Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Perceptions of Red Hat Software
Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks this
worthwhile question which even I don't
have a ready answer to:
"It seems to me that a growing number of
people within the Linux community are
starting to fear and loathe Red Hat Software.
I read that
article about the Red Hat backlash
and I often see comments here on
Slashdot that make disparaging remarks
against them. I'm curious: has Red Hat
actually done anything that warrants
this type of reaction? Or are people just
getting paranoid about what Red Hat has the
potential to do? No, I'm not a Red Hat
lacky, I'd just like to illuminate a
potentially irrational paranoia within the
community." So what do you all think?
Red Hat and Caldera probably have the most potential to legitimize Linux in the business world. I don't see how this can be bad, period. It's not as if the Linux community won't still have enough influence to mold Linux into what we want it to be. Without companies like Red Hat et al, we'd all be out in the cold.
I had used Slackware since 1.2.13 days but switched over to RH around 5.1 and honestly could care less which dist I used. I do think rpm's are pretty cool though, they definately make my life easier.
I really don't understand the animosity though, I find it very hard to believe that someone's favorite dist will be stiffled because I don't know if you can force free software out. How can you force something out of a market where everything's free?
It seems as though Debian has a very verbal community that is more than willing to attack redhat users (e.g. a previous Slashdot.org post labeled Debian as the distro for hackers and Redhat - the distro for newbies)
I have been using linux for about 4 months. I am an established c, c++, java, programer. I find redhat infintely more useful than debian purely because the binary packages are more up to date and the installation more easily navigatable (dselect is an eye-sore, the installer seems to ask a number of questions more than once (where is my cdrom from example it asks 2+ times during the install), and the installer failed to set up lilo correctly both times i installed forcing me to boot off a floppy to correct the problem)
debian advocates loud apt, but scorn untested software, but forgive me if i'm wrong isn't apt unstable at this time? debian seems to be more about unix standards and redhat more about GUI admin tools.
any one have any good debian specific info. The cause really pleases me. I'd especially like to know how to make usable debs from RPMs/source of my work (i hear alien doesn't work so well after all)
thanks,
no flames, just the facts please
-matt
It was just a little while ago when I switched
from RH to Debian. I know RH's income money helps
fund the Linux community too, but I think if they
became too popular and started tweaking or bending existing standards to their own, the userbase would be so big that the standard would change. Maybe a propietary application that RH ships on its demo CDs needs certain files in non-standard directories: the company pays RH the money for distributing this demo, and so RH changes a little.
I haven't seen this happen, but it's just a thought. And most people are right, right now RH hasn't done anything wrong for the Linux community. But for the future, I don't want to go along with RH.
Debian being non-commercial helps maintain standards based on what people want, not how much a company can get for doing something else. BTW, I don't like how some propietary software companies only ship RPMs. RPM will always stay free, so alien will always work, but that is a sign that RH is becoming too synonomous with Linux among newer and less experienced Linux users.
Who said you get to pick the "goal" for Linux? Hell, even Linus himself doesn't get to do that, as he doesn't have any greater right to change and distribute it than I do.
My goal is not to put Linux on every desktop. In fact, I'd rather see it kept out of the hands of the typical computer idiots of the world. I used to simply want a decent OS. Now I have it, and the GPL has spoiled me by allowing me to modify & distribute as well, so that's a good secondary goal.
I resent that you presume to speak for me, as I resent ESR and Bruce Perens presuming to know what I want, too.
Please, people, remember this: I am an anonymous Linux user. I have my own opinions, my own goals, my own desires. I don't want to be in any damn community with you. The advertisement in Linux Journal used to say "There's no such thing as a typical Linux user." Please remember that. You pursue your goals how you want, but never, ever, ever try to impede me from pursuing mine.
--
"There is no worse tyranny than to make a man pay for something he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." -Benjamin Franklin
apt is stable and is part of Debian 2.1.
potatoe??
I didn't know Dan Quayle was hip enough to be a Linux user! Amazing.
:-D
I know that personally, when I started Linux (which was early in the 1.2.x kernel series),
I always found a resentment towards Red Hat, mainly because of the RPM system.
(Among the local Linux community, no body would ever use RH.)
Since then, a lot of us have realized that using packages does not make you a "wuss,"
(well, most of us have), but virtually all of us have switched to Debian.
Finally someone who said something that made some sense. Just cause Redhat feels easy dont mean that its NOT linux... last i checked it was like all the rest. And for all you who have a problem with RPM's Where the hell does it say that you have to use the RPM's ? ? There are SRPMS and hell just screw that part of redhat. I started using it just cause i wanted to see what all the talk was about, also using Slackware 3.6... RPM's are great when something goes wrong with tar balls and you want something on the system!!! Redhat is being run by ppl. who dont want it to remain in the basement of Power users, but want their product out there. Thats the way things work.... so go with it
...but Debian's where it's at.
Really, previous posters are absolutely correct that RedHat has done nothing at all to tick anyone off...in fact, the CDE and Applix thing was a pretty stand-up thing to do...probably cost them a little in the short run.
And their software contribution has been large and very well received.
I think RedHat would be a great deal better if the rpm maintainers pulled the --write-a-crappy-package option out of rpm.
But if their chief enterprise were redistributing slackware 2.0 from now to eternity, their (very well-placed...Intel, IBM, etc.) contribution to the "I get to use it at work" idea has been their most remarkable contribution to-date...and that's what everyone should feel pretty good about.
I'll always be a fan, if not a user.
--A.C.
So, Who made you in charge? And in particular who are you talking about?
Who said they were speaking for you. Who the hell are you and why would someone _want_ to speak for you.
I resent that you wish to keep something good from other people, of course, maybe linux was written for you alone so you then have a right to bitch about who it is and is not for. Go have a glass of warm milk and calm down.
Those that do linux programming pick the goal for it. If you don't like it then start writing your own code.
Steven.
come on, man, get alien if you can't use rpm's.
it's the author's perogative to only distro in RPM. It's becoming a standard, maybe you should
install rpm?
Ummm....WTF? What does music have to
:)
do with Red Hat being evil? Just for that...
I will write out your email address so that
all the spambots find it HEHEHEHEHE!
mani.ghasemlou@sympatico.ca
May your mail box fill to the brim with
spammy goodness! Man I have been coding
too long
I'm sure he's got it installed on his Fisher-Price Computer. ;-)
I don't like and never have liked Red Hat. They have done some good things and are supporting quite a few good things, but what they're doing is making Linux idiot-friendly.
I originally installed Linux (slackware... which i still use) about 4 years ago because I wanted to learn something. Red Hat's distribution does everything for you during the installation process, and after the installation process.
Making this short... the average Slackware devotee most likely knows a lot more about the inner workings of the operating system than a Red Hat person does. Adding a user to the system with a stupid GUI isn't exactly a learning experience. And that's just the starting of it.
RPMs... well... that's a whole different post... *shudder*
Why not, I'm sure Al Gore is.
You need to answer your original question yourself. wtf is the point of restricting a damn good computing environment to about .1% of users. Let me ask you a question, could you have set up a LINUX box seven years ago with only a couple of floppies and no help to guide you? Maybe you could, I know that I probobly couldn't without devoting an entire year to it's study. I probobly would have had trouble three/four years ago. The evolution of the OS is the entire point. Expanding the user base is directly correlated to getting more functionality out of LINUX.
Personally, I kind of resent the attitude : " I'd rather see it kept out of the hands of the typical computer idiots of the world". Very few 'computer idiots' are attempting to implement LINUX. If they are (idiotic), then, yes, they will not succeed, but there are an ever expanding group of capable users not willing to give it a shot because it is so intimidating. Why not make it more accessible?
br See y'all at the expo in Ral, I'll be the guy with the glint of optimism in his eyes.
What distribution do you use?
;)seems commonplace on this site, even by the administators. I suggest that everybody stops wining about distro's, *including* Rob Malda.
I started with Slackware years ago. These days I use Redhat 5.1 on my servers and Debian on personal boxes. New users should start with Red Hat. Advanced users should consider Debian, especially if they are familiar with Unix already. Nobody should use Slackware
unless they are used to it already. SuSE is also popular, and friends speak highly of it. I'm not familiar enough with the other
distributions to speak fairly for them, and frankly, my love affair with Debian shows no signs of waning any time soon.
That is from the SlahDot FAQ, so bashing Distributions (In this case slackware in case you didn't notice
wayout
ewout at chello dot nl
(Left my cookies at home)
I remember something that has to do with Oracle and Library Versions.
So check out library versions needed by Oracle and how they are included in the RedHat distribution.
I guess this is the real reason for
The version of Stampede I used was Slackware with an nfs site set up for installs, everything compiled with pgcc, and glibc2 as the default. Oh yeah, they renamed .tgz packages to .slp. Dunno if they got the new installer ready yet or not.
SLP is a package system of its own, not renamed TGZs.
Go back and look at the post of the person to whom I was responding. He said, "Remember, the goal is to have Linux on every desktop, including where we work, we're going to get stuck using commercial software, so at least let us run a GOOD distribution... like Stampede."
So, he was presuming to speak for all Linux users. I dislike this. I told him so. If you reread MY post, now, you'll see that I DID NOT presume to be in charge, I did not try to speak for him or put words into his mouth. I disagree with his reason for disliking Red Hat's market dominance, and I think his basis for it is ridiculous.
Also, you'll see that I actually ADVOCATED the freedom under the GPL, and therefore don't actually wish to see it actively withheld from interested parties. My quip about "keeping it out of the hands of the typical computer idiots of the world" was made with the intent to make this guy reevaluate his goals for his OS. It doesn't take a history professor to remember what happened when the Internet was a largely homogenous environment: remember the Internet Worm of the late eighties?
And homogenous network environments in the hands of the typical computer idiots of the world: can you say "Melissa virus?"
"Of course as far as the actual GPLed code circulating out there, that's fair game for everyone and impossible to retract or recall."
This is exactly my point. Linus doesn't have the power to change the license over that any more than I do, and therefore he and I have equal leverage over what happens to our respective code archives. He can't tell me what to do with mine any more than I can tell him what to do with his, and I like that freedom! And I'll thank him for giving me that freedom by GPL'ing the code, too, if I can.
Point is, I'm different from him, I'm different from the guy to whom I responded, and I don't think Linus's little joke about world domination (yes, pimple-faces, it was a joke!) should be taken up as a banner-waving religion under which Red Hat is railed simply because they use the freedom they have (and I have, and he has, and Linus has) to make more money than the rest of us.
Got it that time?
Please note that I was in fact advocating the freedom of the GPL in my post; I was not trying to actively withhold code (or freedom) from anyone. I think you may have latched onto the phrase "computer idiot" and ignored the rest of my post, just because of the strong wording there.
Let me explain that, so you can get back to reading the rest of my post and sympathizing with my refusal to be grouped with operating system bigots:
In introduction, I am a self-professed geek. I run Unix operating systems because I think they're fun, Bash is still my favorite file manager, and I get a thrill out of seeing new networking tools working together. The average computer user does not care about these things, nor do they find them entertaining as I do, nor do they have the time to spend administrating a Unix-based network, as I do.
The average computer user should only really HAVE to do a few simple things to their computer to get it to become useful and safe. When an email comes across their security advisory list to make sure macro virus protection is enabled in their copy of Word 97, they should be able to click that checkbox in the preferences dialog and go on with their business.
The "typical computer idiots" are the ones who don't do this, and go whining and pissing and moaning about their glutted email servers when the Melissa virus hits them, even though they can blame only their own ignorance. Do they contribute anything to a community? Do they understand the basic implications of replacing typewriters with computers? Do they care? Can they do actual work on their virus-riddled computers? Can they contribute anything useful to the world around them other than that annoying whining, pissing, and moaning?
The answers to these questions are all "no," and therefore, if asked, "do we want to support these users in our newsgroups and IRC channels?" I would again say "no." These are the computer idiots I don't care about, and about which you hear the customer support horror stories and jokes. They don't care about us geeks, and we don't care about them. To "convert" them is a worthless goal, and an even worse basis for deriding Red Hat. So my argument against the person to whom I responded still stands: don't discern the value of distributions on the opinions of people who don't matter. Evangelizing everyone is not my goal, nor even minorly important in the way most of us use Linux.
Got it that time?
Sounds like nonsense. Oracle ships for stock RedHat, and the stock RedHat C library is available as SRPMS (which means source) from every RedHat distro. What I could conceive is that Oracle needs some specific library version at least. SuSE has been pretty slow in adapting to newer library versions.
RedHat *is* the 800# Gorilla. It is wading through the thickets and making pathway for Linux. All the stuff it creates gets released under GPL or LGPL. Which means that they have rendered themselves utterly unable to do any harm to the Linux community, all their weight withstanding.
People are pounding on RedHat because of jealousy and being unhappy with themselves. There is no company that has dared to commit itself to free software the way RedHat did. Now that they are successful, everybody else is getting mad that they have not and still not dare to equal their commitment.
The only danger this gorilla poses is that it is able to choose its direction itself. While it cannot turn on anybody, it clears mostly one path and that is of its own volition. So everybody complains that it would be better if the gorilla was dead and everybody had to clear its own path because then all paths would be equally bad.
Now RedHat is even behaving very open towards standardization efforts. It very much looks like RedHat is going to accept any standardization efforts of Linux once they get into serious waters.
If the Linux community would care to stop this senseless RedHat-bashing at least until it may be able to figure out a single bad thing that RedHat did to Linux, it would probably be not as tiring to RedHat employees. If I were one of them, I know I would at some point of time get exasperated and say "screw the Linux community. If they want to perceive us as an enemy at all costs, perhaps we should satisfy their wishes."
Linux groupies are used to supporting it as the underdog, so when a successful Linux distribution comes along it is obviously a "bad thing." Microsoft would love people to believe that Linux is a strong competitor to "prove" they don't have a monopoly, so comparisons between Red Hat and themselves must be mana from heaven (and they would be the last to let reality get in the way of a good story...)
You have not understood what the /usr directory is for. The idea of /usr/local is to accomodate non-standard, site-maintained software. /usr is where everything goes that does not need to be on / (available at boot time). If you want to keep / small, make a separate partition for /usr, /var and a few other dirs.
Your quaint notions of where things belong are at odds with the Linux file system standard.
I don't think the person you are responding to was talking about the Red Hat distribution. I think he was complaining about RPMs from Red Hat that are not part of the distribution. He wants those to go into /usr/local/bin.
Redhat was nice enough to include a redhat bumpersticker (which isn't as cute as the bitten off apple you used to see everywhere) in their $50 shelf distro. It looks great on my 10 year old totaled, oil leaking, rusty Escort, next to my Grateful Dead sun. Do any other distros include a bumper sticker?
GeorgeH, trying hard not to be an AC.
I attended a redhat meeting recently, here at ncsu in raleigh (so no I'm not an employee) and redhat addressed this issue, saying that they didn't feel that they should serve files for other companies like Oracle. As it is right now, they don't have the bandwidth. They're upgrading servers, however, quite soon, and they will then have an expanded file selection. Btw: I believe that the files you mentioned are actually on ftp.redhat.com, but of course that is always quite busy. Redhat is aiming at establishing bandwidth such that people could use ftp.redhat.com as their primary download site, rather than mirrors.
Isn't RedHat sort of the standard for corporate
people? And hell, they still give it away,
no one forced anyone to _buy_ it.
I think the replacement for hating MS is Apple now. Even though they have been continuously doing Good Things(TM) recently.
"The APSL wasn't perfect the first time around, so let's persecute them! Oh, it's right now... it isn't exactly like the GPL so it sucks! It's a few hundred words longer than the GPL, I don't have the attention span to read it all! And they're a corporation, therefore no matter what, what they are doing is only for evil reasons! Even if they opened everything up, went out of business and donated every last penny to charities, they're still evil and always will be!"
"What's with those iMacs? Those only appeal to women and gays!! I have proof of this because one gay person at my college has an iMac! And we all know being gay is just WRONG! Why did they make those iMacs!??! (Even though they make non iMac computers, but let's ignore that fact)."
"And how dare Apple advertise and promote their own products! Those evil greedy corporate bastards! And let's hold grudges because they cancelled the Lisa and I once had one! Now I will forever hate them because of some mistakes in their past!"
"Most of all, they're an evil empire! With over 10% of the computer market, they are a force to be feared! They just have sooo much power over standards... Look how many standards they are supporting with Quicktime 4, I bet they plan on ruining them all somehow! Look how proprietery they are!! I mean, come on! They are workers of Satan... the employees probably belong to the Trenchcoat mafia!"
"And that Think Different campaign, pfft. If people really thought different, they'd all be using Linux like the rest of us because it is the REAL rebel OS. "
"And if we can't think of anything to say, we'll bring up political philosophies. Down with corporations and capitalism! What has capitalism ever done for us!?!? They only exist to make money, therefore they do not care AT ALL what their customers want, but only what their shareholders want! (Let's ignore the fact the key thing with surviving as a company is pleasing customers, drawing in new ones, and providing a service(s) people want... in order to stay afloat)."
When you talk about corporations, Caldera is also a very popular distribution.
When all of us had glibc, Caldera was still in dark ages, using libc5 and an old version of the kernel. A bit like version 4.2 (?) of RedHat, that is still on sale, because it is very stable and "proven". For hackers, this is a joke, but for corporate, that seemed acceptable.
Anyway, I think the new Caldera is a big improvement, a worth taking a look at.
Er I still use libc 5. I dont see how i'm in the dark ages, i can do anything a glibc system can except threading :)
...are the flocks of idjits that take the paranoids seriously. Demonizing Red Hat because they have achieved some success is a stupid waste of time, as is this thread.
Sure can, the latest versions of tripwire.
I upgraded slack 3.6 to glibc2.1 and asked
if www.tripwiresecurity.com was working on
a version that worked w/ glibc2.1.
They replied that the newest versions are
RedHat only. You have your example.
Later.
Whoever said RPM was a code IMPROVMENT? RPM is very very inflexible and in my view not a good packaging system.
You have to keep in mind that Red Hat is also freely downloadable. I think the authors who see their software sold as "Red Hat" chuckle at the people who actually buy the software rather than feel ripped off.
I'm using caldera at the moment. I've a got new job where caldera is what they use. I come from a redhat/debian/suse background and let me tell ya...caldera _needs some work_.
The only thing you didn't try is Debian. :-) Which is second behind Red Hat in market share. Perhaps it's worth trying, if you're so much into trying different OSes anyway. :-)
I suppose my only gripe with RedHat (I am using 5.2) is that the init/config files are written such that they rely upon other RedHat "approved" packages. For example: Upon upgrading to kernel 2.2.5 and DHCPcd to 1.3.16, (DHCP was effected by the kernel changes), DHCPcd would fail to get an IP address 90% of the time (although it ACTED like it got a legit address). After trying everything I could think of, I removed the dhcpcd rpm and gor ISC version of DHCP-client. I really like this client. Not only did it work, It provides lots of info to the user. Unfortunately, the init files were written expecting DHCPcd, not DHCP-client. If redhat had used a nice, plain rc.inet1/2, I could have simply edited the file by hand. However, they use a complex hierachy of scripts designed not to be modified. changes should be made to a config file which is nothing more then a bunch of shell variables, which will be fed to the scripts. So: Does debian do this? Is there a distribution out there with a nice package management system that uses plain-old rc.xxxxx files for initialization? Thanks.
>Anyway it doesn't matter to me as I normally edit the config files by hand.
:)
You are such a macho!
the rpm-suite is Open Source remember which means it'll just run fine on many distro's, and if not I'm sure it can be 'ported'
I've seen too many posts calling Redhat the "Microsoft of the linux world". They are nothing like microsoft. They don't have "hidden" APIs, they don't have a monopoly, and they give their software away for FREE via download. People are afraid because redhat is popular.
If anything, the linux community should be thankful to redhat. They have proven linux can be easy to install. They have also been the ones to strive to bring linux to media attention. The majority of the reviews I read on linux in mainstream press are about redhat. They deserve it. They've created an exceptional distribution.
The average person doesn't want to sit reading manpages for hours just so they can start Xwindows. Redhat has taken care of that hassle for them. Redhat isn't perfect, but it started the momentum towards an easy install and easy configuration. Who else was doing it? No, Redhat isn't microsoft. It's simply a company that knows what the people want, and tries to give it to them.
I still haven't been able to get the real video player working under SuSE(5.3/6.0)... But it could just be a configuration/library issue (I can't seem to compile a Linux 2.2.6 kernel either), anyway I do agree with you that there is nothing wrong with RH!
Wouldn't it be nice if programs that were installed on the system automatically got added to my menus?
What do you mean I have to hunt down all the RPMs this depends on myself??
You have to use --force --no-deps.
:-) ) and it's incredibly frustrating to see people requesting convenience features in 'Linux' that other distributions have had forever. I don't usually have a whole lot of ill will towards Red Hat, I just get periodically fed up with questions about things that people shouldn't even have to ask questions about if Red Hat really is the 'user-friendly' distribution.
RedHat's installation is the *only* thing I've seen about their distribution that is even passably user-friendly (Gnome will help
Daniel
Many redhat people are under NDA with big companies to write stuff for linux.
Redhat shows through this, and its other actions
a lack of respect for the 'free' nature of linux.
If you were the redhat chiefs, and you could make
lots of $ and thought you could get 'in' some huge business market, and had to sacrifice just a little bit of freedom, would you do it?
the redhat people probably will.
Slackware hardly does anything for you, (no, not even X) and you have to convert RPM packages to tar.gzs or cpios (or use -nodeps for _every _single_package_, if you decide to get it).
Or Install the rpm program under slackware
"In short, RH is making it easier for folks like myself who're comfortable with the other OS' out there to learn Linux. "
How do you know that Redhat is easier than (in
alphabetical order) Caldera, Debian, Mandrake,
Slackware, Stampede, Suse or Turbolinux?
Have you tried any of these?
I think it is more telling that you picked up
RedHat rather than the other ones. Maybe it's
word of mouth, but most likely it is marketing
and media hype, where quite often Linux is
equated with RedHat.
Is this a good thing? I don't think so.
Matthias
My experience is with Slackware, Redhat, and Debian. I really can't say that Debian is any harder than either of these. Perhaps a bit harder than Redhat, but only incrementally so.
However, *running* Debian is far far easier than anything else I've tried. For example, last night I needed bunzip2 to uncompress a tar ball. Logged in as root, ran dselect, did a search for bzip, marked it to be uninstalled, did another search for bzip, marked it to be installed, selected install from the main menu, waited 20 seconds, and done.
There's a good reason that Rob switched to Debian.
I've done a couple of FTP based Red Hat installs, and haven't paid them a cent. Who is it that told people that Red Hat sells Linux? Red Hat creates a *free* (emphasis on the word, "FREE") distribution and sells BOOKS. Are we next going to start flaming O'Reilly for [insert your five favorite books here]? The fact that Red Hat is interested in standards (exceptions notwithstanding) and actually employs people to work on GPL utilities shows a tremendous amount of good faith, IMHO. Frankly, I'm ashamed of myself for not yet buying the Red Hat Linux book. (Maybe Tomorrow.)
Right now, YaST is proprietary. Without a free way to install and configure the OS, the OS is pretty much useless. If SuSE got a monopoly, I'm willing to bet most of the user interface would start to phase over to proprietary or semiproprietary. You'd also see even more proprietary kernel modules for new hardware. The OS already depends on some proprietary software, and it would begin to depend on it more and more.
It's not and never was free in the freedom sense. After a couple of years, SuSE could easily drop free-of-charge distribution, and it would certainly not be free even in the free-of-charge sense, and we'd be back to Windows.
I agree with this. I use Slackware, but I believe any distro for Linux helps out the Linux community. I for one, would like to see Red Hat become very popular so I could stop using f*cking winblows at work (reboot anyone?). Making Red Hat easier/popular would help out small businesses (that don't make millions a year, and just use the computer for accounting and word processing) run a stable robust OS, whether it's RH, Slack, Debian whatever. Where I work, no one but me knows anything about keeping a system running and they're only interested in Quickbooks and Word. We have lots problems with win, but it's simple for the owners...They don't understand Linux, command prompts scare them, so they wouldn't run it. The Linux community needs to stop their whining (please!) and pressure companies such as Intuit to port Quicken/Quickbooks (we already have Corel!) to Linux. If Quickbooks ran under Linux, the company I work for would be running Linux (they wouldn't switch to a different acct software), but if we waste our time whining about who sucks and who doesn't, this grand opportunity to get small business to run Linux will be over. We forget how many small businesses there are out there that would like a cheaper/stabler alternative to 95, but it has to be easy to use. Go ahead and flame away, but I don't care if RH becomes more popular, I for one, would love to run Linux at work instead of seeing that blue screen of death every 30 minutes.
--SlackGal prcmetal@cts.com
That would probably be the reason Redhat puts Gnome on the Powertools CD and not the main distro.
If you want to stick to stick with the tried and proven technology on linux, than fvwm and friends are about it. Personally, had I to use a linux system I would use Gnome or KDE but they are not stable enough for newbies. A new user would be really confused soon as the gnome-panel stopped responding, or KDE starts apps minimized.
I realize you were talking about more than just X, but I think X is a good example were using the proven technology (fvwm, fvwm2, twm) makes for a wretched environment.
Did you pay for your computer?
Nothing. I found it abandoned in someone's living room. So I took it.
Home? Food? Entertainment?
Home: I just watch to see when people go on vacation, then move in.
Food: Last night I ate the neighbor's cat. Yum.
Entertainment: I usually go to the local elementry school and taunt all the children with visable differences. Great entertainment, and its free.
Conclusion: Everything is free if you really try hard enough.
Come on. We all know what it really is. Linux supporters like to work in closets. They love the esoteric, and they hate it when what they know isn't exclusive knowlege any more. As soon as Red Hat becomes popular (if it does), it'll be scorned by all ultra-Linux-ites as not good enough. Most Linux people will never be happy with a product unless it's unknown. That's just the nature of it. It sounds like kids in school that don't like music bands as soon as they become popular. Same juvenile attitude.
seeing as it has always been Red Hat's policy to NOT announce a release date until they are absolutely sure that it is ready, I wonder why your friend couldn't find that information. And support@redhat.com is what you pay for when you buy the box set - support (imagine that!)
For others it's just "youth."
There are many in the world (not just Linux or computer users) whose self-worth is determined by the fact that they can do something with a common product, such as a computer, that few others can. Linux is one of these "somethings." If Linux does topple M$ and millions of people can learn to use it (RH or other), their skills won't be as valuable and their self-esteem will go down.
This belief is, of course, pure baloney. People who think like this could be the computer-world's version of Michael Jordan and still have the same lack of self-esteem no matter what their endeavor or how good they really are. These folks need a psychiatrist more than they need an operating system.
The Evil Mister Gates comes to mind as an example.
Actually, Companies need someone they can sue if this go wrong. Red Hat just makes linux "accountable" and accountablility is synonmous with "maturity" in the minds of corporate purchasers. Also anyone who has done large scale system deployments knows that on-demand on-phone and on-site tech support 24-7-365 is essential. Red Hat sells to people who want security. If you look at who invested in Red Hat you will find mostly hardware people. These are PC companies burned by MS. Their interest is in having a free OS to loosen the yoke of MS.
I have to agree. I do a lot of helping out on IRC under #unixhelp and #nixhelp. And I can handle people that are uneducated and willing.
But I have to say that Linux *CAN* be a desktop machine. If you go back to the core of the UNIX OS (like BeOS) and think about how it works as a multi-user system. It's not very hard to scale it down to a single user. Where do you think the first UNIX OS came from? At one point during the development cycle it had to pass through a single-user operation state in order to provide multi-user enviroment as rich as we have now.
