, have been negligible over the past few years. Yes, you can now buy a GHz uP for less than you paid for a 500 MHz one a few years ago, and RAM is cheaper, and so on. That's all very nice, but it means nothing. A majority of desktops and laptops in the world today are used for nothing but running business software, email, and Web browsing. In this context, rather than in the geek/techie world of speed for its own sake (and for game playing), there is little practical gain in doubling CPU speed, and a 20 GB hard drive is plenty big enough, especially for a business desktop connected to a network -- as most are nowadays.

The generally accepted lifespan of a computer in the world of corporate accounting is about three years, and the IRS depreciation schedule says it's five years. So all those computers purchased in the last half of 1998, in all of 1999, and into the first quarter of 2000 are still new enough that there is no compelling financial reason to replace them. But computers wear out. Keyboards get grungy, monitors get dim, and cases start to get a yellow tinge even if they are cleaned regularly. Hard drives crash after they've spun around umpty-ump times, and parts failures in general increase with age. A manager who is trying to look thrifty might not feel comfortable asking to replace two-year-old computers, but can easily justify replacing three-year-old computers that are starting to need regular repairs. And after five years, when those computers are "depreciated out" by IRS standards, and buying new ones can start the depreciation tax break cycle all over again, it becomes mighty tempting for even the worlds' most penny-pinching boss to start taking bids for new boxes.

Computers bought in 1997 will reach the end of their tax-depreciation life next year. Computers bought in 1999 will be three years old in 2002. Even if no great new technologies hit us in the next few months, we are going to see a lot of old computers replaced before long, probably starting in the fourth quarter of 2001, in a cycle that is going to continue for at least another three years after that.

Why Corporations Will Happily Lease Software

As co-owner of DSM&RM Inc, the holding company that owns Robin's Limousine and rights to any freelance writing I do outside of OSDN, I love to lease instead of buy. For many years, the limousine I drove was owned by a corporation controlled by a friend, who leased it to me. We did this because limousines, like computers, have a five-year tax depreciation lifespan, while lease payments are 100% deductible in the year you make them. It gets a bit more complicated than this in practice, and you can buy up to $20,000 worth of computer equipment and deduct it all in a single year, but Slashdot is not a tax advice site and I am not a CPA or a tax lawyer (and this article should not be considered personal or corporate tax advice, which you should only get from a qualified professional) so we'll keep things simple here.

Suffice it to say that from a tax standpoint, most companies consider leasing better than buying. And as a side benefit, leasing leaves capital in your hands to carry you through a slow month or make a sudden purchase instead of tieing it up in things like computers, limousines, trucks, bulldozers, office furniture or whatever -- or in software, which the IRS allows you to depreciate over three years.

You can laugh at the idea of software having a three-year lifespan if you want, but that's the IRS rule right now, and if you look at Microsoft's release cycle, you'll notice a three-year pattern. You may not like Microsoft, and the company may make a lot of mistakes, but when it comes to macro-marketing, especially in the commercial arena, their people generally know what they are doing. And Microsoft is turning to software leasing.

"Ha ha," lots of techies say, "Who in their right mind is going to lease software instead of owning it?"

Answer: Lots of corporate managers who listen to their financial people and tax strategists.

Besides tax advantages, leasing software with upgrades as part of the deal makes software budgets predictable, and unless your business is software, you'd just as soon not spend any time or energy worrying about it. It's lots easier to sign a lease contract once every two or three years than to constantly track software upgrades. I'd like to do that myself. Of course, since my business runs entirely on Linux, I am not interested in leasing software from Microsoft. But isn't the Red Hat Network essentially the Free/Open Source Software equivalent of a Microsoft software lease program? If I sign up with Red Hat Network, every dime I spend on it is tax deductible, and I have a fixed-price contract with a known company that (for a fee) makes sure my computers have the latest stable versions of all the software I use, and will take care of security patches and upgrades so that I don't have to worry about such things and can concentrate on running my business instead.

