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HP To Sell And Support Red Hat Linux
Dman33 writes "Redhat Linux seems to be gaining an even stronger share in the server and workstation market as HP is announcing worldwide sales and support of the popular distro. Infoworld has a writeup on the announcement and the press release straight from HP is a good read regarding the initiative."
is it big enough to hate yet? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Big blue supports it, Dell supports it, and now HP is supporting it. More and more, sounds to me like its taking the Microsoft and Unix world by storm.
ph34r teh p0w3r 0f th3 c0w
There are far too many customers using HP-UX to shut it down, but if they are supplying Linux on-the-cheap, why would any new customers buy in to HP-UX?
Sounds like "pi*sing in the company soup"
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
HP advertises selling RedHat with their Itaniums on the back of Doctor Dobbs.
I couldn't understand why dell dropped linux support, they don't have a UNIX product like HP does. HP with HPUX, why would they want to sell and support linux?
I guess I could see them doing it for a number of reasons, mainly because it would be a gateway into the small/medium sized business market.
Speaking from personal experience, my CEO is relucant to approve software with no point of support. The more support open source gets, the easier it makes my job of trying to convince him to move to more open source software.
What happened to the Debian support? or did that disappear when Bruce Perens left?
"HP, in Palo Alto, Calif. , generated about $2 billion in Linux-based revenue in 2002, the company said in Wednesday's statement. "
:) Who said u cannot make money by using linux?
Thats freaking huge
Announcements like this always say "workstations and servers". Don't they think that Linux users want portable devices?
I just want a good quality Linux laptop with firewire, a built-in CDR, lots of RAM, and a power-efficient CPU. I don't want to pay the Windows tax and I don't want an expensive, high speed CPU.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 2 GHz CPU in a laptop is a mystery to me. )
The Lindows "$799" machine would have been perfect but it has no built in CD drive - a fatal deficiency, at least to me.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
The question is when I walk into CompUSA, Circuit City, and all those other consumer heavens of electronics.. will I see a HP workstation running RedHat?
Or will it just be an obscure option burried in their website?
--------
Free your mind.
I can't help but think that people will start to associate HP's overall lackluster in the home pc market with linux? Hopefully this is just a server type thing because HP does make some pretty sweet servers. And we definatly don't need noobies with HP's thinking they can tackle red hat just becuase they can change the properties of a shortcut in windows.
Wasn't HP making claims to use and support Debian?
I remember reading articles about HP picking Debian because it was non commercial and the most stable disto out there.
As i have always said before on this board, abstraction breeds fundamentalism. HP has long had a reputation for just doing what it needs to do to please the masses, while offering no real substance to its service or products. Recent reports have even stated that HP will be adding proprietary software to the RH distro as time goes on.
Just my 2 cents
The real issue is if this will see HP really pushing linux through its sales channels instead of just being another "we recommend Windows 2000" shill.
Check out the site sponsor in the lower left corner.
http://www.debian.org/
As RedHat has clearly stated, you can cobble together an equivalent product to Advanced Server for free, but you will not get support. What more do you want from them? Quit whining!
HP To Sell Custom High-Security GNU/Linux Distro
HP to give 24/7 support for Linux
seems not to be the first time...
So what price will we _pay_ for finally seeing a large consumer desktop/server seller (HP) support and sell _free_ software?
KARMA TAG! You're it.
Linux on Compaq server hardware and supported by the vendor? Dare I dream?
I'm a little concerned that this may lead to no x86-64 (Opteron, Althon64) support from RedHat. :(
:(
... is yours?
HP co-owns the IP for Itanium with Intel, so they have a vested interest in seeing Itanium get lots of support, and AMD x86-64 get none. RedHat has already announced Itanium versions of Advanced Server, but AFAIK, has been silent on the x86-64 front.
SuSE has announced long ago that they'd release x86-64 versions of their distro to coincide with Opteron's release, and they seem to be actively involved with that process.
Am I being paranoid here? Or does it look like RH might not support the most cost-effective 64bit platform going? Not all of us have deep pockets for I2.
