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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Released
OrenWolf writes "CNET is running an article on the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which is Red Hat's shiny new 'enterprise' version of Linux. Major changes include more IBM Mainframe support, support for AMD64 (x86_64) processors (aka Opteron, Athlon64 and AthlonFX), changes to support options, integration of Stronghold Apache, and much more."
Windows blows. Use Unixware instead.
Unixware blows. Use OS X
They all blow. Use TRON.
Amigo blows. Use a pencil and paper
TRON is too gay. Use GNU/Hurd.
GNU/Hurd is vaporware. Use SuSE 9.0.
But Suse 9.0 sucks, so use Gentoo!
Does it come with a SCO license?
How about some Sparc/Solaris vs Opteron/Solaris vs Opteron/RH3.0 benchmarks for server, database etc.
Since a discussion about RH's licenses with these seem to pop up every time they are mentioned on /., I thought I'd point out that source RPMs for RHEL 3 are located on Red Hat's FTP server. .iso images are not available.
No one said they had to make it EASY...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
About a week ago I got to listen in on a conference call where some folks from Red Hat engineering and marketing, along with their IBM counterparts, introduced the v 3 releases and sang its praises. Looked pretty good on paper... (ok, virtual paper, an Acrobat presentation). Full disclosure - I work for Big Blue, and I'm glad they support Linux like they do.
And oh yeah, first post!
So basically the story pretty much says it all...all it is "shiny" red hat, you can probably pay for this too which is great for I.T. managers, but best of all, it is shiny new linux.
--Shut up and get a mac--
"The scalability of the threading has gone from being able to support 1,200 to 32,000 threads. The impact on Java is just amazing," said Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development at Red Hat. "That was probably the most significant engineering effort and the most profound impact on customers."
Excellent. Multiple concurrent downloads of lots and lots of pictures, if you know what I mean....
I don't mean to sound like some astroturfer, but RedHat has definitely brought Linux to the fore of server operating systems.
With the rapid decline of AIX and Solaris, Win2K and RedHat Linux are making steady gains in the server market.
What's more, with Linux you don't need to have a server farm like NT requires, so in the long run you save your company money by choosing to go with RedHat.
Yes it is hard to beat M$ because of their already installed user base etc. etc. but I really would like to see some heavy hitters to release ditributions targetted at the desktop.
:)
Enterprise users of linux servers has a good linux administrator base to perform the tweaks this new version is bringing in right out of the box.
I am waiting for the day to see the windoooze on desktop killer linux distro to come out of Redhat
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Let me tell you; I own stock in Red Hat, I've researched their business strategies fervently...and these people know what they are doing with open source software. Red Hat posted a profit of 240,000 for the last quarter, the first profit EVER for a company mainly based on open-source software. Red Hat is moving forward, and fast, and there is no denying that soon, very soon, they could destroy Microsoft's server market share, and possibly kill poor ol' Sun Micrososystems(who I also own stock in). Red Hat, by the way, is a steal at its current 12.81 price, but I got in at 10.70. ;-)
This include Samba 3.0, any one know?
Linux is and has always been a server OS. Why? Because it is patterned around UNIX which is designed as a scaled down version of Multics which is a server OS.
You can train the OS all you like with fancy window managers and scalable fonts and all the rest of the eye candy that desktop users want, but at its heart the OS is still yearning to be driven by the commandline. That's why most GUI programs are usually thin wrappers around sophisticated commandline applications.
This isn't to say that Linux couldn't be ready to overtake Windows on the desktop one day. Take a look at where Linux is today. It is the fastest growing server operating system out there. Windows couldn't hope to beat it there.
>>Yes it is hard to beat M$ because of their already installed user base etc. etc. but I really would like to see some heavy hitters to release ditributions targetted at the desktop.
Mandrake and Lindows immediately come to mind...
I didn't realize how cheap WS is. I was all set to give up on my RH after my trusty 7.3 w/up2date was end-of-lifed. But for $179 to get a distro with that much spit and polish.. I might just get it for my home gateway/webserver/etc box.
which is Red Hat's shiny new 'enterprise' version of Linux
Actually, there are three versions of Red Hat Enterprise, WS, ES, and AS, WS is supposed to be a desktop OS, while AS is the most advanced version, WS price starts at 179$, and AS price at 1499$ for the Intel x86 platform.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
... and no free support either.
As a matter of fact, I just did. Hmmm. Funny you ask.