Question is (this is straying from the orignal topic a lot =)why can't Linux be a desktop OS for the masses? *WHAT* prevents it? What makes a server OS and desktop OS different? How it is used? What software is installed?
I forsee two paths for Linux (Redhat Corp..Listen up! =).. The current path where you have a good solid Server OS that will beable to bring business the power and stability they want (that NT does not always provide), and a small side track for desktop. Where the desktop version might not include what is mainly "server features" (Like telnetd, ftpd, etc), but will provide a rich UI and a simple way of maintaining the OS so you don't have to reintall every year due to the OS eating itself.
BTW, We have already cracked open the can of worms with KDE and GNOME for desktop support. We should finish it and help educate those who want to use it.
Saves a lot of clutter in /usr/bin etc.
Hey all,
One thing that I keep on reading is about how people pay for RedHat, even though most of it is freely downloadable. Whilst I find that this is fair enough, I personally like the fact that if I need to install a new package for whatever reason, all I have to go to is my one CD, and sure enough, it's on it.
Also, I'm not sure about those from other countries but, I have never *really* paid for a RedHat CD. Normally, you can see a RedHat CD as a coverdisk on a computer magazine. Now, for a couple of quid, I think that's good value.
Whilst on the subject, at work SuSe is used... I like both RedHat and SuSe, but don't loose sight of the fact that you can also get a lot of the SuSe CDs from the 'net.
I agree entirely. I hate rpm's, and prefer tar.gz because I can use whatever tools I want in whatever combination I want to do whatever I want. "rpm" is to "tar.gz" as "pdf" is to "ps".
On the other hand, I understand why some people prefer rpm's, and I appreciate the problems RedHat was trying to solve with the rpm format. I very much believe that they could have implemented it better, though. Consider: they could have put all the rpm metadata into a file called " metadata" (ie, space + space + "metadata") and put it in an ordinary tar file. Now anyone who wants to treat it as an ordinary tarball can do so, but the special enhanced tar utility ("etar", or "rhtar" or whatever) can scan the top of the tarball for the presence of this metadata, and if it is present it can use it to implement all of the rpm functionality. Everyone wins.
-- Guges --
the key is "learning curve to move to another distro" is deeper for red hat usrs.
I'm using SuSE and loving it, but i guess you have a point. however, i don't use anything in SuSe that are closed, i don't use YaST or whatever the X configuration tool it comes with. no RPM, i compile everything.
i think SuSE made a smart decision: any slackware user will feel like home using SuSE. we can do without any of the SuSE distro-specific stuffs. i.e. we can switch to another distro in a jiffy.
but, can red hat users do that? i guess not. red hat people are mostly windows new transfers, and they rely too much on configuration tools, scripts and such.
i think a lot of people have this feeling that red hat intended to make people "hooked" to thier distro. which is pretty much what MS did to gain market share. "make it easy to get in, hard to get out." but this has NEVER been the point of unix.
i personally am sick of people who are installing red hat distros on someone who is not ready for unix; it created more problems than we can handle.
why is it that all pro-RH comments get high ratings? i smell comspiracy.
this whole thing is a lame flame bait anyways. slashdot do it 50 times a month.
I think it's even more that lots of folks think that the more paranoid and suspicious you are, the _smarter_ you are -- thus, in a thread on FreeDOS right here on Slashdot, we had "FreeDOS is a Microsoft plot"... (he wasn't kidding)
Y'see? _He's_ a genius, the rest of us are dupes...
Well, as far as I understand, RPM does just that but uses cpio instead of tar. If you strip couple bytes of the .rpm header you'll get your cpio archive (rhcpio == dd ... |cpio - ;-) )
paul
i hate that "need someone to sue" myth that everyone always throws out.
most licenses include provisions that make it illegal to sue because of the software... have seen many posts about this before.
its a MYTH!
People like brand names because they don't want to look like a fool for buying a mistake. When they buy a brand name, they buy safety. This is good for Linux since it will (and has) brought more users to the linux community. More users will bring more software and more development to the community.
Those of us who are more comfortable with Linux will work with the lesser known tools and distrabutions.
Pull your head out.
Haven't you been reading the responses on your own website for chrissakes?
I used to think Slashdot was an intelligent discussion forum, but changed my mind after reading too many irrationally paranoid posts.
FUD? You want FUD? There's tons of it right here, on Slashdot, in the form of the knee-jerk responses to everything from Linux, to Microsoft, to Government, to etc...
Open your eyes.
I suppose you think Linus Torvalds is a new
/usr/local,
convert from Windows. Oh please.
SuSE can't even follow Linux standards, like the
FSSTD or new FHS. They fuck with
which is reserved for local admin use. I should
be able to keep my private stuff there and not
need to worry about it getting screwed by an
OS upgrade.
I never even bothered with the GUI stuff that
Red Hat includes, just like you didn't bother
with the crap that SuSE includes. If I wanted
to though, I could package up the Red Hat tools
for Slackware or Debian. You can't do that with
SuSE tools because SuSE is a parasite.
In fairly extreme cases, people have emotional ages roughly equal to the square root of their calendar ages.
Lack of Self-Esteem? Which group CONSISTENTLY screams about their OS more than any other group?? The Linux users!! Most Linux users are so damn proud that THEY can figure the shit out and nobody else can. Sorry if you have to deny it jsut because you fall in that group...
The Evil Mister Gates comes to mind as an example.
And I think this is a prime example of your maturity level!
I agree with what you're saying, but you are either confused yourself, or you wrote that at 3:00 in the morning and no caffeine... pick one... either slackware or BSD, you can't say you like slackware and you've never used another distro, then switch and say you'll stick with BSD... make up your mind or atleast pick a linux distro.
Anybody that has been in Linux for 5 or more years may know this little known fact.
Back when Caldera based it's distro on Red Hat, they had recognized that a package mangement system would be required inorder to make upgrading possible for it's VARs. Caldera thus provided funding to Red Hat to develop such a system. With this money Red Hat was able to go out and hire some engineers to work on this project including Donnie Barnes.
Red Hat won't admit it out in the open, but its true. Now I know that RPMs still have some quirks, but face it Red Hat has done very much to innovate it for some time. Why, because they've become more like Redmond in that they believe they have control of the "Linux mindshare" and with that comes complacentcy and with that comes lack of innovation.
Nice to know, unlike us Australians, that American's don't have a Tall Poppy syndrome...
Huh?
I hope that guy doesn't own a gun...
For a long time, people argued about whether CP/M was better than MS-DOS. Only problem was the M$ got the marketing right. Digital Research did not.
Why is RedHat everywhere? Because they went after the corporate (seller) market and stayed GPL.
Who would be happier if a half-proprietary Linux (Caldera, Microsoft) were gaining widespread popularity?
For a long time, people argued about whether CP/M was better than MS-DOS. Only problem was the M$ got the marketing right. Digital Research did not.
Why is RedHat everywhere? Because they went after the corporate (seller) market and stayed GPL.
Who would be happier if a half-proprietary Linux (Caldera, Microsoft) were gaining widespread popularity?
Conclusion to draw from this mindless chatter?...
Anyone who uses E for a window manager can't spell iether.
It's mostly paranoia. Red Hat hasn't done anything bad. They are certainly better than anyone other than Debian.
If they do anything bad, people are free to stop paying for Red Hat, since every bit of code Red Hat develops is GPL (with the exception of binary-only X servers, where they are under NDA). Red Hat completely depends on people buying it because they support the company. If at any point we decide Red Hat has actually become evil, we can take Red Hat, and continue developing it independently of the mother company. In reality, Red Hat has enough good people working for them that should Red Hat do anything bad, 90% of the company would quit, and continue working on the good version.
In fact, Red Hat is one of the only two major completely free distributions (the other being Debian). SuSE, Caldera, Slackware and Pacific High Tech distribute a number of proprietary packages with their distributions.
I, for one, am scared as shit of a scenerio where a distribution without Red Hat's commitment to freedom/open source wins out. For instance, SuSE is based on proprietary tools. It could easily get rid of even the free-of-charge distribution it offers today if it gains a monopoly. Then, even though the kernel would be free, the whole OS would no longer be.
- pmitros at mit.edu
I think much of the problem is RH is the big kid on the block right now in terms of Linux. The biggest is always the biggest target, plus there is the fear of anyone 'controlling' Linux in general.
What if we considered what Microsoft would do if they were in Red Hat's shoes?
... Information is power. Red Hat can share or not share depending on how well the publisher plays ball. Put a "Works Best With Red Hat" logo on your product and get early info on the distro.
By setting the de facto standards, Red Hat is in a dominant market position. If they choose to be agressive about it, they could also potentially ruin distro competition, both competitive and non-competitive. It really doesn't have anything to do with 'Open Source' or proprietary code.
Image its 2 years from now and Red Hat has an 80% market share (remember this is a though experiment, not a prediction). Even the small variations in distributions are enough to break large applications like MS Office for Linux and PhotoMegaGimp. Most competitors now wait until Red Hat releases their latest distro and then scramble to update their own to be compatible.
Large publishers now consult Red Hat to see what will make it into their next distro and what won't. What build, what code base, what protocols, what what what
This isn't to say thats what Red Hat wants, or would do - merely that its one example of how a dominant distro publisher could influence even the 'Open Source' market.
RedHat isn't doing anything at all wrong. Whether or not you like the company, their distrobution has done alot for the Linux community and Linux in general. Sure, if Redhat hadn't been there someone else would have, but they've done great IMHO.
And as a sidenote, someone above posted that the only people who complain about Redhat are the "true hackers out there." Let me explain something to you...the "true hackers" out there don't really give a rats ass about any distribution...they install whatever is most popular and start writing code. Most of them only read the headlines on Slashdot and avoid what is commonly percieved as the braindead remarks of clueless morons who blather on and on about which distribution is better, what's the best color, etc. I wouldn't count Slashdot user comments as your finger on the pulse of serious Linux developers.
May I remind you, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox use Redhat. Why? Well, it's a Linux kernel and GNU tools...like every other distribution. If you were the "power user" you claim to be, you'd be able to step back out of your narrow paradigm and grasp this simple concept.
If we start branding RH as "the next bad guy", then we are doing M$'s job for them. This is what they wanted.
Since RH is the one that can gather support from big companies (and Caldera with their OpenLinux probably next), when we start to kill RH from the inside, then M$ has already won.
If we fight among ourselves, there's nothing to be gained from it.
When I took over the IT helm at my company, we were running nothing but NT Servers in office. Important documents were corrupting, fileservers were going blue screen, the MAC - NT network would lock up for long periods of time. I knew that we had to replace the NT network with the stability and performance of a *nix. Red Hat has enabled us to switch because it is perceived as a *SUPPORTED* distribution by management, thus an easy sell. Congrats to Red Hat for contributing to the legitimacy of Linux in business world!
Skimming over the comments thus far, I didn't notice any about RHAD Labs, although a recent post did make mention of Rasterman.
I think it's extremely important to note that while Redhat not only packages its distribution under the GPL, it funds development of such software. We are all well aware that for Linux to become a viable system for out-of-the box use by novices, certain components absolutely need to be developed.
I don't intend to get invoved in everybody's holy war between Gnome, KDE, CDE and whatever else is out there, so I won't make any claims about Gnome's superiority. But it is out there, and is a big step in the direction of novice useability. Developers will also recognize Imlib as a sizeable contribution Redhat developers have made to the Linux community. The list goes on.
Of course, the money to fund full-time employees to write free software has to come from somewhere. And this is where the corporate presence comes in. It becomes difficult for us to distinguish between the corporate Redhat who sells user support as the added value (which is legitimately worth the cash paid for it) and the free Redhat who distributes its product the old-fashioned way.
Redhat as a distribution is another story entirely. Whether it complies to the FSSTD, has your favorite software pre-packaged, or whatever, is a completely subjective issue. But Redhat as a company is unquestionably non-destructive, and in fact helpful to the Linux community at large.
"Well, he don't know the meaning of dope when he's looking for a suit and tie rap that's cleaner than a bar of soap. And i'm the dirtiest thing in sight, matter of fact, break out the girls and let's have a mud fight."
Dan Rosen
So any comments seem to suggest that there has
.0 release.
been widespread Redhat bashing going on
Slashdot. This must be a case of people wounded by
criticism (fair and unfair) of their favourite distro.
In fact, and this series of comments shows it
quite obviously, Slashdot is very Redhat friendly
and seems to have a fair amount of "Redhat groupies" in its daily postings.
Back to the topic at hand, I don't think that
Redhat has done a single bad thing that annoyed
people so much, but they made several decisions in
the last year that I find questionable.
On the technical side the move to glibc2 was
probably premature and it showed. 5.1 was a mess,
constant upgrades were necessary, and I had the
feeling that they rushed it out for whatever
reason. 5.2 was finally stabilized. But there
were several annoyances in the upgrades that
just accumulated and I finally had the impression
that their handiwork was just not up to snuff.
I basically felt I was part of a really large beta
test. So when Suse6.0 came out I switched at my
home machine and found it of much sounder quality
especially for a supposedly "unstable"
Politically, their original wavering with the LSB
was a mistake, although incredibly there are
people even now arguing that it was the right decision.
The other political decision I did and do not
understand was the KDE/QT/GNOME issue.
Their public denouncement of KDE because of the
QT issue was IMHO one of the reason for the
division of the community in this matter (Bruce
Perens essay didn't help either). As has been
pointed out Redhat at that time was far from free
from proprietary software (not in the base but in
the add-on software), and they even shipped
(allowed shipping) RH5.2 with KDE in Europe,
further undermining their original reasoning in this matter.
Their very active support of GNOME instead of supporting the Harmony effort (a GPL
clone of the QT library that died quickly when
Troll tech announced the QPL) also disturbed me
quite a bit at that time.
Now it can be argued that even this has born
fruits, as maybe Troll would not have QPLed QT
without the big furor about it, and now (or soon
enough hopefully) there are two desktop
environments available (and competition is
good as they say). But the division and bad blood
that the KDE/GNOME flames created will be
difficult to heal, and I think Redhat has to take
some responsibility for it (as do others).
Will Redhat be the next Microsoft? No, but there
are possibilities which I would not like to see
happen, some of them have been pointed out earlier
like dependence of widely popular commercial
software on the Redhat distro, forcing everybody
else to emulate their system to make such binaries
work. But I kind of doubt this will happen.
Anyway, I am now running Redhat at the lab and
Suse at home and really the differences are not as
big as most people make them out, some of contrib
rpm's install and run fine on both systems. That
might change again since Redhat is pushing
glibc2.1 (again I think that this is too early)
but we will see. If I get disenchanted by Suse and
Redhat delivers a more solid distro maybe I switch
back who knows.
And that is their dogged insistance on putting every damn thing that falls in their lap into /usr/bin instead of /usr/local/bin where it belongs. /usr/bin is for the non-priviledged system tools, /usr/local/bin is where all the non-required stuff with high code churn is supposed to live.
/usr/bin, even after deinstalling a few RPMs to add newer versions to /usr/local/bin. My solaris box (can you say bloat?) at work only has 421 files in /usr/bin.
/usr/local/* (not always bin).
/usr/contrib/bin meant they were usually SOL, whereas /usr/local/bin meant phones would start ringing.
/usr/bin. ee belongs in /usr/local/bin.
RH 5.9 has 1779 executables in
One company I worked at many years ago had a simple directory structure for the user commands:
/usr/bin - utilities supplied by manufacturer
/usr/local/bin - stuff developed in-house
/usr/contrib/bin - stuff developed by people outside the company, i.e. net community
Purchased 3rd party applications would usually find themselves under
The users could run the command 'which ' and immediately tell who they were supposed to ask for support just by looking at the path name. Anything under
RedHat's packaging of binaries would have us believe that they developed everything in their distro, and that programs such as pbmtoptx are absolute requirements such that the system is completely unusable without them.
find belongs in
C'mon Red Hat, get with the program!
Red hat has been really successful in creating a well-known brand name. This is the problem. They are stealing the fire from Linux itself. Probably 95% of the good things that Red Hat offers are not Red Hat. They're just Linux.
Some people outside of the Linux world think that Red Hat is synonymous with Linux. They are not even aware that there are other distributions.
It's only natural that this bugs people. A lot of people spend a lot of their own personal time contributing freeware to Linux and associated software. It bugs them to see all of this sold as "Red Hat".
In my opinion, the best way to combat this is not to condemn Red Hat, but rather to make sure that there are always many different distributions of Linux, and that no one of them comes to dominate.
So are we to criticize Red Hat just for being successful? There are many commercial linux distributors who do not feel as inclined as Red Hat to follow GPL. Caldera and Suse come to mind. Red Hat is nearly as concerned with following GPL as non-profit organizations like Debian. They pioneered glibc. Without them gnome would never have gotten off the ground and it is unlikely that a GPL version of QT would have been created as a response. Red Hat is not some larger coorporation trying to take over Linux. They are quite possibly the best thing that ever happened to Linux. Yet people insist on attacking them solely because they've done well. Sure, people associate Linux with Red Hat first, but that is only because Red Hat has created a very good distribution which has become common. They are not trying to make people think that Red Hat is Linux.
AC
Red Hat is a company, which needs to be profitable. Red Hat is entering the brave new world of attempting to make a profit out of
;)
the OSS model. Are they doing the right thing??
A number of 'fears' which are generated when the
word Red Hat comes to mind is:
- Possible Microsoft replacement
A monopoly on package distribution format,
as well as 'Red Hats implementation is the
"right" way!' debate
- Start setting standards which is not in favor
of the Linux community
Again, a monopoly effect.
- Is becoming the 'de facto' in terms as to what
Vendors release their applications to (i.e the
infamous RPM vs. DEB debate...)
- And a minor note...it is getting rid of the 'Why I love Linux' effect.
But, it all boils down to the question which
manu people have given ideas to, debated over,
maybe lost sleep to:
Can you make money out of the OSS model?
Maybe Red Hat is the answer for Linux to go
Commercial, and then again maybe not.
What's really scary is that other distributions
are being 'left out'. Maybe it is part of the
capitalism world which we belong to in
which the 'strongest' survive, and unfortunately
the strongest seem to have money.
We need reassurance from Red Hat which they will
not become another Microsoft. Assurance in their
actions will not contradict the OSS model. Assurance that their influence in the commercial
markets will be beneficial for both the commercial and linux communities.
I hope this thread or responses to this 'Ask Slashdot' question will generate ideas and
promote a better path for the linux community.
Remember our goal...'World Domination!'
-Frank Macha
emacha_frank@yahoo.com
#include
#include
#include "Gotta_Love_Linux.h"
I'm interested in legitimising Linux in those terms, granted - but only as a means to an end.
I want packaged software to be made available for Linux. I want hardware vendors and service providers to continue to respond to problem reports after I admit that I'm using Linux, rather than just going silent on me or saying "Lie-nooks? I don't think we support that."
I don't really care whether Linux is used by large corporations, per se. However, I do want to see more reports like the 3Com one - where the big players say "We want Linux support" and it happens.
Without corporate acceptance of Linux, that kind of thing is just a dream.
C'mon, it had a built in tape drive, and an IEEE-422 interface included. Neither the TRS-80 or Apple ][ could match that, that's something that even the latest Gateways and Dells don't offer (well, they offer the tape drive, just not the IEEE-422)! On top of that, if you had the right model, you could self destruct your computer with software alone!
But, other than the superiority of the PET 2001 Series, we do need to limit the bickering and the flames.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I also started with Slackware as my first serious installation of Linux. (I had a brief stint with RedHat 4.2). Slackware teaches you Linux at a very low level. You learn how things fit together and how everything interacts. It's quite a learning experience, but it's definitely too much to maintain.
I had another brief stint with Redhat 5.0 after that (or was it 5.1, it doesn't matter). It was nice. But there was just a feeling of not fitting well. Perhaps its too "one-size fits all", but something about it seems too sanitary.
Then I moved on to debian. I'll never go back. I think most people say it's for experienced users, because dselect (the package installation/management program) can be quite intimidating at first. It took me a good week the first time around to get things installed correctly. Now I can install things in a matter of minutes because I already have a package listing of the packages I like. So if I have to replace my system, or install a new one I can do something like:
dpkg --set-selections filename
and then perhaps a
apt-get upgrade
and it automatically gets the newest version, installs and configures all the packages. All I have to do is hit enter a bunch of times at the end.
Debian is by far the easiest to maintain distro that I've used. Most hard-to-configure programs come with a program called 'programname'config. Just run that and you can reconfigure sendmail, or apache, or squid, or whatever. Very slick.
If people can get beyond the dogma they'll find a very professional, very well packaged, very easy to maintain distrubution.
6. $99 for a proprietary secure web server.
a good chunk of this goes to R$A's pocket... there is no way to give this away for free in the US.
i disagree that this is a complaint.
henri
>We need reassurance from Red Hat which they
>not become another Microsoft. Assurance in their
>actions will not contradict the OSS model.
>Assurance that their influence in the commercial
>markets will be beneficial for both the
>commercial and linux communities.
Actions speak louder than words, and RedHat's actions have done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that they are going to become another Microsoft, that they will violate the spirit of OSS, or that they are jeapordizing the relationship between the commercial and linux communities.
RedHat sponsors massive numbers of coders who write nothing but GPL'd code, they take care of getting Linux noticed in good ways by the press.
They made RPM which (not starting a deb v rpm war) is a viable and effective method of software distribution. In fact during a recent presentation on Microsoft SMS 2.0, Windows 2000, and DLL Hell, a consultee of mine turned to me and asked 'so basically Microsoft is claiming that in a few years, their DLL management will be as good as RedHat has today?'
I'd LOVE to hear a well-reasoned writeup on why RedHat is bad and should be trashed though. SysV init scripts, RPM package management, and one of the more overlooked advantages, wide installed base means it's more likely somebody else ran into the bug you're experiencing.
I was approached by a Wired Magazine columnist that wanted my comments on GeekWorld when it was announced. I sent back the message below the same day, but it seems that journalism deadlines these days are quite cut-throat (I apparently sent in the response too late - although it was no more than 6 hours after she had sent it). Anyway, here is what I said.
Red Hat has received multiple grants of funds from industry heavyweights during the past few months, including Intel, Netscape and IBM. Also, Red Hat has become the major source for US vendors for a "standardized" Linux distribution. While I myself use Red Hat, I in no way see that Red Hat should become a "buzz-vendor" of Linux. Should Dell have, for instance, chosen SuSE Linux to be their distribution of choice for workstations, the announcement, in my belief, would not have created as much a stir as the decision to use the well-known US company's distribution.
Now, on to my previous statement about GeekWorld being a PR stunt. While Red Hat may have hit home with PC vendors and the mainstream public interest (for instance, readers of CNET News.Com), the company realizes the potential this capital has. Mainly, it will help attract new Linux developers to work for RedHat, but more importantly, it has the ability to draw users.
What other Linux distribution group has the funding to launch its own television advertising campaign? Possibly SuSE or Pacific HiTech, but keep in mind they are international vendors. Not that Red Hat has done so, but high profile media advertising (ie. television, the New York Times, or other popular newspapers) is definitely a viable option at this point. Branding of the company's red hat logo could be just as important to the company as the "Where do you want to go today?" slogan is to Microsoft. Keep in mind, Red Hat is a company. And its ultimate goal is to make a profit, albeit, in this case, there is a purpose behind the goal other than money. Note that it pays other developers around the world to keep working on projects such as GNOME.
GeekWorld seems to me to be a way of saying to the general public "Red Hat is as cool as MTV," alluding to the popular "Real World" television show. And in essence, Red Hat may imply that the people who use their distribution are also that 'cool.'
GeekWorld is a contest. And, therefore; will most likely will get much publicity, much like the Wired Magazine journalist's article. I would not be surprised if I saw a side-story about the contest winners on World News Tonight during the week of Linux Expo. Of course, Red Hat will gain a national spotlight in this sense, thereby growing consumer awareness of their product.
Note: The following becomes slightly off-topic from the subject of Red Hat paranoia, but it was part of the letter nonetheless.
About the difficulty of the contest: There is actually nothing really difficult about it. For instance, many geeks out there are taking their time away from kernel hacking (or whatever they used to coding) and writing Perl scripts that will scour Red Hat's site from 12AM to 11:59 PM and start over again the next day, just looking for that small footprint.
I do not denounce Red Hat for doing this. The Linux community needs something like this every once in a while to add some excitement to the regular life of the average geek. Heck, I'd love to go myself. However, I've got a summer job coming up, I'm an active coder on an open source project, and I'll be perfectly happy attending the Season Finals of the Professional Gamers' League in Manhattan, NY - it's free and definitely a lot closer. Also, I don't have to find a GNOME logo to go.
- Shaheen Gandhi (sgandhi@andrew.cmu.edu)
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
> I dislike the complicated debian source build
.spec file.
.deb packages tend to be of superior quality.
> procedure, and I also would like to see DEB
> more on par with RPM on optional packaging for
> software
I have to take issue with this. I maintained about 30 rpm packages long ago, and currently maintain about 90 packages for debian, so I'm very familiar with both source formats.
Rpm's format looks easier on the surface, but the fact is if you maintain rpm packages over a long period of time, especially lots of packages, you start discovering that you're wasting a lot of time diddling around with patch files, messy spec file hacks, and so on.
Debian's format looks harder on the surface, but once I got over the learning curve with it I found that it let me be much more productive, which is mainly why I maintain 90 packages today as opposed to only 30-some rpm packages before. It's also conceptually much cleaner - it's just a makefile after all. And more powerful - it's a makefile after all and you can do amazing things with a makefile.
> but I understand that it's more
> difficult to maintain a DEB package than it is
> to write a RPM
Ah, there's the rub. You _write_ a rpm spec file. You _maintain_ a debian package. Of course it's more work to do the latter, since maintaining a package is a continuing process. This is of course why
And of course tools like debhelper have considerably lowered the bar for newcomers to debian source packages.
see shy jo
Let's face it: no Unix does the path thing properly, and none ever will. As long as Redhat's maintaining some sort of order in their paths, I don't really think it matters all that much.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
>been thinking about trying potato, but
>I'm wary since it's still in development.
>Is it pretty stable?
As potato is in development, packages may or may not break without any notification. I wouldn't recommend using it on production systems. However, if you don't mind a program occiasonally breaking, you certainly could give it a try. But keep in mind that downgrading from potato to slink isn't as easy as upgrading from slink to potato!
Sometimes alien doesn't work very well indeed. But then again, it isn't that difficult to create Debian packages. You can ar -x package.deb and untar the two files that come out of the ar command. More information is at www.debian.org.
You need several Debian packages in order to be able to easily create Debian packages yourself, but you may install them using ar/tar: devscripts, dpkg-dev, dh-make and debhelper, iirc. Just try it yourself a few times, once you get the idea it isn't that difficult!
What's the worst RedHat can manage, legally? That rules out killing all Linux programmers... They can't take over, they can't dictate the development of Linux, but what they have been doing is making a nice (I use Debian though) distribution even with items made AT RedHat, TCL scripts, RPM (remember the R stands for RedHat - but it can be used on any Unix-like system) and other goodies. They *pay* people to make a distribution that can be freely downloaded from the 'net. They also pay guys to hack GNOME right? What's wrong with that?
Err...xv?
Doesn't stop it from being pathetic.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
This has to be quick - sorry have not read through the list of other comments (no time).
