Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open?

Chillybott writes "CNET reports that Red Hat is trying to bolster more support for the Fedora project by giving the users more control over and input into the development process. The article states that they have made their CVS repositories visible and hints that soon members of the Fedora community will be able to act as distribution maintainers. Seems like a good idea to me, although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired."

Comments

FUDCon1?!?!

[ackthpt]

This isn't premature for Apr 1st, is it?

I would seriously reconsider whatever cred I gave a community which adopted such a name ... unless that was their goal, i.e. Gates, Balmer and Mundie organise some press conference to expound the virtues of closed source, IP and the evils of Open Source.

OT FUD humor

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[sopwith]

Those among us who chose the name have a sense of humor. ;-)

Maybe some people don't find it ironic that a conference intended to eliminate FUD and promote open information sharing would be named "FUDcon".

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[ackthpt]

Maybe some people don't find it ironic that a conference intended to eliminate FUD and promote open information sharing would be named "FUDcon".

It would be nice if you could get some media coverage and point out your tongue-in-cheek humor. Lord knows we need it with all the FUD out there.

Joe PHB: "what's the FUD I'm hearing about?"

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[ted1488]

If they eliminated the FUD in FUDcon, then wouldnt it just be called "con"?

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[MikeMacK]

I understand Microsoft and SCO are buying up most of the exhibition floor space, and the keynotes are going to be given by Robert Enderle and Laura Didio.

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they could call it "FEDcon."

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[Donny Smith]

Joe PHB: "what's the FUD I'm hearing about?"

Goe PHP: "it's FUDORA!"

FUDCon?

[froggero1]

FUDCon???? what were they thinking?

Doesn't do much for thier credibility.... although I personally think that Fedora is awesome.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that was the whole point of Fedora Core.

FUD + Con = Not a good sign

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that combines FUD and conning people is reminiscent of other, umm, companies.

FUDCon

[Verveonica]

Ah...so they are sucking them in and grinding them up into FUD! Don't go to the conference man - Fedora is people!

Re:FUDCon

[Golias]

Fedora is people!

You are my new hero.

You also owe me a keyboard, as I just sprayed my soda all over mine while reading that.

-Signed,
Yet Another Former Red Hat Linux User

Re:FUDCon

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh. I use linux because I like KDE's file manager better. Preview and edit documents in the right-hand pane no matter their type. Hey, wasn't explorer's "integration" supposed to do that? Least integrated thing Windows has, seriously. All that file management is great when you're futzing around with digital camera images from random family members who have different ideas about organizing them. When I create albums, I just create a new hard link to the original (hard link, because then I can move or delete the original if I want) and copy for edits. Filesystem operations are just a lot zippier too.

The photo editing tools kind of suck, so I prefer doing that on windows. Firefox is also slow on linux too. And of course I still play games on windows.

Yeah, I probably need a Mac. They still ain't cheap (and that new mac mini has a whopping 32 megs of RAM. jeepers)

Re:FUDCon

[OECD]

(and that new mac mini has a whopping 32 megs of RAM. jeepers)

Er, that's just for the graphics. The memory is 256K, stock. check it out.

Re:FUDCon

[the endless]

(and that new mac mini has a whopping 32 megs of RAM. jeepers)

Er, that's just for the graphics. The memory is 256K, stock. check it out.

Yeah. Good point. 256K is waaaaay better than a whopping 32 megs. Wait a minute...

Re:FUDCon

[Anonymous Coward]

But 256 is a much bigger number than 32! Of course it's better. Silly, the endless...

;)

Re:FUDCon

[Anonymous Coward]

(and that new mac mini has a whopping 32 megs of RAM. jeepers)

Er, that's just for the graphics. The memory is 256K, stock. check it out.

Personally, I'll wait until the Mac 512k comes out...

Re:FUDCon

[UnixRevolution]

Don't you mean 256M?

Re:FUDCon

[demachina]

"although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired"

I dont know about that .... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt pretty much sums up Fedora and the new Red Hat pretty darn well. You know since they:

- stuck a knife in the back of their loyal users, customers and flagship distribution that was a popular and well known standard. If nothing else they don't know anything about protecting their brand
-Started a subscription update service and then in less than a year(and the length of a subscription) stuck a knife in it too and screwed all the people who were paying them money for it.
- Started Fedora and tried to sucker a bunch of unpaid volunteers in to doing all their work for them while they kept all the control and power. Certainly a good way to improve your profitability if you can find enough unpaid and cluefull volunteers who are suckers enough to work on a project on which they have no say while you rake in the salary and the stock options.
- And of course with Enterprise Linux they converted Linux from being the low cost solution in to one that makes Windows, SCO and proprietary Unix look almost cheap

Re:FUDCon

[CapnGrunge]

Hahaha, that makes it doubly funny for Mexicans, since FUD is also a well-known mark of minced meat.

Re:FUDCon

[conteXXt]

Cue the gentoo zealot remarks now...3..2..1

I am thinkful for Redhat's decision to do whatever they did (back when they did it, I forget now, see sig)

It was just enough to get me off my lazy ass to start playing with gentoo.

Nw I have tight(light) servers and full functioning laptops and desktops.

Redhat only gave me pains.

Ok now back to the bashing....

Distro forks

[uid100]

Do I sense a coming of distro splits/forks?

Re:Distro forks

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat has been for many years a FORK of Linux.

Fedora was an attempt to bring OSS developers into the Redhat fold, though Redhat claims that it was to give back to the OSS community.

Queue

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointlessness in sticking with Red Hat and user migration to SuSE, Debian, or Gentoo.

So Fedora on stick would be a . . .

[kfg]

FUDCicle?

KFG

FUDCon

[TyfStar]

Awww.. what's wrong with "FUDCon"??

Most the people I know that use Linux are doing so strictly out of FUD....

What would you have preferred? "Anti-MS-R-Us-Con"? "Fear the MS: use something you might understand!"

I am just confused

[superpulpsicle]

One day redhat wants to put all the best resources in improving RH enterprise series.

The next day redhat wants to put all the best resources in rescuing RH Fedora.

Life was just better when there was a universally superior redhat 9. We could have successfully been at redhat 10 by now.

Re:I am just confused

[g0dsp33d]

I think its a step in the right direction from where they are though. One of the problems with getting a broader peice of the market share is ease of use. Dumbing down linux is probably not a popular topic among geeks who don't need a gui, but those unaccustomed to Linux often get frusttrated with its complexities, from what I've seen.

Re:I am just confused

[eln]

The cynical side of me says this is just the first step in abandoning Fedora altogether. If they just drop it now, the community will hate RedHat even more than they already do. So, they "open it up" more and more, putting members of the community (not on their payroll) in charge of more and more important modules, until eventually they have no paid employees working on the project at all. They'll give unpaid maintainers more and more freedoms to do what they wish, until they finally decide to abandon Fedora entirely, with the argument that it is barely a RedHat product anymore anyway.

This frees RedHat up to concentrate on their "Enterprise" system without the immediate bad press of dumping the folks that got them to where they are in the first place (the open source enthusiast and his home computer).

Re:I am just confused

[Feztaa]

Dude, if it makes you feel better, think of Fedora Core 3 as "RedHat 12".

Re:I am just confused

[LeneJ]

Can I just point out that Red Hat actually RELY on Fedora to work? Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a fork.

At the moment most of the developers are working real hard on RHEL4. As soon as that is out the door, focus will completely shift to Fedora. Why? Without Fedora, RHEL doesn't have a base. It's been about 15 months since RHEL3 was released. The only progress that has been made in product development in that period has happened in Fedora. (I am exaggerating, of course.)

Fedora is also one of the best tested products that Red Hat has ever released. When FC1 was release, no product, not even RHEL had gone through more rigorous QA. Red Hat still continue this process, because RHEL depends on the fact that things work in FC. If it doesn't it's out!

Think about it for a second, Red Hat is a small company compaired to the competition. Who is really doing QA? You guys. If Red Hat didn't have people trying things out, the company would be out of business in a heart beat.

During the RHL years Red Hat slowly started going from the red into the black. It was slow, with setbacks (going back into red, then into black again) and Red Hat barely broke even. Since RHEL3 was released, the company has seen a huge profit rise and have made heaps of money for share holders.

So Red Hat cannot please everybody. Who can? Should the company continue making small profits, making shareholders unhappy, workers in unsafe jobs, large customers unhappy (you are moving too fast! We haven't got the applications we need, because no-one will make it for you)? It made partners frustrated too, since they would not have time to certify their software on each release (come on, six month? It sometimes takes that long just to test that things work!)

The problem as I see it, is that it is a sin to make money in the Linux world. We must all be idealists only, and when someone is making money, we chop them down! Down you go, matey! Not only do we want free speach, we want free beer to! In my home country, Norway, we call this the Jantelaw: Don't think you are somebody, in fact, you are nobody.

I work for Red Hat, and a I have never seen such a bunch of dedicated people work together before. We argue about what is best for our product and we tell management when they are wrong. Most of us are idealists that does this for love of Linux and Open Source, not for money. We do, however, need to eat, hence want our company to go with profit, why shouldn't we? It makes our jobs more secure too!

Sometimes employees of Red Hat lashes out. It is very frustrating to go to work every day, trying to be an idealist, trying to do the right thing for everyone, trying to help grow the business, grow Linux, meet the competition, just to be told that we are a bunch of money grabbing bastards with no integrity. Many of us could go somewhere else and make a whole darn more money, but we stay with Red Hat because our ideals. Because we love Open Source and want it to be more than just a hobby OS. That's what we all want in the end, isn't it?

Re:I am just confused

[Nailer]

Improving Fedora does improve Red Hat Enterprise - Fedora is maintained over time. Every so often, established technology from a Fedora Fedora (that's already made it through three Fedora beta cycles) is taken, tested even further, and put into an Enterprise Linux release.

Conference acronym

[wiredog]

"Attention all personnel! Incoming Microsoft press release! Set FUD CON 1 throughout the facility!"

Here's some pointers

[CastrTroy]

As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default. Especially when I tell the installer I live outsite the US.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter that you live outside of the US, what matters is that THEY are inside the US. Besides how hard is it to download the 3rd party MP3 RPM.

Re:Here's some pointers

[nzkoz]

That's just *not* going to happen, Thomson charges $5 per 'unit'. If the mp3 rpms were on the installation CD, I'd imagine that redhat would be liable for that fee. Even if only non-americans installed it.

Besides, http://rpm.livna.org is your friend.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Lightman_73]

You know what ?

Launch your preferred shell, then :

su -
yum search mp3
yum install xmms-mp3
exit

The first two points can be skipped if you 1) are already logged in as root (bad), and 2) you already know the name of the xmms-mp3 package (oh, wait, I just told you... ;))...

Is it really so hard ?

Re:Here's some pointers

[praksys]

Where you live makes no difference to Redhat's legal libility for patent violations.

Re:Here's some pointers

[ndtechnologies]

Well, as was stated above, in order to play mp3's just install it onto XMMS through the YUM command, or look for other sites that use open source formats such as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. There are a couple of Indie Music sites out there that support that format, such as http://www.ind-music.com/ mp3 format is a proprietary format anyway and Red Hat would have to pay Royalties to the developers of it, before they could use that format for any of the players on there distro, or rather, the makers of the programs would have to pay the license fees to Red Hat, who in turn pays the owner. Make sense?

Re:Here's some pointers

[TheSunborn]

Ofcause it does. If I live in Denmark installing an xmms that can play mp3 is legal, because there is no patent covering Mp3 in Denmark.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

As my first recommendation, I would like to use the cluestick(TM) on clueless people like you who forget that even though they don't live in the US, REDHAT IS and could still be held legally responsible.

