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Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro

darthcamaro writes "Looks like Red Hat is still the #1 distro according to Netcraft stats cited by Internetnews.com. Gentoo is now the fastest growing, replaced Debian which was the fastest growing distro just six months ago...and as we all know, and as the article rightly points out, the stats aren't accurate cause most webserver admins disable version reporting...right? So if all version were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting? Read the Netcraft stats (without the context that they're BS) here"

208 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. I think part of it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That things like CPanel that are commonly used were up until recently only available on RedHat.

    1. Re:I think part of it is by Seven001 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Good point. Not just cPanel, but Ensim too. I'm pretty sure Ensim still uses RedHat exclusively, too.

    2. Re:I think part of it is by krgallagher · · Score: 1

      I lease a dedicated server on the internet. It runs a version of Red Hat. That was not my choice. Iwould have preferred SuSE. While the company would have installed a different distribution if I had insisted (I checked) they would not have supported it at the same level or for the same price if I needed onsite support. It was an easy decision to run Red Hat at that point. Still, I have been very unhappy with it and would prefer a different distribution.

      --

      Insert Generic Sig Here:

    3. Re:I think part of it is by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Informative

      SuSE at least picks sensible defaults, like bash color values that you can actually read when you need to list a directory, unlike RedHat's dark blue on black scheme. And the horrible vim highlighting... shudder.

      While I like both, I spent more time configuring redhat to not be trivially annoying than I ever did SuSE.

  2. Red Hat / Fedora by x3ro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is that Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora?

    --
    [ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
    1. Re:Red Hat / Fedora by mirror_dude · · Score: 2, Informative

      its all redhat distros , including fedora
      So means RH X , Redhat Enterprise X and Fedora X
      Where X is a version number

      --
      Note to Mods: When I post mirrors, it's a best guess. I don't know for certain whether or not the site will go down!
    2. Re:Red Hat / Fedora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait, I thought X was the windowing system!? God damn you linux, why must you be so confusing! screw you guys, I'm going back to windows.

    3. Re:Red Hat / Fedora by cujo_1111 · · Score: 1

      Put them in together, make of it what you will, these numbers mean nothing anyway. Too many hosts turn off version reporting or fill it with false data.

      Anyway, how big is the hosting market compared to the desktop market? What is the leading distro on the desktop?

      --
      If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
    4. Re:Red Hat / Fedora by bstone · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I thought Google kept track of host systems accessing their search engine in some fashion. That's still going to have some problems (masquerading, randomness of sample, etc.), but it seems like it would be at least as good as the Netcraft stats.

    5. Re:Red Hat / Fedora by CatOne · · Score: 1

      I'm sure the most significant percentage is still running 7.3 and 8.x. So neither ;-)

  3. BSD? by Coneasfast · · Score: 4, Informative

    i wonder what the BSD numbers would be like. anyone know where to get those stats? would be nice to see if all those 'bsd is dead/dying' arguments are right or wrong.

    --
    Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
    1. Re:BSD? by PacoTaco · · Score: 4, Informative

      FreeBSD has 2.5 million sites, about a million more than Red Hat (with the usual Netcraft caveats).

    2. Re:BSD? by drclaw007 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Some would say quality is more important than quantity :

      http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

      BSD variants still dominate the average uptime chart.

      But each to their own.

    3. Re:BSD? by moZer · · Score: 2, Informative

      Get the facts:

      "Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days."

      http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html#whic ho s

      --
      Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
    4. Re:BSD? by fishbot · · Score: 1

      Of course BSD is dying! It's always been dying, and will continue to be dying for a good long while yet :)

  4. Re:I guess that just proves it... by whfsdude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't say BSD is dying. Look at Apple. Darwin is based on FreeBSD and you can't say that xserves are not selling.

  5. Is this the same Netcraft by RLiegh · · Score: 2, Insightful

    that's always saying BSD is dying? As a NetBSd user, I wouldn't consider them an reliable source. ;)*

    *winky provided for the sardonically challenged

  6. Whatever it is... by tbjw · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

    1. Re:Whatever it is... by whfsdude · · Score: 1

      I don't think so. That year will be when the average person decides that they want to run an open source operating system. Right now it's just geeks who really use linux.

    2. Re:Whatever it is... by Metteyya · · Score: 1

      Oh, come on, after about five years this joke became a little boring!
      (not that I'm not dreaming of Desktop market dominated by penguin...)

    3. Re:Whatever it is... by HermanAB · · Score: 3, Informative
      According to IBM's figures, there are 30 million Linux systems, of which 23 million are desktops and 7 million servers, plus more than a billion embedded devices.

      So in total, there are probably way more Linux than Windows machines out there.

      --
      Oh well, what the hell...
    4. Re:Whatever it is... by Feztaa · · Score: 1

      Wow, what are your sources on that? It's been my impression that linux has been massively popular on servers, but is just now making inroads on the desktop. I'd be very surprised if linux was 3x as popular on the desktop as it is on the server.

    5. Re:Whatever it is... by dj245 · · Score: 1

      If by "desktop" you meant to say "server", then you would be correct in that cliche.

      --
      Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
    6. Re:Whatever it is... by JWSmythe · · Score: 1

      I've known a lot of people who run Linux on workstations, mostly beginners trying it out, but heck, they're still users. But there are many *MANY* more hosting companies using it, which dramatically sway the numbers to servers. For example, where I am, there are about 6 workstations running Linux. But there are roughly 150 servers and network devices running Linux. Most of the people who I've known that consistantly run Linux either are or have been techs or admins.

      I'm starting to agree with Microsoft's TCO analysis though. I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together. I'd probably be quicker at mine, if I had a machine that I could develop on, rather than putting it together to put into service.

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    7. Re:Whatever it is... by Feztaa · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice.

      Actually, I thought that was the whole point of the new software economy created by open source... you get the software for free, and then you pay for support so that the developers can afford to create more software to give away for free.

      Anyway, I'm not really familiar with 64-bit distros, but I'm sure you could do a fedora install or something with a 64 bit yum repository, and then you wouldn't have to pay for software updates. I'm sure you could do something similar with Debian! If there's one distro I can think of off the top of my head that I know will have an x86_64 port with a free repository for updates, it'll be debian (and debian makes a great server anyway).

      As for your other comment about linux servers being far more prolific than linux workstations, that's exactly consistent with my expectations.

    8. Re:Whatever it is... by Phragmen-Lindelof · · Score: 2

      Have you tried Gentoo? If you go through stages 1-3 (or 4), it will take some time (a few days at most) to compile and optimize; it does not sound like you have that kind of free computer time. You might want to use a Gentoo LiveCD. From here:

      "Portage will keep your Gentoo Linux system as "up-to-date" as you desire. And because of this, experienced Gentoo users don't pay too much attention to "new versions" of Gentoo Linux -- after all, the latest and greatest version of Gentoo Linux is always available by typing an emerge sync command. There's no need to wait several months for a "new version" of Gentoo Linux to be released because Gentoo Linux is continually updated and refined and these improvements are immediately made available to you.
      "Of course, we do roll up official CD releases of Gentoo Linux so that new Gentoo Linux installs are as up-to-date as possible from the start. Here's an overview of what is included in the recent 2004.1 release of Gentoo Linux:
      "Support for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS processors
      LiveCD-based installation for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc and Alpha
      Latest stable KDE and GNOME
      Various optimized Linux kernels
      Very modern GNU development environment
      Excellent filesystem support: ReiserFS, XFS, ext3, EVMS, LVM
      Excellent hardware support: NVIDIA, Creative Labs Live! and Audigy
      Modular OpenGL and compiler sub-system (supports multiple co-existing versions)
      Clean, dependency-based system initialization scripts
      New "hardened" Gentoo security initiative
      almost 7000 packages of the latest and greatest software
      Enhanced Portage capabilities
      See also.

    9. Re:Whatever it is... by clymere · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I'm running Slackware right now, and am much happier with it than RH.

      that said, Gentoo and SuSE both have 64-bit versions out right now, and you can get neccesary updates to either one free of charge. It sounds to me as if you are running Fedora, not true RH if you are supposedly being charged for updates. I can tell you that if you purcahsed RH's supported product, you would get free updates and still have spent considerably less on TCO than if you were running Windows. And while I am not been a RH user since RH9, I find it very hard to believe that Fedora has no free security updates...that would just be irresponsible. I download my RH9 for free, never gave RH a cent, and i still get free updates to this day.

      Lastly, 64-bit versions are in development for both Slackware and Debian :) Unfortunately I think Debian's will most likely be ready first(slack dev. is sometimes slow). However, from what my 64-bit laptop toting friend has told me, 64-bit isn't really ready-for-primetime in anything other than servers yet anyways.

      --
      once you go slack, you never go back
    10. Re:Whatever it is... by Skuto · · Score: 1

      From my experience the only usable gratis 64 bit distribution is Gentoo, which works really well.

      Debian 64 bit is plain unusable, and simply outpaced by Gentoo speedy tracking of new stuff.

    11. Re:Whatever it is... by M1FCJ · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Gentoo is fun to tinker with.

      On the other hand I'm sick of wasting time on tuning my OS. I want it to work, out of the box, 100% of the time. Redhat&Suse work fine for that matter. If I want to run something on an obsolete box, Slackware is good enough and still takes less time to install and configure.

      Gentoo is fun but it has no place on my servers and desktops. I have one image on a spare disk and when I'm in the mood, I can screw my system as much as I like.

    12. Re:Whatever it is... by Odin's+Raven · · Score: 3, Informative
      I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together.

      Since you mention having far more servers than workstations, I'll assume that Fedora isn't what you're looking for. (x86_64 support, free updates, but sometimes a wee bit too much on the bleeding edge.)

      If you want the stability of Red Hat Enterprise software on an x86_64 but don't want (or simply don't need) a support contract, you might want to check out:

      Both of these distros are based on the Red Hat Enterprise SRPMs (legally they can't say that they are Red Hat Enterprise), and provide updates for free.

      FWIW, I'm currently using Tao on a dual Opteron system. (Back when I was setting the box up, White Box hadn't quite finished their x86_64 release). Installed without any problems. If you've got a spare x86_64 machine to test with, you might want to take a look at these distributions.

      --
      A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
    13. Re:Whatever it is... by HermanAB · · Score: 1

      Mr Stallings IBM. Just do a google for the article.

