Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats

Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"

Comments

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[cowbutt]

That's exactly it.

Fedora's catching up fast, but Debian and Gentoo are still in the lead with respect to the number of applications available within their main package repositories. That's why their package management tools appear to work better - it's actually down to all the hard work that's been put in by the package maintainers though; the tools are nothing special (rpm provides equal or better functionality to dpkgs and ebuilds, and apt is available for rpm as well as yum).

The trouble is that the lesser number of packages for Fedora/RH encourages newbie and intermediate users to indiscriminately install packages from random places, with the expected results. If, however, you pick a handful of co-operative package repositories (e.g. dag + rpmforge only, or fedora extras + livna only, or ATrpms only), things work out pretty well. For packages that aren't available, it's best to learn to roll your own, either by porting packages from other versions/distros, or upgrading existing packages, or from scratch.

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[joe 155]

well, the article isn't really about this, but as a fedora user I feel like I should at least counter some of your claims:

YUM works very well in FC5, it has made keeping software up to date really easy, far more than on windows. everything does it pretty much strait away; so for me it's great. They do have a GUI one aswell, but that doesn't seem to be as fast and I like the information... so run it from the command line

You also don't need to look through random websites, you already get 3 repositories with the distro, but it's really easy to add another (I've got livna) in there. These will contain pretty much all the software you could ever want to find

you really should consider trying fedora again. it's such a good little OS. anyway, if you do you should go to http://www.fedorafaq.org/ it contains a load of helpful information about how to get everything going. Also, it's not fedora's fault that some proprietary stuff doesn't work out of the box - it's free speech and wants to stay that way - we really should be praising them for this, not condeming them because it might take a little more effort to get some things working. Anyway, give it a go.