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Linux is Not Red Hat
Vox wrote in to send
us a link to a feature that appears over at Linux Today. The
article is called
Linux is not Red Hat
and describes the fears that a growing number of the old
school Linux users have been expressing lately. Specifically
it talks about MetroWorks deciding to only support Red Hat
for their CodeWarrior for Linux release.
For support reasons, a first release of a product "specific" to the dominant distribution makes sense to me. They have some serious cost considerations and have to work within their limited resources.
Only if the product were deliberately crippled to work *only* on RH would this resemble MS tactics. As it is, it may work just fine with any distribution that the user is willing to support himself.
And, lacking evidence to the contrary, I wouldn't assume that RH had anything to do with this "exclusive" arrangement. I, for one, have not noticed any such anti-social pattern in RH's behavior.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
The only advantage I've ever seen from an 'IDE' is that there's a button in the editor to compile. And Emacs does that. So.. ?
Actually, I should contradict myself here. The project managment features can seem pretty nice at first, but I usually end up fighting with them to get more control over what's going on -- autoconf and automake take a little more time to learn (I picked them up in an evening, YMMV..) but aren't much more complex for common cases and actually *work* for uncommon cases.
Daniel
A good chunk of the linux community has been wanting commercial software for a while. What did you think was going to happen? Companies that have the vast majority of their current customer base running other OSes were going to train all of their support staff to a level where they can help any linux user running any combination of software/kernal/libraries? This just doesn't make economic sense for the company trying to sell the software. I would guess that if a company does well with redhat as an officially supported platform, that they would eventually start supporting other well developed platforms like debian or caldera as well.
My $0.02 anyway.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
I'm a slackware user, and a new one, so not out of
sentimental reasons. I just don't like the RH distro.
But I bet I can get the codewarrior to work with some symlinks and a glibc2.1 compile. I've got an slack distro ported half to gilb2 just for the citadel BBS (Nice!) so I know how to do it.
I mean, they can *say* it's for redhat only, but it's just a little work to adapt it to your distro
of choice.
I take it you don't like Quake?
Windows NT and BeOS, don't kick ass, they suck just as much as other OSs do, but in their own ways.
Well you might say.... Windows doesn't suck from the programs I have used.... Well then I would say..... duh, neither does linux..... Its when you go on windows expecting linux, or go to linux expecting windows, that either of them suck.....
a) Linux and BeOS just don't have the high end software, but they are stable and have good performance in their respective fields.
b) Windows NT has the software, but is very sluggish and unstable (I can't stress this enough, it sucks!!!). They try to depend on hardware vendors to get performance, but that in turn makes it unstable. Go figure.
I think there could be value in extend the LSB to include other, non-technical things...such as advice on how to document requirements and handle propiatory software.....examples
for requirements
...This products requires library XXX and XXX, and has been tested and know to work on distro X and Y.
This avoids the balikanization that people are worried about and still provides for companies that do not want to test all distros...and it provides the info needed to make it work on an non-compliant system (ie symling this library to here, whatever)....the same can be used to cover propriatory software in a distro, IE they should be clearly and consistandly labeled. Propriatory software isn't evil, but it should be treated carefully when working with open software.
As for distros, there is obviously too much paranoia going on here, but there is some basis for it. Redhat, to their credit, has played the game correctly, releasing all software under the GPL et all. But they are growing very powerful, which undermines the traditional strenght of Linux (and also its greatest weakness), which is its distrubuited nature. I respect redhat, but I wont use their product, despite their good behavior, because I fear this growing hegemony....other than that I wish them the best...
Apologies if this repeats other comments, I don't have the time to go through all responses.
The only benefits an IDE would have over this would be organization, and hot keys... Someone could create a project manager that uses other programs to edit source files, uses other programs to compile or assemble, and memorizes what applications you have open, and are to be compiled. All of this being mean and lean because it would not be an IDE (integrated developement environment) it would just be a DE (developement environment), which simply loads projects, and loads data into other programs as well as memorize the position and other data of these programs.
I remember reading something about the Turing machine, which also mentioned genetic based computing, which was about creating programs from organs, and the program would be extremely small since it would simply use what is already in the operating system, so it will use emacs or gnotepad under X, and notepad under windows, to edit source code, as oposed to creating an editor in an IDE.
You are unhappy with gcc's error messages? Try Visual C++'s: you would come back and treat gcc developers as God.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
This is an example of what happens with closed source apps. An Open Source app would be easily ported to other distros by the people who run those distros.
Its been obvious (to me anyway) that redhat is just out to make linux into an operating system for the masses, while making a nice sum of money at the same time.
My opinion? if you want to be someone using a "different" os , use FreeBSD. I think we need a healty amount of different operating systems as main stream , so we never get another MS
He just doesn't know how unnecesary they are yet...
Re:uhmmm... NO.
IDEs just simply replace other programs, and are essentially just trying to replace the functions of other programs.
Don't be lame, there are ways to make money in the open source community, and there are ways to even make money in a free open source community.
so you have just pointed out that they are a microsoft of a different flavor. last i new most ppl big beef with microsoft was not that they didnt release open source software but because they practiced monopolistic and preadatory business practices. it certainly sounds to me (and many others here) that that is what redhat is doing.
You think it's bad now, wait till REd Hat IPO's.
Talk about a severe conflict of interest.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Why so much vitriol? And why do so many puff up self-righteously when a company makes a decision it feels is in its own best interests?
Linux has shown itself to be a very capable platform. We who would prefer not to ride the MS bus can only benefit from the continued success of Linux. Open Source is a good thing for the OS, and is essential IMHO to its continued success. It is not, however, essential that every tool which runs on the platform be open source.
Religious fervor is best kept in religious contexts, or even dispensed with altogether.
I can understand that MetroWerks may need to limit their full testing to a single distribution, for simple economic reasons. The likelihood of their tools being compatible with other major distros remains high, as long as the library levels are compatible.
The key is that they are saying they cannot certify that it will run on more than one distro. Perhaps instead of screaming in indignation, some of the energetically agitated might wish to consider that this problem will arise again and again, and that there seems to be a need for an independent certification group to resolve the problem.
Such a group, like the developers of Linux, could be staffed with volunteers. In the case of compilers, a common test suite could be assembled; for other types of tools, the testing may not need such rigor.
If the diversity of distributions is to be fostered, I think that such a group is absolutely required.
As to whether MetroWerks should be boycotted, it seems a silly thing to do. We buy tools according to our preferences. That's the beauty of a free market.
Let's try to be constructive, folks, and proactive. And let's waste less bandwidth on mindless rants and polemics.
--- Bill
What the Red Hat label means is that Metrowerks has thoroughly tested CW for Linux with RedHat so that is the official support. Look for it to support other distro's in the future.
That said, yes it's a port of the IDE. Yes, it has it's quirks. But quite frankly, it will get better. It will look better. just be patient people!! the product will mature as time progresses.
Now, WHO is CW for Linux for? The newbie Linux user who came from another GUI environment (Mac OS or Windows) and is not familiar with vi or emacs as an IDE. Second, the user who uses CW on other GUI environments and wants to port the code easily (the project files are completely multi-platform compatible) ie: john carmack. And Finally the user who wants a GUI IDE to do development as a front-end to the GCC tools. If you don't fall into that category, that's fine. Use what you like and feel comfortable with. No one is forcing you to use an IDE.
Lastly, Metrowerks will be releasing their Professional edition of their Linux IDE later this year (check the website for details). It will use their compilers instead of GCC and also includes JAVA tools.
-- DuckWing
You would be talking about in quake2. The source to all their projects is always released after a time delay! Doom was released, Wolf was released the only problem they have had is not holding all copy rights on things like the sound and what not. But all source will get released and they should be releasing quake source code a little after q3 comes out. They are waiting for a few companies to move over to their quake2 or 3 engine so they can do so.
But to even compare someone as great as Carmack to Microsoft is just nuts! Look at all the time he has spent buggin Mac about their systems and finally they got a clue and updated. Sure you might not like Macs but the more competion between operating systems the better because they can only take ground from Microsoft there is not much left to lose.
--MD--
--MD--
I really agree with this. Until now, I have viewed these Red Hat deals as good, over all.
I guess I still do, supporting one Linux Distro makes it that much easier to support other Linux distros.
I hope that ISVs will realize that supporting only one Distro is bad for their linux investment. If they help balkanize the market then the market will not grow as fast as it could, making their upside considerably less than it could be.
The default behavior of recursively searching #include trees is the same for CW on Mac and Windows and Linux. Nothing surprising here. You can change that just by clicking the recursive search icon and provide an exact path to the include directory. It's that easy. Have you read the manual? It sounds like you're ranting on about things you've experienced but all this information is provided in the manual. You might want to read it.
Lastly, CW has a plug-in architecture. Their Plug-in API is publically available. If you want to write your own compiler to plug into the CW IDE, go for it! If other people want to do it, go for it! nothing's stoping you from doing that and MW encourages such action.
As for the mwcc command line arguments, I can't speak there as I don't use those tools.
-- DuckWing
Whenever I read a distro-bashing piece, I can only smile sadly. Because this is *not* what we had in mind when we started using and advocating Linux almost 7 years back.
.deb on a Caldera machine? Why are .tgz not as easy to uninstall as a .rpm? Why is it wrong to have XF86config in /etc/X11 instead of the highly cluttered /etc?
I always thought that Linux was about choice. It appears that when it comes to Linux, it is OK to have choice available, but when you actually *make* that choice, you can never be right, and more and more people are beginning to notice that.
So people choose to use RedHat. So RedHat is successful. So they make tons of money. So what's the big deal?
I am not saying that RedHat is the greatest or the best - but I do sit up and take notice when my clients insist that "if at all Linux, then RedHat". That's quite a switch from the "Linux - are you kidding?" attitude from just last year!
Sure, it may be because RedHat advertises, and spends money pushing the product. But does that make them bad?
People keep dissing RH for "doing things differently". But tell me, dear people, aren't all the distros doing that? Is the layout of Debian identical to Slackware's? Is SuSE's layout the same as Caldera's? Is Debian's packaging the same as Stampede's? Why can I not install a
The fact that a package is "designed for RedHat Linux" has its roots in both RedHat's visibility, as well as the fact that since every distro does things differently (read as "non-standard"), it makes sense to stick with the one having the greatest visibility and/or acceptance.
Everyone keeps talking about "RH is successful only because of its massive commercial push". But no one highlights the fact that most of the RedHat installations are either through anonymous FTP or CheapBytes CDs - something that RH makes no money off. RH is so popular not because of "commercial seduction" or "the lemmings effect" - it is the simple fact that people seem to like RH's distro!
Strangely enough, every scriptkiddy under the sun will yell from the rooftop that "Linux is about the right to choose!", but when people actually *exercise* that right to choose (resulting in a success like that experienced by RH) they will be verbally castrated, and their choice ridiculed as "the next Microsoft".
Whether this is the "underdog syndrome" or just plain stupidity - it reeks of hippocracy and sour grapes, and I fear that it will be the primary weapon that will be used against Linux in the very near future.
People in meatspace have enough problems understanding the concept of Open Source - try and make them understand this one (with due apologies to Henry Ford):
"You may choose any color you want - as long as it is not the most popular one".
:-\
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
...neither will pretending this type of thing doesn't/can't happen. How difficult do you think it'd be for an OS maker to extend it's base compiler to provide an 'enhanced' ide similar to Metrowerks? Remember Stacker? Netscape?
Because rpm wouldn't know anything of your other installed software. In Debian it wouldn't know of any installed deb packages. Converting it with the alien tool would not make it as good as a normal deb-package.
As long as rpm isn't standard I get highly offended by rpm only packages. No problem with tar-files because it works for everyone (and has existed forever). And rpm will never be standard, because it is inferior to deb.
I think what they mean is certain distros have their own layout of directories and init scripts.
Anh they only support the RedHat way.
I usually hate to write the "Me too!" type posts...but damn...your post rocked!
That is the attitude that the Linux community needs...not this..."look at evil company X...they aren't supporting *my* distro...they suck!"
Preach on Brother!
The problem that I see here is one of expectations. You wanted Linux to become a mainstream operating system, but you wanted it to remain open and free.
Yes, that's what we want. That's what we will get. We must insist on it. There is *no reason* why a mainstream os may not also be open and free.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Shut up Beavis! If RPM sucks, what to say about SLP, this amateur package software used by Stampede??? If they cant' make a decent one, use RPM or DEB. And again, silly boy, I can use the fucking tarballs to compile all my stuff if I want. I don't have to use RPM! And don't forget that src.rpm exists. It's the source.
Rather than argue about it, I just sent the following to MetroWerk's sales department:
I use RedHat 5.2 Linux and was going to buy a copy of CodeWarrior until you decided to *not* support other distributions. Other people I work with use Debian, Slackware, SuSE, and Caldera. There are other distros as well, but if you are going to participate in the kind of balkanization that cripples the major Unix platforms I feel I have no choice but to keep looking for another vendor's solution.
Should you decide to support (at least) the other major distributions I will reconsider my decision.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How hard it is to create an autoconf/automake/libtool/whatever system to be able to recompile the code under any POSIX system? It's easy to make an application portable to Linux, FreeBSD and even Solaris or AIX. And after it's done the first time, adding more POSIX systems is a simple matter of adding some more #ifdefs.
Making an app that can be ported to non-POSIX systems (e.g. Windoze) is harder, but after made the first time, only a small portion of the program (the OS-dependent one) has to be recoded for a new OS (e.g. NSPR).