Use yer' noggin!

Besides that, RedHat is committed to Open Source software, and based on the GPL you cannot legally place any MP3 related code under the GPL.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

So they make one of their non US offices a wholey owned subsiduary and make it available through that. As they are not legally the same company as Redhat then Redhat themselves couldn't be touched, and as other countries have no patents on software the subsiduary couldn't be touched either. Spawning of subsiduaries from the main company is a common tactic to avoid financial liability in business.

Re:Here's some pointers

[mic256]

Does it work also for Fedora x86_64 ?

Re:Here's some pointers

[BrookHarty]

As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default.

That *EXACTLY* the reason I left Redhat. They started taking out things I use on a daily basis. If I have to look for programs on users websites, and also re-compile my own programs, why am I using that distro?

Fedora had too many problems, driver detection, missing librarys, broken programs, xwindows configuration wasnt even on the same level as SuSE or Mandrake.

Now I use Gentoo and Mandrake, depending on the hardware. Fedora just doesnt offer anything special and is lacking too many things to use it. I used SuSE Sparc port for almost 2 years before Gentoo's Sparc was stable enough to move too. (I perfer Linux over NetBSD, but NetBSD has great hardware support)

But thats me, I'm sure some Redhat die hard will take offense. I'm just stating my view, and reasons I dont use it anymore, and I don't see a reason to go back. I'll install it, look around at the config files, kick the tires type install, but I doubt I'll ever switch back to it.

Re:Here's some pointers

[russint]

Actually, this only works if you have already added "rpm http://rpm.livna.org/ fedora/3/i386 stable unstable testing" to /etc/yum.conf

Really intuative...

Re:Here's some pointers

[Donny Smith]

>>As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default.

>That *EXACTLY* the reason I left Redhat.

That *EXACTLY* the reason I have never left Windows.

Re:Here's some pointers

[rainman_bc]

As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default. Especially when I tell the installer I live outsite the US.

Isn't it Fraunhofer who holds the license for MP3? Aren't they from Germany? Aren't they the ones who collect money for MP3? Don't they hold an international patent?

Re:Here's some pointers

[IANAAC]

True enough, but it's still a valid point: If you're striving to create the best desktop, you need to find a way to include stuff that's found on every other desktop.

Re:Here's some pointers

[praksys]

That means it is legal for *you* to obtain and install mp3 software in Denmark. Redhat is a US company. If they provide you with the software then they can be sued for patent infringement.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the stuff red hat removed is stuff they had to remove because of it being a US-based company. There has always been alternative reprisitorys (rpm.livna.org) that you could use to get the stuff that red hat could not legally distribute (mp3 etc).

I guess it was Fedora Core 2 that you used if you had that many problems but if you had known red hat you would had known FC2 was a .0-release and would have avoided it if you wanted stable.

I have used Red Hat since 5.2 and is now running Fedora Core 3 and it has always been stable to me (although I have always avoided .0-releases).

The main reason I run it even though I live outside US is that they are such a huge contributer to the linux-community and I want to support that.

Re:Here's some pointers

[anaradad]

Besides, http://rpm.livna.org is your friend.

DAG and other repositories can also be your friend. Livna doesn't mix well with anything except fedora.us.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

OGG!

Secondly, Google for more than a couple of seconds and you'll find how to get the appropriate mp3 plugin RPMs. It's pretty trivial to get this going.

Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[Hornsby]

I just installed Fedora. Can someone tell me the difference between using Yum and the RedHat Update Network? It seems to me that the Gnome applet uses the update network, and I thought you had to pay to access it. Sorry for the offtopic question, but I've been wondering about this for a while.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[nzkoz]

The gnome applet is actually using yum.

The 'redhat network' is for enterprise customers only.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[Mothra the III]

Yum seems to need less resources than the RedHat Update network. When installing Fedora on a low end system it makes a lot of difference.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[Sibshops]

In the past, for up2date you had to register with the redhat network. It was a secure way of getting updates from a secure server. However, up2date is being phased out with yum, which is basically up2date with added features.

For example, yum can be set up with one of many mirrors . Where up2date only got updates from redhat's server.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[Anonymous Coward]

up2date will work just fine. It comes with the Fedora mirrors set up but you can add other mirrors like yum repositories into it's config file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[learn fast]

It seems to me that the Gnome applet uses the update network

The gnome applet uses the RHAT update network to run updates if you click, but otherwise checks to see if you're up-to-date using RPM. So, if you use yum it will still correctly tell you whether you're software is up to date or not.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[pyrotic]

With yum, you can choose which update mirror to use, unlike the RedHat Network. There's no annual subscription charge. Also, yum can resolve dependencies, so if you want to install a package it will work out what you need. And also, you can upgrade OS versions, say RH7.1 to RH7.3 using yum. Yum downloads all the packages and dependencies, and runs the upgrade scripts. Check your kernel is OK, reboot and you're done. Previously, we'd have half an hour downtime to upgrade a production server, insert CD, have Anaconda determine installed packages etc. Now yum does the upgrade in the background over the network. Awesome.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[crush]

You should just remove the up2date gnome-applet unless you are subscribed to RHN. It is exactly as you say: a pay for access service for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The gnome-applet "throbber" does nothing except use 30M of memory and take up space on the panel unless you're subscribed. Just do a "rpm -e up2date" you'll missing nothing if you're running Fedora Core.

Even Linux companies

[paranode]

Have to make money to survive. They are focusing on their server market now, because at the present that's where most of the Linux use is.

Re:Even Linux companies

[JudasBlue]

And they have lost at least some paid server installs over this. I mean, I understand their thinking. But I know of two techs who were Redhat-centric who switched first for desktops because they felt that Fedora wasn't stable enough. This led to the same two techs starting to recommend SuSE's server product for installs.

I know I have switched to SuSE for desktops now, and am still clinging to RH for servers, but am likely to start working with Deb or SuSE in the future, since if I am going to have a different distro on the server than on the desktop, I might as well real-world test some other toys.

I realize this is just guys like me working small shops, but I really think that by abandoning the RHL line, RH caused a group of low- to mid-level techs to start considering other options, when RH had been our default. If Fedora's QC had been there from the start, this might not have happened, but a series of small bugs, including not dual boot installing cleanely from the default installer, ran some of us off. These problems are probably fixed now, but the damage is done. I know I won't go back to Fedora, because I don't trust their QC process.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Karn]

Warning: Redhat Rant Ahead

How does letting Joe Smoe and his small business run RHEL without the support take focus from the server market? Redhat doesn't have to exclude people who can't afford their support from running their distribution. They could just not support you unless you purchase support, and let you run their stable product.

The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare. Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder. Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.

Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.

Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.

Note: I migrated my users and servers from SunOS and Digital Unix to Redhat about 5 years ago, and migrated servers from Redhat 9 to Debian Woody about 2 years ago, and am currently in the market for a Desktop Linux replacment for Fedora.

Re:Even Linux companies

[RedHat Rocky]

"...but I really think that by abandoning the RHL line, RH caused a group of low- to mid-level techs to start considering other options, when RH had been our default."

Bang, hammer hits nail on head. When Redhat started the whole Fedora thing, they left the small/middle tier folks without an option. It was either spend the big bucks for Enterprise or roll the dice on Fedora. They didn't seem to realize that a lot of grassroots support depended on that small/middle tier.

Yeah yeah, they're running a business (and I'm a share holder, so what) but rule one of business would be don't piss off your customers unless you can afford to lose them. I think they undervalued what the grassroot support was worth. Novell seems to understand this, perhaps, but it could also be they are trying to see if they can bleed Redhat out of the market before upping their price for their distro. Time will tell.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered how effective Gentoo's rolling upgrades are for desktop

One thing I like about the maintenance aspect is that in the rare event the Gentoo devs DO get something wrong, it is very easy to take your problems upstream.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Kurrelgyre]

1: Red Hat is two words
2: You can still use the software for free, you just can't call it RHEL and you have to build it yourself since you don't get the binaries.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, except you don't have to build it yourself, someone has and is distributing it under the White Box name.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Karn]

Regarding the spelling of Redhat: Their logo reads redhat (notice the lack of a space,) so perhaps you could email their marketing department and have them change it so as to make it clear that there is a space between the words Red and Hat? Personally, I don't give a shit whether a fellow slashdotter eliminated a space between their name or not, but that's just me..

Regarding the actual meat of the post, I'm well aware that I can download the SRPMS and recompile, them, and I can even run a White Box RHEL. That (which is actually a testament to the GPL and free software in general) is beside the point. The point is that Redhat is now offering less to the "leeches" (ie the people who played a critical role in Redhat's popularity, but gave the least amount of hard cash) because the wind changed directions. Who can say that they won't do it again, generating yet another headache for people who still feel that Linux should be free? You can say that they just changed things to stay afloat, and that technically I can go download the sources and compile myself, but the net effect of their actions is that organizations like mine are excluded from running their stable distro. The primary reason we migrated from SunOS/Solaris to Linux was that it was free. I'm not going to go back and tell my boss that we now have to pay X/year for Linux, I'm going to use something else, and had I known then that Redhat was going to either require me to compile SRPMS or pay more than Windows for something that used to be free, I wouldn't have even standardized on it. Not many people would have, I'd wager.

I don't blame anybody for trying to make a buck, but I think they could have handled things differently, and as a result, I feel that us "leeches" can do better by putting a different distro on our servers and desktops, and by recommending a different distro to our friends. When Ubuntu matures and has KDE support, I think it and Debian will be my recommendation for desktop and server, respectively. Long live non-profit distros.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

>>When Redhat started the whole Fedora thing, they left the small/middle tier folks without an option bang bang. you hit both nails on the head. i, for one, am glad that they did this to us. i'm now a very happy debian and slack user. i need something that i can setup quick with lots of packages ready to go, i'll go with debian...especially if the system is slow and i don't want to compile stuff on it. otoh, if i need a custom solution with a lot of hand-compiled stuff, i'll go with slackware. i know the "untainted sources" idealogy is going to give me the least amount of trouble when trying to build some custom packages. no more "i wanted to run xyz, but redhat's kernel tweaks cause unexpected breakage"

Re:Even Linux companies

[jav1231]

They didn't just abandon "leeches" they abandoned customers. Many companies were left with 1 year or more agreements that became useless when they dropped support for RHDL. This pissed real customers off! They weren't losing money on boxed sets, something that RH admitted in a past /. interview. They just didn't want to focus on it anymore. Well, it cost them. It may be that they want to back out of Fedora altogether. RH is becoming Sun (think about it, really, scary, eh?) and Sun is becoming...well...some kinda proprietary version of Richard Stallman.
If you want to run RHEL but not pay for support, run CentOS. Personally, I'd pay for support if it was reasonable.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat is still giving away the source to RHEL. You're free to build it and use it as you wish, provided you don't call it Redhat. See, for instance:

http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

Re:Even Linux companies

[Karn]

Looks like UserLinux is still in the works. Last time I checked their website, it was a wiki, but they have a very professional-looking site now, and they have installer isos available. I have used it in the past, and it was not bad, basically Debian unstable with their package set.

Anybody here active in UserLinux that can give us a quick summary of what's been happening lately?

Re:Even Linux companies

[SunFan]

When Redhat started the whole Fedora thing, they left the small/middle tier folks without an option.

Sun has set themselves up to take up the slack. Solaris 10 will be free as in beer, and OpenSolaris will be free as in speech (same codebase). They have also set up their price structure to be one-for-one the same as Red Hat and Dell.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare.

"Fedora" is not considered an "unstable product." It is more inline with what Red Hat Linux was. A product released every 4-6 months, with no support.

