Slashdot Mirror

"the ill-fated 3.0 compiler"

I think that's too negative. 3.0 might not have been 'redhat-approved', but it definitely was an important milestone for gcc and represented large improvements.

There have been some really nice changes from 2.95 to 3.0, such as the inliner.

Plus there have been many releases since: 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, and 3.1 release since 3.0. And 3.1 is as much faster than 3.0 as 3.0 is faster than 2.95.

"the ill-fated 3.0 compiler"

I think that's too negative. 3.0 might not have been 'redhat-approved', but it definitely was an important milestone for gcc and represented large improvements.

There have been some really nice changes from 2.95 to 3.0, such as the inliner.

Plus there have been many releases since: 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, and 3.1 release since 3.0. And 3.1 is as much faster than 3.0 as 3.0 is faster than 2.95.

"the ill-fated 3.0 compiler"

I think that's too negative. 3.0 might not have been 'redhat-approved', but it definitely was an important milestone for gcc and represented large improvements.

There have been some really nice changes from 2.95 to 3.0, such as the inliner.

Plus there have been many releases since: 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, and 3.1 release since 3.0. And 3.1 is as much faster than 3.0 as 3.0 is faster than 2.95.

UL is just the 2nd tier distros trying to get attention and ink away from the "evil forces" in North Carolina.

Yeah, because we all know what a second-tier outfit SuSE is.

For those who don't know, because its very unclear from the article, Suse was the first (or at least before Mandrake) linux distro to announce Hammer support.

Check it out here

-Spyky

Funny to see how SuSE is not part of that alliance. They were the first to ship an Itanium distribution, back in June 2001!

Why do you cheer about this! Do you ENJOY pain? I installed $lackware on my machine and it was torture! My computer was weezing and crying that i installed a Operating System worse than windows! It has no proper packge management, you just unzip tgzes and hope for the best. It has a half assed text based setup tool and and only supports the obsolete and unreliable ext/2 file systems. You have to edit at least 2000 text files to get the damn thing working and it only supports systems made before 1993!

HINT : Go and buy yourself a real distrobution or download a real one

Find the SuSE press release about this (in German).

Why did Germany go with IBM? I mean, if they wanted to go with Linux to save money or for other reasons, why didn't they just contact SuSE?

SuSE has a prepackaged box just for this purpose.

they take a loss on every ISO download? SuSE would probably have more market share if they gave away their YaST2 enabled distribution, but it's not in their business plan.

That's why SuSE Pro is $80 and Red Hat Pro is $200. To be fair, though, SuSE does give their distro away for free, just not as ISOs. Anyone can install it over FTP, and they provide instructions for doing so on their website. IIRC, it was also an option on the boot disk install menu (my Mother-in-Law's computer mourns the demise of the boot disk in 8.0), at least from 6.3 to 7.2.

I haven't tried it, so I don't know how easy/difficult it really is, but it's an available option, and certainly a viable one for anyone who has the bandwidth to download ISOs, especially since (at least in theory) you'd only be downloading the packages you were actually installing. There's certainly nothing stopping anyone from simply burning their FTP directories to CD. Hell, they even let you mount their FTP directory as an NFS partition if that floats your boat...

Recent kernels and recent glibc's and recent distros have support for large files. See http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html

you are correct. SuSE is doing serious work on getting x86-64 into the linux kernel. if you click the link to x86-64.org, you'll notice that SuSE is the only distribution featured on the front page. when AMD wanted to demonstrate 64-bit linux on its hammer (now opteron) processors, they used SuSE.

SuSE is also qualified for SAP.

i think SuSE has done a really smart thing in getting a good mix of ease of use combined with stability and scalability. easy to use, but not dumbed down. and everything is nicely integrated.

Im rather pleased with SuSE, though I did manage to cause a hiccup in an otherwise smooth install: I wanted to keep my / partition small, thus I did a minimal install and symlinked /opt to /usr/opt then did an update from my minimal install to a default. The installer didnt smoothly configure my graphics card and such, which I had to resort to sax2 to configure. Not much of a hardship at all. Perhaps I should just read up on LVM and just fiddle with the sizes of the volumes after the install.

