Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat 7.0 Coming On Monday
the_quark writes: "According to this ZDNet story, RedHat will be rolling out a subscription update service with 7.0, which will be available by FTP on Monday." They're also announcing the "Red Hat Network" which essentially adds something like Debian's apt-get function that I've been using for a couple years now *grin*. BTW, has anyone played with gnome-apt? Not bad.
At least the temporary ATAPI drivers for the Win2000 install have DMA enabled; Linux always uses PIO mode during the install (unless you hack the install disk with the IDE driver module for your chipset, maybe).
There are some damned good reasons for this -- some drives with some IDE controllers, mostly older controllers, will destroy data if you enable DMA. There are very good reasons to not enable DMA. I've learned about them through experience, with a hacked-up slackware install long ago, but some of those buggy controllers are still around.
OK, now I'll just anticipate your next response: don't enable it on those controllers. OK, what about buggy drives (I believe that Maxtor has a few around). How about bugs that only occur with one combination of a controller and drive? Or a specific controller, a specific master drive, and a specific slave? All of these conditions do exist.
</rant>
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I once saw a download page for some open-source app criticizing RedHat with the usual cry of "doing nonstandard stuff!". The complaint? That RedHat had used a separate font server (XFS) instead of having the XFree server handle the fonts itself. /opt, never mind that /opt is NOT compatible with the Linux Filesystem Standard, which RH follows pretty closely.
Of course, anyone who took the time to do any research would note that this was the configuration that was RECOMMENDED by the XFree people, because it is more easily extensible and prevents the entire server from hanging when rescaling a font. But this guy had just jumped on the chance to dis Red Hat.
I even remember similar complaints when RH moved to Xwrapper, never mind that it was the STANDARD way to do things. People complain about RH moving KDE out of
I've gotten sick of hearing it. If we want to talk about evil Linux distros and commercialization, let's talk about the Mickey Mouse Logo people (Caldera).
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
The compiler is gcc 2.96 (which will become gcc 3.0). The kernel will be compiled with an older compiler (kgcc). At least, that's how Pinstripe (the beta) was.
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I will never ever pay any penny for Linux software. PERIOD! Certainly as i know enough about linux to build my own systems/network.
Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not Richard Stallman!
OK. Time for two quick lessons. Number one: Redhat pays many excellent developers money so they can make the cool "free" software you like and still pay rent and for their kids health insurance. Redhat then must get money, so they must have something to sell. Number two: this is for priority access, not for any access. It's a service to make it easier for lusers to update their systems, and gives them access to priority servers that have sufficient bandwidth (which again costs money, see lesson one).
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Does RedHat 7 include SSH by default, now that the RSA patent expired?
Because they provide me with relatively stable, cheap, extensible operating system that I understand and enjoy using. I think somewhere the movement against a sub-standard, expensive, closed-source OS turned into a movement agains any operating system that you have to pay for.
Redhat provides a good product, and (perhaps now) a useful service, so wny not return the effort with a few dollars. To some people, it's worth that to make use of their service, even if they can find the same thing for free elsewhere with a little work.
Do you pay for running water, or do you collect rainwater in your cistern?
Come on people, show some intelligence. Windows update isn't free, it's just paid for in a different way.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've got rpm-4.0-0.66 installed on my (pinstripe beta) Red Hat system, and I'd love to know how to do apt-get type stuff with it. The Rice LUG is choosing a distribution tomorrow night for our installfest on the 30th, and being able to tell newbies, "Type this one command, and you're assured that all security fixes are installed" is a pretty big selling point.
p dates/current/*/*.rpm" works, sort of... but it downloads the entire file on every single RPM before it decides whether or not to upgrade it, even when the file name and file header data should indicate that no upgrade is to be made. This makes that command worthless for dialup connections. I've got an enhancement request "bug" submitted to Red Hat tonight, but they aren't going to have a fix out by the time we need to start burning Debian CDs.
Yeah, "rpm -Fvh http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/distributions/redhat/u
So, is there any other way (short of paying $$$ for many access licenses to a non-clogged up2date server) for us to give newbies a "one command security update" for Red Hat or Mandrake?
If that's insightful, check this out:
The two services are actually completely opposite each other. Microsoft makes you buy the software in the first place, pay for every major upgrade, and gives you SOME bugfixes for free.
Red Hat on the other hand, will distribute the software for free, including major upgrades and bug fixes. If you'd like access to their well tested, bugfixed, signed bugfixes and updates on a high priority, high availability basis, then you can pay for such a service. These same bugfixes and updates will still be available for free on Red Hat's site and all of their mirrors.