Don
my smug mug is on smugmug
my smug mug is on smugmug
Can't we do both? I read your post while listening to streaming NPR at 0rk.
Carly and Capellas went above and beyond the call of duty to destroy most of the interesting engineering that was done at DEC and the other firms (Tandem, etc) that have been borged over the years. The result has been the creation of the ultimate outsourcer of commodity junk "me-too" product on the market. Hopefully they will succeed through sheer scale at this point, since that is all they have left.
An HP/Red Hat support partnership is sort of no big deal. It's great to see, but not a surprise.
What left me semi-stunned (until I regained my natural skepticism) was the following sentence:
Today's announcement builds on our $2 billion in Linux-based revenue in 2002 and our decade of commitment to the open source and Linux communities," said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Systems Group. (emphasis mine.)
Where the heck does HP get this figure from? (And if VA Linux couldn't make it in the Linux hardware biz, how come HP is making $2 billion revenues just a couple years later?)
"Sniff test" problems here... but I wouldn't mind being enlightened by someone from HP.
--LP
I've been planning this for awhile - cyborg monkey's post was just the straw that broke the camel's back. It's so much nicer to troll than to try and think up some way to combine GNU/topic or misspell MS's name in less-than-creative ways. The trolls are the only real people here, but we all know that - 90% of the people here are running Windows, but won't admit to it because they're afraid michael or timothy might rape them next time they're at their local LUG gathering, and rightfully so. I know the people of slashdot are afraid, and it's up to trolls to set them free.
Heh...Sun sure does seem to be lashing out at Microsoft quite a bit recently...first, they poked fun at them after dropping the .NET stuff (which I thought was pretty hokey anyway), and now they're taking shots on the CLR and C#. Could this be death throes? Or mindless banter? Hmm....
OMG! Wau!
This is hardly news at all.
Lindows at Walmart.com was news.
When will I be able to walk into Best Buy or Circuit City or a bricks n mortar Wal-Mart and see laptops and consumer desktops that don't make me want to scream in agony?
That will be news.
mt
Here's a little story. Joe Clueless would walk into his local computer store and see two HP computers. One is running Linux, and one is running XP. Joe obviously buys the Linux one because it's cheaper. He takes his new computer home and shows it to all of the little Clueless's. They try to install Deer Hunter on it with no luck. They try to install Quicken on it with no luck. Little Bobby Clueless tries to install his pirated version of Photoshop with no luck. They take it back to the computer store to say that it's broken. They walk out a few hundred dollars poorer with a bad idea of what Linux is. Until Linux becomes a solid Desktop OS solution for everyone, it is better off having it this way.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Sure, mod me down. It's not offtopic when we are going to war, you fucking dipshits. Get a clue. What's offtopic is the fucking Linux fanboyism on a day like this.
"The Red Hat operating systems covered by this agreement include Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, used in high-end servers for demanding tasks such as database and enterprise applications; Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, used in smaller, departmental servers, such as mail, Web and print servers; and Red Hat Enterprise WS, used in workstations."
CompUSA will still just be selling HP home PCs bundled with WinXP home. This is for commercial accounts who want RedHat Linux with their HP servers or workstations and are prepared to pay for it.Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Remember, HP isn't only hardware; they have a large share of the systems management software market (Openview), and a consulting group as well. If you count all the Openview agent licenses for Linux boxes (which aren't cheap), plus consulting income, plus embedded linux revenue, $2B seems within reach.
HP is selling and doing phone support for Red Hat. They dont own Red Hat, conrol Red Hat, or any of the such.
If HP chooses only to sell Itanium based rigs, that's their perogitive. If you want a hammer-equiped red hat rig, dont get it from HP.
So just relax. This is just HP making sure the latest IT buzzword is prominent in their marketing literature.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's not underlined, it's abbreviated. If your browser renders it with an underline, and you don't like it, then get another browser. Or pick another stylesheet or something like that.
Ok, I'm probably dumb and paranoid. :)
... is yours?
Found a press release about it, afterall, so perhaps RedHat will still be supporting Hammer.
