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Red Hat may have dropped their SPARC support but there's still plenty to choose from:

Debian has active ports for both SPARC/UltraSPARC with a 32-bit userland and an UltraSPARC port with a 64-bit userland. The 32-bit SPARC port is much more up-to-date and complete, and basically is at parity with Debian-x86. It has a stable, testing and unstable branch just like Debian-x86 and thanks to the clever Debian package management and development tools is kept up-to-date with the main x86 tree automatically. Due to Debian's widely-ported and volunteer nature the SPARC port is likely to be supported for quite some time.

SuSE is also widely ported, and again, has a SPARC port which is essentially at parity with the main x86 version - 7.1.

Slackware also has a SPARC port, but if you are used to Red Hat or Solaris it may be too much of a culture shock with things like its BSD-style initscripts and primitive package management.

All of these are modern, up-to-date distros, which (Debian especially) I prefer to Red Hat.

Try them out. You might like them.

I might want to add that S.u.S.E. now has Linux for Sparc I'm tempted to give that a try when I get a spare sparc to play around with.

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...

Try either Yellow Dog or SuSE's PowerPC distribution. Both should support the same platforms that LinuxPPC supports.

There's also a PowerPC version of Debian if you want to use apt-get (which, although I have never used it myself, is supposedly comparable to BSD's ports).

Or, wait two weeks and swallow the blue pill....


--

Has anyone checked their homepage?

Not only are they shipping 7.1 [with da 2.4 kernel] on the 12th - they are also hiring...

What's going on?

Has anyone checked their homepage?

Not only are they shipping 7.1 [with da 2.4 kernel] on the 12th - they are also hiring...

What's going on?

Not for anyone running IE5 for MacOS (often described as the best browser yet). And before anyone accuses me of being a Mac weenie, I run the MacOS on my SuSE Linux box using Mac-on-Linux, so I can use things like IE5, Adobe Photoshop and BBEdit.

Not that it really matters; it's probably the same picture that I have here.

--

They can go through their patent file and go for anything in Linux that looks remotely like some patent they have.

Which will do them precisely how much good? Apart from the US and Japan, no technologically advanced country recognises software patents. So Mandrake (in France) is invulnerable, SuSE (in Germany) is invulnerable, Debian is invulnerable anyway because it can put it's servers overseas, and gues what, you might just find RedHat relocating to Wales.

I don't see how Microsoft can prevent individual developers doing Linux work in their spare time in the US, and even if they can there are enough Linux hackers in Europe to keep the flame alive.

Of course it may be illegal to sell Linux in the US, but how is that going to stop you downloading it?

I used ElectricFence, mainly because I happened to already have it installed. It helped. There are a bunch of others, some of them look interesting:

MallocDebug
Thu Dec 21 13:26:01 CST 2000 - overview of malloc debugging
tools. looks good.

mpatrol
Thu Dec 21 13:37:30 CST 2000 - didn't try it out,
but the documentation actually lists
"related software", which indicates to me they did their
reseach.

glibc builtin
Thu Dec 21 13:43:54 CST 2000 - evidently glibc has debugging
stuff built-in.

Let's see. Depending on who you want to sell on the issue, we certainly have the big boys. IBM , HP and quite likely Compaq (the TrueUnix/VMS folks, not the crappy box assemblers) can quite likely deliver expensive support and professional Linux services. Of course it's up to you to determine the quality. But you also have to do that when EDS is shipping 10 of their clones with bad haircuts to you.

Then there are specialized companies whose most prominent representation is probably Linuxcare.

Finally and - in my experience most importantly there are the distributers who base their business model basically on services. I had outstanding experiences with SuSE (American site) which guided me through struggles getting X up on my notebook. They made a very idealistic, determined and goal oriented impression and delivered far better support then what I've seen with companies that charge $1/4 million a year (and that was the free issue installation support). They run a professional services department and they have various support plans including 24/7 - and dedicated resource plans. Pricing looks quite reasonable.

I can't vouch for Red Hat, Mandrake , or Caldera, but at least Red Hat has a good reputation.

So, here we go. There's a lot around to chose from and compare. If the gentlemen in the suits insist on an IBMHPSUNDEC rubber stamp, here you go and you probably pay for it through your nose. Not that the distributers quite give away theire services, but from what I've seen there seems to be excellent value there.