I intentionally tried to purchase a shrink wrapped box of Red Hat Linux to show my appreciation of their support for open source/Free software. However, despite the box having Red Hat version 5.2 and the manual seeming to be theirs too - there were these notes about McMillan .
Without the details my question was forwarded to RH, where I learned this was not their distribution. Moreover, they do not receive any funds for its sale. Well next time it's the "original" when I pull a copy off of a CompUSA shelf.
As long as there is GPL, and developers continue to improve the design and implementation no distribution will become another MS in the Linux world.
Sure I feel that Redhat often puts commercial deadline before high quality and stability and I feel even more like Redhat is continuing the Windoze tradition of .0 releases being unstable and buggy before they fix them in .1 and .2 releases, but still that is my personal perception and gripe. It doesn't necessarily make Redhat evil per se and Redhat has opened their development efforts more which will help to cure the buggy .0 release syndrome. That's GOOD and I applaud them for this.
And of course I feel Debian is a better distribution. Why else would I spend my time working on it? But just because Debian is IMO better doesn't make the others BAD. I'm greatly saddened by all of the my-software-rules-and-yours-sucks crap I see on irc and in newsgroups and mailing lists. If you think a particular piece of software is crap, don't run it, it's simple. Or even better, tell the people responsible for new releases what you want to see. What's the worst that could happen, they tell you they won't make the changes you want to see? Bickering like I see constantly helps nobody.
You'd be surprised how many times I have told someone "I don't like this about your software, would you consider maybe making it more like this instead?" to receive an answer in a day or two on the order of "Great idea! Why didn't I think of it sooner?"
Acronym!=abbreviation
NASA=acronym
NSA=abbreviation
Of course, some terms could go either way (like LOL)
Please read the license agreement you agree to in order to run Windows NT, Solaris, or etc. It specifically states that if you run this software, you are agreeing to this license. And it specifically says that this software comes with *NO WARRANTY* and that the OS vendor is not responsible for any losses that occur due to its use.
Find me *ONE* instance of a business suing Microsoft because of losses caused by problems with Windows NT. ONE instance. I bet you won't find one, because any lawyer on the planet would laugh you out of their office if you walked in and said "I want to sue Microsoft because Windows NT ate my company's payroll." It just can't be done, because you signed away your right to sue when you agreed to the NT license. A contract is a contract, bud, and if you don't want to abide by your side of the contract, then don't enter into it.
Which, of course, is where Linux comes in. If there's a bug in Linux at least you can fix it yourself. In the meantime, my brother's company is spending large sums of money due to NT crashes and reboots. Every time NT crashes out on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, they have to spend close to a thousand dollars flying somebody out there on a helicopter to fix it. The biggest problem, memory leaks in the DCOM stack, recieves a big "that will be fixed in Windows 2000" response from Microsoft. That doesn't help him now!
Yeah. Accountability. Sure. What you REALLY mean is that Microsoft provides an excuse. Can't get your network to work properly? Blame it on Microsoft instead of getting off your fat overpaid bum and fixing it!
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
It's interesting that Slackware originated because SLS did the same thing as SuSE: they copyrighted their installer/configuration tool as non-free software. Thus Pat Volkerding could not distribute a "fixed" SLS with all the patches he wanted in it, so he had to re-write the installer from scratch.
SLS is long gone, and Slackware still remains. Who gets the last laugh?
Now you know why I no longer run SuSE on my machines. Don't get me wrong, it's a great distribution. But until the YaST license is freed, I intend to avoid it. After all, the whole point of free software is to get away from restrictive licenses.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by Open Matrix:
RedHat has done nothing wrong so far. Some people are just paranoid about the greed of others. They see RedHat becoming quite successful and wonder if they are going to try (i'm not saying it's even possible) to manipulate the Linux community in harmful or even just distasteful ways. I really think though that some of the other distro's would be in more of a position to do this if they were as popular as RedHat considering the proprietary tools in some of these other distro's.
As for the files being in the wrong places, I don't really think it would be that hard to make other distro's compatible with RedHat by using symlinks.
I have personally tried several different distro's... Debian, RedHat, Suse, and Slackware. I like RedHat best not just because it's most popular or because Linus uses it, I like the handy GPL'ed graphical tools and these make it easier for me to do common tasks quickly (which I suspect is probably the reason Linus uses RH ). If I find that somehow RedHat is doing something harmful or distasteful I will drop it that very day and install Debian.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
My girlfriend left me for a redhat employee with a fancy car and lucrative stock options! RedHat is trying to destroy the OS community by stealing our women and leaving us without heirs!
I say we hit them where they live. We must inject sterility drugs into the redhat software development complexes, those monolithic towers which will surpass their cousins in redmont all too soon.
Posted by LOTHAR, of the Hill People:
Why do so many of us dislike Red Hat? We're snobs, that's why. We pride ourselves on using an "alternative" Operating System. Now that Linux is starting to be used by Joe User, we are losing that special feeling that we get by being part of an exclusive group. You hear the same thing when an underground music group suddenly gets popular. People running for the doors screaming "SELL OUT".
Red Hat is largely responsible for the current popularity and press coverage of Linux. Red Hat has the corporate structure that makes other companies feel safe when handing over million dollar checks. Bottom Line is, Red Hat is working VERY hard at making Linux a mainstream, full service OS. Red Hat is doing a very good job of it too. It's no suprise that there is resentment from people as Linux grows in popularity. Us Linux users prefer to live out on the fringe. Now we are losing that frontier feeling, and some of us aren't happy about it.
We have to blame someone, right?
That said, Red Hat isn't always the leader. Their distribution has odd quirks, as all distributions do, and they can be annoying. But fear and loathing isn't about irritating RedHat-isms. It's about people thinking that a company which funds Free Software development, has made virtually everything they have produced available under the GPL, and has done more to actively push Linux than anyone else save for possibly VAR is going to try and take over the world. Listen up, people - Even if they wanted to, it wouldn't happen. People who rant about Red Hat are the same ones who extoll the virtues of Free Software, saying that something like that can't happen with [Favorite Free license here]. Red Hat is not the enemy. And if you don't like them, don't use their distro! There are many others, and let's not forget that one of those others is the most popular in Europe.
I can't agree with you any more on this...
This is why the GPL was created. As long as RedHat keeps on with their policy of releasing everything under the GPL, they can do NOTHING as far as "hijacking" Linux. Period.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Ah, SLS, that brings back memories. It was my first Linux distribution, with I believe the 0.95 kernel. It worked well. Then I tried slackware, which always installed, when I could not get the early debian and redhat distributions to install. But it was harder to upgrade. And then I switched to redhat, which I really like. I still would like to try suse and debian. But there are so many thing I want to try, like freebsd, netbsd, openbsd, solaris, beos,.. and so little time..
> I think one of the very real things feeding this > penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing > things about /. in general) is the (apparently) > prevailing attitude that anyone in in management > (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
/.'ers who have no real experience with business people. What % of readership is students? How many /.'ers worship Dilbert, overlooking what an apologetic POS it really is? And what % of the readership actually interacts heavily with management on a daily basis? Of course, heaven forbid management and labor should work together. That would break all the rules of labor relations, and might even be productive.
As much as I agree with this, I think a significant reason behind this attitude is the number of
Okay, so redhat puts out a decent to good product, in terms of its distribution. My university uses RedHat as its official linux distro (though my machines are debian, which is my preference). RedHat has pioneered the concept of an easier method of installing software (and, more importantly, maintaining software) on a Linux system through its RPM format.
Also, it has supported free software via the right methods, by fundings its general development and releasing its source code under the GPL, without replacing the copyright and without claiming ownership.
So, while it is possible their may be an evil plan afoot, I can't possibly see what it is. Closing the RPM format? It would succeed to breaking old distributions and a converter would exist within hours of its release to an open format. Closing other code? What code?
I guess I just don't see it.
It's not just that you can't fix a Microsoft problem yourself but how often you end up paying for a fix they provide either in a charged support call, charged patch, or having the fix rolled into an upgrade which is not free.
Let's be honest about this. The only people who have a problem with RedHat are the people who use outdated Linux dists like Slackware. Many of the Slackware users seem to be similar to the Amiga users who sat around yelling about how great the Amiga was doing in Europe while people were abandoning the Amiga in droves in the US. A lot of people (myself included) don't like Slackware for a *HUGE* number of reasons. But you don't really see the users of the other dists put down Slackware like the Slackware users put down RedHat and the other dists.
Total Bullshit. Download and compile the latest version of the Lynx WWW browser source code. This is a great test for Unix compatibility on any system. Guess what? It compiles perfectly on my RedHat 5.2 system.
If they take my paranoia away, what else will remain ?
A distribution should never touch /usr/local. That's the whole point of /usr/local -- it's somewhere for the local admin to put things that where they won't get touched. If Red Hat ever put anything in /usr/local... well, I just don't want to think about it.
You should read the FHS some time instead of shooting off at the mouth randomly. Here's what is says about /usr/local .
--
W.A.S.T.E.
W.A.S.T.E.
Funny, I *used* to be very suspicious at RedHat when I started out using GNU/Linux. I've changed my mind however, they've pretty much proved that they are an all good-guy company, at least in my eyes. Should they however turn their backs on free software there are other distributions, people with a clue would use them instead.
If there is any reasson to fear and loathe redhat its for the fvwm95 and that controll panel thingie that comes with it. Yuck.
i don't like redhat. not the company, the distribution. it doesn't have slack. redhat is not the enemy though. they are a potent force for good in the linux community. but let me have my slack. it truly bothers me when i find software that's ONLY distributed as an RPM, or when people answer questions with "well if you were using redhat that would be easy.."
I personally don't like Redhat. In my experiences I have found their distro to be sub-par of what I want in a distro. I started off using Slackware (which I think everyone should do) and moved on to Redhat then quickly on to SuSE, and now I'm at Debian. I think Debian is the best distro around for experienced users.
That being said, I believe Redhat is a good distro for beginners (although I still think everyone should start with Slackware).
Joe
Well, if you want to get to know Linux in an intimate fashion, Slackware is good because everyting isn't automated and prettied up for you. If you want to install a new program, you have to get it unzip and untar it, read the README's with it to see if you have all the dependencies, configure, compile, etc. I feel you get a better understanding of how Linux operates and what is really going on... I know I did. But that being said, Redhat definitely has it's pluses. If you just want to have a computer to go on the internet and check your email and you don't care about the inner-workings of Linux, then Redhat and SuSE are very good distros. Redhat (and especially SuSE) automate a lot of things for you (adding directories to PATH's, setting up xdm or kdm, etc). But that's not always a bad thing. Some people don't want to bother with all that.
I don't necessarily think that Debian is good for experienced users, but that it's not the best for beginners. You have to know what you're doing more than you would with other distros.
I think all distros have value.
Excuse me Peter, but I was not bitching. I was just stating that I don't like Redhat. I think it is good for many people, just not me. That's the great thing about Linux... CHOICES!
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by (MICROSOFT convert!!!). I haven't used M$ products for about 1.5 years (except at work).
Joe
Wow...
That's pretty close to the same path I took.
Slackware (with kernel 2.0.0) to Redhat 4.2 (and eventually upgraded to 5.0) to SuSE (5.2 -> 5.3 -> 6.0) to Debian 2.1 when it came out. I haven't looked back since.
Are you using slink or potato? I've been thinking about trying potato, but I'm wary since it's still in development. Is it pretty stable?
Now that I think about it, I tried Stampede for about a week also.
I have been using Debian 2.1 since it came out. I love it.
Why did you choose Redhat for your servers? (I'm not saying it was a bad choice, I'm just curious).
I have attempted to install redhat numerous times and find their installation non-intuitive and tedious. How can one SLOW DOWN the actual
execution of a linux install? Or perhaps the actual execution speed of the resultant install? Redhat does! They execute at less than half the of the speed of my slackware install. I wish I understood why.
\
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
While there might be some debate about stuff floating around in /etc or other areas, I highly doubt that Red Hat intentionally did it to insure they were the only distribution that would run propriatery software. Quite to the contrarary, Several other distributions are _based_ on Red Hat's distribution. These other distributions coupled with Red Hat's large Linux market share do make Red Hat the de-facto standard (so to speak) when a ISV looks in at Linux from the outside world and considers porting thier application to Linux.
Now, consider the fact that the LSB stands to be the largest, most widely acceptable Linux standard. This is the one oppertunity that Red Hat has had to really do some damage, and they didn't, and won't. Red Hat had an early oppertunity to join the LSB, and declined. Why you ask? Because Red Hat KNEW that if they were one of the orignal members of the LSB there would be resentment and resistance, therefore, in the best interest of the LSB itself, they held back. After the LSB started to gain acceptance, Red Hat signed on, only after criticizm from the Linux community (including massive flame-age here on SlashDot "Why won't Red Hat join the LSB!?!"). Then, once Red Hat did goin the LSB, they did not push for domanance, only volenteered thier services, which included paid manhours, to work on standards that were agreed upon by the community, not Red Hat. Red Hat did the right thing!
So, why is Red Hat so despised? Well, because they have a legitimate right to be respected, and they GPL thier work, and they have done great service to the Linux community. That adds up to becoming a power in the Linux community, and people (Including me) BUY thier CD's on occasion to support a company that supports paying people to write GPL code.
Does Red Hat suck? Well, Yes. For some people, in some cases, it sucks. RPM's can be a headache, and I believe that the RPM technology is probably superior to how Red Hat even uses it (which is why other distributions use RPM's, but it's "Red Hat RPM's" that are most complained about). What else? Well, can you say "120M+ minimal install" even after you go through all the menus and unselelect everything (Which is why I use Debian on some of my smaller specific purpose systems). And, then there is the the whole init battle, and if your not use to it, it can be a pain in the rear to work with. So, yes, if your use to something else, or you have a specific need, or ..... then Red Hat Linux may not be the right Linux for you. In many cases, to many people, Red Hat Sux. ;-)
But, overall, for the majority of people, Red Hat is just fine, no problems, actually better than most. Is there any reason to Hate of Fear Red Hat? Heck no!
As for "They don't stick to standards for file layouts or much else, so you can run an alternate distribution -- but not if you want to use something without source.", I have to ask, WHO IN THIER RIGHT MIND WOULD RELEASE SHRINK WRAP SOFTWARE TO THE _SMALLEST_ MARKET SEGMENT?!?!? Yea, it's not exactly the same as every other linux, but they aren't exactly the same as each other either. Given enought time, for every 1 thing you can find "non-standard" and actually referance a standard that _should_ be, and it's source, I can probably find you at least 2 non standard things in Slackware, Debian, or anything else. So, I say, "Please Site Your Source Of Linux Standards. :-)" AFAIK, the LSB will be the standard, and Red Hat will _comply_ to the LSB, not the other way around.
Sure, they release stuff under the GPL, but with all these strategic partnerships popping up, a lot of commercial software only runs on RedHat. They don't stick to standards for file layouts or much else, so you can run an alternate distribution -- but not if you want to use something without source.
:) plug!)
Remember, the goal is to have Linux on every desktop, including where we work, we're going to get stuck using commercial software, so at least let us run a GOOD distribution... like Stampede
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
There are many complaints with Red Hat that bear consideration:
1. Timely security updates don't always happen. Go over to Linux Weekly News and read the back issues-- Red Hat has dropped the ball several times with regard to security updates, and there has been no indication of how this will be consistently addressed in the future.
2. A history of upgrade problems. Every distribution has had upgrade difficulties at some point, of course, but it seems like RH has had more than its share.
3. Immature bug tracking. Red Hat did not have a public bug tracking system before bugzilla was released.
4. Lack of update tools. e.g.: no single, approved command to check for and install any "errata" patches over the internet.
5. Frequently inaccessible ftp server, hard to locate list of mirrors.
6. $99 for a proprietary secure web server.
7. Please add to this list.
These are largely management problems rather than technical problems. If Red Hat resembles Microsoft, it is in putting publicity and financing before the needs of its customers. As to any sort of "monopoly" power-- no chance. RH knows damn well that any attempt to monopolize the Linux market will destroy it.
Once an argument digresses to "but X has the right", you might as well give up. Red Hat has the right to have poor QA and a nonstandard filesystem layout, I have the right to complain, blah blah.
I don't hate Red Hat, but make no mistake about it: Excellence is not their forte. This is precisely why I worry. If I want to use another distribution that I might consider to be of higher quality (Debian for me), then I worry about a time where I need to install some program that requires RedHat, and I'm in big trouble. Red Hat has been good about releasing their code, but what about the future?
No way. Computers are my livelihood. I'm not going to stop worrying and fretting about it, because relaxation really is the enemy of quality.
I've been fortunate so far because the Red Hat-specific packages I've used (actually just Sybase so far) have been usable once converted with alien.
I wish people like you, calling others "fools" and such, would take the time to learn a little bit more about these issues. Have you used anything other than Red Hat? Do you know how RH differs from some other distros and from the filesystem standard? My guess is no on both counts.
You got it almost right.
It is what you add to Linux that makes you good. If Redhat continues to add code improvements (Like RPM) or just continues to be a GREAT marketing name (something my bos recignizes) I'll continue to support them.
The day they apear to have just put code in a box i'll stop buying. (Like Slackware)
I heard Young says he is selling a brand name. I hope this dosn't loose site of what this work is. A colabritive effert to make the computer world better.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Not only a Linux user, but his repeated reference to potatoes can only mean that he is using the latest, bleeding-edge, unstable Debian distribution.
That's doubly impressive; as we know, Debian is not the easiest one to install either.
All the obsession around "legitimizing" Linux seems to cater to a particular environment: Corporations. I.e. corporate users, commercial vendors.
With all due respect, while it is nice to have the backing and support of these, they are not what run things in the world of free software. Never was, really. UNIX has always in its 30-year history been a loosely gathered collection of free software (GNU or not) - thousands of small pieces that work together in a mosaic, much like developers who create them.
RedHat's role? Well, consider this. The user demographics will not change much, come Linux world domination. Then, as now, there will be technology have's and technology have-not's.
Roughly the same groups of people will want to use a commercial product, with commercial polishing on the edges, and thus pay money to be allowed ro remain "dumb" with respect to the software they use. These are the mortals, the mission statement generators, the people with other interests. Also, roughly the same groups of people will remain "power users" and developers: People who desire more sophistication and flexibility, and who appreciate the freedom that the bazaar model gives them to achieve this.
The former group today uses Windows, the latter Linux. Within the Linux camp, you have a preview of tomorrow's landscape: The former group uses RedHat/SuSE/Caldera, the latter uses Debian. (Roughly the same people who now uses Amigas, OS/2, etc will stick with Slackware, for nostalgic reasons).
That said, Linux domination will bring about a better world than the current proprietary domination by Microsoft.
Sure, there is no doubt that commerial software will be released specifically for RedHat. (Hopefully the LSB effort can provide a pseudo/proxy-platform before too long, to preempt such a trend. Ian Jackson of Debian has some good views on this). Regardless, binary compatability of such commercial applications to other distributions is almost certain to remain intact.
Look at FreeBSD's excellent Linux emulation for an example of this. The only applications you cannot run under it are the same ones that seem to be very fuzzy with various Linux installations as well: StarOffice, to name one. The GNU license ensures that the basics of the RedHat platform (i.e. the kernel, libc, X toolkits, core utilities) remain open.
Now, AFAIK, there are already more developers working on Debian than any other operating system in the world. Add to this that people who develop UNIX software in general are more useful to Debian than to, say, Windows. This trend will continue. As such, free software development is not really dependent on what a particular corporation does or does not do. We thrive with today's direct hostility from Microsoft, I am sure we can excel even in a RedHat dominated world, and even if today's cool people at RedHat get replaced with corporate zombies who misunderstand the dynamics around free software and instead try to be more short-sighted for their own personal benefit.
To put it bluntly: Should RedHat Inc. ever change, it would be their loss, not so much ours.
I said StarOffice did not run under Linux emulation in FreeBSD. That was pretty silly of me.
/proc filesystem under Linux. A couple of different ways to work around this were quickly found, however.
:*)
It does. SO4 Service pack 3 did not straight out of the box, however, because it accessed the
The problem does not exist with the last version of StarOffice.
Hope this preemted flames from overzealous FreeBSDers.
No flames, just facts please
.deb from original source, you need some debian utilties: dh_make, notably. You could do things manually with 'tar', 'gzip' and 'ar', but you really do not want to. There is a lot of bookkeeping stuff in there also, such as menu entries for your window managers (if your package wants to be included in them), maintainer info, changelogs, build rules, etc etc; all of which follow a very strict format.
Kindof unfair, don't you think, after that inflammatory tone in your post? ('verbal community that is more willing to attack') Especially since you base that on such an innocent remark from one person - a remark that also has some truth to it?
Either way. Some facts.
In the stable/released version of Debian, packages have gone through month-long scrutiny and testing. They are out of date if you e.g. want to parttake in development of subcomponents. So are RedHat's releases. There is not much difference time-wise between these.
In the unstable branch, however, you keep yourself on the bleeding edge of things. For instance, Debian was the first to include glibc2.1 (which will break StarOffice, btw), always have the latest snapshots of things like enlightenment and gnome, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Portions of apt are considered stable, and included in the last stable distribution, slink. That includes the 'apt' backend for the 'dselect' utility as well as the 'apt-get' command line tool.
To make a
Now, the reason why Debian really stands out (aside from being the largest distribution with the most activity in it): Its menu system. Its bug tracking system. Its package managers. Basically the bookkeeping that automates virtually everything, from upgrading your system in-place to keeping all installed window managers with up-to-date default menus to being perhaps the most secure UNIX around (I know OpenBSD also has a reputation of that kind).
After all, there is a reason why Corel chose to base their "ultra-userfriendly" distribution on Debian - all the infrastructure is geared towards complete maintainability.
I might agree with your hypothetical assessment, if it wasn't for the GPL. If there were indeed small variations between distributions that kept the officially released binaries of PhotoMegaGimp from working with any distribution except RedHat's, how long do you think it would take for a few enterprising hackers to track down the differences, apply appropriate patches, and then release the slightly altered source code as 'hacked for Debian' or 'hacked for Slackware'. After which, there would rapidly be binaries available for all the other distributions.
I think the situation you describe is the very idea that people are having so many knee-jerk reactions to. In many respects I consider it a testament to the sheer might of the Microsoft corporate machine, and the degree to which tbey have fundamentally changed our perception of OS software companies. Microsoft has the power to change the game by introducing new cards into play. They can do this because they write the rules and they make the cards, so to be able to use the cards, and hence learn the new rules, you must be 'friends' {e.g. pay money to} with Microsoft. For anyone who might be nervous that RedHat is trying to get into the card-making business for the Linux game, need not worry. Because of the foresightedness of the GPL license, not only is RedHat allowed to make new rules, but so am I and so are you, and hence we ALL get to make new cards to use with the new rules that help to extend and expand the game of Linux.
In this way, the company that attempts to comandeer the game of Linux is going to rapidly find themselves playing at an ever shrinking table. And this would not be profitable. So this will not happen.
Sean
RFC2119
So exactly which version of RedHat are you using? I've been using RedHat since 3.0.3, and I've never seen it mess with /usr/local (other than creating the directory stubs allowed under the FHS).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
... which is now being phased out (by Red Hat, at least), now that someone has created a free replacement (Electric Eyes, GQview, etc).
What are other distros doing for image viewers?
Wil
--
Internet Meta-Resources:
Wil
wiki
> 1. Timely security updates don't always happen.
> They almost always happen in a more timely manner for Red Hat than any other distribution (perhaps excluding Debian, I wouldn't know).
I used to agree with this, sadly I don't think I can any more. How long did it take Redhat to get the latest procmail fix out? 2 weeks? That's inexcusable, they used to get fixes out in under 24 hours. And it's not the first time either. I'm a long time Redhat user (3.5 years now maybe? since 2.0 whenever that was), but one of the reasons I switched from Slackware was timely security updates. Since those seem to have become a thing of the past, I'm about to jump ship to Debian.
It's sad that a solid company strongly rooted in the tradition of GPL software is the subject of the ugly side of it's own community. RedHat has contributed far more than most if not all Distros when you combine the software they have contribute to and/or developed and GPL'd. They are hustling in order to bring features to a distribution that will strengthen the perception of Linux in corporate america, and have been doing an excellent job thus far. They've done nothing wrong towards the community and if the potential is even there, I can't see it, seeing how all there critical software is GPL. It seems to me that RedHat has been VERY careful to tread this line correctly, knowing full well that if they tip, and make a mistake, they WILL lose community support, and I think they know that it IS the community that will make or break a distro in the end. I don't care if your a RH user or not... I am about half the time, but don't attack them as a company just because you don't like where they place an RPM. C'mon people. We're better than that. Any organization supporting Linux should in turn recieve our support, until they do something that fundamentally undermines the community itself.
Secondly, they sponsor Alan Cox, Stephen Tweedie, David Miller, Rasterman, Federico Quintero, and others, as well as sponsoring projects like the port of KDE to Qt 2.0 and the Gnome project.
I don't know the recent stats, but three years ago, RedHat was the largest single contributor to the Free Software Foundation.
Now I'm a Debian user, and professional Free Software developer, but I have great difficulty finding any faults with Red Hat, other than the fact that their growing pains sometimes show themselves by a less-than-polished performance. They deserve their success, and I hope they all get a nice big bucket of money.
First, before I start bashing them, I have to say that any company that employs Alan, Rasterman, and all the rest is OK in my book. Period. They do their share not to just leach off the success of Linux, and we must respect them for that.
:). I've kind of developed an ideology for using RedHat: run the system. Don't let it run you.
:). Very little of my system resembles virgin RH5.1....
:). But this will improve in any case with one of two beautiful DE's installed by default.
:)
I started on Slack, and ran it for a long time, back when RedHat was way less important than it is now. I don't consider Slack particularly hard to install. I enjoyed running it. I didn't enjoy upgrading it in serious ways however. When comes to serious packages like libc's and whatever, I want to know I've killed old stuff before putting in new stuff, not go chasing around files that have moved. It becomes increasingly hard to keep a Slack system up to date as it ages.
I still run a Slack3.1 system at home. I must enjoy suffering.
I started using RedHat with 5.1. I disagree with the comment above basing 5.1; it always worked well for me. Granted, I'm sitting here at CMU and applying all the updates wasn't a big deal
I kill all rpm stuff on kernels (I do those the normal old fashioned way. just plain easier). I kill it mostly on X. I have a lot of video cards floating around as a game developer, and frequently swap them around. I can't deal with this XConfigurator @#$%, I use xf86config, and always found it perfectly straightforward. For that matter I skip the config proggy and just write out a config file (or hack an old one). They're not that bad. I can't wait around for RPM's of the latest XFree86 release to come out -- I needed the XSuSE servers as soon as they were available. For that matter after all this time I don't really quite understand the way RH's X works if you follow their setup
But it's nice to be able to select features from 5.2/whatever's fresh and just put'em in with a one liner, or easily switch versions of wine for whatever I need to work right.
I dislike immensely the stupid win95 lookalike default WM config. What a mistake. I know GNOME/KDE weren't available. I don't care. They shoulda chosen a clean, elegant fvwm2 config with a good menu and some nice wallpaper
The other thing I can't stand is the control-panel. Just gets in the way, more likely to whack out your scripts, makes scripts harder to read. I wanna read man pages and do them by hand dammit.