Let's hope so.
Don my smug mug is on smugmug
my smug mug is on smugmug
I thought the enemy of my enemy was my friend or some such. Works GREAT for U.S. foreign policy! ;-)
Why don't IBM, HP, SUN et al just throw together a good entry-level common distro and give it away just to GUT Microsoft ? Are they afraid the DOJ will sue them for collusion?!!
Any money to be made on Linux is all in the support.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, if you were stuck commuting on Caltrain for 2 hours a day, believe me, you'd love to be able to bust out some $CPU_HOG_GAME to pass the time. :-)
It's nice to have!
Well, for one thing, our company bought a ton (think hundreds) of their $7,000 Linux workstations (Dual Xeon, 2 Gb Memory, yada yada). Plus 24x7x365 support anywhere in the world. It's a big contract that they got (definitely in the millions). I think they got a bunch of contracts for big Beowulf clusters too last year.
Plus, don't forget they now own Compaq. Compaq servers were being dished out a long time with Linux, so all of the Compaq servers with Linux were prob counted too. Let's not forget Alpha servers that shipped with Linux as well.
About the only bitch I had with HP was their workstations were shipping with RH 7.1. And it was a hideously nasty version of it too.
While I find $2 billion to be a bit on the high side, I could definitely see $1 billion just from digging through press releases & what not.
I am not surprised - if Linux makes up even for
just 1/4th of the servers and HP sells with similar
Linux/Windows ratio it is sufficient to sell
servers/workstations for 6 billion dollars.
What are HP server/workstation total sales ?
Anyone who had to mess with the wacky 9u Compaq server hardware of a couple of years ago and wanted to run Linux on knows that Compaq (before HP) and RedHat we're holding hands a long time before this announcement. Not kissing or petting, but there was a tacit agreement that Compaq supported the RedHat distros (6.x and 7.x series) and RedHat made sure to roll their SCSI array drivers into the mix. They were good friends, and probably even exchanged a couple of "partner" trinkets over the years.
Before this, Dell was the RedHat "Daddy". That was probably before Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer had a couple of meetings and came to the agreement that Linux was bad for Dell in the "consumer space", which somehow included their laptops, and their website. Anyone remember the "powerapp" boxen. They were good, and came with RH 6.2 and 7.0 distros. That was before "Red the Hat", decided to really mess up their distro.
This latest announcement is a "Stock market Ad" designed to make both HP and RedHat look better than usual (warty beasts with scrabbling claws and pale lidless eyes which cannot withstand the brilliant light of full-disclosure) and to signal that server clients and channel partners can "Have RedHat, we mean Linux, with that".
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Nice.
A variation of the "GET SOME PRIORITIES" troll that was popular post-9/11. And you have a low UID. I thought you woulda gotten mod'ed up, but it looks like the almight editor has spoken.
Wasn't HP supporting Debian before?
Its far superior...
not to gentoo, but definatly to anything RPM-based
Buttsex.
I know the people of slashdot are afraid, and it's up to trolls to set them free.
Yes, and the US is the troll of the world!I would just like to say:
:( It's just so easy, and maintainable. I love Debian. Thanks Debian, you sexy Debian you.
Debian is the greatest. It's so easy to keep up to date. If I was using Redhat I'd have to reinstall every 12 months
And we definatly don't need noobies with HP's thinking they can tackle red hat just becuase they can change the properties of a shortcut in windows.
Yes, we do. We also need elitists like you to stop spreading a meme that is helping to prop up Microsoft's desktop dominance. As of RH8, the interface is such that the level of competence required to change the properites of a windows "shortcut" is similar to the level of competence required to be productive with Linux - even more so in consumer-oriented distros such as Mandrake, Lycoris, and Lindows.
As long as people like you help the average joe think that Linux is too 31337 for them, the power base of Microsoft will continue its staying power.
In our company, HP is also aggressively trying to get us to switch our support for our SUN E class from sun to HP. We are suspicious, and asking lots of questions like when the blame game begins, but so far all their answers are sharp and quick, and their price is better than Sun's. Our management is seriously considering this switch, so a move to support linux would be seen as a good thing for companies trying to get over this "open source" support model.