More information here:
http://www.suse.de/en/news/PressReleases/Itanium.h tml

Here's the output of 'cat/proc/cpuinfo' (I ripped the CPU numbers just in case and just showed the last CPU to reduce this message's size):

[...]

processor : 3
vendor : GenuineIntel
family : IA-64
model : Itanium
revision : 0
archrev : 0
features : standard
cpu number : xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cpu regs : 4
cpu MHz : 500.053000
itc MHz : 500.053000
BogoMIPS : 497.02

So I now wonder if I tested real machines or were they just beta PCs or simulating such an architecture ? Anyone has information about these ? SourceForge also has such PCs, I don't know however if they are SMP but SuSe's ones were definitely SMP.

I don't think that a seven year old want's to use a linux disto because of the simple fact that they can't play much games on them....and that is one of the only things that kids do with a computer(except tomorrows geeks) :)

Well my daughter (6yrs old) is no geek :( she doesn't run freeBSD for a start ;o)
However she does run SuSE linux as her main OS (She also has BeOS, and Win95 for her Authur and Fireman Sam CDROMs). She hasn't expressed any interest in programming, but she does enjoy KDE's range of games - particularly Shisen-sho, SameGame, Sokoban and KPoker.

Back on topic: As well as debian-jr and SuSE's educational emphasis, there are projects such as www.seul.org.

Residents of the UK should watch their local Linux news sites for a schools Linux project which will be launching soon....
- Derwen

a point by point retort:

"Surprised there haven't been any comments pointing out that X is woefully out of date. Nostalgia aside, it's really fairly embarassing that we'll still all be using X Window in 2001 - I would have thought a tech-savvy audience like Slashdot would have been the first to point this out."

X Windows has been with us a long time, and I'll be the first to admit that in its original incantation, it isn't the greatest GUI. All of the GUIs that are specifically written for a specific platform usually outperform it, and for someone who only will use one platform and for one specific function, that's fine. X has its power as a DISTRIBUTED GUI though, in that one can run applications on MANY different computers, regardless of the OS on the computer (providing it has X and TCP/IP support) and use them ALL on one workstation with one X Server. In fact, one doesn't even need a computer to run X, just an X Terminal. They are often cheaper and better equipment than most full blown computers. I have on my desk an HP Envizex term that I use to connect to my BSD box in the rack, and it's great! For someone who wants to be connected to a network and have software available regardless of the platform, X is the easiest way to go, for ALL modern Unices support it, and OS/2 does as well (for whatever reason).

"So, is it really so exciting that Apple now support X? I suppose in one sense it's great to have all those legacy applications, but it would be nice to see the state of the art pushed forward somewhat - I would certainly have expected this of Apple, one of the more forward-thinking old-school computer companies."

It's exciting because it gives lots of professionals more options than they have with Microsoft products, like the ability to run very common software on a central server (software like web browsers, email clients, and other stuff that just doesn't _need_ to be installed on every computer and needs to be updated from time to time) to ease maintenance and overhead. I personally would MUCH rather upgrade just ONE installation of Netscape or an office suite instead of like, 200...

"Then again, I must admit there are no serious contenders to X currently visible on the radar. I've looked at WHY (fairly promising but early days) and Berlin (extremely interesting, but a little too bogged-down in providing support for glitzy rotations and the like too early on in the development), but I don't see X being replaced in the forseeable future, sadly."

Well, one thing that will always allow X to compete is that the X Consortium has the option of adding features as they see them necessary. Remember, many of the existing X installations (like my aformentioned term) aren't running X11R6.4 revisions, I think my term has a X11R5 or R4 server. So far, all that I have tried has worked on it, but maintaining compatiblity is very tricky. If they want 15 year old equipment to stay working, they have to test and test and test...

"Perhaps this is because X Window was developed by academic experts who were basically employed to do this, whereas it's putative replacements are being developed by enthusiastic amateurs (and this isn't intended as a knock to those developers, but merely a reflection of the truth - I am an enthusiastic amateur myself!)."

Remember, a lot of early UNIX stuff was all at schools, with students and teachers doing the work, and not necessarily for money. I'd say that the only difference is that they didn't have existing paradigms for this sort of development, so they created them. Besides, most of the RFCs are fairly easy to read if one has the technical background for them, and one could fairly easily figure out what they did. Also, the sources are available from groups like the XFree86 project and the X Consortium, so one who is skilled enough can work with it (I'm not that good, but oh well, I can type "make" with the best of them)

"Specifically, one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990, so why has it taken so long for the rest of the world to catch up?"