Apple has already released a Windoze killer, its just that nobody in the Linux community will admit to this :/
In its current form there are no Linux distros anywhere near good enough for the home desktop market. Why dont we turn our attention to beating the enemy first and then sort out our differences later. Red Hat have a great server OS, Apple have one for the desktop. Combine the 2 and it is impossible to beat. (Well, possibly by a farm of G5's ;) )
Just my $0.95 worth.
I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
They may not produce open source but they use it throughout to produce their revenues and support it (they employ some FreeBSD team members).
Picasso was released in what, early 1996?
A company offering an honest assessment of their new product offerings? What's going on? Is it April already?
Shareholders and company officers can promote their stock at will.
so now there are how many linux distributions that run on the new 64 bit machines out of the box?
Suse, Redhat, others?
and how many other OSs that also run out of the box without you having to use said box as a house after purchasing it?
You gave a shit to someone?
finally we've reached version 3 in the enterprise series. in a few years we should be expecting redhat enterprise 3 for workgroups, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Lornhorne.. Way to go! sooner or later we'll be able to block others from forwarding our emails too in upcoming office releases!
my blog
It's a game, right?
Or maybe, a secret version of Red Hat Bob?
I would really love to see the machine that can dual boot that combination.
If Apple would release a version of OS X for the x86(-64) architecture, I'd convert my desktop machines in a hot second -- as I'm sure many (multiple) tens of thousands of others would. But that will never happen, so I'm just going to use the one OS I already have on the wide range of hardware I already have purchased and amortizing.
It's a pity, really. OS X is nice. But not that nice. Red Hat, SuSE, et al. do just fine as a Unixish desktop. Red Hat in particular has a lot of commercial support, and indeed is giving Sun/SGI a run for their money in some areas. Commodity hardware and a (cheap) OS make a fairly attractive combination. It's easy to standardize hardware/vendors for nearly everything your CAD/VLSI/etc worksations to the secretaries' WinXP desktops. That can't happen so well if you have some Apples, some Intel, some SPARC, etc.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Congratulations, genius. Now just the minor detail that OSX doesn't run on 99% of desktops means it isn't even a contender. Do you expect apple will magically attain > 50% of the desktop quite soon, do you?
I can guarantee you that you won't get support but it will be interesting to see how Red Hat goes about publishing updates since I somehow don't see some of their larger customers downloading and compiling source code and then rdisting the non-RPM, binary updates to their Red Hat systems. I'm guessing Red Hat won't really care since the people who would go to the trouble of figuring out how to make this work probably wouldn't cough up $1,499 or whatever it is anyway. There's always Mandrake, Debian, Slack, Red Hat's own Fedora, etc. for us cheap bastards.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Pity it doesn't run on anything but Apple hardware.
Ok so Redhat is charging $149 for their spiffy new version of Linux. Fine. Unlike some I'm not under the influence of mind-altering ideologies. But that doesn't mean that I want to pay $149 for EVERY system I install it on. I'm THE Linux support for ASU's Fulton school of engineering, and we've got almost two hundred systems (that I know of) running one version of Linux or another. I'm the person who has to keep these systems running, and that means it's my job to keep them up to date and make sure they're running a version of Linux that we can expect to see vendor supplied patches and security fixes for. Lets just say I'm not happy about the fact that after the end of the year I'll have to create my own update RPM's whenever a remote vulnerability is found in some package or another. And now I find that even updates to RH 9 are going to end in April of 2004. What does this mean for the school? Either we move over to the new enterprise version, or we start looking real hard at Mandrake, SuSe, etc.
Which brings me back to my original question. Does anyone know if there are non-GPL'd components included in the new Enterprise version and if so what they are? I'm not going to go around installing proprietary for $$$$ software on people's system illegally, and I'm not going to be able to ask them to pony up $149 per copy when the copy of Redhat the system is already running didn't cost them a dime. So if anyone knows anything, even rumors, I'd really like to know. If I can surgically remove the proprietary components from the system I will as long as they are not critical to its operation. Of course if Redhat is simply charging $149 for the service of being able to download their distro and aren't looking to prevent you from installing it on as many systems as you'd like (sans support obviously), then I'll be more than happy to pay the money to get those ISO images. I've never contacted them for support yet, so why should I need to start?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
There is a difference between a great desktop distro and one that is simply easy to install. Mandrake et al fall in to the latter category, IMHO.