Where the heck does HP get this figure from?
ISTR HP snagged a huge Linux deal at Dreamworks last year. And they also scored a big Linux deal at Disney.
The entertainment industry (especially the movie industry) are ironically moving to Linux big-time. The visual effects industry essentially told all their tools suppliers to port to Linux or else. The tools vendors have complied. Expect to see tasks that were traditionally done on SGI or Sun machines to be done pretty much exclusively on Linux machines from now on.
James Cameron pretty much set the tone for Linux in Hollywood with the renderfarm he used for Titanic. That farm was built with Digital Alpha processors, but instead of buying DEC Unix (or Tru64 or whatever it was called then), his effects guys put Linux on the machines and saved a couple of hundred grand.
I find it endlessly amusing that Hollywood is so staunchly in support of intellectual property rights, but is more than willing to enjoy the benefits of Linux.
i'm an electronic musician, throw as much CPU at me as you can and i will use it. my laptop is 2.4ghz and i need MORE!!! :)
tasty electronic music vittles
Obvious that redhat-lovers are the moderators today.
I agree, many MANY things are sickening in the redhat camp..
HEY! redhat! you want to make it big? SELL THE SUPPORT AND SOFTWARE EXTENSIONS! Leave the OS out of it.
We're changing over to all slackware on the serversn and Mandrake on the desktops quietly AWAY from redhat after their last announcement and advanced server tactics..
I PAID for the support on 3 of the 6 servers, and I have 2 more servers acting as testbeds.. Advanced server wont allow me to do this...
Screw redhat... I'm done with them and reccomending them.
Apparently, complaints about support have skyrocketed 50% in ONE QUARTER!
Register story
FWIW, I can already walk into the local Dick Smith (Australasian equivalent of Fry's) and check out one of several Athlon systems running Mandrake Linux.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Is that since HP got rid of their NetServer line in place of Compaq's servers, they no longer support Debian GNU/Linux on their servers. Too bad, Debian's our CORPORATE standard, and that was a feather in their cap (IBM has supported us, but unofficially).
Just that one time. I thought it was gas, but as my innards released the pressure, a jet of molten shit colored like pea soup jetted out onto the shoes of an unsuspecting passerby.
This topic is not earth shattering.
When HP decides to drop Windows for LInux then that will big news.
I think even SGI did this, roll out Linux along their own OS for servers. No complaints from us but, I wonder why dont they offer BSD as well, just for more diversity in their offerings? They shouldnt make much money from Linux as an OS, so they could do that.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Is that why youre not watching CNN and on Slashdot? Hey news for nerds! Shit that matters!
I'll alt-tab to cnn.com in a while but wont expect material belonging there in slashdot. And then a company rolling out Linux against their own UNIX is news for nerds.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Actually, HP has been offering RedHat AS for their Itanium boxes for quite a while now, along with HP-UX and Windows 64-bit Enterprise Server (the price difference between HP-UX and Linux has always been negligable, but Windows adds substancially to the final system price). The only thing new here was the same Linux software and support is now being offered for the 32-bit Intel hardware.
A couple of people have asked the question "what about HP and Debian?" .. I'll make it a bit more broad. Are there any established companies (like IBM or HP) offering support for Debian? After trying out Redhat 8 and Debian 3.0 I definetly would prefer to use Debian more often, and commercial support (if needed) would be icing on the cake.
I really would like HP to provide some Linux support for their recent comsumer products like my laptop. Or at leasr release the info so someone can write device drivers. Now THAT would be very Linux-friendly.
Because one of HP's biggest clients is getting ready to start using Linux in a big way. NDA prevents me from saying who I work for.
The project thats working on it has been trying to get info from Red Hat concerning their High availability product but has been stonewalled rumor is that RH is afraid of the support commitment.
The only down side to us using linux is that I'm 99% sure that any developments that we make in house would not be given back to the Linux project. I only give them 1% credit because there are a lot of Open Source advocates there that would let something slip anon if they could. But I imagine most corporations would be stingy like that.