Anyway, my point: The SuSE DVD, part of the SuSE proffesional pack doesnt work with certain Pioneer drives (along with a few others): http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/wessels_pioneerdvd. html. Apparently its a vibration problem. The DVD starts to spin up, then sticks? with a low clicking sound. Firmware updates solve this problem for a few of the Pioneer models. My own, a DVD-115 will happily read the CD's.

Beyond that Ive hand no significant problems )beyond some rushed editing of the manuals) and am happy to attest to SuSE 8 being rather slick indeed.

Like Bero said, the above would appear to state that because RedHat ships gcj they cannot ship JDK.

I am quite sure that the paragraph in question is not aimed at other packages such gcj or kaffe but rather disallows that a vendor adds classes intended to replace core classes of Sun's Java implementation thus creating an incompatible version of Java.

May be so, I'm not a SuSE user, but in that case I'm guessing SuSE doesnt ship gcj, Jikes nor Kaffe...

Enough guessing ;-)

SuSE 8.0 ships with Sun J2SE 1.3.1, IBM JDK 1.3.0, jikes and GCJ according to their package list at: http://www.suse.de/de/products/suse_linux/i386/pac kages_professional/index_all.html.

-- kryps

:(

However, here is something I can relate to. The DMCA has been a bane to Real Americans since the day it was made law on June 16th, 1998. Since its passage, we have seen the near death of the record industry due to general consumer discontent over the state of copyright law. In addition, as Alan Cox points out in the article above, the DMCA has been incredibly harmful to the Open Source and Free Software movements. Since it became law, people are leaving Linux in droves, clinging harder than ever to the safety of Windows.

Sad? You bet. But as a former Linux customer, I have to agree that I'd rather use Windows than risk getting arrested for using semi-legal software just to watch DVDs.

If such a law passes in Europe, Linux will only continue down the road to failure. Until now, foreigners have been the last bastion of Free Software idealism. As silly and unrealistic as it might be in the long run, I'd kind of hate to see them go the way of BSD.

Among those distros I have attempted to install (an ancient Slackware, RH52-71, Mandrake 6 and 7, Debian Potato, SuSe 7.0(?)), Mandrake have had the best installer, but as these things change all the time, that may or may not be true today.

And even though the Debian installer may not be the best in the world (it lacks automatic hardware detection); once I managed to get Testing onto my computer I've never looked back.

//Johan

SuSE don't provide ISOs. But you can install by ftp direct from their ftp server or a mirror. See here (in English) for details. I'd recommend SuSE highly, I'm using SuSE 7.3 at the moment, but will upgrade once I get around to buying the set (downloaded the last couple of versions I used, feel obliged to contribute some money...).

Have a look here and here. The speed problems with KDE are in fact being scrutinised in interesting ways.

M$ is now helping AMD to compete, because AMD is not helping Linux.

Ummmm... didn't AMD contract SUSE to optimise Linux for the Hammer chip.

AMD Announces SuSE Linux Support for Next-Generation Processors

marty

CUPS. It rocks. I got debian unstable printing to my Epson 780 in full photo quality color very quickly. Administration is simple. It truely is a beauty in the world of printing. I would be surprised if SuSE doesn't already have packages for it too.

SDB: Printing with CUPS looks good... I also had to upgrade the gimp-print plugin to have it work with CUPS. Good luck.

I understand where you're coming from, although to be honest, my high-end Athlon chip and DDR RAM don't mind KDE at all.

There was a survey at dot.kde.org about users' #1 concerns about the desktop environment. About one out of four said they were concerned with its speed.

That being said, you should definitely read (or at least skim through) this article about C++ applications on the desktop.

Eric Krout

I don't claim to be qualified to speak on this myself, but Waldo Bastian's paper on this subject would be a good start. (Note that it concerns linking, not g++, although there are plenty of wishes out there for g++ too.) Write Waldo or post to the kde-devel mailing list and I'm sure plenty of detailed suggestions will be forthcoming.

As Linux becomes more and more popular, the question becomes more and more important: which distribution should I use? I use SuSE Linux for several reasons. Firstly, it is the most LSB-compliant distribution. It comes with huge amounts of software (6 CDs of binaries for the Professional version, and (arguably) SuSE has the largest security team. SuSE updates are free and released often. Announcements are even GPG-signed. According to LWN.net research, SuSE has the best security after TurboLinux (which much less security-related bugs than RedHat.