Recompiling to another CPU is even easier, unless you depend heavily on assembly and has no portable equivalents of the asm routines. The main issue is support for 64-bit and 128-bit (currently non-existing, but in the future will be an issue) CPUs -- but again, once done for the first time, making it work in new situations is easier.
This is a bit like the way Linux was done -- first it was i386-only, then it was ported the first time, and then it became much easier to port.
anyway... which toolkit this program uses??
Has anyone tried Code Crusader? As I recall, it's supposed to be a clone of Code Warrior. I haven't used either, but am about to install Crusader.
personally I feel that there should only be one or 2 (pref 2) distros of linux instead of all these tiny distros with some interesting ideas but these distros just don't have the focus and support that's needed to position linux as a good OS for others to consider. I wouldn't mind just seeing redhat and debian and everyone else would focus on working on either the "free" linux debian or the "corporate" linux redhat. Otherwise MS will easily take advantage of this lack of a unified linux voice (the mindcraft study and aftermath comes to mind)
---
Claiming that "anyone who knows what they're doing doesn't do/use [whatever]" is inane.
I was reacting to the premise of the editorial more than the reality of the current situation. While Codewarrior does run on other distributions, it is entirely conceivable that at some future point, we will see proprietary software that runs on only one distribution. Such fragmentation is simply not possible with free software, because the users can modify software without any commercial support.
Commercial support is a blessing. Proprietary software that needs commercial support in order to be useful is a curse. Whether or not to take one, or the other, both, or neither, is a complex decision involving many tradeoffs. However, I am convinced that fragmentation of Linux will lead to its death. So, for me, one point in favor of free software is that incompatible fragmentation is impossible. That's all.
Do you know what it takes to do a quality assurance on a piece of software? If MetroWorks has to support every single distribution out there, with every version of every library used, do you have ANY idea what that would cost?
I highly doubt CodeWarrior will not work on debian, slackware, suse, caldera, or any other distribution with the required libraries. MetroWorks isn't stupid. They just won't support a different distribution to run it on. Same goes for almost any other commercial software, it goes trough quality assurance for one particular platform (which happens to be RedHat on Linux, since they seem to have the largest userbase, or the highest profile), and only support that. It may or may not run on a different distribution, since they have not tested that.
Anyways, that's my rambling about this particular topic, you can agree or not, I'll stand by it.
Bas Vermeulen
We should not fear the presence of commercial software, but rather revel in it as it gives Open Source the opportunity to prove how much better it is. We do believe that, don't we?
If a commercial vendor shows up with some restrictive license or policy, is it their fault that our choice is restricted? Or is it our fault because we chose to whine and complain about it rather than provide a better alternative for ourselves? Freedom goes both ways, and they are free to support you or to leave you behind, just as you are free to buy their product or to come up with an alternative.
We have the choice. The GPL ensures that we will always have the choice. That doesn't mean that freedom will be handed to us on a silver platter. MetroWerks has just as much right to support a single distro as we have to support them all. We shouldn't restrict their freedom by enforcing our notion of freedom.
Lately, it seems that the Open Source notion of freedom is that everyone should be free to do only what we think they should do. We need to lose that attitude quickly, and start competing on the basis of our technical and philosophical superiority. Does it make any sense that we preach freedom and procede to rant that everyone should be restricted to the GPL?
Wake up, people! Stop whining and get to work! I've seen the enemy and the enemy is us.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Disk Druid killed your partitions? I bet you killed your partitions because you're too dim to figure out how to use the installer. I've installed 4.2,5.0,5.1,5.2 and 6.0 on all sorts of systems, Intel and Alpha, Notebooks, and never had any such problem. Why? Because I know what I'm doing.
So I was, after a while, sick of having to spend hours finding and downloading an obscure library slackware didn't include that some other distro did, and sick of fixing things in programs that didn't work with my system for some reason or another (when the make process for a package I really wanted came up with a bunch of compile time errors (not warnings), I could often fix them with 2 to 7 hours of effort (average)). I heard about the holy grail of typing "rpm -i package.rpm" and having it just work immediately sounded pretty damn cool. And I knew that my experience of using rpm on slackware was less than perfect, so I wanted to get a real Red Hat system - they were, after all the market leader, and I wanted them to be the best. So I got a copy from a friend, and installed it.
I later regretted this move. For one thing, Red Hat uses the init scripts with the folder for every runlevel, and S09SERVICE links and such. I know some people like it, and I even know that my SuSE system I use now uses it by default, but one of the things I really didn't like about red hat at first was the switch from slackware's simple single level rc.d directory with a series of text files to initialize different parts of the system.
The next big problem was linuxconf. I don't know how it's version number got to the 0.9x's, because the version I used was not, in my opinion, suitable for an alpha quality release. Practically _NONE_ of the functions I tried to use to administrate my system worked. I'm talking important, basic things like adding users and groups, changing network settings, etc... I couldn't believe Red Hat would put such a useless tool in the center of it's admin interface. I wanted to use shell scripts - and I'm sure there probably were some I could use - but the names I knew from slackware didn't work, and I didn't know where else to look (All my linux knowledge came from slackware experience at that point). Then RPM came crashing down - sure, it was nice to be able to type "rpm -i gimp-0.91.rpm", but that lost it's appeal when the latest development versions failed to appear as RPMs. Sure, I could do a plain old source compile and install, but that would break my system's rpm-purity. It was an annoying feeling to have to worry if rpm's database was up to date in addition to worrying if my actual system was up to date. I couldn't believe rpm didn't have some graceful way to cover this situation (typing --nodeps for the rest of your system's life is NOT graceful), at least not a well documented one. I read everything I could find, even a large portion of Maximum RPM, but no solution presented itself. RPMs were not so cool after all, I had to start doing source compiles. I am not the type of linux user who is interested in only using old stuff.
SRPMS didn't work for me at ALL, by the way.
When I needed to install a newer gimp, turned out I also had to install a newer GTK. And this newer gtk conflicted with the rpm gtk I had installed (no rpm available for the new one, of course), so I had to -erase the old one. Installing the compiled gtk did not stop the warnings when I tried to install any package that depended on gtk. This pattern occured with many a package, and I got accostumed to typing --nodeps. What the hell was the point of having rpm if I didn't use it's dependencies? My system's combination of rpm-based programs and compiled programs resisted eachother and I eventually couldn't deal with their fighting, the linuxconf fiasco, my printing problems, and my general feeling that Red Hat had just downloaded a bunch of crap off the net and put it on a cd without testing it even once from a new user's perspective. I missed slackware. But I felt like trying other distros.
To make a long story short (I'm late for class), SuSE had the best combination of actually working as advertised (try YaST! it is excellent compared to every other (linux) admin tool I've tried) and having a higher level of control than slackware.
Every Microsoft program I've ever used has been a bloated resource hog that constantly crashed.
I had the Arcade Pak for Win3.1. Asteroids, Battlezone, Centipede, Missile Command, and most importantly, Tempest. They ran in 4MB of core, didn't seem particularly bloated, and didn't crash that I can remember. (:
It's Red Hat's stated policy (by Bob Young to ZDNet) to have their brandname eclipse or become synonymous with that of Linux, and this article makes perfect sense in that context and quite frankly I really dislike it.
I'm switching from Rh5.2 to Debian at the earliest opportunity. I don't know what Linux users are all thinking anyway, simultaneously espousing all this GNU rhetoric while the majority run a distinctly corporate OS. It's just stupid and it makes me think that 'Free speech not beer' is more fashion statement than philosophy. Well it isn't for me. I know Red Hat is GPL, but quite obviously there is a vastly different, and opposed set of aesthetics, ambitions and ideals underpinning Red Hat and Debian, Open Source and GNU, and I prefer the latter in both cases. We users have no profits to gain just freedom to lose. Support freedom and shun corporatism before it gets out of hand.
I have no problem with modest businesses in Linux. Selling Slackware, FreeBSD or O'Reilly books is cool by me, but this is something different and something potentially sinister. The truth is Red Hat probably doesn't care about their image with the users any more - corporate uptake is their target market - but where will they be without free software hackers making their product for them? Dead in the water. I just hope the users realise before it's too late and Red Hat Linux(tm) is the next Windows or Windows NT, and every other box in PC stores has 'Minimum Requirements: Red hat Linux' on it.
As for the guy who said the Linux community has signs of 'self loathing' -- what ??!?
Without RedHat, Linux is dead. Look at the Gnome project. Without RedHat, Gnome is dead. And if Gnome is dead, GTK+ is dead. Oh, RedHat owns the world. Debian? A bunch of nerds making releases with a lot of bugs. RedHat is serious. RedHat is the best Linux distribution.
When will Mozilla be ready?
The contact form server ... not accepting connections;). ... let me know when they are
The heat be on
done.
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
Try SuSE: get rpms AND stability!
Posted by Synsthe:
/. is an accurate representation of the Linux community as a whole, guess what folks, Linux is doomed.
I read everything I need to know about you in the first sentence or two == "I am not a Linux user."
End of story. Your opinion means shit.
It's people like you that are the biggest problems for the Linux community.
I'm just going to chime in here quick, I'm not a regular poster, but I read posts here quite often; that is, when it's possible to wade through all the trolls, and anonymous cowards with immature posts such as the above.
If
Did you even bother to read his post? He points out some very good, very good facts. He had the honesty and decency to point out he doesn't use Linux himself because it doesn't work for him. He deserves praise for that, not your kind of shit. He's got more balls than you'll ever have kiddo.
Put aside the fact that he uses windows for a moment and read what he said, and understand well what he said. The kind of mentality some people show around here is exactly why he is right, and exactly what people who want to see Linux fail, need. You're providing it for them with your elitist attitude.
Linux is not about usurping Microsoft's power and demolishing it as a valid marketable OS. If it was, Linux would be no better than MS itself, and all of you who would like to see it do as such, would be doing so in vain. You'd be creating exactly what you allegedly didn't like. I believe Linux is about providing alternatives to what is currently dominating the market. I think it's doing a good job of providing just that.
You, are taking all of that, and in one small post, supporting the exact opposite.
You're last line alone shows plainly you're without a clue. He wasn't defending the act, he was pointing out the fact that the reaction to it is an even more serious problem.
Throughout how many hundred posts here, I've seen one or two people provide possible solutions and courses of action that could be taken to rectify this situation with little or no backlash. Yet the rest of you just bitch and bitch, and make matters worse.
Wake up and smell the coffee, you people are going to be bigger problems for Linux than MetroWerks (sp?) and RedHat could ever be.
--
Mark Waterous (mark@revision3.com)
I'll be the first to respond that it isn't theoretically feasable due to the GPL. However, the GPL is like the US constitution -- useless unless enforced.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
hedrek you are a fool.
SO the guy isn't a linux user. So what? He makes a great point that was well thought out and took alot of his time to type it.
rant? hardly. you're the one ranting. He was very calm and rational and logical.
So he uses windows. so what? it works for him.
clue: Many people who use Windows are very intelligent people.
Personally, I have no problem with Windows as a "recreational" OS for playing games and such. I dislike the company that makes it, and I despise thier business practices, but the OS is not evil in and of itself.
OPEN YOUR EYES, PEOPLE.
Red Hat CANNOT PULL MICROSOFT TRICKS. Everything in RedHat Linux is GPLed!
installpkg kde.tgz
Got another one?
Dunno about debain, but Debian has (AFAIK) more packages available than RedHat. I still have to compile programs myself occasionally, but very rarely; most of the time it's because I'm trying to find a bleeding-edge alpha version of something to fiddle with for a few hours. (eg, Gnome before it got out of CVS-only mode)
Daniel
But that's the rub though, isn't it? I don't have a problem with discussions about what kind of actions should be taken if our worst fears are realized. But in the mean time, there really isn't any good reason to trash RedHat for anything beyond the "I hate RedHat because of feature/bloatware/glibc/package x." (Which, by the way, I think are legitimate complaints.)
The only reason people are going after RH is because it's been successful. I would bet that if debian were the popular distribution right now, people would be going after debian in exactly the same way. This kind of bickering isn't constructive, it's destructive to the linux movement as a whole and hurtful to the guys at RedHat who have worked hard to make RedHat what it is (whether you like RH or not).
Until we have hard proof that RH is doing anything really wrong (aside from being successful), I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
It's to bad these fools won't go back to the MS world where they belong.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Carmack may want to use Codewarrior, but he seems to like it mostly because of the editor (which makes sense to me, neither vi nor emacs have ever made me happy). on the other hand, Carmack is developing a closed-source product for linux/i386, so i've got about as much respect for him as i do for the windows people.
Normally RedHat linux vs. brand X linux doesn't matter, however it seems that RedHat is taking steps to insure that doesn't work any more. It's very clearly visible in RHL6. Try compiling Apache w/ mod_ssl out of the box. NG. Can't find ndbm.h, obviously a bug right? Nope. "There are two flavors of ndbm.h that would like the honor of being called THE ndbm.h, so re-write the make file to use the one in db1 or db2." Checkout RedHat Bugzilla Bug number 2527. I don't know about you, but it looks to me like RedHat is trying to segment the market. I USED to be an avid RedHat fan, now I'm taking my distribution preference elsewhere...
-Carl "No, we already thought of that one. 'Why?' '42' - It doesn't fit." -Hitchhiker'
Right. But you apparently want the distribution that is "technicallY the best" to prosper most. Many people apparently have other concerns, such as writing for a large user base, or choosing a distro that's easy to get help with. Sorry if it's not exactly what you want, but see item (2) above.