Red Hat's way of doing business hasn't gotten any less friendly to their customers, and they aren't forcing anyone into ridiculous licensing schemes like some other companies we've been reading about here on slashdot.
You're not in the twilight zone, and nothing is backwards. Just look at the pretty GNU and repeat to yourself "It's...OK".
Yes. RPM 4 is supposed to include many features that apt-get supplied. RPM 4 should effectively do away with 3rd-party applications (such as autorpm).
You do know you can pick and choose what you want installed right? An install I did last week was roughly 350 and something megs. That's before I went through and started stripping stuff out. And 7.0 is supposed to be smaller than 6.2. Having a lot of packages does not make it any more bloated, just more flexible.
The standard installs aren't even that bad. If you just choose a workstation install you don't have those security problems because inetd isn't installed. I've found that I have to manually go through and install inetd so that I can run things that use it. If a newbie chooses to install httpd and inetd then that's their fault if it's exploited. A different story would be if someone chose to do a KDE workstation and ends up with telnetd, ftpd, inted, whateverd running. That is not the case. Should RedHat second guess those who actually want them installed on their system?
I really find the comment that RPMs make people lazy. Why reduplicate the effort in recompiling software that doesn't need recompiling. For some software (Apache, Kernel, some bleeding edge CVS source) it makes sense to compile your self because of the build time options. Why is it of any use for people to spend a couple of hours building X? or the couple of minutes per package it takes to compile it? Having the build tools themselves take up a significant amount of space, and it's often more economical to just install an RPM and be done with it.
That being said, if you don't like RPMS, don't use them. Feel free to compile whatever applications you want. You could even recompile the base operating system. It would't matter. The RPM dependencies wouldn't be met, but you wouldn't care. Just don't insult those of us who value the time it takes to do a ./configure, make, make install and wait for things to build.
I do agree on the mailing list point though
treke
This network thing they've come up doesn't look like such a bad idea, in theory at least. It could turn out to be a crock, but otherwise my company will probably subscribe, as long as the fee is not outrageous. One of the reasons that a lot of closed-source folk don't embrace the open-source business model is becuase they claim that no revenue can be generated. Redhat has come up with another way to make money off of their open-source product. It's good to see that.
Cheers
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
About the subscription service, it seems everybody is doing the Helix nowadays. But Helix itself is poised to allow updates of the entire distribution (not only GUI), so won't a paid service like that become moot?
Red Hat Inc. next week will announce a bold new concept in the provision of its Linux software to users.
.1 and .2 release, and I hope they're successful, but I *really* wish ZD Net wasn't so bloody stupid. No other way to put it. Most of the stuff I read there is drivel. Ugh, it bothers me so much when someone starts an argument by saying, "But on ZD Net I read that ..." Absolutely infuriating. So when they say that Red Hat's new subscription service is a "bold new concept", I can't help but be offended. I use Red Hat exclusively, but I wish they'd step up and tell these people not to write things that are blatant lies. How long has the "bold new concept" been used for Debian's distribution? Much longer than Red Hat Networks, which has been around for ... oh, wait, it's coming this Monday, so it isn't even here yet.
Bold new concept? Don't get me wrong - I love Red Hat and buy every
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Anybody ever seen windowsupdate.microsoft.com Sounds like a pretty similar service if you ask me. Except for this one little thing: Microsoft gives it away, and RedHat is going to make you pay for it.
This just can't be. I must be in the Twilight zone! Everything has gone backwards!
hey taco! haven't you tried the Storm Package Manager? it's got all the features of apt, in a nice GUI interface. from what i've heard, it does more then gnome-apt, and it'll be included in Woody some time soon.
you can get it right now, along with other nifty additions like the Storm Adminstration System, from the stormix ftp site.
Or, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and do an "apt-get update; apt-get install stormpkg":
deb http://ftp.stormix.com/storm hail main contrib
blatant plug: try out the new Storm Linux distribution (called Hail) that just got released, based on the latest debian potato. I wrote part of the ftp install :)
-Doviende
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
If you run a nice clean theme, probably. If you run an all-singing, all-dancing, ridiculous theme, probably not.
Will Microsoft stop changing their protocol for no other reason than to break Samba?
Will Creative release Windows drivers that don't crash your system every time you attempt to play a sound?
I don't - I'm happily running Debian and intend to stay running Debian!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Redhat updates are free too.
Their 'updating service' is not. You are always free to ftp the files yourself and add them manually.
They simply want you to pay for a SERVICE they are offering you. No sweat.
