Slashdot Mirror

(I don't count NTFS, because that is hard-pushed enough to be called a genuine filesystem, never mind a journalling one.)

Feel free to reply to this, adding any that I've missed.

The Logging filesystem does much the same thing as Ext3 - it is an extension to Ext2 - but it looks like it would be a lot more useful than Ext3. IMHO, it'd be much better if neither of them were so FS-specific and could be used as a generic wrapper. SnapFS does exactly this, for example.

Anyway, on with the list of Journalling Filling systems...

... -IN- the main kernel tree:

• ReiserFS

... at a stable release:

• XFS

... at a developmental release:

• JFS
• Ext3FS

... currently abandoned:

• LogFS

... extensions for:

• SnapFS - versioning for journalling filesystems

Look for a BIOS update from your vendor - most mothersboards seem to have gotten one, except the ones from ASUS (unfortunately - I have one myself).. Also, if there is a choice in your BIOS, turn performance down from "Optimal" to "Normal". Using PIO instead of DMA would be beneficial - turn it off in the BIOS.

As for recompilation, remember to run "make mrproper" first - the tree we ship isn't clean (so people can compile modules without having to compile a kernel first).

What kernel to use varies... right now, 2.4.4 should be OK. 2.4.3 wasn't (we made fixes after 2.4.3 was released... but as we were working hard on stabilizing it, upgrading didn't make sense as it didn't solve the disk corruption problems we were seing on all hardware (and which we fixed)). The ac kernels are usually a little bit closer to what we ship (well, they have some patches we have and some we don't) - and you can also find newer kernels in rawhide.

And I see:

The following major system components have been upgraded in Red Hat Linux 7.1: * gcc 2.96-RH

What's the error message you get when building the kernel? Did you make mrproper first (read the manual)? What's the bug report number of this problem? We can't fix problems we aren't aware of. (And compiling the kernel definitely works for me).

The services being turned off is intentional for security reasons (read the manual).
Run ntsysv, or "chkconfig ftpd on", "chkconfig telnet on", ...

Also, make sure the firewall settings aren't preventing accesses to the services you want to run (read the manual).

Or go for the Open Source embedded OS, eCos

-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"

Ok, the big claim to fame for QNX is that it boots off a floppy. Unfortunately, it only runs on x86 processors. If you knew about the embedded space, you'd know that almost nobody uses x86.
I haven't heard of chorusOS or nucleus. I've heard of ThreadX, and had a demo of it from green hills, but why bother? It comes to something like $20k for the scheduler, synch mechanisms, and a file i/o layer. My embedded OS of choice: eCos.
Also, FYI, distributions dont matter in the embedded space. Most embedded devices have limitations on space (or, if they dont, they should for cost reasons), so using a distribution is pointless. Just a kernel and a ramfs with some basic utilities is all you really need. This is how it's done on devices like the empeg.

There was other coverage but I can't be bothered to find it right now.

In fact some of the more fanatic anti-KDE crowd may have a point in continuously bringing up Qt's licensing issues (although the real pain is past now, with Qt/Linux being GPL).

Except what you call "Qt/Linux" will (with trivial tweaking) compile and run on Windows, thanks to Cygwin XFree86 (think DirectX11), which has recently been patched to run properly on Windows 9x and ME (which are not as 32-bit clean as Microsoft would have you think).

How does this work? Qt Free Edition is intended to run on any POSIX environment with an X11 server. Cygwin creates a POSIX conforming environment with a complete GNU userland inside Win32; Cygwin/XFree86 handles requests from Xlib clients and calls GDI and DirectX on their behalf.

Of course, Mac OS X can run X11 programs too.

Oh, you can zip it? Great, let me run out and link the zip libraries into my application. What? There's licensing issues? Well, what do I do know?

ZIP gzip and bzip are all available under very liberal free licenses (no copyleft restriction, OK to use in both closed and open source software).

gzip and bzip2 aren't difficult to use for intermediate (1 to 2 years of experience) C programmers either. I don't know about ZIP because I've never used it, but it's probably not much harder.