Then again, if you personally must have the version that's "technically the best," it will always be available. You can't "smash the competition" in Linux. Shoot, some other distros are already working with no money or off pocket change. What can Red Hat do to them? Red Hat grossed about $10 million last year, Microsoft grossed that much since I started writing this.
This is a different business. Forget everything you know about proprietary software, it doesn't apply to this stuff. That's what we like about it, remember?
I have an Integrated Development Environment. It is named /bin/bash (grin).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
A pain in the ass it may be, but don't be fooled: gcc is a good compiler. Sure, its error messages may be cryptic, but few compilers (or compiler writers) do drastically better.
In either case, compilers or error messages, MetroWorks is not the answer. I've used it on other platforms and not only does it crash frequently, but its error messages make gcc seem as if its speaking the king's english.
Cygnus' GNUPro toolkit supports only RedHat 5.x and higher, officially. See http://www.cygnus.com/gnupro/faq.html for the details on that.
So on this point, Cygnus isn't very different from MetroWerks. At least they supply source code with their tools...
--
Knave, I think that was the most intelligent, well thought out, well written, and frighteningly POSSIBLE thing I have ever wirtten in these pages.
:-)
It would be so easy for someone to do what you described, especially with the knee-jerk reactionaries that post to this page....
I think hedrick might be in the employ of MS, he was SO FAST to try to discredit you..
-geekd
Look people, THINK before you spread rumors and repeat "facts" that may or may not be true.
*sigh*
And this oppinion is useful to OpenSource how?
Or, did you get cut off, when you were saying:
Linux Sucks slime-coated rocks
BSD sucks rocks
and Windoze NT rulz!
You should really get a better connection to the net, one that doesn't cut you off like that. Perhaps, loading an OpenSource OS and replacing Windows would help your ability to use the 'net.
go figure. Red Hat is becoming the victim of a paranoid linux user base.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
This has to be the dumbest discussion I have ever heard.
It's not like the software you used 5 years ago is gone. There just are more options. Personally, I'd rather have the choice of a lot of applications, some free some proprietary, and then select those I *want* to use than to be foreced into using what's there. It's all about choice when you think about it, it's just that some slashdot weenies seem to value choice no more than microsoft.
RedHat is NOT microsoft. RedHat is the only comercial distrobution that is totally RedHat. RedHat is the only companie that opens ALL it's source. RedHat is also the base of many other distributions and RedHat makes no money off it. RedHat did NOT make any money off of LinuxPPC which is meerly a port of RH 5.2 to the PPC (or it was last summer). RedHat did NOT make any money off of Ultra-Linux which is also a port of RH. S.U.S.E. uses a large part of RH code base with out any support. Besides SUSE, RH is the only company to develop and then open source X servers for AGP cards.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
RedHat would be even sillier to enter more deals 'X for RedHat Linux'. I can only think of two reasons that would definitely force me to switch from RedHat: (a) if they pull some technical crap that makes their distro clearly inferior to others (b) if they pull some marketing crap that tries to dominate the distro market not on technical merit but incompatible lockins.
Then again, as Joe Average I'm probably no longer in the market segment that RedHat is after. Any attempt at balkanizing Linux will kill RedHat's longterm viability, they will be sawing on the branch they're sitting on. And the Linux community is much more vigilant than the Windows community was when Microsoft succeeded in locking everybody into their product. If RedHat tries, they will face outrage, boycotts etc. way before their strategic moves could benefit them.
RedHat would be very well advised to avoid even the appearance of trying to corner the distro market. 'CodeWarrior for RedHat Linux' is a PR disaster at best.
Posted by hurstdawg:
What is the _Real_ agreement between RedHat and Metrowerks...
and how long until the different distributions start becoming incompatible with each other... sure people could just port the apps over, but how long until some of the OS _isn't_ open source anymore...?
Come on now folks Red Hat has always been for lusers. Let them happily luse away.
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
The FHS is there today, and a lot of vendors don't
follow it. Since all indications are that
LSB will encompass the FHS, I see no
reason why. Locations of XF86Config very from
dist to dist and there is no reason.
If LSB is not here yet, demand support for FHS.
It's a step in the right direction.
file location issues can be fixed in the worst case with a symlink, can't they?
Oh super. So we'll end up with a symlink-riddled filesystem like latter versions of Solaris.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
catdoc file.doc > file.txt ; emacs file.txt
>Oh super. So we'll end up with a symlink-riddled filesystem like >latter versions of Solaris
Only if you Slackware Users choose not to get your act together and adopt the things everybody else is using. If you guys don't want to, then quit bitching.
People are just going to have to get used to the fact that the distribution aimed at the majority of the userbase is going to be including software and be setup so that userbase can use it, and attract software with similar goals from the commercial sector.
IDE's are for clueless gumbies.
Redhat Linux is for clueless gumbies.
I think it's a good match. And I praise Redhat for taking the time to keep software real hackers don't need, and users real hackers don't want to deal with, away from the distributions real hackers use.
Let Redhat pitch themselves at Microsoft, let their users think Linux is the alternative to Microsoft. The real hackers know Microsoft don't even enter the equation.
Matt
Also, I'm not entirely sure I want every application I install to come with custom scripts which fsck around with my main system libraries, thankyou very much.
That said, some versions of the Blackdown JDK did come with their own set of libraries. And I must admit that back in the bad old days it did seem to help. Hopefully we're past needing that now though.
Come on folks! One guy starts spouting off about RedHat making exclusive contracts when there is absolutely NO evidence to suggest that this has happened, nor has there EVER been any indication from RedHat that they were interested in making any exclusive deals with anyone. Has anyone read any of the interviews and various articles with/from Bob Young?! Young, has stated several times that RedHat's intensions were not along these lines, and has given several good reasons for why RedHat couldn't get away with this kind of stunt even if they wanted to. If we have a bone to pick with anyone, it's Metroworks, not RedHat.
Frankly I think we need to take a good look at ourselves to see if we aren't suffering from paranoia. Think about it, we've been dealing with monopolistic technology companies for so long that the second one of our own starts to become successful, it automatically must mean that they are monopolistic too! Get Real!
I, for one, am not concerned about RedHat. If such things as RH is being accused of actually occur, most of us will move to another distro so fast it will make Bob Young's head spin...and he know's it.
Other companies targeting a specific distribution is cause for concern, but until the LSB gets out the door and people adhere to it, this is the kind of thing we're going to get. What else would you expect!?
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Nicely said. I just want to add one thing about why geeks dislike Microsoft: because they make inferior software. Every Microsoft program I've ever used has been a bloated resource hog that constantly crashed. Having been forced to use Windows the other day, I had to ask myself, "How did these people sell a single copy of this operating system?" You've provided the answer to this one.
I haven't tried the other distos (no time!), but I have not encountered the RPM problems dynamo describes for RedHat. I *did* have a similar problem installing an upgrading RedHat with a non-RPM installation of XFree86 (it didn't detect the non-RPM installation in /usr/local), but it was not that difficult to replace the RPM version with the one I wanted.
RPMs aren't magic, and they are *not* required for adding software to a RedHat box. But if you want to mix and match installation methods, you really need to know what your system is doing during those installations. Bypassing RPMs is like extracting an archive on WinXX instead of running the installer -- things get missed, but can be dealt with manually if you're patient enough and not afraid of the registry editor. (Of course with a Wintendo game system it's unstable no matter how you install the software, but that's an irrelevant rant...)
Stability? I don't know what people are complaining about. I haven't had any stability problems at all, just the occasional config error (always been my own fault.) After many years of working with production *nix systems, it's usually easy to tell whether I've encountered a stability problem or if I've just screwed something up. 99% of the time it's my fault, not the system's.
I'm quite certain I could screw up any distro by installing software in unexpected locations, forgetting a few symlinks, or otherwise botching the procedures. I don't try to blame the vendor for those problems -- if it worked out of the box and I broke it, there's no one to blame except the guy sitting in my chair.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
CodeWarrior for Linux is based on Linux, AFAIK. Metrowerks doesn't have a decent x86 compiler - BeOS/x86 switched over to gcc some time ago.
It was not unusual to me to upgrade even the system libraries on our HP. With the glibc and it's versioning support there are two options ... software relies on bugs (bad) or it just works (good). It is just a matter of saying "ok, it works with glibc-2.1.0+ or 2.1.1+". BTW, I've given up using distributions with kernel 0.99.10, I never compiled X, NS or Motif but a lot of other stuff, no problem ... if they want to have it that way, that is.
Their claims of not being able to support 39 distributions insipres absolutely no confidence in me. There is no way in hell I would pay for a product that is so poorly supported that its open source competitors look good in comparison.
A commercial company's idea of support is different than the open source idea of support. People have a number of expectations with a piece of commercial software that they do not have with a piece of GPL software. For example, just because Perl is "supported" in Debian does not mean that Larry Wall is knowledgable about how to make a .deb package, or how to get Perl to compile on a Debian system. It just means that someone on the net has managed to compile, and perhaps make a .deb package for a single version of Perl. It doesn't mean that the particular 5.00X release you need to make all your scripts work will compile in Debian, much less that there is a .deb package of the version of Perl you need compatible with the version of Debian you have.
Compare this to the expectations of commercial support. If MetroWorks said "Debian" on the box, you would expect that there were .deb packages suitable for all releases of Debian currently in use. You would expect that MetroWorks technical support hotline would be trained in Debian-specific issues. You would expect that there would be no nasty bugs that only pop up because of Debian's particular eccentricities. Which, to MetroWorks, means they would have to perform an additional SQA (Software Quality Assurance) testing round for the Debian version.
When it comes to commercial software, "Support" does not just mean "it can work with a little hacking" or "We managed to compile it for this distribution". It means a large investment of time and money.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
You are right. Of course it is strictly personal decision but I for example, find it hard to use Emacs and forget about vi ( tried couple times and still get mad as hell ... definately not for me.) Visual Slick edit is quite good ( however little bit on the slow side on my K2 300 + G200, well it is static Motif so can't really expect more )
I've worled with MS Visual C++ and while I might make the sacreligious statement that it actually has some neat features, its user interface sucks rocks.
The term IDE was coined by Borland and the best currently available IDE is Delphi. It's hard to explain why something is cool to people who don't believe in it, and Unix people generally scoff at the very notion of an IDE or a visual development environment.
All I can say is, trust me, the reason I like Delphi is not that I am incompetent or unable to handle "real" programming. Designing GUI dialogs by drawing what they should look like just feels like the right way to do things. So far, I haven't seen a Unix-based GUI builder that doesn't suck, but I'm really hoping something will appear soon.
-Graham
The Quake executable is closed, but the gamex86.dll is open so people can make mods.
Valve did the same. I don't know about Unreal (gave up after oggling the scenery).
I only take a drink on two occasions - when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.
Brendan Behan
But the neat thing about Linux is that a company like Red Hat can only stay on top as long as they stay good.
this does not mean 'technically good' it could mean they get into the market first, gain market share and blast the competition out of the water. Then proceed to strangle/buyout new inovative start-ups and distribute so-so software that makes money for the shareholders.
if you doubt this, look at the car, oil, computer industries. the company who dominates the linux market do not have to be technically the best (unfortunatly).
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
... that, IMHO, MetroWork would soon see the light and offer broader support. Let's face it : we are only a couple million (compared to several hundred of million for the Win32 platform), so releasing a product for a fraction of a fraction of the software market make no sense. They'll get back to common sense or they'll never get my (and many other Linux user) business.
I may seem overly optimistic, but I really think the LSB will sort that out once it's done.
I don't like RedHat (the distro, not the business), but I respect the way they give back to OSS (rpm, Gnome, etc.). I will risk a little conspiracy theory : RedHat goes public; MetroWork give them some visibility; maybe they work together to rack a little more from Wall Street. In that case, it's OK about me and I wish them a really enriching IPO.
Beside that, I don't use an IDE and would probably favor Cygnus if I had to. And I don't fear a code/distro fork : variety is the spice of life and I would continue to choose the right tool for the right job.
I am a Linux user. I have also bought 4 linux distributions. Slackware, RedHat and SuSE (x2). I have installed these on four other people's machines and two at the office. All these machines were purchased with Windows already installed and therefore added 1 to the Windows installed base although they aren't running Windows. I think my ratio of licenses to actual users beats your ratio :)
With regard to the rest of your message, you really need to check out one of the modern linux desktop environments for your pointy clicky stuff.
Don't take the RedHat bashing too seriously as this is the Linux community and we are all stark raving mad. We do, however, work it out in the end.
Regards
Who on earth wants to use crappy IDE's anyway?
This is such a non-sensical thing to say. There are all sorts of programmers out there and many prefer an IDE. Show a little tolerance for your fellow programmer, eh?
You *could* try rpm -Uvh some-redhat-package.1386(who are we kidding?).rpm --nodeps.
That sometimes works, but it's no substitute for across-the-board support for Linux in general.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
And tell us, Master Linuxian, can you spell out these instabilities? Or what your high-octane needs are?
Or is this just another distro poseur who realized Slack or Debian was out of his league?
My guess?
JADP who screwed up his Red Hat box beyond all comprehension, freaked, and decided to buy something in shrinkwrap, but not before lurking around enough other distro poseurs to figure out which one would let him keep a little cred but still get his hand held.
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
I'm another that agrees, and IMO as well I think everyone is afraid of RedHat becoming another MS, where people use the product and vendors support the product only because its MS, and not because of the technical merits of the product.
My favourite distribution has passed away soundly ...
It is about time to try other distributions. I used Slackware 3.0 the first time I installed linux. I guess I will try Debian this time but I addict to rpm (I make rpm even I compile a program myself). I hope deb is as versatile as rpm.