And because it's open source stuff they are distributing for the mostpart, anyone else can go make their OWN automatic updater for redhat as well.
People, they are offering a SERVICE. Believe it or not, lots of roothat users are *NOT* really computer savvy yet, and don't WANT to do it all manually.
Do the tech savvy find this service useful? I doubt they will. Will the common user? For sure.
Make the software free ... Make money through service and support of that software.
In RedHat's case, you can easily provide yourself with the same service and software manually. The fees, as I read it, are for updates and whatnot delivered to you in a convenient and timely manner.
[Steve Martin voice] Excuse me, I'm sorry, I'm so PISSED!
Go ahead. Mark this as flamebait. Mark me down, bring up the same complaints already voiced in other threads as if they're unique...but answer me this;
Why are people ripping RedHat a new one?
Is this just an attempt at 'bash the leader' again? Sure looks like it, and I'm sick of it.
Is any of this based on facts of a real problem, or just unhappyness over someone charging for something nobody's forcing you to buy?
I'll give folks who mentioned Debian/apt-get/windows_update/... a point. Yes, those are handy. You can do similar things with RPM -- no not _identical_, _similar_. Not really interesting, though.
If you know how to run a Linux system, you probably don't need any special services. I sure don't want to update anything without seeing if there's a reason and what those changes are first. If you want to use the service, and it saves you some anguish/time/effort then it does not seem that prohibitive.
It's like people complaining about the cost of VMware or other handy tools. If you don't want to play, don't pay. Why gripe about it?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I think a lot of the people posting to this article missed the point of the RedHat Network.
Big businesses like subscription models, for a number of reasons. Pay-as-you-go, and pay-as-much-as-you-use-it allow them to tailor the pricing to their needs. And the subscription-style updates frees them from having to worry so much about the OS changing. Having updates and new releases automatically shipped to you vastly simplifies the whole process. If you read the article, you'd note that the subscription will delivered on CD as well as electronic distribution.
Its true that the updates were available from their site, and with up2date. But this is going beyond simple OS updates. Read the article and you'll see how.
RedHat stated a while back that 7.0 would ship with a 2.2 kernel but that everything would be ready to go for the 2.4 kernel when it became availalble. Expect to see the kernel change as just another update package in a couple of months.
Related to this, KDE 2 is supposed to go final within the next month. That's another major applicaiton set that it would have made sense to wait for. I expect to see this updated after release as well.
Odds are, people can come up with a dozen other major packages that are "close" to having a new stable version ready. If RedHat waited for all of them, they would never get a release out.
World Beach List, my latest project.
They don't wait because then RedHat 7 wouldn't be out for a long time after those two come out - they can't just download them, throw them onto the CD, and send it to the presses - they have to make sure adding those two doesn't break anything else in the system, and that's a time-consuming thing. If they did just release it quickly, you all would be bitching about how they didn't test it well enough and XFree86 4 doesn't work with XYZ app when you have an ABC video card.
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I think it's unfair to trash Redhat just for offering a subscription service. The people that use the service will be the ones with extra cash that are too lazy to follow the updates and grab an rpm every once in a while. To generalize.
Don't discount what may be a perfectly good distrobution because they are trying to make a buck.
And don't get me started on the Microsoft Network... hehe
I'll most likely continue using my current Redhat 6.1 and update packages where I see fit. I'd love to try Debian, but I figure it would be such a hassle to migrate, I can live without apt-get.
Just my two cents.
Its a 3/4 page ZDNet article, for christ's sake! Have you forgotten that Redhat, just like every other Linux distribution, is based on GPL software? Thats free to upgrade. Why anyone would rely on a distribution to determine what software you get is beyond me. Download what you need, when you need it. Sure, have a list of new packages to review, but don't trust just one source with your computer's (read: network's) well being. One bad package, and everything goes kaputz.
Also, you mention that there is no promise of quality. Of course, Redhat can't guarentee the quality of GPL'd software. No one can! Do you think Debian guarentees all of its packages are bug free? Ha! Of course, since they release a new distro every other year, we should hope there would be less bugs. Just wish harder I guess.
But getting back to Redhat, they probably have an uptime guarentee that says their update server will be up 99.9% of the time or something like that, and that all packages will be updated in a timely fashion. That's better than nothing.
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Which is a better response, a) or b)?
Or how about this one?It looks to me like Mr. Suit would be more likely to take your proposal seriously if you answered a) to both of his questions. They are looking for the "reliable" solution, even if they have to pay for it.
I don't even use Redhat, I just think they have a pretty good idea
Cheers
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>