On a more subjective note, many consider SuSE to be the most polished distribution, and YaST2 is considered one of the best all-around system configuration utilities.

Give up. Switch to SuSE.
http://www.suse.de/us/support/oracle/

I would assume that it has been and you are missing something based on their partnership with Suse and that according to Oracle there have been more thatn 91,000 copies of Oracle 9i downloaded for linux.

The best performance measure is running your code on a variety of systems. Because most people can't do that, it may make sense to look for standard benchmarks that look like your code, and then make analogies based on the similarities of those loads to what you want to do. It's critical to pick the right benchmarks to have a good analogy; if you're interested in 3d performance, it doesn't make sense to make performance comparisons based on the number of rc5 keys per second.

Unfortunately, the Open Magazine article doesn't give any information on what exactly their tests are doing. So it's not possible for you to figure out which, if any, of their tests will be analogous to your code. :-(

As I've mentioned before, I'm mostly interested in integer performance. From what I've read about the Intel C compiler, its strength is floating point. If I did a lot of FP work, I'd be sending Intel a credit card number about now, and I imagine many FP people will.

But for integer work, I think it's not so clear. Andreas Jaeger has a nice page benchmarking versions of GCC. On Athlon processors, SPEC CPU2000 CINT2000 base looks like it's around 10% faster when built with the Intel C compiler than with GCC 3.0.1. I think I can live with that.

It's a lot easier to modify gcc than icc too, and yes, I really do hack on gcc from time to time.

Also, slowly, people realise that when you have source, you are not dependent upon that corporation , wherever they are.

Many people are amused by the Finnish link but it doesn't necessarily sell the product as 'european'.

SuSE has a (german) press release here.

ALeX

SuSE has a (german) press release here.

ALeX

on SuSE crypto FS is an option during installation, so you might want to check this it is writen for suse but there is some usefull info in there for all distros.

Well, getting Java to use unicode shouldn't be a problem :)
>One thing I'd really like to see is something for latex that would allow me to do typesetting and printing of characters.

What about CJK-Latex? Or the TeX extension Omega?

SuSE has some good information about its support of the CJK languages.
And there is always the Linux Chinese HOWTO, which you've probably already read, but could be helpful to other people, who are reading this post.

SuSE has already had these RPMs out for a couple of days. This has KDE 2.2.2 for SuSE the various SuSE versions on the various platforms.

Please note that these are not officially

They also have a similar service for Gnome.

As always, use the mirrors Luke...

SuSE has already had these RPMs out for a couple of days. This has KDE 2.2.2 for SuSE the various SuSE versions on the various platforms.

Please note that these are not officially

They also have a similar service for Gnome.

As always, use the mirrors Luke...

The glibc limits the file size to 64 bit (9 million terabytes), so unless the POSIX LFS api changes, that is the current maximum file size regardless of the file system (on x86 that is).

A 9 million terabyte file size limit isn't a large problem for me ....

You need to compile with large file support. The functions have to be 32-bit for backwards compatibility.

http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html has more info.

It should also be noted that XFS isn't the only 64-bit filesystem. Reiserfs is too, and I'm sure (thought I don't know for a fact) that most of the other new ones are as well.

It's nice to have some type 8e around too - Linux LVM. Logical volume management lets you do some cool things, like re-sizing your partitions with the data in place. You can add free space to a logical volume with reiserfs while it's "live", although you have to unmount the volume if you want to shrink it. *Very* handy when you don't know at install-time exactly how much space is going to be taken up by your /home, /usr, /var/log, etc.

Of course the Amiga "RDB" partitioning scheme had its nice points too. Linux can read it, but I don't know if there are any Linux tools to create one.

Actually, you can get a pretty expensive support contract qith a commercial company.

Yes, SuSE Gmbh is a commercial company that provides solutions for companies in forms of:

-24/7 support
-training
-selling of products
-software customization

and all those goodies and security nets that a big company is used to.

Also, get some zSeries mainframes from IBM Corp were SuSE is te distribution of choice. They will have reliable hardware for a (comparative) cheap price. Do you recall the article about cost savings while running a Mainframe instead a server farm? Here's one: in this link

And, of course, if they do not like SuSE, because the product is OpenSource, the German Government can hire and train their own team to support themselves the whole thing.

