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I'm glad that 64-bit Firefox doesn't have a flash plugin.

Really? http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/faq.html

It's in Alpha but works fine with Fedora 10 and 11. Also works well in CentOS/RHEL 5, rpmforge even has it in the repo:

http://packages.sw.be/flash-plugin/flash-plugin-10.0.32.18-0.1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

Oh, your must be using "The OS" (TM) or "The Other OS" (TM)(C), then yeah, your right it doesn't exist and you have my sympathy.

Sorry for the sarcastic tone, I'm just feeling like it right now.

... grinding that anti-MS axe.

Hey, that's not fair. I stand up for Microsoft now and then. Were those posts not helpful?

The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.

The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop also comes with OpenOffice preinstalled, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution for email.

That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spam zombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.

Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers' Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.

The list of hardware known to be compatible with RHEL 5 is impressive, as is the list of systems that are certified and supported.

Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.

The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux

Throw in some clustering of resources there and I like it. Closest thing I saw to something like that was ClusterKnoppix. Though I never tried it out, the thought that you could start an entire cluster from a single CD is pretty cool. Take that and set up a system where the local clients cache the programs they get from the server, and it could work.

No, seriously, if you're setting up a cluster where your work can be batch-queued, or intend to run MPI, then Rocks http://www.rocksclusters.org/ is the way to go. It also comes with tools such as SGE (Sun Grid Engine) or OpenPBS pre-configured, Intel compilers and libraries ready for you to drop a license onto (but of course the entire GNU suite is there as well, including Ada), has more monitoring tools (plus some nice web-based interfaces) than you can shake a stick at, and runs on IA-32/AMD-64/IA-64 (Itanium). It also has a Roll to help build a tiled display wall, which would be a really cool use of a small cluster.

They're also really great guys.

On the other hand, Oscar is supposed to be good, and if you're not into the whole batch-mode thing, you can get OpenMosix up and running using http://clusterknoppix.sw.be// ClusterKnoppix, and just fire jobs off into space and let them find their own unburdened node.

But still, Rocks is really an elegant and clean way to go, plus it will scale up in case you're going to deploy a huge one of these for real after you get your feet wet.

Maybe it was running ClusterKnoppix?

Smart Package Manager makes installing, updating, and removing software easy. It subsumes deb, rpm, apt, apt-rpm, yum, etc, and even lets you use multiple application repositories even if they are in different formats (apt-rpm, deb, yum, etc). Really, installing software can be as easy as searching for what you want in Smart's GUI and then selecting what you want to install. Removing an application is similarly easy, and updating is even easier!

Smart also has a commandline _and_ GUI interface, so you can use whatever interface you like best, unlike yum. It also allows for prioritizing package repositories so that you can make use of any repository you want and leave overlaps/conflict resolution up to smart.

I am using it under Fedora Core 4. It is still beta, so it has a few cosmetic bugs, but otherwise it works nicely. If you are using Fedora Core 4 and want to try it out, you can, even if you are already using yum or apt, as Smart can be used alongside other managers.

rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/dries/fedora/fc4/i386/dries/RPMS/ smart-0.35-2.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/dries/fedora/fc4/i386/dries/RPMS/ smart-gui-0.35-2.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm

Smart Package Manager makes installing, updating, and removing software easy. It subsumes deb, rpm, apt, apt-rpm, yum, etc, and even lets you use multiple application repositories even if they are in different formats (apt-rpm, deb, yum, etc). Really, installing software can be as easy as searching for what you want in Smart's GUI and then selecting what you want to install. Removing an application is similarly easy, and updating is even easier!

Smart also has a commandline _and_ GUI interface, so you can use whatever interface you like best, unlike yum. It also allows for prioritizing package repositories so that you can make use of any repository you want and leave overlaps/conflict resolution up to smart.

I am using it under Fedora Core 4. It is still beta, so it has a few cosmetic bugs, but otherwise it works nicely. If you are using Fedora Core 4 and want to try it out, you can, even if you are already using yum or apt, as Smart can be used alongside other managers.

rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/dries/fedora/fc4/i386/dries/RPMS/ smart-0.35-2.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/dries/fedora/fc4/i386/dries/RPMS/ smart-gui-0.35-2.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm

Actually, dag's repository has rpm's for current redhat-based distros. Works great in fc1 and fc2, except that multi-gnome-terminal isn't gtk2-friendly so the colors are all off (I need to backport my theme to the older gtk).