Well, I'll admit speed is an issue, but most of the terminals have classically been on 10BaseT or slower network connections, so it really didn't matter for a long, long time. SuSE has developed a lot of X servers that are accelerated, and these are really nice servers. As more vendors decide to support their equipment natively, thist should become less and less of a problem.

I like X, it does almost everything I need it to do. The only thing lacking that I'd like to see is better support for some of the more enhanced routines, but as it stands it does do a fairly good job.

I don't think this is an installable version of SuSE 7.0. Loot here to see what they have in the German site(read the READMEs). I think this might be what's on the American site.

Information can be had here and here
--

It's just an announcement that they will make two versions, a "Personal" and a "Professional" version.
I don't consider it as _released_.
According to the press release: Both versions will be available at the end of August.

Don't panic ;-)

...can be found here

Personal is aimed at the desktop-market, so maybe it will be preconfigured not to run all services under the sun by default and make beginners a bit less vulnerable.

I'm unclear by about what you're saying here when you state you cleaned up. Unless you did a completely fresh re-installation from a cdrom or some other medium that is known to be safe and cannot be altered you did not clean anything up.

Before going back on the network you should:

Perform fresh install, then disbale all unnecessary services. Perform a suid audit and determine which suids are needed and which aren't. Consider changing the umask on the system to something a bit more secure. A umask of 027 will yield the following permissions rwxrw---- for newly created files.

Set up your hosts.deny to ALL:ALL Configure IP Chains to do what you want them to do. I believe gfcc is a nice gui frontend to make this easier.

For a company based implementation maybe even another step further and have another box in front of this one as a dedicated firewall.

Never assume you have gotten everything cleaned up on a cracked box unless you have wiped the disk, or even better backed the disk up then wiped the original for re-use. Go back and look at the old disk in a safe environment to see what went wrong.

Installing tripwire is also a good idea so if it happens again you know what was touched.

Might even be beneifical to have a sniffer out there to see what's going on on your network.

And of course there's always the obvious:

No telnetd and ftpd
USE SSH!!!

Portscan your box before others do and remove the unecessary daemons running on your system.

I completely removed inetd form the equation after I read up on why it's bad for people like me who don't need ***ANY*** of the services it provided.

And as always good strong encryption and frequent password changes will increase the likelihood of not getting cracked.

Remember, the crackers are always one step ahead of you, stay on your toes and get all the latest security fixes and releases when they come out.

Nothing is foolproof, so even after you do all this, prepare to be cracked and provide your system with a method of recovery should such an event happen. This means keeping a secure immutable backup of the system somplace safe and updating frequently enough for it to be useful.

Laters, Dan O'Shea

I don't know about the others, but while SuSE only provides an ISO for the first CD, their FTP distribution includes almost everything on the 6 CD's except for the "pay" section (which includes mostly trial versions of proprietary software.) The non-US FTP version includes a lot of encryption software too. They release the full FTP version about a month after the CD version. Here is their mirror list.

pppoe on linux? but of course. check this out

That's why I think there should be Distro certified hardware instead. (for example, SuSE supported would have a chameleon)

JFYI: SuSE already does this for quite a while (about a year). See our Hardware - Certification pages for more info about this. I can assure you - we bang those boxes hard, it is not just a simple test installation.

---
Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines.
---

Ah yes. Apple has been terrible about releasing the information used in order to port alternative operating systems on their hardware, eh?

Darwin
MkLinux
LinuxPPC
NetBSD
Yellow Dog Linux
Debian
SuSE

Think for yourself. No matter what Be's propaganda says, Apple has nothing to lose from Be porting their OS to their hardware, since they still gain sales either way. Perhaps they don't want to subsidize Be's development, but that's besides the point. Be's argument was questionable from the beginning, and is twice as questionable now that Apple has released Darwin.

Don't get me wrong - I love BeOS, but the company behind it doesn't seem to have any trouble hiding reality from their userbase. They got seduced by Wintel and they know it.

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

greetings, eMBee.
--

Well, you can download the bootdisk and install it via FTP.
You don't even need to have a CD-ROM drive.

Just read the FTP install HOWTO.
However, I'd strongly recommend not to install from ftp.suse.com, but from ftp.gwdg.de as due to US export laws the US server does not contain cryptographic software (such as ssh).

Only the bundled commercial software will be missing (OSS, Staroffice etc.) of course.

So WHAT? If you can configure sendmail you can configure sendmail! What type of questions do you expect at that test? The kind that you can learn for without knowing anything? Now, so far all the people who said they made the test said they were good, so it cannot be such simple type of questions, so it shouldn't matter if anyones knows them or not.