The list of immediate plans includes the simpler things to implement, including Menu/desktop files, MIME system, Themes (naming, pixmap engine), URI schemes, and Drag and Drop. There is a much larger list on the site, but those are the things to look for the next few releases of Gnome and KDE (there's already a draft stanard for the desktop entry system).

I don't think *BSD is in too much danger of being dropped, since the BSD license doesn't force them to publish thier code (compared to the GPL).
--

...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.

If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not

• Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
• Support Page, which contains a link to the
• New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
• Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.

...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.

If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not

• Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
• Support Page, which contains a link to the
• New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
• Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.

...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.

If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not

• Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
• Support Page, which contains a link to the
• New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
• Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.

...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.

If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not

• Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
• Support Page, which contains a link to the
• New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
• Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.

I'll catch this for support. We had some problems with our auto-mailer a few months ago that we didn't catch for a while (it was failing silently). We thought it was a rare intermittent problem, and it turned out to be much more serious than that. All that was fixed about a month ago. As noted on our web site and in the email you receive when you submit a ticket via the web site, you can contact sup-manager@redhat.com if there are any problems with your submission. We do not have an email address that you can send support requests to -- all of that is handled on the web site. As far as we know, there were no problems with the initial automated response -- everyone seemed to get those. If you did not get one, drop me a line off-list and we can look into it.

In any case, Installation Support would not have been able to help you with your issue, as we don't assist people working on compiler problems. What we support is defined in our Service Level Agreement. Also feel free to comment on the sla to sla@redhat.com -- I wrote the monstrous thing and would love some feedback.

Finally, Bero is right -- bugzilla is the way to go for issues like these, so that you can deal with someone that really knows what you are talking about. Support does have support available at that level (developer support) but it does not come with the boxed set.

Look, RTFM, Redhat website recommends using Apache as the assistant.

I believe the april 24th date only applies to boxed versions. Red Hat is kind of different from distros like SuSE in this apspect; with Red Hat the isos are made available immediately after a new version is announced and weeks before you can buy it in the shop, with SuSE you have to wait for weeks after it is available in the shop to be allowed to download it.

Note that the updates will break some builds - e.g. newer glibc cleaned up some name space polllution ( vs ), this broke compiling for a lot of packages. Both the pollution and the apps depending on it were fixed for Red Hat Linux 7., but this not released for RHL 7 as it didn't affect functionality.

We do mass rebuilds on a regular basis, so the packages should build - if you experience bugs with this, report it in bugzilla

gcc is used for more than compiling kernels. Appearantly Red Hat believed that fixing a lot of bugs and brokeness with gcc 2.95.2 was worth the hassle of having to ship another compiler for compiling the 2.2 kernel (which also was broken).

We hear on IRC all the time "I just installed gcc but ./configure tells me it can't make executables", we reply "install glibc-dev", they reply "I have glibc", we reply "install glibc-dev", they reply "fuck this, I'm going to use Windows..."

Tell them to install the gcc errata update and/or get the fixes for the program that they are compiling that compiles with more standards-compliant compilers (if the maintainer is unwilling to fix his program if it's his code that's broken, well, that is obviously not an option).

Or how about the guy the other day who chose the "Start with a graphical login" option, yet his X was not configured so he couldn't login until we showed him how to use runlevel 1 to change his default runlevel.

AFAIK, he couldn't have chosen "Start with a graphical login" without being presented with the graphics settings and ignoring them...

Y'all try to get all fancy and Windows-like, yet just end up making things a lot more confusing and complicated.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't. I enjoyed Red Hat 7 very much and deeply appreciate the work Red Hat has done for the free software community.

2.96-81 (from 7.1) fixes every genuine bug people reported to us.
Code that doesn't compile correctly with it will almost certainly not compile with gcc 3.0 when it's released.

As for the (double) and (float) things you're mentioning, we aren't aware of any problems.
What exactly is the problem? Do you have some sample code?

If so, report it at our bug tracking system and/or drop me a message.

So, where did you report your issues? If you reported them to support, it was simply the wrong place. They should have told you, but they're probably too overloaded at times.