      --
      Oh well, what the hell...
    14. Re:Whatever it is... by ckaminski · · Score: 1

      Why not SuSE x86_64? or amd64 even? ;-) And updates *ARE* free.

    15. Re:Whatever it is... by Squinky86 · · Score: 1

      Gentoo packages normally ship with fairly default configuration, especially for servers. It's the installation of the base system that would take any time or small tweaks. The "tuning" part only takes 3 minutes to write a simple /etc/make.conf and /etc/fstab here, and that's a one-time thing.

      However, I have been happy with Debian, Slackware, and SuSE servers over the years, too. Though right now, Gentoo is the easiest to keep up to date- a simple cron entry that syncs the local portage tree and sends me an email of what it wants to update is definitely the way to go.

    16. Re:Whatever it is... by JaumPaw · · Score: 1

      Well, one distro that actively supports 64bit archs (and not just amd64, also ppc64 and ia64...) is Gentoo.
      And you don't really have to think about binary mess.

    17. Re:Whatever it is... by M1FCJ · · Score: 1
      The tuning part is downloading everything and re-compiling. That's just too much wasted time. Not necessarily I want an uptodate system. I don't want my BD4 version to change, in case it will become backward compatible and screw up my Subversion repositories. I don't want my glibc to change, in case my XXXXX stops working (and the list goes on).

      I want to work with my OS, not work on it constantly, just to get it running most of the time. All binary distributions are friends of sysadmins. Source distributions are fun but they are also a pain. My apt-get/yum/up2date/urpmi/(insert pkgmgt system here) setup also keeps me uptodate with security updates but it takes a very small time to maintain such a system compared to the bandwidth of downloading every dependent source code and wasted time of re-compiling them.

      Gentoo has its niche, especially in the Fun Things To Do department. I love to play with it, mess with it, break it. I don't like it when I need something running and I need it there and then.

    18. Re:Whatever it is... by JWSmythe · · Score: 1


      I may have to try Gentoo on a server finally. :) The two x86_64 servers I'm working on are not yet complete, so I can still switch.

      I'm more than happy to pay into something that I'm completely satisfied with. You'll see me and a few of our staff running around with Slackware disks and gear (hats, shirts, etc). Heck, I'm wearing my BOFH hat right now. :)

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    19. Re:Whatever it is... by JWSmythe · · Score: 1


      Mmmmm.. Sounds good.

      I always take Slackware and recompile things to suit my needs. Slackware's always been almost perfect, except for a few little things, but of course I always compile my own kernel specifically for my hardware (is there any other way? {grin})

      Since these are servers, I'll be skipping the X, KDE, and/or Gnome, and multimedia stuff.

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    20. Re:Whatever it is... by Zardus · · Score: 1

      Did one. For everyone who hasn't googled, its here. Second to last question on that page.

      --
      You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
  7. Come to Gentoo :) by rd4tech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gentoo, 6-month Growth Rate, 49.5%.
    Seems like we have the biggest growth rate...
    C'mon geeks, show some backbone, come to Gentoo, our precious...:)

    And it isn't even hard to install. When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff, once KDE is up, the rest can follow safely. *Literary, the manual had a section where they didn't had an extra slash and that screwed me for half an hour:)

    1. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by rd4tech · · Score: 3, Informative

      To each his own flavour. There's the time component and I have to agree with you on that one. But if one has extra time for playing/tweaking, it pays off grealy. It's also good as a general distribution if you start from stage3, then it goes fast. And you can also install binaries. OS for everyone practically.

    2. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by foonf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff

      To put that in perspective, it took me about two hours to install Slackware 3.3 on my totally obsolete 386SX when I started using Linux. That was installing off of a parallel port Zip drive on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM. Even then, to install on that limited of a machine, you had to mount the root floppy directly rather than loading it into a ramdisk, and setup a swap partition before even being able to run the installer.

      24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

      --

      "(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
    3. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Malc · · Score: 1

      For a server, I don't want to be playing and tweaking. I want something stable, reliable and secure out of the box. When I say stable, I don't just mean crash-proof, but I also mean invariant for more than six months. There's nothing I hate more when it comes to servers than having the goal posts moved or rug pulled out from under me. There's got to be consistency. This is one of Debian's many strengths.

    4. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      Yes, but the strength of Gentoo is its package management. With Gentoo, it automatically figures out dependencies, and installs packages in the corresponding order. Upgrading to newer versions (vital as some packages have frequent security updates) is a single command away. Uninstalling is too.

      In Slackware, how are packages managed? I ask mostly out of ignorance, as I've only heard from people who used Slackware years ago and aren't up to date on it.

      --
      Beetle B.
    5. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by That's+Unpossible! · · Score: 1

      24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

      C'mon, you're accepting the "it takes 24 hours to install" idea from some guy that says "without no previous experience!"

      --
      Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
    6. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      but I also mean invariant for more than six months.

      Invariant? At the very least, you'll want to update packages when security issues are raised (frequent enough to warrant updates aplenty within 6 months)

      --
      Beetle B.
    7. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Malc · · Score: 1

      Security patches go without saying. They don't change features or functionality so frequently.

    8. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by ajayrockrock · · Score: 1

      24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

      I'm not rushing to Gentoo's defense on their poor install times, but I had a server up and running in about an hour on a P3 box. Granted it was a *server* so there's no X-windows or KDE, just the kernel, some utilities and apache/mysql/php. Nice and lean box...

      --Ajay

    9. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by atomic-penguin · · Score: 2, Informative

      In Slackware, how are packages managed?

      Slackware uses .tgz files, glorified tarballs with an install script. Same as an rpm on a low-level, just without dependencies and a fancy database to track things. You use upgradepkg, installpkg, removepkg mostly to manage these. Information about each package is kept in /var/log/packages in plain greppable text. One package per file under /var/log. Every file coming from a package is kept in it's corresponding entry under /var/log. If I want to know where a file came from I can type grep /var/log/packages/*. If I want an inventory ls /var/log/packages > inventory.

      Why do I think this is better than rpm or other package systems? With RPM I have to know the name and version number of something to remove it. With Slack packages, I just cd to /var/log/packages and removepkg *. Most packages are independent of each other, exceptions of course are libraries and backend programs. I must say I have had more headaches with RPM than I ever have with a Slack Package.

      --
      /^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
    10. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by atomic-penguin · · Score: 1

      That did come out a little wrong: The removepkg *, should have said removepkg \*. It got thrown away as invalid html. Yes, I know removepkg * would not be very pleasant.

      --
      /^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
    11. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      I do not doubt its superiority over rpms, but how is it better than the package system used (portage) in Gentoo?

      Specifically, what does Gentoo lack that Slackware has?

      --
      Beetle B.
    12. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Got all that and more in a FC2 install -- half hour.
      Runs faster than Gentoo too.

    13. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by micolous · · Score: 1

      But you only compile once. You run that version of the compiled, optimized, with the quantum_flux_generator use-flag many many times. It's not a case of "you have to recompile your desktop, IDE, web browser, etc. each time you use it".

      And also, when I was doing my initial Stage 1 install, I left the computer alone for a while, and did other things in real life. Also, if you're not that way inclined, the LiveCD does include an IRC client, and you can run your favourite editor* from a USB Flash disk or other hard drive, and go and code or write something truly insightful. There is even an alternative installation method where use can use a Knoppix environment while installing Gentoo, so you can have a graphical environment, along with tonnes of applications.

      Most modern distros lack the "being able to use your computer while installing" feature. Debian has a minesweeper game in aptitude, which is good for some, and Lycrois had a solitaire game in the installer when I tried it once-upon-a-time. Installation time is present in installing any OS, and it is very boring. If you can make the time easily passable, it's a great user-friendly touch.

      * = Should you not like nano... I don't want to start an editor war; it's not the point of the comment.

      --
      SSdtIGFzIGJvcmVkIGFzIHlvdSBhcmUK
    14. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by lintux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But you only compile once.

      You never do upgrades? I thought Gentoo users were the ones who always want to be up-to-date with the least stable (but obviously most recent) software...

    15. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by lintux · · Score: 1

      Running Gentoo on a webserver? Come on, webservers are meant to run Apache and serve as many users as possible, they're not meant to be compiling all day.

    16. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Phragmen-Lindelof · · Score: 1

      Look through the step-by-step instructions in the 12 steps here. It really is easy.

    17. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by SpooForBrains · · Score: 1
      Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4
      Hmm ... it's tempting I'll agree, but if it's all the same to you I'll stick with a little under an hour without reformatting, thanks.
      --
      "The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
    18. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Phragmen-Lindelof · · Score: 1

      Once Gentoo is compiled, it just runs; it does not compile and compile forever. When you want to update, for example, KDE, just (i) type "emerge sync" (as root) (ii) type "emerge -up KDE" to see which packages it needs to update and which new packages (if any) it needs to add and (iii) type "emerge -u KDE" if you want portage to compile and install it for you. Portage works in the background while your computer does its job.

    19. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Simplicity.

      Simply put, you in all likelyhood have no idea how Portage works. It's easy to use, yes. So is apt-get. Both are great from a user's perspective, but Slackware is not designed to be a user-friendly Linux like Mandrake or Suse. Slackware is an old-school, hacker distro. Gentoo claims to be a new-school hacker distro, that's development oriented, etc.

      However, there's nothing hacker friendly about Gentoo. While there's nothing wrong with the distro, it often seems like the loudest Gentoo proponents are the ones Slack and Debian users tell to shut up and rtfm on IRC. They can emerge apps and stuff, sure, and they feel all leet because they're compiling stuff. In actuality though, if Portage ever broke (or some dependency got fucked up) the vast majority of Gentoo users would be stuck. Not because they're stupid, though they might very well be :) but rather because portage isn't hacker friendly.

      Slackware is the distro you use if you want to really understand how Linux is put together but don't have time to do LFS. Gentoo users like to say that Gentoo is "automated LFS". But the automation completely removes the whole point of LFS, which is comprehension. Gentoo offers no comprehension.

      Hope this clears things up for you.

    20. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by clymere · · Score: 2, Interesting
      24 hours? I can get a Slackware install finished in 15 minutes.

      You would probably get a larger performance gain from ditching KDE then from any optimized compiling you did.