The people who "in fact helped gain their marketshare" are mostly open source developers. OSS developers are most interested in bleeding edge distributions like Fedora, or source code which is still available to them even for RHEL.

Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder.

Red Hat still helps provide a 4-6 month binary distribution. Red Hat still provides all source code. What they added was a new distribution that has a 7 year support life and a 1.5 year life cycle.

The ONLY thing that was lost was the "Red Hat" branding on "Fedora." People feel comfy with brand names. But, Red Hat wanted to give MORE flexibility to the community, not less.

Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.

Red Hat does and recognizes that. It's even in all of their financial statements today. They are the biggest contributers to open source projects, including the kernel.

Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.

So... Red Hat has changed once, from RHL -> Fedora + RHEL. I, for one, think that it was a better change.

Red Hat is one of the few commercial open source companies that are socially stable. Their whole message is about choice and giving back to the community.

Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.

It's unfortunate that a simple name change and branding made some people feel that Red Hat had somehow fucked the OSS community when in fact they did what was best for everyone.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Anonymous Coward]

The ONLY thing that was lost was the "Red Hat" branding on "Fedora."

That and a lot of security patches.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Karn]

Yes, Redhat has given more options, but the problem is that the "leeches" were singled out as to not have the option to run Redhat's own server distro without the support tacked on. More options does not mean things automatically become better. It seems to me that if Redhat was as interested in giving the community options as it was in getting them to pay up, they would allow people to download RHEL from Ibiblio and install it on their file server, and allow them to purchase a support contract if they so desire. The problem isn't more options, it is the marrying of the support to their distro, and they way in which they accomplish this, by playing the "Intellectual Property" card. The problem isn't what they offer, it is what they don't offer, and who they don't offer it to. The issue is more than just a name change.

The one thing that Redhat can do to alleviate this animosity towards them is to simply allow people to download ISOs from Tucows and Ibiblio, instead of making them go through the rigmarole of getting a white box equivalent. If they're going to provide the SRPMs anyway, why not go the extra step and let people download the ISOs? Is their business model so fragile that they have to force people to buy their support by finding a legal loophole for disallowing downloads of their ISOs?

I like Fedora

[drewzhrodague]

I actually like Fedora. I've been a Red Hat fan since 4.2 sparc (IIRC, MHILAS). Relatively consistant installation process, sensemaking install dirs, and RPMs have been slightly more fun than building source for this non-developer.

Currently I use FC3 for a desktop, and FC2 for a GIS workstation. I have installed Red Hat at dotcoms, small businesses, hosting facilities, and mega-corporations. Of course, I'm familiar with it, and I remember making a DNS server from junk broken Windows box to full function in 20 minutes.

I have been considering contributing to their package, I guess now I can.

Re:I like Fedora

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I bet they would appreciate it even more if you recommended Redhat WS or ES rather than Fedora.

Re:I like Fedora

[c_spencer100]

This is personal bias is I've ever heard it. Sense making install dirs? Having Gnome, KDE, and the kitchen sink blended together by installing everything under '/usr' is sensical to you ? IMHO, nothing is more sensical than the 'opt' directory that Slackware and SuSE implement.

And by consistant installation you must mean consitatnly problematic. Instead of leaving packages out, RedHat was one of the distros who shipped "crippled" packages such as libavfile or MPlayer to name a few. Then when the programs didn't work with your multimedia files, you had no idea why, because you had all the required files installed. And don't even get me started on the broken glib packages that RedHat was notorious for having, constantly causing problems for builders. Not to mention their personal bias towards Gnome leaving you with terrible KDE support. Heck, I remeber when RedHat was one of the distros not recommended for newbies (7.x series) because of their distro-specific quirks and other misc problems.

I used RedHat for a couple of years myself, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing it for what it is. If anything, it aids my vision.

Re:I like Fedora

[jsight]

> IMHO, nothing is more sensical than the 'opt' directory that Slackware and SuSE implement.

Ok, so non-LHS stuff is great!

> Heck, I remeber when RedHat was one of the distros not recommended for newbies (7.x series) because of their distro-specific quirks and other misc problems.

Ok, following LHS is great!

Er, which is it?

Re:I like Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, MHILAS

What the heck, did you fall on the keyboard?

Re:I like Fedora

[guacamole]

You can keep your /opt with one hundred thousand separate package directories in it to yourself, thank you very much.

Re:I like Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of leaving packages out, RedHat was one of the distros who shipped "crippled" packages such as libavfile or MPlayer to name a few.

Wrong. Red Hat has never shipped mplayer or libavfile. They removed mp3 support from xmms - which is easily fixed by installing the xmms-mp3 rpm.

Gentoo

[af_robot]

I think RedHat should somehow also support gentoo - it is very popular distro now and everyone will benefit if such a huge linux brand as redhat whould help it.
They can merge Fedora and Gentoo, or just dedicate developers to some key gentoo projects. I don't think that a million of a slightly different linux distribution is a good thing - we *must* unite if we want to get more market share.

Re:Gentoo

[goldspider]

"we *must* unite if we want to get more market share."

Since when was the purpose of Linux to gain market share?

I was under the impression that Linux is just a free/open alternative to commercial operating systems. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Gentoo

[Lord Kano]

What the fuck is wrong with you?

It'll be hard to find two projects with such radically different goals.

Red Hat's goal is stability. 2 years with out a reboot kind of stable. Gentoo is about staying current, and fast execution.

I don't user either Distro. But I'd hate to see them ruin both distros by merging them for the sake of merging.

LK

Re:Gentoo

[m50d]

Gaining marketshare is a good idea as it should make more hardware manufacturers give us drivers and/or specs. Yes, the primary aim of linux is simply to be a good operating system - but for me, it would be much better if it had more driver support, which would be the case if it had more marketshare.

Re:Gentoo

[af_robot]

Yea, but what is good in reinventing wheel every time a new distro started?
apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.

Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!

Re:Gentoo

[Crimsane]

Please no :(

Part of what makes gentoo awesome is the fact that its not backed by a company, which means you CAN get mplayer easily, you CAN get all the codecs you want for xine at the touch of a button, and there isn't all the bullshit that comes with corporates on the mailing list.

I hope I am seen as speaking from experiance, since fedora was the first distro I used after fdisking my last windows partition, and I eventually found my way to gentoo 4 or so months ago and have no intention on switching any time in the future.

I left fedora when eventually got fed up with seeing legal explinations on fedora-list and the general "we can't do that or we'll get sued attitude" explinations as to why i can't apt-get mplayer from a reliable source. The third party repositories were what eventually killed it for me, with more conflicting gstreamer packages then i wish to count.

Gentoo doesn't need corporate support, its doing fine just the way it is.
Not every linux distro exists to be ran in every environment.

If you want distro's to "unite" for "market share", look towards distro's like yellow dog or ubunto or something more similar to the fedora project, gentoo is something else entirely (IMO), and fits its niche awesomeaicly.

In conclusion: I spilt coffee on my newly purchased gentoo t-shirt yesterday. I was really sad until I realized I just spilt coffee on my gentoo t-shirt. Thats like reaching the sixth plane of geekhood enlightenment, I don't think I've ever been happier :)

Re:Gentoo

[BlueCodeWarrior]

Warning: The following post contains broad generalizations that are not intended for the eyes of children or those without a sense of humor. The ideas in this post may have a grain of truth behind them, but are presented in an inflammatory manner for your amusement. Parental discretion is adivsed.

So wait a minute, you want to merge Gentoo, possibly the 1337est distro this side of Roll Your Own Linux, with Fedora, the newbest distro this side of Lindows? How the hell do you propose that? How are you going to merge the 'now click on the packages you'd like to install' graphical-ness of Fedora with the command line install with a 60 page install guide neccesary for even a Level 3 Gentoo install?

What's next, Steve Jobs introducing a cheap...wait, scratch that, bad example.

...

What's next, we find out that Longhorn is actually all CLI and no GUI?

Anyway, as someone who's installed Fedora Core 2, 3, and Gentoo on the SAME MACHINE 3 TIMES EACH (well, 2 for Gentoo) in the past week, (Fedora can't autodetect my stuff very well :-\) Gentoo and Fedora are like apples and oranges.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled /.

Re:Gentoo

[af_robot]

I think you should not be so pessimistic.
Fedore and Gento actually *could* benefit from strong sides of each other without ruining distro.
I'm not saying that they should be one distro, but they could share a single codebase, ports, installers and so on.

Re:Gentoo

[at_slashdot]

Since when was the purpose of Linux to gain market share?

Purpose of Linux? Linux doesn't have purpose, people who use it have. The post clearly said "we must unite if we want to get more market share". So the question is: do we want?

Re:Gentoo

[goldspider]

I agree that some consolidation would do a world of good, for many OSS projects. I think a lot of people who are re-inventing the wheel just want to create a wheel with their name on it.

In other words, ego is perpetuating the problem of redundant projects.

Re:Gentoo

[beef3k]

That's easy, just add RPM to Gentoo if it isn't already in there, make 'emerge' handle SRPM's as well as tarballs, then put all the Fedora SRPM's on the Gentoo mirrors.

Sit back and wait for 3 weeks for everything to build.

Seriously - merge Gentoo and Fedora? They have completely different goals and purposes.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

The good is the same good that any competition offers.

Ford makes better cars thanks to GM.

Intel makes better chips thanks to AMD.

The FSF makes better polices thanks to the OSI

Microsoft makes better software - uh, no they don't, because many of their customers are locked in.

Competition is a very good thing, especially for open source projects where different philosophies and aproaches to software are easily tested.

Re:Gentoo

[bankman]

I think RedHat should somehow also support gentoo - it is very popular distro now and everyone will benefit if such a huge linux brand as redhat whould help it. They can merge Fedora and Gentoo, or just dedicate developers to some key gentoo projects. I don't think that a million of a slightly different linux distribution is a good thing - we *must* unite if we want to get more market share.

First of all, nobody *must* unite.

Having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that RedHat adopts anything or will contribute anything publicly and specifically to Gentoo's idea of a distro. They are in the enterprise server/workstation distro and service business, not in the "tweak and compile your distro so that it becomes unmaintainable for the enterprise market" business.

As a company in RedHat's position, I would do everything but associate my products with Gentoo, which in the enterprise market can be viewed as useless. Remember that time is money and stability everything.

That doesn't mean that I don't like Gentoo, but the community driven distro that comes closest to what you want in the enterprise market, is Debian.

Re:Gentoo

[Qzukk]

apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.

These aren't wheels. They're NOT interchangable.

You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile.

That is, if you can even get gentoo started. You'll probably need debian's sleek and, well, skimpy installer to get it started on a machine with 4MB.

Or what if its not a PC at all? Debian's installer runs on what... 8? 12 platforms? I've lost count.

Or, if you're clueless or just need everything detected for you because you can't tell your video card from your monitor model, you want a redhat or mandrake install that supports a few architectures, but has automatic hardware detection, and so on.

Completely different target markets here.

Re:Gentoo

[RealAlaskan]

Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!

Those people are doing what they do because they want to. No PHBs involved. If you could tell them to work on something else, they'd probably just stop working.

These ``developer resources'' aren't a limited number of corporate code monkeys, they are folks who are volunteering to do something they want to do. Because everyone is self-assigned, ``we'' have exactly enough people to do what is being done, and not nearly enough people to follow anyone's grand scheme, even if that grand scheme took far fewer ``developer resources''.

That's the strength and weakness of libre, collaberative development. Each person does whatever he wants to, and if that means three hundred thousand people are writing a new grep or a new apt-get at any given moment, well, that's not wasted effort. It makes them happy, and that's reason enough. When someone (like maybe you) suggests that something else should be making them happy, it shows a profound misunderstanding of how ``developer resources'' get allocated outside the corporation.

