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First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat
Susie D writes "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released today, and Linux Format has an in-depth first look (with screenshots aplenty). With RHEL 5, Red Hat aims to become even more 'open', by using a shorter and clearer SLA, improving community involvement through its Knowledge Base, and providing the new Red Hat Exchange. But what you really want to know is, yes, it does include XGL for fancy 3D desktop effects."
Red Hat kindly makes SRPM's available, so yes you could download RHEL for free. You would have to build the system yourself.
Thankfully, others have already done that and made the results available, for instance CentOS
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Things are different these days. The main thing you get from being a paying customer of Red Hat is long-term stability (i.e., packages stay relatively the same for years, aside from bugfixes), patch rollout, and support from both Red Hat and other vendors. You're probably not in their ideal audience anymore, since general users who want a good free desktop were pointed to Fedora when that project was created from RH9 a few years ago. Now the company's audience consists almost exclusively of corporate types who want support from Red Hat, or who run software that is certified to run on Red Hat but is not guaranteed to work on much else (such as Oracle). Your distro of choice, righteous though it may be, wouldn't suit that audience very well because if there were problems, there would be no one to blame.
You can argue which distro is better until the cows come home. But when it comes to a corporate adoption, you'll need a RedHat, SuSE, or some other company like that to provide the target for finger pointing.
OCO is Loco
RHEL (like Fedora) does NOT include or support XGL. They support AIGLX, another accelerated desktop mechanism. They do support and ship compiz (the Window Manager that does the cube thingy), though. (compiz works on both AIGLX and XGL)
People running mission-critical systems that require rapid, on-demand support where a newsgroup just won't suffice rely on Red Hat (or Sun, who is in a similar position) to provide defined support.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
There is no limit on downloading the source. When you buy RHEL, you buy the *binaries* and you buy support. The GPL explicitly allows charging for binaries. You are even allowed to charge "reasonable" media fees for source, but Red Hat very kindly makes the source free as in beer. You can compile the source yourself, or let http://centos.org/ do it for you.
The GPL is about *freedom*, not price. RHEL gives you full freedom. And while you can't get official RHEL binaries for free, derivatives based on the source are available that are free as in beer.
While an individual or small business has little reason to buy RHEL, an enterprise has good reasons. You get a highly stable platform with security patches for a long period of time. You get support. You get someone to blame when things go wrong. As an individual, you might want to try Centos and get familiar with it. You never know when you might want to work for an enterprise that uses RHEL. As a small business, you can start out with Centos, and if your business takes off, scale right up to RHEL with minimal hassle.
Well you just gotta look at it the right way.
/etc/inittab
He's running perl with three options, right? -p -i -e (I like them in that order because "It's easy as pie to replace strings in files with perl")
then he's giving a regex, followed by a file name.
If he had a file with the contents "foo" and wanted to replace the word "foo" with "bar", he'd do:
perl -p -i -e s/foo/bar/ file
The command he gave just looks ugly because it needs the \s to escape the colons. It'd be easier to not escape the colons and wrap the command in quotes, like so:
perl -p -i -e "s/id:6:in/id:3:in/"
Six one way, one half dozen the other.