The right place to report bugs is http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla.

Since we can recompile all SRPMs with our compiler (how do we think we're putting together the distribution? Check the headers in the binaries and you'll see that we do eat our own dogfood), you'll probably get a "RESOLVED: NOTABUG" and a "We can't reproduce this, must be a local configuration issue, make sure you installed the correct version of glibc-devel", but we'd rather get 30 bug reports about things that are actually a local configuration issue than missing one genuine bug report.

I can't reproduce the compiler problems you're talking about. We didn't use any non-2.96 compilers for building 7.0 and all errata packages. Chances are you didn't install a required -devel package or you're using nonstandard kernel headers.

As for not getting a response from support, this isn't nice (and I can't verify what's up, I'm in development, not support), but it's understandable.
Unless you've purchased a support contract, you'll only get installation support (even Red Hat has to live of something), and since you think you've found a bug, you should have reported it to our bug tracking system at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/ instead. You usually get replies to bugzilla entries in a reasonable time.

If you are aware of anything that causes infinite loops or gcc chokes with 2.96-81, please report it, so we can fix it. We're not aware of any big problems in 2.96-81, and we can't fix problems we aren't aware of.

C++ binary compatibility is a joke until gcc 3.0 is released. Handling C++ source isn't. gcc 2.96 does that well, 2.95.3 and earlier don't.

And yes, all of 7.0 was compiled with 7.0 itself.
If you can't get the SRPMs to recompile, it's a local installation issue (missing -devel packages? Modified glibc? Other kernel headers?).
If you find any 7.0 SRPM that can't be compiled on a 7.0 Everything install, let me know and I'll personally fix it, but this shouldn't be the case.

Enhancements
A number of incremental enhancements have been made:

• True zero-copy disk reads: Whereas TUX 1.0 copied files into a temporary buffer, TUX 2.0 is integrated with the page cache and thus uses zero-copy block I/O.

• Generic zero-copy network writes: TUX 2.0 uses the generic zero-copy TCP framework.

• Zero-copy parsing: Where possible, TUX parses input packets directly. Even in RAM-limited situations, TUX now does full, back-to-back zero-copy I/O.

Other changes include:

• Enhanced user-space utilities and module support.

• Mass virtual hosting support. The host-based virtual server patch has been added to TUX. There is no limit on the number of virtual hosts supported, only RAM and diskspace.

• CGIs can be bound to particular CPUs or can be left unbound.

• A number of bugs were fixed which caused performance problems - TUX 2.0 is now significantly faster than TUX 1.0!

--
And sorry for replying to myself. I didn't have this information in my previous posts.

• "The elements of Red Hat Linux 7.1 work together to deliver the most powerful, automated open source operating system for fast-growing enterprise and Internet infrastructure users."
• "`With the scalability enhancements in the new 2.4 kernel, Red Hat is delivering the most robust version of Linux to date,' said Dick Sullivan"

The RH 7.1 FTP Is up @ ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.1/, i'm getting the ISO's now, tho quite slow! (9kb/s) Hopefully there will be mirrors shortly!

3rd Floo

These packages are GPG signed by Red Hat, Inc. for security. Our key is available at:

http://www.redhat.com/corp/contact.html

You can verify each package with the following command:

rpm --checksig

If you only wish to verify that each package has not been corrupted or tampered with, examine only the md5sum with the following command:

rpm --checksig --nogpg

So it's not exactly a new idea :-)

I'm sorry but this situation must be corrected. So far, no one has enlightened this poor troll. I know for nearly everyone else this is review, but it appears that it is indeed necessary.

Red Hat did not invent Linux, Linus Torvalds (sp?) and a whole bunch of developers from all over the world did, and they did it mostly in their free time. They are not 'hackers' in the sense that that they are not some evil hoard conspiring to steal your credit card number and publish which porn sites you visit.

Red Hat sells a prepackaged version of linux which they have worked hard to form into a viable and competative consumer product complete with support and continued development. Debian, is a completely free, open source project. It includes nothing that you would have to pay money for. Debian, by definition makes no money. Read their social contract for a little more insight.