My point is that if you were to try to choke off development of all those competing projects, you would not only lose the benefit of the competition, but you would find that most of the people who you thought would be working on your favorite project are instead doing something else with their free time, like surfing pr0n or seeing their girlfriends. You might even wind up with fewer ``developer resources'' working on your favorite!

Finally, the libre licensing means that a really good idea which shows up in any of the competing projects can and probably will wind up in all of them.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you share installers when one distribution installs binaries and the other compiles everything from scratch?

Re:Gentoo

[af_robot]

How do you share installers when one distribution installs binaries and the other compiles everything from scratch?
Dear Anonymous Coward!
You should learn more about redhat and gentoo. Redhat's RRM *can* install from sources: rpm --rebuild package.src.rpm
Actually you can rebuld entire redhat distro with rpmbuild --rebuild and source rpm-s, just like gentoo, look at whitehat linux for example.

And gentoo's emerge CAN install binary packages too, read man pages.
You can also install gentoo with pre-build binaries without compiling it on your box - just like redhat!

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

> apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.

setup.exe vs msi vs SMS vs SUS vs Wise vs Installshield ... It's hardly limited to Linux, and it's not generally considered a problem.

Re:Gentoo

[snorklewacker]

There already is something with the best of fedora and gentoo: Debian.

Want stable? Use the stable distro. Want bleeding edge? Use sid (use sid and switch to the test servers if you want your bleeding edge sharp and messy). Want to build from sources? apt-get source --compile

All it lacks is a pretty boot splash (Knoppix doesn't count, since it's basically not upgradeable with Debian core packages)

Re:Gentoo

[Billly Gates]

I so wished Debian stable was not so far behind. It looked like a promising OS.

Redhat server and workstation are about as stable as debian and alot more cutting edge. Reason being is that Debian wants to make sure a package or kernel is stable on all 12 platforms. If all 32 of the amiga folks find a bug in the 2.6 kernel, the millions who use x86 must wait until the bug is fixed. Of course debian does not believe in a distro that is ahead for other platforms. Instead everyone must use the same version until the bugs are worked out. Debian use to be more cutting edge back in the 90's. It was during the ports of Linux to other architectures and the explosion of FOSS software packages that doomed it.

Many have developers who just compile package X on redhat and assume its ready. Meanwhile it breaks on other distro's with different libraries and versions of depandancies. Makefiles too are not that portable between the BSD's, and linux distro's.

NetBSD is more stable than any Linux distro and more up to date and runs well on almost all architectures. The system was designed from the ground up to be portable. I wish more amiga users used this platform instead which is more up to date and stable.

If you are using x86 then redhat would be a better bet for a workstation that needs to be stable and not too out of date. Or netbsd if its a server.

A server needs to be stable and it sucks if the server has more than 2 processors and unique raid cards that kernel 2.6 can take care of but debian can not include to make the atari users happy.

Re:Gentoo

[Billly Gates]

Well using it in the enterpise and not just at home as hobby is certainly important and requires marketshare for proper hardware/software support.

FOSS has evolved since the 90's and has many different users with complex and different needs. If you want to use it as a free/open alternative and not care that is up to you.

Re:Gentoo

[chris_mahan]

Consolidation would only make sense if it makes a product better, and allows for the product to grow into a better product long term. Itherwise, it's not only a waste of time, but an insult to the people who have put in so much work creating the individual pieces to begin with.

Remember precept 1 of the unix philosophy: Each program should do one thing well.

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Umm... I've got a better idea. How about Red Hat keeps doing their own thing, and if Gentoo likes it, we'll take it and use it. The same thing can apply for Gentoo's projects and Red Hat/Fedora. There is nothing stopping them from taking our work and using it, that's the whole point of us all using the GPL. Red Hat doesn't have to "dedicate developers" to work on our project any more than we have to do so to work on theirs. If I submit a kernel patch, or a patch to hwsetup, then I am submitting it for all Linux users to use, not one distribution. You concept of how distributions work is pretty well off kilter and not at all how the developer community works.

Re:Gentoo

[MrHanky]

Redhat server and workstation are about as stable as debian and alot more cutting edge. Reason being is that Debian wants to make sure a package or kernel is stable on all 12 platforms. If all 32 of the amiga folks find a bug in the 2.6 kernel, the millions who use x86 must wait until the bug is fixed.

Not really. The kernel packages for i386 doesn't include drivers only used by SGI MIPS or PPC or vice versa. So yes, Debian can include a RAID driver that's broken on Atari.

One of the reasons why NetBSD seems so much more portable than Debian is that it does the same, just a bit more extreme. For instance, the fact that NetBSD didn't support the graphics console on an SGI Indigo2 (last time I checked) didn't hold back the release for that computer. You just had to use serial console instead. That's what Debian calls unsupported or experimental.

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Who cares about the packaging? Release the damn thing as source with a decent license and let the distributors themselves work out the packaging. Even when that isn't the case, there's still ways around it. Look at the ATI binary drivers. They are released as RPM-only, but Gentoo has no problem installing them. I would rather see people release something that we can use than to sit around and release nothing waiting for a world-wide group of volunteers to agree on a single interface for anything.

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Actually, Gentoo is about control and choice. Only little Gentoo ricer-wannabes think it is about speed. Gentoo is also not a corporate entity. Red Hat is about one thing, their stockholders. While they may or may not be good members of the community does not matter, as they are a publicly traded company and their true master is the market. So remember kids, Red Hat isn't about anything but profit. All things they do are based around it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just different. It also doesn't mean that they will not be altruistic, it just means that they aren't going to go around cutting their own throats just to be nice. If something doesn't cost them anything or may have gains in the future, then they'll make sure to give it back to the community. The same can be said for things that will only produce a small loss, if there's hope that it will be regained in market share or sales.

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Honestly, there's little that could be improved from the way things are now. When Red Hat writes code, they release it. The same is true with Gentoo. If Red Hat decides that catalyst is the best CD-making tool since sliced bread, then there is nothing stopping them from using it. We don't have to work together in any way for this to be possible. Also, we do all work from a single code base. We both use the Linux kernel, and the GNU tools, and X.Org's X server, and...

The point is that we don't have to be clones of each other to benefit from each other's work, especially as some of the main differences between Red Hat and Gentoo are cultural and philisophical, and not technical.

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Yes, but the philosophies are different.

Explain to me how I build an RPM for, let's say, Nagios, from a source RPM, without editing the RPM, to pass different configure options, such as MySQL support.

You can't, can you? Perhaps it is because the two tools do not serve the same function?

In case you are wondering, besides working on Gentoo in my spare time, I work for a company that uses Red Hat, so I am required to build RPM packages pretty often. While both have some overlapping features and essentially do the same thing, they go about them very differently.

Re:Gentoo

[Billly Gates]

I wondered about this as well since I really wanted to run NetBSD on my computer buy mesa could not run hardware accelerating with my nvidia card.

This is why I think NetBSD is great for servers only at this point. But of course I am biased like everyone here.

THere is no perfect distro and fighting is pointless since no distro is for everyone. Use whatever you like. Its free and the power is in our hands and that is what FOSS is all about.

Re:Gentoo

[Lord Kano]

As I see it, GNU/Linux is about control and choice. I'm not trying to pimp my distro of choice here, so I won't mention it by name, but I made my choice based on a balance of flexibility and ease of setup.

There is no question that Gentoo is very flexible. Possibly even the most flexible major distro. I have serious doubts that all of the people using it are doing so because they need or even really want the amount of flexibility that Gentoo provides them. I suspect that a large number of Gentoo users are the ricer wannabes that you referred to.

Because RedHat is now a commercial entity, one that really only need be concerned with revenue and profit, I no longer trust them enough to make it my distro. I'm not going to pay for "updates" that other distros provide for free. I'm glad Gentoo is out there. The more choices people have, the greater the pressure on everyone to make a good product.

LK

Re:Gentoo

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind for many corporate users support and stability are important. Not free software or the gobs of ports.

I have not used Gentoo since 1.1 and I heard its getting better. I got burned a few times.

No distro is perfect and I had some ebuilds fail and some bugs show. I could not even get gnome running for a few days and I needed Gpilot to sync with my handheld. For a server I need someone who tests for these kinds of things. Gentoo did not test servers for bugs or do QA as good as a commercial distro or debian.

If someone wants to pay redhat then whats the problem? Its their right?

Fedora is free and is used by redhat for testing their new corporate releases.

Re:Gentoo

[4of12]

it would be much better if it had more driver support, which would be the case if it had more marketshare.

That, and from what I've read over the years on Slashdot, the driver support increases if the interfaces with the kernel are kept more stable over time and distributions.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile

If all you have are 486s, then yes you will have problems. If you have ONE P3 you can build packages targeted to 486s that are about as well optimized as you can get for that enviornment. Although you'd probably be better off using them as thin clients.

Re:Gentoo

[conteXXt]

I actually agree with you with a caveat.

Gentoo should be the Rehat build environment

IOW those who like to tweak source use emerge.

Those who want packages use rpm (which is enabled to use emerged packages)

Suse and whoever else can use the same gentoo build envoronments with different use flags, directory overides, etc.

Make life easier for the project maintainers (programmers) if they only have one (source) target.

Sounds like a great idea but would require work and cooperation.

It HAS happened before.

Oh yeah and....

Re:Gentoo

[SunFan]

Now that commercial operating systems are becoming free and open, what do you do?

Re:MOD parent UP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod you up if I had points... maybe that's why they never give me any.

It could've been worse - REAL FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

It could've been worse...

It could've been the

REALPlayer on Fedora....
conference. :)

higher moral ground

[stonebeat.org]

i think RH is just trying to gain higher moral ground by further open sourcing the Fedora distro. After all Suse is gaining momentum. Rehat vs. IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun 1) Sun's JavaDesktop [sun.com] is based on Suse Linux, and provides a very good mechanism for updates, for just one time cost of $50 (includes Star Office). 2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office. 3) IBM and Suse have been in bed for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area. 4) Novell's new directory services can be used on Suse Linux. 5) Suse can be a cluster resource in the Novell Clustered environment.

Re:higher moral ground

[hdparm]

i think RH is just trying to gain higher moral ground by further open sourcing the Fedora distro

I really don't understand what you mean by this. Both Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora Core are 100% opensourced, so how can they be opensourced further?

Fix XP dual boot

[KenSeymour]

I was tracking Red Hat Linux distributions up through 9.
I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.
Most folks on /. seem to think this is a "feature."
But I only have one computer at home and I need to have Windows XP available.

So I am stuck with Windows XP, Redhat 9, and Debian stable on my machine.
I can't get Debian to work properly with everything I have on Redhat 9.

At work, people ask me what I think about Linux. I wish I could recommend an up to date distribution that I use at home, but I can't.
I am not going to spend about USD $1000 for a seperate machine to run Fedora on.

Red Hat thought their precious name was too important to give out for the $40 or so the box set used to cost.

Well at work we program in Java which means that Windows works fine for what we do.
Why would I want to recommend that they switch to a distribution I haven't tried out first at home?
Being the only Linux person at work means that if I recommend it, I support it.
In exchange for that hassle, I would like RedHat to allow me to track their latest stuff for a reasonable charge.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[G-Licious!]

I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.

Well, whatever that issue was, it's probably fixed. I only just moved to Fedora after the release of Core 3 and it detected my Windows XP install fine. (It just didn't call it "Windows", it called it "Other". But heck, they offer you to change that name in the installer; it's probably just some more trademark paranoia)

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Physics Dude]

I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.