Cause we've been fighting to get it stable on RH "certified" hardware for nearly a year. Everyone say "shoot the partner". Now say it over & over again. Don't get me started on "Platinum support".
Well, tell us. The guy who started this thread wants to know who's handing them out. I think he rubs himself down with them... not mine to wonder why.
You can train the OS all you like with fancy window managers and scalable fonts and all the rest of the eye candy that desktop users want, but at its heart the OS is still yearning to be driven by the commandline.
Duh, any reasonable computer will have a command line for certian chores because thats the best way to do them. Unreasonable software has no CLI or a very poor one and these task just don't get done. Anyone who can figure out Microsoft's ever changing forest of tabs can figure out how to manipulate a few text files in the /etc directory. Software that lacks a decent CLI is just feature poor and hard to maintain. Most of them are 3 year disposables.
This isn't to say that Linux couldn't be ready to overtake Windows on the desktop one day.
I'm not sure why free software has not supplanted Windoze yet. It's better designed, easier to use, more rugged and more flexible. Every modern window manager has virtual desktops, but not Microsoft. SSH -X make RDP, PCAnywhere and all that look like the garbage it is. Email, web browsing on Microsoft platrorms is miserable and will break your silly PC. Free software handles those tasks masterfully and that's just the tip of the free software networking gold mine. I can indeed spare a few clock cycles to run as an sftp "server", or a web "server". Modest hardware, such as a 450MHz K6/2 with 128MB easily hosts myself and my wife at the same time. She surfs, I burn CDs with a graphical client but never have buffer underflows. Free software is lean, clean and does what I want it to on my desktop right now. I did not have to do much training to work any of the 5 or 6 GUIs I'm now familiar with. Click and drool works even better in the free software world than M$ can dream their bloated mess will work.
Red Hat's got your 64bit software! That's outstanding. I'd just love to get my hands on a nice little shuttle and drop this on it. The $800 cost is more than justified in a business environment. It can easily replace 8 windoze bozes by converting them to X terminals with something nice like Debian. Each of those nice little PCs could log onto that box as a "server" for document sharing, email and group colaboration that free software is famous for. I'm sure it would have no problem at all running 8 sessions of Star Office, fetchmail and other nice applications for users. $800 is a little steep for a personal box, but that price will come down and the 64 bit builds will come out in cheaper or free distros. That will be nice, not that I need it yet. I might reconsider that when firewire video gets cheap enough for me and PC video lives up to the hype that M$ has put out since 1995 with it's "multi media" bullshit. Hats off to Red Hat for putting this out.
Bill Gates said that a personal computer would never need more than 640K of RAM. Maybe he knows what a "server" is. He's real smart, I'm told.
Yeah, yeah, I know about turning off services to a computer that's exposed to an untrusted network. I read the Microsoft hotmail report, but already knew most of that. That's why my 486 packet filter has no GUI and has a limited set of software installed. Does this flexiblity somehow keep the software I use for my 486 from being a good desktop machine?
I'm so confused. Here I am, having run Linux and free software exclusively for the last two years on my desktops. I have not figured out what people mean when they say I'm running a server OS yet. Can you help me out here?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When I hear Linux people talking about it I start to feel ill. Talk about taking a perfectly good linux kernel and fucking it up.
I just ignore it.
Ouch!
And that's for their workstation configuration...
$179 for the x86 version.
-dameron
The prices on the AMD64 versions are nutty. I understand they have to recoup development costs for the new architecture and that they only expect rich businesses to use it on expensive servers, but I'm testing Opteron for research purposes at a university. There's no way we can afford that in the long haul.
Anyone know if AMD64 support is expected for Fedora? Or what cheaper AMD64 distributions are around? Do they work? The actual details on AMD64 support on distributions' sites are very sketchy.
Anyone considering just taking their kick-ass kernel and installing it on a free Linux variant? It's GPL so it would be 100% legal, anyway... or would you need to take some other stuff like their glibc also?
Mr. Debian, are you listening? This might be a good way to accelerate the ISV verification process... they will verify their projects with RHEL, so if you have the same kernel, same glibc etc., you could quite easily persuade them to verify their product on *your* distro also.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
*That would be a problem in a different sort of way (and of course would not work), but doesn't detract to the point I'm making, which is that there is a difference between offering software which is licensed under terms considered free, and offering services using free software, which can be licesnsed any which way, modulo some restrictions with some licenses.