I've recently installed Debian on my second computer (can't do it to my main machine till I get a fresh HD, can't risk a non-working machine). I like it a lot. The package system is better. The distro is much easier to manage from config files. Installing a whole mess of packages is easier (I never got thru installing GNOME 1.0. never figured out quite which rpm's were essential, or quite what order to install them in. bleah. I think I eventually found the instructions but the GNOME people should put the essential stuff in a big tarball with easy rpm install intructions...end digression...). From a technological standpoint it's just a better distro IMHO.
What does this mean? I like RedHat. I've used their stuff a hell of a lot. But they're not invincible, and the better distro will always win.
This is Linux after all. Down deep, we use it 'cos it's better. Oh, and because we like really cool desktops
Can anyone name any commercial software that runs ONLY on a Rehdat based system??
I betcha' can't... RH is "just" Linux... there is nothing intrinsicly in RH that is not in every other flavour of Linux. Remember, they give their source changes back to the source pool according to the GPL just like everyone else does.
RH bashing just reeks of sour grapes -- they've (and Caldera) been very effective at getting peple to take Linux seriously, and that's because they have done a LOT of hard work.
I think that what's really bugging the people who seem to have a grudge against RedHat, is that as Linux becomes more accessible to non-experts the whiners will no longer be members of an exclusive club.
These whining weasels should grow up, get a real job, a life, and enjoy the fact that they were in at the beginning of the revolution, and most importantly, start coding!!!!
_DHMSpector
It's a lot better than what came before! It was a major step forward from .tar.gz files. It's still not ready for Mom but at least it works for Windows people. :-)
:-)
Debian's packaging system is a lot nicer, because they had a chance to learn from the mistakes in rpm. I don't know if it's technically possible for RedHat to graft Debian-like functionality onto their RPM system, but it would sure be nice if they could figure out how.
It's not really fair to knock rpm and RedHat for being first, ya know.
If there are "proprietary tools" in SuSE, then "the whole OS", in the sense of SuSE Linux, is already "no longer [free]", at least in the "speech" sense.
However, more than just the kernel is free, in the speech (and beer) sense; the C library is free, as are the other libraries that implement the UNIX API, and as are the utilities that implement the UNIX command set and most of the GUI (Qt 1.x being an exception, although 2.0 might be considered free).
SuSE (or any other distributor), for example, couldn't keep you from redistributing, for free (speech and beer), the free components in its OS. Only if its monopoly got people to depend on the proprietary parts of the OS (and if those parts couldn't be, or weren't, cloned) would they have a stranglehold.
While it is true that Redhat did distribute non-free stuff (BRU and RealServer come to mind), they've been backing down on that. I think the only thing not strictly free that they distribute now is Netscape.
So far RedHat contributed to the growth of Linux in substantial way. RPM is probably the best technology to install software today and it's Open Source so you can use it with other distros. Long before the first investors started being interested in RH, RH sponsored the development of GNOME (the G stands for GNU, so they are directly supporting OSS). So far, I believe, they have done nothing but good. Of course they can change in future but if we don't give credit to people that showed a lot of good will than nobody has a chance. You might disagree with their choice of software but there are several other distros and I don't believe there's a risk of having a "distribution monopoly" in the future.
It's not clear to me that automatically installing errata is a good thing. I make it a point to read the errata carefully to decide whether to install things.
Nevertheless, there are readily available tools that do exactly what you want. And if you don't like the various contributed programs, it can be done in three lines from the shell:
wget -m ftp://updates.redhat.com/5.2/alpha/
for p in *.rpm; do rpm -q `rpm -qp --queryformat '%{name}' $p` && pl="$pl $p"; done
rpm -U $pl
Mind the ticks and backticks. If you're not sufficiently familiar with RPM to do things like this, put it in a script and preface it with a '#!/bin/sh' line.
Firstly, you should be using a mirror. And secondly, the mirrors are trivial to find. It took me less than thirty seconds to find the list of mirror sites When there is a competing non-proprietary secure web server that can be freely distributed in the US for commercial use, then you might have some grounds for complaining about this. I don't want to be US-centric, but the reality is that currently Red Hat products have to be packaged for sale in the US (and, in the case of secure web servers, only in the US, due to our stupid laws).Granted, defacto standards are often not optimal, but we've got to choose between several evils- defacto standards, proprietary standards, and standards set by committee, all of which have their own serious shortcomings.
I don't buy the argument that we should dislike Redhat for charging for their software. The GPL explicitly encourages the sale of the code, and if you really don't like it, just do what I do and download and burn your own CD for free.
R
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
All i'm gonna say is that I'm glad I use Slackware
Red Hat makes good products
Good products sell well
Selling well means getting lots of money
Lots of money buys lots of hackers
Hackers create free software
Free software makes me happy
Ergo Red Hat makes me happy
i used to be a bootdisk-0.95 user, then a sls user, then a slackware user, briefly a debian user and back to slackware,
but after RH 2.1 I really haven't wanted to tinker with my machine enough to compile every single new package I install from source, I really have better things to do with my computer than
around installing new versions of packages from source.
Bob Young himself is a good example of the reason for backlash. I met him at the last ISPCON in
San Jose, and introduced myself, then had the opportunity to ask him a question or two, and IMHO he was quite arrogant, as he also was when Linus
was featured at the show. This was the first time a company invested in Red Hat, and it went to their heads.
I respect Marc and Donnie, and the others and have been a supporter for years, but it has been noticable. It's the OS and the *users* that made Red Hat, not Bob Young.
why does ee belong in /usr/local/bin? are you developing it?
/usr/X11/bin, or even a /usr/gnome/bin, but unless you're raster or some other ee hacker, ee does not belong in /usr/local/bin. by your own argument might i add.
/usr/local/bin (where many sites fold your /usr/contrib/bin) are gnu utilities on vendor unix boxes. quite useful on an aix box i use since i get gnu utils by default since /usr/local/bin is first in my path.
/usr/bin then a solaris box? gee, i'm guessing it has more software. just my experience of course.
look, i can see ee belonging in
a lot of the things from
but why would a linux box but them there? gnu utils *are* it's default utils.
as to why redhat has more binaries in
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a few thoughts frank...
"can you make money with the oss model?" redhat's distribution is gpl'd, their software is gpl'd, and almost all the software is free software in some manner. they mad alliances with closed source companies, but have slowly been getting away from that except wrt video drivers for x. and even there they team up with video vendors and then lobby them to go open source.
rpm fears. rpm is gpl'd software. anyone can use it. is it better then dpkg? damned if i know, but if rpm is winning out why not look into merging dpkg features into rpm?
"assurances." you want to know their commitment to free software? you want a statement? why? actions speak louder then words, and all their software **AND** documentation is gpl'd.
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Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
I can't particularly think of anything that they've done, and more than that, it's kind of funny that a community that tends to be as strong spirited as the linux community often needs a bad guy to beat up on.
I used redhat linux, I can often be found downloading the latest upgrades, I think rpm is rad, but I'm probably going to be moving to Debian. Why? Because I'm becoming more and more of a GNU hardliner in my old age. (20) I just like the idea of a more ideologically "pure" distribution in that Debian is NOTHING but Free Software.
It seems to me as though we're almost headed toward the type of paradox that is there with Microsoft - it seems everybody hates them but at the same time, they have 80% market share. How does that work exactly? I am not comparing redhat to microsoft in terms of what they do, but rather they both have huge market shares of their respective markets, and both seem to be disliked.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
> I think all packaged distributions just be a ;-).
;-) BTW, that's what _I_ use now, and I'll be using it forever. The only binaries not compiled on my machine that I trust are Patrick Volkerding's
> large box with one small piece of paper inside
> with a ftp address so the user can just download
> the source and build it himself
Sounds very much like Slackware to me
--Moo
As long as RedHat developed software is released under the GPL, I don't think there can be a problem. We'll always have distros like Mandrake that are just RedHat, with extra goodies added that their authors wanted.
Now, if they start releasing proprietary software, then we could be in trouble, but I suspect enough people would drop them like a hot potatoe that they would about lose their position in the Linux world.
Note for the Humor Impaired, this is SATIRE!
This PROVES that RedHat is evil, beyond redemption, and it must die!!!
Oh. Can I have access to their bank account though? I've been jealous of how much money they make!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
rather dislike using Red Hat, I am a dyed in the wool Debian user, I think technically and
ideology, Debian is superior.
But those three names make a FUCK of a lot of difference to me as a person,
and as a Linux user.
Red hat is not evil, Rather Like going to the dentist, tolerated, beneficial but painful.
If Red hat had 99% of the "linux" market I could care less as long as the Linux kernel
standards are open, and there are no proprietary drivers/protocals.
I believe that it will not happen.
Red hat the company has never to my knowledge been anti-other-distros; that is the key.
Microsoft on the other hand, is anti anything other then Microsoft.
Distros are a matter of taste, are you not glad that, you have many choices?
"Think of it as evolution in action."
It cut off the subject.
Three names that make the difference Alan Cox, Stephen Tweedie, David Miller.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
For the past year now, people like me have defended Red Hat with reason and evidence against complaints largely based on anecdotes, jealousy and wild conjecture. Yet week after week someone trots out the same tired story and we have to go through it all over again. Well, I've had it, and I've decided it might be more fun, as well as make me look more `31ee7', if I change sides and become an anti-`Red$at' basher on ./ .
The only problem is I don't know which wildly contradictory arguements I should use against this Evil Empire. Should I say "Red$at is just for newbies" or "Red$at makes me set up my own security"? Should I say "Red$at won't let me hack" or "Red$at makes me update errata", or how about "Red$at makes me use their Windows imitating GUI" or "Red$at won't give me MY Windows imitating GUI"?
Obviously I can't spout *all* of these complaints at the same time, or I'll look as foolish and transparent as so much of the other anti-`Red$at' FUD around here. So please, advise me on how to be the best `Red$at' basher I can be!
And in conclusion, picture me waving my finger as I say "I am not an astroturf agent of that company...Microsoft..."
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
Nutshell: I've already burned some Debian CD's in preparation for switching my computers from Redhat to Debian.
My opinion of Redhat has been slowly going downhill. I don't know whether some of the things posted about them are true or not (i.e. Redhat deliberately not complying with the LSB, or their certification methods, or other things), and I really don't care. They're getting too big for their britches. I chose Linux to move away from the omnipresent corporation, and now here is one forming in our back yard.
Don't take this as an extremist point of view, however. Most of Redhat's connections benefit the entire Linux community, not just themselves. They should keep doing what they can until it doesn't work for them anymore.
I'm just not willing to support their business oriented model anymore. Debian here I come.
- Red Hat is getting popular, so they must be getting like Micros~1.
- Red Hat is the distro for Windows haters, not "serious" unix folks.
Facts:- Red Hat offers a LOT of value for the money. Cutting edge software, a nice powerful installer, good package management, great response to security issues, etc.
- Red Hat returns stuff to the community (all their management utils are open source. They use linuxconf by default instead of something like YAST
Bottom line: Red Hat keeps up with the times, they play by the rules, and their distro is very good. What else do you want?They haven't done anything wrong yet.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I just thought I'd point out the similarity in your arguments to the arguments for the GNU/Linux name, and the problems some people have with calling the whole system "Linux". It's the same thing. If RedHat is stealing from Linux, as you claim, well, Linux is stealing from GNU, *BSD, XFree and all the other projects that make up a useful Linux (or RedHat) system. You can't have it both ways - if the RedHat brand is bad, then so is the "Linux brand". Think about it.
Host your own websites, anywhere!
I've run RHL since v4.1; at present I'm running 5.2. I've also run SuSE 5.1-6.0, tried FreeBSD, Slackware, TurboLinux, and Solaris 2.6. (At work I also use HP-UX and Solaris.) I've bought a few "official" distros and downloaded many others.
Red Hat Linux 5.2 is the best distro I've used. It configures easily at the command line, packages are nicely integrated to the system, adding packages via tarball is easy, C programming works well, and the distro isn't overloaded with gludge. SuSE 5.2 is a very close second.
Is Red Hat Software subject to change? Of course they are. They've already changed. Change doesn't need to be bad.
Will change be bad? Only Red Hat and time can tell. I suspect Linus' comments at COMDEX reflects concern over the future of Linux and the various GNU/Linux distributions.
In any case, I'll continue to use Red Hat for the forseeable future. If they are undeserving of my attention, I'll certainly direct it and my money elsewhere.
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
Did you pay for your computer?
Home? Food? Entertainment?
If you're going to "fight the system", don't be so choosy.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Based on the comments I've actually seen, the vast majority of Linux users aren't particularly worried about Redhat achieving monopoly (or near-monopoly) power within the Linux market. There are two reasons:
/usr/bin/perl instead of /usr/local/bin/perl can easily be fixed (or a symlink made.) And so it seems like it would (and thus far, has proved to be in several instances) fairly easy to construct wrapper scripts. Of course, that's not as good as a native package (rpm, deb, or whatever) but it's not so bad either.
1. Redhat releases almost all of their products under the GPL, and releases all their "core" products under the GPL (ie libraries, rpm software, etc. as opposed to BRU2000, applixware, etc.)
2. If the above changes, many Linux users and developers would switch distributions. Of course, then people writing free software wouldn't be able to improve key components of the Redhat distro, which (presumably) would cause it to be left behind.
There are some real issues, however:
1. It is possible that commercial software vendors will only support Redhat. However, since detection of libraries works so easily, libraries wouldn't be a problem. The occassional shell script referring to, say,
2. Redhat is actively targetting newbies. This means that it's likely to get a prettier and prettier face by default, and hence one which is simpler. Hopefully, they will keep an "advanced options" button in an easy to find location. But if not, it's Linux -- we can find the text files to edit and configure by hand if need be. Of course, there's something to be said for being forced to read all the info. I learned a lot more from my first slackware install than I do from install Redhat by reading the package descriptions and being forced to figure out how to configure things. Nonetheless, these days, I'll take simplicity and sloth anyday.
-Muffie
well you can't really fault Caldera for giving what their customers want! I thought that's what good businesses do.
Anyway, Corel will use debian and kde-now isn't that ironic?
---
So my first impression of Red Hat was that they put a lot more money into marketing and sales than into good technology and support, which is indeed the MS business model.
I've heard their installs are a lot better now, and I know they've done some good development too. My only experience with them was a major letdown, but maybe I was just unlucky.
James
That said, I must admit it irritates the hell out of me when people say "Linux 5.2" when they mean "Red Hat Linux 5.2". Aaaargh!
I think RH has done The Right Thing for the community, releasing all their code under GPL. Red Hat is a much better free software citizen than a lot of the recent "me, too" bandwagon-jumpers will prove to be.
HP-UX is, I'm convinced, written for and by alien beings. It looks like unix, it smells like unix, but it doesn't feel like unix. It seems (from my experience, YMMV) that the unix world is undergoing a regrouping, and most flavors are tending to meld back together so that the vast differences of one kind vs another are gradually softening - except for HP. They're still off doing their own thing, and not (IMHO) doing it very well...
Red Hat does a decent job at sticking to the FSSTAND. What are you talking about?
"RH should be publicly held, so that ANYONE can share the proceeds of the growth of Linux, and not just companies that don't care about it, but only care about the profit."
The problem with that is then RedHat will get all the stockholder baggage that every other publicly traded company has to deal with. Investment in a privately held company does not necessarily grant voting rights to the investor. There's also nothing stopping non-corporate investments. RedHat needs capital to grow and if, for example, a LUG got together some money to invest in the company, I don't think RedHat would turn them down.
Personally, I think the fact that RedHat is not publicly traded is a Good Thing. Do you think that the shareholders with the biggest stake are all going to be people who are primarily concerned with Free Software's best interest? No, the major shareholders with the most influence are going to be major stock market players who are more concerned about profit margins. On top of that, you run the risk of another company buying out RedHat in a stock deal, and who's to say that company will have the any concern about Free Software ideals?
RedHat's success does profit the Free Software community because it's continued success legitimizes it. It proves that you can profit from Free Software, and once the rest of the industry gets the idea, more and more of the people who contribute code in their spare time to the community might get paid for doing it.
I guess this is a bit of a religious issue, but I really believe that Red Hat's (the SYSV) way is the Right Way To Do It.
One script per service makes everything much, much easier. Adding a new service? Just drop a script for it in /etc/rc.d/init.d and link it to the /etc/rc.d/rcN.d, where N is the runlevel you want to stop or start it.
Removing a service? Remove the init scripts. Done. This is much much easier than the BSD way.
The SYSV way also makes it much easier to write service administration programs, like Red Hat's chkconfig, or KDE's ksysv.
It really does make sense. I've yet to hear a single practical reason why the BSD way is better - it just doesn't have a single advantage over the SYSV way that I can see.
I had written a long comment about how Redhat failed to work properly with half the X programs it installed, but actually I don't really think that's the problem.
Mainly I think that Redhat's problem is that it dumbs down linux, which is an anathema (sp?) to most of the old linux users.
It's a bit like AOL. Before redhat, people would ask on the comp.os.linux What's the best distribution and you'd get loads of responses from the various groups, all of which were sensible and open-minded. However now you just get r3DH@t r00L2! slackware 5UKz...
All of a sudden you have the linux community fighting within itself -- and RedHat is one of the main culprits for this.
Of course we have a lot to thank RedHat for -- their corporate image of Linux has brought us massive amounts of vendor support -- but IMHO it is the AOL syndrome that upsets most people
I have no problems with redhat, or their distro. I personally use redhat and find it stable, not bloated and easy to administer. I have not heard of any commertial software that does not work on non-redhat distros, and even if some peice of software did nto work, it would be more likely library versions than file positions (files are not THAT hard to find) Which is again just another reason to keep up to date, no matter what distro you're using.
I'll agree with you, there.
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group; renaming their home directory, and that should cover it. In HP-UX, there is no /etc/shadow, you have to navigate the /tcb/files/auth/?/* files. In SCO (which I hate hate hate because there are no real files because everything is a damned symlink to something), there is *both* an /etc/shadow and /tcb/files/auth tree.
/etc.
Take, for example, the task of changing a username. In linux, and solaris, the simplest case of this would involve only changing their username in
In an industry with so many standards that each vendor gets to choose their own, I really like RedHat's mostly FSSTAND compliant layout, and got spoiled with all system config files in
Perhaps it makes too much sense, though.
I have yet to evaluate Debian 2.1 and OpenLinux 2.2 to see how similar they are in general setup...
I used to think printing on on Unix sucked. Then I figured it out. Printing on Unix *does* suck. Like a Kirby.
Teh company, that is. My new box came with Red Hat 5.1 pre installed, and I don't like where various dirs and files ended up. But then, my old computer was a 4 year old Slackware, manually upgraded to 2.0, glibc, ELF. I will install Slackware on the new box when the glibc version comes out, because I don't want to have to go thru that upgrade again.
But Red Hat as a company is doing fine. They can't steal Linux any more than Borgus of Bill could. And people who say they have too many partnerships with companies whose proprietary closed source applications only run on Red Hat -- fools! Non of the Linux distros are anywhere near far enough apart for that to be the case. That's just FUD from within, silly, ignorant, pointless FUD.
--
Infuriate left and right
This is a very good point. I myself, being a Unix System Admin / Past freeBSD user started using Linux about 8 months ago. Knowing that it was just another Unix variant I actually started off with Slackware 3.5. I didn't really have that much trouble installing it and was using it for a few weeks until RH 5.2 was released. I must say that I was much more impressed with RH 5.2's install process and have been using it since. Although even though I installed RH 5.2 I wouldn't say that's what I use now. Just like any other distro, other than the few distro dependant utils such as rpm, yast, etc... All my utils an added apps were either added from ./configure ; make ; make install, or rpm -i blah.rpm (if I didn't feel like compiling)... My point is... Once I had RH 5.2 installed I tweaked it just like any Linux user. I installed Samba, Xfree 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1, AfterStep 1.7.90, Kernel v2.2.6, etc... Other than some of the initial setup, every distro is the same... I don't see RH falling prey to MS business tactics and think they are doing a very good job. Until I ran the RH 5.2 install, I still was thinking I should once again use FreeBSD since the 2.0 install of freeBSD was very slick.... I hope all the so called hard core linux users will realize that RedHat hasn't done bad yet...and as everything else has been saying... If they're GPL'ing all of their utils/code, they can't really become a monopolistic bunch. Also, in the real world it is more than likely that vendors will make the simple install scripts / wrapper scripts for different distros because this is a significantly less amount of effort than actual porting from say, HP-UX -> Solaris -> AIX, etc...
Just my $.02 worth!
DJ Booya
-Booya "No Try Not. Do or do not, there is no try." -Yoda
This is a very good point. I myself, being a Unix System Admin / Past freeBSD user started using Linux about 8 months ago. Knowing that it was just another Unix variant I actually started off with Slackware 3.5. I didn't really have that much trouble installing it and was using it for a few weeks until RH 5.2 was released. I must say that I was much more impressed with RH 5.2's install process and have been using it since. Although even though I installed RH 5.2 I wouldn't say that's what I use now. Just like any other distro, other than the few distro dependant utils such as rpm, yast, etc... All my utils an added apps were either added from ./configure ; make ; make install, or rpm -i blah.rpm (if I didn't feel like compiling)... My point is... Once I had RH 5.2 installed I tweaked it just like any Linux user. I installed Samba, Xfree 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1, AfterStep 1.7.90, Kernel v2.2.6, etc... Other than some of the initial setup, every distro is the same... I don't see RH falling prey to MS business tactics and think they are doing a very good job. Until I ran the RH 5.2 install, I still was thinking I should once again use FreeBSD since the 2.0 install of freeBSD was very slick.... I hope all the so called hard core linux users will realize that RedHat hasn't done bad yet...and as everything else has been saying... If they're GPL'ing all of their utils/code, they can't really become a monopolistic bunch. Also, in the real world it is more than likely that vendors will make the simple install scripts / wrapper scripts for different distros because this is a significantly less amount of effort than actual porting from say, HP-UX -> Solaris -> AIX, etc...
Just my $.02 worth!
-Booya "No Try Not. Do or do not, there is no try." -Yoda
Hint: /usr/local is for the system administrator, not the distribution.
--
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
I'm not a hardcore "GNU rules world" advocate, but Linux essentially did the same thing with the GNU tools. Why should people get upset if the same thing happens with Linux? Isn't turn-about fair play?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
My system is too heavily invested in RH for me to abandon it for another distro in the name of Macho Geekdom. I usually download archives, and compile and install them myself, and I compiled my own 2.2.5 kernel and have it running nicely. I also installed KDE 1.1, and WindowMaker. My system is mine and it evolves as I evolve. That's one of the reasons I love this OS. In many ways its a living OS. (It's ALIVE!!!!!!)
I do , however, like RH's "upgrade" feature that upgrades every installed package if you want a quick systemwide update with no hassle, and then after that I customize things and go back to installing/upgrading programs manually until a major upgrade happens. Oh well, that's the way I do it.
To each his/her own is what I proclaim.
I think there is defintly a large amount of ppl in this community that have much love for Linux, and a lot of hate for other things like, MS. Now this hate of say, MS is common place so they inadvertantly turn it towards the next big thing, ReadHat. I don't think its knowingly, but how could U "hate" a company that has done so much for the community, and is the best (IMO) way to get Linux into the mainstream!
-- "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so.
i grewup on redhat linux that's all i knew really was available never felt pressured tried slackware didn't like it...now i know the "redhat directory structure" and work fine and that's the point, to get stuff done...any linux is fine as long as you know it well...kde i don't like either it's almost another windows...i am more afraid of kde than redhat...
sages say the path is narrow and hard to follow...narrow as the edge of a razor...
Oops... then it becomes FreeBSD vs. NetBSD vs. OpenBSD, etc. :-) :-)
The main problem I see regarding whether closed-source package X runs on distro Y is library versions. What can we do to fix this? Static linking sucks from a bloat point of view.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
RedHat bugs me, for a few reasons.
.rpm packages very well. As far as I can see, *anyone* can offer up an .rpm, with no "oversight committee" of experienced users having input on the final product. You're never really sure if you're getting a well-tested, peer-reviewed package, or just something someone tossed together last night that has no hope of running on your machine.
.RPMs, which frustrates them, so they give up, and proclaim far and wide that Linux sucks, it's too hard, etc.
One, and probably the one that bugs me the most, is that they don't seem to test their
This means that a lot of the rawest of newbies have difficulties installing Redhat and
Another reason is their package manager isn't as thorough at detecting conflicts, dependencies, requirements, and suggesting additional packages as Debian's is.
Another reason: I sometimes have the feeling that RedHat is trying to be the next Microsoft: never mind the bugs, if it compiles, SHIP IT NOW. We'll incorporate patches later when enough people complain loudly enough.
If I wanted a half-broken, barely-tested, buggy OS that was rushed out the door too soon, I can think of one that's easier to install and use, and more popular, than RedHat.
And finally: Linux takes time to learn; it's sometimes pretty difficult to deal with. I resent the idea that RedHat thinks all my hard work is valueless, and they can just shovel junk at me. If I'm going to put this much time and effort into Linux, I *darn* well want to be using the most stable version I can find. Things get messy enough, just dealing with my own screwups... without having the packages themselves crash and burn due to simple things usually found via peer review, like typos and stuff.
I'd love to actually see someone do this, though.
;-)
Microsoft's first (and probably last) legal line of defense would be to say "You did not exercise due diligence when you were operating that Windows NT computer without regular backups in case it ate your data."
The idea of a Microsoft lawyer having to state on public record that data-eating crashes are a normal part of day-to-day NT operation leaves me with this happy happy feeling...
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
RPM runs on Solaris and I've heard noises from one of the *BSD's about it. That means that the RPM *packager* and *database engine* work. Unfortunately, the *data* contained *inside* the RPM (gee, look at all those asterisks ;-) doesn't actually work when it gets there.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd and use /sbin/chkconfig to configure them, which is great as long as the rest of the distribution actually puts its startup scripts there and has a /sbin/chkconfig. If you try installing this RPM on Debian, you won't get very far.
Consider ssh*.rpm install scripts--they'll write their startup scripts in
Of course other distributions can respond to this by installing a tree of symbolic links and conversion scripts so that Red Hat's configuration data from 3rd-party RPMs can be used in the "native" distribution. Try proposing that to Debian and see what the response is like...
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
Well, there was also the problem that SLS sucked much more than Slackware did. I managed to repair SLS to the point where it could be used to bootstrap a complete set of Linux sources. Then Slackware came along, and I managed to repair that to the point where it could be used to bootstrap a complete set of Linux sources. Then Red Hat came along, and for the first time there was a vendor that was fixing bugs faster than I could on my own in my spare time.
_That_ was cool, at least at the time (1996).
I was able to use Red Hat's precompiled kernels for the first time in late 1998. That was cool too.
Red Hat still requires a lot of post-installation fixes before it becomes useful, but they're getting smaller and smaller.
I'm planning to explore Debian sometime soon (I have to do this given where I work anyway) but it's not a big priority for me until I actually get a new machine to play with. Right now I don't feel like debugging an alien Linux distribution for which I don't have a workaround script ready to drop on it as soon as the installer finishes.
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
Redhat is a good distro to get into the work place, and start your friends on... it installs on all the major architectures and various methods. I like the fact that a cable modem user can get a boot/supp disk set and format and ftp install linux onto an empty hard disk.
Redhat pays for a lot of software development and forced the other distrobutions to try harder. If linux was still slackware ( I started on slack w/ 1.2.13 ) how many of you that dismiss Redhat would know what the hell linux is... ?
Everyone that belly aches about Graphical User Interface configuration tools. You can still use the console. I give newbies console instructions to setup/trouble shoot their modems, and let them use netcfg with vi for ppp. I think you should use the right tool for the job, reguardless.