Now, just because it is free does not mean it is unsafe. No safe is uncrackable and no network is perfectly secure. As such, criminals often have a better knowledge of proprietary software such as windows NT, etc. than the network administrator running the system simply because the knowledge base is not public and the net admin can only learn what information is provided him. At best, the network admin and the criminal or on level ground. Open source makes that knowledge base public and you don't have to trust someone with your security you can secure things yourself. The burden is not on Microsoft to protect your credit card or porn habits, it's on you.

Hopefully, armed with this new knowledge, an enlightened debate can ensue.

I am willing to pay for quality products and to support musicians, but I am not willing to let my choices be made for me simply under the guise that some mega corporation has my best interests in mind. People will use microsofts preinstalled software because by and large, the computer consumer is a sheep and if it's at all difficult, they curl up into a fetal position and cry for bill gates to powder their ass and make everything smell better. Napster did not create MP3's but it made it simple for even the most ignorant user to download anything he or she wanted. It just happened to be free.

In related news, anonymous sources indicate that Redhat will be producing a pornographic version of the world's most popular Linux distribution.

Redhat is hoping that this will generate much-needed revenue, as "the only online companies turning a profit these days are pr0n (sic) sites."

Chairman Bob Young was quoted as saying "this distribution will have such features as fleshy desktops and interactive screensavers."

This leaves us wondering, what new device drivers will be included?

--j

If you are interested in broadening your timeline to include other operating systems' promise/delay/delivery-not-meeting-expectations, there are plenty of other examples out there, notably OS-X (AKA Rhapsody) which is 3 years late and lacks CD-R(W), DVDRW, DVD play support, along with missing printer and SCSI drivers (without running in 9.1 emulation mode). I'm still waiting for a major x86 Linux distro with good enough USB support, lacking for over a year, to use my Visor that I don't have to manually upgrade the kernel (I know, short work for some of you kernel hackers, but too much of a PITA for me), preferrably Red Hat, but their 'next several weeks' continues to drag on.

I doubt the 'promises/delays/letdowns' are exclusive to Windows, but fairly standard practice for the industry as a whole. That doesn't make it right, just typical.

Even more puzzling to me is how these apparently industry standard release cycles contribute to fragmentation, especially from a single proprietary vendor who can control all the different flavors! Sure, if they want it to fragment, they could make it happen, but it would require them to make it happen (or perhaps a federal judge ;).

Perhaps that's why Slashdot seems to have horrendous response times

I don't think so. Many consider the `unstable' branch of Debian GNU/Linux to be more stable than a certain popular commercial Linux OS. The `testing' branch is where the truly less-than-stable software resides.

It's nice to see that the folks at this Open Source Directory are modeling the software categories after Sourceforge'.s Software/application taxonomies typically vary from site-to-site and distribution-to-distribution. While I appreciate that all the site maintainers out there take time to organize information about software applications, the diversity makes it difficult to synthesize materials from multiple sources. I applaud this directory's deference to a previously-existing taxonomy.

A while back, I started creating a list of software categorization schemes/systems relevent to Linuxland:

http://freshmeat.net/browse/627/
http://apps.kde.com/na/2/categories&nav=f
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Softwa re/
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/ binary-i386/
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/
http://www.gnu.org/gnulist/production/index.html
http://www.userfriendly.net/linux/RPM/Groups.html
http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-category/
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media- types/media-types
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
http://www.labs.redhat.com/gug/users-guide/main-me nu.html
http://www.linux.com/links/Software/

There's even a place in the same city as Spindletop where I usually buy my hardware. PCs for Everyone checks out each component for Linux support.

The price I pay over cost is a contribution to what seems like a superfluous project. I just don't see the added value.

All of which is not to say that I would turn the dogs on the UPS driver if he showed up at the door with one...

As long as I'm wishing, I might as well wish for a pony...

They plan to make money off of Eazel Online Storage and Eazel Software Catalog.