I'm just curious what issue you're referring to. I'm a late-commer to fedora core 3 (amd64) which I just downloaded and installed this weekend. I'm using it in a dual boot setup with WindowsXP on my laptop and haven't seen any problems related to dual boot issues. The only pain was having to add mp3 support, and finding no 64-bit Thunderbird builds, or 64-bit flashplayer support (I'm still tyring to get GNUFlash to compile in 64-bit).

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[donbrock]

I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.

Please explain what that issue is. I have three machines that I dual boot XP with various distributions of Linux.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Oxy the moron]

You really should give Ubuntu a shot. Yes, it is based on Debian (which you already have) and yet it isn't 100% perfect, but it is a great Linux distro. =]

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Drive42]

Core 2 had issues with correctly reading the drive geometry upon installing GRUB. It would effectively hose your XP install, if not completely freeze upon boot. I believe that this was a kernel problem (2.6), not one specific to FC2. It has since been resolved.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[KenSeymour]

The bug was that after installing Fedora on a system with Windows XP, the master boot record would be corrupted and you couldn't boot Windows XP anymore.

This is the bugzilla entry. It was present in Core 2.

115980

Comment 161 says it is also present in Fedora Core 3. I guess it does not affect everyone who installs Fedora on a system with Windows XP on it.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[RedHat Rocky]

Fedora was billed FROM THE START as a beta-level distro. It was never (nor is it still) intended to be a stable, rock solid platform.

Now, I could go into why this is a bad idea on Redhat's part, but never mind.

What would I recommend instead of Fedora? I wouldn't. You need to choose your own Linux path based on your experience, ability to learn and/or bank account.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to realize that this is actually a bug in the upstream version of libparted.. that affects pretty much every distro that uses libparted with a 2.6 kernel. For the record.. suse is the first distro I know of that saw evidence of this problem, because Suse actually had a beta release using a 2.6 kernel out in the wild before fedora did. too bad suse's bugreporting system isn't open for public query... anyways.

The upstream developer is aware of this problem.. and the upstream developer has been active on bugreports associated with it in the red hat bugzilla. As far as I can tell from bugzilla comments in the red hat bugzilla.... the upstream developer as of 004-12-25 thinks the problem as been solved. And has repeatedly asked for new evidence that the problem still exists. Laying this at the foot of any single distribution to fix is ill-advised. There was a real problem with parted.. that real problem has been fixed according to those who have intimate knowledge of the codebase.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Anonymous Coward]

Please... show me any official or semi-official document that uses the word 'beta' to describe what fedora is. I do not believe Fedora was ever billed by any person actively a part of the process as a 'beta' anything.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Rudeboy777]

I do not believe Fedora was ever billed by any person actively a part of the process as a 'beta' anything.

Yes, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... The idea was/is to put the bleeding-edge, freshly released, little-tested code from open source projects in one place. You tell me what that implies.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[Physics Dude]

Thanks for the info. I guess getting into the game late can have its advantages. :)

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[crush]

That would be the same bug that occured for all distors using an early 2.6.kernel and partitioning code based on Parted. (e.g. SuSE 9.1) A clear write up of this problem in case someone is still suffering from it and it's solution is provided by Jef Spaleta here

Re:Why Linux will fail

[nolife]

Nice rip of the comments from this forum.

Reputation?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

After trying Core 1 and 2, I switched to SUSE and never looked back. I've heard Core 3 isn't as full of bugs as the first 2 were but...I like SUSE now. Things *just work* compared to Fedora. Plus the whole distribution seems more polished and unified. Also, it's much easier to buy SUSE 9.2 Professional at Fry's for my desktop and even a server or two and buy enterprise level support for it if I need to (haven't yet). Much easier to justify to management. But Fedora has its place. I'm just curious to see if SUSE will start catching on with corporate America. I'm doing my best at my company. One more thing...compare SUSE 9.2 Porfessional to Redhat WS. Significant difference on price.

Re:Reputation?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 2, I switched to SUSE and never looked back

Funny, but I switched from Suse to FC2, which I think is the best distribution I've ever had on my laptop.

> I've heard Core 3 isn't as full of bugs

It's much worse. SELinux is on by default which means that 90% of the demons don't work anymore, insert a usb stick the gnome file manager pops up and then the kernel crashes, emacs 21.3 is completely broken in the de_DE locale: iso-level-shift key termiates isearch, X11 now uses an advanced mousepad driver, which is, at least on my laptop, completely unusable in the default configuration, gcj has been patched to death (well, it could be a problem in the upstream 4.3 gcj, the gcc3.3, gcc4/gcj4 are RPM's are okay), it is impossible to compile and a simple java program with gcj3.4 which uses a hashtable through JNI, ...

In fact the only reason I use FC3 is to test my applications under SELinux. For everything else I boot my laptop into FC2.

> compare SUSE 9.2 Porfessional to Redhat WS

Well, Suse is dead. It was a very good distribution 3 years ago. But now? No /var/www/html directory, no /etc/php.d, apache doesn't really work well with PHP, no SELinux, no eclipse java compiler or any other enhancement I expect from a modern distribution.

Re:Reputation?

[Anonymous Coward]

SUSE 9.2 Porfessional

Hmmm, doesn't sound too reliable to me.

FC3 is a lot better.....

[cyberkahn]

I went away from Fedora for a while. I used Suse, now I am back. Objectively take a look at Fedora Core 3 again. They really have made a lot of improvements. I think Red Hat has taken a lot of flack for the split, but even as a student you can get a copy of Red Hat AS for $50.00, which is cheap IMHO. They still maintain an open source focus and do give back to the community.

Re:Windows XP Home

[Anonymous Coward]

You're really kicking a dead gift-horse in the mouth with this one. Let it go.

Finally, but timely?

[augustz]

When Redhat first started up Fedora (to much noise everywhere) I spent a fair amount of time poking around with an eye towards getting involved.

In particular, for folks creating their own internal RPM's for packages (for a long time php-devel was not packaged for example), the idea of being able to mainline packages was very appealing, and similar to other open projects (gentoo though debian etc).

But going to the site, nothing like this was there. Pretty dissapointing. In other words, it was existing bug reporting every distro and many commercial packages have plus some marketing (this omits other things that were offered, but was my feeling at the time).

Finally, it looks like they will be making some efforts to really create an enviroment folks are able to contribute in. A shame they weren't able to harness the initial energy and interest, but these are the right types of moves, though coming a little late perhaps.

Also useful to note that a fair number of places showed up filling in gaps in redhat's offering. Freshrpms and friends come to mind for example. But with some more creativity I think redhat could have really put together something exciting.

Re:Finally, but timely?

[gdek]

Yep. Exactly right.

The 3rd party repos that have popped up to fill the gaps have provided an invaluable service. The goal of Fedora Extras is similar -- but instead of providing individual repositories, Fedora Extras will provide a centralized repository that is more tightly integrated with Fedora Core. Ultimately, anyone who can build a package that conforms to the rules will be able to contribute to Fedora Extras.

And timely? Maybe not as timely as it could have been... but better late than never.

Re:Finally, but timely?

[crush]

Part of the slowness of Fedora Extras was that Red Hat had to set up a single CVS system for it and also merge three pre-existing internal CVS into it. Bound to take a fair bit of time to do. Seth Vidal gives a good insight on the process in his blog including the rolling out of a demonstration Pre-Extras so that people can see progress. Hopefully all the excellent independent packagers: Dag Wieers, Axel Thimm, Matthias Saou will be able to find a way to contribute to this project.

Comments "I like Fedora....."

[RazorJ_2000]

I think that anyone who starts off their message body with "I like Fedora..." and their /. login ID is greater than 250000 should be automatically modded down 1 point. Clearly, they are not early adopters.

Re:Comments "I like Fedora....."

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used RedHat since version 8. I have used it through Fedora Core 3... and I have never signed up for Slashdot. Since when is a Slashdot login ID representative of any fucking thing at all?

Re:Comments "I like Fedora....."

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you are a pompus ass.

Re:Comments "I like Fedora....."

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with the first part of what you said, the second part is so much BS I can't not reply. This may come as a shock to you but not everyone who was an "early adopter" signed up for a Slashdot account back in the day. With this logic Linus Torvalds is not an early adopter. Your sir are a fool.

Re:Comments "I like Fedora....."

[Anonymous Coward]

I think anyone who suggests mod point usage related to /. ID numbers should be modded -1 Troll.

I'm Anonymous Coward and I've been around /. before you!

Re:Comments "I like Fedora....."

[Anonymous Coward]

And why would any of us care about early adopters. In my company we stay away from early adoption of any technology outside our own area of expertise, as a matter of strategy and policy.

That is the market RedHat appeals to.

Why use Fedora when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the top-ten list at www.distrowatch.org, it seems Debian and Debian-based distros are more popular than ever:

debian
knoppix
mepis
ubuntu

For desktops, why should I bother with Fedora when I can use Mepis or Ubuntu or highly-regarded non-Debian distros such as Suse or Mandrake?

For servers, why should I bother with Fedora when I can use CentOS (free RHEL clone), RHEL (if it can be afforded), Debian, or ...?

Am I wrong in thinking these other distros are better choices than Fedora? Is it possible that there are many others that agree with me and that is why RedHat is responding by doing this?

Re:Why use Fedora when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, why indeed! Of course you should let the most popular distro on distrowatch guide your choice!

Oh wait, there aren't any Debian based distros in the top 3 are there? I think you need to reconsider.

Re:Why use Fedora when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you wrong in thinking that other distros can be better choices? No, not really. But if you are trying to say that there is one distro that is better for everyone and for every purpose then you'd be wrong.

Choice is good right? If Fedora is a better fit for one person and Mepis a better fit for another who can say other than each individual? A few distributions trying out ideas that can be cross-pollinated isn't a bad thing.

as to why Red Hat's motivation for continuing to open up Fedora to the community... I think you are probably very wrong.

Use whatever distribution you feel bests meets your needs and your long term interests. Contribute to that community as you see fit. The clearly good ideas will cross-pollinate or work their way upstream into the open source projects which all the distributions are based on for common benefit. Trying to convince others into which effort they should be contributing is a hollow goal.

About time

[OblongPlatypus]

To everyone who's trying to interpret the "intentions" behind this "new move" from Redhat: This is basically what they've been planning all along - they've just been dreadfully slow going about it.

Confused?

[gdek]

If you think that this is "the first step towards Red Hat dropping Fedora entirely," think again.

Red Hat made a promise, almost two years ago now, to make the development process around Fedora more open. That's precisely what we're now doing.

Red Hat will continue to develop Fedora Core, and will continue to use it as the pathfinder technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat will be more aggressive in the development of Fedora Extras, which will be driven both by Red Hat and by community contributors, using open processes and an open infrastructure.

Fedora's success is Red Hat's success. Red Hat will never, ever, ever walk away from Fedora.

Re:Confused?

[chris_mahan]

Premise A: RedHat is a company.
Premise B: Companies lie.
Comclusion: hehe

If you object to the word "lie", substitute "have different interpretations of the perceived truth"

I like fedora ok but

[codepunk]

It lacks some fine polishing ...
The patch system blows and updating usually makes a
machine unusable...

Now if the Mepis guys would just get around to supporting a root file system on a scsi device instead of just IDE I would never have to look at
Fedora again. Mepis just plain works right from the start but it just won't work on a scsi disk.

Re:I like fedora ok but

[SmokeHalo]

It lacks some fine polishing ...
The patch system blows and updating usually makes a
machine unusable...

Sounds like Windows 95.

docs

[IceFox]

How about updating the *$^&%$& document on how to make rpm's? Is that so much to ask?