How to install Linux from scratch without using any distribution? What are the procedures?
(suppose I have a blank harddisk)
You can grab the threaded libs for X and just tar zxvf them and go from there, I run slackware 3.6 and after I dumped those libs in x11amp (winamp?) runs just fine. (although mpg123 runs better =D )
I recently needed a program that I could only find distributed in RPM format. After 3 years of using Slackware with only tar.gz packages, I finally had to install RPM to get one program working. I also had to link a required library to its preferred location. RPM and the program are working fine. I also am using glibc as my primary C library. My "Slackware" system seems to be gradually becoming "Red Hattified". But I haven't been forced to change distributions yet.
> Oh super. So we'll end up with a symlink-riddled filesystem like latter versions of Solaris.
.deb, .tgz, .c, whatever...) or configured for only one GNU/ Linux distribution, then that's their decision, and if you don't like it then take it up with them instead of griping about the builders of the distributions.
In what way would Red Hat be responsible for this? I still don't get it... What exactly are Red Hat doing that's so wrong, except being very popular and having a nifty (imho) package management tool (it certainly took away a lot of my headaches)?
If companies want to supply their products in only one distribution format (.rpm,
From debian-devel:
"1. Clueless users are bad
2. Clueless users are bad for Debian
therefore,
3. Clueless users should be ignored"
We do not have to simply follow the mainstream. We can fight it the same way we fought before we got mainstream.
Someone wants to port a non-free app to Linux? "No thanks, I'll write a free clone myself and use it even if it's worse than the original one". It's the zealots who made Linux possible, and it will be the zealots that will avoid its fall.
When I was using Win95, I was programming in Delphi, so I sort of liked the sophisticated IDE and integrated debugging, but I figured for a worthy cause like Linux I could learn to live without. But the other day I decided to try CodeForge for Linux and it's really great. It uses the built in diff tools and RCS, allows you to set all the GCC and G++ options in a dialog box. Error messages and output windows are well designed and the code editor has this cool feature where you can "collapse" and "expand" function blocks, classes, etc. In a few months, Borland is coming out with a version of JBuilder for Linux. Soon there will be no shortage of IDE's to choose from. So who cares if ONE vendor ties a product to Red Hat? There will be lots of other offerings, both GPL'd and commercial.
"The only advantage I've ever seen from an 'IDE' is that there's a button in the editor to compile. And Emacs does that. So.. ?"
This is probably the most stupid thing I have heared for quite a while. Seems like you don't have the faintest idea what a *good* IDE can do to your productivity...
After being used to VC++ and Delphi, I simply refuse to work with emacs anymore. It is just stone age technology. But maybe hobby programmers or authors of 1000-lines-code don't care about that...
Debian is better.
Who needs their distro, not me. I say /.'es lets quit useing RH and go with the other Distro's. They are as good and they install as easy or easier. I just blew away my red hat, installing debian right now!!! lets make a point it is us who runs linux not big business!!!!
30000 slashdot readers lets get the word out.
Screw RH.
:)
Regarding
ar x package.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
The files other than data.tar.gz are similar in function to the install.sh that slackware
RPM is harder to get into, as standard unix tools won't get into it, afaik (though perhaps cpio can do it), but there are programs out there that can can get them open, like rpm2cpio and alien.
Besides, you don't have to limit yourself by using package managers.. Lots of people on slackware go outside the packaging system and put stuff in
By the way, (and I'll admit tagging this on here so that my post will get read as well), The president of Metro Werks replied to the original article with a clarification of their position on RH linux, which is that "Metrowerks validated and QAed the first version of CodeWarrior for Linux GNU Edition against the RedHat distro. Metrowerks is also currently validating against other distros...", mentioning SUSE and Caldera as in process.
So while RH Linux is the only distro which they are supporting so far, the ultimately goal is to support all of the major distributions. So give MW credit and maybe even a pat on the back for taking the time to make sure their product works on each and every platform, one step at a time.
Bet they wish they'd made it clear that that's what they were doing earlier, however. :-)
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
You can do that but it just takes a little more work, I agree though double clicking on a word and hitting F1 is quick, but then again knowing MS sometimes its uneventful, there are many times I find their documentation to be incomplete and hard to understand, its like you have to experiment to find out, especially with some errors a function should return.
1. Anyone who bothered to read the answers to the article in Linux Today would know that Red Hat did not sign an exclusive contract with MetroWerks.
2. Corel, as well as MetroWerks have the right to support whatever distro they prefer, even creating their own. I don't see any reason why they should be forced to support each and every distro.
I think the article is heavily biased and it hurts not only Red Hat but the entire Linux community because it will put off any other software vendor that considers porting to Linux.
My Linux is Red Hat precisely because of everything they return to the whole community (well, and because they are the easiest to maintain). And it would be absurd to begin to dislike them only because a software company likes them as well. Please, let's try to be more mature about these things.
What about having built-in support for all the distributions? If it's a small issue, it shouldn't be that dificult. If it's a big issue, why don't they show a little respect to their target audience; open-source it!
I only take a drink on two occasions - when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.
Brendan Behan
Six weeks ago, Metrowerks launched CodeWarrior for RedHat Linux, GNU Edition. We do in fact have a marketing agreement with Red Hat, however, Metrowerks is not restricted in any way to supporting only a Red Hat distribution. CodeWarrior has been validated on other distributions and we have not knowingly added any restrictions that limits it on any other Linux distributions. How can you be assured this is in fact the case. I think our track record in other markets may be of interest in this regards.
Metrowerks supports many operating systems for desktop and embedded computing including Windows, Mac, Palm, PlayStation, Nintendo, QNX, etc. Our OS partners want us to be the best tools company there is, and they do not want us competing against them. So we go to great lengths to make sure all of our partners are comfortable with this. This does not mean we are restricted in any way and in fact, we have many situations where we support competing operating systems. For instance, we support Mac and Windows who compete every day in the market, and we also support all of the games console vendors. Our operating systems partners understand we need to support a lot of target OSes to make our business model work. They accept this as we do not compete with them directly.
As a result, in the Linux world we need to have solid agreements with the companies behind the major distributions in order for it to be clear to customers that we do the tools and the distribution company does the OS support. We started with RedHat because they are the biggest and at no time did RedHat ever ask for an exclusive or exclusionary arrangement. In fact, RedHat's senior management has gone out of their way to make sure we knew they had no problem with us supporting other Linux distributions.
So the long and the short of it is that we have a business plan which is very clear, we need to support a lot of OSes for us to be successful. We have spent over $35 million dollars in R&D over the past five years mastering the technology issues which make this possible. We are big supporters of the open source community and in no way do we believe that our business strategy conflicts with it. We will support other distributions for Linux but it takes time to put all the product QA and agreements in place.
I hope this eases all concerns. If anyone has any further comments, or concerns please feel free to write directly to me at anytime.
I will attempt to contact the author and clarify this misunderstanding.
Ron Liechty, MWRon@metrowerks.com
Ombudsman for Metrowerks Corporation
-- METROWERKS Ron Liechty "Software at Work" MWRon@metrowerks.com
You're exactly right.
I believe that there are some fundamental conflicts of interest between corporations and open source. Yes, corporations can participate and be members of the community, but the danger is that they can become defined as the community, especially when commercial arrangements with other corporations are defining the growth of Linux, and some other open source endeavours (Apache comes to mind).
This depends very much on the manner in which Linux is marketed. If the marketing is primarily word of mouth and acquistion is via internet downloads and ordering basic distros on CD at low cost, then corporations can't dominate that. They can compete with smaller money-making distros and non-profit distros but can't dominate in that medium because the means of advertising and distribution give them no great advantage.
But when marketing is through commercial ads and acquisition is via sales in major retail chains and bulk orders at the corporate level, with support contracts, then it is a different matter.
This is now occurring because demand for both services and applications has accelerated and it appears that Linux will supplant MS at all levels, including the desktop, within just a few years.
The only solution is for the smaller distros and the non-profit ones to pool their resources and advertise and promote Linux in a more democratic way. To promote Linux for what it is - open source. And to affirm that the roots of Linux as something "homegrown" cannot be allowed to dry up by making it into some hybrid which grows in artificial soil. What makes Linux different and really more appealing in the long run to the vast majority of potential users - home users, smaller businesses which can't affort service contracts, schools, etc., is that it is free and responsibe to the neeeds of its users. True, in the past these users have mostly been developers and internet pioneers, but that is changing.
Again, the goals and methods of a corporation like Redhat are fundamentally incompatible with what Linux is and should be. Enough about what RedHat has done for the community. Certainly Redhat has the right to market Linux, but not to define it, unless others surrender that right to RedHat and possibly other large vendors that make deals with billion dollar corporations behind closed doors.
Regardless of GPL, RedHat can define what Linux is with the sheer power of advertising and contracts with distributors, retailers and large users. For example, imagine a contract with the U.S. Government to use RedHat Linux exclusively in all Federal agencies. Far fetched? Not at all. RedHat will supply support and much more - training and custom application development to smooth the transition between a Microsoft based implementation and a Linux based on among millions of users in the Federal government. And so on.
What does the GLP and the fact that Linux is not RedHat mean in that scenario? Nothing whatsoever.
It is a commercial contract between on large entity and another. A large entity like the Federal government cannot make a contract with the
"community". What does that mean?
It might not be a bad idea for Debian, Slackware, GNU, and anyone else with an interest in open source to do a little advertising and to promote Linux in a number of ways. At least there does seem to be some healthy competition in major retail chains among a number of Linux distros. Also, to proceed with the formation of umbrella organizations with the sole purpose of promoting Linux, not a particular distro of Linux or a particular service contractor.
It may well be that for certain kinds of distribution and service contracts with large commercial organizations or agencies a corporation like RedHat may be the only solution. But that is only a small part of what Linux is and can be. Linux should forever be for the little guy, students, home users, small businesses. It can easily become something else if this market is under-represented and doesn't claim its rights.
Did anyone consider that Metroweks decision is based soley on Marketshare?
Companies that large must make carefull decisions about what they can handle as far as support.
I can't say that I agree with there choice but I don't think RH is to blaim for their choice...
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
Since when does ANYONE /DSERVE/ to be dominant?
It would. I would like to purchase code warrior. but run redhat i do now (I prefer stampede :-). And I'll be damned if i'm gonna buy something only to find out it doesn't fscking work!!!
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
I is free to download and use. Check out ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse. Their only restriction is that you can't redistribute YaST FOR A PROFIT without permission.
Ben
uh-huh. whatever. not from my experience. RedShit's Disk Druid killed my partition table *twice*. I've tried 5.0 (an alpha quality distro), 5.1, 5.2 and (briefly) 6.0. They all have been extremely misconfigured. OK, 6.0 is a bit better at it but I don't give a fuck -- I found two distributions that work: SuSE, I run it on my workstation, and Debian, I run it on my server.
piss off
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
First of all, who needs CodeWarrior when every
Linux distro comes with compilers, debuggers, and
most every other development tool needed? I have a feeling an DE like CodeWarrior will end up bringing more pain than usefullness to developers who were doing just fine with the 'old-skewl' tools.
Second, don't u think RedHat is doing a disservice
to the Linux community by increasingly separating
itself from the project as a whole? Leading people to believe that RedHat is the maker of Linux only hurts us. Its caused me to hate using RedHat because of the incompatibility issues that come up in development.
Any thoughts on this?
I don't really like redhat linux. I don't like the direction they are taking linux. They are doing what linux wasn't supposed to be commercial. RPM's suck, real men use the source code and compile and install there own. And there new RHCE, redhat certified engineer HA!, sorry folks but that really goes against what linux is in my book. I will never use redhat again, they are getting to much corporate investment and there recent go for IPO really spells bad news... Redhat is become the microsoft of linux....
Nobody gave Linux a second, third or fourth thought.
5 years ago, many people, including me, were expecting Linux to take off. That was before windows 95 came out rememeber, and Linux actually proved that a Dx4/100 didn't have to suck. Many people were expecting Linux to take off, and it did, at least in acedemia, like wildfire.
You can't have it both ways.
The Hell we can't. Just because Red Hat has marketing clout doesn't mean that it cannot be accepted by corporate culture and still be just as useful as it is now for real work. It can remain a 'hobbyist's toy' and still compete with Windows. It's a fallacy that in order for something to be used by the rest of the world, it's got to somehow suck. This is faulty reasoning, and there is no reason to suggest that this is true.
I take it you're not familiar with the ever-lovable gnulix guy .
My character has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with parody.
Also, I prefer the term, ``Linux'', myself. :p
Instead of blind hatred towards the gnulix guy , maybe you should visit my web pages -- you might find there is a lot to love about the ever-lovable.
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
Slackware balkanizing Linux ?
....
Slackware hapens to use a STANDARD package manager that's all
Slackware uses tar and gzip , what's so bad about that ? every unix around can use tar , gzip is available on most too
rpm , deb ?
why limit yourself to one distribution by using them ?
granted that Slackware's uninstall and upgrade isn't as easy as appget or whatever debian calls it
Slackware is standard , librarys in sensible historical places , portable package managment
if you can get source in tar.gz format then every UNIX flavor can download it and use it not just some linux people !
sorry I think you're wrong about slackware , and lets not have a my distribution is better than yours war
thanks
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
OK, I know this gets a "-1 troll", but hahaha. I knew it. Down comes mighty Linux. When are Linux nuts going to learn that money matters, and bullshit doesn't?
Better yet, follow the LSB standards for file locations and let the non-standard distros make symlinks. Isn't that what standards are for?