More crack, anyone? I've got a great patent-vs-trademark discussion over here...
I forget what 8 was for.
Hah! Debian has been on version 3 for ages! ;-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Why dont we turn our attention to beating the enemy first and then sort out our differences later.
Why trade one for another? In all seriousness. If Apple was in Microsoft's position, do you honestly think that they'd act any differently? Do you think that Red Hat would behave much differently?
Business is always that, business. Businesses are out to make money. You don't maximize your profits by sharing your market. You do every legal thing within your power to dominate it.
If Pepsi could figure out a way to take 50% of Coke's sales in the next 5 years do you doubt that they would do it? If McDonalds could woo a substantial portion of Burger King's customers, do you think that they would hesitate even for a second?
There is no question that Apple is more innovative than Microsoft. There is no doubt that Apple is more willing to cooperate with others than Microsoft is. That is what they have to do because of the position that they're in. There is also no doubt that Apple is a business. When you have shareholders to answer to, being a nice guy isn't always the top priority.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
emerge redhat-sources
O yeah, I forgot to say. Don't forget to buy some stock so that you can artificially inflate the price for me.
I know this Microsoft Sycophant (Microphant) that claims that RedHat Enterprise servers are violating the GPL. I believe this has been cleared up, but this is my mini-askslashdot. Does anybody know the details of GPL compliance on these pricey high end RedHat distributions?
-pyrrho
We're using RH ES 2.1 for a few servers at work (a big hospital in Sweden).. Most servers are still HPUX and NT4 but we're slowly (too slowly IMHO) migrating to Linux. I had been praising Linux for a LONG time when we finally got our first copy of RH ES to install on a production-server. It was a big surprise for me.. I have been using Linux since 1996. Started with RH 4.2, then Debian and have been running Gentoo for little more than 2 years now.
:) We now have 3 production servers running RH ES2.1 (two running webservices with apache+tomcat, one running Sybase).
RH ES 2.1 was like a time warp back to the 90s. Only ext2/3 filesystems. Where the hell is LVM?? It was hard to convince my fellow coworkers (HPUX and Solaris fanatics) how a Unix without LVM can be considered "enterprise"... But eventually I convinced then.
We've had a lot of problems with them though.. They start to become SLOOOOW after a few days of uptime under load.. Load avg is 0.0 to 0.1, cpu is 99% idle, but they are so slow it takes a good minute or two just to start "top". I think I tracked the problem down to the cciss-driver and upgrading to the latest kernel (e.27) seemed to fix the problem somewhat (still slow but not nearly as slow as when running e.16).
I really hope ES3.0 will fix our problems! Otherwise my dream of someday running Linux on all of our servers just went down the drain because I don't think that neither management or my fellow coworkers will let me install another distribution (oh no! not ANOTHER set of commands/configfile-system to learn!)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
No, I'm very glad redhat users like you don't have anything to do with debian. Thank you. I wouldn't dream of trying to make you switch.
You can download the ISOs from Red Hat Network if you have purchased an earlier version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Something like a subscription is better though because it proactively warns you of updates - with apt4rpm you have to seek it out yourself. There is also the problem that unlike RHN (or the similar for enterprises) patches aren't checked so much for compatability with other patches.
See my journal, I write things there
I had the very same problem; never stable big-iron fileserver with RH9-kernel or 2.4.20+ stock.
The slowlyness comes from the kernel itself - please choose a 2.4.21-aa1 (patch from Andrea, in the people/ dir in kernel.org) and the problems are gone (mainly, the slabcache is the problem).
Especially if you are running bigmem-machines.
You might want to change the kernel-/userspace mapping in said kernel to 2G/2G, so your kernel has less stress mapping caches/pages if you aren't running apps that require 3G/process.
Sigh...
And if you own a 2.1 licence, the upgrade to 3.0 is free!!! I've just ordered another 15 licences...
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
I have to admit I would really like to use Linux on my home, but at the moment, there's no versions of it that are ..... as brainless as I need them to be, to use them.
For instance, a problem I am having at the moment. I installed Debian 3.0 (I think), and when I try to start X I get the message that it can't find any screens. Which confuses the heck out of me, but I think I know how to fix it. All I ned to do is find my XF86Config files. Which means using either find or locate, and some kind of operator (/f?). And then there was the time I spent 4 days, on and off, trying to install some graphics drivers, before giving up and going back to windows. I discovered soon after that Nvidia don't support linux very well, and that if I'd just waited 2 days more, they have released the drivets I was looking for, and I could have installed them......