--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

Actually, it's easy to speak against them again and again, but they really have some quite good programs for supporting e.g. developers. The same with Oracle. No Linux company has anything even remotely similar to what those companies have. It's quite effective for the masses of people as well. Try and subscribe to one of MS's or Oracle's partner programs!
We will get there... but one has to acknowledge that 3xx people companies like us (SuSE) or RH can't have everything 4x.xxx people companies like Oracle have.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

No, lets not give them a break. Or us (see my email address) for that matter. We don't get any extra points for doing Linux stuff in the market, except from some of you guys here. We have to _compete_ with all the other players, especially MS. I don't _want_ special treatment, we just don't need that. We can't go to the customers telling them "Oh, but we're so small compared to MS, would you excuse us charging you more, so that we can use the extra money to grow?". Excuse me, something is wrong with your argumentation. And that from an American (if the .edu is right?)!
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

You can't be serious. A test that needs to hide the answers because people could learn them by heart is not worth anything. I don't think that their test is like that, I actually think - without having tried it (I didn't need it to get hired ;-) ) - that they have a good test.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

Read the press release here.
http://www.suse.de/en/news/PressReleases/Terabyte_ en.html

No no no, Open Sound System is a commercial package, we've nothing to do with that. What you mean is open source ALSA. See http://www.suse.cz/development/index.html which is a page of our developers in the Prague (Chech Republic) office.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

Also, see not just the kernel or glibc list for the many suse people there, but also our latest commitment for HA (high availability).

Right, we should hire more marketing gurus...
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

I would not want to have any company set the Linux standard. Some day, they'd use the power they'd get through this.

Better: LSB (which will happen), and then let everyone who wants build on top of that independent and free (thats free as in freedom, not just free as in no-money) standard.
I don't understand why you want to give someone so much power.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

I don't see that anyone has told you anything. He was asked (here: by the press) and he answered.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

and I have never heard of this game. The graphics are not very impressive. While porting to linux is sort of nice, are we going to hear every time an unknown app is ported?

Somebody earlier today said that at this point slashdot would probably be better if it just posted press releases, and that really seems to be what's happening. the "[program] ported to linux!" was cool before things were all being ported to linux. If this was "Office ported to linux!" or "Photoshop ported to linux!" it would be something else entirely. Hell, even "Diablo 2 for linux!" would almost be newsworthy. But "Software product #21-201 ported to linux" is not interesting.

TO ANY SLASHDOT EDITOR READING THIS: please make a new topic section for Linux kernel announcements so that people who don't care can filter them out. In the same vein, "x ported to linux!" should go in its own category.

In other news, Linux now supports 2 TERABYTES of memory: http://www.suse.de/en/new s/PressReleases/Terabyte_en.html, courtesy kuro5hin's submission queue.

I have a beanie baby named Munchie that looks much more like the Suse chameleon logo then their 'plush toy'.

Check out a picture of the SuSE doll at this link:

http://www.suse.de /en/news/news/newproduct/chamaeleon/index.html

It really does look horrid.

I am the Lord.

This is not a troll or flamebait. I respect SuSE. I really do. Anyone who can win a landwar in Europe the way they have against RedHat has to be doing something right.

With that said, I must now vent against SuSE's mascot, which to me (and lots of other people, I assume) looks like a green turd with legs and a face. Everyone knows Shakespeare's quote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and most people know the common variation on that quote about excrement smelling just as sweet, and I for one find it quite appropos here.

RedHat's shadowman is somehow mysterious. Tux is adorable. The idea of a chameleon has a lot of promise, both for its symbolism and because it has a lot of untapped cuteness-value that could be unearthed and exploited (and maybe plush stuffed-animals is a step in the right direction). But please, SuSE, give the lizard a makeover.

And lest anyone think it's just a crappy slashdot rendition, here's the actual logo from SuSE's website).
For comparison, an actual green chameleon from Kenya. Real chameleons are adroit climbers and skillful hunters with long strong muscular legs. SuSE's chameleon is perched on two pairs of stubby little legs (grossly out of proportion with the rest of its body) and sadly looks like it's about to fall over and die from asphyxiation like a sheep lying on its back. SuSE's chameleon wouldn't have a chance in hell of surviving in the wild (compared with, say, Tux as portrayed on extremelinux.com), which is not the message that we'd like to send about SuSE's distribution in particular or about Linux in general.

And as for the name, that issue's been beaten to death already. Alas, crappy ideas never die in the minds of marketers.

