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They don't have to think if they don't wan't to.
Both Red Hat and Mandrake provide pointy-clicky-fancy updaters for fetching and installing latest updates. Perfect for those who don't want to think, they just have to remember to run it once in a while.

They don't have to think if they don't wan't to.
Both Red Hat and Mandrake provide pointy-clicky-fancy updaters for fetching and installing latest updates. Perfect for those who don't want to think, they just have to remember to run it once in a while.

The up2date service has been changed, and no longer uses that directory - it's now a part of Red Hat Network. I like the new program better - I never liked the old one, so I didn't use it much. The new version works nicely, and I use it on my private machines.

What's ironic is that RedHat's up2date service doesn't support RH 7 either (At least, there is no rhl-7.0 directory under ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/up2date ).

Everyone seems to just jump right in and complain about how hard it is to get help for Linux in general, but the article specifically asks about GNOME and KDE. I don't know how well Windows users are catered to, but there is the GNOME User's Guide, as well as one for the K Desktop Environment. I hope these help.

Red Hat has plenty of quality documentation on their website. Newbie or linux veteran, there's lots of stuff for everyone.
http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/

Although Linux does support console on the serial port, so if that "rack mount device" you speak of is a basic term-server/serial port switcher, you can manage your x86 Linux boxen the same damn way.

True, almost. Just hope you don't have to perform any BIOS changes from a serial console. You can't compare the poor excuse of firmware that ships with most PCs to OpenBoot.

The Blackdown Project has Sparc ports. 1.2.2 is available, though I don't believe that 1.3 is yet.

Good point. The Blackdown folks do fine work. But it's still no match for the Solaris 1.2.2 Production VM. Our server apps have to be robust, fast, robust, high performance, robust...

(I'm hoping the gcj project will become the great equalizer on Java performance, but it's not quite there yet.)

DocBook is your friend

DocBook is a lot to digest at one time, but it is well worth the effort. Personally I prefer DocBook XML and use Norm Walsh's XSLT stylesheets to transform the XML to anything I want... HTML, PDF, whatever.

Here are some resources for your reading pleasure.

• OASIS DocBook Site
• Norm Walsh's DocBook Site
• Get Going With DocBook - Mark Galassi
• SGML for Windows NT
• DocBook tools

DocBook is Open Source, freely available on all platforms of interest, can be used for simple documents to complex books, separates presentation from content, and is extensible. What more could you want from a document format?

- and Bradley Kuhn is working on compiling Perl to the JVM, using Kawa - see the Kawa mailing list archives.

Has RedHat, the thing presumably most ZDNet readers think is Linux, grown larger than one CD lately? [Last time I looked, the other two CDs in the box were bonus bits and source code]

Uhh, actually yes... Red Hat Linux 7 is two CDs which are all RPMs. Both CDs are required for a full installation. There are even more CDs for the SRPMS and the Powertools.

Speak not from whence you know not...

--

Check out the article on Gnotices. Owen has added OpenType support to freetype and Pango. It uses the XRender extension to achieve this.
----

The Media is thoroughly confused, but this isn't news to anyone. I'm tired, too, of hearing about the "Eazel" desktop environment. Don't get me wrong. I love what Eazel, and other companies are doing for open source projects such as Gnome. I just dislike the Media's gross misunderstanding of the relationship between the Community and the Corporation. One wonders of the Media will ever really grasp the beast known as the Open Source/Free Software Community and how it integrates with the business models of companies such as Red Hat, Eazel, and Helix Code. "They" don't seem to fully grasp the idea that the Community (project, source, forums) is an entity separate from the Corporation, yet a part of it with a powerful relationship. The Corporation may enhance the Community, providing resources that the Community might not be able to provide on it's own, yet if the Corporation were to die, the Community would live on. And the Corporation very much feeds on the Community.
----

Distribution of binaries is of the utmost importance for platforms like Windows, where a compiler does not come with the operating system, and the compilers that are readily available are often non-free.

So what if MinGW or Cygwin doesn't come with the system? They're both easy to download and install, and they're both GPL'd free software (based on GCC and other GNU stuff). Or, you can use the (non-free but free beer) LCC compiler. However, Mac OS 9 systems (that can't run OS X because don't have a G3 mobo and 128 MB of RAM), on the other hand, don't even have a command line; good luck getting GNU anything to work.