I've installed only Debian, Slackware, and RedHat... and I choose RedHat for my personal use. You should refer new users to a distrobution or even OS that fits *their needs. BeOS, linux, BSD, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, NT, etc... everyone has a tool that fits their hand. Please remember this before you tell a newbie to "...just go get distro X, it's what I use. ".
I managed to type this without a single acronym! ^_^* back to the grind
What would you do if one of the next versions of Red Hat introduced a set of scripts for initialization and configuration which does everything, including making coffee and ordering a pizza but is overarchitected, slow, complicated and hard to maintain. Would you switch to a different distribution just because of that or would you stay with RH?
"Others claim that this has already happened." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Redhat is good, I even like the control panel! I started Linux about half a year ago. I wanted to be *hardcore* so for the most part I have left rpms aside and went for tarballs, and left the control panel to do $vi /etc/*. However, I recently upgraded to the 2.2 kernel and my printer didn't work (changed from /dev/lp1 to /dev/lp0, I did read the documentation). I plunged around in /etc for awhile, but I finally remembered the control panel and fixed it in a second. The control panel is by no means a catch all, but it does make some jobs easy. I have to agree with you on fvwm95,though, hopefully starbuck will change that.
--no claims that I actually am hardcore, just achieving my own perception
It is there because linuxconf (at least at RH 5.2 release time) didn't support printer configuration (primary reason) and a time/date modification. The control panel also links to glint, which linuxconf doesn't. Control Panel probably won't be in Starbuck (Dunno, ask someone running 5.9) and is being phased out, but my understanding is RH didn't feel linuxconf was ready to 'do the job alone' with the 5.2 release.
I am quick to remind Linuxcare customers (especially here in the US) and the press (when asked) that Red Hat has done wonders legitimizing Linux. Without Red Hat- the market would not be as vibrant as it is today. Look at all that Red Hat has done and let the record speak for itself.
Yeah, but if you're running Debian, you can use the alien utility.
And it's not that hard to install RPM on some other distribution.
Well, I'm a pretty happy Red Hat 5.2 user, but I've also installed and run Slackware (twice) and Debian (once) for at least a couple of months at a time. My impressions of Red Hat are as follows:
I got v4.2 from a book. At the time, I was a novice user. I'd been running Slackware 96 for a little while having recovered from a crashed Debian install (hardware, not software issue) and was getting frustrated with it. At the time, computers weren't a big issue to me. I just wanted a working, anything-but-Microsoft computer.
The installation was no easier to me than Slack or Debian had been, once I allowed for first-time jitters from that first Debian install and the fear I had of Slack's reputation. The advantage was a lack of compilation paranoia that had hounded me as a novice thanks to RPM's.
Not long after I installed 4.2, 5.0 hit the market. It had a working Gimp on CD, and I didn't have internet access at the time, so I got that. It was fine. It lasted me about a year.
When 5.1 came out, I bought it, because the net had come and gone in my home once again, and herein lies the tale:
Simply put, Red Hat 5.1 was a horrible thing to foist on customers. Take a quick peek at the errata page if you're curious. The worst part for me were the broken graphics libraries. There were also broken configuration tools, and a nonchalant warning to leave the graphical disk configurator alone because it was wrong. Cold comfort having had it scare me to death the first time I consulted it.
So, Red Hat 5.1 sucked.
About this time, Red Hat started supporting the GNOME push and announced they were against KDE in fairly definitive and ideological terms. They also stopped carrying CDE. To many users, I'm sure this seemed like a little midget Microsoft preparing for dominance of the Linux desktop, and, by extension, the corporate market for Linux.
So, so far we have:
In addition, and I am less qualified to speak to this because I've quite frankly forgotten Debian's setup and wouldn't remember Slackware well enough to have an opinion, I think Red Hat does some funky stuff with configuration files. I guess people go looking for things and don't find them where they're used to because Red Hat put 'em somewhere else. Like I said, I don't remember the others well enough to compare.
Last on my laundry list of things that seem to cause people to mistrust Red Hat would have to be their use of RPM as a package standard, and here I have to grit my teeth:
RPM isn't proprietary, despite claims to the contrary. It's true that RPM makes things easier on the novice, which is a "bad thing" to some among us. It's also true that there's an argument to be made for RPM allowing the person who compiles and packages an RPM to control the choices of the person installing the package later on down the road. I am assuming people who raise that last issue also complain about anything that doesn't involve compiling from source. I'd also point out that RPM supports source packages (SRPM's) that allow the end user as much control compiling a package as the original archive, because (as far as the one Red Hat produces) that's what they are in terms of the code they are carrying.
An additional complaint about RPM's, which I haven't seen for myself, is that some things are available only via RPM. I guess there are some commercial offerings where this would hold true, but I haven't seen them, and can't speak to that. Even if it is true, RPM is self-documenting. It's a simple matter to crack an RPM open for the files, figure out where they'd be placed, and put 'em there if it doesn't trample a pre-existing file. No need to even have an active RPM db on your system. Just RPM and cpio.
My own opinion on the matter is this:
They obviously learned from the disaster that was 5.1. They shipped a much better product with 5.2, and they "opened" the development process a lot more with Starbuck. I may even buy Red Hat 6.0, instead of going through Cheapbytes now that they've earned my trust back from the 5.1 fiasco.
They have also taken a conciliatory tack with the KDE project, based on maintaining that the root of their problem was ideological and acting accordingly by letting KDE back into their distro once the license issues with QT were resolved.
They aren't alone in wanting business to like them, either. Caldera is out there, and I think the Linux community at large is enjoying the slow and relentless process that is Linux overtaking and dominating in the "enterprise" world. That change has accelerated since last summer, when 5.1's crumminess and the spurning of KDE were such big issues.
I've also read the recent "Red Hat is the next Microsoft" press and have attributed that to bad journalism elsewhere. I will continue to maintain this:
We are all well aware that journalists don't confer "reality" in a sense that's meaningful to a rational person. Witness, for instance, Linux. Linux isn't "new," no matter who says it is. It existed and was in use long before the New York Times noticed it. Linux worked well before the people at ZDNet decided it did, once they had their noses rubbed in a few benchmarks.
In this case, once again, sayin' it don't make it so.
Conflict attracts attention, and reporting on conflict attracts readers. It also helps the nay-sayers get through another day of Linux bashing, because once you eliminate the mistruths told about performance, features, the presence of applications, ease of installation, and cost, you're left with tales about the underlying instability of the community that produces the product to begin with. And a good way to prove your point there is to highlight the flames and feuds (even though I don't think they're a sign of anything other than a community of people who care about something a lot) in hopes that you can prove Linux is doomed.
I also believe that the complaints about Red Hat's choices in terms of configuration file location and so on are pointless.
I am no expert. I can install several flavors of Linux, and I use it for everything I do with a computer (at home, because I'm not allowed to use it at work.) I'm not afraid of Linux, and I forebear when people talk about how "hard" it is. On the other hand, I doubt I'd be credited as a full-fledged geek by many here. Either way, Red Hat has bent to my will just fine. When I've disagreed with a choice in terms of a file's location or what have you, simple use of existing tools like 'ln' has allowed me to correct the issue to make myself more comfortable. In addition, when I couldn't find something where I thought it ought to be, it was just time to run 'find' and go get a glass of water or check my mail while I waited. At root, and speaking as a user who has written a tiny bit of Perl and had only five 'animal' books, six if you count the little Perl reference, Red Hat runs enough like the other two distros I've used as to make the differences meaningless.
Apologies for going on so long.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
I think that even if the people at Red Hat are turning into money hungry meglomaniacs, it can't be denied that they have done alot to support the Linux community. Red Hat has invested monies into a number of important projects and also helped with getting recognized by the general public. Besides, no matter what Red Hat does there is no way that they can take total control of the Linux community thanks to the GNU license and efforts by other distributions.
The day they apear to have just put code in a box i'll stop buying. (Like Slackware) Um personally, I don't like all of RedHat's added "value". RPM is not a very good packaging system, and all of their admin tools never work for me. However, I'm free to run what I wish, and that's what makes our system better. ;) Damon
There is a difference to being uneducated and being an idiot. If you read his post, you will notice that he's not interested in helping people who won't help themselves. I agree. A person who is just uneducated can be educated. A person who is uneducated and unmotivated is basically hopeless.
Personally, I think trying to make Linux accessible to the masses is laughable. What is my mom going to do with a multi-user server OS on her desktop machine? She wouldn't have a clue. OSes like BeOS have got the right idea. Take the hard core of Unix, and put a nice, pretty, easy, and stable interface on it. Normal users don't want the power. The people who use Linux do. Don't force something on somebody who doesn't need it.
Damon
Check out your local paper's Letters To The Editor section. Far more people write to complain about things than to praise them. If you did a poll I'm sure you'd find that the overwhelming number of /.'ers feel that RedHat is a largely if not wholely positive force. But who takes the trouble to write just because they agree with something? It's clear from the responses here that, given a chance to disagree with something like "RedHat Sux!" a lot of folks are willing to pipe up and say "Does not!"
It's human nature. It's also nice to be reminded of it now and then. If I actually assumed that the average geek was represented by the average /. post, I'd have hung it all up and gone into something like used car sales a long time ago...
The so called linux "community" will turn on various parts of itself with the same vengence they play OS jihad amongst other os's.
This is to be expected from teh narrow minded personalities that take on OS's as sacred religious duty.
In so doing the fantics will feed the press and make the 'community' the court jester to other OS makers.
This may cause several courses of action, one of which may be that Linux users,relegated to second class status linux users will mirgrate to BSD, Solairs, BeOs, and anyother os that will not carry the stigma of court jesterdom.
This shouldnt be allowed to happen. Fight stupidity, kill a jihader today.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
In the corporate community it is important to have NAME RECOGNITION. When I approached my boss with switching from M$ Windows 98/NT to a unix based system it was he who suggested Red Hat. Due to aggressive marketing Red Hat at least has name recognition with the pointy-haired Dilbert-esque boss. We in the linux community should not view the company as public enemy number one for supplying support to newbies and selling a package distro in the stores next to M$ windoze.
Think twice before bashing a company for trying to make money on an OS. Personally I usually use Solaris at work and FreeBSD at home but by attracting new people to the flock the folks at Red Hat should be congratulated. Even if you believe your boss could accomplish more work with an Etch-A-Sketch if he uses linux that's one less dollar in Bill's pocket
Where would the Linux community be without the help of Redhat funding (Rasterman, Alan Cox)?
Would Dell be selling computers today with Linux preinstalled if Redhat didn't exist?
Would fortune 500 companies actually consider Linux as a viable solution if Redhat had not pushed and promoted their software in such a way that the suits take notice?
You still may not agree with any of this, but I don't really care. What matters is that Redhat is giving back to the Linux community as much as any other company or distribution. If you don't agree with me, obviously you've been watching the Star Wars trailer way too much.
Well... a lot of commercial software is released in RPM format. That alone causes some inconvenience for the non-RedHat user.
domc
I don't have problems with Red Hat now but they could be a problem in the future. They could stick to their own standards for layout of where things go as a ditribution. All the commercial apps then work with Red Hat but don't with other distribitions. If everything was under GPL that would be great but not all software is going to be GPL, especially if you are using this in a business environment and you are just getting people away from Windows/SCO/yourOSoftheweek.
Red Hat has done some great things. I use Enlightenment on almost every Desktop that I can. I started back before Rasterman got a job with Red Hat. He is still able to kickout code like he did back in Aussieland. All of good GPL apps/progs have gotten almost dropped because the main author has gotten too busy to continue to work on it. (Xanim comes to mind)
So while the GPL is great, a program can become orphaned fairly easy once a main author becomes disinterested or too busy to continue work on it.
Is Red Hat bad? You Linux guys should take a minute to put yourselves in the shoes of a BSD advocate, and imagine how this all looks from the outside. I'm not saying you'll learn anything useful, but at least you'll get a different point of view. :-)
The most amusing thing about this whole brouhaha between different distributions is that a year ago it was the Linux camp accusing the BSDs of being `fragmented.' Why is it that the BSDs don't seem to be as fragmented now? There are still about the same number of major Linux distributions out there, and the same number of BSDs.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
What do the fools think RedHat has done wrong? I've heard "They're greedy megalomaniacs," or something along those lines. If true, how does that affect anything?
You fools need to realize that other people are not working for your benefit. They work for their own, as should you. The cooperation and sharing of ideas that GNU and GPL promote is a wonderful thing. This does not, however, mean that everyone else should do work for your benefit.
I've been seeing a lot of disturbing sentiments lately. People saying that "no, can't do this, it doesn't help the community." Wake up fools. That's not their responsibility, it is only, a possibility.
Do not expect others to give to you through Altruism. Most of you that complain don't contribute yourselves, many probably don't even code. But I digress...
More to the point. Redhat is suceeding and growing, and profitting. Good for them. Wonderful. There are benefits we all receive from this. It is their right to do business as they see fit. Enough of the jealousy and fear and hatred of success. Go away, let us that know how to succeed do so.
Really, there's one reason all this is going on. Red Hat bashing is officially "in" :)
It's a fad, folks.
The longer you lose Linux, the less distro wars are entertaining. Distro's are really meant to do one task: Get a user set up with "Linux"(or get technical and say Linux kernel, GNU tools, yabba dabba do). It's the user's task to take the system to the next level, the level that is right for them.
Calling Red Hat the root of all evil does one good thing. It keeps the kids (yes, they are doing most of the yelling) of the streets and at the keyboards flaming
Redhat is good for someone who wants to break into the linux world. But I hate to say it, but RPM's are annoying. Trying to install something like the new GTK is a nightmare of package dependancies and such. I should know, I gave up on using the rpms and went to source installs, which I find easier and more informative.
Lots of people find source installs easier than rpms in the long run. Should this be so? Maybe someone should revamp rpm and make it really, really frikin intelligent... because thats what a package manager needs to be.
Redhat does some things wierd, but all in all it's a pretty efficient distribution, it dosen't have as much raw kipple on the CD's as debian does, but it has 90% of what a beginner needs. As time goes on, you can stop depending on the rpm system and slowly begin to maintain it yourself with source installs.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
In some areas yes.. in other areas no..
RH seems to be a bleeding edge kind of company, they were on eof ht efirst ot go to glibc2, and rpm, and others followed, SUSE ahs some old libs in there 6.0 distro, and it can slow down a system, in some cases, or make you have to install 2 versions of a package which sucks. SUSE is way eaiser to administer adn YAST is the best setup tool linux has to offer, to bad that they do not GPL it.
redhat (IMHO) is (IMHO) not a bad distribution. I have tried debain, slackware, suse, redhat, caldera, and linux pro, as well as turbolinux, and so far RH 5.2 is my choice.. the upgrade from 5.1 was supper easy with no problems, which is where slackware lacks.. debain is also good, but deselect is where it lacks . debian is not for a newbie... turbolinux is not to bad however they sufer from a similar problem as debain.. try a custom install when you don't now what the 2000+ packages are or wha tyou should or should not install.. however TL is better than debina in that respect..
Redhat, is simply one of the more well thought out distros.. BUT that is not to say that all distros will not get better ...
when I use a computer I want stability Linux has this Windows does sometime when it wants to . I look for ease of use, I really do not want to spend a month trying to configure my system, well windows tries, and so do some of the linux distros (like RH).. I look for programs, well linux has them coming but that is where it still lacks....
no SUSE is not better...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Yea, I think the Xfree86 project is the best. We should adopt its name for the OS, ohh wait I think apple already did that with OSX. ohh well.
ArsonSmith
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Wow, I think I just reilezed why people would say "linux 5.2" anyone ever look at the redhat box? as I was reading this I looked up at my redhat 5.1 and redhat 5.2alpha boxes on the shelf and they have "redhat LINUX 5.2" with redhat in very small almost unseeable letters. If I didnt know better I would think it was linux 5.x. ohh well I dont think it is a bad thing though really. but as soon as I see MSLinux2000 then I will be scared.
ArsonSmith
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I think Red Hat deserves praise--I mean, c'mon... Look at what they have done:
* They develop all their software under the GPL, which is something that cannot be said of other distros, such as SuSE or Slackware.
* They developed RPM, which is arguably the BEST packaging system available for Linux now... So much so that virtually everyone else, with the exception of Slackware and Debian, are using it too, now.
* They have done more than almost anyone else (except maybe Caldera) to legitimize Linux in the corporate setting.
* They *DO* follow standards--their filesystem follows the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), and they appear to be actively supporting LSB.
I say, as long as they continue using the GPL, there is little possibility of them gaining proprietary competitive advantages over others the way Micro$oft does. And as to commercial software being developed for Red Hat: there is no reason why Red Hat competitors cannot taylor their distributions to work with those apps, too. And as the LSB gains more momentum, this will be less of a concern, too. I think the main reason some people are so scared about Red Hat is that they are trying to escape from the world of Micro$oft (justifiably) by using Linux, and are paranoid about ANYONE trying to make money at all with Linux.
But as I say, I think there is little real reason for panic here. There are many competitors that have taken Red Hat's features--examples: Linux Mandrake and BeroLinux, which have since merged. Red Hat 6.0 will narrow the gap between them, proving that true competition can yield good things... With the merge of BeroLinux with Mandrake now though, Mandrake's next competitive advantages will probably be Pentium/K6 optimization, and better integration of GNOME/KDE.
So overall, the only problem I have with Red Hat right now is their certification program. Otherwise, they are cool... And Red Hat 6.0 is going to be AWESOME when it comes out--I have been using Raw Hide for quite some time, and assuming 6.0 is going to be at all like Raw Hide, it will be AWESOME. I am a bit disappointed to see the reception it is getting in the press and by users so far... Especially since it will include *BOTH* GNOME and KDE.
I think Redhat is doing great. Most of the people that complain about Linux are the true hackers out there. I for one use Slackware (on a older computer) Redhat for my webserver (Did this because its the less painful to maintain), Debian (to play games, program and play mp3's) and of course LinuxPPC (its a Mac). Alot of people are maybe paranoid that if RedHat becomes to powerful they will turn Linux into a GUI dependant/to much crap OS. I for one belive that they are doing great espically with the gnome project kicking hard!
Natas
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Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
If Caldera was in the position RedHat is (i.e. most popular distribution, big investments), I would be worried. Caldera ships a lot of proprietary software with OpenLinux (bit of a misnomer), like Netware. RedHat (while still selling some proprietary software) has been very committed to releasing the code for just about everything *they* write.
I agree with you. Debian is probably the smartest distro. But that install...
I just got back from Comdex-Chicago. I installed the Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 that someone handed me for free at the show. Wait till you see this installation! THREADED. Play Tetris while packages are loading!
By the way, Linus's speech was funny. Atta way Linus! Sock it to 'em!
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
1. RedHat is a company.
;-)
2. Companies are evil.
therefore,
3. RedHat is evil.
Jeez, RedHat is doing the Right Thing (or at least trying to do it). But they made the wrong thing by being a company. So, they should not be trusted.
If you don't like it, use Debian. Or create your own distro based on pristine upstream source. But stop whining.
And to those that like it: be ready to change to something else if it blows up
If everyone followed the "standards", what would be the point of Open Source? Aren't we talking about the freedom to take software in a different direction? Standards help software interoperate, freedom helps software evolve. You *can* have it both ways, but don't blame someone for choosing the other path.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
... that all the big corporations -- with all the stockholder controlling interests that come with them --- are being allowed to invest in RH, and capitalize on the growth of RH and Linux. Great! Except that the people who really MADE RH have a product - the kernel hackers, the average joes, cannot purchase stock. In fact RH has stated on the SVLUG (Silicon Valley LUG) that it has no intention in the foreseeable future of going public.
Many Linux hackers and supporters are also in a position to invest a decent amount in RH. These are the people who deserve the most to profit from the rise of Linux, not Dell who up until LWCE couldn't give a crap about Linux. Dell is in it for the money, nothing more nothing less. The people who are in it for the love are left outside waiting for the door to open while the corporations get richer.
RH should be publicly held, so that ANYONE can share the proceeds of the growth of Linux, and not just companies that don't care about it, but only care about the profit.
I suppose the one most serious criticism that could be levelled at RHS is that they--like all of the other commercial distros--are in it for the bucks, which means some things get left behind. For example, Red Hat's "Rough Cuts" ports aren't done by them... it's hackers like Jes Sorensen who did all the work without one cent from Red Hat. Contrast that with Debian where it's all volunteers so things become "official" because they have the quality already, not because of what some person trying to commercialize it thinks.
But clearly m68k-neglect isn't what bothers most people. Hell, it isn't even what bothers me. I think what does bother people is that RHS (whatever SuSE and Caldera may think) is the 800 pound gorilla, and therefore represents what's "wrong" with the commercialization of Linux, even if it's not the one guilty of those sins. If anything, they're more benign than Caldera (whose cheapo packages only work for 90 days or so, IIRC), SuSE and Corel. Well at least two of the three by the time most people read this...
Having said that, I don't want to see Red Hat gone... if only for the "Thank god for Arkansas" factor (as in "dpkg may suck, but at least it's not the worst... thank god for rpm!").
So there you go... from a Debian weenie's perspective at any rate.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
First I think the placement of all RPMS in /usr/bin is a real problem. I no longer know the properway to partition my harddrives. I think core functions should go in /usr/bin and others somewhere else. /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/RH/bin, how about a user definable location? Even Microsoft (most of the time) gives you a choice on where to install (most) of the files.
Where you ask? Well if not
Second problem, is the official lack of useful support. I don't expect alot of support, but going through official channels I wouldn't trust RH to do anything. Through un-official channels, RH employees are good about helping people. They now how support to buisnesses, but how about 1-900 support for home users or people in a hurry.
So who's next.
The guy who made SLS will tell you all about how SLS was the #1 distribution until Slackware unleashed a snappy install and better package management.
The Slackware guys will tell you all about how they were the #1 distribution until RedHat unleashed a snappy install and better package management.
It's not tough to see a trend here. History repeats itself. Who's next?
-Rich
The only problem I have with redhat is their bugs and broken packages. However, overall it is a solid distro.
The installation is easy, it's constantly updated, and they support open source. I don't believe it's the best distro but it's damn good.
Linux is what you make of it. So what if you use Redhat or Slask or Debian as a base? What's important is what you have left after all the tweaking and modifications.
I've been using linux for about a year and a half now. I'm planning on making my own linux installation purely from scratch. I guess you can say I'll have my own personal distro. I'll take what I like best from every distro and incorporate it to my own.
I can understand some linux user's concerns about REDHAT's popularity but they really haven't acted "M$ish" yet.
We should be glad that Redhat is getting more popular. I can't wait for the day when I can abandon my M$ workstation and go 100% linux!
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
- is
, this is a truely significant comment! Otherwise, I'm going to guess that they've been doing some work. (Also, some have said that RH 5.0 also needed lots of work...)I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, there are people who attack them, but most of this thread seems highly supportive
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You've got that right! (At least from my point of view.) One of the convincers for my getting involved with Linux was the availablility of improved installers. (Of course, I don't have X windows working yet... [bunch of updated rpm's I need to install].)
The fear of the unknown is mighty! Anything that smooths the path makes new users feel less timid. (Of course, as SOON as I reformatted my hard disk there was an urgent request for a file that only existed on backup tape, and neither the application that used it nor the backup program currently installed! Any wonder people get timid?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I cut my teeth on IRIX with SGI's chkconfig and was severely disappointed that my first Linux installation (Slakware) didn't have such a thing. I was overjoyed to see this util when I installed RedHat.
/etc/rc.d/init.d and do a "chkconfig --add"
Installing new services is trivial with SYSV inits and chkconfig: add 2 lines to the init script, pop it into
SYSV makes sense. BSD is, er, evil.
I've never seen RedHat put anything in /usr/local. Some third-party rpm's may do it, but that's not RedHat's fault.
Although I don't know of any products that run only on redhat I do know of several that are only SUPPORTED on redhat. Thats still a big deal.
Having said that I support redhat as much of the money they make is thrown right back into the linux community. most importantly, unlike MS, redhat's linux distro will always be available free for people to do with as they will. The community will make sure that they stay in line.
How is KDE proprietary. Yes I know about QT, but now its QT 2.0 and its not proprietary. Pressure from gnome certainly helped there.
Much more importantly redhat 6.0 will ship with both gnome and kde.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.
(Can't really imitate Frank Oz's voice on line.)
Anyways, we've suffered log enough under MS's rule. But thanks to Linux, and GNU, and others, we now have a choice. And since this is what the GPL is built on, we will always have a choice. So worry not, and do something important, like code.
While they would most likely make a killing if they did offer stock, then guess what would happen? You would have another Internet-type stock and regular uninformed people would have the power which would be to maximize their profits. And that leads to Microsoft.
They will eventually go public. And of all of the companies now investing into Red Hat- Intel, Netscape/AOL, Dell, and other I'm sure I've forgotten will not be able to collectively decide on anything. I'm sure all they want for now is to end the MS monopoly.
And have you ever asked them if you could invest in them? Maybe they would take a large enough sum from a group of people. Don't complain unless you try to change it and fail.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
The reason I think that a lot of compnaies will shell out shedloads rather than use free/open opensource software is that they want a comeback. If the system they just installed to run their company fails due to problem with the system...they want to be able to sue the backside of someone for loss of earnings (or whatever the corporate equivalent is). I'm not advocating this, I'm advocating linux but its the world we live in I'm afraid!
Yup, starbuck should, I've just tried a rawhide installation, and the default, for my install was enlightnement...but it could've just as easily been K, or windowmaker...its just how decided to install. And its been up for 5 hours now without a problem...I guess RH6.0 will definately be along soon!!
If you are talking about RPMs not made by RedHat, then you don't have a valid complaint. It's not RedHat's responsibility, nor should it be, to verify every single RPM that is going to be put on the Internet. They can only be responsible for what they themselves produce. Should Linus and Alan Cox have to verify every package written for Linux, even stuff like user programs that are clearly outside of the kernel?
It would be another thing entirely to blame the RPM format for making it easy to screw up RPMs, and that would be valid (if true, I'm not saying it is). You seem to address that in the next paragraph, saying that RPM is not as good at detecting dependencies and suggesting additional packages as Debian's system is. This I can't speak to because I haven't used Debian, but the RedHat stuff seems to work pretty well.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
--Terry Pratchett
"RedHat is evil" is nothing but flamebait from some bored, paranoid script kiddies. Every (well, okay, almost every) Linux distribution has its place.
:)
:)
Wanna learn Linux? REALLY learn Linux? Get Slackware. By the time you've got it running happily you'll be employable as a Linux sysadmin. (It's true. And only six months earlier I'd been a mac guy whose only exposure to emacs was its entry in the jargon file).
Hack a lot? Need to have a system that runs well with only a little effort, but that you can tweak and hack on to your heart's content. Get Debian.
Need to have a web server up from bare metal in thirty minutes to impress a manager who's a member of the "I've heard IIS is the fastest and most popular web server ever*" crowd? RedHat worked for me (the server has been up for a year)
Need to keep your Novell-running company from migrating to Windows NT? Will your manager not approve any OS he can't see a number higher than $50 on a P.O. for? Caldera.
Like RedHat, like KDE, don't wanna wait for RH6? Mandrake.
What other OS has an _entirely separate product_ just to change the look and feel? Come on, choice is one of Linux' cardinal strongpoints!
(If I didn't mention your favorite distro, I'm sure it's cool too. I just haven't used it yet.
Our community is percieved by many as being fragmented because of these multiple choices; don't give them any ammunition...