I have to admit, SuSE started to care about an easier installation pretty late. Even the character based Yast (1) installation was/is needlessly complex (no workflow!). Our development team thought, installation is just once, but you use the system for a long time, and that's where most of the energy was spend: inside.

While I haven't tried it myself, I've heard a lot of good things about the new version of Yast II that's going to be on SuSE Linux 6.4 - from installation supporters, those guys that I really believe, because they have to suffer first when something doesn't work.

Anyway, I still think we've got a lot to offer, not just size (amount of packages). The best thing for servers will be the pair LVM (logical volume manager) and journaling reiserfs in 6.4. The advantage of journaling is well-known, and for those who don't know, with an LVM you can enlarge partitions on the fly (by adding hard disks and having a virtual partition as a volume group), and with reiserfs you can actually really use this LVM stuff without reformating (ext2 filesystems cannot grow). That's very, very good for servers!
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

Ah, read first, then post, didn't see he already spoke for himself... sorry.
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

The owner of linux-ha.org and leader of that project is Alan Robertson. He is a SuSE employee now. End ;-)
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/

...and even if you didn't want to use "perfectly normal computers" then you could always go and talk to SuSE about buying one of their extremely funky clustering racks without having to worry at all about paranoid American export regulations.

...and even if you didn't want to use "perfectly normal computers" then you could always go and talk to SuSE about buying one of their extremely funky clustering racks without having to worry at all about paranoid American export regulations.

ATi has _the_ best integrated DVD decoding of any multifunction card on the market right now. I own an ATi 128 All-in-Wonder card and its a very good card for my Linux machine. It is lacking an opensource driver but the binary one from SuSE works great. (http://www.suse.de/en/support/xsuse/). The driver is also present in lastest XFree as well (I think it's also opensourced).

The only other thing you need to make your ATi complete is the TV.... get gatos (General ATI TV and Overlay Software ATI-TV) at http://www.core.binghamton.edu/~ins omnia/gatos/

With this SDK we'll be able to combine all these features + DVD into one driver.

Awesome! I only wish other comps. did this... (*cough* nVidia *cough*)

--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.

You forgot SuSE

Dr. SuSE
SuSEanne Somers
Oh SuSEanna
SuSEan Sarandon (Ok, so the joke is wearing thin)
Linus the Lizard
Karma Chameleon
Bill Gates
Natalie Portman (j/k on the last two)

oh and by the way info on the contest is here

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

What else is new? See here (German) and here (English). Duh.

Screenshots are here!

Bootdisks not working on K6? Not sure what you're referring to.

I use a K6 myself, and have installed all versions of Suse since 5.1 on it without trouble.

Looking in the SuSE support database, I see the following two articles: Faulty processor AMD K6-2 with 100Mhz system clock and AMD K6 with more than 32MB - system hangs .

The former seems to be an acknowledged flaw in the k6 processor which can be replaced under warrantee. The latter is less clear but also seems an acknowledged AMD bug (see the article).

The other issue, of course, was the Athlon, which did not boot with the 6.2 floppy images, as the MTRR support we built into said floppies in this past summer did not work on the Athlons. I'm sure if AMD had sent samples to the SuSE offices, this would not have occured, but a athlon boot floppy image promptly appeared on the FTP site after the problem was described. A simple call to SuSE support would have gotten a floppy mailed to you if you have no way to download it yourself.

Or did I miss the issue you were talking about? SuSE can only fix problems they know about. feedback@suse.de is your friend.

Bootdisks not working on K6? Not sure what you're referring to.

I use a K6 myself, and have installed all versions of Suse since 5.1 on it without trouble.

Looking in the SuSE support database, I see the following two articles: Faulty processor AMD K6-2 with 100Mhz system clock and AMD K6 with more than 32MB - system hangs .

The former seems to be an acknowledged flaw in the k6 processor which can be replaced under warrantee. The latter is less clear but also seems an acknowledged AMD bug (see the article).

The other issue, of course, was the Athlon, which did not boot with the 6.2 floppy images, as the MTRR support we built into said floppies in this past summer did not work on the Athlons. I'm sure if AMD had sent samples to the SuSE offices, this would not have occured, but a athlon boot floppy image promptly appeared on the FTP site after the problem was described. A simple call to SuSE support would have gotten a floppy mailed to you if you have no way to download it yourself.

Or did I miss the issue you were talking about? SuSE can only fix problems they know about. feedback@suse.de is your friend.