I'm a member of the customer services department at Etnus, so I'm interested in helping you get TotalView working. You didn't give any information about your system, so it's a little hard to troubleshoot your problem. But I'll take a stab anyway.

Since you are posting to Slashdot I'd say that the likelihood is good that you are on top of the latest releases of all things related to Linux, and that you are comfortable dealing with libraries.

The latest versions of libbfd changed in a way that breaks functionality that TotalView relies on. If this is indeed what is happening in your case then the fix is simple. The fix is just to include the library that TotalView expects to find. Grab libbfd-2.9.5.0.22.so out of binutils-2.9.5.0.22-6.

You can install it in /usr/lib/libbfd-2.9.5.0.22.so or you can place it anywhere you want and just update the symbolic link libbfd-2.9.1.0.15.so.0 in /usr/toolworks/totalview.4.1.0-2/linux-x86/shlib/ to point at your libbfd-2.9.5.0.22.so.

Our release package will be changed to include a working libbfd sometime in the next week.

Please feel free to contact us at support@etnus.com about this or any other problem.

binutils and libbfd are licensed under the GPL.

Cheers,

Chris Gottbrath, Etnus

It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).

It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.

'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.

It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.

Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say .GNET?

The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:

C++ objects and their complexities are happily left out. There is no polymorphism or tricky exception handling (the difficulty of understanding exception handling caused the explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket).

It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.

It's too bad, cause I'm sure an arm running an embedded version of linux would get a really high price from some open-source-advocate amputee...

;-)
It's funny, laugh.

-the wunderhorn

I have done a lot of work on rebuilding uClibc (the Clinux C library) the last 6 months or so to make it cross platform. Have I received even 1 stinking patch from our friends at Red Hat? I think not.

Joe deBlaquiere at Red Hat (who posts frequently on the mailing list and recently put together a nice howto on porting uClinux) is the only redhat person I have ever seen on the mailing list. Does writing a howto make it Red Hat's? I think not.

I can answer a) with a 'yes' - look at the RedHat training & certification program, for instance. I've heard that other distro providers offer something similar, but I've only looked at RedHat so far - maybe I'll take a GNOME programming course and certification myself once I convince my boss that I need that enough to make him cough up the dough.

Good luck!

Good luck!

that seems more appropriate to an industrial-strength OS with an approved hardware list, which Linux decidedly doesn't have.

Here's Red Hat's. Your Linux distributor is likely to have its own list.

Sorry about the link. I have no idea what happened. It should have been:
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/eeor acle/.
Is there any chance that HP would help you out with some of their Unix servers? They make a fairly broad range of really solid (but expensive) servers running HP-UX on their PA-RISC chips. Not as much bang for the buck as Intel, but more peace of mind.

There are a number of other free/open source RTOSes for the embedded community. RTEMS (http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS) is probably the oldest of these. Other alternatives include eCos (http://sources.redhat.com/ecos) and uCOS (no URL handy).

Disclaimer: I am one of the original authors and current maintainer of RTEMS. :)

it is 'GNOME ORBit' :)
Seriously it is a very hight speed implementation of the OMG CORBA specification, created to give the GNOME project a very fast CORBA implementation. You find more information on the RH Labs homepage.

You should only choose another license if you specifically intend to allow anyone to make closed-source, commercial use of your code.

That's why it's pointed out in an earlier comment that Microsoft wouldn't base an offerring on Linux, but on BSD - as Apple is doing, with Mac OS X.

The Free Software Foundation recommends against the general use of the LGPL - formerly called the GNU Library Public License but now called the lesser public license.

Generally, you'd only want to use the LGPL if there is already an existing high-quality library that is available in closed-source form and you want yours to be adopted by people who want to keep the source to their applications closed. This was done, for example, with glibc, to make a replacement for the proprietary libc popular.

But if you're writing a totally new library, or if you feel that your library is a significant improvement on an existing closed-source library, using the GPL rather than the LGPL will draw new free software into the world, and although it won't prevent people from selling your work, it will prevent them from holding the source closed.

Licenses that would be inappropriate for competing with Microsoft would be the BSD License or the MIT License, the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License.