-----
kernel: lp0: using parport0 (polling).
kernel: lp0 off-line
kernel: lp0 out of paper
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Considering that Red Hat adheres to the FSSTND, the number of file location issues is probably very minimal, isn't it? If that's true, it's a weak argument/complaint.
Worst of all, you ignored the substance of my post, which is that this is how business works. There aren't going to be 39 customized versions of any commercial product because, quite simply, it's not worth it. It's especially not worth it when there is a clear leader like Red Hat to aim at.
The alternative is to pay exorbitant prices for something that can be customized to satisfy you...but then I suppose people would whine about that too.
I'm not saying Red Hat's perfect at all. I'm especially not fond of the price hike for 6.0. But too many people damn them like satanists when there is plenty of reason to dispute that (witness their firm support of the GPL, releasing their own code under it as well).
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
CodeWarrior for Linux is based on gcc, AFAIK. Metrowerks doesn't have a decent x86 compiler - BeOS/x86 switched over to gcc some time ago.
We ought to have many terrible universities then. No, I understood the poster completely. No need to evaluate me, I am the teacher in that university.
When is the Linux community get it's head out of its arse and agree on a standardization that will guarantee compatability amongst the different distirbutions? Is this the towering ego problem in that noone can agree? From my point of view, we damn well better start agreeing on *SOMETHING* pretty soon beyond the 'Agreeing that nobody agrees syndrom' we are currently caught in.
All this stupidity about my disrtribution is better than your distribution, blah blah blah ad nasuaem is just outright harmful to the whole community. Everyone agreeing on a common way to do things only makes sense. All your config files go here. You minimum version of libraries is this, your revision of gcc is this, and so on. Until the powers that be in the Linux community can agree on a standard, you will continue to see companies only supporting the distro with the most common demoninator which is currently Redhat. Don't bitch at Redhat about it. Instead become involved. Email the companies or individuals who release your favorite distribution and DEMAND they take their collective heads out of their butts and agree upon a standard that will do away with this problem once and for all. Simply crying foul to the vendors of your fav distro and or software package will not accomplish a damn thing.
I don't believe that Redhat is out to sabatoge Linux or to become some big monopoly like Microsoft. This company has lived in the shadow of a Monopoly since its inception, They understand the Linux community being vocal like it is will not condone any type of behavor like this. So in the end, I think the community as a collective whole should voice its concerns to ALL the distributions and absolutely demand these people agree on a common standard. Once this happens, I believe we will see announcements that simply say for LINUX. Besides,a common standard will level the playing field amongst the different distributions. And thats something I think will allow us all to sleep easier at night.
You have been assimilated.
I have the opposite situation so I'd imagine it evens out. Theoretically I own 5 copies of various Win98/NT. I use one. I theoretically own one copy of Linux, I use 4. I'd imagine that the more professional Linux usage counts would take these types of statistics into account and correct for it both ways.
Personally, I don't use IDE's, but I can understand that some people may want to use them. They aren't as big of an issue in Linux because most programs don't really need visual building tools.
,AFAIK, I think that RHIDE is a pretty good clone of that.
From my personal experience with IDE's though, MetroWorks is just terrible. Borland's old IDE from DOS was kind of neat, but
Okay, then I have no idea what you're talking about. Code Warrior probably will, as far as I could guess, work with any Linux distro. Some people are whining because Metrowerks is calling their product "Code Warrior for Red Hat Linux." They are whining if in fact the product will work with any distro.
Metrowerks is perfectly within their rights to certify their product for a single distro if they wish. To certify for many is non-trivial if there are significant differences between them. If there are no significant differences then the whiners need to shut up because the product will work fine for them. These people are crying like babies because it appeared Metrowerks wasn't going to release a "Code Warrior for [insert-almost-unheard-of-distro-name-here]".
I never said RedHat didn't follow the standards, nor did i even imply it.
I misread your post. I thought you were suggesting that Red Hat doesn't use the LSB when in fact you were suggesting that Metrowerks follow it. My apologies.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The compiler that came with R3 Intel was outdated. The current Metroworks toolchain for x86 has much improved codegen.
First from Metrowerks president himself:
"Metrowerks validated and QAed the first version of CodeWarrior for Linux
GNU Edition against the RedHat distro. Metrowerks is also currently
validating against other distros such as SuSe and Caldera as additional
supported distros. Nothing in any of our agreements with RedHat preclude us
from validating and distributing against other distros, rather this is a
question of resource allocation to get the validation and distribution tasks
into gear.
We'll remedy this in the near future.
Best regards,
-GregG"
A thoughtful and sensible reply.
I think there is validity to a couple of the arguments here. It IS good that Red Hat and MetroWerks have collaborated to bring a valuable programming IDE to a great platform (Linux). As long as this is a positive FIRST step, and not a collusive agreement that would ultimately cause harm to the Linux Community in general and individual vendors in particular.
I believe it is our responsibility to simply and politely let Vendors and Distributors know that we are a part of a community and that we will support ONLY entities that are also "open" and supportive of the larger Community in which they exist.
If we just do this and strengthen the constuctive dialog among ourselves and our organizations we will win through as a community, rather than being reduced to isolated "customers" which many of us have revolted against.
Peace,
mowa
I'm guessing that CodeWarrior was developed with the libraries and such that Red Hat provides. Most likely, this includes stuff like glibc2.1, gtk+, and whatever Open Source goodies included in Red Hat that other distributions may or may not have.
Instead of saying CodeWarrior *only* works with Red Hat Linux, it would be better off saying something like the following:
Requirements:
- Linux distribution with glibc2.1, etc. (recommended for use with Red Hat Linux 6.0)
Something like that. That way, you can check the specs of your own Linux distribution and see if you have the requirements for running CodeWarrior.
As a reseller, I would like you to note that
the best price I can get on an Official Redhat
Linux is $70 plus shipping. From their (Redhat's)
official distributor, the best I can get is $74.
How am I as a reseller, supposed to resell Redhat
Linux 6.0 at $79.99?
Despite Microsofts outragesous prices, I can
still make a better profit selling that and if
something doesn't work, I can just say "Look,
that's they way it is, until MS fixes it!",
but with Linux I have to defend and fix any
problems. The money I make off of support
is probably roughly equal.
Which would you sell?
I love Linux and can easily sell it in many
situations, but not if the "major" distributor
decides to raise prices every release (without
any added features, I might add), doesn't provide
support, and doesn't even allow me room to make
money.
Derry Bryson
You just wish your ID was as low as mine! I used to be proud to have such a low id, but not so much now. Slashdot most
Metrowerks has a very good x86 compiler; one that in some benchmarks toasts everything else in the x86 world. Because of their PPC support and alliance with IBM they have access to a lot of high level software optimization talent and patents that are not available to other competitors. Lest we forget, IBM *invented* optimizing compilers.
Posted by d106ene5:
RedHat would be silly to pour their marketing money into a product that can be easily associated with a competitor. Yes, it sucks, but thats the market.
Who on earth wants to use crappy IDE's anyway?
Anyone who knows what they are doing dismissed IDE's long ago.
This is what I've been trying to point out over and over....there are nothing but questions here. rpm-only? Who knows? Will it work with Debian? Who knows? Does this mean you can install it on other platforms and that metroworks will only *support* (ie...answer questions...fix bugs..etc., etc.) for RedHat? Again no one knows.
The one thing I do know though is that there are plenty of idiots willing to speculate and bash and generally work themselves into a froth when they have little to no *facts* on the reality of the situation.
And why are people bashing RedHat for anyway? Metroworks is the one making their product one-distro only...christ, like RedHat should say "gee...no, please don't place our company logo prominantly on your package. Think of SuSe's feelings! Let's have a group hug instead!"
... isn't the idea of an Exclusive agreement just speculation on the part of the author?
It's a hassle in my company (er, companies) to convince a non-technical manager to support *any* variety of Linux. The branding there by RedHat or whomever gives enough visibility to clear through some of the FUD.
Yes, CodeWarrior is probably easily usable on any other distribution given a couple of standards.
No, we don't know whether or not there is any sort of exclusive agreement.
Getting up in arms and threatening RedHat is, in my opinion, very premature at this point.
--
QDMerge -- generate documents automatically.
how to invest, a novice's guide
As for the feasibility of supporting 39 distributions: Consider whether you, going to the software store, would want to fish around through 39 boxes that all otherwise look the same, looking for the one that says "My Gonzo Distro" or whatever. Business realities are what they are. You can't make them go away by wishing real hard. It costs extra money to package those 39 different "versions" (if really needed). It costs more in support.
Choices have to be made. If there's a real market, they ought to be able to convince some vendor or other to make "My Gonzo Linux" versions of anything. If there's not -- they won't. It's business, not a religion, and not even politics.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
A warning to a fragile community...
I want to talk a little bit about how dangerous and destructive articles like this are.
I AM NOT A LINUX USER, although I have dallied with running Linux on my machine on more than one occasion. I am one of the many x86 Windows users who has at one time or another installed and then uninstalled a Linux distribution. Over the last few years, I've bought two copies of Slackware and two copies of RedHat which translates in the grand Linux headcount to "four users" when in fact I represent zero (I have a single license for Windows 95, thereby contributing 1/4th the number to the Windows headcount that I contribute to Linux's). I don't use Linux for a relatively simple reason: it doesn't work for me. When I think about what I do with my computr I'm systematic.
I read email using Eudora, an excellent email program with a good interface that's easy to use and handles my email volume and have seamlessly integrated PGP. I read netnews using Free Agent from Forte, likewise an excellent program with a good interface. I browse the web with Netscape and Internet Explorer, with Netscape configured with images, Java and Javascript turned off and IE with all of them on so that I can choose "how" to browse just by choosing the tool to browse with. I play games -- lately, "Gruntz" and various arcade game emulators. Lastly, I program, with Cafe or Visual Studio. I primarily program graphics using DirectX and OpenGL.
For these tasks, Linux has little to offer me. Moving to Linux would mean giving up having a good email client, giving up having a good newsreader, giving up all hope of a stable, up-to-date, fast web browser, giving up my favorite games (MAME is available for Linux, but it's generally slower than the DOS and win32 versions), giving up all hope of having a good, rich IDE. Graphics? Give it up entirely. 3d support is practically non-existant on Linux and where it exists it's for last-generation hardware (at best) and poorly supported and even more poorly integrated into the overall system (Mesa on 3dfx is an unacceptable substitute, though perhaps this will change in the long term with some support coming from Matrox for the G200 and Nvidia).
I don't want to have to spend days or weeks getting the system "the way I like it" or even into a usable state (fvwm95 on RH4 was a great example of this: lots of icons pointing to programs that weren't installed, the worst possible GUI interface concept) and I don't want to have to rebuild my kernel just to get sound.
So Linux doesn't work for me and can't be made to work for now. I don't want to use a hacked together tcl/tk based email program where I can manually add a button for PGP and I don't want to have to pretend that EMACS is an acceptable substitute for an IDE with an excellent help system (CW Linux may suffice here, the other Linux alternatives simply don't -- documentation and context-sensitive documentation searches is 50% of making efficient use of an IDE). I like good interfaces and consider ease of use to be the primary reason to use a computer instead of a paper and pen.
Nevertheless, I take great interest in alternative operating systems like Linux and in the Linux community in general and sat the above mainly to illustrate that I'm an outsider by necessity. If the above changes, I'll move. I'd love to run a faster, more stable OS.
The point of this message is to give a warning. When I read articles like the one entitled "Linux is not Red Hat" I detect a strain of paranoia that is very familiar to me as a former Amiga user and this concerns me. It reveals that the Linux community is very fragile and that, if one desired, disrupting the commnity would be very easy. Since there are companies that would be served by such disruptions, and these companies are currently being motivated to improve their own products (some of which I use) largely due to Linux, I have a legitimate point of concern.
The Linux community, from the outside, seems distrustful and self-loathing. When a Linux company succeeds and tries to distinguish themselves (as Red Hat is doing), the Linux community tends to have discussions reminiscent of revultionaries questioning the loyalty of their leaders to a cause. This is very, very dangerous.
Consider how easy it would be to use Slashdot's anonymous coward posting to "dead agent" Linux.
"dead agent" --> fictional messages distributed within the ranks to inspire fear, confusion or terror. typical ideas are things like dropping leaflets on troops that you have good intelligence on telling them that you just bombed their families in town such-and-such into a burning oblivion and include what looks like xeroxes of newspaper reports about the tragedy [from papers familiar to the troops in question] along with a marked-up casualties & fatalities list (also looking copied/xeroxed). In the modern day, Scientologists use "dead agenting" to attack critics by spreading stories about their critics social lives, etc.
I offer the following four fictional messages. Imagine if they were posted by employees or agents of companies that would benefit
THE FOLLOWING ARE TOTALLY FALSE!
First, start the havoc with something like:
>>
There's a much larger issue at stake with CW. A friend of mine who I will not name used to work on the backend for CW MacOS. He said that on numerous occasions he came across code that was obviously cut and pasted from GPL'd code from GNU (especially gcc and no I am not talking about flex/bison generated parser stuff [which they don't use, btw] or other exempt stuff) or stuff that had obviously started that way and been modified. Whenever he brought it up the manager squashed it ("it's public domain") or said that it wasn't their problem (since it was in a different part of the product). He was warned pretty severely not to make an issue of it and told that if he wanted to talk licenses, legal would be happy to explain to him all sorts of things.