While not being a complete idiot, I am not very Linux-savvy, so I struggle with such issues. Whereas my copy of windows worked straight out of the box. So what do I use more often? I'll let you do the math.
Only once linux becomes usable by non-techie types, without having to go on a course to learn how, will it truly take off.
Just my perplexed 0.02
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
So this means we will get even more lamers in IRC asking for "Linux version 3". I wonder how they plan to explain moving from Linux 9 to Linux 3, shrug.
(troll? yes ma'am)
I have an experience of installing Red Hat 9 on my IBM ThinkPad R40, on which there is a pre-installed Windows XP. My original plan is that when its installation is finished, I will format all windows pattions and release them for Linux due to the limited disk storage (only 15G).
The installation process is very smooth. and the desktop is beautiful too! The only problem is that the Linux can not recognize the modem device - neither neat nor kppp can. I need help, so I want to google 'linux modem', but I can't surf since modem can't work.
How should I do? tell me.
I had to reboot, return to WinXP, and configure the dial-up Internet Connection in Windows... and connect to Internet..., only took 3 minutes! it's so easy, too easy!
Then I searched resources in Windows, and on the other hand tried to drive my modem in Linux...It almost spent me 2 days. But there are still problems -- it's unstable, too slow (2-3 k/s vs. 5.x k/s in WinXP).
Despite whatever defects, I love Linux still because of its free, open source, security..., though I have to use WinXP sometimes.
-- forgive me my poor Engl...
We where having problems as well with memory management. The kernel would never free cached memory so the box would slow to a crawl and start swapping madly. I am sure it was a bug in kswapd and this is fixed nicely in the later kernels above .18 . One call to RH gave me that answer.
Got Code?
If you want brainless, Debian is about the worst choice of distro you could make. It demands a lot of configuration, for instance for an Nvidia card. I've never had problems with my Nvidia card on ANY other distro than Debian. So, maybe you should consider RedHat or SuSe?
I have to tell you that as a member of a Linux Migration / Consolidation team, my employer is excited about Fedora once they looked into it.
Our take on it is - Fedora gets the latest and greatest. As a result, it will be a lot more likely to have stability issues. As things mature and stabilize in Fedora, they will be pulled into the Enterprise versions.
This is a win-win for us. Fedora is free and gets the benefit of more debugging eyeballs by those who are willing to potentially trade stability for the latest and greatest. Most of us have agreed to use Fedora at home to do our part.
Our employer, on the other hand, puts stability first on the list. They are also willing to pay a price to know that RedHat stands behind the product and is going to support it.
Everyone wins!
At around $1000/cpu each year price is becoming a major factor.
I have heard that Ford went with SUSE because of price and that other major accounts have as well.
Today, there aren't many places to 'get' 64 bit Linux. If you're building a cluster with thousands of nodes, that $1000/cpu becomes very significant. Be glad that SUSE is around.
so does anyone have a link to iso files. i would like to see this product, without paying for it. torrent link?
I can't seem to find any screenshots of it. Anybody have any? They're touting bluecurve, so I'd like to see it.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I was using RedHat when I had the graphics problems. It was Red Hat 8 and I used it before the drivers for the Nvidia cards came out. I changed to Debian to see if I could get that working....I'm still persevering...give me some time, I'll get there in the end :D
And my local Linux Guru is going to be annoyed as hell with the volume of questionhs...mwahahahahaha
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Because you work for IBM, you see...
Is that the one with 17" wheels, a spoiler, and a stiffer suspension?
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Red-Carpet from Ximian have updates to most of Redhats products. I am not sure where they update from, but it might still be possible to get the systems quickly uptodate even after Redhat themselves stop updating.
As far as updates go:
/var/spool/up2date via http or ftp
1. Buy one copy and install "everything"
2. Configure up2date to not delete the rpm's it downloads
3. share
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Ok, I should have mentioned I've only tried with newer versions of the distros - I haven't been in this game for too long. But I assure you, if you try a recent version of one of the commercial distros, there's a good chance it will work right out of the box. But I'll agree that it still takes a little more interest and patience to use Linux than Windows. However, the rewards make it worth it :)
Linux takes about 6 months to learn. After that, its all fun and games.
However, there are some distros that'll work out of box. Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, Xandros, etc. However, what I think would help is if these distros came preinstalled.