That's why, despite Mozilla, we still need a good browser that is GPL'ed.

For lists of a lot of licenses, see the opensource.org approved licenses and GPL Compatible Licenses - these last basically can be combined in software with GPL'ed code. Also note License that are incompatible with the GPL.

Upon further examination, I see that if you are not going to use the GPL, you should at least use a license that would allow your code to be used in the same project with GPL'ed code. This is the case with the revised BSD license (without the advertising class) and the MIT license but not the Mozilla license, or, significantly, the Python license - in some cases the incompatibility is not caused by restrictions by what you can do with the code but in the case of Python it's because the licensed is governed by the laws of the state of Virginia in the U.S.A.

Sometimes people do specifically choose to use things like the MIT License because they intend for it to be used for commercial use. My friend Andy Green who wrote the ZooLib cross-platform application framework is an independent consultant, and he had it in mind to make things easier for other consultants and small commercial developers, as well as free software developers. It was a complex decision but they people with an interest in the code ultimately agreed on the MIT license.

On the one hand, this allows people like Microsoft to write cross-platform closed-source products that would compete with free software - so MS could port their products to ZooLib and have source compatibility with Linux, Windows and Mac (and BeOS too), and this source would be closed, which could be a problem.

On the other hand, the ready availability of an open source but commercially-compatible crossplatform library gives power to the third-party developer at the expense of all OS vendors whether closed or open source, which I feel is arguably a good thing.

So it is a complex decision, really. But I think that, when in doubt, use the GPL. If you hold the copyright yourself, you can always supply a separately licensed version to people who pay you for it. For example, while the CygWin library (a POSIX API for Windows, part of a GNU programming environment that is largely source-code compatible with Linux) is under the GPL, you can purchase a proprietary license for it from Redhat which is actually pretty expensive from the terms they used to have on their page.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

You should only choose another license if you specifically intend to allow anyone to make closed-source, commercial use of your code.

That's why it's pointed out in an earlier comment that Microsoft wouldn't base an offerring on Linux, but on BSD - as Apple is doing, with Mac OS X.

The Free Software Foundation recommends against the general use of the LGPL - formerly called the GNU Library Public License but now called the lesser public license.

Generally, you'd only want to use the LGPL if there is already an existing high-quality library that is available in closed-source form and you want yours to be adopted by people who want to keep the source to their applications closed. This was done, for example, with glibc, to make a replacement for the proprietary libc popular.

But if you're writing a totally new library, or if you feel that your library is a significant improvement on an existing closed-source library, using the GPL rather than the LGPL will draw new free software into the world, and although it won't prevent people from selling your work, it will prevent them from holding the source closed.

Licenses that would be inappropriate for competing with Microsoft would be the BSD License or the MIT License, the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License.

That's why, despite Mozilla, we still need a good browser that is GPL'ed.

For lists of a lot of licenses, see the opensource.org approved licenses and GPL Compatible Licenses - these last basically can be combined in software with GPL'ed code. Also note License that are incompatible with the GPL.

Upon further examination, I see that if you are not going to use the GPL, you should at least use a license that would allow your code to be used in the same project with GPL'ed code. This is the case with the revised BSD license (without the advertising class) and the MIT license but not the Mozilla license, or, significantly, the Python license - in some cases the incompatibility is not caused by restrictions by what you can do with the code but in the case of Python it's because the licensed is governed by the laws of the state of Virginia in the U.S.A.

Sometimes people do specifically choose to use things like the MIT License because they intend for it to be used for commercial use. My friend Andy Green who wrote the ZooLib cross-platform application framework is an independent consultant, and he had it in mind to make things easier for other consultants and small commercial developers, as well as free software developers. It was a complex decision but they people with an interest in the code ultimately agreed on the MIT license.

On the one hand, this allows people like Microsoft to write cross-platform closed-source products that would compete with free software - so MS could port their products to ZooLib and have source compatibility with Linux, Windows and Mac (and BeOS too), and this source would be closed, which could be a problem.

On the other hand, the ready availability of an open source but commercially-compatible crossplatform library gives power to the third-party developer at the expense of all OS vendors whether closed or open source, which I feel is arguably a good thing.