I shrugged off this knowledge because CW was strictly Mac&Windows and Open Source is mostly lipservice in that segment. I'm a linux user, I don't care. I know that sounds lazy, but that's how it is. But to have it happening on Linux and nobody willing or able to do anything about it is a horrifying thought. If we don't defend GPL, it becomes meaningless, but who wants to get involved in a suit with a big ISV (who can afford it?). They (and others) are seeking to drive a wedge between free software and open source.
>see bottom>
Add on another message as a reply:
>>
Not surprising AT ALL. I heard something similar to this from a buddy of mine who worked at RedHat before he got sick of the place and decided to move on. He said that GPL abuse was considered a non-issue at RedHat in any context involving improving their relations with commercial ISVs. RedHat was talking about putting together engineer-consultants whose job was going to be to go into commercial ISVs and do nothing but get those ISVs onto Linux and Red Hat Linux specifically (if possible). Management even had a term for it -- "fair game" -- that they'd use as a sort of code when referring to focusing ISVs on RHL instead of general Linux. Helping ISVs by throwing code at them was SOP and since the engineers were Linux geeks a lot of the code that went out was modified GPL'd code with the license removed that presumably ends up in products. I think they were working with Metrowerks, too...
Same buddy said that he'd had enough of working for a commercial company that claimed they were interested in "open source" and "free software." He couldn't take the hypocrites at every turn.
>see bottom>
That would be more than enough to start a firestorm, but smart players know how to win. Add another post along the lines of:
>>
No surprise. GPL is dead if commercial people feel they can ignore it. They'll use whatever resources they can for the least amoutn possible == free! How can we stop this? A boycott would be a start but isn't enough.
>see bottom>
The purpose of the above post would be to silence people who would panic -- they see someone else panicing and instead of downplaying the problem or trying to calm people down, they move to the attack. To solidify this (and add feelings of general hopelessness by brining up a well financed and well staffed enemy), you add a fourth message:
>>
Ho could you prove it, anyway? Suppose that Metrowerks memset (for example, I have no idea) was ripped off. How could you prove it?... someone should crawl through the C runtime source that MS provides with VC++, too...
>see bottom>
And that'd do it. Firestorm.
In this case, the target (Metrowerks) would be burned pretty thoroughly by nothing more than four contrived posts and the use of anti-RedHat paranoia. More than one company has a good reason to burn companies that are considering supporting Linux commercially. They might like to make a few examples as warnings to others.
You can bet that certain companies would call up Metrowerks (if the above posts & resulting firestorm were reality) and say, "Gee, sorry you're having so much trouble there -- isn't it strange that you never have those kind of PR problems on a platform like ours? They're such kooks, god, you have our sympathy working with them. They're probably just using it as an excuse to steal your software, anyway."
Think about who would gain from such practices. Think about the paranoia and conspiracy-minded aspects of the community they'd be using to get there.
Articles like this one (RH != Linux) make these kinds of destructive tactics MORE POSSIBLE.
I think what I'm trying to say here, folks, is that you need to relax a little. If Metrowerks thinks that they can gain by supporting other Linux platforms, they'll support more. If they think that you're just going to bitch and moan or propose totally absurd alternatives (like having volunteers port it "for free!" to other Linux versions), you frustrate and annoy the people who ARE trying to work with you, make others who are considering it rule you out, and fester a virulent strain of paranoia and hostility that could be used (as demonstrated above) to destabilize the community a whole.
In other words, LIGHTEN UP.
RSR
*QUOTED ARTICLES ABOVE AND ALL OF THEIR CONTENTS WERE TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. THEY WERE EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF DESTRUCTIVE PROPAGANDA THAT ***COULD*** BE WRITTEN. (I feel obligated to say this again or people will read the above and not read the context and just freak...)
x with gcc, gdb, and an editor of your choice is only a development environment, it is nowhere near and Integrated Develoment Environment, or do you just not know what an IDE is?
BSD sucks rocks. but then we all knew that.
Lately Carmack has been helping out a lot on the G200 GLX project, he has also donated $10,000 to Mesa, both of which are open-source. Where is the problem?
Analogy: Linux is to Free Software Distributions, what the first pancake is to batch of pancakes. The first one almost never comes out a perfect as the rest of the batch. It is written in a software engineering tome, "You make one to throw it away." The relevance of this comment to the subject is that in the long term, RedHat and all the other distrobutions are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The Free Software community is just getting started. You aint seen nothing yet. "Watch out McDonald's!" cheers, gbs
Posted by Dr Evil:
:)
"lovable" wouldn't be the way I would put it...
-Dr Evil (preferring lignux more , pronounced lig-nuts)
You are an inspirition to us all and a true linux comrade (may I use that term)
As someone who runs SuSE, to see these comment by a Red hat user really makes my day. You are one of the community we all should be proud of. My main concern is that all ISV's should market their products as "ABC for Linux" LSB. No distributor should be allowed to monopolize the Linux market. Compaq themselves, who too have some marketing agreement with red Hat, refer to the "Red Hat Linux Operating System".
I fear that corporate IT will choose only to support/buy Red Hat Linux and this will be bad for the entire Linux community. Red hat is not Linux - If they go under, or are bought out, the distinction between Red hat the distributor and Linux has to be clear. We could all wake up tomorrow and the world could be running on Caldera, SuSE, PHT, whatever - What do the likes of Dell, Compaq and Metrowerks do then.
Just stick with "We support Linux LSB" and we will take care of the rest.
United we stand, divided we fall.
Alan
In typical style, everyone has jumped the gun prematurely. After reading the article, I can see the author's fears, but I'm not sure how founded they are. After all, all we have right now is a deal between two companies and the words "RedHat Linux" in the System Requirements.
The author calls for everyone to support the LSB and boycott anyone who doesn't. Well, my follow-up to that is "Show me the LSB." Last I heard, the thing wasn't even FINISHED yet. How are we supposed to support something that is so anamorphous?
According to their official statements, RedHat is totally committed to the LSB, they just aren't crowing about it. They have said that they're going to wait until it's finished before they start making noise about it.
I do agree that it's presents a troubling future. I for one would cry if Linux ever became balkenized. However, unlike the author, I don't see that as happening very easily. It would take a major change in the attitude of the community to allow anything like that to happen. We'd all have to return to being lazy, grain-fed consumers.
The differences between Linux distributions is actually very minor. From experience, I can say that for the most part, they work pretty interchangeably. I've used Slackware and RedHat on my boxes and I've helped install SuSE on other machines. RedHat, Caldera, SuSE and others all use RPM as their packaging format. The major differences besides that are in the location of files and libraries. But any self-respecting programer DOESN'T hard-code library paths except under EXTREME circumstances. That and as long as you keep up on the versions of libraries, most programs can exist happily.
Even though I use RedHat and could probably pretty easily install CodeWarrior, that doesn't mean I'm not going to help anyone who wants to install it on SuSE, Debian, or whichever. I imagine the majority of Linux users have the same attitude.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Anyway, it could be done with a better desktop/windows environment, for example a window can own another window and comunicate back and forth, then it could trap hot keys and respond aproriately to it. It would be cool to have a project manager style program that uses other programs to edit source, edit dialogs, compile or assemble code. So that people can choose which tools they want to use for a particular task.
I've been on /. a while, and this is the first post I've ever felt a need to move above '0' to read. AC's (in general, of course), please, get some sort of random clue.
./configure;make;make install doesn't generally get you real far without source to compile. (Yes, i know, you could do all of those things to discover libs and set up an .rc paths)
1) No one said anything about open sourcing Code Warrior.
2) For everyone complaining about the 'instability' of 'red hat' in whatever way you mean it.. Post details. I think you're either lying, or you don't have a clue as to what you're doing.
3) They did say 'support' RH Linux. That probably does mean call in and get help, not 'it won't run on any other distro.' Hell, download redhat, get a cd burner, and make your own distro. Whammo, it instantly works on another, non-supported platform. And you're in control! Feel better?
Red Hat is not evil. They are not microsoft. Saying things like that only instantly makes you glow with the 'I'm a clueless contrarian' aura.
Have a nice life,
--
blue - Only runs the bluenix distro.
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Go back to your little hole and go find a corner to sit in until you've smartened up a little.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
I think you're missing the point. This is something new, in my experience of Linux. It is not, however, new to Microsoft's way of doing business.
I've seen quite a few commercial apps for Linux, but never before one advertised to work on a particular distro of Linux only. Sure, it can probably be made to work on others, but it is the advertising of this "quality assurance for RedHat" and that it is only supported, so far, for RedHat that is troubling. In other words, if you aren't using RedHat we can't support you. Why the change?
Because this is something new, it is almost impossible to believe that RedHat did not have some hand in an exclusive deal behind closed doors. Even if this was Metro's idea, not RH's, RedHat obviously didn't try to change the wording or the contract for the good of Linux. Instead, RedHat pretends that it is just the fortunate beneficiary of having the largest distro. Hmmm....
This comes across as very dishonest, considering that RedHat could have easily explained how the situation would be interpreted in the "community".
Further, I do not feel this incident is an isolated trend. Look at how RedHat knowingly over-hyped Gnome, an act that *really* hurt Linux, becase a newbie trying to use Linux because it had Gnome discovered very quickly how unstable the 1.0
release was. So did the reviewers who tried to install RedHat with Gnome - all unsuccessfully. A few just gave up, and a few other were able to get it installed only with a *lot* of help from RedHat that the average paying customer can't get. RedHat's support for customers who have paid for that support consists of unanswered email, unless those customers are big corporations or reviewers for big magazines.
O.K., RedHat assigns one of its staff as a Kde liason, and then includes Kde in its latest distro as an optional, but not the standard, desktop. Guess what. They make a broken version of Kde, which is difficult to do considering that Kde 1.1.1 is one of the most stable and easy to install set of packages ever on almost any other distro. This is no coincidence. Dishonesty, intentional breakage of competitor's products, etc., etc., etc.
RedHat promotes certification programs in "RedHat Linux", not certification in Linux. Please, no more about what RedHat has done for the community. Microsoft also claims to have done a lot for its community of users, most of whom were, to begin with, small businesses and home users just like Linux.
Is RedHat evil? Yes, I think so. I think RedHat started with the intention of being right where they are today, and the situation reminds me of Microsoft in too many ways. I'm not even going into details about how RedHat intentionally includes broken libs so that Mozilla, for example, doesn't work with distros that don't include those broken libs which Mozilla was compiled against in its binary releases.
Finally, Linux doesn't need RedHat to continue to grow at a rapid pace. Linux did not get where it is today because of RedHat; rather, RedHat got where it is today because Linux is free. There are all kinds of ways to promote, advertise and distribute Linux to a large potential user base of
home users, students, small businesses, schools and government agencies without this kind of crap. None of this is even necessary to get corporate support, but to get a certain kind of corporate support it is. We don't need or want that kind of corporate support, thank you.
Companies wanting to do business with "Linux" need to learn that they don't have to do business in the same way they did business with Microsoft. Sad that they are coming to expect it.
It seems a bit odd that they claim to 'support' only Red Hat. Is this statement just limited to support vis-a-vis tech support? How easy to call up and say "Yep, it's a Red Hat kernel" and still run whatever distro you like.
--
Neurowiz
ok, this post gets -1 because it's blatent Flamebait, but the post it replies to get 1 point, yet it's the same crap. "redhat sucks, debian and suse rule." is it just me or are the moderators all idiots?
Few of us care about having an operating system called ``Linux'' on the desktop. What we want is a good, free, open operating system, and Linux happens to be one of those. We're tired of being restricted by licenses and lack of source. What do we care if the OS on our desktop is called ``Linux'' if it turned into Windows?
The only ironic thing in all these discussions is that Red Hat is the only major commercial distribution with a firm commitment to free/open source software. SuSE writes a ton of proprietary crap for their distrib, and Caldera is even worse. I haven't used Pacific HiTech, but they at the very least package proprietary software with it. I'm much more scared of loosing Linux as we know it if Red Hat and Debian loose than if either wins.
In terms of good citizenship, it's either Red Hat or Debian. A free-for-all with the rest would result in increasing proprietization, as each distrib tried to gain an edge on the rest.
- pmitros
MSPerl is *not* open source. Its also *not* built on an open source platform.
Why all the redhat bashing? Redhat has done many good things for Linux.
They finaced Gnome(I prefer Gnome to KDE).
They give away Redhat for free and they make sure that all there software on the distro is GPL and free. When the go public they said that want to use the money to contunie Linux develop, which means a better Linux for YOU, for free.
Until Redhat starts making shitty software, and locking down APIs we should be glad that they are here to make a good distro for us to use. Besides if you don't like use Mandrake, or something.
I understand that Red Hat might try to diverge from the common denominator of Linux distributions at some point in order to try to capture the market, but it's unlikely that they'll succeed, since they don't own or control a significant part of the code. They can't prevent anyone from hacking e.g. CodeWarrior for RH to work on any Linux distribution and distribute the patches, and they won't find much support among OSS development teams either (e.g. the KDE folks won't suddenly write their stuff to work for RH Linux if that makes it difficult to use KDE on other distributions).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
It doesn't really matter, KDevelop is already VERY good and useable and right now is the only IDE for Qt/KDE development. Gnome also has an IDE in development for it's toolkit GTK so i don't really see the problem. This brings in to question however what toolkit CodeWarrior will use for the port AND what toolkits they will support in the IDE (such as gtk/qt/motif). Will i be able to write a KDE app or a gnome app or both ?
cos redhat is not forcing anyone or anything to adhere. Theyre trying to release all their software under the GPL. they include GPLised standard installers such as RPM, and are trying to get the LSB together. catch micro$hit releasing even 1 line of source.