Eazel Online Storage

This is similar to the technology made popular by X-drive that allows users to create a virtual drive that actual exists on a remote server. The problem with this technology is that it is expensive for the service provider (hard drive space and bandwidth) and from what I've seen from the online file storage market is that a lot of them (e.g. X-drive) have given up on the consumer market because of economies of scale and will instead try to capture the business market. Online file storage seems to be at best a break-even part of teh business instead of one that will generate enough profits to cover the cost of software development.

Eazel Software Catalog

This seems similar to RedHat's download page, where one can obtain software from a web interface instead of via FTP. One hopes that they also plan to have something like RedHat's up2date or Debian's apt-get to distinguish themselves, if not then it isn't worth signing up for. Again, I don't see this as a great profit generator.

What exactly is the business model for Eazel? How are they expecting to turn a profit ever? How (besides the now dried-up venture capital) will they pay their engineers and sustain a viable company?

If you look at their website, you will notice that they have corporate dealings with Sun Microsystems, Red Hat Linux, and Dell. They also are partnered with Xythos and Loudcloud.

They may not be turning over a profit yet, but they are working toward making a profit with a product that may be an innovation.

Snapper has found it difficult to get Microsoft to recognize new systems as being part of that license, said Snapper CIO Howard Jones.

I guess he forgot that magic line "If you throw it all away.. things can only get better."

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-se curity.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-bu gfixes.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-up dates.html


Ok, I did a fresh install of windows on a computer at work. Windows 98 first edition. I popped in the cd, the install ran, and in 30 minutes the computer booted and I went to the Windows Update site. Four downloads and two reboots later, I have a reasonably secure system with no known exploits. Full install, all fixes applied - less than an hour and a half.

Compare this with Redhat 7. Of course, everyone will complain that either these are for other apps (not the beloved linux kernel) or that RH 7 is just chock full o bugs. These are not excuses - and it's not an excuse that a knowledgeable person can plug up all the security holes in their GNU/Linux distro. Windows is a rather secure OS. OpenBSD it is not, but I garuantee that if you replaced every Windows user's desktop with KDE running on RH or SuSe, in absolutely no time at all 1337 4ax0rs will be having field days.

And on top of it, my copy of Windows ME that I use on my main desktop is the most stable full GUI system I've ever run. After turning off stupid things like system restore and PCHealth, it's quick, unobtrusive, and NEVER CRASHES. I haven't had a crash on this machine not caused by RealPlayer or Mozilla since I installed it. My current uptime is around 29 days, and that was only to change the ethernet card. Same goes with my Thinkpad.

I run an OpenBSD server, and I'm impressed with its default install security, and the fact that everything is turned off. I like OpenBSD, and I like Linux. However, putting X on Linux and running windows-equivalent apps, in my experience, makes it just as buggy and not much, if at all, more secure.

No one cares how fucking wonderful, stable, bug-free, and brilliant the Linux kernel is when common Linux apps aren't. I don't give a shit if Linux has better memory management when I can just click "open from location" and have apps install right there and give me a nice icon. Users won't care about the source code to the gnu c++ compiler when I can click TWICE and have ALL of the latest bug fixes and security updates install THEMSELVES WITH NO EXTRA INTERVENTION.

I don't care if Linux is more powerful when Windows is just so much easier to manage. I do WORK with my time, not bug downloads and system management.

Sorry about that, I just had a bone to pick.

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-se curity.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-bu gfixes.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-up dates.html


Ok, I did a fresh install of windows on a computer at work. Windows 98 first edition. I popped in the cd, the install ran, and in 30 minutes the computer booted and I went to the Windows Update site. Four downloads and two reboots later, I have a reasonably secure system with no known exploits. Full install, all fixes applied - less than an hour and a half.

Compare this with Redhat 7. Of course, everyone will complain that either these are for other apps (not the beloved linux kernel) or that RH 7 is just chock full o bugs. These are not excuses - and it's not an excuse that a knowledgeable person can plug up all the security holes in their GNU/Linux distro. Windows is a rather secure OS. OpenBSD it is not, but I garuantee that if you replaced every Windows user's desktop with KDE running on RH or SuSe, in absolutely no time at all 1337 4ax0rs will be having field days.