Debian is very nice if you take a few months to learn it. Installing software is very easy.
Try a Knoppix live CD to get a feel for Linux, if you haven't already.
I remember, does anyone else remember, when Microsoft stopped supporting windows 95 in 2000? That caused a big stir in the slashdot community about all those millions of computers out there still running windows 95 who are going to have no support! Well, I advise you to take a look at the end-of-the-line dates [redhat.com] for RedHat. Redhat 8 was release, what, about a year ago? Mabey 14 months? And it's end of the line is December 31st of this year?
You are confused. RH Advanced Server does not have a short end-of-life like the rapidly updating RH 7/8/9 series - if I remember correctly it's about 5 years from initial release. I also suspect that you can extend that support further should you be willing to pay for it. Just don't expect support beyond the EOL of a product line to be cheap - you (and whomever else around also wants that support) will have to pay to retain that department in RedHat active.
See, another problem that's going to hit redhat is that, until now, they had planned on releasing a free product called redhat and a pay-for-support-in-order-to-get-the-CD's product, also called redhat (enterprise). But, the way I understand it now, it's looking like the enterprise product is going to be called redhat and the free one is going to be called something else (fedora?). Well, that's just great for redhat, but what about me? I'm in the webhosting business. What do I say when customers call and ask about the $119/month dedicated server? Does it come with redhat? And I have to tell them No, becuase it quite simply costs too much. In fact, sir, it's more expensive that windows server 2003, if all you want to do is webhosting.
Excellent. Well done. You are going to pass on your own confusion to your customers.
If your customers want a Redhat QA'd linux distribution, you can give them Fedora. RH is still overseeing the core packaging and quality of the Fedora release, and will probably cut stable releases from the development set as a distro every 6 months.
If your customers want Redhat Advanced Server with support, then let them pay for it. You still have options. Your customer still has options. If your customer is confused over the choices available, it is up to you to explain what is available, what is suitable and needed for their requirements. That is good business sense - know your own market.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
You got to love the name.
'Enterprise' Edition. It's as is RedHat is scoffing "Hey, Darl! THIS is what a truly 'Enterprise' class OS looks and smells like! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Screw you and your OpenServer!"
Question. If redhat has mingles their non-GPL code/progs/etc.. so closely with GPLed code that they are insperable, isn't that like a poisoned a distro? I've used Redhat's distro for years and I would like to continue using it. If redhat makes me choose between their non-GPL code and some substandard variant, I'll pass on RedHat and look for another distro. What is the 'jist' of the situation? Oh yeah, "Remember the fork wars." Not again, please. Thank You, Mike
Look at their Subscription Agreement.
Some choice snippets:
4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
Where is the line drawn? Surely I can rebuild the freely available SRPMS and put them wherever I want. What if I use their binary RPMs with apt to upgrade an RH9 system? Hm....
(be kind, simulated)
/opt/orahome/bin/oracler mcap.so
/opt/orahome/bin/oracle
$ ldd `which bash`
/lib64/libc.so
/lib64/libreadline.so
...
$ file `which bash`
ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86_64, stripped
$ ldd
/lib/libc.so
/lib/libte
/opt/orahome/lib/blahla
...
$ file
ELF 32-bit LSB executabe, Intel 80386, stripped
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
i'm really glad you debian users are staying away from gentoo, don't need you dirty hippies stinking up the place....
If you install the software from CD or their binary packages, you agree to pay for one year of support - period. This is *NOT* free software. It is GPL binaries that are contractualy encumbered with a support agreement.
RedHat is a disaster for us - our own legal department wont accept the EULA. RedHat can come audit you, punish you, find any running systems, and charge for support contracts you don't need or want. You allow them to do this the instant you do an installation. Each subsequent installation extends your "agreement" for another year, for your entire company, and all your systems.
Avoid it at all cost - get your hardware vendors to support free software again. If they think RHEL is sufficient - they're wrong, and they're out of the free software business. Going from zero to one dollar per system is a massive burden if you're stamping out labs full of desktops, or 1000's of servers for a global enterprise.
The Market will decide against RedHat, if and only if we all read the draconian EULA. Either read it now, or read it when it's attached to a subpoena.
-edfardos
Uh, OK. I got lost . . . from Debian . . . forever.