      --
      once you go slack, you never go back
    21. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by clymere · · Score: 1
      Amen. I'm a Computer Science student, and I've learned infinitely more about Linux, and in general how an operating system works since installing Slackware than I ever have at school using Solaris and Red Hat.

      I run Debian on my server because of its nice, easy-to-use package managemnt. But if I want a workstation, its always going to be Slack.

      --
      once you go slack, you never go back
    22. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by micolous · · Score: 1

      Yeah, of course. But you don't have to update any more than you would on a binary-only distro. I don't go and update things every single subrevision, unless there's a need for it (ie: security hole), or I particularly want a new feature. Otherwise, I'll leave it alone - it works.

      Some people like using Gentoo for updating constantly, and sure, they can update every hour, and chew up bandwidth and resources like that. You can do that with any distro, or even in a roll-your-own system. If you want bleeding edge code, then roll-your-own is probably better for you. Either way, to normally get bleeding edge stuff, you'll have to compile it too - or wait for someone else to do it for you (in the case of binary-based distros). Though you do have to wait for Ebuilds in Gentoo.

      The point I was trying to get across is that while compilation takes time, you don't have to do it each time you run the program, as is implied in the parent to my original post.

      --
      SSdtIGFzIGJvcmVkIGFzIHlvdSBhcmUK
    23. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      An OS for EVERYONE? Get real. Some of us need proper, long-supported releases with backports, thankyou. Along with serious QA, testing and support. Gentoo is fine for toying around, but for critical business work it's not an option. Perhaps you should read this...

      -------

      Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

      Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

      "Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
      "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

      "Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
      "Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

      "I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
      "Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

      "Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
      "I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

      "...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
      "...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

      "You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
      "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

      "All the other distros are soooo out of date."
      "Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

      "Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
      "OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

    24. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by M1FCJ · · Score: 1
      Apart from the initial steps of using fdisk, mkfs etc. Gentoo is not teaching anything extra that you can't learn by using Slackware. It feels like more technical, it isn't. The main two differences between a Redhat/Suse/Mandrake installation and a Gentoo installation is, to be able to finish Gentoo installation, you have to read the manual , on the other hand, without reading the manual probably your Redhat/Suse/Mandrake installation will succeed. The second is you will be spending quite a long time undproductively, waiting for downloads and compiles to finish whereas Redhat/Suse/Mandrake will install within an hour.

      Gentoo is fun. You should not get confused with something being fun and productive. Gentoo is not productive.

      You won't be able to install Gentoo onto an obsolete box with 1GB of disk and a whopping 128MB of RAM unless you are very very patient and you won't have anything else but Gentoo on that box for some time. You can install Slackware on something even much slower and smaller. Redhat/Mandrake/Suse might not even work.

      You choose what you want to use, the distribution should not dictate what you can do, you should be able to choose what distro to use for a particular role. SuSE 9.1 is a very good user/desktop distro (so is Mandrake 10). Probably if you want to run Oracle 10g, you will have to use SuSE SLES 8 (with all of its out-dated packages but you shouldn't care, the reason you are using that particular distribution is because Oracle installs and runs without any pain).

    25. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by M1FCJ · · Score: 1

      It's a shame that you have to be an AC to write such an insightful message.

    26. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by M1FCJ · · Score: 1

      It isn't hard but it is very time consuming.

    27. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Etyenne · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This post is symptomatic of all the reasons Gentoo is despised in a large segment of the Linux population. First, Gentoo users are overly evangelical to the point of being annoying. Gentoo is a nice toy, a real impressive hack but it is not the right tools for most situation. I have seen Gentoo advocate recommend it to complete newbie, saying "installing software is easy, you just type emerge blah blah blah...". Pathetic.

      Second, the vocal evangelist portion of the Gentoo community seem to be mostly beginner who just feel so empowered to be able to compile their own software. When you have been sysadmining professionnally for a while, compiling is not fun anymore, it become a chore you try to avoid. Binary packages, for all their imperfection, are convenient and predictable. And if you raise me an "emerge", I'll raise you an "apt", period.

      --
      :wq
    28. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by KFK2 · · Score: 1

      Ok.. I'll bite.. In 2 Hours. I had Gentoo installed on my system with X, KDE, and some other nice utilities.. (but not stuff I won't use, such as emacs, or 30 different graphical configure programs) Gentoo is not just a source based distro. It can also be a pre-compiled package distro. Hence why they release a packages CD optimized for different architectures. Show me a distro with different sets of optimized packages; one for a 686 and another P4 and yet more for P3, Athlon XP and generic x86.. The most I've seen is an i586 and an i386 releases.. and maybe an occasional i686..

      Oh yeh.. I forgot to mention.. during this install I was also using the computer for playing movies and saved tv shows. Show me the ability to install Redhat/Fedora, Suse, Debian, Slack ware box without booting the installer and without playing tricks with RPM, UML (user mode linux), etc. With Gentoo, I can install a complete system without ever rebooting the box (it is already running Linux, never tried *BSD) except to boot into the new system.

    29. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by hey! · · Score: 1

      24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

      Which is why I gave up on Gentoo as a desktop distro.

      For a server, it's a different story.

      First, you don't want to install anything more than you have to, for security reasons at the very least. In any case you are going to be installing a lot less stuff, so you don't have to emerge KDE and X, for example, which take a huge hung of time.

      In some ways, it's probably good to have the instalaltion process make you think about whether something is really necessary. It follows the general open source server experience, which is take a little more time up front, reap the benefits downstream.

      That said, if your job was setting up server after server, it'd be a drag to install by hand, so you'd probably set up a disk image and duplicate that to hard disk after hard disk.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    30. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by juhaz · · Score: 1

      Invariant? At the very least, you'll want to update packages when security issues are raised (frequent enough to warrant updates aplenty within 6 months)

      Generally, no, you don't want new version of a package when security issues are raised.

      You want the fix backported to old version so that fixing the security bug causes least possible disturbance.

    31. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by wolf31o2 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      However, there's nothing hacker friendly about Gentoo. While there's nothing wrong with the distro, it often seems like the loudest Gentoo proponents are the ones Slack and Debian users tell to shut up and rtfm on IRC. They can emerge apps and stuff, sure, and they feel all leet because they're compiling stuff. In actuality though, if Portage ever broke (or some dependency got fucked up) the vast majority of Gentoo users would be stuck. Not because they're stupid, though they might very well be :) but rather because portage isn't hacker friendly. Slackware is the distro you use if you want to really understand how Linux is put together but don't have time to do LFS. Gentoo users like to say that Gentoo is "automated LFS". But the automation completely removes the whole point of LFS, which is comprehension. Gentoo offers no comprehension.

      I used to feel the same way about Gentoo. I ran LFS on my main system, and Slackware on any others. I tried out Gentoo, and found that I was right. It *can* be a hacker's distro, but so can Red Hat in the right hands. I was impressed by what Gentoo offered, but still did not feel it was up to the hype given it. Then I started writing my own ebuilds and making my own patches to add functionality. I started submitting my ebuilds to Gentoo's bugzilla and got noticed by a developer, who offered a development position to me. Now I am not only a developer, but the new QA Manager for Release Engineering, and I couldn't love Gentoo more. I tend to think that what you get out of a distribution is equivalent to what you put into it. I don't necessarily mean submissions or code, but how much you decide to learn the system and exploit its strengths, and work on its weaknesses.

      At work, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our platform. I am really starting to like it just as well. We are using kickstart to build new servers and have setup a satellite server. We have created custom channels for each of our server types. Now to bring up a new MX server, we simply kickstart it, which registers it with the satellite server at the end of the install, then subscribe it to the "MX Server" channel and

      up2date -u
      the machine to download all of the necessary packages automatically. This makes our lives very easy and also proves my theory.

      We have put a lot of work into working with the tools provided to us by Red Hat, and make the best use of them. Because of that, we get a lot out of our servers and have to spend minimal time brining up new ones or changing their roles.

    32. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      They can emerge apps and stuff, sure, and they feel all leet because they're compiling stuff. In actuality though, if Portage ever broke (or some dependency got fucked up) the vast majority of Gentoo users would be stuck.

      The information is all on the disk. Frequently the source code is already there. All one needs to do is go to the source code, and do it manually should the need arise.

      I'm sorry, but who on the Gentoo development team said that the goal of Gentoo was to be hacker friendly. They may have listed it on the side, but AFAIK, it's not the goal.

      What attracted me was the fact that it resolved dependencies in a way Mandrake, Red Hat, etc couldn't. And the fact that virtually nothing is preconfigured made it easy to personalize. It's not meant for learning about how Linux works - just for getting a desktop OS where everything works (I can't say that for Mandrake or Red Hat).

      Slackware is the distro you use if you want to really understand how Linux is put together but don't have time to do LFS.

      No arguments there. But I doubt I'd be wrong when I say that most Gentoo users didn't install it because it was an automated LFS. They did it to get something that worked, and that wouldn't be a hassle to maintain.

      --
      Beetle B.
    33. Re:Come to Gentoo :) by CatOne · · Score: 1

      Well, when you compare it to OS X:

      15 minutes, and 100% tuned to the hardware.

      It's still a bit slow ;-)

      And if I bill out at $150/hour, well your OS install costs a few thousand more than mine does :-P

  8. Also Note: Cobalt Growth Increses After Opening... by weston · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's another netcraft article tying cobalt gains to opening the ROM source.

    Especially interesting in the context of the fact the product was discontinued.

  9. definately take with a grain of salt by XMichael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lets see, NetCraft has successfully identified my exterior Linux Virtual Server boxes, RedHat; great. However they don't know that there are 90 systems running behind that LVS server, 20 of them are RedHat (as they were part of the origional deployment) the other 70 are Debian ... since the licensing change, we changed our corperate distro of choice.

    22 systems running RedHat 7.3 (All paid for)
    70 systems running Debian Woody (Company donated $6000) to the debian folks.

    All in all, netcraft see's two systems. Sweet.

    Priceless Photos

    1. Re:definately take with a grain of salt by Oggust · · Score: 1
      NetCraft has successfully identified my exterior Linux Virtual Server boxes, RedHat; great.

      Huh? It should see the real servers, that's what it's talking to. (The number will (probably) still be way off, but you probably make up for it in vhosts anyway.)

      But the OS of the LVS box shouldn't matter at all, exapt maybe if they do some kind of IP profiling, and even then it'd have to be something weird. It's just acting as a router after all.