As for the "RedHat may take over Linux and commericalize it until it sucks" argument, well, RMS might dust off a big pile of software patents he was just granted on GCC tomorrow and make all of us pay $495.00 for using his compiler. Oh, wait. It's all protected by the GPL. Nevermind, we're safe. Even if RedHat wanted to do something like this (which is, as in my example here, extremely unlikely), it couldn't.
* This statement about IIS was obtained by a scientific poll, conducted a couple of weeks ago in Redmond, WA, USA. The size of the sample for this study was 1.
I've only been running Linux for about a month now, and only tried RH 5.2.
Now, I'll openly admit, I know next to nothing about *nix (well, a bit of user end stuff, but that's rusty from disuse).
But so far I'm pretty happy with it, but, I find that the administration tools leave me wondering what's really going on underneath the gui.
So... though I'll keep that system running the way it is, i'm clunking together another machine of spare bits and pieces, and I'll be (gulp) trying out slackware. and then other distro, and then another, till I feel like I know what I'm doing, till I've answered the questions I've got, and generated another bunch of questions I don't even know how to ask yet.
I think RH is a good starting point for people who DON'T want to get deep into the OS, but that's from a very cursory exam. Otherwise, try everything you can get your hands on, learn as much as you can, and feel good because you did it.
Not because a nice easy installer did it all for you. (now to live up to those words...)
Mike
CIA Industries - Running the world for fun and profit
Who cares if Linux has been or will be legitimized by large corporations? I really don't. I started using Linux in 1997 and will continue to use it regardless of whether Corel makes a version or 3com supports it, or HP thinks it's hip. Who really cares. It was around long before CNN did there 12 minute story on Linux. It was here long before any of the "Big Boys" started showing an interest. Are they going to ruin linux? I don't see how. If companies, like RedHat, start trying to make software that only runs on RedHat, me and every other redblooded linux user will run to Debian or something like Debian. I like Debian, I used it for awhile. I decided to give RedHat a shot, and I like RedHat too. But as soon as anyone starts messing with my OS, I will just wipe my drives and install a distribution that doesn't want to be M$. I don't see any of that happening with RedHat. People just fear anyone that succeeds, like M$. RedHat is nowhere near the size of M$, and they never will be. I don't think there ever will be another M$. I think we have all learned from seeing what M$ has done, to not let that happen ever again. Especially now that we have viable alternatives.
My biggest fear about all the RedHat bashing is that it will divide the Linux community and we will go by way of the dinosaur or UNIX. We need to stick together and not fight amongst ourselves.
LoRider
To my knowledge, there is not a single objection to Red Hat that can't be answered with "Mandrake/Berolinux", and there's a lot of good things to be said about them.
A friend and I were talking over dinner last night, and his opinion (which I'm shamelessly co-opting) is that if you're trying to convince your boss to switch from NT to Linux, it just won't sink in when you tell him it's free.
It's like a bad Dilbert cartoon: you say to the pointy-haired boss, "We can install Linux. It will save us several thousand dollars, because it's free."
"What's free?"
"Linux."
"For how long?"
"Forever."
"But how much do we have to pay to install it?"
"Nothing."
"But if it's free, we can't get tech support, can we?"
"Yes. Tech support by the geek community at-large. For free."
"Okay, but then we obviously have to pay a fee for upgrades."
You can continue to say "no" at this point, and the boss will be convinced that it's some sort of underhanded budget trick--or worse yet, a joke on him--or you can say:
"Well, yeah... if we buy RedHat."
"What's RedHat?"
"It's the most expensive version of Linux."
"How much?"
...at this point, you basically name a number that doesn't sound too absurd. You want a hundred boxes for the office? tell him $5K. You want to show him amazing savings? Get ten, and tell him $500. You want to see if he'll bite? Get one (so you can have that nifty manual) and say $150, for the whole office. And buy your office some beers with the change.
As my friend said, "Management likes to buy things. If you tell them they can have things (especially expensive things like operating system upgrades) without buying them, they won't ever believe you."
So RedHat is not only not evil, but the fact that somebody is actually selling Linux is making The Suits pay attention, and even though Suits in our little world may be a Bad Thing(tm), there will never come a day when any one company can "own" Linux. Linus saw to that back in the day.
-jurph
Thank you for the intelligent and logical look at the situation. I hope that more and more people will remember why it is that we use LINUX.
1. It's stable.
2. It's powerful.
3. It's Fun!
4. It is created, maintained, and supported by intelligent, helpful, and talented people.
5. It is not from Redmond....
My two cents worth..
I doubt anyone in the "Linux community" opposes widespread adoption and use of Linux. In order for this to happen, a large number of people must have access to Linux. Red Hat provides that access. The company is simply good at what it does. If, as everyone wishes, a large number of people use Linux, the company providing Linux to them will become large as well. As long as it remembers and respects the reasons for its popularity, I don't think Red Hat is a bad thing. I think it's a good solution to the difficult problem of providing Linux to lots of people.
/usr/local/* is the perfect place to install non-RPM programs (.tgz's et. al.) If RPM put binaries into /usr/local, I wouldn't know right offhand whether I could just delete random files from that tree without breaking anything in /var/lib/rpm/*, instead of having to confirm the fact manually with 'rpm -qf '. The thought of mixing referenced and unreferenced files (esp. where multiple directories are involved) gives me the willies.
:-)
/usr/local/bin)
I know, this is just a small convenience in the greater scheme of things, but as with your example, it is also well thought-out. Just . . . well-thought out in a different way
(And just not too long ago I was annoyed finding my RPM'ed GQmpeg binary in
iSKUNK!
No /usr/adm, not even a link to the /var/log. For those of us who grew up with 'tail /usr/adm/messages/' ingrained in our brainstem, this was annoying. The fix, obviously, is trivial
/var/adm compatibility link for a couple of releases, and then removed it. The Linux standard is /var/log. If you are used to /usr/adm, You have some REAL problems. (/usr became "read-onlyable" a long time ago)
/etc/rc.d is WAY too complicated for any purpose I can realistically see people desiring ... and it is nontrivial for administrators to jump between distributions on different machines. The Slakware scheme was more than sufficient. Thankfully, VAResearch includes a cheat-sheet with all of their servers, making the transition easier if you have the means
I assume you are new to RedHat. As per the FSSTND, they had the
Goddamned runlevels.
Sorry, after many years of almost every type of UNIX, I immediatly found the RedHat layout to be the best ever, and hope everyone switches to it. (Hard links suck, BSD is un-maintainable).
The Arch-PAB! The RPM for a later version of afterstep (no wm flames please) that I got FROM THE REDHAT WEB SITE placed the 'afterstep' executable in a different place from RedHat 5.2! Major annoyance to find this, and I suspect there are plenty of other RPMs out there doing similarly nasty (and transparent!) things.
Didn't have this problem. Did you get it from contrib? They are currently not controlled, though RedHat has considered the idea of creating RPM standards.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
I hope they do, at least they have proven their ability at doing things properly, remember you can still get RED HAT free of charge from their ftp site, is that something a blood set borg'd out company like Micro$haft would do?, I think not.. but lets look at a pc world dominated by Red Hat.. everyone running E. having total flexabilty in their operating system.. no hardware problems.. high speed update's.. trovold could work for them.. make a billion a year.. what's the problem with that.. as you can tell I am all for Red Hat, but only beacuse they have time and time again demonstrated their ability to turn out a useable full fledged distribution.. "hail to the king baby" =)
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
As for putting other packages into the /opt directory I find it better than having them all over the place, and if you must rais Sh$t about it you can change the installation path to something else, why is it when a good thing comes along there are allways people there to shoot it down, I have had less problems with red hat than anything else, probably due to the fact the take on a well planned directory system.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Lets not get political about Redhat. On balance they have been good for linux and contribute a lot to the community.
I use Debian where possible because I like it - it is simple (even elegant). I had to use Redhat last week and was less productive - not Windows-like unproductive, just less so. I might also have been less comfortable using BSD or Solaris, two systems I have a lot of respect for.
Redhat have also been instrumental in getting Linux in the door. Nobody noticed when the dialup PC installed by the ISP went from Redhat 4.2 to Debian 2.1 - it rocked my world but who else gives a damn. What people noticed was the speed and the stability of Linux. They noticed Oracle, Samba, Apache and Squid.
Linux won and Redhat played a part in it.
That's the only thing which concerns me about RedHat's success. It's the momentum thing, what with all the big (moneyed) players entering the game, mediahype, antitrust cases, et al.
;-)
Fortunately, the diversity doesn't seem to have been lost: IBM (PowerPC), Intel (x86, StrongArm), Compaq (Alpha), to name a few.
RedHat's building a concert hall for us. As long as we keep writing the music and rehersing the orchestra, we don't need no stinkin' piper.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I disagree, the concern about RedHat is not irrational. RedHat has in recent times courted IBM, Intel and other companies with less than stellar pasts. This does not refer to their finances, but rather policy and products aka MCA.
It stands to reason that these companies see a way to make money through Linux, the only question is how. It is possible that these companies can in the future influence RedHat in ways that may not be of benefit to the Linux 'community'. After all it is the function of corporations to look out for themselves.
But while some degree of wariness can be justified RedHat has done no wrong, in my opinion. And some of the vitriol is due to the fact that it has grown by courting newcomers. This annoys older users, especially those that started with Slackware.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
You know, I can't really think of anything really bad that RedHat has done. They're really one of the driving forces that's gotten Linux into the corporate marketplace, IMHO. They've really become part of the "corporate identity" of Linux (if Linux can have such an identity besides the infamous penguin).
/'ing their RedHat installs in favor of something else really fast. No one likes a sell-out.
You can't ignore the contributions RedHat has made to the community - they gave us the first of the easier-to-install distributions (back when they came out, I wouldn't call Slackware "easy"). They gave us RPM to make system maintenance and upgrading easy...I know I'd have a lot more headaches if it weren't for RPMs. I think it's tough to argue that any other distribution to this point has had such a significant impact in the general computing community. And now, they're putting capital into the RedHat Labs, helping to make GNOME into a stable and viable desktop system that works, and looks good doing it. (I don't like the look/feel of KDE, personally, and KDE won't get along with WindowMaker as well as I'd like.)
The original question does raise a valid point - could RedHat turn to the "dark side"? I'd argue that the fact that all of RedHat's software is GPL'd makes it difficult at best. Some people might argue that RedHat's now dependent on the investments from various big names in the computing industry, but, once again, I think the Linux community in itself is a strong enough influence to keep RedHat in line. If RedHat were to try and push things "too far" away from OpenSource software, they'll have people rm -rf
is why is that Control Panel there at all? Isn't it just a relic from RH3.0.3? I thought that this was completely obsoleted by linuxconf?
Anyway it doesn't matter to me as I normally edit the config files by hand.
James
Greetings,
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Red Hat.
Storytime boys and girls!
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away (from pdpvax)...
IBM equipment was extremely expensive, and came with a service warranty. That service warranty included a pretty much dedicated customer service representative, who was like that neighbor who never stops dropping by. 'Howdy-ho neighbor!'
IBM's parts were very very proprietary, but some companies had figured out the trick of making peripherals for it. Heck, some companies made peripherals that IBM didn't!
If you bought a part that was non-IBM, and the service rep found out about it, he had the power to go to his boss and say, 'Hey, they bought a non-IBM part. We can, through this clause in their contract, revoke their service agreement without having to pay them the remaining time-adjusted value.' He would then go to a management person in the company, and make it clear that unless the person who made that purchasing decision was fired, the company would lose its (several million dollar, often!) service contract with IBM.
*poof* People got fired. Well, duh.
This didn't happen if you bought IBM, of course. That's where the phrase Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM came from. It wasn't that people wanted to make that decision or that there was in-company pressure to always buy the top name brand (there rarely is!), it was that IBM had the sheer power to enforce that kind of internal meddling.
Red Hat does not now, and (imho) never will have that kind of power. To compare them to any company with single-source powers is utter nonsense.
It has since become used as a catchphrase for the general tendency for company management to be more comfortable with an established company than a unbacked, unknown, possibly fly-by-night company. I would say that that's not possible in the Free Software world, but that's not true. How many people think that I could cleanly upgrade my archaic Yggdrasil installation to a modern-day one? Probably zip, because it's too old, and too different from all the current installs. It's no longer supported. 'But the source is open, it'll always be supported!' they cry. Don't you believe it. Sometimes, people Just Don't Care anymore. That leaves things just as unsupported as if they had been proprietary!
If my company had standardized on the Yggdrasil installation, forever ago, would our programs run on anyone else's systems now? NO!
That's why companies look for the top dog in the field, the established company, the one with financing. That's Red Hat right now. In The Future, All Restaurants Will Be Taco Bell...and all Linux installs will be LSB-compliant, but until that time, Red Hat is the one with Brand Recognition. They also happen to funnel a hell of a lot of cash directly into people WRITING REAL FREE SOFTWARE. They're not just the guys in the red hats, they're also the guys in the white hats still.
Cut them some slack where that's concerned, okay? As a friend says, 'Dey bein' real good to the s'ware biz right now...'
*cough*
Cyberfox!
1. Timely security updates don't always happen.
OK, maybe I'm missing something, but how is this Red Hat's problem? Are you talking about security updates to Red Hat proprietary software? i wasn't aware that they made any. If it's not Red Hat proprietary, then do you mean that Red Hat should shoulder the entire burden for security for all free software? I find that position untenable. Do you mean that Red Hat isn't fast enough in putting up nice, pretty, easy-to-use RPMs to plug newly-known security holes? If security is truly a concern for you, then you shouldn't be waiting for Red Hat's people to make the update easy to install for you, no matter how fast they are. You should instead be spending your time fixing your system. In the time it takes someone else to figure out how to apply a patch and how to make it easy to use and how to put it on their website, I could figure out how to apply the patch and be done with it.
ARGH... I had a long comparison of the distributions I've used... but I was compiling Mozilla on Solaris/x86 with not enough RAM+swap and the thing logged me out... ^*&%$*(%
.tgz packages to .slp. Dunno if they got the new installer ready yet or not.
Anyway, here's a summary of what I was going to say...
Slackware hardly does anything for you, (no, not even X) and you have to convert RPM packages to tar.gzs or cpios (or use -nodeps for _every _single_package_, if you decide to get it). Even though it was the first I used, I wouldn't recommend it to the newbie.
The version of Stampede I used was Slackware with an nfs site set up for installs, everything compiled with pgcc, and glibc2 as the default. Oh yeah, they renamed
Caldera OpenLinux was overly customized. They even used a DE which was not KDE, not GNOME, but some proprietary thing. Probably shouldn't expect that part to change for the new release.
RedHat is the one you can go into Best Buy and purchase with a manual. I haven't tried it though.
S.u.S.E has the best install/admin tool I've seen, YaST. You can do almost every admin job you would need from there. IIRC, though, some config files were marked "Do not edit" or "You MUST run suseconfig after editing this file", which is a Bad Thing. It does use RPMs, but if they were truly compatible why would Gnome need a seperate page for S.u.S.E RPMs?
Debian has the most current packages, some (potentially) too current for your own good. Updates are super-easy thanks to dselect. However, it uses DEBs instead of RPMs, so for most precompiled software you have to use alien.
All things considered, RedHat is probably best for the masses. SuSE is good for sysadmins, Slackware for control freaks, Debian for people who love the "bleeding edge", Stampede for speed freaks, and OpenLinux for... ummm... people who think Motif is Open Source because it's made by the Open Group? Can't really come up with a good target market for that one. Maybe big corporations who need (or feel they need) a custom solution?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
You know, I recently gave up Redhat, mainly
because I found RPM to more trouble than it
was worth, and have since happily switched to
Debian. But Redhat, when I first used it ages
ago, provided a perfect intro to Linux. It gave
me simple ways to accomplish common tasks so
that I could get going, which gave me time
to get used to things and ease into the more
complex but more powerful ways of doing things.
And this is to me the value that distros like
Redhat have. Also, this company actively employ people to write code that they contribute back to the community. So they also sell a lot of CDs. Good for them.
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man -Jebediah Springfield (a.k.a. Hans Sprungfeld)
It's a matter of Choice.
IF there were several varieties of Losedoze
on the market and it was the only viable
OS, I"m sure that my choice wouldn't be the same
as most other's choice; yet it would be MY choice!
I, for one, am grateful there are so many choices out there in the world of Linux distribution land.
I may never, EVER, use another distribution other than the one I currently use now.
I WILL defend, to the death, my right to choose another if I like.
Don't close doors because you think _I_ might not like what you are supposing MIGHT be behind it.
There are enough people in the world doing that already and I find it cramping my life at every turn.
Thanx.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
I hear a lot of discussion as to which distrobution is best for each level of experience, but a lot of it is contradictory. Why is Slackware a good starting point? What makes Debian so good for experienced users?
Who comes up with these things? I am used to the way that HP-UX does things, now I have to wander aimlessly through a Solaris system to find simple log files (slight exagerration:).
People can put things where they like 'em, but some of the standardization in the *NIX world could be better.
Briefly, in my opinion Red Hat is about the best
you could expect of a corporation. Their
commitment to a fully free distribution is very laudable. Their significant commitment to new free development is great. They really seem to buy into our way of doing things.
On the other hand they are a corporation with investors and a board of directors. In the end this may may lead them to change as they work to
maximize their shareholder value.
However, even at that, all we have to lose is that they won't be the Red Hat of old. I don't think it will be so hard to shift to other distributions in force if they try to screw us.
Myself, I would like to switch to Debian on general principle, but I am glad that Red Hat is out there, doing what they do.
As a community, I think we should take care to not demonize them too much in public.
Geospatial Programmer for Rent
Vi vs Emacs. WindowMaker vs KDE vs nearly-every-other-WM. Debian vs Redhat. For the most part, it's a matter of personal preference and the way you're used to. Or at least that's how i see it.
I find redhat infintely more useful than debian purely because the binary packages are more up to date
Except in a few cases where something just doesn't work or needs a large amount of tweaking to fit in with Debian's guidelines or when the maintainer is short on time, the unstable tree seems to be quite up to date. The stable tree is behind, because everything there is what it known for sure to work well. If you don't mind risking it a little, just add the unstable tree to /etc/apt/sources.list.
And if you really need something not in a deb, you can always get the source and compile it under /usr/local.
dselect is an eye-sore
Sometimes i wonder if i'm the only one who likes dselect... And if you don't like it, you can always download the debs from the packages listing and do a dpkg --install.
debian advocates loud apt, but scorn untested software, but forgive me if i'm wrong isn't apt unstable at this time?
Nope, it's stable. As for scorning untested software, are you only looking at stable?
debian seems to be more about unix standards and redhat more about GUI admin tools.
Personally, i'd rather have standards so i can find what i'm looking for over a plethora of GUI tools. Other people would much rather have the GUI for everything. Again, it's personal preference and fodder for a holy war.
I'd especially like to know how to make usable debs from RPMs/source of my work (i hear alien doesn't work so well after all)
i would too, one of these days when i have time i plan on teaching myself. As for alien, the problem comes in when the alien package puts files where the distro doesn't want them...
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
This directory should always be empty after first installing a FHS-compliant system. No exceptions to this rule should be made other than the listed directory stubs.
Redhat vaguely bothers me because it does mess with /usr/local...
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
RedHat has done nothing but make a name for itself in the eyes of the Corporate & layman world. True you say Linux and the basic computer user will say RedHat in response but so what? If it give people a stepping platform from which to spring let it. I use it along with Caldera and have never had any incompatibilities execept not having the glibc in Caldera.
Once someone starts using Linux whether it is RedHat or something else.This will get them to start reading and gathering more information and see that there are other distibutions out there.
The only fear I have is if/when RedHat goes public and the possibility of board members that are from proprietary companies can start steering the ship. Thats when we should start worrying or start buy as much of their stock as possible to keep them heading the right direction.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
And for those who think that the corporate $$$ poured into Red Hat is a "bad thing", remember that these companies are going to be the driving force behind improvements in scalability, high performance file systems, etc.
That's what's important to these people, and they're going to put money into hiring people to develop to their needs and to provide them with the equipment they need.
I spoke to a S.u.S.E. employee at CeBIT who claimed that RedHat did use a
modified clib to run Oracle stable, and that they weren't able to get a patch
or this modified C library from RedHat's ftp server. This is only first hand
rumor, I am in no position to asses if RedHat really played intentionally
dirty.
Oracle stated that it only supports RedHat, so that SAP felt it also should
exclusively go with one distribution vendor (being RedHat). That is how
the SAP investment in RedHat came to pass. No wonder the SuSE guys felt
left out and were somewhat pissed. After all it was SuSE who pioneered
the German market.
I plan to switch to Debian in the near future since they are the only
distribution that it is really committed to the Linux standardization.
I also think RedHat is great. I just don't like using it. But I don't like S.u.S.E (which I'm planning to switch to next upgrade) for same reason: (Almost) all RPMs want to install in /. I hate this. (That's / fullstop, btw, not slashdot)
Why must everything including the kitchen sink go in /? Isn't that the whole idea of /usr/local (or /opt, /vol, /your-preference)? I'm sick of having to grow my / partition, repartitioning my drive, each upgrade. Currently standing at 450Mb and proving too small. I like to keep / small.
Anyone else feel like this? An RPM format with a selectable destination would be nice, even if it means putting soft links back to /.
Actually this would make a good AskSlashdot if it hasn't been done before: How do other distributions compare on this? I've only used RH, S.u.S.E, Caldera and Slackware in the old days. All (except Slackware which does/didn't have RPMs) suffer from the same problem. What's debian like on this point?
On a related note, has there ever been an objective comparison of Linux dists? Not opinions on their quality, just what they are good/bad at, eg ease of installation, size of /, configurability, software bundled, etc.
Oh yeah, the bumper sticker is the only reason I
;-).
got the boxed version over burning my own disc.
;) The sticker rules!
But seriously, Red Hat is cool. It's bringing
Linux to the world with an "easy" installation.
Of course there will be opposition to it among
the Linux community. I think the greatest threat
is Caldera! Let's talk about that!
I think all packaged distributions just be a
large box with one small piece of paper inside
with a ftp address so the user can just download
the source and build it himself
--- witty signature
I really feel that RedHat has been one of the benefactors of Linux.... Yes, as a somewhat of a newbie to the Linux Genre, I have been fortunate enough to get info about RH to run it on my laptop (before 5.2 i might add) when I had to configure my own XF86Config file to work with my neomagic card.... but, as I think about it, is it not better to have people run the "other" OS rather than to succumb to the NT nonsense?
..... I could be wrong.... but then again
I dunno, I guess there will always be wars about which OS is better, i.e. my debian will kick your SUSE's ass and RH is nothing but proprietary software created by "THE MAN" to lull us Linux users into a place where Bill Gates can open up the Schmeissers and gun us down to non-existance)
WAKE UP EVERYONE!!!!!!!!
We are prolly the same users who remember REAL hard disk drives that weighed 50 pounds
do you remember punch cards? I do
c'mon
Let's not fight about a distribution of software.
I remember back in 81 there was New-Dos
MS-Dos
Trs-DOs
and a handfull of others
well I might be rambling, and I open my arms to the flames of the new genereation, but.......
I welcome the response
/e dons the asbestos shorts
and
Who Cares
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Thank you.....
Yes they may becoming meglomaniacs,but at leat they are OUR megomaniacs
CHOWN ROOT
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Huh?
RedHat uses the Filesystem Hiearchy Standard all over the place. They put their log files where log files go and they put their config files where config files go.
If that breaks software... then the software is broken.
As for running non-RPM packages? Just load them, duh, I do it all the time.
I don't understand your point(s).
Every time I hear someone say 'you are a linux expert, what distribution should I use', I tend to send them to redhat. Me myself? I don't *CARE* what distribution I use. Depends on what I want to do. Yes, for tiny installs, routers, etc, I use debian at the moment. For desktops, I use redhat. Is SUSE Better? From what I hear it is, but who cares? I can make slackware be my deskop if I want. Heck, I could take MCC and make it work.
RedHat is turning into a successful company, yes. and we keep our eyes on them, but so far, they have absolutely done the right thing.
I keep hearing stories about how the linux community 'dislikes' redhat's certification program. I haven't heard anyone complain.
When I first heard about it, I thought 'oh great, someone to botch up a certification and screw me out of a job', but I took a look at the critera. It's GOOD. It covers a lot of ground. People who say 'it must cover all distributions to be fair' are out to lunch. REdhat's certification, though it of course USES redhat's distro, requires a good solid knowledge of unix in general and many of the popular (and not-so-popular) systems we use.
Yes, it could make them popular with employers because there is a program to certify people tow ork on equipment. Has anyone else provided a good, solid certification yet? Is anyone planning it? If so, what distro are THEY going to use?
IMHO, if it matters to you what distro you are using, you aren't a linux 'expert'.
And besides, when you order a redhat bundle, you get some cool little stickers!
About the only thing I can think of that RedHat has done recently that might adversly affect the Linux community is their refusal to jump on the file system standards bandwagon. And there could be some good reasons that they haven't.
/usr/bin.
Now, maybe people are afraid that all of that money that's presently flowing to RedHat is gonna have some strings attached. And that maybe those strings are gonna pull RedHat away from the goals of the Open Source movement and more towards the goals of corporate America, whatever we may perceive those goals to be. But to expect them to blindly follow the 'conventional wisdom' of the Open Source community, just so they can prove that they aren't beholden to their new investors, is going to damage them in the long run, just as bowing down to every wish of their 'Big Brother' investors would. They've got a tricky course to steer for the next year or so. I say give them a chance. They seem to be doing just fine so far.
Well, OK, except for crowding so much crap into
What has red hat done bad? It has introduced Linux to the masses.
I think that alot of flack gets dished out to Red Hat because they attract a large # of newbies that ask questions in newsgroups like "Why doesn't X-windows work? I am running Red Hat 5.2."
I run a little corner of linux machines in our company, and I also happen to be the office that home users go to to ask linux questions. And for all of my paitence I get tired of explaining that Disk Druid is buggy in the 5.1 release, I don't use netcfg, so don't ask me why it doesn't work, and yes, your system seems very slow because FVWM95 makes KDE look like TWM.
But I also explain that SuSE users should go ahead and do away with running Apache local as soon as they have a good PPP connection, etc... But some of the slackware eletists feel that anybody who runs YAST to add a user is running a podunk watered-down distro. So herein lies the problem.
I am not a Red Hat fan, because I feel that they try to sell too many packages as additional to the distro. The Red Hat Power tools are an add on, and they charge you again. SuSE includes that on the standard distro.
That's my $0.02.
Just as a reference points, the binary X servers you're referring to (the i740 and that other one I can't remember) were very recently released as source. Redhat had plans to the whole time (more then them though, Precision Insight was a big part of those servers). That source it out there. As well as the 3D GL extensions that Redhat/PI are playing with.. It's all in the Xfree86 devel areas if you wanna look (:
T
well Joe I started on RH and have no problems with them at all.... Define exactly for the rest of the linux community what the problem are, instead bitching with NO solution. Linux started out with constructive help, NOT with bitching people like you!!!!(MICROSOFT convert!!!)
peter.....
well Joe I started on RH and have no problems with them at all.... Define exactly for the rest of the linux community what the problem are, instead bitching with NO solution. Linux started out with constructive help, NOT with bitching people like you!!!!(MICROSOFT convert!!!)
peter.....
RedHat has done more good than bad. They have
provided the credibility that is needed to get
linux into mainstream IT. hey have also done a lot
by supporting projects like GNOME. We shoudn't
worry about RedHat becoming a monolith and here is
why...