It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years. Look for yourself here

If you want people to help out you should update the doc! There are so many edge cases and hidden options it is insane and any new developers will pull there hair out. Not only that, but put the documentation in the cvs so everyone can help update it.

For something as critical as RPM Red Hat should be ashamed that their developer documentation is so bad.

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:docs

[Anonymous Coward]

How about updating the *$^&%$& document on how to make rpm's? Is that so much to ask? It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years.

Fair enough, but I'd like to point out that RedHat made a note of this when rpm -b became rpmbuild back around RH8.0 or so.

Re:docs

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk of being off topic or trollish, the documentation problem isn't just with Red Hat. If it's one thing I despise it's lack of good documentation. My feeling is this:

As you write a feature into the program, take 5 minutes to describe it and how to use it. It might not even take 5 minutes.

How many times have you tossed out a perfectly good product that had everything and the kitchen sink because there was no manual or documentation and went back to the product that you've used for years. How often have you gone with a program that was of lesser quality but had the documentation to tell you how to get the job done?

Every developer that documents reaps an immediate benefit.

If you look at software companies like Intuit or Adobe or, yes...even Micro$oft, there's always something in the box that gets you up and running. Need to know about a menu item? It's in the book. This is why people pay for closed-source software.

Average Joe has the patience of an ogre and the attention span of a frog. Of course, he's going to love the idea of "free" software, but he's not going to sit there for days trying to do something productive. He'll gladly get up after the first 24 hours and go buy software in a box.

FUDCon Keynote Speaker...

[Zemplar]

Who else? It's Elmer!

Yes, that waskely wabbit will have a day off as Elmer FUD comes to the Fedora Project with insight and strategies for the Community.

scared of Ubuntu?

[blixblix]

Am i the only one who thinks this is a response to the recent success that Ubuntu has had?

I've personally been all over the place with my choice of preferred distro. Ubuntu is the nicest desktop linux I've found.

Re:scared of Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, you likely are the only person.

Re:scared of Ubuntu?

[Wesley Felter]

Am i the only one who thinks this is a response to the recent success that Ubuntu has had?

Yes. Fedora was planned to be open from day 1.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to choosing to cut out the desktop version for lack of resources or going bankrupt in flames in Open Source glory then I would prefer the former.

Re:Well

[JudasBlue]

Yeah, except they weren't going bankrupt. Not throwing stones, they made a choice, and I am not privy to all the factors involved. But they were showing profitable quarters when they supported both server and RHL. They made a strategic decision to drop RHL in a bid, I am sure, to maximize profits, but they were making money when they were supporting both products. And in the long run, it remains to be seen if by losing mindshre among the "little guys" they didn't cost themselves some money doing it.

once upon a time

[Anonymous Coward]

i used to like Redhat back when 7.1 & 7.2 was current, when 7.3 was released i started to dislike Redhat's distro, 8 was worse 9 was almost unbearable, Fedora is just gobs of unnecessary bloat & lack of control over what gets installed (almost). nowadays i would not run Redhat/Fedora on anything...

sooms like some distros are (rpm based) are getting just like windoze...

don't stray to far from the source...

CVS

[coolfrood]

The Fedora CVS is available at http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/. Lots of goodies there!

We need a deb based distribution that is as open

[exa]

Why don't we have an open CVS thingie for a more advanced packaging system, hey?

First was gnome....

[jotaeleemeese]

.... and it was crap.

Then came KDE and gnome improved. AND KDE fighted back.

Now we have 2 very usable desktops.

Competition is good!

Re:First was gnome....

[nitehorse]

Actually, if you want to be pedantic about it, first there was KDE, and then the GNOME project was formed as a desktop project "like KDE, but all Free Software."

Then KDE improved, and GNOME improved, and KDE improved, and GNOME ripped out all the features and crack that everyone loved, and then KDE improved, and then GNOME improved....

But it's not really that simple, of course. (Just wanted to point out that KDE was actually first, as the "GNOME was first" misconception seems to be popular around here.)

Re:First was gnome....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, KDE came first, _way_ first, and was useable and useful and stable way before it hit version 1.

Gnome came into existence solely because people didn't like QT's version 1.x licensing, stumbled along for a bit, eventually released possibly the crappiest version 1.0 in living memory, and took another year or two to become remotely stable.

Only once Gnome hit version 2 did it start to approach KDE in stability and usefulness - however, you're right that competiton between the two desktops has been very beneficial - especially since the competition is friendly (at least from the developers), and results in some good collaboration too.

correction

[JudasBlue]

AC was right. RH was losing money hand over fist. I hadn't realized that they were unprofitable during the period.

Here Is Why It Isn't Installed By Default

[EXTomar]

To avoid "the sharks" in the world that would sue on the behalf of whom ever. It isn't necessarily a move to protect themselves from RIAA...it is more to protect themselves from being charged by the group that owns the MP3 encoding standard.

The good news is it is easy to get MP3 support back into your RH or Fedora install. It is just RH nor the Fedora crew are going to help you do it. Given the nature of some litegation happy parts of the tech world I'm more than happy with Fedora's decision leave out this questionable piece of technology by default.

Already Happened

[Inhibit]

The fork/split stuff already happened. With no one contributing to Fedora, they pretty much went off and did CentOS and White Box.

Wrote up a short editorial over at PCBurn with links to the relevant distributions (or you could use Google ;).

Redhat must be happy

[poofyhairguy82]

The primary goal of the Fedora project is to develop the OSS tools (such as gnome) that they will one day sell in their commercial software. When the first Fedora came out, it was THE major free Gnome distro- without it Gnome would have developed at a slower pace.

But nowadays the Fedora project is not as crucial. Newer projects such as Ubuntu are now sharing the burden that Fedora has of developing the software. Redhat doesn't care how Gnome and what not gets better as long as it does.

Now that the burden is lifted Redhat does not need absolute control in order to ensure their favorite apps survival. Now there are enough distros out there that Fedora could never have a new release and the tools will still continue to develop at an acceptable rate. So naturally Redhat now wishes to open up the development of Fedora to make it easier on them and to allow new ideas (that are risky) to potentially improve the project.

This does not personally concern me, as I switch away from Fedora on the last release (Yum seems like a hack once you see apt-get work in its native environment IMHO). But I respect Redhat for wanting to give Fedora to the community of users that love it.

Re:Why Linux will fail

[Isbiten]

Actually it's a troll article from something awful. But still it's just a troll.

OT: What's your experience of GIS+Fedora?

[moreati]

Sorry to go off topic, and feel free to ignore this.

What is your experience of Linux desktop GIS? What software do you use (other than postgis, mapserver, gdal et al at wifimaps.com)? I most curious what GUI map visualiser/editor (if any) that you use.

With thanks for your time.

Alex

translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"we *must* unite"

Which, to me, simply means write good code (with lots of preplanning and lots of comments!), don't use obscure libraries unless you really have to, and test on as many different systems as you can. The Holy Universal Format of ASCII and our own human brains will some day achieve something far better than unity: Consensus.

Just don't take away our ascii... (microsoft)

Does this help with RPM dependencies?

[DarkHelmet]

Does this mean sometime that the MySQL packages in Fedora Core 4 will actually be the ones from MySQL.com, and not one big shoddy package?

Since I choose to install the RPM files from MySQL, some of the other packages that are now dependent on it (e.g: dovecot) fail to install.

Yippie.

Re:Does this help with RPM dependencies?

[Dejohn]

Yeah, it seems like it's either take the RPM route and suffer with whatever they give you, or just download *everything* and compile it your self... oh well....

Takes Guts or something...

[4of12]

Red Hat got a lot of flack for previous Fedorae that were too buggy or made it too hard for independent developers to write into the repository.

Fedora 3 seems to be better (been running it for a couple of months), but I do notice the annoyances like lack of fonts, shockwave, acrobat, flash player, java, nVidia X drivers, etc. that one comes to expect.

Red Hat can make a fine living by loading the luxury items onto Fedora 3 and calling it RHEL 4, providing support, etc.

But with other developers also providing pathways for making Fedora 3 nicer, Red Hat is implicitly providing RHEL 4 low-cost competitors.

Red Hat must feel they can provide a product that customers will want to pay for despite the competition. Or, maybe the customers will feel more comfortable buying into an enterprise service agreement with Red Hat because the Exit door is visible just because such competition exists (remembering their experiences with MS where there's no where to run if you're dissatisfied except off the cliff).

It doesn't exist

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as an "international patent".

Question for those who have used Fedora

[Billly Gates]

Are the bugs fixed?

I remember old posts here that found 3 bugs including setting GDM and XDM, X.org, and one with openoffice.

I have been quite disapointed with Linux distros over the years since I started using them in 98. I find them becoming less and less reliable and more bugy and resource hugs.

Anyway how often is Fedora updated? I may switch back to RedHat Fedora after a disapoint with the bugs in SuSE and FreeBSD5.3.

I am not a troll, but a student and does not have the time to continually tinker with my linux box or put up with core dumps from many userland apps like I use to. I need something that just works and wonders if it fits my bill.

No Debian stable is not an option because its a newer machine and I have limited bandwith and time and do not want to play with apt-get.

Re:Question for those who have used Fedora

[BenjyD]

I noticed a lot of bugs initially in FC3 - enough to make me switch to another distro. But I reinstalled it last weekend and there have been a lot of updates that fixed many of the problems I had (mainly USB related). Updates have been daily for the past two weeks according to fedoranews.org.
I have SuSe 9.2 on my laptop, but I am going to stick with FC3 on my desktop machine for now.

Re:Question for those who have used Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been quite disapointed with Linux distros over the years since I started using them in 98. I find them becoming less and less reliable and more bugy and resource hugs.

I agree completely.

Can I just say here, for one moment, that I have a new theory about Linux distributions?

What is my theory that it is? Yes. Well, you may well ask what is my theory. This theory, which belongs to me, is as follows... This is how it goes... The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. Ready?

By the year 2015, Linux will have killed Windows. By the time that happens, the major Linux distributions will suck even worse than Windows. That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.

(still a Linux fan, though)

Re:Question for those who have used Fedora

[LeneJ]

Fedora has a release cycle of 4-6 months. My money is on 6 months...

Since you are a student, you might want to try to buy the student version of RHEL, it is not the latest, but it is stable. The price? $50.

Ditching RH Desktop was a dumb move.

[Isldeur]

When redhat ditched their normal desktop product in favor of this "Fedora" thing it struck me as a critically stupid move.

Redhat got to the height it did because of one thing, namely mindshare. Today the people I know who need to use linux for business normally use Redhat. Why? Because other business products are certified against it.

But while RH retains that gravity, it's loosing it's momentum simply because it is loosing mindshare. Why? My guess is that they've diluted things with this Fedora Project. It's not "RedHat" per se any more.

So they've closed the door on those coming in from the ground floor. And what happens? Other distributions spring up. I started using redhat at version 2.2 back with kernel 1.2.13 but I've now tried other ways of doing things - non RPM based distributions and I'm telling you I wouldn't go back. Gone are the days I need to go culling through freshrpms for some PACKAGE-connectiva.i386.rpm substitute for RPM Hell. Things are happy here now. :)

That's nothing.

[theendlessnow]

Under the new revised GPL (soon to be released), if you just use a GPL program you must make 12 copies of the source and distribute them to your friends and family members.

RedHat implemented this for a week. One engineer said, "Man.. I mean everyone I know has a copy now. And I've received so many copies that I can't see out the rear view window of my car." Another engineer found two CDs in his hamburger during lunch! "This is getting ridiculous....", he said.