And note that everything I say about my tiny, home-based business applies even more to larger companies. I have five computers, three of which are critical for everyday operation. If you have thousands of computers, anything that makes managing them and making their cost more predictable is worthwhile. Whether you are using Macintosh, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, BSD Unix or Linux doesn't matter. Money and taxes are totally OS-independent.

Open Source Opportunity

What I -- and most people in business I know -- really want from our computers is to have them do their jobs without any fuss. I have more personal commitment to Open Source and Free Software than most small business owners, and I'm more than typically willing to experiment with hardware and software, but in the end my main desire, most of the time, for my business computers, is to not think about them at all!

For me, business computer nirvana would be the ability to write a single monthly check (of moderate size) to a local company and have that company take care of all my computer needs. Other than out of curiosity, I wouldn't care whether my computers were running an RPM-based or Debian-based distribution. As long as my computers worked reliably and ran all the software I needed at a reasonable speed, I'd be satisfied

There are plenty of systems packagers and value-added resellers [VARs] that provide this level of service for Windows-based business computing, but few for Open Source users. This is silly, and it is going to change. There is a grand business opportunity in this area for small entrepreneurs who don't have a lot of capital, and it continually shocks me that companies like VA (which owns Slashdot, remember), Red Hat, and others that play heavily in the Open Source sandbox haven't been encouraging resellers and systems packagers all along, right down to providing franchise-style "Linux Consultant in a Box" packages complete with "approved" software, "certified" hardware packages, and all the rest of the support structure that has long been availbale to Windows-based VARs.

This is not the first time (or place) I've suggested this business opportunity, and it won't be the last. But now that investment capital is not easy to come by, and Linux companies need to make profits just like car parts warehouses and all the other businesses in the world, maybe a few more people will listen to the idea.

What I Say Here Doesn't Matter

Real life is real life. It will take its course whether you agree or disagree with what I have said here. Aging computers are going to wear out and get replaced either way. The cost of developing proprietary software is going to keep on rising, and Open Source is going to become an increasingly attractive alternative. Sooner or later -- probably sooner -- at least one innovative politician will claim he or she can save taxpayers millions (on the local or state level) or billions (on the national level) by switching from proprietary to Open Source Software and, especially if the local, state or national economy is in "down" mode at the time, will get additional votes by taking that stance. Other politicians will notice, and suddenly you'll see Linux and Open Source popping up all over the place in government buildings, even (perhaps especially) on office desktops.

IRS policies have -- and will continue to have -- more effect on corporate computer purchasing policies than all of the articles and comments on Slashdot put together. All the dying "pure" dot-coms in the world aren't collectively spit next to the big, established companies like J C Penney and Wal-Mart that are just now starting to pick up steam on the Internet (and are hiring laid-off dot-commers). And even these giants aren't going to have as much of an effect on Internet spending over the next few years as the millions of small businesses that are only now discovering that a Web site is less expensive (and often more effective) than a big Yellow Pages ad.

So relax. Whatever you and I say or do, things will be better next year than this year for almost everyone who works with computers or the Internet. And while Linux and Open Source may not dominate the world as fast as some people would like, you are going to see them become steadily more popular over the next few years, no matter what happens to any particular Linux or Open Source company.

Yes, that Bob Young. The one who helped endow online information resource ibiblio.org, but is better known for his role as co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat. Ask him anything you want, but please hold it down to one question per post. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated inquiries to Bob (who is in England this week), and he'll send back his answers just as soon as he can.

Yes, that Bob Young. The one who helped endow online information resource ibiblio.org, but is better known for his role as co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat. Ask him anything you want, but please hold it down to one question per post. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated inquiries to Bob (who is in England this week), and he'll send back his answers just as soon as he can.

jfinke writes "Linux Today is running an article about Redhat's financial situation. The company reported an adjusted net loss of $600,000, or break even per share, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2001, compared to an adjusted net loss of $5.6 million, or $0.04 per share, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2000. On a reported basis, the net loss was $24.2 million, or $0.14 per share, compared with a net loss of $24.6 million, or $0.17 per share in fiscal 2000." Congrats to all the folks there.