Read back a few stories today about EGCS. This is
proof that the open source community will put the
support behind products that meet our needs. GCC
has been great for a long time but it was time to
move to a new compiler design. The community moved
and without bloodshed the new gcc took over the
controls. If redhat ever stops meeting our needs
someone else will take over.
More importantly is that RedHat knows this, they
have no intention of providing anything but what
we need. If you think there are design issues with
RedHat then let them know. Write a HELPFUL message
and have your friends write letters too. We can
drive RedHat as much as any outside company.
-SOTTEK
Let's look at what Redhat has done for the comunity. Redhat labs is got their hands into E and Gnome, both excelent projects. Redhat has also done what no one in the past has been able to do. When I first learned about linux I was shocked ("you mean I can run Unix at home, on the machine I already have, and it's free"), now there is a new linux site around every turn. I'm not saying that Redhat is responsible for all the ruckus, but seeing as how redhat holds the largest share of the market, and most new users get weened on it, do the math. My point is this, RH is not Microsoft, if you don't like the distro, use something else(I myself have been thinking about trying debian for it's package management).
If you are paranoid about Redhat having too much power, take a reality check, the mighty shall always fall (look at king Bill, I assure you he is going down). My last point is this, RH is priced about the same as all other distros (free if you have a few free days to download, $50 for the "official" version, or you can get $1.99 CD's from LSL). Don't wine, don't complain, put your dillusions of little green men in red hats coming to take your freedom away back in the closet. We are all in this for basically the same reasons. It seems like a lot of you who post comments just want to piss and moan about something. Pissing and moaning, and calling people names is not constructive. To quote Silent Bob "Do something, OK". I have ranted long enought, but in my opinion, it's all RIB (Righteousness, Ignorance, Blame.)
refused are awesome. they have that cool rock sound, like you can totally rock out to refused even though they are hardcore. have you ever seen their music videos? total crap.
if "/usr/bin is for the non-priviledged system tools" then what exactly are /sbin /usr/sbin and /usr/local/sbin supposed to be for?
/bin or /usr/bin.
/usr/local/bin or /usr/local/sbin depending on whether or not they are system tools.
as far as i'm concerned, all system tools belong in a */sbin directory. all generally accessible executables *installed with the operating system* belong in
then all executables installed by the *local* site belong in
fo
You're on crack. The Apple // hardware architecture was more elegant and more open. It wrang much more performance out of the hardware through Woz's severe optimization. There's no contest: Apple // rules. :-)
Redhat is worth supporting because they support GPL software. They pay for programmers to write GPL'ed code. There aren't many companies doing this.
You can download redhat for free. You can get a cheap cd for $2.
Or you can buy it for $50 and support free software programmers, and get some tech support.
Caldera are much more scary with their non-gpled addons etc.
Don't knock redhat just because they are successful. I wouldn't mind if they had 90% of the linux market, as long as they stayed GPL'ing everything, it would be an excellent situation.
Apparently they have 40 full time programmers currently working on GPL'ed projects... Imagined if that became 400?? that would rock.
I've been using unix for 8 years, and I find Redhat is fine for the more advanced user.
I don't use (or really like) RPM's, but they are helpful in some situations.. good for newbies... Though I do detest when people are too lazy to progress past rpm level - that is the fault of people not RedHat though.
More power to them...
If you're going to bash, bash anything remotely non-free.. like QT/troll tech/caldera/APSL. But as long as Redhat are fully GPL'ed then support them.
The important issue is whether the code is free.
wayne.
Some Linux users in general, and slashdotters in specific, like to feel like the little guy in the fight for truth, justice, and the [fill in your country]-ian way. With MS having a particularly bad run lately, I think its a case of looking for the next "evil empire" to turn against. Red Hat has gotten a lot of good press and some investments from large corporations so their persecution complexes have turned to Red Hat. Irrational as it may seem.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Redhat is doing a good thing to bring linux to 'normal' people's desktops. (I personally prefer any old linux, my self, but will settle for any other linux if I have to).
I'll also be sad and nostalgic in 3 years when all the rich old ladies in california sell their imacs for iLinux machines, but I can still have my own setup how ever I want it.
It would be kind of cool if there were several distributions that all 'made it'. Better to have several linux's than 1 windos. Hell, make your own distribution, sooner or later I'll try it.
That's my 1.9 cents worth.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fractioning...
Linux is at the point at which it is visible, functional, and fashionable enough for many high level companies to run in their own directions with. What it cannot endure at this point, is a fractioning of the very community that fostered its development. That would be a sure way to kill it. Just look at what happened to Unix and its myriad flavors. I, for one (as I sit on my lazy butt), would like to see more effort going into incorporating those very features that VARs are adding on, in their own proprietary way, into Linux itself (non-proprietarily (?)). *Some* sort of package management would be nice...even the fundementals for things like this, so that people can't run off on tangents stranding the other distributions.
This reaction is classic. People are starting to realize that Linux could be viable soon. Everyone would like to see their vision of the future come true, they have put a lot of time into it. So when Red Hat pulls ahead the emotions run high and the stones start flying.....
/*---------------------------*/
Man? What is man?
But a collection of chemicals with delusions of granduer.
My problem with it is simply that I bought version 5.0 and it was terribly, terribly broken. The worst part is that the things that were broken were simple things that simply COULDN'T have been un-noticed in any installation, I paid a fair chunk for the boxed package, and got burned the same way I get burned when I by M$ products - broken releases, then megabyte after megabyte of patches are released later. I did an rpm upgrade to 5.1, applied all kinds of patches, and lots of things were STILL broken. I dropped it then, switched to Debian, and found my box to be at least 3 times faster, and had no problems. I have since switched to SuSe, and its the same deal - the box is WAY faster than RH was, and there are no stupid bugs. M$ Linux? Hey, I wasn't the first to say it . . . .
Eph. 1:2
We already have all the assurance we need that RedHat *cannot* become another Microsoft... even if they wanted to. All of RedHat's core ditrobution - everything on the main CD - is free/open source software. In fact, to my knowledge, RedHat and Debian are the ONLY distributions whose policy is to include only free/open source software in their main distribution. (admittedly, this is very recent with RedHat).
Because all of the RedHat distribution is free/open source, anyone can copy a RedHat CD and create their own "new" distribution. This is, in fact, exactly how the Mandrake distribution was created. They started with RedHat, then started adding and changing the things they didn't like.
(I'm not certain, but I believe Caldera and TurboLinux also started in a similar manner)
Because RedHat has no proprietary tools/software in their distribution, they have *no* power over the Linux community. They *cannot* charge excessively high prices (because cheapbytes and other can sell the ENTIRE RedHat cd).
They cannot attempt to "control" the Linux community. If any portion of the community doesn't like RedHat's decisions on the direction of their distro, they can copy ALL of the RedHat distro... and use it as the starting point for their own distro!!! You sure as hell can't do that with Windows!!!
I've been using Linux for 5 years now, and started off with Slackware. Last year I decided to try out RedHat (5.0 I think) and I've been using it ever since. I'm a CLI person (like all *real* linux people, huh? :-) but I must say I love RedHat... everything from the easy installation to the automatic setup of X. RPMs make everything easier to install (for dumbasses as well as power users), but don't keep you from compiling and installing tarballs if you want. I don't understand the problem everybody has with RedHat, because they've obviously done some wonderful things for the Linux community.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
"Why do so many of us dislike Red Hat? We're snobs, that's why. We pride ourselves on using an "alternative" Operating System. Now that Linux is starting to be used by Joe User, we are losing that special feeling that we get by being part of an exclusive group. You hear the same thing when an underground music group suddenly gets popular. People running for the doors screaming "SELL OUT". "
:-)
Very nicely said... couldn't have said it better myself
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I started using Slackware when I was a Comp Sci major in college. My first kernel was 1.1.57 if I remember right and I had to learn quite a bit to get it running. All told, I think it took me a week and a failed exam to get my system completely up and running, including X.
I have thought about trying Red Hat, and I appreciate all they have done to help bring it into the mainstream, but a couple things have always kept me from doing it. I like the fact that with Slackware, everything isnt just prettied up into a nice rpm and ready to go. I need to make decisions about where things go, and how I want them configured. I need to actually read the README files and ensure I have what I need on my system, and this helps keep me fresh on whats out there and what is current. I also like the directory layout and other configuration layouts of Slackware.
While I have in the past (and will in the future) suggested Red Hat to some people, anyone who really wants to jump in and learn whats going on, I always suggest Slackware.
I have heard this before, and it always leaves me wondering, "what has Caldera written that isn't GPL?" Most of the proprietary stuff that comes with OpenLinux is done by other companies (StarOffice, WordPerfect, Partition Magic).
I don't know who did their Novell client, but that is irrelevent with the new kernel. I also don't know about BRU (I assume it isn't open source). Is LISA open source? I also don't know if they are releasing their code to their new snappy installer for 2.2, but I can tolerate a proprietary installer.
But once OpenLinux is installed, just how much of what is there is proprietary *and* written by them?
Again, what have they written that isn't GPL? Instead of just making the statement, please list examples.
*Bzzzzt*, incorrect: ftp = file transfer protocol. PPP = point to point protocol
You also used the following abbrevations:
I have *way* too much time on my hands.
Either they've changed English since I was in school or you're wrong.
An abbreviation is a short form of a word, like "auto" for automobile, "ref" for referee, etc. An acronym is what you get when you use the first letters in a phrase: "NSA" for National Security Agency, "NASA" for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Either they've changed English since I was in school or you're wrong.
An abbreviation is a short form of a word, like "auto" for automobile, "ref" for referee, etc. An acronym is what you get when you use the first letters in a phrase: "NSA" for National Security Agency, "NASA" for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I stopped by Costco the other day near Redmond and there were two neat, shrink-wrapped stacks of OS's: the Win '98 upgrade for $89, and Redhat 5.2 for $30. Guess which one I bought? [Hey, I'm a little lazy, and you try downloading Linux from the corporate LAN and not get noticed!]
I do some research 'fore I purchase things, but my eyeball is drawn [er, I have two] to the prettiest packaging. I suppose if Slackware had a tre colio glossy black box there, I may have bought that.
The important thing is that it's Linux, yes?
The party's over
I just dislike some of the things about their distribution...
:-)
I dislike RPM... but that's my personal opinion, and I don't force it on anyone else. It wouldn't be so bad if RPMs were multiplatform and were used by people... but HP have their package management tools, sun have theirs... I tend to avoid learning these things as they don't scale.
I dislike their extensions to the init stuff. although I prefer the SVR4 style multiple little scripts symbolically linked style over the one big init script per level style. But again, that is just personal.
All in all, I don't use Red Hat much, but I have no objections to the company.
The only distribution that actually manages to irritate me is Debian, but that's because I can't seem to get the install to do what I want it to, and the GNU/Linux debate irritates me... mostly the GNU attitude to man pages. "this page doesn't exist because we think you should use texinfo" Fortunately I have found a texinfo to groff converter...
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
I switched to RedHat and RPM when I needed the latest version of a Tcl/Tk based tool. The new version of that tool required a newer Tk than I had. The new Tk required a new Tcl. The new Tcl required new compilers and libraries, as well as several other things. All of which I got to figure out by wading through the doc of each package (or the preceding version, as the current version did not mention a requirement which the previous version had added).
With RPM, -qlp lets you see which files it wants to change. With -qip you get a better description than just the file name (useful when you have a directory full of RPMs). And --test gives you a preview of the installation attempt.
Admittedly, Debian has a more advanced packaging system. But all packaging systems let the installer use what the packager already learned rather than requiring the installer to learn ahead of time all the problems. An installer that really wants to learn the details can get the source RPM and look at the source and the changes made by the RPM creator.
The problem with distributions like Redhat is that they force a standard on you: the directory structure. I wouldn't have such a problem with Redhat if they would support the LSB. The directory structure gives Redhat a way to muscle the other distributions around. It might not seem like much, but Redhat wouldn't be able to pull crap like "Redhat Linux Certification" without that structure.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
The reasons cited fall into two categories. The first look like:
But what worried me were some of the other reasons given for choosing Red Hat:
Those last few reasons are arguments for Red Hat regardless of technical or economic superiority.
Now, what may have happened here was that, in some organizations' cases, the people in charge of making the decision were already RH partisans. The justifications were easy-to-articulate surface statements, and their hard-to-articulate judgements that led them to that position didn't come out.
In some way, I'm glad that there are several distros out there that are close enough technically that this level of discussion is enough. But that won't always be the case if the sentiment in those last few statements overtakes enough of us.
Well, it obviously won't, at least not entirely. There will still be people out there who wipe their new Dell's RH installation to install SuSE, even if that blows away their phone support. But the attitude I worry about is, to steal a phrase from IBM's FUD glory days,
Jay
well, Solaris separates /sbin (static binaries) /usr/sbin
/usr is a big issue anyway,
/usr
from
I don't think losing
it's probably on the same disk as / so if you lose
/usr, / is likely to go with it
and it's always possible to boot from CD or net
there are other reasons to separate / and
Talk about community trends and hating Microsoft
well... I don't hate Microsoft. IMHO there are
some things Microsoft does better!!
OMG did I say that?
What is all this crap with distributions anyway?
Linux is a tool, windows is a tool.
The wise man choses the right tool for the job.
if i want to play half life i use win98
if i want to use Linux I use Redhat-- i have tried slackware, suse, and redhat-- after the install is done and there is a working system what difference does the distribution make?
Bottom line-- redhat is going to be supported and easier for the average person to install.
Ultimately, RedHat is a vendor, and they will do vendor-ish things like try to sell their product and make it more attractive than the competition (Debian, Slackware, SuSE & Co.). And their basic installed software is lacking in some departments -- but how many vendors include all of the *alternatives* to their basic software? Ya can't switch 95's or NT's window managers out of the box...
There's some annoying things about them, but they've created an open, commercial standard for Linux and are pretty dedicated to the community. If Microsoft did *half* of the things that RedHat does, I'd still be using NT -- but I'll take RedHat as a vendor over MS anyday.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Dude.. you are seriously missing out on one of the coolest things about Red Hat. RPMs are a great way to keep track of what is on your system. Red Hat has done a really good job of putting everything in /usr/(...) so that when you install something with a normal configure script that puts it in /usr/local/(...) you can see what you have installed and what was an RPM. It also means that if you "upgraded" a program by installing the newer version from source, that it won't get overwritten by an RPM that is trying to possibly "upgrade" to an older version (example: installing Netscape from it's .tar.gz, it's a good idea to remove the RPM and install netscape in /usr/local/netscape so that if you ever upgrade Red Hat it won't overwrite that installation and you can quickly remove the older rpm if necessary).
/usr/src/redhat on down. Also allow writes to /var/tmp by the rpm group. Then you can build RPMs without being root, because it "installs" them in /var/tmp/program-root/(...) instead of in /(...).
/usr/local/bin/file1 /usr/local/bin/file2" (...etc...). And it's really a lot easier than anything MS has ever come up with or will ever come up with.
.debs compare with rpms and stuff. That doesn't mean I want a lot of flames, but it'd be nice to know why people are many times as enthusiastic about .debs as I am about .rpms.
The best thing to do, IMHO, is to make an RPM of everything you install. Sometimes you can find one in the contrib section. By far, the best method that I have found for building RPMs is to create a new RPM group and setgid rpm every directory from
I really need to get a good book on RPMs and learn some more, but I already love the simplicity that RPM provides when it comes time to install and uninstall packages. doing "rpm -e packagename" is a lot easier than "rm
For those of you who are debian fans, I'd really like to know some more about how
I've had an uneven share of odd misfortunes with redhat products. But the one thing in common with them is that it supresses useful error messages and falsely reports success. I get plenty of that from the microsoft world, and vast fields of useful error messages are one of my favorite features in linux. And they're tech support is very unhelpful. And the --force option in rpm is useless.
apt-get install bzip2
I've noticed that peoples notions regarding such things as enviromental and regulatory issues for waterfront property depends primarily on whether they own some or not. That is, political and other philosophical ideologies get reconciled between those who own finitely limited resources.
:-)
Perhaps there is a correlation between any entity that reaches some pinnacle (not necessarily financial success) and those who find attaining similar achievement elusive. To the extent that notion is true, it might get exasperated when those reaching the pinnacle aren't much different from those who don't. Successful worldwide marketing entities may be as limited (although by different criteria) as the amount of waterfront property. So the more successful Red Hat becomes the more rocks that will be thrown, notwithstanding that the pervasiveness of Linux depends on entities like Red Hat.
Anyway I happen to own a beautiful waterfront lot, so I'm all for Red Hat
Didn't you hear? Al Gore helped Linus write the kernel!
Isn't "release early, release often" kind of a major part of OSS stuff? The big problem with Microsoft throwing crap out on the market is that you can't fix it. With Linux, if something buggy goes out, chances are somebody will have a fix out there way before a company like Microsoft would release the next service pack. I guess I could be wrong about it, this is more from what I've read than from experience, it just seems like saying oranges suck because they don't taste quite like apples.
Of course, this would be a problem for people who don't know enough or just aren't willing to go out and find the fixes, but I still see it as more of a problem (for some) with the way the open source model works than with Red Hat. Besides, from a buisness point of view, isn't it one of the advantages of open source that you get to spend less time/money on debugging because other people will help out once you relase?
This is one of my bigest headaches at work - I have to remeber the location of everything and how startup scripts are written etc for each type of system that is around. I've gotten used to the way Solaris does things and Red-Hat is not to far off from that but move over to HPUX and its a whole different world. I would like to see everyone play nice together so that the poor sysadmin surrounded by the users with the pitch forks and torches dosn't have to flail around trying to find what got put where when a system is down (probably the fault of the people with the pitch forks and torches).
Suits want to se a company behind everything - they just don't understand "free" or "open source" or anything like that. They may complain bitterly about shelling out thousands of bucks for some OS but in the back of their little brain a voice is telling them "if it costs this much they must be good" (never said the pointy hairs were bright).
I started with slackware simply because it was the easiest one for me to download an install. Everything was seperated into nice big packages with clearly defined goals (Hey all I really need to download is A, AP, X, XAP, and maybe D). When I got a real job and could afford CD-ROMs I went to Linux Central and ordered every distribution they carry. I have intalled all of them (Slackware 3.6, Red Hat 5.2, SuSE 6.0, TurboLinux 3.0, Mandrake 5.3, Openlinux 1.3) but Debian 2.1 (I tried, but it will take me a good, solid weekend to figure out dselect, and so far I haven't had a weekend free). The easiest to install from CD-ROM were Red Hat 5.2 and Mandrake 5.3 (Mandrake is merely Red Hat plus KDE with a little smoothing to make KDE work better). Currently I am using Mandrake 5.3. SuSE 6.0 felt wrong. I can not explain it, I just did not feel right. OpenLinux 1.3 was nice but slow on my machine. I really did not give TurboLinux 3.0 a chance. Slackware was okay, but I love kpackage too much now to go back to tgz. All of this said, if I had to do an install on a machine with a 28.8 modem, and I did not have a CD-ROM of linux handy, I would download Slackware and install.
I see Redhat as doing a number of positive things. They've made it easy to install, they've done a good job at helping commercial software companies and traditional hardware companies get on the Linux bandwagon, and RPMs are great.
:)
If I had to speculate, I suspect people are upset that Redhat is becoming successful. For a free, open movement like this, it's easy to be suspicious that Redhat will start to leverage it's success in way that don't benefit the community overall. Some might see the Redhat certification as a start down that path.
Still, there is noting intrinsically wrong with Redhat, or Linux in general, being popular. As long as they treat Linux fair, there should be no complaint.
If they do get cocky and do something stupid, there are other distributions to use. They can't go COMPLETELY MS on us, if we have the source
Ryan
You're maybe a little harsh on slashdot posters, but I think you make a good point. A distribution is really just a starting point -- sooner or later, after downloading a new kernel, new libraries, installing this, removing that, you end up with your own customized distribution.
BTW -- Linus uses SuSE at home.
[Ducking to avoid the keyboard thrown at me]
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Redhat Linux seems to be the basic linux distribution to me. There's nothing particularly great about it (almost every distribution has packages in some form or another), and there's nothing particularly bad about it. It's a great corporate figure head: A small, dynamic company that's making a killing on this "new" open source software paradigm.
A lot of people don't think that it's important to have that commercial side, but I think it's critical to the success of Linux, which is a good thing for everybody, even those who don't use Linux. If anything, it raises the expectations of the industry when it comes to features, performance, and stability, for all operating systems. Without Redhat, we wouldn't be taken nearly as seriously as we are today. Without a corporate entity to point at, big businesses don't even consider an option, no matter how technically superior it may be.
So I think Redhat is a good thing. More power to them. Let them become the massive Linux figurehead.
It doesn't bother me, because I know there are several superior distributions, most of which are doing quite well. That's the magic of Linux. I have a choice. I don't have to conform to the Redhat pseudo-standards, but I can still reap the benefits of the money, software, and corporate kudos that Redhat creates.
I think one of the very real things feeding this penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing things about /. in general) is the (apparently) prevailing attitude that anyone in in management (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
While PHB's and empty suits certainly exist at many companies, there are also a lot of very talented, quite savvy people in these positions at some companies. Many of them even used to be hackers themselves - some still are.
Don't tar the whole bunch of them - we should all be smarter (and bigger) than that. The world is big enough for everything from open source software to hideously proprietary solutions. The market will decide where the value really is. I'd argue MS is in trouble in the market more because they have become tiresome to live with (continual forced "upgrades" and mandatory functionality like IE4) than because their software is inadequate...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
A good majority of new commercial software being released in binary formats are release 1) in RPM and 2) "for RedHat 5.2".
/they/ want it. In our ISP we ONLY use RH because it's a great platform to work with. One doesn't have to muck around with a bunch of different things just to worry about where in the bootup process a daemon is being loaded.
/your/ running? Look at what Caldera has did to make Linux more accessible as well. Caldera was my first 'commercial' distro of Linux that I actually purchased and it confused me, simply because it was different than Slackware, which I'd been running. After stumbling on RH when I started working for an ISP, I was amazed to find that working in Linux became 'fun'.
:) That's just my 2 cents worth.
So what?! I agree entirely, RH is still 'just Linux'. I couldn't imagine being a commercial software vendor (read in "for profit") and trying to support a variety of platforms within a platform. At least in other OS's you know WHERE all the components are supposed to be, and that's what these companies counting on with RH.
Just when it's getting good you always get the ppl that whine because it's now how
I've heard good things about other distributions, namely Debian. But, why should you loyal Debian folk feel that RH is crap, just because it's not what
Anyways, I'm starting to wander a bit here
Don't forget, their code is still free for download...
I recently read something about Redhat's lukewarm embrace of the linux standard base (LSB) project. The CEO of Redhat expressed concerns that it would become a vehicle for their competitors to "catch up" with redhat. This really makes me question where they are coming from. It's one thing to see Microsoft as your competitor, or SCO, or Sun. But its quite another thing to see Debian or Slackware in the same light. The similarities between distributions eclipse any differences, usually by a wide margin. The LSB is simply an attempt to ensure that certain key similarities are maintained to ensure that software written in compliance with it will run accross all distributions. Why should Redhat fear this? The best reason I can think of is money. Money that goes towards purchasing Debian or Openlinux does not go into their pockets, even though they do recieve the indirect benefit that one more person is using linux which potentially increases their sales in the long run. Linux was developed within a community based on trust and cooperation. If it is to succeed that community must endure. If money becomes too much of a consideration and goal, linux will fragment the same way unix did. This helps no one in the long run. Money is important, and Redhat should make all the money they can. But when a situation arises where money can be made but only at the expense of the community which created the product redhat sells, that community must be preserved. This is a war for freedom, make no mistake. Bill Gates would love to see the day when Microsoft was the only option and anyone who owned a computer was forced to run Windows. Superior software, which is beyond his ability to destroy or buy out, is the best solution. This type of software, of which linux is but one example, will be far more effective at solving the Microsoft problem than anything the Justice Department can ever do. But that software will only emerge within an open community of many people working towards a common goal. What I fear is that Redhat will damage that community simply for greater market share and increased profits.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Package management is meant to make maintenance tasks easier. Source installs are nice, but again you face the task of tracking down sources and keeping tabs on the version of each installed program, and whether it has changed. I'm sorry, but I just can't find the time to monitor Freshmeat and upgrade.
.deb I have installed.
.debs elsewhere), but I'd rather install one or two packages from source than all of them.
My goal is NOT to install everything from source. My goal is to have a system which has the programs I need and is fairly current.
I've briefly used RedHat, but package management became too much of a headache. Debian has been wonderful in that area; one command will upgrade every
No searching, no need to watch Freshmeat, no hassle.
apt-get upgrade.
I have a few complaints, such as the fact that Debian does not yet support XFree86 3.3.3.1 (I have a G200, and had to find
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Well, _I_ was once one of those computer idiots,
just like you were, I'm sure... A few years ago
I didn't know Linux from MacOS, but decided that
if I'm ever going to use a computer, I might as
well know what I'm doing, and so I downloaded
Slackware (on a 14.4 modem no less) and tried
installing it... again and again and again...
It took me a long time before I actually got
anything working right, but I'm here now, using
what is basically my own distro now, happy
to have found Linux...
The only way I would have ever learned anything
is by trying... If we stop all those "idiots"
from even trying Linux, then Linux isn't going
to get anywhere in the world and will just die
out after awhile from lack of support and
users...
Well, I only have 97 files in my /bin (of course, I'm running it on a sole machine for personal use)...
/bin /local, etc. exist), and verything works and installs just fun... Why other complaining? Everybody whined at my place
Personally, I don't care that much about the directory structure (as long as it's organized, at least).. If there's stability between them and future releases (and are similar enough to other Linuxs, ie,
of work for installing things on our Windows system weird, but it was organized and worked.. That's all that's important.
Well, I only have 860 files in my /bin (of course, I'm running it on a sole machine for personal use)... (never noticed how many there
/bin /local, etc. exist), and verything works and installs just fun... Why other complaining? Everybody whined at my place
were before...)
Personally, I don't care that much about the directory structure (as long as it's organized, at least).. If there's stability between them and future releases (and are similar enough to other Linuxs, ie,
of work for installing things on our Windows system weird, but it was organized and worked.. That's all that's important.
Sorry for having it twice and STILL not doing /usr/bin ... I'll stop
it right... I meant
wasting bandwith now.
I've been thinking about Red Hat quite a bit lately. It being the most
popular linux ditribution and having recently had my first encounter
with Red Hat 5.2. And this post gives me the chance to voice my veiws.
I want to point out before I go any farther that I have experience
with only two distributions, Red Hat and Slackware. I've been using
Slackware since early 1995 and have only had a few encounters with
Red Hat.
First the installation process. I've installed Red Hat on two
machines.
I find the Red Hat install to be nearly as frustrating as a windows
install. (What's that did he say Linux is easier to install than
windows? Surely not. YES I did.)
My first hang up was the Disk Druid which I tried to use to repartion
the drive. I don't remember what I tried but I just couldn't get it
to work. I personally find fdisk much easier to use. Perhaps because
fdisk doesn't even pretend to be "intuative" while the disk druid
does. fdisk is driven by many criptic comands but it does offer help
and if you know anything about disk partions (which you should if
you're going to attempt to repartion a drive) the help is quite
good. As a matter of fact the prompt is (press m for help). So it's
hard to miss the help. Of course I should point out here that
slackware starts with a prompt and you must setup your partions by
yourself. I don't think there are even any hint that you should do
so. Anyway enough about partions. Onto the install...