I guess I'm slow but it's just become clear to me that the Redhat I've used and evangelised since 4.1 is dead. I find this surprising. I am an IT manager at a large telco and have fought (and won) the battle to get Linux accepted into the datacentre. When the discussion came to flavour I chose RedHat, not because it is better but because I used and understood it.
If the same question comes up, and it will because other companies in the group favour Suse, I will not fight the corner. Linux is still important but not RedHat. They have walked away from the things that got them where they are today - not a good idea.
I run a business too on Linux and I have now gone off to look at Suse, Mandrake and Debian to move my services onto. I'd be interested in opinions on the best general purpose server variant to run apache, mysql, mail etc on out of those 3.
Bummer.
No one seems to have mentioned the Red Hat Professional Worstation product that will also be released. Of course, you'd never know from their front page. It's supposedly the same as RHEL 3 WS, but no support and RHN (not RHEN) update access for a year. Targeted at Home power users. I've only so far found it listed on buy.com.
Not totally clear what the product is or what the support life will be. If it's in fact RHEL 3 WS and totally compatible that will be a good thing.
jasonLast I checked, every last line of code in RHEL 3.0 was GPLed, and the SRPMs are downloadable from redhat.com.
Don't want to pay RedHat's support prices? Download the SRPMs, compile them, roll your own distro. (CheapBytes or someone like them will inevitably do this for you, for a nominal cost.) Or hell, just borrow the ISO from someone with a RHEL license and make a copy: it's quite legal.
If you really are running a webhosting business, stop bitching and start calling your redhat salesrep. There's these things called "volume discounts" that have been all the vogue since, ah, the industrial revolution.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
After a read of the various manuals, and after grepping through the list of SRPMS, I see no evidence of support for clustering systems, as with AS2.1. Has Red Hat dropped support for shared storage dual cluster systems? I hope not, we just bought one!
At 10:52 PM 10/22/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>So, any chace of a CheapBytes version of Pink Tie Enterprise Linux? Or
>has Red Hat figured out a way to beat the GPL?
It is a big question mark at this time. We haven't seen the latest Red Hat Enterprise yet. If we can offer something economically priced based on Red Hat Enterpise, we will do our best to offer it. We will be offering the Fedora version which is the distributable offshoot of Red Hat. Time will tell how all of this works out.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
You worked your way to the forefront of Linux mindshare by means of a combination of hard work and moral idealism. You showed the masses that there are viable alternatives to the evil empire, and you taught us that Windows' separation into "workstations" and "servers" was artificial and counterproductive. You popularized open source software in an unprecedented way, and your name became virtually synonymous with Linux.
But somewhere along the way, you lost the plot. I don't know exactly why the change happened (although I'd be very surprised if marketroids and lawyers didn't figure into it), but I do know when; it was some time between versions 7.3 (which is widely considered the best distribution you ever made) and 8.0 (which is widely considered the "jump-the-shark" version).
Now, the idealism which made it so easy to get and use your software is buried under licensing legalese. Now, you've decided to emulate Microsoft's ridiculous separation of "workstations" and "servers," and your pricing structure actually makes Windows look attractive.
You've disowned your biggest and best achievement - Red Hat Linux - and now none of your heretofore faithful users (myself included) can figure out what the future holds, or what to do after Redhat 9 reaches end-of-life; you've turned your back on the very people who brought you to where you are. Gone, apparently, are the days where single users could run Redhat for the price of a blank cd or a reasonably-priced boxed set from the local computer mart; now, it looks as though it will be impossible to run Redhat at home *at all*. (Hint: why is Windows - widely regarded as inferior - found in the server room? Because it's familiar - it's the same thing people use at home.) Granted, we power-user geek types aren't the ones directly controlling the money, but we *are* the ones with the word-of-mouth and the ears of the CTOs where we work.
Probably worst of all is the damage you're doing to the image of open source software in general and Linux in specific in the eyes of the general public. Now, instead of a clear-eyed trailblazer offering a perceptibly different way of doing things, you present the image of an uncertain imitator, shooting yourselves in both feet at once and doing things pretty much the way Microsoft does, only not as well. Just when, in the day of SCO, Linux and open source really need a champion, you turn into a stammering weasel.
So, way to go, Redhat. You couldn't have screwed up more if you'd done it on purpose. It was great while it lasted... maybe I'll see you around some time.
Me? I've already converted my systems to OpenBSD.
Okay, I see that Red Hat are selling their Cluster Suite as a separate product for Enterprise customers only. But I don't see where the code is.