So it is a complex decision, really. But I think that, when in doubt, use the GPL. If you hold the copyright yourself, you can always supply a separately licensed version to people who pay you for it. For example, while the CygWin library (a POSIX API for Windows, part of a GNU programming environment that is largely source-code compatible with Linux) is under the GPL, you can purchase a proprietary license for it from Redhat which is actually pretty expensive from the terms they used to have on their page.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I run Unigraphics on NT using Exceed, and lemme tell ya, it's not all it's cracked up to be!

So quit using Exceed and start using XFree86 for NT.

XFree86 4 already works on Windows NT and Windows 2000; however, there is buggy 16-bit legacy code in Windows 9x's kernel and GDI that keeps the X server from working properly (according to the XFree86 for Windows FAQ). This should be less of a problem once Windows 2000 Personal (codename Whistler) is released.

They needed an X server and a commercial unix emulation package to do this.

KDE too started out relying on proprietary software but (with Trolltech's help) phased it out. Once XFree86 4 begins to work around buggy 16-bit code in Windows 9x (it already works fine on NT/2K) or Whistler is released, we will have our free X11 server for Windows. And it shouldn't be too much work to move from Uwin to Red Hat Cygwin, another POSIX layer for Windows.

Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp

Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp

Check Cygnus for XFree for Win32. Apparently it only works on NT, ME, and 2K at the moment.

1. Caldera Systems, Inc.
2. Red Hat
3. Rebel.com

First, get the cygnus (now owned by RedHat) toolkit . This gives you a great many unix type commands (tar, ls, cp, dd, less, cat, pwd, ftp, cut, sort, etc), and a real bash shell, and a decent terminal window. Just having the bash autocompletion and command line history is worth the price of download, not to mention your directory slashes now go the right way :)

Next, get yourself the activestate perl port for windows. This gives you perl, which combined with the cygnus toolset makes easy and highly portable scripts very easy to throw together.

Next, get the putty secure shell tools . This gives you pscp (like rcp, but better in every regard) and a pssh (a secure telnet replacement). These will both connect right up with a RedHat 7 system running the openSSH stuff right out of the box.

Of course, get the latest version of emacs for windows.

Finally, just for good measure, throw on Apache so you can serve up files in a pinch. This is handy in case you need to move files around with a system that lacks secure shell for whatever reason. Just throw together a quickie page and use browsers to do all the transfers.

I keep all these tools on a single burned CD (with room to spare). They are the first things I put on any system I use. With this toolset, windows goes from a useless development platform to a slightly annoying development platform, which is better then nothing when your clients require windows on your desktop box.

Jeff Dike, the author on User-mode Linux has been actively seraching for people to undertake the Win32 port of UML. (UML is a cool hack that makes it possible to run Linux on top of the Unix system call API, eg. as a userlevel process in linux.) I think someone already started porting. They are using cygwin (at least in the beginning).

If they are succesful, one can execute linux binaries on Win32.

RedHat 7 versions of nightly builds are available. There are also builds for RH6 there, and those work on at least Suse 6.4.

Benny

IBM's support of its own hardware choices for Linux systems is sketchy at best... ThinkPads were merely the best example because of the fact they must use cutting edge technology to provide the best performance per battery costs.

Just as the S3 video for a ThinkPad's Mobile/Savage IX is hard to configure, so it is with the majority of the S3 line IBM uses. Does IBM take notice? If you examine the servers on their website, They say they support their hardware, but in the asterisksed footnotes, they say it is only tested to work is a plain-jane SVGA display.

Recently DELL made an announcement that it would incentivize hardware manufacturers to be more forthcoming on their specifications for Linux drivers. Can't IBM do likewise? Is the crippled support they actually impliment worth claiming as support at all?

Another site to check is Red Hat. They sort supported systems by manufacturer, including IBM. There you can see which systems are "supported" for RedHat (which in turn should mean support for redhat compatible Mandrake), and in what ways the support is held short.

I believe that is what Red Hat Network tryes to accomplish.

5) Consider dropping your distro and adopting Debian. I know you are proud of RH, but the realeases appear to have significant flaws...7.0, 6.0, 5.0 were all disasters.

Eh.. pardon me, but why on earth should Red Hat become Debian? Personally, I see no advantages in Debian except maybe apt (which is basically just aconvinient frontend to a package system and can be adapted to rpm).
I also think that RH7 is the best Red Hat I have ever used. I don't see what the "disaster" should be about.