And on top of it, my copy of Windows ME that I use on my main desktop is the most stable full GUI system I've ever run. After turning off stupid things like system restore and PCHealth, it's quick, unobtrusive, and NEVER CRASHES. I haven't had a crash on this machine not caused by RealPlayer or Mozilla since I installed it. My current uptime is around 29 days, and that was only to change the ethernet card. Same goes with my Thinkpad.

I run an OpenBSD server, and I'm impressed with its default install security, and the fact that everything is turned off. I like OpenBSD, and I like Linux. However, putting X on Linux and running windows-equivalent apps, in my experience, makes it just as buggy and not much, if at all, more secure.

No one cares how fucking wonderful, stable, bug-free, and brilliant the Linux kernel is when common Linux apps aren't. I don't give a shit if Linux has better memory management when I can just click "open from location" and have apps install right there and give me a nice icon. Users won't care about the source code to the gnu c++ compiler when I can click TWICE and have ALL of the latest bug fixes and security updates install THEMSELVES WITH NO EXTRA INTERVENTION.

I don't care if Linux is more powerful when Windows is just so much easier to manage. I do WORK with my time, not bug downloads and system management.

Sorry about that, I just had a bone to pick.

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-se curity.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-bu gfixes.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh7-errata-up dates.html


Ok, I did a fresh install of windows on a computer at work. Windows 98 first edition. I popped in the cd, the install ran, and in 30 minutes the computer booted and I went to the Windows Update site. Four downloads and two reboots later, I have a reasonably secure system with no known exploits. Full install, all fixes applied - less than an hour and a half.

Compare this with Redhat 7. Of course, everyone will complain that either these are for other apps (not the beloved linux kernel) or that RH 7 is just chock full o bugs. These are not excuses - and it's not an excuse that a knowledgeable person can plug up all the security holes in their GNU/Linux distro. Windows is a rather secure OS. OpenBSD it is not, but I garuantee that if you replaced every Windows user's desktop with KDE running on RH or SuSe, in absolutely no time at all 1337 4ax0rs will be having field days.

And on top of it, my copy of Windows ME that I use on my main desktop is the most stable full GUI system I've ever run. After turning off stupid things like system restore and PCHealth, it's quick, unobtrusive, and NEVER CRASHES. I haven't had a crash on this machine not caused by RealPlayer or Mozilla since I installed it. My current uptime is around 29 days, and that was only to change the ethernet card. Same goes with my Thinkpad.

I run an OpenBSD server, and I'm impressed with its default install security, and the fact that everything is turned off. I like OpenBSD, and I like Linux. However, putting X on Linux and running windows-equivalent apps, in my experience, makes it just as buggy and not much, if at all, more secure.

No one cares how fucking wonderful, stable, bug-free, and brilliant the Linux kernel is when common Linux apps aren't. I don't give a shit if Linux has better memory management when I can just click "open from location" and have apps install right there and give me a nice icon. Users won't care about the source code to the gnu c++ compiler when I can click TWICE and have ALL of the latest bug fixes and security updates install THEMSELVES WITH NO EXTRA INTERVENTION.

I don't care if Linux is more powerful when Windows is just so much easier to manage. I do WORK with my time, not bug downloads and system management.

Sorry about that, I just had a bone to pick.

...you can get it here.

Microsoft: Who Do j00 want to 0wn today?

RedHat has two links on their front page at redhat.com. Maybe they got scared, although there really isn't anything to be scared of with this particular virus. It is kind of cool that it afflict PE and ELF files.

Yes, they can do this. But at present they cant stop me from mirroring it for free. Now what they could also do is do what OpenBSD does, and copyright the ISO file structure, which says you cant distribute that either. But you could also take the packages and make a whole new ISO image. This is just a bad business practice, And they are hardly one of the best. They should learn from RedHat's business model, and there will always be Debian

2GB hard drive space? 128Meg RAM minimum? What are they trying to run here, Nautilus (rimshot)

Seriously though, is this the 'future' of software? Bloatware? Where will this leave users with yesterdays computers? Oh right..