      /August.

      --
      "An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1." -- 6.1.2.5, C99 standard.
    2. Re:definately take with a grain of salt by clymere · · Score: 2, Insightful
      is www.completecctv your company?

      I really like that you said they donated $6000 to Debian, even though there was nothing forcing them too.

      I know that I would certainly go out of my way to do business with that kind of company.

      Someone ought to put together a highly public list of OSS supporting companies(unless someone already has, and i just don't know)

      --
      once you go slack, you never go back
    3. Re:definately take with a grain of salt by AbbyNormal · · Score: 1

      So? Open up your firewall, post your IP address here on Slashdot. We'll make sure you get your boxen fairly counted...Yeah...

      --
      Sig it.
  10. Re:HAHAHA Gentoo by boudie · · Score: 4, Funny

    As a Gentoo user, it's nice to see that they have 1% of Linux's 1%. Sort of the fringe of the fringe.

  11. Red Hat internationally by davejenkins · · Score: 5, Informative

    Red Hat, as we all know, dominates the US market. SuSE used to have a strong hold on Germany, and I think momentum is taking them through that to some degree. Mandrake seems to have plucked the right strings with the French Govt (major buys lately) and they will see some domestic growth there.

    Asia is still wide open: Red Hat is the only real distro around, but their execution is leaving a lot to be desired. SuSE just isn't here, and Turbo, Miracle, Red Flag are such odd little operations that they cannot seem to gain any marketshare.

    I would think that the place things get interesting is where the race between IBM and HP in the developing world (Indonesia, Malaysia, Middle East, India) brings a linux with them. Increasingly, IBM is bringing SuSE with them, while HP signs deals with whatever local distro is the flavour of the day (Turbo in Japan and China, Red Flag in China, ? in Korea).

    1. Re:Red Hat internationally by Metteyya · · Score: 1

      I will add to Your list Aurox, a Linux distro based on Re... Fedora. Created in Poland, but growing in popularity in all Mid-Eastern Europa.
      There's also DaNiX, Czech Live distro, as shown on www.linuxsoft.cz the most popular distribution in its homecountry.
      I think Asia will go the same way and every country will develop it's own distro, based on one of the Major Ones (RH/Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware). But still the Major Distros will have a big share of the market, just like in Poland, where some guys (e.g. me :)) just like to have OS in English.

    2. Re:Red Hat internationally by jayaramk · · Score: 2, Informative

      I would tend to disagree with some parts of Dave's opinion.

      While it is true that Red Hat is the dominant distributor worldwide(I run Fc2),many other distributors arent sleeping.

      Mandrake is doing very well,many of my peers in colleges and in corporates have now begin to evaluate Mandrake as well as Suse before taking a call on what to purchase.

      Suse has a lot going for it.The support from Novell is one of the best things to happen to os/fs in a long time.Novell is also hiring aggresively(not in terms of number of ppl but in quality of ppl) for its Bangalore(India based) center primarily for its open source initiative.

      The best way to increase market shares as we all know is to sign up long term deals with major OEM's like HP,Compaq and Dell.While some of the distributions have achived success in this,a lot still needs to be done.

      In developing countries like India and China that have huge markets but major major piracy problems,getting users to use Linux instead of a pirated windows is going to be the key.Most home users understand that piracy is bad but continue using it because the OS is just too expensive. How linux distributors approach these ppl is going to be crucial in deciding future growth rates

      --
      http://students.iiit.net/~jayaram
    3. Re:Red Hat internationally by Feztaa · · Score: 1

      Red Hat, as we all know, dominates the US market. SuSE used to have a strong hold on Germany, and I think momentum is taking them through that to some degree. Mandrake seems to have plucked the right strings with the French Govt (major buys lately) and they will see some domestic growth there.

      That makes sense, considering that RedHat is American, SuSE is German, and Mandrake is French (ie, all those governments would tend to prefer locally-produced software than foreign imports).

      The way I see it, though (and this is my heavily biased opinion based on personal experience), there are only three distros worth mentioning: Fedora Core, Debian Stable, and Knoppix.

      Fedora Core on the desktop because it's easy to install and bluecurve provides the user with a pleasantly consistent UI; Debian Stable on the server because it's the most "secure by default" linux distro I've ever seen; and Knoppix as a rescue disk or for converting Windows users ;)

      Of course other distros serve their own niche and it's a good thing that we aren't all forced to use the three distros I've chosen, what I'm really trying to say is that these three distros are the most important ones to me.

  12. More mportantly by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    More important in this piece is that all of them are growing in absolute terms, and growing quickly. 10-15% growth every six months is nothing to sneeze at. It would be interesting to see these figures for other OS:es.

    --
    Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  13. Re:I guess that just proves it... by bwy · · Score: 1

    You didn't get that memo?

    Where have you been- Apple has been dying hard for the last 10 years or so. (Nevermind 100 million songs sold, lots of exciting new R&D and products that they can't even keep in stock because they're so popular.)

  14. fastest in terms of percentage? by alphan · · Score: 3, Informative
    from the article :

    Community-driven Linux distribution provider Debian held on to the third spot with a 15.9 percent market share rating, up a half percentage point.

    and

    For Netcraft, the fastest growing distribution this time around is Gentoo Linux, which showed a rate of 49.5 percent. But that's growth toward a 1 percent market share.

    THAT means Gentoo's growth is around .5 percent MARKET SHARE which is around Debian's. A draw if you ask me.

    Relative percentage doesn't make sense considering all new distributions around.

    1. Re:fastest in terms of percentage? by thumperward · · Score: 1

      Actually, if they're nearing 1% now, and they've had 50% growth, then they were on about 3/2% previously. They've only had about 1/3% growth. Debian wins. (again.)

      - Chris

  15. Gentoo is for ricers by Fourier · · Score: 1, Funny
    1. Re:Gentoo is for ricers by proj_2501 · · Score: 1

      god, that website's layout makes me want to take a dump.

  16. You're confusing winky with goatsy by RLiegh · · Score: 1

    common mistake, though.

  17. Slashdot's standard anto RH bias. by Nailer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is there anything that suggests people using Debian would likely use RH externally, more than vice versa? Or that Debian users are more likely to disable version numbering?

    Unless there is, I don't see what the problem is with the figures.

    To paint a picture you have to use broad brush strokes.

    1. Re:Slashdot's standard anto RH bias. by XMichael · · Score: 2, Funny

      My point is, in alot of corperate enviroments, they have already deployed there LVS load balancers / Firewalls, and will not be replacing these systems any time soon. I suspect there is a larger leaning towards having older RedHat systems being exposed to the world. The newer systems are likely just pieces of the cluster.

      Unforchutely given the tech. market I doubt there is nearly the ratio of NEW cluster deployments as we saw a few years ago.

      At my previous employeer we had a large we cluster (using LVS) It consisted of about 220 x PIII 666Mhz Systems (all redhat). Now at my new employeer we do nearly 3 times the volume on 90 x P4 2.4 Ghz Systems.

      xoduszero Mike

  18. Two different worlds... by Graelin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    RedHat AS/ES or Suse for the enterprise. The logic being that Suse and RedHat invest a lot in the mid-range to high-end server market. Not only do they make sure their kernels take advantage of this hardware but they'll support them as well. RPM may have it's problems but a well trained admin should know how to avoid them.

    Gentoo's growth really shouldn't suprise anyone. The ideals behind Gentoo fit well with the entry-level sys admin / "hacker" types that run servers for most small companies.

    I think it's sad that Debian, which is one of the best (if not THE best) server distro, appears to be losing momentum. I'm sure that will change though. Who knows, these stats are merely an indication.

    Just my two cents on the matter. Heh, there goes the karma....

    1. Re:Two different worlds... by seb249 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Debians not totally dead - have just about completed migrating 20 production servers over and to be honest i have never been happier. Apt-get just works ! Used to be RedHat through and through -then went to Mandrake (work was a mandrake shop when i got there) and to be honest urpmi - although a refreshing change from RedHats incomplete package management system (granted this was RH 7.2-7.3 days) compared to apt-get, it is somewhat broken.

      Running Debian on my desktop at home - as for being out of date - just run unstable.

    2. Re:Two different worlds... by nil0lab · · Score: 1

      Actually, it's the clueful sysadmins that tend to turn *off* version reporting, and it's the clueful sysadmins that choose Debian, so of course Debian is underreported ;-P

  19. Re:Who would want to use Gentoo? by Eu4ria · · Score: 1

    Thats why u dont reinstall. I think you must be confusing it with Windows.

  20. Re:I guess that just proves it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster of gay *BSD niggers imagines YOU dying!

  21. Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etcetera · · Score: 5, Interesting


    So if all versions were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting?

    Probably still RedHat/Fedora. It's quick, easy to set up, well supported, has decent-to-good administration tools, and gives good Karma to both you and your boss.

    We use Fedora for both our dedicated servers (to be leased/rented to clients) and for internal use. We theoretically offer FreeBSD installs as well, but no one has ever taken us up on that offer (I wonder why)...

    RH's kickstart and anaconda features are godsends, the text-only and curses utilities are more than adequate when needed, and with Yum I know longer have to care about RPM dependancy hell.

    Gentoo? Give me my three days back, please.

    Debian? I suppose... but something smells "stagnant" to me and it's not just the water.

    *BSD? Too complex for most customers, and a headache I'd rather not have to deal with on our production machines. There's very little that the BSDs can offer me (for the time invested in learning all the "oddities" (from my perspective)) that's worth it for me to move over.

    Your mileage may vary, but mine stays pretty constant.

    1. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Vlion · · Score: 2, Interesting

      FYI on Debian:
      Yes and no.

      The "testing" setup is reasonably up to date.
      Right now I'm using it and the 2.4.25 kernel, and gcc hit 3.3.4 last weekend.

      The stable distro is seriously out of date in all reality. They are basically tied up in ideology....:(

      I'm glad to hear RH got the dependancy mess straightened out.

      enjoy !

      --
      /b
      |f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
      /a
    2. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      Debian Stagnant ? You're joking right ?

      good karma from redhat / fedora ? Where do you get that idea ?

      I work in a hosting company, The only real Redhat builds I see going out have a paid for control panel (ensim, plesk cpanel etc)

      All the rest are other linux's.

      As for yum, wasn't that origionally just a port / take off of APT on debian?