Anyhow some dedicated Linux users are working on the project to bring it to our company and if this happens it will be a huge blow to MS down the road because other companies in the industry watch what we do.
The first stage is to use them as file and print servers. We currently have about 17000 remote locations with at least 1 server each and all of those are NT. would be quite a coup.
I thought it was interesting to see them using open source and GPL work, while creating the RIAA and sueing anyone and everyone they could find. Perhaps individual music creators will release their music and videos under open source...
thank you Fiorina :-(
Entropy sucks.
Fortunately, this is a free country, and I am free to do as I please.
Which means: I don't have to watch CNN, keep track of world events, or even watch you walk your dog. What you deem important may not necessarily match what I deem important.
Even more, I am allowed to visit a forum that specifically discusses things related to "News for Nerds." Unfolding events in Iraq, in general, is not "News for Nerds." The fact that possible military action in the Gulf region may result in SA being turned back on in the GPS stream, is, however.
Fortunately, you've been modded down to an appropriate level already, and deservedly so. You'd be better of sticking to watching CNN and ignorantly 'thinking' how their news reporters tell you to think than trying to coerce a group of free thinkers into doing what you want them too.
That farm was built with Digital Alpha processors, but instead of buying DEC Unix (or Tru64 or whatever it was called then), his effects guys put Linux on the machines and saved a couple of hundred grand
Even worse for DEC/Compaq, they weren't really DEC Alphas, but Alpha clones. Was weird to see them rave about this "Titanic made using Alpha technology", when they didn't use DEC hardware or software, just use Alpha chips from someone else. They may have got a few bucks on Alpha licensing for those clones, but they had to really search for that silver lining in that storm cloud.
waste your mod points on this bad boy
Shut your flabby trap, geek spawn. What a fucking nigger.
Would be nice to have an iPAQ that ships with Opie / Familiar (minimal Linux distributions with GUI specifically for PDAs) rather than have to burn it in ourself. Take a bit from Pocket PCs pocket...
come on fhqwhgads
This is the dying gasp of a dying company. Every company that has embraced linux has seen their stock price plummet.
Good question; I didn't have a sense of it post-merger, so let's check the 2002 annual report. Skimming that, company wide they had $72 billion in gross revenues, $56.6 billion in net revenues. Broken down, that was:
The PC division of the combined HP/Compaq had net revenues of $22 billion.
The HP Services revenue was $9.1 billion.
HP's Imaging and printing was $20.3 billion.
The Enterprise group (which is all the non-PC business I think: workstation+server+storage) net revenues were $11.4 billion.
$2 billion out of $11.4 billion is 17% of HP's enterprise sales. Not ludicrous, but somehow I didn't think Linux had quite grown that big yet. I'd love for it to be $2 billion but that still seems quite high to me in relation to other figures floating in my memory.
Let me cross-check Google. Ah, here we go. A recent IDC batch of figures (add salt) in TechExtreme say that Linux revenue, industry-wide, was $607 million in the fourth quarter 2002, with conventional UNIX totalling $5 billion. Which extrapolating badly would mean Linux system sales have hit $2.4 billion (its actually less because prior quarters were less- Linux is growing rapidly). HP's share of that isn't outlined there, but it does say IBM is #2 with 20.5% and Dell has 19.5%. Assuming HP is getting, say, 25% of the market, HP's Linux sales would be $600 million. If they were like twice that of IBMs (which seems quite unlikely or HP'd be bragging about it), that's still only $1.2 billion.
So I still don't understand what the heck that $2 billion dollar figure represents.
--LP
Ah, stupid me. The IDC figures were servers only. And I can't find workstation figures, other than these IDC 3Q2002 unit shipment figures for workstations. Still, if the average selling price for "Personal Workstations" (ie Intel-based) is $8k, 70K units for HP would be another $560 million. If Linux is half of that (which would be surprising, an upper bound), that's an extra $280 million which still leaves my conclusions intact, with a missing $1 billion or so.