My biggest gripe tho is the 2GB they talk about needed. The biggest, baddest install of Debian I can come up with is smaller then that, and we're talking about enough development tools and libraries to recompile the kernel, the display server, the UI... I don't even want to think how big Visual Studio XP will be. Save me!!!

Looks like another reason to use djbdns, which has a $500 security guarantee and is supposedly a lot more efficient than BIND.

For RedHat users, here's how to apply the fixes:

Download the appropriate RPMs to fix BIND.

At a shell, as root, type rpm -Ui package -- package of course being the name of the RPM.

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press _Q42001.html

I haven't been able to reach the article since it appears to be Slashdotted, but I would be surprised if it is anything more than a rehash of the press-release with the obligatory journalist missunderstandings and confusing rephrasing.

A quick-n-dirty summary/analyzis from someone with *some* economic education and experience:

Red Hat's fiscal year 2001 ranges from February 28 2000 to February 28 2001 and that's what they have released figures for.

They made a "reported net loss" of $24.2 million, compared to a net loss of $24.6 million the year before, which by first look might seem like an extremely small improvement. However, their revenue rised by 100%, from $42 million in 2000 to $84 million in 2001, hinting that they are expanding rapidly so their losses are likely to come from investments that haven't payed off yet.

However, their "adjusted net loss" changed much more, from $19 million in 2000 to $5.9 million in 2001. It's very typical that a company that makes large aquisitions/investments wants to spread the cost over a few years and that's most likely what they have done here. This is actually good since it keeps the company's result level (and thus its shareprice) a bit more stable. You can't make your big cost magically disappear, you can only spread it over a few years.

The thing that Red Hat emphasizes is that they only made an adjusted net loss of $600.000 for the *LAST QUARTER*, trying to give the impression that they are on the virge of going break-even. However, remember that this is an _adjusted_ net loss, so they can have done some magic here, but I do find their statement believable considering their rapid increase in revenue, but we can't know for sure until we see the next report.

What I find to be most promising is the rapid increase in revenue. Up 100% compared to a year ago. That shows to me that Red Hat is on the right track.

You probably shouldn't be running bind (or anything else). Linux's security problems are almost always created by people leaving stuff up/on/open when they don't need to.

These "people" are you and me, the admins. This problem is clearly the admin's fault.

Insert standard "wish-the-distros-would-wise-up-and-ship-closed-by -default-installations" thought here...

There is very little truth in your statement these days. On most recent distros you have to choose explicitly to be a server. If you don't, you have to explicitly choose to install and enable BIND. Truth be known, I doubt there are very many KDE workstations out there running named.

No, the blame lies in lazy (or nonexistant?) sysadmins. Let's face it; why is your server running BIND if it doesn't need to (you chose it from the install...)? If the machine is a nameserver, then when the advisory came out in January, did you patch up right away? If not, WHY NOT?. The vendors got updated RPMs and whatnot out fairly quickly.

For the non-existant admin problem, things like the Redhat network will help tremendously.

Not trying to flame here, but your ranting sounds like the parents who blame high-school shootings on video games and movies, when they should be pointing in the mirror. To all the slack admins out there: Enough of this sh*t. Suck it up and do your damn jobs.

FWIW, installs are getting very savvy these days, taking up the slack for the poor job a lot of admins out there are doing; check out RH's latest beta (wolverine?) install - it does ipchains config during the install.

OSX allows me to very openly work in a heterogenious environment as Windows and the old MacOS seem to do the exact opposite

On Windows, there's Red Hat Cygwin, a Win32 version of GNU userland. On Classic Mac OS, there's MPW.

I could make that list even longer with many more projects that Red Hat either funds, maintains, develops or contributes to, but I think I've already proven my point.

I could make that list even longer with many more projects that Red Hat either funds, maintains, develops or contributes to, but I think I've already proven my point.