OK, so exactly why isn't Slashdot spending a bit more time talking about GCJ? It's not like it's hard to find, the GCJ site is linked right off the GCC page.

Don't tell me all these slashdotters are so bereft of independent thought that they're following Sun's marketing party line without even prodding it to see if maybe there isn't a better way to use Java. (I can tell it's true!)

Current status: it compiles from Java source or classfiles into native code, using the same codegen the rest of GCC uses. It supports CNI, which basically lets you access native code at C++ method invocation speeds. Looking good, and some production apps are using it. When you create an app with GCJ, it can look like any other native executable ... and it starts and runs faster than anything I've seen out of Hotspot!

I'd not try anything older than the GCJ 2.96 found in RedHat 7 (or maybe Debian). And you'd need to be cautious about using "Java 2" APIs; they were, after all, part of Sun's strategy to quickly bloat Java so it couldn't be "open". But I'd really encourage folk interested in Java and Linux to start investing in GCJ ... if anything is in a position to reconnect these two communities, it's GCJ ...

Jamie Zawinski has an excellent commentary on the good and bad points of Java.
It can be found at:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

Except for the handful of things outlined by Zawinski, Java is great. You can even get good performance (though not even close to C-like) with native compilers.

Check out gcj (The gcc native Java compiler) at http://sources.redhat.com/java.

Also, be sure to check out my Java CueCat driver at http://www.popbeads.org/Software

--

I've put up slides from several talks I have done on my web page. Several of the talks are fairly similar to each other, explaining some of the benefits of Open Source to several different audiences. There might be useful material there. FWIW...

I went to disable ftp and telnet by outcommenting /etc/inetd.conf. Guess what? There is no inetd.conf!

Redhat: Please leave the standard config files in place! Stop molesting /etc!

Quote from the RedHat 7 Features/Enhancements page:

inetd replaced by xinetd The xinetd package has greater functionality than the inetd super-server it replaces.

Most programs that are available for both platforms run faster on Windows (Quake)

People say Windows is too bloated. There is a reason for that: Windows has support for hardware made in the past two years. According to RedHatthe space required for their latest release is: "1620 MB for Server, 450 MB for Workstation , and 120 MB for Custom Install" This is similar to the amount of diskspace Windows uses, only windows offers a lot more features.

Unless you've actually used Win ME or Win2K, don't even try to call Windows unstable. I have boxes running both and they are rock solid

Linux is always in beta.

It doesn't matter anyway, because anyone who defends Evil Microsoft instantly gets (-1, Flamebait) This is my opinion, but I can back it up with solif facts.

Since I happen to have just come across it in this weeks NTK, here
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/download.html is some (so far - I haven't finished reading it) pretty decent docs for autoconf and automake.

1. True, and so what? Most opensource programmers may well work as closedsource programmers during the day. That would only be a problem if you believed closedsource software was somehow evil.
2. Even if you did believe that closedsource software was evil, again, so what? Richard Stallman-- an opponent of closedsource-- said this in his seminal paper on the subject, The Gnu Manifesto :

   >"Won't programmers starve?"

   >I could answer that nobody is forced to be
   >a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get
   >any money for standing on the street and making
   >faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to
   >spend our lives standing on the street making faces,
   >and starving. We do something else.

3. In any case, there is money to be made out of opensource-- in support, in distribution, in media. How else would RedHat and VA Linux (and so on and on) survive as commercial entities?

If you don't want that happening, please support the GCC/MingW/CygWin, ReactOS and WinE open source projects.

I'm just curious: why do you need native threads?

Wouldn't you be better using C++? [Presuming you're using native threads for speed reasons.]

Or if there are other reasons for their use, wouldn't it be better to compile the Java source into native bytecode (using GCJ)? Although it wouldn't be as fast as C++ (by a factor of at least 3 times, according to tests), it would be at least somewhat faster.

They'll turn "Windows Update" into a revenue stream

...in the same way Redhat are charging to remain up to date with the Redhat Network.

They'll turn "Windows Update" into a revenue stream

...in the same way Redhat are charging to remain up to date with the Redhat Network.