Big government organizations in Europe tend to have tight budgets. I know because I used to work in one of them. And that organization is right now, as we speak, evaluating the full migration towards Linux-based solutions. Yes, tehy cannot afford in any way the new Microsoft pricing policy, so they have decided to go the Penguin way. Too bad they did that after I left.

All the best,
OpKool

Buy a copy of SuSE's iSeries distro: http://www.suse.de/us/products/susesoft/iseries/

This tells you how to download the SuSE distro from the net. The page also gives their rationale for this approach to net distribution.

To make God laugh, tell him your plans.

That announcement won't need babelfishing: It's the english version ;-)

From what I understood, a major component of KDE's speed issues is C++ linking, which is an ld.so problem. ld is part of the whole gnu compiler collection system by the way.

Waldo Bastian wrote an excellent paper on the subject of KDE's speed a couple of months ago.

A lot of KDE's speed issues have been hacked at in the new 2.2 release, but the ld issues are still being worked on.

So before you go blaming all of KDE's problems on the current bug reports in one small portion of a big big project, please read the literature at hand.

Worth reading, especially if you're a headteacher or principal.
If only they knew, and only if they knew what linux actually stands for, how far linux has come, how it perfectly suits their needs, etc...
I reckon it all comes down to the teachers ignorance. If they were properly educated (no, I'm not saying they should at least have a CS degree), they would know why they shouldn't use windows in classrooms. I remember reading a german governmental white paper on this, and why they decided to have linux installed in 500 schools throughout the nation. I forgot the URL, but it basically comes down to the fact the german government shares the toughts of the avarage /.-reader on these issues.

hmm... our marketoids must not be doing there job very well... see http://ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/linux/ you can run Linux natively in a logical partition. It gets raw access to the hardware assigned to it at the PowerPC and PCI levels, so aside from the kernel changes to handle the lpar configuration issues and such it's the same PPC Linux binaries as you run on a powermac or an rs/6000. SuSE already has a beta up on the web.

hmm... our marketoids must not be doing there job very well... see http://ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/linux/ you can run Linux natively in a logical partition. It gets raw access to the hardware assigned to it at the PowerPC and PCI levels, so aside from the kernel changes to handle the lpar configuration issues and such it's the same PPC Linux binaries as you run on a powermac or an rs/6000. SuSE already has a beta up on the web.

Unless they wanted compatibility with LinuxPPC,

but that wouldn't get them anywhere considering the lack of packaged software for it.

You are a moron and a troll.

If you take 3-4 days to set up a client you need to find a new career path. Professionals tend to purchase many identical stations, create a stable build, and mass deploy with a tool like ALICE.

What is wrong with the moderators to call this Insightful? Oi!


In other News:

Hindu's Labeled In Afghanistan

Penguin's In Tuxedos

Plus many more wierd and interesting stories.

Mr. Bates is spreading more disinformation.

Yuk-yuk.

Did anyone else notice how silent their Chief Software Architect is on this matter? Linus and RMS spin forth, but Mr. Bill remains elusive. Guess he's too busy gushing over the XBox.

Try Debian GNU/Linux. I run it on both MicroSparc and UltraSparc. Not the easiest of distributions to install and configure, but well worth the time to get familiarised with. Debian is stable and is well supported - loads of help on their website and there is also a very good O'Reilly book availible. Security updates are prompt and there doesn't seem to be any major bugs kicking around. It also seems very efficiant in its use of resources and you can get it to install in quite a small amount of disk space (though this is true for most distros if you take the time to install packages one-by-one!) The ethos behind the OS is also pretty cool.

I don't think Debian is using the latest kernal yet (not for Sparc at any rate) and there might not be as many packages availible for Debian as other distros, but you should be able to compile most stuff you need without much trouble if it isn't on the 3 ISOs that are availble from many locations.

Best way of starting your installation is to boot from CDROM. When you have completed that, you instal the .deb packages themselves. Older Suns (SS5 etc) will boot from floppy, but not Sun4u (UltraSparc) machines. Once you have the base install completed you can do the .debpackages via HTTP/FTP or whatever. All in all, you should be up and running within three or four hours to a single working day, depending on how you configure your box, security, packages, etc.

I've tried most distros on Sparc over the last eighteen months and Debian is my fave hands down. You might also want to check out SuSE who released a Sparc port last month.

--