Red Hat Linux 9 Release And Interview

Gentu writes "Red Hat Linux 9 has been released to the official mirrors, brace for impact! Additionally, OSNews features an interview with Red Hat Linux's manager, Matt Wilson and they discuss everything from mp3/dvd playback, to Randr, dependancy policies and more." Also on the Red Hat front, DdJ writes "So, I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit this morning, and checked the news to find out why. It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product. Both appear to be based on Java/Tomcat, which would mean it's not Zope-based or Zend-based. But, they're supposedly open source. Anyone have any further info on this stuff yet?" Update: 04/08 05:24 GMT by T : Don't forget that the new Red Hat release is available through BitTorrent, too.

Comments

Stock Price

[BadBlood]

The entire market is up today, so I would not base any increases in RedHat's price soley on a product release. As of closing, RedHat's price increase is not statistically significant when compared to the rest of the market.

Yet another upgrade

[rf0]

Yay another Redhat update. Reading the article I can't seen any reason to upgrade apart from the normal updated packages. However it is nice to see RedHat at least following a sensible, if slightly unpopular, route with regards to pantents such as MP3

Rus

Interview?

[Milo Fungus]

What was up with that interviewer? The interviewer was either being a little too confrontational or just had an overall lack of tact.

Some Examples:

• Don't you think leaving out the mp3 codec makes it less convienient [for the user] and less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users? Is there any way around this limitation of Red Hat Linux 9 for future releases?
• Why was there no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat 9?
• Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?
• Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs?
• Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too?
• Currently, no matter how I turn it, downloading RPMs from the web can create many dependancy problems most of the time.

Where did they learn their interviewing skills? This is terrible. "Why don't you do blah and blah? Your software doesn't do blah. I always have problems with blah. Blah blah blah." I was very impressed with Matt's answers, though. He didn't get mad and say, "Well, why don't you fork the project then?!!" He just cordially and politely explained the concepts of open source and their development efforts. Nice work.

Re:Interview?

[JoeBuck]

The answers to almost all of those questions comes down to one single point, one that I'm sure that the Red Hat folks are tired of repeating: they are committed to a policy of pure open source/free software in the distro, period, and they won't include anything that will make them subject to patent licensing or the DMCA. That means they won't ship MP3, proprietary NVidia drivers, or DVD playback, or Microsoft fonts. However, you can get these all from the net if you want them. If your Nvidia driver crashes the kernel, then complaining to Red Hat is complaining to the wrong party: Red Hat can only see their source, NVidia can see all of the source.

Since the OSNews people have been around enough to already know these answers, since we had this same discussion when Red Hat 8 came out, it is rude and pointless of them to repeat the same questions. Are they hoping that, one day, Red Hat will wake up and say, "OK, we agree: open source was a stupid idea. We've negotiated licenses from all these folks, and now Red Hat X is a proprietary distro, but it plays MP3s and DVDs out of the box, and we support NVidia drivers. We've tweaked every pixel to match Eugenia's suggestions, too. But no more free ISO downloads, it costs $150, and there's a per-CPU license"?

And yes, I'm aware that some non-US-based distros made different decisions on some of these matters. Note, though, that not being based in the US, they don't need to worry as much about liability from bogus software patents. In the meantime, Red Hat users can install apt, then install MP3 and DVD playback support with a single line. Read all about it.

SP500 up 0.2 %, RHAT up 3.0 %

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that is "statisticially significant".

Re:I'm running it

[IamTheRealMike]

Careful, as already pointed out, there's nothing illegal about it - corporates can't make laws fortunately, it is however perhaps slightly immoral, they want people to pay for that priviledge :)

Re:That's All Nice and Dandy, But...

[Cylix]

It is a shame, but people have problems on occassion.

Me, peronsonally, I haven't had a problem with the RH installers since 6.0 and even then it wasn't a problem I could not work around.

I always have a few friends who have some odd hardware configurations and get around to trying a RH install on occassion and sometimes they are happy and sometimes not. Last night, a friend of mine came to me and was fairly happy everything went OK right out of the box.

I'm still scratching my head on how his foobarred his RH8 install as we both have the exact same laptops. (My install went flawlessly with rh8 and upgrade to 9)

So yeah, there are success stories and there are failure stories, that is just life. Now doing something about the failure stories is a whole other thread. ;)

That's nice, but

[MicroBerto]

It's still not better than Mandrake 9.1 (for Desktop)

Question 9 evaded

[Trogre]

9. Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too? Is Red Hat open regarding licensing technologies and services from other sources?

Matt Wilson: We will not include technology that prevents Red Hat Linux from being freely distributed. Including software that places these kinds of restrictions on our community of users does not help drive Open Source software.

This evades the question of DVD playback.
No license is required to play DVDs on a linux computer. DVD players such as Ogle and Xine are GPL.

And no, it is not a violation of the DMCA to employ DeCSS to watch media you have purchased or rented on hardware that you own.

No matter, these programs can always be added post-install.

Re:Linux for laptop? which distro?

[vivek7006]

If you are new to linux, then I will recommend Mandrake 9.1. It is the best distribution in my opinion as far as hardware support, performance and usability is concerned

Re:Red Hat 9 for Workstation

[Overly Critical Guy]

I know there are those around here who think I am a Microsoft shill or whatever, but I have to admit my recent installation of Red Hat 8 on my laptop impressed me, from the installer to the professional documentation. A few minor errors (and no sound in TuxRacer for some reason), but all in all, the very nice look of the GUI and usable configuration tools means I will be trying 9...as soon as I can get it downloaded...

Re:Red Hat 9 for Workstation

[bogie]

That's why you shouldn't prejudge something without using it.

Most people around here who give Red Hat crap haven't used it in years and know little about it. Its just easier to parrot stupid comments like "Red Hat is bloated" or "Red Hat is like M$" then to take the time to use it and learn about it.

Red Hat may sometimes do things "their own way", but so does every other distro. The difference is Red Hat, unlike say Gentoo, gets no slack(no pun intended) for changes they want to make. Everyone like to assume the worst and give them crap.

Re:"But java is bad. Too much memory required. "

[smccrory]

In theory, yes, but in practice you just throw cheap hardware at the problem and be done with it. The benefits of a comprehensive, scalable, cohesive yet decoupled Java architecture outweighs the incremental speed reduction. It's the same argument that poor old C++ had to go through when the MASM luddites came knocking at it's doors, torches lit and well in hand... ;-)