Suprisingly, there are areas of M$ that have been shut down because of the plethora of CDs that are now littering the campus. Bill Gates was heard saying, "See the problems that free software causes!" M$ has set up a charitable foundation for Victims of Free Software to help combat the problem. You can also download a "free" (DRM protected) video explaining the virtues of having just ONE supplier for all software and why Free software does not count.

thats cool

[smileplzz]

I will love this kind of act unless i learn linux first.

OK, they may have taken FUDCon

[stor]

...but here on /. we still have the Trollfest.

Cheers
Stor

Oh Come on Now

[c_spencer100]

1) No distro is perfect, but RedHat had its run for being known as one of the most problematic distros. In fact, there were numerous complaints from programmers (wish I woulda saved that article) in regards to RedHat not properly following the Unix File Hierachy Standard, or whatever you call it.

2) Actually, SuSE only had about 4 directories in 'opt' - KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice. Slackware has even fewer, only having KDE and Gnome. But honestly, Having necessary system files and libraries and optional software mixed all together makes more since to you ? Even Windows doesn't do this. Don't be biased. If LongHorn is released tommorow with the structure to install Mozilla Thunderbird in 'C:\WINNT\system32', there will be endless flames about how stupid/messy/unorganized Windows is.

Re:Oh Come on Now

[jdunn14]

Personally I don't really care where a package installs its files as long as I can find them, and you know what? With Fedora I can. rpm -ql blah lists files installed by blah. Don't know what owns file /usr/blah/blah? rpm -qf /usr/blah/blah tells you. For met the point of the directory structure is to organize things so that I can find them, so that I can identify them, and so that it makes sense to someone. Since you'll never get everyone to agree on the one true directory structure just make sure that someone can at least answer the obvious questions easily. I'd kill to have something in windows that would let me find out what applications/parts of windows installed that DLL in c:\windows\system32.

As for redhat being a problematic distro.... I use it, and know the issues I've had in the past. In general, nothing too serious, although with each release I wonder what they fucked up. Oh well, I've talked to other people about installing other distros and was just never convinced. Too set in my ways, and used to what I know. Someday I'll switch, but for now I'll stick to my untweaked relatively easy to install and manage rpms. Yes I said relatively easy to install. I do wish that I could install an app without some of the dependencies because I know I don't need those features, but that's not specific to rpm, just to binary packaging systems where someone has to make a choice as to what features to compile into the binary. But, as far as I'm concerned I'd rather throw another 1% of my drive space at the dependencies then have to wait for a compiler.

The reason behind the naming

[Nailer]

Is posts like the above.

* Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux. New Open Source technology regularly (well, actually more regularly) perhaps at the expense of app compatibility - ie, like when you upgraded to NPTL from Linuxthreads in Red Hat 8 and had to upgrade your JRE.

* The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about? Complaining that you didn't read the release announcement for Red Hat 9, which mentioned the support period?

Red Hat staff spend their says working on Fedora. In fact, Fedora is the thing that's maintained over time. It has its own beta cycle. Report a bug and a Red Hat staff member will fix it. RHEL is forked from it every so often.

If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox. You pay $0 to use the software. You pay money, however, to get unlimited support calls to Red Hat every year. Try that with Sun, Microsoft, or most other Linux distros.

Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?

Oh wait, cause we have more business market share than every other Linux distro combined. Red Hat, despite its merits, is That Distro They Make You Use At Work.

Oh, yeah, and some dickead tried Red Hat circa 1998, noted the dependency resolution, and doesn't understand the concept of software improving over time.

Idiots.

Re:The reason behind the naming

[demachina]

"The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"

Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter. I was on 8, 9 being a rather minor update and no one knows why you did a major version bump and I didn't bother with it.

I guess I should be thankful to your fine company that I was in the middle of a one year subscription when you stopped doing any updates and abandoned your distributions while they were still in their prime, and told everyone to go buy support from a third party, because you were apparently bored with supporting your products or it was dragging your Wall Stree numbers. At a minimum you should have probably done an automated check as part of my paying you money and told me I was wasting my money buying support for an OS you were abandoning in a few months.

People are paying you for support service so you SUPPORT your distributions even if they aren't the latest and greatest. Microsoft support there old OS's way longer which is what a computer has to do to maintain customer loyalty.

"Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux."

You've been drinking a little to much of your companies marketing koolaid. The logical succession would have been to call Red Hat 9 what it was, 8.1 and then there would be 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10.0 etc and I could still buy a box set in store. And you might have end of lifed support for 7.x but my subscription to Red Hat 8.0 support should still work and I would have paid you to renew it a while ago and I wouldn't be running Gentoo now.

"If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox."

Uh, because I'm like the other guy that posted here. Your companies sorry attitude motivated me to finally nuke your OS off my machines, switch to Gentoo and I've never been so happy. No living RPM hell too which was a big bonus. I can update my systems with security fixes as soon as they are out, no hassle, no charge, no RPM hell.

Again this gets back to being totally clueless about preserving your brand. You created a massive discontinuity in your product line at RH 9. If Whitebox is basicly the same thing as Red Hat 9 was why the hell didn't you just call it 10.x or whatever and stop PLAYING THE STUPID MARKETING GAMES. I don't even know what Whitebox is because you totally lost your marketing way.

"Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?"

Uh, because you did a bunch of stupid shit that massively pissed off your loyal customers, and whats worse you apparently didn't even notice or are in complete denial that you did it.

"Idiots."

If thats your attitude, and the attitude of your company, towards your former loyal customers, now your unhappy ex-customers I guess we all understand why you are doing the things you are doing. May your sales and your stock crater.

I hope you can make money off the dumb suits and corporate CTO's that fall for your crap, me personally I don't know a single linux geek any more that hasn't switched to Debian, Gentoo, Suse or anything but Red Hat. They all used to be loyal Red Hat geeks, me included, no more.

Re:The reason behind the naming

[Nailer]

"The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"

Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter.

Er, what does end of lifing a product have to do with abandoning a model we still use today? If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat), then say so. But since that was the stated lifetime for Red Hat 8, your complaints wouldn't wash. Go read before you complain.

I was on 8, 9 being a rather minor update and no one knows why you did a major version bump

Everybody who's familiar with the Red Hat version scheme knows - if a technology can interfere with app compatibility, we bump the major version. Go read before you complain.

I guess I should be thankful to your fine company that I was in the middle of a one year subscription when you stopped

That's a problem they've acknowledged - if you actually talk to them about this grievance, rather than screaming loudly on Slashdot amongst a bunch of lies, they'll cut you a rather nice deal on RHEL support.

told everyone to go buy support from a third party, because you were apparently bored with supporting your products or it was dragging your Wall Stree numbers.

The truth: Red Hat is a small company. 800 people might seem a lot, but our competitors (Sun, Microsoft) are much larger. As a result, we need to focus on customers that will pay us for what we do (rather than if something goes wrong).

The logical succession would have been to call Red Hat 9 what it was, 8.1

Er, no, that would break Red Hat's versioning scheme. We don't imply a new version is a minor upgrade when it will impact on application compatibility - like many other Linux vendors do.

and then there would be 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10.0 etc and I could still buy a box set in store.

Er, that Fedora has a new numbering scheme doesn't make it not the successor to Red Hat Linux, or disprove my earlier notion that its the same concept - Open Source technology, tested, and made available frequently.

No living RPM hell too

'up2date foo'
Will fetch foo from your various sources (RHN, directories, yum servers, apt-get servers - it works with them all and can resolve dependencies) between them. Again, go read before you complain.

If Whitebox is basicly the same thing as Red Hat 9 was why the hell didn't you just call it 10.x

You mean Fedora, not whitebox.

or whatever and stop PLAYING THE STUPID MARKETING GAMES.

Its not a stupid marketing game.

a) Because having the half supported (some SLAs weren't available on RL, only RHEL) Red Hat Linux sent mixed messages to our customers and was a bad idea. The Enterprise / Fedora split makes things clear - if you want support, pay us.

a) Red Hat Linux, if you ever purchased a CD from someone online, should not have been called Red Hat Linux due to the unfortunate reality of US trademark law (you need to be seen to protecting a trademark to continue having it). But that never happened. Calling Fedora Fedora has the side benefit of people not having to rename Red Hat to 'Pink Tie' when they sell it.

I don't even know what Whitebox is because you totally lost your marketing way.

Then you should probably not talk about it. And its not our product, and we don't market it.

"Idiots."

If thats your attitude, and the attitude of your company, towards your former loyal customers,

No, its my personal label for people who post things they either know to be false or could easily investigate to find out to be false on the internet.

Re:The reason behind the naming

[demachina]

"If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat),"

If this was some kind of long established plan how did you manage to end of life THREE major versions in the space of quarter. You didn't release them all in the space of a quarter did you?

"That's a problem they've acknowledged - if you actually talk to them about this grievance, rather than screaming loudly on Slashdot amongst a bunch of lies, they'll cut you a rather nice deal on RHEL support."

HAHAHA...HA...HAHAHA....HAHAHA...HAHAHA..HAHAHA

Stop it your killing me.

So you just screwed me on my previous subscription and your solution is I go beg and plead to you and if I'm nice to you and give you even MORE money for a NEW subscription, which you have an established a track record for screwing people over on, you will CUT ME A DEAL.

HAHAHA....HAHAHAHAH...HAHAHAHA

You oughta be a comedian or in marketing, though only maroons are gonna reward you with more business after you screw them the first time around. Like I said it was way easier to just nuke your sorry OS and install Gentoo than grovel at your feet. You aren't one of the good guys any more so I really have no desire to give you any money.

So if this end of lifing frenzy was part of this long term, well publicized plan, then how how did this problem which you "acknowledge" come about. Either A. everything was according to plan so there is no problem to acknowledge or B. you intentionally screwed paying customers and it appears you "acknowledge" you did.

"As a result, we need to focus on customers that will pay us for what we do (rather than if something goes wrong)."

Uh, I paid you when I bought a box set for nearly every minor release, whether I needed to or not (though I could have burned bandwidth and time and burned my own). Why because Red Hat used to be the good guys and I was glad to give you money so you would succeed and the box sets were nice to have.

I bought your subscription service and was gonna give you money every year in perpetuity.

I think you meant to say "we need to focus on customers that will pay buckets of money in big whacks" instead of paying attention to all the little people that took Red Hat from a couple people in an apartment to an eight hundred person company with billions in the bank and made Bob Young filthy rich.

"Er, that Fedora has a new numbering scheme doesn't make it not the successor to Red Hat Linux,"

You are pissing in the wind. You completely screwed your brand when you did it and it was for no particularly good reason other a marketing guys brain fart. If you need to change the name from Red Hat to Fedora great, call it Fedora 10.X and stay the course and you wouldn't have pissed everyone off. I'm assuming your marketing people got there degrees from a degree mill because they seem to have no clue they had a valuable brand and a loyal customer base and they intentionally gave both the finger.

"You mean Fedora, not whitebox."

Once again you are just showing your product strategy is incoherent. It clear as mud what exactly the difference is between Fedora, Whitebox and Enterprise, other than a big whack of money comes in to the mix with Enterprise. Only thing that is clear is you have an out of control marketeer.

"The Enterprise / Fedora split makes things clear - if you want support, pay us."

Ok so what is Whitebox again then, I'm sooooo confused.

"Will fetch foo from your various sources (RHN, directories, yum servers, apt-get servers - it works with them all and can resolve dependencies) between them. Again, go read before you complain."

Ya until you need some software that isn't on those, or you load some mis-packaged betas, or you uninstall something and the unistall rules are bad, or your OS is end of lifed and the updates stop coming, or after a while the RPM history gets slow or goes south and you pretty much

Re:The reason behind the naming

[Nailer]

If this was some kind of long established plan how did you manage to end of life THREE major versions in the space of quarter.