Its very easy to piss on Sun, but the Sun Gear/OS i have running here _are_ Enterrpise Class systems. They go for half or less the price of RedHat Advanced Server on eBay. Thats just FYI :)
cheers,
Robert
Look, mate.
There are a couple of different sorts of people that might use Linux. The first are the developers, the techies. They're the ones that built GNU/Linux. A Linux company that offends these as a group does so at their own peril. A couple of companies tried cashing in on these. No good. Not enough money here, too much resistance, and it's like biting the hand that feeds you. Red Hat hasn't irritated these at all. As a matter of fact, it tends to coddle them. RH expanded the range of packages they offer by adding Fedora to their lineup (hopefully adopting yum as well) with frequent updates. RH has traditionally been extremely pro-open source, and anal about getting rid of non-free source packages in their distribution. Xv went away, xanim went away, netscape navigator went away (probably before it was a good idea to do so, as a matter of fact). They're less so than Debian, but more so than almost any of the other "corporatish" types. RH donates lots of money and developer time into core Linux products, so that all the hackers benefit. Gcc owes a lot to RH.
The second group are the mom-and-pop types. Joe Sixpack. Ordinary old home users. These generally haven't had much interest in Linux so far. RH has put a lot of money into developing GNOME to make things more palatable, but there's a long ways to go. RH hasn't really hurt this group at all.
The third group are business desktop users. This is a potentially growing market. I don't know exactly why Red Hat isn't as interested as they could be -- presumably because users tend to resist change a bit, and because businesses have balked at retrainting costs. However, RH (and Mandrake and SuSE) have all put a lot of resources into projects that will benefit these folks. They're slowly but steadily trickling into the fold -- there are migrations to Linux, but not away.
Last of all, there are the server folks. These are the ones that want Red Hat Enterprise Server. All they care about is supported servers. They want support contracts and someone to call if things break. They want very occasional updates, and don't care about the latest-and-greatest browser plugin. They want very heavy QA. For them, $699 is very attractive, especially if it lets them migrate from Solaris and AIX and the associated (expensive) hardware. If you don't fall into this group, you don't want RH Enterprise. Incidently, Debian Stable is probably a good alternative for techie admins that don't want support contracts. There are IT managers that just aren't *comfortable* dealing with most Linux companies, and want a familiar old contract and guarantees -- just with less vendor lock-in and cheaper prices.
The problem is that you're thinking that RH is trying to get you on RHE. Nope. RH doesn't market RHE to you and doesn't have an interest in doing so. Maybe one day, when they absorb enough generic suits and drop enough of the Linux folks, they'll do something unutterably stupid like trying to sock techies up for cash, but not today. About the only way they get money from you is if you want pressed CDs (worth it if you're installing on a bunch of machines at work and don't want to worry about a burned CD going bad) or if you want to buy their up2date service (frankly, not worth it -- even aside from being free, yum blows up2date out of the water).
So don't bash RH. This isn't a case of Red Hat going evil. They aren't transitioning you to give you a worse deal. They're just expanding into the server market as fast as possible.
You're talking about RH not including a web server. Ridiculous. RH still has a boxed version that it sells. It still has a web server. It comes with *installation support*, same as it always has. You can buy a support contract if you want for usage support.
Fedora is a group of developers that got together and packaged a lot more software for Red Hat than Red Hat did themselves. Red Hat realized that a lot of RH users really liked Fedora. Now, Fedora is becoming an officia
May we never see th
A rude coward wrote:
"Thank you for trolling, please drive through. And install Fedora Core while you're at it."
My post was not intended as a troll. Trolls are generally defined as insincere posts, written purely with the intent of provoking reactions; often they are copied and pasted en masse from previous posts.
My post, on the other hand, represents my sincere beliefs and opinions. Furthermore, it is original; I spent an hour or so of my time writing and editing it in an attempt to accurately convey my views. Your glib dismissal of my work is inaccurate, inappropriate, and rude.
As for Fedora: we'll see. Maybe, in time, Fedora will become a worthy successor to its predecessors; for now, though, it's beta, unknown, untested, and has no clearly defined support channel (i refer to .rpm updates) or development roadmap. At best, it's based on Redhat 9, a flaky, unstable release in my (considerable) experience. Fine for tinkering with, perhaps, but most certainly not ready for use where a stable system is required, for example, production servers or my laptop. Again, your advice is poorly thought through and inappropriate.
I stand by my original post.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.