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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Priority updates - RedHat could hypothetically decide to offer updates via the update agent service before they're available via FTP. Depending on how this gets done, it could be delibrate (such as it appearing on the update agent a week before FTP) or just an artifact of bandwidth and priority (it may appear on the FTP site as soon as the update agent starts pushing, but connection limits and mirroring delays may mean it's not readily available until a day or two later).

Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.

Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.

All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.

Priority updates - RedHat could hypothetically decide to offer updates via the update agent service before they're available via FTP. Depending on how this gets done, it could be delibrate (such as it appearing on the update agent a week before FTP) or just an artifact of bandwidth and priority (it may appear on the FTP site as soon as the update agent starts pushing, but connection limits and mirroring delays may mean it's not readily available until a day or two later).

Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.

Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.

All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.

Priority updates - RedHat could hypothetically decide to offer updates via the update agent service before they're available via FTP. Depending on how this gets done, it could be delibrate (such as it appearing on the update agent a week before FTP) or just an artifact of bandwidth and priority (it may appear on the FTP site as soon as the update agent starts pushing, but connection limits and mirroring delays may mean it's not readily available until a day or two later).

Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.

Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.

All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.

From Red Hat's Network FAQ:

Just as a matter of interest, isn't Windows.NET going to be available on a subscription basis? And aren't Microsofties the world over going on about how brilliant it is, even though it's still semi-vapour at the moment. Of course if you actually read the Changes FAQs you'll find the following words:

Starting February 26, you can try the full version of Software Manager for free, but only on one system.

So basically for every RedHat box you buy, you get free updates. It's only if you use the one box set to set up several PCs that you have to pay. This is obviously aimed at businesses, but for those of us with more than one PC at home there are still plenty of distros to choose from.
BTW if this change happened nearly a month ago, why has it only just become news?

or you could use the TUX kernel patch and write a c based cgi called from tux for anything dynamic

IMHO, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols should open his eyes.
Only two distributions left?
Not even a mention of my favorite desktop distribution.

What about special distributions?
Heck, there's so many niche markets that even Redhat has almost a dozen different versions. and that list doesn't include the Cheapbytes , or Embedded versions.

Don't get me wrong, Redhat makes a great distribution, but do you really expect them to fit every market niche?

Umm... you're right, it's

rpm -Uvh glibc-2.2-12.i686.rpm glibc-common-2.2-12.i386.rpm nscd-2.2-12.i386.rpm

That was a great deal more, was it?
My point is, upgrading the glibc on Red Hat 7 really isn't harder than that. Red Hat 7 was compiled against glibc 2.1.92, a prerelease of glibc 2.2, and thus everything is binary compatible with the final glibc 2.2. If you think you shouldn't upgrade your glibc, think again.

Eazel Services look very similar to Red Hat's Network service - see www.redhat.com/network/

Anyone care to explain to me what the difference is?

If you need Mozilla 0.8 packages you can find them at: http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/software/
I got the same conflict. After installing 0.8 the installer at least started to download...

I'm not on Linux (I miss tab completion the most), so I can't grep for it

If you use Red Hat Cygwin (GNU software for Windows) or the full version of DJGPP (GNU software for DOS), you get bash and grep.

Back on topic... lack of tab completion in the WinDOS distributions is what keeps us using easy-to-type 8.3 names.

On an 8-way Dell PowerEdge 8450/700,

• TUX 2.0 scores 7500 simultaneous connections.
• IIS 5.0 and SWC 3.0 (a cache front-end) scores 7300.

The rematch has already been quietly won, by Linux.

I'd like to see how they define UNIX platform.

You mean for licensing purposes? Qt Free is GPL, so you can port it to any platform.

Does NT's POSIX count as a UNIX platform? Does BeOS count as a UNIX platform?

Currently, Qt Free requires a working POSIX subsystem (NT's is subpar but Red Hat Cygwin is good) and an X11 server. XFree86 works on Windows NT/2K but not on 9x because of stupid assumptions in the design of Windows 9x's USER and GDI servers. (Why oh why didn't Microsoft just release NT 4 as Windows 95?)

free for OSS and pay for commercial is one thing. Doing the same for UNIX and Windows is just punishing a developer for not liking *NIX.

It's not punishing but instead "not wasting effort on porting a free software package to an environment that's thought to be hostile to free software."

I'd like to see how they define UNIX platform.

You mean for licensing purposes? Qt Free is GPL, so you can port it to any platform.

Does NT's POSIX count as a UNIX platform? Does BeOS count as a UNIX platform?