Would service contracts + openview agents really double the cost of the hardware? Seems unlikely. With Dell, a next-day service contract adds maybe 10-20% or so for a 3-year term in my expereience. But my attempts to reverse-engineer the figures here are getting a bit flimsy, I admit.
--LP
Actually, this just confirms my opinion of where Open Source/Intellectual Property meets.
The thing about a software package is that you develop it once, then it works forever & a day. Okay, sure, you may have to upgrade it to add features that you forgot the first time, but once it's done right, there's not really any compelling reason to upgrade any more. (Look at MS Office, or even Windows for that matter.)
On the other hand, creating an artistic work on the scale of a Hollywood picture takes an enormous amount of effort and person-hours. And once the box-office takings & video releases are done, that's pretty much it for the life of the picture. You have to start from scratch for the next one! Any large-scale effort that bypasses official distribution channels (eg. pirate DVDs) greatly reduces final movie profits.
This is (IMHO) why we'll never see heaps of high-quality, free open-source games. The community may band together to build one or two good ones, but unless the game has an extreme replayability factor, people will get bored and move on to something else. It's not a good return for the investment of your time, unless (say) Apache, where people are able to use your server continuously for years on end.
Free, open source development and distribution of OSes, toolkits and applications makes sense (because the total development costs are shared among many people). Doing the same for Hollywood pictures makes no sense at all.
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
Absolutely - I work in this industry and what you say is true(although lets get it straight, folks - "James Cameron" didn't decide to go Linux fer cryin' out loud - the folks at Digital Domain did. Crike.)
Also, there is a massive leap between the renderfarm for Titanic and workstation penetration. Ask anyone that implemented the former and they would have laughed in your face if you said "Linux will take over your industry". At the time, there were absolutely no usable graphics drivers, and no apps. It's been a struggle to get this to happen, market forces drove it, not DD. SGI's stranglehold on the industry(onscene prices and *far* more obscene support contracts) was first assailed by windows, and then Linux. They finally broke - and now they're primarily serving military and research markets - back where they started. I for one am glad - an intel option, and no MS.
DT
I for one am happy that Linux is being recognized , and is growing, as a serious tool in todays growing business. Our day is coming Linux users....
Step 1: Get contract to do Linux support for IBM
Step 2: Get another vendor to do the Linux support for you
Step 3: Profit!
Carly tried her best to kill RPN. She qualifies as satan in my books.
Well, that's perhaps because you have a simplistic view of what Linux, open source, and the free software movement stand for.
First of all, open source is simply an economic and practical movement: as a user, I want the source to applications I use and I want to be able to modify them. If the vendor doesn't give them to me, I just don't use their software and hardware if I can help it. There is no long term political, economic, or IP agenda bound up in that--it's simple supply and demand.
Free software advocates do want changes in IP laws, but they don't want to abolish them--they want them to be different. But their arguments apply mostly to software, so there isn't necessarily any contradiction between Hollywood and the FSF.
Before this, HP was supposed to be offering their own Linux distribution, which seemed stupid to me. Why incur all that extra development and support cost, when you're never going to be the next Redhat anyway? Companies like HP should have been on the Linux bandwagon years ago, but they stalled only because they couldn't figure out how to stamp their own brand on it. This is asinine, but typical of corporate dinosaurs like HP. Shareholders should be very upset. It's high time HP just grabbed a good distribution and went with it.
It would be really neat if a big company standardized on Debian, but still kept its fingers out of it, in a sense of true community spirit. It's not that weird an idea.
Saw HP at a trade show a few months back, IBM was also present. They both were doing blade servers, and let me tell you, HP's look like crap compared to what IBM offers for a similar price. IBM's will share the console fully digitally, whereas HP's comes with a piece of hardware that has to be snapped into place on the front of the blade, and moved around to share the console. And its too big to just buy a ton of them and put one on each blade, so you can't even go buy a phat kvm to save your sanity.