The short lifespan of Red Hat 9 was announced on its release. So yes, this was planned.

HAHAHA...HA...HAHAHA....HAHAHA...HAHAHA..HAHAHA

Stop it your killing me.

Thinks: why am I talking to this person...

So you just screwed me on my previous subscription and your solution is I go beg and plead to you and if I'm nice to you and give you even MORE money for a NEW subscription, which you have an established a track record for screwing people over on, you will CUT ME A DEAL.

No, not beg and plead. Yell and scream and be angry if you want (and you do want that, its obvious), a Red Hat person will do something to remedy your issue.

So if this end of lifing frenzy was part of this long term, well publicized plan, then how how did this problem which you "acknowledge" come about.


It was planned between Red Hat 8 and 9. Hence the short lifespan of Red Hat 9 announced when it was released. As I've said already.

"Er, that Fedora has a new numbering scheme doesn't make it not the successor to Red Hat Linux,"

You are pissing in the wind.

That's not a rebuttal (not is the angry diatribe that follows it). You still haven't disproven that Fedora isn't a logical sucessor to Red Hat.

If you need to change the name from Red Hat to Fedora great, call it Fedora 10.X and stay the course and you wouldn't have pissed everyone off.

I disagree. The Slashdot trolls would still find a reason to be angry.

"You mean Fedora, not whitebox."

Once again you are just showing your product strategy is incoherent.

Again, Whitebox is not our product.
You know Fedora and RHEL. They're our products. You seem clear about that. Good. Marketing must be doing its job.

It clear as mud what exactly the difference is between Fedora, Whitebox and Enterprise, other than a big whack of money comes in to the mix with Enterprise.

Enterprise has a five year lifecycle, and official support. You might know this if you visited the Fedora vs Enterprise: Which is right for you page that was on the front page of redhat.com for a rather long time.

"Will fetch foo from your various sources (RHN, directories, yum servers, apt-get servers - it works with them all and can resolve dependencies) between them. Again, go read before you complain."

Ya until you need some software that isn't on those,

Then add another source to /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources There's a ridiculous amount of packaged software for RHEL from third party sites like Dag Wieers should you need it.

or you load some mis-packaged betas

If you load beta software, it is, you know, beta software. You should be aware of the potential problems. This doesn't affect Red Hat more than any other OS out there.

or you uninstall something and the unistall rules are bad

Again, unlikely if you're not using beta software. The software in RHEL has undergone 3 beta to make it into Fedora, testing as part of that Fedora release, and further testing for the RHEL beta. It's pretty damned solid.

or your OS is end of lifed and the updates stop coming

Nah, Fedora legacy deals with that (they only ended support for Red Hat 8 recently).

or after a while the RPM history gets slow or goes south and you pretty much have to start over.

! Asides from one issue circa Red Hat 8 that had a simple and well known work around (delete the temporary files), there's been no such issues reported in Red Hat for ages.

You can pretend RPM's work great but most people that have used them over time know better.

I disagree. Though as a YELLING guy on Slashdot with bad grammer who allegedly buys stuff from a vendor but complains on Slashdot, rather than

Re:The reason behind the naming

[demachina]

I give up. You aren't gonna say anything thats gonna make me happy with your company, and you really are just digging a deeper hole as far as I'm concerned, though I know your goal here is to point out what an "idiot" I am to everyone else. You seem to be from the "the customer is always wrong and I'm always right school".

All I'll say about all your ranting that I'm a bad customer because I didn't call you up and whine, is there wasn't any point. Your company took a gigantic strategic left turn and you hung many of your customers out to dry, the only way you could have fixed that was to do a gigantic undo of your whole strategy and little ol' me wasn't gonna make that happen no matter how much I grovelled at your feet.

Instead of spending futile days trying to find the right people at your company to talk to it was way easier and more satisfying to just download Gentoo CD's and kiss your company goodbye. Low and behold I liked Gentoo better anyway but thats just me. This is what's called a customer voting with his feet.

I just delight in reminding everyone of your recent stellar performance everytime there is a /. article about your company's vain attempt to try and straighten out the royal mess its made of itself.

So, lets just leave it that I had enough of your company a year ago, I ain't gonna come back, and I ain't alone. There hows that for grammar.

Later dude.

Re:The reason behind the naming

[Nailer]

I don't think anyone could say anything that would make you happy with Red Hat.

And not communicating with a vendor you're unhappy with, then ranting online about it, doesn't make you a bad customer, it makes you somewhat immature.

Link to this conversation all you want. I think our audience would draw the same conclusion of you that I have.

Re:The reason behind the naming

[justins]

Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?

Yeah, Suse's really been screwing people by including working mp3, java, and flash implementations. What a lousy way to treat users!

The problem with Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Fedora is that RH will never allow Fedora become a production level distribution due to the conflict with its "Enterprise" products.

If you want to play with a Linux disro or want to provide RH with free help in developing and testing of the packages that's all fine and dandy. However, if you are looking for a production OS to run your production systems, there are other Linux distros that are much better suited to do the job.

That's the reason we went with Debian when we were looking to replace RH7.3 Debian is excellent, my only wish we would've migrated to it sooner.

Good, because they have broken Linux in Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Try any non-rh kernel with core libs in enterprise,
specifically multithreaded and libresolv linked
binaries and tell me what you think of their cont
ributions to open source.

Hey RH: F*cktard season is always open and your
methods suck.

Delusional Crackheads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, its like you guys dont live in the same world that I do.

Lets define some terms:

Support:
Support in "Red Hat" means not only "we help you set it up", but it also means, "if it breaks, we help you fix it".

No two installs of Gentoo are the same, different compile flags, different use flags. Most Gentoo systems are difficult to update (Dont get me started, I was around for the DB3 migration).

Reproducable:
Can you imagine the support nightmares in reproducing a "performance problem" on a 19 month old Gentoo install using -ck patched for JFS and elevator IO tuning along with super hyper performance flags ?. For the time it would take you t o reproduce that build environment would be easier to send a Tech out onsite and re-install
Enterprise Linux.

The poster earlier suggests that "Red Hat" (Two words !!) should also "support" Gentoo. Any Gentoo developer can push any build, broken or not into the portage tree. No quality testing, no code assurance, no backwards compatability guarantee. Wow, I can tell you thought that through.

For the record it is not a 2 year support cycle, its supposed to be 5 years. This means that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 will be supported in 2007.

I think that a persons "previous comment ratings" should affect if their posts are even moderated above 0.

I keep forgetting this is slashdot.

Grits, Profit, All your base.

Fedora was a bad idea

[doodleboy]

So Redhat has this great plan to monetize its relationship with its users. It'll split its line into RHEL, which is being faithfully copied by the free alternatives CentOS and Whitebox, and Fedora, a time based distribution meant to be a testbed for future versions of RHEL. Fantastic. I guess I'm supposed to be a beta tester for some enterprise version of linux that I can't/won't pay for.

So the high end stuff is going to get copied about 8 minutes after its released. And completely free, stable, excellent linux distributions like ubuntu, gentoo, debian, et al, are available that are not meant to be some sort of farm team for the real distribution. How did it not occur to the powers that be at Redhat that their base would drift away to other distributions?

Take myself. I've used Redhat since v5.2, but I'm switching to ubuntu. It's so fast, so stable, it's free, there's a great upgrade path, etc. What do I need Redhat/Fedora for?

wish they didn't change

[suezz]

don't understand how letting people run their os with/without support was hurting them. I was using redhat 9 and paid the 60 dollars for a year to get the updates. but when the price of that tripled - well that just priced me out. I switched to debian/ubuntu - it is just as stable if not more and gives me a lot more software. I always said redhat had the best hardware detection but ubuntu has caught up fast and is just as good in my book. yes the installer isn't pretty and graphical but I only have to do it once and it is very stable and it works. probably wouldn't of switched if redhat didn't triple their prices. but I still like them and wish them well - I really want to see them do great along with debian and all the other distros. I think there is room for them all because they can interoperate together because they all use open standards i.e cups. This says a lot - a lot of microsofts own products can say that. I just hope people realize this and stop the desktop craziness that microsoft has us in.

other RHEL clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey people, don't forget Scientific Linux and Taolinux.

White Box: The first? Seems to have very good user satisfaction over time.

CentOS: Self-hosting. Their team seems a little flaky to me, OMG WE NEED MONIES FOR TEH FTP SERVER, but whatever.

Taolinux: Interesting because the guy maintaining it is fanatical about compatibility with RHEL, so it's deliberately NOT self-hosting. He notes on his page that some RHEL packages are built on RH9.

Scientific Linux / Fermi Linux: Well maintained by admins at a national lab. Self-hosting. Includes rpms for openafs and some other things that aren't strictly RHEL-compatible.

Right now I'm using Scientific Linux. The nice thing about all these is that you could switch a system from one to the other without too much difficulty if you needed to.

For what it's worth

[anomaly]

From the customer's perspective it doesn't matter whether or not you're right. The corporate direction was not communicated to him in a way that he understood, and it ended up being a significant inconvenience to him.

While I have used redhat sinec 4.2 (on Sparc, no less) I don't remember enough of the history to say whether he's 100% right, or you're 100% right on the details, but it really doesn't matter.

In terms of customer service, being right is really unimportant. The customer's perception IS his reality. I'm sorry that his frustration was turned toward redhat and eventually toward you.

Telling him point by point that he's wrong, and then issuing an ad hominem attack against him does not convince him of your rightness or his alleged wrongness .

I'd highly recommend that you peruse This book

You may find that application of the enclosed principles are extremely helpful in your life path.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Re:For what it's worth

[Nailer]

I'm sure most companies would react the same to suck an attack. Attack being the key word here: the person isn't interested in dialogue, they're interested in winning a shouting competition. There is nothing I could say that would make him happy.

Re:For what it's worth

[Nailer]

Actually, I'll add to that: not only is there nothing I could say that would make him happy, he's more interested in doing as much damage to Red Hat as possible, by any means including lying.

My main interest is the people that might read his post and believe it, when 90% of it is provably false.

Don't write off the company because of Slashdot

[anomaly]

Look, I got frustrated with the constant upgrade cycle of the consumer redhat products, and the whole fedora morass was what encouraged me to look for alternatives - because ultimately I'm too cheap to pay for software to run at my house.

Professionally I have no issue with paying for things that make me $$, but personally it's not worth a bunch of cash per systems to do the upgrade cycle.

I switched my home boxes to whitebox linux. It's a totally non-redhat affiliated distro - except for the fact that it's built almost entirely from the SRPMS released from redhat. It's designed to be binary compatible with RHES, and in my experience, I've found that it has been - down to the bugs!

I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful.

I'm sorry that you're frustrated.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Re:Don't write off the company because of Slashdot

[demachina]

"I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful."

I appreciate the advice but I thought I made it clear I don't want to fix any relationship with RedHat and I don't what to get in touch with their marketing team, that would just tick me off about as much as Nailer did running down all the excuses why they think their shit don't stink.

Replacing Gentoo with Red Hat would be a giant step backward in my book. I guess your right, now that I think about it, I should apologize to RedHat. If they hadn't done what they done I never would have been motivated to switch to Gentoo. They did me a great service. THANKS RED HAT!!!

Don't think I was carping to an employee here, I think their employee was carping at me. I just thought I'd giving everyone a rundown all the wonderful things RedHat did last year, and which are a matter of record, and which are so thoroughly burned in my memory ... since we were talking about Red Hat making a feeble attempt to try and straighten out that which they wrought.