      The only problem with Debian is it takes sooo long to switch from one version to the next, but when you're talking about what 12 different hardware platforms. And if you want the latest you just use unstable / testing.

      Not to mention that I find building .deb's ALOT easier than rpm's.

    3. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by thinkninja · · Score: 1

      There is nothing stagnant about Debian. If you're talking about Debian/stable being ancient you're only showing that you know nothing of the three different Debian distributions. HAND.

      --
      "The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
    4. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by tux_deamon · · Score: 1

      We use Fedora for both our dedicated servers (to be leased/rented to clients) and for internal use. We theoretically offer FreeBSD installs as well, but no one has ever taken us up on that offer (I wonder why)...

      Yeah, Fedora is great: cutting edge features along side the familiar Red Hat environment. But I would have a hard time implementing it in a "stable" role with its 6 month product cycle and all. It's great for my laptop and at home, but we have a little under two dozen odd machines in the data center and around the ranch. I just don't have the hours in the day to maintain those upgrades two times a year.

      RHEL is seemingly the way to go if you want the high end service and support that comes with its high price tag. No doubt, the support it top notch, but my .org doesn't have that kind of cash. Fortunately, we've found a couple of great alternatives.

      White Box Linux and CentOS are effectively the poor man's RHEL. Built from Red Hat source, and blessed by the GPL, they're both testament to the fact that free speech can still mean free beer if you're willing to corral the liability square in your own corner (in other words, I'm the support, and if I screw it up, my ass is on the line).

    5. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Psiren · · Score: 1

      I wouldn't run unstable on a production server. I do run testing, but that requires careful monitoring, since security updates are not always as timely for unstable or testing. stable is by far the best to use on a server in terms ot stability and security, but it's so out of date it won't even install on most new hardware. This I believe was one of the main reasons that they've decided to go ahead with the release of sarge, despite the problems with non-free content. People like myself are getting frustrated at not having a usable stable platform. And I say all this as a long time fan of Debian.

    6. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by sd4l · · Score: 1

      Gentoo? Give me my three days back, please.

      I know you were trying to be funny, however let's start to clear up some myths about Gentoo. On Friday I installed Gentoo for a customer. To install (on a blank hard drive) took me under 4 hours, including installing Exim, UW-IMAP, Squid, ClamAV, SpamAssassin from a Stage3 install and updating world afterwards.

      Now, you can say four hours is too long if you want to compare against a sub 1 hour install for Fedora, however 4 hours on a reasonable spec machine (2.4GHz P4, 256Mb RAM, normal IDE HDD) is nothing. That was for a fully up-to-date server, running latest versions of everything stable.

      If you need to install a lot of these (i.e. you have a lot of servers), then you can make it quicker by setting up a small distcc farm on spare machines (even on people's Gentoo workstations or on quiet previously installed Gentoo servers or by using distccKNOPPIX and temporarily rebooting peoples' Windows machines).

      I understand that it's slower than other distros, but let's not get carried away with talking about compile times in "days". It just makes you sound naive or narrow-minded (I've heard it's slow to compile, so I won't try it for myself)

      --
      -- Andy Jeffries Scramdisk for Linux (Change the orgy to org to reply)
    7. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      1 hour, 4 hours, 3 days ... it's somewhat unimportant, yes. The problem is that most people, including myself, don't see the point of compiling every little piece of software you install on your server. The reputed gain in performance is not worth it; hardware is cheap, cheaper than sysadmin time. I know you may use pre-compiled package with Gentoo, but then what is the point ? You may as well use Debian or a RedHat deritative. And this is exactly what I do.

      --
      :wq
    8. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1
      Not to mention that I find building .deb's ALOT easier than rpm's.

      Just curious, but what could be easier than "rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/blah.spec" ?

      --
      :wq
    9. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      You don't get it. Everybody know about testing and unstable (talk about a reassuring naming scheme !). The problem is that both of these is in a constant state of flux. They are not snapshot; package change version regularly. Ideally, most sysadmin prefer a stable platform where software stay at a well-known revision. The latest such snpashot from Debian is what ? 3 years old ?

      Notice that Fedora will suffer from a similar problems in the near future. Considerng the very short support window (6 months), user will have to run forward and deploy new revision to get bug fixes, which will cause a lot of headache.

      --
      :wq
    10. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by runderwo · · Score: 1
      debuild && sudo debi

    11. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      You don't have to specify which package to build ?

      --
      :wq
    12. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      Just be in the directory.

      src.rpm's still have worse dependancy issues than src.deb's
      I'm yet to have a dependancy issue for any package on debian.

    13. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by thinkninja · · Score: 1

      Most people wouldn't use unstable in a production environment (other than as a test platform) and I do agree that tracking testing can be 'fun' when some nasties slip through. Security fixes in testing also present a problem because, even though they're fast tracked through unstable (2 days instead of 10, iirc) there's still no 'vendor' fix available as soon as some people might like. And while stable enjoys the attention of the Debian security team and fixes turn up in Sid pretty fast, testing is left out in the open, comparatively.

      As for "won't even install", are you talking SATA here? Otherwise, I found Woody's 2.4 kernel to generally have adequate hardware support.

      But I am glad that Sarge hasn't been delayed. For one it will stop people backporting 2.6 kernels to Woody...

      --
      "The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
    14. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by thinkninja · · Score: 1

      Hmm, I do see your point. I guess that's why RH has 50% market share to Debian's 15% (however accurate these numbers are...): Most people prefer regular snapshots to tracking active distributions.

      --
      "The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
    15. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1
      src.rpm's still have worse dependancy issues than src.deb's I'm yet to have a dependancy issue for any package on debian.

      Would you mind explaining what these issues are ? Do you mean you can dispense with installing development packages under Debian ?

      --
      :wq
    16. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by runderwo · · Score: 1
      debuild checks the build dependencies for you and lets you know if any are missing.

    17. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by runderwo · · Score: 1
      Of course not. Were you wanting to be able to install a package as non-root? This isn't Windows 95 anymore.

    18. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      So does rpmbuild ... what is your point ?

      --
      :wq
    19. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by runderwo · · Score: 1
      What is your point? You're the one who asked if it was necessary to install development packages under Debian. I answered yes with a method to find out which ones you need.

    20. Re:Probably still RH/Fedora... by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      Sorry, sir. I thought you where the guy who said that building rpm was a dependency hell. My bad.

      --
      :wq
  22. [OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes!? by JessLeah · · Score: 4, Funny
    NetCraft "see's" (sic) two systems?

    Excuse me, but just when in the fuck did it become chic to pepper language with inappropriate and meaningless apostrophes? Lately, I've seen apostrophes misused in:

    The infamous "it's" instead of "its" (to show possessive, as in "the animal defended its home"-- most people nowadays would write "the animal defended it's (sic) home", which means "the animal defended it is home", which makes no sense)

    Plurals ("sunglass'" (sic), "pizza's" (sic), etc.)

    At the end of "its" (bizarrely)-- i.e. its' (sic), which is not a word at all and probably never was

    ...And now, I see you using it as part of a verb. "See's"? WTF up with that? "See is"?

    God, am I getting fucking sick of idiocy like this. Why the fuck do I even bother writing proper English any more, when even relatively intelligent people like you mangle the language like cheese through a grater? And if you're from a non-English-speaking nation: I apologize. Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America, and in fact from people born in America, who have been learning English all their lives. Go figure.

    Anyhow, I'm fucking sick of this. Who the fuck started this "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it" shit?

  23. And in other news... by JessLeah · · Score: 4, Funny

    Windows still top desktop distro.

    All this proves is that the old maxim "there's no accounting for taste" is truly universal in its applicability. ;)

  24. Debian Sarge by JJahn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Expect to see more momentum when Debian Sarge finally becomes stable, replacing good ol' Woody. I love Debian, but for an increasing number of servers I find myself going to testing or unstable to grab packages when the Woody ones are just too old for my uses.

    Besides, the new debian-installer is actually quite nice. Still text based, but its fast and intuitive even at beta stage. Its a great improvement on boot-floppies, and the cross platform support is impressive to say the least.

  25. How about an anon survey? by Fiz+Ocelot · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'd really be interested in numbers from an anonymous survey of top corporations on what OS they use and for what purpose.

    Why anon? I think that's obvious, I hope...

    I'm not really interested in what the current "popular" Distro is. I need to know what has a proven track record in very important areas.

    Anyone else's input is also appreciated.

  26. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by TheShadowHawk · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you just need a hug mate.

    :)
    --
    Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
  27. "Gentoo is now the fastest growing" ... uh, no by chunderfest · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Gentoo went from 0.7% to 1.0% share. SuSE went from 10.9% to 11.8%. i.e. SuSE's market share grew 3X as much as Gentoo's did.

    Don't be fooled by that last column. It's pretty much meaningless to compare the ratio "july/jan" for each distro; it's the tiny "jan" value for Gentoo what makes its "6-month Growth Rate" look impressive, which it's not (looked at on a number-of-installations basis).

    Basically RH lost a %, SuSE gained one, some others gained fractions of a %. Nothing terribly interesting.

    --
    Ah, bitter dregs.
  28. Bah by 222 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare. If you end up taking this poll too seriously, think about how popular mcdonalds is.

    1. Re:Bah by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 1

      Do you really think the apps you need to run a server result in "an rpm dependancy nightmare?" You may have rpm dependancy problems with your favorite desktop apps but for the server side Redhat ES runs fine with rpms readily available that install in a second.

    2. Re:Bah by Limburgher · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Amen, sister. And the tiny amount of RAM the installer needs makes it the king of the minimalist distros, while still being full-featured and highly compatible. It's the backbone of my network, though I will admit to using Fedora for desktop. Slack is definately the king for servers.

      --

      You are not the customer.

    3. Re:Bah by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 1

      You run your servers with a tiny amount of ram?

      --

      This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.

    4. Re:Bah by justins · · Score: 1

      Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare.

      Yes, not having a package system is a really clever solution to package dependency problems. I wonder why every other distro hasn't thought of that.

      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    5. Re:Bah by Etyenne · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you think RedHat/Fedora users still deal with "RPM hell", you are sadly mistaken and out-of-date. While you recompile your software for the latest patches, I update with yum/apt-get/up2date. Welcome to the 21st century.