Paul Nelson, writing "We are educators who think using open source software in public agencies is the responsible thing to do," says "We have released a turn-key terminal server distribution based on RH7 and the LTSP packages. Simply install Linux and start plugging in your diskless terminals. Very little or no configuration is required. We've included some cool educational software and have (with permission) bundled StarOffice as part of the install. To kick things off we have 1000 Intel Celeron processors to give to schools building Linux terminals. We also have some Xeon processors to help schools building servers. Our goal is to have 1000 terminals in 100 schools by one day (July 4th.) For more info including links to download the CD-Install image (650mb) head for http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/." Any parents (or other aggrieved taxpayers) out there might be interested in showing this off at a PTA meeting. You may also be interested in the Simple End User Linux and the Debian Jr. projects.

An anonymous user wrote in to tell us (and Timothy called RH and confirmed, this change was made a few weeks ago) that you no longer can Freely and Anonymously use Red Hat's Update Agent to download updated package DBs, and update packages. You must register, and pay $9.95 for the service. Of course you can still update manually, but how long before other services pop up to take its place? And Debian still does apt without me having to tell them where I live. This is unfortunate, but not unsurprising. I want RH to make a buck too, but this seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Update: 03/19 03:21 PM by T : An unnamed reader points to this FAQ on the change, too.

Boiling rumors can now be set aside: Linux-Mandrake's 8.0 beta is ready for grabbing. Before you complain about Version Inflation (Slackware, Red Hat and others should come out with v10 just for fun), read the fine print indicating that by using this beta version, you're surrendering your machine to the winds of time, and French aliens may come kidnap you and your data for sheer sadistic sport. That is, especially if you have a VIA Apollo Pro or KT133 Chipsets and a WD drive greater than 8.4Gb in size. So the real 8.0 isn't ready yet (that will be the time to complain about version inflation proper), but like Red Hat's Fisher, this is a nice way to experience upgrades all around the mulberry bush, including a 2.4 kernel (2.4.2, actually) without building them all yourself.

Cranky Spice (and everyone, and everyone's brother) writes: "Get it here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/beta/fisher They've moved to mainstream the 2.4 kernel (surprise), there's an IA64 set of .iso files, the installer can wizard you up a basic firewall config, all the usual minor tweaks and enhancements. Though they say PCMCIA support is still flaky, meaning my VAIO Z505 slimline might not be running Fisher anytime soon. :/" The flood will only increase now -- even PocketLinux was demonstrating 2.4 on their iPAQs today at LinuxWorld.

Mike McTernan asks: "I am about to start programming my final year project for my degree. I am aiming to write a lightweight application that will communicate with the user through some (yet to be dreamt up) novel speech interface. The program is to support the idea of applets that can be loaded and unloaded on demand, and should be reasonably lightweight. The target OS will be Linux on an ARM based board. My initial considerations were to use Java, since Reflection allows easy opening of new class files at runtime, but Blackdown are only upto 1.1.8 on arm, and this doesn't allow WeakReferences that I would very much need to use for the unloading aspect. I thought about using gcj but this isn't upto Java 2 either. I then though about C, and it seems tempting and would give a much finer grained control over the application. In particular I think can do anything with dlopen() that reflection can do for me in Java."

"Am I correct in thinking that C is probably more protable than Java since I can get it to compile on any Linux system, most Unix variants (with tweaks) and probably on Windows with some hacks ;) I can only run Java on a few supported platforms (downloads for Java seem only to be Solaris SPARC|x86, Linux x86 & Windows). So, in summary, should I bother with using an outdated JDK on arm and limit my self to a select range of platforms, or just dig in and enjoy the freedom of C?"