Currently, Qt Free requires a working POSIX subsystem (NT's is subpar but Red Hat Cygwin is good) and an X11 server. XFree86 works on Windows NT/2K but not on 9x because of stupid assumptions in the design of Windows 9x's USER and GDI servers. (Why oh why didn't Microsoft just release NT 4 as Windows 95?)

free for OSS and pay for commercial is one thing. Doing the same for UNIX and Windows is just punishing a developer for not liking *NIX.

It's not punishing but instead "not wasting effort on porting a free software package to an environment that's thought to be hostile to free software."

Most windows lusers couldn't compile anyway

They can if the installation wizard handles compiling the software; such an installation package would be similar to a source RPM. And yes, there is a free full-featured GNU compiler for Windows. There are two in fact: MinGW GCC and the GCC from Red Hat Cygwin.

they had brains they wouldn't be using an OS designed for two year olds.

So we're supposed to run games for the Wintendo platform under Wine? Good luck.

I upgrade my software with apt

Pretty hard to do if the distro on your Debian CD doesn't support your network connection hardware and protocols (winmodem, AOL, Juno, NetZero, network card, cable modem, DSL modem, PPPoE, etc.).

I read my docs online

Pretty hard to do if you can't boot or if your video subsystem isn't working.

... they're just keeping a low-profile.

My favorite UNIX-based game is a turn-based game, XConq, which is a derivative of the old Empire and Conquest series.

The thing that keeps turn-based games alive is that a large number of people prefer strategy games. There are no real-time strategy games that I'm aware of. Game such as StarCraft, Total Annihilation, and other "gather-resources and make units" aren't strategy games, no matter what the marketing droids say. They're tactical games. Which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.

What I'm waiting for is someone to create the marriage of the 1st-person shooter with the real-time "strategy" game and requiring multi-person teams. Strategy requires a larger time-frame, and a broad view, something with our current generation of realtime games don't have, but turn-based ones have down cold.

-Erik
(who knows more than a few people at MIT who almost didn't graduate because of an Xconq addiction...)

Shipping something of quality was exactly what they tried to do. The problem was that the gcc maintainers had not released anything for over a year. gcc 2.95.2 was broken with regards to lots of stuff, most notably C++ and Alpha stuff, for which many fixes had existed for a long time in cvs.
So what Red Hat did was to debug and polish a release snapshot with all these fixes, to ensure a quality compiler.
And with the 2.96-69 update, it's probably the best gcc compiler you can get.

Redhat Errata

are being packaged by Christoper Blizzard and can be found here. As of right now, the binary RPMs are not around, but the 0.8 SRPM for Redhat 7 is there now. Build it yourself if you're in a hurry -- the source is a smaller download than the binaries anyway. :)

... that this is almost a non-issue.

Have a look at this page (written back in July 98), which compares libc with glibc.

In particular:
"Programs compiled to use libc 5 will not run with glibc, and vice versa. However, glibc includes support for "symbol versioning". This will virtually eliminate the need for another incompatible libc switchover, like the one from libc 5 to glibc, to ever happen again."

In other words, you can have multiple versions of libc installed alongside each other and applications that use either will work. I have libc2.1 and 2.2 applications both running right now on my mandrake linux desktop.

(Am I missing something here?)

http://sources.redhat.com/glibc/glibc-faq.html

In Windows, use win+r for the RUN command

This opens a single command line. History? Tab completion? cd? Hardly. It does not open a shell window. To open a shell window, you have to type command or bash into the dialog box that the Run... command creates. (To get bash and friends, download and install DJGPP (DOS/Win9x) or Cygwin (9x/NT).)

A lot of people seem to be concerned about the problems with 'open hardware' development - fab. costs, logistics, and so on. These certainly are major stumbling blocks.

However, how about a more modern business model? Here in the UK, ARM have been designing first-class processors for years, and yet they don't make any chips themselves. They *licence* their designs to other manufacturers (eg. VLSI, Intel, etc.).

So - all we need is an OpenHardware licence, some outstanding technology, and some effective advocacy. Think about it - the openh team could design an absolute corker of a processor, then some manufacturer could manufacture it, and would be obliged to put their 'real-world' improvements/refinements/fixes back into the open. After a few iterations of this, momentum would gather, and we'd have a well-tested, well-designed, real-world piece of hardware.

Wishful thinking perhaps, but if you'd have told me twelve years ago that some companies would be making money from selling products based on an entirely freely available, hobbyist-designed OS, I might not have believed you. Things change, sometimes for the better.

The only trouble is, all those chip manufacturers would get rich quick off the labours of the open hardware designers. But that's a philosophical argument for another day... :-)

...the open source game Xconq. That one really huge map of the world is way, way impressive.

("Way impressive" is a technical term they learnt me in college...)