      --
      :wq
    6. Re:Bah by ScreamingSlave · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Since when doesn't Slackware have a package system? man makepkg man explodepkg man installpkg man removepkg man upgradepkg man pkgtool Not having dependency checking does not equal not having a packaging system.

  29. Netcraft confirms - RedHat is DYING by melted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry, I couldn't resist.

  30. Does it matter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Lets not worry about which Linux distro owns the market, but rather worry about what operating system owns the market, huh?

    1. Re:Does it matter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      IDC recently published a report of all machines connected to the Internet (as opposed to the hosting service reports issued by Netcraft). A breakdown of all machines connected to the net (dorm rooms, small business, ISPs, corporations, cable modems, etc) according to IDC is as follows:
      Windows . . . 45 %
      Linux . . . . 33 %
      Solaris . . . 10 %
      HP/AIX/Unix . . 8 %
      Other/Unknown . 3 %
      BSD . . . . . . 1 %
  31. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by jebiester · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you missed an apostrophe's in there somewhere

  32. Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by Thaidog · · Score: 1

    Red Hat is the defacto standard for Linux machines in the "workstation" class... if you've got a highend app that runs on linux.. (Maya...etc) Red Hat has the certification.... Second would still be SuSE.

    --

    ||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.

    1. Re:Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by timmarhy · · Score: 1

      i certainly wouldn't go anywhere near saying redhat is a defacto standard. the moment we move towards apps only working on certain distributions is the moment i forget linux exists along with NT.

      --
      If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    2. Re:Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by Thaidog · · Score: 1

      It's not that they will not... it's that the hardware is not certified or it's a customer configuration.... like this for example:
      http://www4.discreet.com/smoke/smoke.php ?id=174

      It's a whole package that's being soled... sure you could more than likely run it on any linux base but that's how they sell it... and you don't find many like these that aren't RH....

      --

      ||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.

    3. Re:Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by timmarhy · · Score: 1

      i'm not much of a red hat user i guess, i use suse but i find their use of customised scripts etc to be a painful deviation that just confuses people when they can't do the same thing on another distro. from the little i've seen red hat is even worse for this and only helps to give the linux community this image of a fragmented OS whic really isn't the case at all.

      --
      If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    4. Re:Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by Thaidog · · Score: 1

      Red Hat does not use YAST, which SuSE has or will be open sourcing... I find it a bit easier from a GUI perspective to setup for server purposes... but then again of you're using Linux as a server, you're more than likely going to know and use the commandline. This is where linux distros are more centered... and the desktop is where it's not. there is not common desktop for Linux... which is what makes it look fragmented.

      --

      ||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.

    5. Re:Red Hat has the workstation market for sure by clymere · · Score: 1
      Compounded by the fact that OSS's biggest strength is customizability. Take 100 KDE desktops, and they are probably all going to look very different. Take 100 WindowsXP desktops....they're going to look more or less the same.

      Of course most windows users i know get jealous over my KDE desktop precisly because of this.

      --
      once you go slack, you never go back
  33. Re:I guess that just proves it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Somebody doesn't realize that the "BSD is dying" stuff stopped being funny quite along time ago.
    Same applies to the Soviet Russia jokes, the Beowulf cluster jokes, and the GNAA shit.


    Hear that? It's time to bring back HOT GRITS and NATALIE PORTMAN!!!

  34. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by Alien+Being · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Who the fuck started this "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it" shit?"

    It dates back to the old testament, Exodus, chapter 8.

    - - - - - - - -

    AND the LORD spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

    2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with apostrophes:

    3 And the river shall bring forth apostrophes abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs:

    4 And the apostrophes shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.

    5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch forth thine hand with thy rod over the streams, over the rivers, and over the ponds, and cause apostrophes to come up upon the land of Egypt.

    6 And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the apostrophes came up, and covered the land of Egypt.

    7 And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up apostrophes upon the land of Egypt.

    8 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, Entreat the LORD, that he may take away the apostrophes from me, and from my people; and I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the LORD.

    9 And Moses said unto Pharaoh, Glory over me: when shall I entreat for thee, and for thy servants, and for thy people, to destroy the apostrophes from thee and thy houses, that they may remain in the river only?

    10 And he said, To-morrow. And he said, Be it according to thy word: that thou mayest know that there is none like unto the LORD our God.

    11 And the apostrophes shall depart from thee, and from thy houses, and from thy servants, and from thy people; they shall remain in the river only.

    12 And Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh: and Moses cried unto the LORD because of the apostrophes which he had brought against Pharaoh.

    13 And the LORD did according to the word of Moses; and the apostrophes died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.

    14 And they gathered them together upon heaps: and the land stank.

  35. And how would they determine distro? by bigberk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linux is the kernel, and the TCP/IP stack is in the kernel. So you can't tell from a TCP/IP connection whether a host is running Redhat, Slackware or Debian.

    What the survey site is probably doing is looking at information tags within the Server: field of the HTTP response headers. Redhat does advertise itself there in the vendor-supplied Apache packages, but some other distros don't. Slackware's Apache packages will return nothing more descriptive than 'Unix' in the Server string.

    So not all distros will reveal themselves, and anybody can easily prevent this information from being shown period with a simple Apache configuration directive. I think that's a good idea to do on your own servers, by the way. Give attackers the least info possible at your setup.

    1. Re:And how would they determine distro? by Nailer · · Score: 1

      Linux is the kernel /me compares contents of kernel.org and linux.org, .com, and .net. /me then checks whether the Linux Standards Base refers to a kernel, or more than that /me then checks the usage of Linux by 99.9% of its users.

      'Linux' stopped being a kernel ages ago. Stop being a pedantic geek and correcting folk.

    2. Re:And how would they determine distro? by Reservoir+Penguin · · Score: 1

      >Linux is the kernel, and the TCP/IP stack is in the >kernel. So you can't tell from a TCP/IP connection >whether a host is running Redhat, Slackware or >Debian.

      On the other hand one can safely identify a server running Debian by the stench of the 2.2 kernel

      --
      US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
    3. Re:And how would they determine distro? by bigberk · · Score: 1
      'Linux' stopped being a kernel ages ago. Stop being a pedantic geek and correcting folk.
      I'm not being pedantic. I'm saying that there is no way they can tell the distro unless the Apache installation identifies it, since TCP/IP fingerprinting can only reveal that the host is running Linux and nothing more. This is important because the survey results might be total bunk - there is no way to remotely differentiate between distros.
  36. In other news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    ACLinux has a growth rate of inifinte percent. Installed server are currently at one computer, but with this growth rate ACLinux is certain to take over the Linux server market in a matter of seconds!

  37. Don't pretend you know Gentoo! by mbello · · Score: 2, Interesting

    People keep arguing that Gentoo is for geeks, gentoo is time consuming, etc... Please, don't pretend you know it! Tell me if you know of any distribution that can install VMWare Workstation, Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, etc... with one (ONLY ONE) command: emerge XXX That saves me a LOT of time! Time you spend with instalation (it can be fast using stage3) is saved many times by Gentoo's excellent PORTAGE. Here in Brazil, Gentoo is becoming VERY popular. I use Gentoo on my desktop, I was a Red Hat user and must say Gentoo is MUCH better. But for a server I would use debian stable, nothing can beat it in terms of stability and maintainance. I think that what makes Gentoo an excellent desktop OS (very uptodate - gnome 2.6, etc...) makes it a dangerous OS for a server.

    1. Re:Don't pretend you know Gentoo! by Sweetshark · · Score: 1

      Basically your right.
      I think that what makes Gentoo an excellent desktop OS (very uptodate - gnome 2.6, etc...) makes it a dangerous OS for a server.
      I installed gentoo on a old k6-200 as a homeserver an DynDNS webserver. Its running PhpBB2 on mysql and apache2, squirrelmail and a TeamSpeak-Server ans some other stuff. I wondered if gentoo was production ready (although this system is not critical at all ...) - it is. The only time I needed to do some serious reconfiguring was when gentoo moved the APACHE-Root to /var/www/localhost/ to make multiple server-root on one system easier to maintain. The system is running for 18 month now.
      About install times: a gentoo desktop will be up and running in less than two hours with stage 3 - a server in less than a hour (plus some time for an unusual setup).

    2. Re:Don't pretend you know Gentoo! by gclef · · Score: 1
      ell me if you know of any distribution that can install VMWare Workstation, Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, etc... with one (ONLY ONE) command: emerge XXX

      Umm...Debian? apt-get install XXX

      Honestly, I'm in the process of moving from Gentoo to Debian, for both servers and desktops. Gentoo finally just pissed me off. From the package maintaner for bind just being a dork (refusing to deal with bind 9.2.3 for almost a year now), to random movements of config files in minor upgrades, to having to wrestle with packages being renamed and portage not cleaning up after that (vcron/vixie-cron, for example), I'm done.

      Granted, I'm having to mix Debian testing with stable to get all the packages I want, but getting the Debian replacement up has taken me about a third of the time it took me to get the Gentoo box up. Gentoo was interesting, but they really haven't gotten their heads 'round the idea that while I *can* sit & tweak my systems all day, I don't really *want* to.

    3. Re:Don't pretend you know Gentoo! by mbello · · Score: 1

      Maybe you should try to install eclipse, vmware, ,tomcat and Jboss using apt-get. You would be surprised it is not there!

  38. Growth rate of Gentoo vs SuSE by JPriest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gentoo had the fastest growth rate only becasue it went from .7 to 1.0 market share.
    SuSE however gained the most market share going from 10.9 to 11.8. It gained .9%, compared to the next highest Debian which gained only .4%.
    So it looks like SuSE picked up more RH defectors than any other distro.

    --
    Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
  39. Re:There are certainly drawbacks with Gentoo by dcstimm · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have 10 Identical servers, one happens to be not used for anything except logging, so on that machine I compile all the updates using the --buildpkg option, so I have a binary pkg I can share between all 10 of my machines. It saves me a ton of time, and I dont have to hunt for outdated rpms.

  40. Redhat is astroturfing by ZeekWatson · · Score: 1

    Redhat is all about astroturfing these days. Redhat enterprise server which costs $$$$$$ is the most common server OS?

    Sorry but I don't believe it. Only the weak have been fooled!

  41. Gentoo rocks on servers! by metalmaniac1759 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Many people had advised me against Gentoo on server machines due to the fact that it might be unstable. Everyone used to recommend Redhat for servers cuz it was supposed to be more stable.