I won't presume to judge the merits of the two. But superior products don't always win. Ask Sony about Beta. Look at Microsoft. If rpm becomes standard, it may very well have nothing to do with its quality compared to other alternatives.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The same thing exists with Red Hat. The only difference is that if they mess up, they have a community to awnser to. We have to make them beg for our money.
--
Until 2 years ago I was a pretty die-hard CodeWarrior user on the Mac (since CW 5! have the CDs sitting right next to me). The support staff at Metrowerks were always helpful, always reading the Mac programming newsgroups (comp.sys.mac.programming.* if I remember correctly. haven't looked at newsgroups in a LONG time).
Metrowerks, like RedHat, is a company with a strong drive to provide the best support for their customers as possible. A happy customer is usually a repeat customer.
I think once they get the first version out and they are comfortable with it they'll probably make sure it works with other -major- flavors of Linux. For now they are starting with one major distribution. I would be surprised if future version are not more linux-compatible rather than just RedHat-compatible.
Stew
Now who is scoffing at who????
I didn't say I didn't believe in it... I didn't say your incompetent if you use an IDE... I said nothing of the sort... Instead I simply said that an IDE isn't really necesary.
As for a gui builder, that doesn't require an IDE, visual developement doesn't really require an IDE, these things do not have to be done from one giant consuming program, why have an IDE with source editors, if you can have an GUI with editors like notepad or gnotepad or some program that is specificly made for just editing source code? Why have a log window in an IDE when you can have a terminal open, displaying errors when it compiles your code? Why have a document viewer in an IDE (InfoViewer in VC++) when you can have a browser (which InfoViewer essentially is)... Why have a tree displaying the files in the project in an IDE when you can have an file program like explorer/midnight commander... Why have an dialog/window editor in an IDE, when you can have a choice of them to use.
I'm not arguing whether Delphi has the best tools in their IDE, I'm arguing that the tools do not and should not be stuck in an IDE, they should be choosable.
The reality of this is that I'm arguing for an IDE that is not integrated, but uses other programs to let users do things like edit source files... So a user can use their favorite editor, or favorite browser, or favorite file view program, or favorite compiler. I'm talking about a system that is closer to a turing system, that is based on a form of Darwinism, in that the best program for the job survives, I'm arguing for small programs that use other programs as organs.
Well done; thank you for your level-headed look at OSS Community (and _especially_ Linuxite) Mass-Hysteria. Straight FUD is not the only weapon _certain companies_ will be using against the OSS movement. And people certainly need to lighten up and believe that it all _will_ work out in the end - such flaming reactions are doing far, far more damage than CW working on RedHat first(and don't worry - other distros _will_ be supported once they have the userbase). Just see how far this whole Freenix/OSS thing has come in the past few years - people are either becoming blind bigots or losing faith in their own strength.
code crusader's pretty nice..
www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/jcc/
Choice of masters is not freedom.
There's more to it than just packaging, but even if there wasn't someone would whine about that instead. They just can't be happy. "YoYo app for Red Hat gets sold in stores, but not for Gonzo Linux! No Fair!" Don't say it wouldn't happen, because you know better.
But there *is* more to it than that, as others have said: there's all the quality assurance stuff that goes into making sure that 39 different versions all work the same.
You can't say that the differences are minor; if they are then there's no need for 39 different versions of a commercial app. If the differences really are significant, then quality assurance has to be done, or the users of Gonzo Linux will whine about how "Red Hat's version of YoYo works better than ours! Waaah!!"
Lastly, I suggested that other distros could actually use symlinks if necessary. And Red Hat *does* support the FSSTND and they are actively supporting LSB. So there's a lot of needless crying going on about this, AFAIC.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I apologize if this has been said before ... @#$% MSIE 3 can't handle rendering the discussion quite right, and its poorly implemented smooth-scrolling is bloody slow on my p133...yuck....
... well, you might hack it into place with Slack or Debian, but good luck to you.
/. depends on a Beer- (not Speech-) licensed SQL database. It'll take some work before the Free community can deliver truly excellent server side applications.
:).
No one ever guaranteed that Linux was proof against commercial applications, Anything Free, and we can port it. Doesn't matter if the original developer only has eyes for one distro, if it's free the work can be done.
But MetroWerks CodeWarriorisn't Free. It's commercial, and if all they give out is an RPM that makes all kinds of assumptions about how your system is set up
On the other hand, CodeWarrior has nothing in the compiler end (everyone knows that). Just that a lot of people like their IDE.
Well, I have a new concept for Linux:
We don't need to be scared of any luser inferface
It's really an idea that's been mentioned before: UI's a fundamentally not a cutting edge thing. They require careful planning and execution, but no massive technology breakthroughs. Hence Gtk+ and Qt, massively superior in flexibility and power to M$'s MFC. In fact the last really good UI I saw on Windoze was DevStudio, which is all custom widgets anyhow.
The point is, we don't need their frikkin' IDE. We can write our own better ones. And our own better spreadsheets, word processors, desktops, and everything else. Miguel and the crew wrote all of GNOME in a year. These things can be developed fast, and with spread out
The only applications that IMHO can deliver real value to Linux are big-iron server-side things that require heavy-duty technology and years of experience (and millions of $$ of screw-ups and mistakes) to get right. Oracle. Lotus Notes.
We can compete in some of these areas, but I'm often less than impressed with Apache or the ftpd's in terms of efficiency and robustness. Take a positive example, CODA, the long awaited high-tech replacement for NFS. It's good. Very good. But it's taken a lot of development, significant resources of CMU, and it's still not quite done. Even our beloved
But even so, these are not the kinds of applications that will Balkanize the distros. They depend on more fundamental, standard services of the OS. They've run on other Unices and the effort to making them cross-Linux is miniscule next to the effort of bringing them in from Solaris or HP-UX or AIX (or worse
In conclusion, CodeWarrior sucks. Go support you favorite GPL'd IDE today!
Again, a pragmatic comment on the issue. i don't think it takes Red Hat to be family's favorite. And i don't either think that free software should be freed from hackers' hands. It's the hackers that made a free OS possible. If Red Hat puts a burden on the free OS we have, slash 'em away!
--exa--
While some of the older X86 releases of CodeWarrior did have some problems, code generated by the latest release Flies! They really made a lot of drastic improvements. Take a look here for benchmark info.
PC Week also has some benchmark info...
Or, try it yourself - get the demo version and some benchmarks and give it a shot...
This RedHat backlash has me bemused...and amused.
I became involved with Linux when I was in the Navy in San Diego in 1994. At that point, Slackware was the dominant distribution, a very narrow range of hardware was supported and a 486 was as powerful a processor as you might ever need.
At that time, OS/2 was the big threat to Microsoft because it was a "better Windows than Windows." Nobody gave Linux a second, third or fourth thought. And there were no rabid Linux enthusiasts, trying to find ways to promote that operating system as a replacement for Microsoft's.
Five years is a long time in the computer world. It's like dog years, I suppose. In that time, fantastic things have happened with Linux, developments that can certainly be attributed to the advocacy of legions of vocal Linux supporters.
Linux has been something like a stepchild that craves attention. It can do so many things very well, and other things competently. We all know the strengths and weaknesses of the operating system. But Windows has been the family favorite and that's tough to swallow.
But lately, something has changed. Linux is becoming more accepted. And that's what we want, right? Well? Isn't that what we want?
Finally, a Linux distribution has gained enough respect and understanding to be the subject of an IPO. The operating system gets more positive media attention than any other. And most of that attention is being paid to the one distribution whose publishers do the most to market: RedHat.
So all of a sudden, RedHat is the Microsoft of Linux. Just because they've achieved significant media attention. Well, so what?
The problem that I see here is one of expectations. You wanted Linux to become a mainstream operating system, but you wanted it to remain open and free. You wanted corporations to embrace Linux over Windows, but you wanted it to remain unencumbered by corporate marketing.
You wanted the same Linux that you've always had to remain the same, even though the short history of the computing industry shows that corporations will not accept software that does not have some sort of traditional means of support and distribution.
You can't have it both ways. Linux will remain a hobbyist's toy and a specialist's tool if it must continue with its established paradigm. But if you want Linux to compete with Windows, then somebody has to adopt the characteristics of Microsoft. The industry reacts poorly to wholesale change, so for Linux to triumph, its advocates must select the best aspects of Microsoft's methods and apply those.
All assuming, of course, that what you really want from Linux is a Microsoft killer.
Red Hat is _not_ the next Microsoft, the opposite is true. In my opinion Red Hat is trying hard to 'stay integrated with the community'. Note that Red Hat does _not_ write any software that is not under the GPL. Red Hat pays/funds Gnome, RPM, glibc, RAID, Adaptec driver, native PIII support in the kernel, lots of kernel features and maintainance done by Alan Cox or David Miller - and Red Hat is giving the source away under the GPL. (no they do not need to give source away - they could go the Caldera or SuSE way and make their distribution rely on commercial code) It would be 'easy' for Red Hat to 'abuse' it's pool of kernel hackers - just like other Linux-related companies do. Red Hat does not do this because Red Hat apparently well understands the Linux community and that it can prosper only if it's playing by the rules. Dont forget, the Microserfs are out there and are actively trying to 'divide and conquer' the Linux community - just by polarizing developers and turning the Linux community against itself.
Dont be over-paranoid, folks - Red Hat cannot and does not want to turn against the Linux community - if it does it knows it will go down. I think Red Hat is the only Linux vendor that knows this.
I was under impression that Carmack's work
is essentially open sourced (after a time delay).
The actual maps may be proprietary, but the
code is released after a while.
Could someone give a more precise picture on this.
buddy, quake is open-sourced.
how do you think they make mods?
and most open source shit sux ass. if Linux was the same way it is now, only closed-source, everyone would hate it. all linux guy like to look back at their "great" accomplishment and claim it the best thing since the transistor. Linux sux. BeOS and NT kick its ass.
I am not familiar with any cross-licensing agreement that they may have with IBM, but it has not produced a quality compiler in practice.
-jwb
Another thing along those lines. If you go to the following address, http://linuxtoday.com/talkback/19294.html, you will find an alleged reply by Greg Galanos, CTO of Metrowerks. He says they are currently validating against SuSe and Caldera as well and that it's mainly a support resource issue. One assumes or hopes support for other distrubutions would follow.
but everybody around here seems to think ms is preatty damn evil. how is what redhat is doing any different than many of the things ms has done?
Try xemacs. It's the hipper, non-monochrome, JWZ-version. Syntax highlighting with colours works great for me.
D
----
Give font-lock-mode a try. Emacs can do some amazing syntax highlighting in many different languages.
Since RedHat is almost totally open source, and Codewarrior is not, I think the blame for this exclusionary packaging lies squarely on MetroWorks. Their claims of not being able to support 39 distributions insipres absolutely no confidence in me. There is no way in hell I would pay for a product that is so poorly supported that its open source competitors look good in comparison.
As someone who started off with Slackware, went to Caldera and liked it, used RH52 and thought it was cool, and jumped ship to COL22, RH is a distro that works.
COL22 is aimed at beginners, but has so many misconfigurations only an intermediate sysadmin can get it going. It doesn't lay down a boot track, no libcrypt files which means you can't recompile php or run commercial software, the xserverrc file was messed up, and on and on and on. To make matters worse, COL has dug in it's heels and isn't doing much to address it.
I just installed RH6, it runs like a charm. It just works.
Hey, a commercial vendor wants to go with someone who sweats the details. RH doesn't antagonize its customers. Who wants to work with a screwup?
Most free-software developers are not against choice. Use MS Windows if you like, I care less. If you use proprietary standards -- for (lets say) file formats or inet protocols -- you are depriving my range of choices. It is not uncommon for me to download a file from the net that is in .doc format. My choice was to use Linux and emacs, but now you are forcing me to use Windows95 and Word. That is why we users are better off with open standards. I'm all for freedom, now try explain it to Microsoft or Corel! Presently, my freedom of choices affects yours, as much as your choices affect mine.
It seemed to me from the latest .plan file that it was metrowerks IDE that got him into linux.
Could be my scewed interpretation though.
5 seconds comtemplation will lead to the astounding idea that the only aspect of CodeWarrior likely to be "RedHat specific" is the libraries against which it is linked and the location of configuration files.
Not quite as scary, I suppose, but my only contact with the Weekly Weird News is laughing in the grocery store checkout line.
--
Infuriate left and right
Yesterday I was thinking the same thing, there is no point to advocate Linux anymore. We probably want to advocate for the GNU project though.GNU has managed to stay pure throughout the decades. I do not particularly care about what their naturally carved 'morality', but we can get along with these people just fine.
Can you right click a function or any word in emacs and have netscape search all your documentation for that keyword?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
And can you have it open up a tree based code browser, and browse the call stack of your code without running it?
There are lots of cool things IDE's do that you find very useful in large projects, or in projects that you're thrown into to try and maintain.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
p.s. I hate Slackware.
p.p.s. All those pesky questions Debian asks you are good for you. Maybe once you've figured out how your computer works, you'll be able to answer them.
p.p.p.s Nice comeback. Made Unca Insinkerator mist up a little.
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
Can I hear an "Amen, brother!!"? Netscape uses 32 meg of RAM on my box and is about as stable as a Windows installation lacking half its dlls. It and RealPlayer 5.0 for Linux are two of the most poorly written applications that have ever been created, in my opinion. And perhaps one of the worst offenders is StarOffice, which runs an entire office suite as one monolithic application and expects you to have the 100 meg or whatever it is of memory to run it. At least StarOffice is stable for the most part, though, even if it is sickeningly slow and bloated.