Did I mention that IBM brought a full rack of working blades with redhat, windows 2k, openbsd, freebsd, suse, and a few other linux distros, and showed off the awesome power? HP brought two broken blade servers and pointed at the Xeon's inside and said, "Intel! Intel!"
Not saying its bad to see Red Hat get exposure, but HP doesn't rate high in my book, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. This might give Red Hat a bad name.
If my HP sales rep is reading, this is why everytime you send me a new offer, I go right to my customers and say, "IBM! Pro Micro!"
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
This is great. It adds to my list of answers to the common question/objection "Who supports Linux?"
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
Good for HP supporting both Red Hat and Debian. I hope they fund the Free Software Society too. Only someone lost in the strange paranoid world of closed source would think it's strange. The days of competing binary file formats, binary executables that you don't own and paying through the nose for software you already bought are over. Those who view the world in a way that supports garbage like that are in for a rude awakening.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Shoot, HP might just turn around and dump Alphas! Now that would be cool. They are beholden to themselves before Intel.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I work at hp. I have just this minute returned from helping smoke test a RedHat AS install on a quad Itanium 2, 40GB machine that's going to a large government customer. It's one of several dozen.
:-) It's a sexy beast, even if it sounds like a hairdryer. Fat chance though.
These people would just never cope with buying random hardware and downloading Linux onto it. Their mind doesn't work that way, regardless of the quality of the software. Buying from hp gives them assurance and support.
I just wish they'd give me one on long-term loan.
A: dell dropped linux support
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
It doesn't seem that odd for different distros to optimize for different architectures. That's the beauty of having all the linuxes, there's one for everything.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
depends what you call desktops. I just managed to get the org chart to fund an HP 3.06GHz 'workstation' desktop box with 1GB ram and a 72MHz SCSI, with the redhat option. Not that I'll necessarily keep redhat on, but if you are going to pay a tax for an OS that you'll scrub, I'd rather donate it to a linux charity than, say, our friends in Redmond. Though I may dual boot it to Win2K just to run GTA III on occasions.
Still, consumer boxes are different. If Lindows takes off, then you might see it.
One of the big advantages of OSes like Solaris and HP-UX is that they are very backward compatible. Write an application for HP-UX 11.00 or Solaris 2.6, and it will still be working for HP-UX 11.23 or Solaris 9. Write something for RedHat Linux 5.2, and it probably won't run on RedHat Linux 8 without a recompile.
I have a friend who works in the Support group at HP, and he said it was a huge problem. Customers would upgrade their RedHat from 7.3 to 8.0 and application would stop working. Why? Because unlike HP-UX, Linux people don't seem to be that interested in backward compatibility (which is why companies like Nvidia has to provide one precompiled module for each possible kernel version).
And lets not even get started on compatibility between distributions.
Personally, I think it would be best if the Linux distributors came up with a reference distribution. Every other distribution would have to be compatible with this distribution. This would really make it easier to support and develop for Linux. Yes, I know about the Linux Standard base, but it's not the exact same thing.
I would nominate Debian GNU/Linux to be the reference distributions, for several reasons.
1. it's not commercial, so it wouldn't be accused to be bias toward RedHat or Suse or whoever.
2. it's very stable, in the sense that it doesn't change every six months with updated libraries, compilers etc (only bug fixes)
Je ne parle pas francais.
Boring boring boring. HP will partner with Red Hat to offer Linux on Intel hardware. As if there weren't enough Linux-on-Intel server vendors already.
When is HP going to port Linux to its 128-processor Superdome PA-RISC boxes? That would make a worthwhile story on Slashdot.
Or failing that, even managing to sell laptops with Linux preinstalled and without the Microsoft tax.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
what's an org chart?
Dear Emily:
I saw a long article that I wish to rebut carefully, what should
I do?
-- Angry
Dear Angry:
Include the entire text with your article, and include your comments
between the lines. Be sure to post, and not mail, even though your article
looks like a reply to the original. Everybody *loves* to read those long
point-by-point debates, especially when they evolve into name-calling and
lots of "Is too!" -- "Is not!" -- "Is too, twizot!" exchanges.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
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