    I have a server running on Gentoo, and another one on Redhat. Both on machine with exactly the same config, running same stuff (LAMP). The one with Gentoo is waaaay faster than the one with Redhat.

    Though neither of them crash!

    1. Re:Gentoo rocks on servers! by temojen · · Score: 1

      Got a 2.6 kernel on the Gentoo box? it's probably the dependent-read disk scheduler that makes the difference.

    2. Re:Gentoo rocks on servers! by DashEvil · · Score: 1

      The major problem I have with Gentoo on a server is that it's too dynamic. I mean, upgrading to new versions of software packages when you don't need new features or security updates is just asking for trouble.

      Look man, I love system administration as much as the next guy, but on a production machine you really don't want to risk anything breaking. Bleeding edge isn't exactly the way to go.

      --
      -If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
    3. Re:Gentoo rocks on servers! by JTunny · · Score: 1

      I use gentoo at home, but I'd be very hesitant to let it near a real, work server.

      Compilation takes up too much CPU time, I want my server to be serving not compiling. I'd go for RedHat, SuSe or debian in a professional environment.

  42. RedHAt should start worrying by haggar · · Score: 1

    RedHat lost 1% marketshare, the biggest loss among Linux distributions. At the same time, SUSE gained 1%, again, the largest gain.

    Sure, RedHat could easily overlook SUSE, as it has roughly 5 times more (visible) websites out there, apparently, and the Asian market is still completely open for taking. But, at least game is not over, yet!

    --
    Sigged!
    1. Re:RedHAt should start worrying by Sunspire · · Score: 1

      Red Hat still achieved a healthy net gain in the number of total machines running RH, so it's not exactly time to be panicking yet. I'm sure they knew some would turn to alternatives when the new support lifecycles/Fedora were announced.

      In fact I'm a bit suprised the aren't more switchers. I guess people don't just up and change distro that easily in a commercial setting. In the next fiscal quarter report it will be very interesting to see just how many more licenses RH is selling now compared to when they were still offering RH9. I'm betting the change pushed a lot of companies that were sitting on the edge into becoming Red Hat Enterprise subscribers.

      --
      It's like deja vu all over again.
  43. Re:I guess that just proves it... by kfg · · Score: 1

    Darwin is based on FreeBSD and you can't say that xserves are not selling.

    That's Mach/BSD, you insensitive clod.

    KFG

  44. Logical Gripe on distro wars by bmurray · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I see alot of people touting there distro lately. But what matters to my boss (and therefor me) is what works, what works well, and how much overhead a system is avoiding.
    Any distro out of the box should be looked upon as all-for-one generic solution. I would not be caught dead putting an out of the box distro in production. Not even after a few hours customizing it.
    My point is yeah, I can install and get the latest apache running with one command on Gentoo, but will it be optimized. (No ofcourse I don't mean hardware optimized.) I am talking about for the company network. No its not. I want to install two web-servers, one light-weight, and one with a good number of mod_*s.
    Though this is one example, what I am trying to say is that any good admin, that doesn't work for a small company hacks and twicks the system so much, that the system doesn't behave like all-for-one solution at all. The distro was the foundation, but even that is changed with a kernel compile and some thread tweaking.

    SO what does it really matter. As someone pointed out earlier, most admin's including me turn of any type of version response, (at least on perimeter servers). Anyway I digress.

  45. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by JessLeah · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I don't think it's a typo. "Teh" is a common typo; "it's" is due to ignorance/stupidity.

  46. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by JTunny · · Score: 1

    "The world of grammar is divided into berks and wankers -- berks being those who are outrageously slipshod about language, and wankers those who are abhorrently over-precise." - Kingsley Amis, The King's English

    That makes the original poster a berk, leaving you with ...

  47. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by JessLeah · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, but better a "wanker" than a moronic troglodyte. I'm still wondering when the English language will completely devolve into caveman-talk, e.g. "UNGA BUNGA, GROG LIKE GIRL, GROG FUCK GIRL!" Of course, things being as they are, it will probably end up (A) in all lowercase, (B) with lots of stupid AOLish abbreviations, and (C) with five metric shitloads worth of unnecessary apostrophes. (e.g. "un'bun grog lk grl', grog fucks' girl!")

  48. Simpsons Quote... by Zorilla · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

    Lisa: "A gay Republican president by 2084?"
    Gay Republican: "We're realistic."

    --

    It would be cool if it didn't suck.
  49. Amen! by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 1

    It's nice to know I'm not the only one who laments the slow death of anything approaching a decent standard of written English.

    *sits back and sweats, praying that he hasn't left a horrendous error in his clever message*

    Seriously, I like the English language. I like playing with it. I like writing. It's incredibly annoying, and demoralising, to see what passes for written English nowadays - mostly from people who supposedly have been learning it since birth...

  50. everything is relative by muyuubyou · · Score: 5, Insightful
    HermanAB wrote:
    According to IBM's figures, there are 30 million Linux systems, of which 23 million are desktops and 7 million servers, plus more than a billion embedded devices. So in total, there are probably way more Linux than Windows machines out there.
    to which Feztaa replied:
    Wow, what are your sources on that? It's been my impression that linux has been massively popular on servers, but is just now making inroads on the desktop. I'd be very surprised if linux was 3x as popular on the desktop as it is on the server.

    Only a problem with that: 23 million desktops is by no means 3x as popular as 7 million servers. Considering the ammount of servers and desktops out there, 7 million servers is very popular while 23 million desktop is very unpopular. For servers, we've been there for a while. For desktops, we're definitely not there yet.
  51. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by B2382F29 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, it's totally fuck'd up!

    'tis strange ain't it?

    --
    Move Sig. For great justice.
  52. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by slimyrubber · · Score: 1
    Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America, and in fact from people born in America, who have been learning English all their lives. Go figure.
    I agree... American should be spoken properly!
    --
    [ I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance ] -- Isaac Asimov
  53. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by wisdom_brewing · · Score: 1

    question... why the hell is this modded insightful? funny that...

  54. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by JTunny · · Score: 1

    It's the schools, grammar doesn't get taught anymore. I used to be guilty of it (maybe I still am).

    I don't think I learnt how to use it properly until my final year of a CS degree. They specifically convened the whole year to give final year project advice, a 15-minute section dedicated to apostrophe usage. It's a mistake a whole lot of people make. I still don't completely get it; things like "don't use the apostrophe if it's a possessive pronoun" don't stay in memory too long.

    Grammar is a guide not a gaol. Language evolves; it's about getting your message across. Communication protocols suited to one media can be tweaked to make them more efficient when used across a different media.

    A) Capitalisation of words has been devolving for long time now. There used to be a time when you had to capitialise a lot more nouns that we do nowadays.

    B) Like ./ ?

    C) Maybe they're emulating Shakespeare

    Grammar is a guide not a gaol. Language evolves. All the things you've cited as problems, are ways in which language will evolve and adapt to our changing needs. Ways in which it moved from Latin to Greek to English.

    A lot of this is sociological rather than practical. People of a younger age develop their own language, different to that of their progenitors as a way to strengthen camaraderie and bonding in that group and a way to exclude the older influences. All perfectly natural and healthy evolution, not devolution.

  55. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by Phragmen-Lindelof · · Score: 1

    "WE" (=the slashdot readers) are the moderators. "We" mod things insightful when they are actually funny and troll when they are actually serious. "We" should accept our responsibility and shrug. Or start a flamewar. Or get a degree in English. Or laugh at SCO. (recursive joke needed here) :-)

  56. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by theTerribleRobbo · · Score: 1

    I do believe this may be appropriate:

    http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

    Send to all your friends. Hours of fun.

  57. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by wisdom_brewing · · Score: 1

    flamewar sounds like a bit of fun... bastardisation of the english tongue seems like a bit of fun too... it really fucks me off when people use "youre" instead of "your", etc... then again, it really fucks some people off that i refuse to use caps most of the time... things like that shouldn't bother you too much, i guess, but they do... anyway...

  58. +1 right on the effing money by chegosaurus · · Score: 1

    your taking it too seriously! no need to loose your cool!

    There are my pet hates. "your" instead of "you're", and "loose" instead of "lose".

    I agree with almost every word you say, but if you think Americans write bad English, you should see what a mess the English make of it. Do American schools teach any kind of spelling or grammar any more? Ours don't seem to.

    I'm not asking for everyone to write perfect English. I just don't want to be regularly depressed because people can't master their native tongue, or spell simple four letter words.

    Seriously people, if you can't use the basic tools of language, why should anyone assume that your grasp of what you're talking about is any better?

    And what retard modded the parent "funny"?

    1. Re:+1 right on the effing money by chegosaurus · · Score: 1

      do you think people shouldn't have a right express whatever their thinking just because their english skills arent as good as yours?

      No! But I do want to make people aware that they will be taken more seriously if they take a little time to write and spell properly. However good your point might be, if you can't articulate it, its force will be lost.

      why should anyone assume that you know what you're talking about just because you spend more time worrying about spelling and punctuating?

      Firstly, with halfway decent grammar and spelling, it should be clear what I'm trying to say. Bad grammar introduces ambiguity. For instance, "loose" means something different to "lose".

      Secondly, it shows I've thought beforehand about what I want to say, and that I've taken the time to read back what I've written. Bad spelling - even typos - suggest someone's dashed something off without thinking.

      Often I write a comment on here, read it back to check my English, then realise I've contradicted myself, made no point whatsoever, or wasted my time in some other way. Then I just click "back" and carry on reading.

      As for my education, the last English lesson I had was when I was 16. I got average grades from a very average school. (Grade C GCSE for anyone who knows what that means.) I don't know a pronoun from a participle. I've always read quite a bit though, and I guess you just get a feeling for when things "look right".

      You're right though, I do need to get over myself.

    2. Re:+1 right on the effing money by ultraw · · Score: 1
      I'm not asking for everyone to write perfect English. I just don't want to be regularly depressed because people can't master their native tongue, or spell simple four letter words.


      Who's saying it is the OPs native tongue?

  59. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by Isldeur · · Score: 1

    God, am I getting fucking sick of idiocy like this. Why the fuck do I even bother writing proper English any more, when even relatively intelligent people like you mangle the language like cheese through a grater? And if you're from a non-English-speaking nation: I apologize. Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America, and in fact from people born in America, who have been learning English all their lives. Go figure

    Yeah, this kind of thing ticks me off as well. I am American though. I've given up on the "whom" thing. But the lack of adverbs ("Think Different"???) still gets to me. Sad really.