Next came the intallation. Red Hat gave me a list of software. I
picked the complete listing or whatever it was. Any way I got a list
of package names with no real explanation. Slackware by contrast
gives some description of the software in all modes and detailed
descriptions in newbie mode (of course it auto instal's more in newbie
mode). I didn't know what much of the software Red Hat was offering
was so I took my best guess.
Next came the setup. Red Hat set up X, my sound card and my network
perfectly without any real hassle. (However I know it's not always that
good with X). The Slackware install doesn't even attempt to set up X
or the sound card. As for the network it does a good job but doesn't
detect the ethernet card and set up conf.modules like Red Hat does.
Now I had my new Red Hat system. First I booted it up and there was
quota's turned on. Then I see appletalk and ipx drivers. I didn't
install those nor did i indicate in any way that i wanted them. Why do
the people at Red Hat think I need networking capabilty with an
apple (or NetWare). If I did then I would be savvy enough to install
it myself.
Anyway, I logged in to complete the next task that I always do when
insatalling a new system. If I remember right I had installed the
kernel source with the rest of the system so I did a cd to
/usr/src/linux typed make menuconfig and got an error. ( I may have
actually got the error when i later typed make zImage. I don't
remember.) It seems that will all the junk Red Hat had installed It
hadn't installed the include files needed to compile just about
anything. So I had to trod through the rpms and find what I needed
installed it typed make and another error. This process continued for
3 or 4 cycles.
Anyway I got the kernal built and then tried to configure the
system. I looked in
like I'm accustomed to with Slackware there where about a dozen
directories full of files. I never did find out where quota's where
being turned on. To me the structure of the rc files seemed needlessly
complex I suspect that it's there to accomadate linuxconf.
Next I added a user. And after typing add user I had to delete the
special group it had made for me and change the setting in
/etc/passwd. (Whose braindead idea was this?) I've also heard that
caldera does something similar. Personally I want groups.
OK so now I started X. One of the first things I wanted to do was run
gimp. It segfaulted. So I got the source and recompiled gimp. Still a
segfault. This is about the time I gave up on Red Hat.
Another thing I hate is all the software that can only be found in an
RPM form. Yes it is obnoxious. If you do download the rpm executables
and try to run them, you'll be running them against an incomplete rpm
database and asking for trouble. Why couldn't Red Hat use a system
more compatable with tar.gz. After all a RPM is symply a gziped cpio
file with a header. Couldn't they have made that header a special file
in a tarball? (Slackware does come with a rpm2targz script but it is a
little buggy).
I guess to sumarize this rant. I don't hate Red Hat. My major gripes
are about the install. Red Hat assume's way too much. It's designed to
pander to the uneducated and ignores the expert. It also panders to
the uneducated in a way that makes it difficult to learn by hiding the
files that should be edited. (I personally prefer vi as a sytem
configuration tool.) Slackware is also guilty of this to a lesser
extent.
Who decide what is installed by default and what isn't? They're
decisions seem rather strange to me. Install all the networking
software possible and enable quota's. Is this really necessary on a
desktop machine?
OK so to the gripe I have about both Slackware and Red Hat. They both
by default enable most network services that have to be turned off
manually. It would be nice if they gave you a choice as to whether or
not to turn on telnet or netstat etc.
I think I'll end this here. I could go on but this already too long.
There are a few things that I did not like when I recently switched from Slakware to RedHat, but overall, the experience was a positive one, so I now suggest that beginners install RedHat as their first distribution.
:) :
/usr/adm, not even a link to the /var/log. For those of us who grew up with 'tail /usr/adm/messages/' ingrained in our brainstem, this was annoying. The fix, obviously, is trivial.
/etc/rc.d is WAY too complicated for any purpose I can realistically see people desiring ... and it is nontrivial for administrators to jump between distributions on different machines. The Slakware scheme was more than sufficient. Thankfully, VAResearch includes a cheat-sheet with all of their servers, making the transition easier if you have the means.
Particularly Annoying Bits (or PAB's
No
Goddamned runlevels.
The Arch-PAB! The RPM for a later version of afterstep (no wm flames please) that I got FROM THE REDHAT WEB SITE placed the 'afterstep' executable in a different place from RedHat 5.2! Major annoyance to find this, and I suspect there are plenty of other RPMs out there doing similarly nasty (and transparent!) things.
bild, www.categoryweb.com
Linux needs to move into its second stage of evolution. we've crossed first obstacle, which was advocating open source. It's time we showed the world you can depend on open source. Distributors need to compete on the basis car dealers do (that is without ripping ppl off).
we development suites like Cygnus' tools to mastch Vis Studio in publicity (not popularity or bugload)
we need production suites to give people the capability to do what one does with CCakewalk Pro Audio on Macs and PC's.
I'm not looking for groupie-bait software however developers need to see software ppl do use to be straight forward and clear as to how to develop it on Linux. We're going to capsize the bandwagon if we don't get some of this stuff out.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
/ - bare necessities for booting
/usr - network shareable
/usr/local - no one on the network needs to be playing in here
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
The "release early, release often" mentality does have it's place. However, there should be a series of rock solid stable releases that are well tested and known to be good. Some people will be interested in using the latest features/improvements and helping to debug the product when problems arise, but others just want something that will run in a stable manner. Don't force everyone to use the bleeding edge of technology. Make releases that are proven. Make releases that are stable.
... or at least the parts that he owns the copyright to. He could release those parts under any sort of other liscense (including closed-source ones) he wants. Of course, as far as the actual GPLed code circulating out there, that's fair game for everyone and impossible to retract or recall.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
and then there remains the question w(ho)tf purged the /bin /lib /sbin directories in order to symlink them to /usr/bin /usr/lib /usr/sbin: this is valid to at least hpux, aix, solaris (did anyone exeienced this on other unices?).
/usr filesystem.
it must have been a come together from the most braindead people from all these companies, trying to bring up some absolutely dumb thing - preventing your system from running if anything happens to your (oh-so-small-that-the-possibility-vanishes)
-- all those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
Some people outside of the Linux world think that Red Hat is synonymous with Linux.
This is true. I've heard many people excitedly report that they had bought and installed a copy of "Linux 5.2." This is annoying and amusing at the same time, but it's certainly not Redhat's fault. I agree that a wide selection of high-quality, interoperable distributions is the best way to educate the public (particularly those that are excited by Linux, but innocently ignorant of some of the details.)
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'm a Linux newbie - I admit it. I've got less than weeks of experience wih Linux and a previous attempt a year ago was removed in favor of NT5 beta1 after I struggled with it not recognizing hardware and such - sue me.
:-)
Now, in just a few nights, I've managed to get RH5.2 on my system running X easily. I've even built a better system to house it after attempts to compile a new SMP kernel with a dual 133 box proved too slow (multiple attempts, none successful yet!). Worth noting is that it installed just fine on the hardware that failed in my previous attempt including network connectivity - yes!
Would I have done any of this or would I even be trying Linux again if it weren't made somewhat easier by RH's distribution? Nope. I'm comfortable with DOS and it's ilk, have been for years. Linux has a learning curve that's steep for a newbie and without feeling like I'm making any progress I wouldn't continue trying. Perhaps if I had someone who could help I would but I don't - and most others don't either.
So far with this install and the week old install I just blasted (my third install overall) I've managed to get GNOME up and running (RPMs made this easier), a new RIVA 128 card recognized (again RPM made it easier but not easy), and when I've got GNOME installed this time I'll again start work on compiling an SMP kernel. Oh yeah - this is now a dual Celeron 450 box vs the previous dual 133(smile).
In short, RH is making it easier for folks like myself who're comfortable with the other OS' out there to learn Linux. It's still hard when it takes me 15minutes of page flipping to figure out how to delete (excuse me RM) a damned file but that's okay. At least I'm not spinning my wheels trying to get to step one!
RH 5.2 cost me $20 and when I'm done downloading all the neat toys I'll have a box more worthy than the damned beta crap it replaced. At some point I'll get good enough with it and comfortable enough with it to recommend it to clients when the opportunity arises. This is what the community would like, no?
So, stop beating up RH or build a better mousetrap yourself. RH is making what was a more painful process easier. Not everyone is willing to spend their nights learning this stuff like I am so if you want to get others on the bandwagon you're going to have to smooth the path - RH is helping you do that!
P.S. I'll get that damned SMP kernel compiled if it kills me! I need the RC5 keys to move my score up further
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
And who's to say that any of those are easier? Does RH have marketing, you bet they do! Is that bad? I don't think so - it makes others including myself aware of their product. If the other groups don't market is that reason for RH to be booed or handicapped in any way? I don't think so!
Will I try other distributions? Maybe, but right now I need the training wheels that RH is lending me. As I get deeper into the nuances I'll more likely appreciate the differences between various distributions but right now I went with the shiny box that had the really decent install book inside. Yup, that book really helped me learn some of the really basic stuff - things that most everyone else takes for granted. Am I stupid? No, I'm just ignorant about Linux and RH is providing me with a way to learn. That was worht the $20 entrance fee. Perhaps next time I'll simply DL a copy but $20 is a pittance for an OS and I'm willing to pay for someone's sweat who took the time to put it together for me.
Look at it this way, there are lot's of bicycles out there, I simply chose the one I wanted that stood out and came with training wheels. Flipping a coin wasn't an option and none of the other distributions had done anything to stand out in my mind - that's not Red Hat's fault is it? (shrug) I can't use ESP to pick "easiest" but if it's any consolation I did wait till it was on sale and I didn't buy the most expensive one on the shelf....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Right now when anyone asks me what Linux Distro to use I recomend they try RH or Caldera or Debian as they are all equaly good. I haven't tried S.u.S.E. or Turbo-Linux so I can't comment on them.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Whether or not you like the fact that Red Hat and Caldera commercialize Linux, the fact remains that they are the best hope at getting Linux accepted into corporate situations. As a matter a fact I can tell you right now that my employer (a department within the State of Minnesota) would not have accepted us switching the Web Server and some database servers to Linux if it hadn't been for the fact that companies like Red Hat existed and we could go and buy a $50 CD. It's that tangible "thing" that calms the fears of CIOs.
The "problem" with redhat, IMHO, is that they're making linux "user friendly". Now before anybody gets on their righteous high horse, i believe that redhat is a good thing. It's just that most of us folks dealt with the headache of installing (even using) Linux; it's sort of a trial by fire for us. As a result, many distributions try to appeal to the kind of user that likes mucking about with config files and such. Redhat does the opposite. The general opinion of people I know is that redhat, while better than no linux at all, is sort of "castrated" - that someone who doesn't deal with the guts is less of a man (or woman, i suppose). It's more of a joke than anything else, really...
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
Exactly. You have hit the nail on the head first try.
Most of the people who are complaining about RedHat are people who are annoyed that they are no longer considered '3133t |-|/-\|3Rs' for running linux.
These people are lemmings just as much as people who switch to NT 'because everyone else is doing it'.
Personally, I think Redhat is doing a wonderful job. There are a few problems with RPM, such as not being able to say 'I really do have this library, don't worry about it but tell me about any others', but overall the system is good.
The thing that really annoys me about people who complain about RedHat is that they don't complain about problems like the one above -- they complain that RedHat has made it possible for anyone to run Linux.
Well, DUH!
That *is* kind of the point, you know.
Shalon Wood
I haven't been in the trenches quites as long as you (Only 17 years earning $$$ behind the keyboard here ), but I agree, FUD is the big problem.
The thing is, there is plenty of room for lots of OSs, even Microsofts. Run what's best FOR YOU, and don't worry about it. People ask me "What computer should I buy" - The ANSWER is a question - "What do you want to do with it?" - figure that out, and the answer is easy. It's the same thing with OSs.
I'm JUST getting into Linux now, have played with Unix, and a bunch of others.
Want Linux to be a real Microsoft killer? I'll tell you how, right now. Windows went NO WHERE until EASY software development tools (read VB) for the corp. market came out. C/C++ takes too much time, Java isn't mature (but getting there). Come out with a tool where a company can write their very uncool (but necessary) Accounts Payable, or Insurance claim software with people they can hire off the street, and Linux will take over.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I started to use Linux because I wanted to run some applications from different Unix platforms.
.......
I use Slackware for this, mainly because you 9 out of 10 times just compile your Unix source and it runs smoothly without any changes at all.
Redhat and Debian dosen't have this compatibility, usally you have to make major changes in your Unix source to get it working, which consumes vast amounts of time, time that you don't have(Unless ofc. you're a student like the majority here).
What I've seen since I started with Linux around 1994, is Redhat is using more and more of Microsoft technologies, like the good old EEE(Extend, Embrace, Extinguish), e.g. Desktop environments.
What Redhat needs to do, is, saying "we're NOT a GPL company, we make our own enhancements to Linux, you can get the source, but we don't really get a damn if you can't compile it on your distribution in a 100 years".
What would they achieve by doing that? They could actually start getting payed for their work, noboddy really trusts something thats free. Also, they could boost small software companies, if they were able to get paid for their software. Noone can make a living making free software, and if you want to make a living as developer, you need CASH for your efforts.
Because of that, all small companies that want to survive makes MS Windows software. If you were able to develop software for e.g. Redhat linux, you might end up with a real alternative to MS Windows.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates gets richer and richer and richer and
I installed RH5.1 via FTP. Later on I obtained a CD of it and installed it on a seprate computer via CD. __There were more packages on the CD than RH had on the FTP site__.
This is a lame example, but xearth was not on the FTP site, but it was on the cd. There were a few other amusments missing too and proabley a few of the more techinal programs I don't play with... spice for example but something major could of been missing as well. Yes I suck, I don't use all 1843 programs included, sorry.
Now, if they've done it once, they can do it again. It's even human nature to want to get an offical CD in a nice boxed set instead of some werido ftp site and I think they're going to abuse this.
I'd also like to point out that the "Redneck" install disappeared between 5.1 and 5.2. With RH's reformed politically correct install, maybe they got their act together and got the FTP site current with the CD. I installed RH 5.2 from CD to start with so I don't know.
And of course on top of all this, they're not supporting the Linux Standard Base... claming it will slow down their development... whatever. That is such a Microsoft thing to do, make your product the most popular and then make it incompatible with the meager fraction of the market that's left over so that you can aquire it.
Red Hat serves a very distinct purpose. It introduces people to Linux who would not otherwise be introduced to Linux. It provides a choice to those who previously had no choice.
However, it should not be used as a crutch. It has been said that "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (Don't know by whom, though) When seen in the context of the freedom provide by free source/open source, this comment is quite telling. If we fail to exercise our freedoms, we are doomed to relinquish them. RPM binary distributions make it far too easy to overlook the freedom and responsibility that free source has brought us. As more people use binary-only distributions of applications, less people are there to protect the freedom of free source. Less people are there to produce and debug free source options, and we will gradually see less free source.
Use the fancy install/config tools from RH, but think hard about the greater threat of binary-only distributions.
A lot of posts contain stuff about getting value
for your money. Linux is free!
You are stupid to buy a Linux distro when you can
download it!(maybe not if you have a really slow 14.4 modem connection)
Aren't we all just trying to make money anyway? Why is it such a horrible thing for a business to want to make some cash?
While i strongly support the idea of a distribution such as Slackware, i also am realistic enough to see that the average user and/or Wintel convert would become completely fed up with Linux if they tried to install Slackware. (unless they had a lot of time on their hands). That's why RedHat is the most popular distribution.
Hey, i'm not a fan of major corporations, either, but if everyone's crying for the big guys to port their software to Linux, how can we fail to support the right of a Linux oriented company to make a few bucks off the distribution?
Here is a thought Perhaps the furor over redhat
getting so big(???) that they hijack linux may
be being authored by the king of monopolies from
Redmond. It would be in MS's best interest if
there is a civil war in the linux community.
Perhaps this is another attempt at stopping the
linux steamroller.
Don O'Connell
So we all agree to disagree, right? Red Hat is great for newbies, but there are other distributions that users can install, depending on individual need. Isn't that what we all want? The CHOICE in OS fine-tuning that Micro$oft and certain vendors do not allow!
/. comments, this reply would make sense. It might even be funny.
Perhaps the real problem with Red Hat is their logo - a red hat. Red is just too aggressive! Perhaps if they were "Grey Hat" or "Plaid Hat" or "Seuss Hat", their perception in the computing community would be much different. (What guy wears a red hat, anyway?)
Perhaps if I got some food and rest instead of reading all the previous
I started on Slackware and am still somewhat of a newbie, but I can see where riffraff is coming from. It doesn't do anything for you and therefore forces you to learn the ins and outs of the OS.. if you have the desire. Indeed RedHat is friendlier from what I've heard, but I enjoyed being forced into the blackness of Slackware and told to find the light. I may be biased because I've only used Slackware, but it is a good learning distro.
I undstand concerns. No one wants to idly sit back and allow Yet Another Company gain control of the computing market and dictate the options available to advocates everywhere. It's happened quite often. IBM. Microsoft. Sure there were competitors. HP. Boroughs. Sperry. Digital. Lotus. Apathy begat those monopolies and the lack of freedom that has ensued.
.tar.gz dummy! Use the Source Luke! Well, I do. Linux is only 1 OS. There's Solaris, SunOS, HPUX, etc. Their package managment is horrid at best. .tar.gz is the only useful alternative. But I admit, I'd rather --rebuild a src.rpm and have the software managed, especially in an Upgrade, than I would with software arbitrarily installed in /usr and /usr/local.
.spec file.
I've poked at Linux for quite a while now. Since the 0.96 days. Distributions I've used over the years include SLS (anyone still remember them?), SlackWare, RedHat, and Debian. Being in the USA, I haven't really had any impetus to try other distributions such as TurboLinux and SuSE, although I've read reviews that speak their praises.
The original SLS and Slackware packages were cumbersome. However, Distributions were a huge improvement. Not having to boot Minix to cross compile the necessary utilities. Not having to download all the various sources and put everything together, in the appropriate places on the filesystem. Scripts to tweak for what you had, or didn't have. Obviously that's got certain appeal, piecing together your own OS from scratch, but that gets old rather quick.
Slackware was great for me, because it had more features, and was better put together than the short-lived SLS distro. Sure there were others, such as TAMU, and Yggsdrill (or however it's spelled).. but with Slackware, I could download all the packages, or even a CD, and install on a new 486 computer and be up and running in no time. Tinkering with programs that *I* wanted to, or even just sitting back and reading news and e-mailing my friends.
I then, cautiously, moved to RedHat. v2.03. It was a big step, I really liked my SlackWare. However, RedHat was the new distro on the block, and even Linus used it. I read it so in the newsgroups, so if it was good enough for Linus...
I found that RedHat rocked. And each successive version kicked absolute butt. As I dealt with more and more Linux machines, I saw obvious problems (package relocation, in-place remote upgrades, installing to automounted directory structures, etc.) but many of those have been addressed. Their install procedures have gotten so much better, even my M$ enamoured friends can install it now. It's leagues better (and easier) than any NetWare install (with the possible exception of NetWare 5, but I digress...). There is TONS of support for their RPM format. And if you are using a RedHat derived distribution on non-Intel architectures, it's cakework to grab the src.rpm and --rebuild for your architecture. Can you say Alpha, SPARC and PPC folks? It sure annoys me when only x86 versions are available.
The obvious rebuttle is, grab the
I have to say that my tastes at this point are more in the Debian arena than anything else. I dislike the complicated debian source build procedure, and I also would like to see DEB more on par with RPM on optional packaging for software, but I understand that it's more difficult to maintain a DEB package than it is to write a RPM
What's my point? Well, if you've made it this far, I'm sure you can already infer what the point is. RedHat to this point has only done good. They have helped bring Linux exposure. Quicker than it might have happened. Some of the attention has been brought in the form of Commercial support. I'm not here to debate that issue. There is a real need for Commercial software. I hope that someday there are 1 or more truely free activly developed and supported equivilents of Commercial software packages.
RedHat has pushed certain portions of the distribution envelope. (RPM, GNOME, glibc 2.0, X on Notebook chipsets, GUI configuration for major components of the system, etc.) If at some point RedHat does something you disagree with, then voice your opinion. I'm sure it will have support, especially if it's a real bonehead mistake that they made. If not, then next upgrade of your system, switch to some other distribution that doesn't make you irate. You'll learn something in the process. I know I did in my RedHat -> Debian transition.
And so what, if in thought experiments or reality, that commercial only software is "supported on RedHat only". Support the free software equivilents. If you can't do it with code, do it with documentation. If you can't do it with documentation, do it with testing. If you can't do it with testing, then do it socially (among friends, newsgroups, etc.) Give them Moral support.
If you really need that commercial package, and RedHat has diverged so much from the LSB that it won't run on Linux-Mandrake, TurboLinux, Caldera OpenLinux, Debian, etc. then run RedHat. It's a good system.
I can tell you this tho, Actions definitly speak louder than people who whine.
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. -- Ferenc Mantfeld
A problem with Microsoft is they try to re-create
concepts they THINK are right when they could
have built on ones used and fine-tuned in the
UNIX community for years before. (Things like
UID/GID vs ACLs, NFS or sNFS vs File Sharing,
TCP/IP vs IPX/NetBEUI, DNS vs WINS the list
goes on and on.)
What RedHat is doing from under the noses of
those who are not familiar with UNIX is similar
to the Microsoft mentality. RedHat THINKS it
is better to put this config file here, or that
log file there. This breaks sh$t and is
completely foreign to a UNIX user from outside
the RedHat world. It also makes it far more
difficult to use both RPM and non-RPM packages.
RedHat is really trying to make life easier by
putting categories of files in specific locations
but the effects are anything but that. They
really should have created most RPM packages
with the default locations the author used
(usually something like
Now if you want to make tweaks to binaries
you're in for plenty of work.
I appreciate the good publicity RedHat has given
the Linux community. Driver support and programs
are being created far faster with a larger
user base. However, (Note to RedHat) don't try
to re-invent UNIX, it has been around a lot
longer than you.
I think that the biggest sin that RedHat can be accused of is marketing, if that's a sin. MS does a great job of marketing to the masses, and RedHat seems like they are following in those footsteps as well. It's the only distro. I see at Best Buy, they've 'partnered' with just about every major player in the game, and they really seem to have their act together in this aspect. Being new to the Linux OS, I've been playing around with the different distros for the last couple of months, picked up Caldera 2.2 at Comdex on Monday, and find myself preferring what RedHat is doing. Although their setup procedure can be difficult, it seems to me to offer a nice balance of retaining user control and making the setup easy. Because of this and their agressive marketing strategy, it comes as no suprise that they seem to be everywhere. I think the backlash is more along the lines of when your favorite underground rock band gets popular and 'sells out' they're not cool anymore. To some extent this is true, but we all have to eat...
You are absolutely correct! I could not have siad it better myself. So I won't! BTW, I use Red Hat (and FreeBSD and Debian)
It seems to me that the Linux community is the Hippie revolution for the 90's. But some of you seem to think that any company that gains any marketshare and influence, they must have become "The Man" and are just trying to surpress the competition. Some companies will do that, I can think of one in particular..... But Redhat isn't like that. Reality check -- the distributions will not all grow at the same rate, one will stand above the rest. So Redhat moved some files, it's not like they made proprietory protocols, make a sym-link and stop bitching. Redhat has made more contributions to the Linux community than any other company, and how do we repay them, with suspicion and accusations. Personally I am chomping at the bit for RH 6.0 to come out at Cheapbytes.
"We all go a little mad sometimes."
--Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Psycho (1960)
With god knows how many millions of users now, there will always be a few protesters. But most anti red-hat comments I see around are similar to my own views. I do not like RH, I seem to get lost in thier system, and it is just too cutsy a distribution for me. But, hey, that is obviously what people wany (zillions of windows users can't be wrong, can they? ;-)).
RH are doing nothing to make things proprietry, it's all Linux, and applications developers need only target the one generic platform.
Holy wars between compatible systems is healthy and fun, because one can always switch with little pain. It is a far cry from holy wars between systems that require you to lock yourself into thier methods, so let's not get things out of perspective.
I think a lot of people new to computing in a *nix environment get RedHat cause its an easier distro to install and use, personally I like slackware, never used any other distro but have heard mandrake is for posers who are to cowardly to get involved in their OS.
RedHat could become a strong force in the linux industry if people continue to think it is one of the best distro's around, which is not the case.
Redhat just seems to have gotten popular due to their website having enough information in a commercial fashion to gain the popularity.
Anyone ever see a SUSE, Debian, Slackware site more commercialized? Cause I sure haven't.
I'll stick to BSD
=P
Thanks for the memories
hah...you know you have a point there...
here's the deal my first nix based system was
slackware cuz i saw that redhat at the time seemed to be kiddiesh from what i had heard... so i decided to get slackware I use it every here and there, but someone put me on to freeBSD and I loved it so I use it more frequently... Besides my site is BSD based (you know) Personally I feel there both good but for the most part I'm 50% BSD, 30% slackware 20% Windows (work and school).. ouch the dreaded em ess word.
Thanks for the memories
For christs sake, I am going to stop reading this 'zine if I see one more "should we think about starting to bash RH just like we bash MS"
NO,NO,NO!! I refuse to cannibalize Linux.
RH rocks for newbies, suits, and even for EXPERIENCED USERS!! Been running it since I gave up on slackeware 3 years ago. I love it, I love what they are doing, and I pay for every release just to support them. I could download it for free, but I fell it is WORTH IT TO INVEST IN LINUX
-Ken
I've survived the following "My system is better than your system" elitist wars:
- TRS-80 vs Apple vs Commodore Pet
- Vic-20 vs Atari 400
- CBM-64 vs Atari 800 vs Radio Shack Color Computer
- Amiga vs Mac vs IBM PC
- IBM OS/2 vs Windows 3.1 vs Windows NT 3.51
- IBM OS/2 vs Windows 95 vs Windows NT 3.51
- Windows 9x vs Windows NT
- ETC, ad nauseum
I even remember bitter battles over which was the better CP/M platform! I've been working with personal computers longer than some of you have been alive, giving me must a little bit of experience in this. The one thing that has never changed in the 21 years is the fact that everyone wants to feel that their choice is the right one.- NT users sneer at Windows 9x users.
- Windows 9x users sneer at Windows 3.x users
- Linux users sneer at Windows users
- FreeBSD users sneer at Linux users.
- Mac users sneer at us
- We sneer at Mac users
In Linux we have a very good operating system. Since you're all reading this, you know WHY you're running Linux. Choice is good. Multiple distros are good. Elitism is not good.The first version of Linux I ever saw and used was Yggdrasil. I've also run Slackware, Debian and of course Red Hat. They were all good. I have my favorite. Even Linux Mandrake is good, without it, I probably wouldn't have tried KDE. Yes, I've even run FreeBSD.
The point is, enjoy what you use. Don't try to fragment the Linux or even the *nix community by all this bickering over distributions. To do so is playing exactly as hoped for in the recent Microsoft white paper on how to deal with the Linux threat. Microsoft FUD doesn't work very well against Linux, their best hope is for balkanization of the Linux community thereby causing us to lose focus.
So, let's try to calm the elitist urges within us and work for the common goals:
I appreciate what RH is doing for Linux, but they dont seem to care for their customers any more:
A friend of mine was trying to find out the release date of the next version and searched their web site - without success (I wonder how it is possible to find anything in there - urgh); he then looked for an email contact - there seems to be no address for general questions, so he tried "support@redhat.com".
The reply: This address is for registered customers only; you did not present a valid key.
No further hints, no pointer to the correct address, nothing. Looks like they are making too much money and dont feel it to be necessary anymore to answer simple questions.