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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."
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
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ah...so they are sucking them in and grinding them up into FUD! Don't go to the conference man - Fedora is people!
Do I sense a coming of distro splits/forks?
...yup...
FUDCicle?
KFG
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.
"Attention all personnel! Incoming Microsoft press release! Set FUD CON 1 throughout the facility!"
Best Slashdot Co
As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default. Especially when I tell the installer I live outsite the US.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
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.
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.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I was tracking Red Hat Linux distributions up through 9. /. seem to think this is a "feature."
I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.
Most folks on
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.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Nice rip of the comments from this forum.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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.
This guy is way out there
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
I am trolling
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.
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.
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?!
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.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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.
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.
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.
Got Code?
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?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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.
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.
I feel so sig.
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
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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.
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.
Self-promotion: blixtra.org
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
See what I've been reading.
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.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
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!
The Fedora CVS is available at http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/. Lots of goodies there!
Why don't we have an open CVS thingie for a more advanced packaging system, hey?
--exa--
.... and it was crap.
Then came KDE and gnome improved. AND KDE fighted back.
Now we have 2 very usable desktops.
Competition is good!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
AC was right. RH was losing money hand over fist. I hadn't realized that they were unprofitable during the period.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
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)
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
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.
Open Source Sushi
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.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Actually it's a troll article from something awful. But still it's just a troll.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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).
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
I will love this kind of act unless i learn linux first.
...but here on /. we still have the Trollfest.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
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.
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....
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
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.
Now that commercial operating systems are becoming free and open, what do you do?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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?
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.
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
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
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
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?