  60. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by bert.cl · · Score: 1
    I think you mean

    I think you need a hug ma'te

  61. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by zsau · · Score: 1
    Though I agree that when in doubt, throw in an apostrophe is a bad rule (anyway, 'when in doubt, throw it out' actually rhymes, so it's the better choice), I will point out that there's no authority that defines English writing (in general---some specific words (sulfur, litre) might have spellings given by the organisations in charge of those things).

    You've got altogether too carried away. If there is a correlation between 'correct' spelling and intelligence, intelligence certainly doesn't cause it. Calm down. Incorrect use of apostrophes hasn't caused anyone to die yet that I'm aware of. If it is a problem to you, it's only because you let it be. Try finding something else to be annoyed at, something slightly more productive.

    Also, I will point out:
    1. That the rule that 'its' is spelt with no apostrophe is relatively recent. Many acclaimed authors of the past put in an apostrophe. The -s in 'its' is (historically speaking) the same as the -'s in 'father's' (that is to say, the possessive of 'it' was formed using the productive morpheme for possession presumably because it was felt that using 'his' for both he and it was wrong). The rule that no apostrophe is used here is also grossly inconsistant with the usual rule that an apostrophe is used in possessives and probably goes some way to explaining the cause of your apostrophetic dillemas.
    2. As for its use in plurals especially after vowels, since the abandonment of using -es as the pluraliser for words ending in vowels (most people and dictionaries would consider 'pizzaes' to be wrong!), an alternative has needed to be found. 'Pizzas' looks wrong, the s appears to bind too closely to the preceeding vowel. 'Pizza's' is meant simply as an assistance to the reader---which is precisely why apostrophes were invented in the first place.
    3. I'll agree that 'its'' is a wankerism in the extreme. Whenever I see it (and in general, most incorrect apostrophes after s's), it looks like the author had something to prove.


    BTW: You don't need to use 'sic' after every example. After all, you're talking about the errors. Of course they're meant to be there!

    So, in summary: (1) don't use apostrophes if you aren't sure, because the mnemonic rhymes; (2) calm down; (3) don't use sic so much; (4) there is nothing about anything except flexible conventions that means some uses of punctuation and spelling are correct and others aren't.
    --
    Look out!
  62. Ok I won't by fw3 · · Score: 1
    Should I also not 'pretend' to know:
    • slackware?
    • RedHat?
    • Sorcerer?
    • Lunar?
    • Debian?
    • Fedora?
    • RHEL?
    • How about bsd's?
    • BSDI?
    • OpenBSD?
    • FreeBSD?
    • DragonflyBSD?
    • Unix[TM]?
    • AT&T Sys5R2.5?
    • AIX?
    • HPUX?
    • SunOs?
    • Solaris?
    • Digital Unix?
    • Tru64 Unix?
    Yes gentoo has it's points. Most of them are not things I value highly, ymmv.
    --
    Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
    bsds are of course just BSD
  63. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by mangastudent · · Score: 1
    "Don't Panic".

    I at least have The King's English (the Oxford Language Classics reprint) right next to my HTML reference on my bookshelf.

    Of course, using that ancient reference (the first edition was in 1906) makes me a troglodyte of another sort.

    But: it's good, still relevent, and reading of the various classics (reference and general) plus a lot of practice at writing will sharpen you up to the point where you won't drive poor JessLeah crazy.

  64. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by vigilology · · Score: 1
    I apologize. Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America

    You mean like 'apologize'?

  65. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by ajs · · Score: 1

    Oh please. We all know that Slashdot comments are dashed off in less time than it takes to drink a glass of hemlock. Why would you get upset with someone for a typo for gods' sake?

  66. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by tom1974 · · Score: 1
    the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America

    I think that honor goes to the Engrish Speakers in Japan!

  67. Debian is stagnant. by jotaeleemeese · · Score: 1

    But that is not a bad thing in many cases.

    If you need cuting edge features you have to thinker too much to get them.

    --
    IANAL but write like a drunk one.
  68. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by bcaffo · · Score: 1

    you need to go to the apostrophe protection society

  69. Care to back that up please? by jotaeleemeese · · Score: 1

    Or is all whishful thinking perhaps?

    --
    IANAL but write like a drunk one.
  70. Bob the Angry Flower sez... by Urban+Garlic · · Score: 1
    --
    2*3*3*3*3*11*251
  71. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by AliasTheRoot · · Score: 1

    Can someone summarise what the parent said? Couldn't be bothered to read it.

  72. Also consider... by paranode · · Score: 1

    24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.

    Neither is running 386 binaries on a Pentium 4. ;)

  73. only 26% of linux active servers have a known dist by xutopia · · Score: 2, Informative

    26% of Linux Active Servers have a known distribution according to Netcraft (2003)

    Does this mean that Red Hat, Cobalt, Debian, Suse, Mandrake and Gentoo make up only 26% of all active Linux servers and that other distros take up 74%? Or does it mean that there may be more of these servers that just don't mention what they are to the world? Either way it doesn't much matter. As many slackware users have mentionned it doesn't matter what is most popular. What matters is that the Linux market grows and grows and grows.

  74. it's more like... by Hooya · · Score: 1

    "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it's" shit.

  75. I want to see by BCW2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What Novell has coming with Suse. I have experience with Netware(4,5,6) and find it easy to use, reliable and secure. With Suse added to the mix it could become a real high end competitor to Red Hat Enterprise. Think about Cisco hardware with a Netware backend, all running on Suse, close to vault quality. I don't like everything that RH has done lately (dropping the desktop, bluecurve) but have to admit they are a big part of the push for corporate Linux. That is not a bad thing. I'll settle for Linux winning in the totals of all distro's.

    --
    Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
  76. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by myc_holmes · · Score: 1

    When in the fuck did it become so fucking fucked to throw fuck in every other fucking word that the fuckers use fuck so fucking much that the fucking meaning of fuck loses all fucking definition and any fucker could use any fucking word to mean almost fucking anything?

  77. Re:[OT] What the F**K is up with these apostrophes by anandrajan · · Score: 1

    Here's a song from "My Fair Lady" which covers the same topic

    Song: Why Can't the English? Lyrics
    Henry Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
    Condemned by every syllable she ever uttered.
    By law she should be taken out and hung,
    For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.
    Eliza Aaoooww!
    Henry imitating her Aaoooww!
    Heaven's! What a noise!
    This is what the British population,
    Calls an elementary education.
    Pickering Oh,
    Counsel, I think you picked a poor example.
    Henry Did I?
    Hear them down in Soho square,
    Dropping "h's" everywhere.
    Speaking English anyway they like.
    You sir, did you go to school?
    Man Wadaya tike me for, a fool?
    Henry No one taught him 'take' instead of 'tike!
    Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
    This verbal class distinction, by now,
    Should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir,
    Instead of the way you do,
    Why, you might be selling flowers, too!
    Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,
    Hear a Cornishman converse,
    I'd rather hear a choir singing flat.
    Chickens cackling in a barn Just like this one!
    Eliza Garn!
    Henry I ask you, sir, what sort of word is that?
    It's "Aoooow" and "Garn" that keep her in her place.
    Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.
    Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
    This verbal class distinction by now should be antique.
    If you spoke as she does, sir, Instead of the way you do,
    Why, you might be selling flowers, too.
    An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
    The moment he talks he makes some other
    Englishman despise him.
    One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.
    Oh, why can't the English learn to set
    A good example to people whose
    English is painful to your ears?
    The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
    There even are places where English completely
    disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!
    Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
    Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their
    Greek. In France every Frenchman knows
    his language fro "A" to "Zed"
    The French never care what they do, actually,
    as long as they pronounce in properly.
    Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
    And Hebrews learn it backwards,
    which is absolutely frightening.
    But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.
    Why can't the English,
    Why can't the English learn to speak?

    --
    Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
  78. Dual Booting/Proxies by 1337+Twinkie · · Score: 1

    Does this take into account all the dual-boot desktops? Or machines behind proxies? There are large desktop implementations out there, but a lot of them sit behind a single machine. Wouldn't this survey only find that server, instead of all the desktops?

  79. "Heaven's! (sic) What a noise!" by JessLeah · · Score: 1

    "Heaven's! (sic) What a noise!" Oh, the irony...

    1. Re:"Heaven's! (sic) What a noise!" by anandrajan · · Score: 1

      I know. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that. What are the odds?

      --
      Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
  80. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by gmhowell · · Score: 1

    In the future, just give the obligatory apostrophe link.

    --
    Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  81. Re:Also Note: Cobalt Growth Increses After Opening by kbahey · · Score: 1

    Yes, interesting indeed.

    Many people love that platform, and inertia has a lot of influence on many people. Why move if what you have works? "If it works, don't fix it".

    In the future though, things will be different. The CPU speed or RAM capacity of those machines will not be enough. So they will move.

    Until then, they are happy though.

  82. less than 24 hours? by Wooky_linuxer · · Score: 1

    I cried during the 45 minutes it took Mandrake 10 to install... what are you Gentoo guys, into SM or something? ;)

    --
    Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
  83. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by Guru2Newbie · · Score: 1

    No, he just needs some See's [chocolate] Candies! :-)

  84. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by elemental23 · · Score: 1

    I'm still wondering when the English language will completely devolve into caveman-talk

    You don't use IRC much, do you?

    --
    I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
  85. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by nametaken · · Score: 1

    http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_a post.html
    "Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals."

    A great site for this sort of thing. I was warned (sadly not too long ago) about my own problems with "its / it's". I don't know how I picked up that bad habit but I'm glad someone pointed it out nicely. :)

  86. Re:[OT] What the FUCK is up with these apostrophes by TheRevenant · · Score: 1

    A native speaker has generally learnt most of their english skills through interacting with other people. In many cases, they are actually less likely to get the nuances of a language (grammar, spelling, etc.) right than someone who learnt english as a second language, simply because ESL students _study_ the language rather han obsorbing it by osmosis...

  87. Re:I guess that just proves it... by bfg9000 · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't say BSD is dying. Look at Apple. Darwin is based on FreeBSD and you can't say that xserves are not selling.

    Do you have any sales figures for the XServes? I can't find any.

    --

    I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."