Deserve? It's not a question about "deserve", it's a question about who actually bother to market "their" distribution (RedHat), and who don't give a damn about media/market presence (apparently everybody else). The success of RedHat does not come at the cost of other distributions, because the proponents of those distros have had the same opportunity to make their "product" known to the public, but have effectively chosen not to.
Over the past few weeks I've been reading more and more about how RedHat is evil and RedHat is MS. Here's a hint folks: They're a company. They're around to make money. Their distro is still GPL and it's still compatible. I use them and have since 4.2. When they start putting their own kernel in so that it's no longer compatible I'll switch, but for now I'm very pleased with the product.
I definately understand this guy's fear. Although I really like redhat, I don't want to see it become so dominant that it squelches out the other distributions. If I were to purchase a piece of non-free software, I would place a high value on being able to run it on any distro i choose. Are you listening metroworks?
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
I don't know whose defintion of free you are trying to say YaST fits under, but if what you say is true, it sure as hell doesn't fit under debian's.
Linux is just a kernel.
Distributions are MORE than an OS.
We need to strictly support LSB and
specify and use the components of LSB and linux
that we'd like to call the OPERATING SYSTEM.
or... use FreeBSD.
paranoia will get you nowhere.
There are people out there who don't understand that under the hood, all linux distributions are pretty much the same thing. The only important difference is whether they are libc5 or libc6 based. Today Slackware is the only remaining libc5 based distribution with any real following, making even the libc issue moot for most users (until glibc2.1 becomes popular anyway). So if Metrowerks decides to market their stuff for Redhat, so what? Redhat is the dominant distribution and anyone using another distribution should already be familiar with getting rpm's for redhat to install on their system and the resulting apps to run. I would be VERY suprised if SuSE wouldn't run codewarrior for redhat out of the box. I do agree with what he said about the LSB though, that is a very imporant initiative. There have been some statements made by people at redhat that indicate a bad attitude. They seem to think that linux is their backyard and that other distributions are the enemy. Sorry guys but you're just a middleman, you don't create linux you just package it. Now the issue would be different if they were creating scores of applications for linux and selling them under the redhat name, they would have claim to them, but that isn't what they are doing as of yet. They would be smart to do that though, because then they would have the opportunity to make money off of linux users regardless of whether they bought the redhat distribution or not. There is nothing wrong with competing with other distributions, but don't let it become a blood feud, find a way to have at least some cooperation involved.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Instead of wasting our time whining about why didn't company X to this and that, why don't we do what we are supposed to do; make an IDE of our own (preferably better then any existing commercial solution)! This ofcourse would be open source, and that would be the end of the discussion.
Even if it could, it won't. According to the latest issue of Linux Journal, which had a feature on different distributions' stances on the LSB, Red Hat seems to be more in favor of complete compliance than most. Also, a Debian rep in the article said that Red Hat had been working with them since before LSB to ensure binary compatibility between the distributions. Also, I'm pretty sure that Red Hat has stated that it will be following Debian's lead standards-wise. Red Hat knows that so many of the people in the Linux community have their eyes on them that the company doesn't dare to do anything wrong. And with tools like rpm 2cpio and Alien, and with RPM being completely open and based on cpio, the packaging system is irrelevant. It looks like just a brain-damaged move on Metrowerk's part. And off the top of my head, I can think of five or six major distributions, and except for Slackware, they all seem like they work pretty well together. Makes me wonder if they were including Tom's RTBT and Trinux in their list of 39 distributions :).
Actually, Windows installers like to downgrade this and other system DLLs also as well as upgrade them. They also change the time-date stamps on the files so often you don't know what you have or why. Chalk it up to Microsoft letting the ISVs and their own app division put out the service packs for them. (And OS stability suffering for it.)
Linux has it's own form of library hell, as the Codewarrior support example seems to verify, but I'm sure that someone will figure out what 50 things to manually upgrade to get CW running on their slackware box.
I would imagine that installers that automatically prompt you to upgrade your libs are coming. There's no way to create a modern (ie, not Motif or monolithic) Linux app that can easily run on all distributions without it.
However, the only way to avoid a Windows-like DLL jumble in this scenario is a dependancy database that dead on accurate. This sounds like it means deb and not rpm, so maybe redhat should just get over it and adopt deb.
Anyway it shows that Linux has a way to go in certain places, if only because nobody really knows how to package a commercial application for it. Too many more Netscapes, Star Offices, and WordPerfects are definately bad news if you are interested in commercial adoption.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If they fit the LSB, then I could see them calling it CW for Linux, and then if that distro in the left feild is not compatible then its the distros fault not CW.
Erik categorically denied having made an exclusive relationship with MetroWerks. In fact, he said that Red Hat would not do such a thing. So MetroWerks is making CodeWarrior for Red Hat Linux. What's Red Hat supposed to do? Should they not help MetroWerks port their product to Linux? Should they somehow force MetroWerks to support other distributions? The only thing Red Hat has done in this is be successful. So any fault you have should be pointed at MetroWerks and not Red Hat.
If we look at the picture from the view of MetroWerks, it does cost money to support different distributions. It is not nearly as trivial as Arne believes with his "Yes you can--./configure; make; make install," response. You have to make installers for each distribution, you have to have multiple machines and/or reboot to rebuild for each distribution, you have to go through test and quality assurance each time the distribution changes, you have to train your support staff in the differences between distributions, you have to print different user documentation, just to name a few. Compiling the code is the least of the issues. All these issues cost money.
It all comes down to time and money. If other distributions have a large enough market share that MetroWerks can take advantage of, then MetroWerks should do the work and make the extra profit. If not, then they shouldn't. You can't reasonably expect MetroWerks to support Daryll's Sunday Night distribution (DSND) which has three users if you include my cat. The line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Let's look at the alternative. MetroWerks does support every distribution they can find. They put all the time and resources into doing it even though the cost of supporting little distributions like DSND is really high. Then they take the total cost and divide it by the total users. Everyone ends up paying a lot of money to support the three users of DSND. The cost of CodeWarrior doubles because of it. They lose sales or have a lot of unhappy users when the Linux version costs twice as much as the Windows version. Not a very good solution.
Luckily the Linux is similar enough, and the LSB will improve those similarities further, so that even DSND will probably run MetroWerks even though it isn't supported. It allows you to have the flexibility to run all these products even though your system is unique for one reason or another. For the vendor the LSB will make it even cheaper to test their product against many distributions. That's another example of the power of Linux.
So don't villify Red Hat or MetroWerks for their descision. If your distribution has the market share to support CodeWarrior then demonstrate that to MetroWerks and they would be foolish not to support it. In fact, another poster posted mail from the President of MetroWerks saying they were already in the process of testing against SUSE and Caldera and working on other distributions. So the process is working exactly as it should!
- |Daryll
* Proprietary package managers?
RPM may be associated with the Red Hat name, but it is GPLed, and there are conversion utilities to other free formats.
* Proprietary file formats?
Are you talking about XFS? Well, SGI has promised some sort of 'open source' license, and anyways at the moment the percentage of Linux systems running XFS is pretty close to zero.
* Proprietary applications?
Sure. There always have been, at least since 1995 or so.
* Proprietary libraries?
In many cases things are moving the opposite direction. In the area of X widget libraries GTK is better and more popular than ever, Qt has adopted a much less proprietary license, and Motif seems almost forgotten.
* Proprietary patents?
Software patents are a problem, no doubt. But is Red Hat part of the problem? I haven't heard ANY evidence of them (or Caldera or SuSe or TurboLinux) gunning for a competitor over patent violations.
On the specific issue of MetroWerks - Red Hat exclusivity, the only thing that I would consider "dirty pool" would be sending lawyers after third parties who post information about how to run Code Warrior under competing distributions. I doubt we'll se Red Hat engaging in such activity anytime soon - I don't know enough about MetroWerks to judge.
The main reason I went to Redhat is that almost every software package out there is made for Redhat, and Redhat compatable. I have said this a number of times.
I still wonder why Corel WP is using debain for there distro thing. This may be the straw that splits the GNU/Linux & Linux Penguin. Will Corel support hte .deb package format or will they also have rpms?
Will there is Redhat Linux & there is GNU/Linux.
Only 'flamers' flame!
On the other hand, one must be careful not to let this sort of directed paranoia cause unecessary hard feelings.
-- $SIGNATURE
Try installing from source. RH 6.0 uses a newer, not-so-binary-compatible glibc. :^( As far as RH using it's own "flavor" of KDE, well, so does SuSE, and, for that matter, the RH-based Mandrake distribution (and I'm sure others do as well.)
:^)
Hell, I remember just a year ago RPMs of KDE were a novelty.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Yes !
We will see this new Logo when we go to
a software shop !!!
That`s a joke...
You can run it on every distro which is glibc2.0/whatever based.
Who needs Metroworks ?
I prefer open source over closed binaries !!!
Closed binaries are BS !!!
This is only the beginning that proprietary
binaries use GNU/Linux as the base because it
is widly used.
I (personally) don`t like this.
The only way to keep Linux pure is to avoid the mainstream. Many old-time Linux geeks have been warning about this for a while, and I'm starting to see their wisdom.
So let's stop advocating Linux to the non-geeks who will never understand. Stop promoting Linux as a MS-killer. Let MS have the non-geeks, they're not like us. We don't need them, we don't want them. They'll just turn Linux into another Windows.
You say you are counted as 4 linux users because you bought 4 copies of linux. This is blatantly untrue. No counting effort I have ever heard of is so closely based on copies sold. This would be such a dumb idea, because not only will people buy different distros to try out such as you did (especially when they can be had for $2 at cheapbytes), but some people will buy one copy and install it many times, which is perfectly legal with linux. Trying to say the two will just hopefully cancel out nicely would be absolutely retarded.
If I have XXX distribution and need to install something that comes in .rpm format, why not just install RPM? I've even installed RPM on my FreeBSD box! The dependencies won't work but a simple '--nodeps' takes care of that. Also there is a utility called 'rpm2cpio' which converts rpms to cpio archives. I've never used it but it should make it possible to install RPM packages without RPM.
Linux baby, why are you transforming into Linux 2000 ?
Lets make the distinction clear about being mainstream. There is loosing, which is when GNU/Linux goes to mainstream and adapts philosophies and practices from the Microsoft world; and there is winning, which is when mainstream goes to GNU/Linux and adapts free-software philosophies and practices from the Linux and *BSD worlds. I'm afraid, we are rapidly loosing to mainstream, not dominating over the mainstream.
While their PowerPC compiler is still very good, MetroWerks' x86 compiler is utter rubbish. Those of you in the Mac community thinking of jumping over to Linux may be gravely disappointed at MetroWerks' offerings on the Intel platform. gcc beats it to hell, both in terms of code generation and reliability. mwcc's command line arguments are also totally wacked out. It also has default behaviors that non-Mac users will find surprising (to put it nicely), like recursively searching subdirectories for #include files.
So from where I'm sitting, MetroWerks' choice to restrict themselves to a single Linux distribution is no big deal. gcc will still be the compiler of choice.
Now if MetroWerks were really clever, they'd design their IDE (which isn't bad) to allow users to specify any compiler in place of mwcc, which would allow them to add value to existing Linux installations. Always a good thing...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Lets see what kind of son of bitch is buying that package
oh shut up you dimwit. All the redhat distros do work first time out of the box..try that on a slackware system. yes, i have installed slackware on over 50 systems (and redhat on only 12). yes, i have written device drivers on slackware systems, installed KDE manually and other crap. redhat makes life easy, but you can install rpm's on slackware after conversion (and symbolic linking and all the other crap. Yes, redhat is trying to adopt the LSB. i dont see any reason to dislike them.
(not to be lame and reply to my own post, but)
(0) I mention the stuff at the top because I'm saying that as someone who isn't really INSIDE (and who has good reasons why) things look pretty paranoid and hostile from the OUTSIDE
(1) the example messages are examples of how hostile corporate entities COULD write FALSE, MISLEADING or otherwise DISHONEST messages that key in on popular Linux community hysteria
(2) to reiterate, those example messages would be posted by people using fake accounts or anons
(3) they are FALSE and are for EXAMPLE PURPOSES ONLY...
Gee, people seem to forget really really quickly all the effort and money RedHat pour into opensource projects and opensourcing internally-developed stuff (see Gnome/X etc.)
Sure, RH is a commercially-oriented distro, and it's to be expected commercial interests will go to them first. This is just decrying the obvious and expected. Stop whining and start doing something productive.
If you are implying Slackware doesn't work out of the box, and you say you have installed Slack on over 50 systems, then you obviously can't read the simple instructions to install.
The only way Slack wouldn't work out of the box is if you decided in your infinite wisdom to not install libc or something. Other than that, Slack works just fine.
Less of the distro bashing please - and before you start, most of the criticisms of Redhat here are justified.
As a former RedHat user, I can say with certainty that not only do they make shitty distributions, but also manage to convince everyone that Linux = RedHat. I totally agree with the article. We must put an end to it!
(Oh, and btw, great job SuSE and Debian -- I love them both!)
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Two things I've learned about the marketplace.
1. It never evolves the way I want it to.
2. That's what's good about it.
The oversimplified reason for (2) is that if I were perfectly happy, then everybody else would be very unhappy. So we reach a compromise that none of us is thrilled with.
There will be more and more of these "Supporting Red Hat only" releases, but it's nothing to be alarmed about. Often they'll work perfectly well with other distributions, but the publishers will officially support only one or two or three of them in order to keep support profitable. Remember, most companies work on much thinner margins than Microsoft.
As long as I've been around computers, the users and developers have gravitated toward a central point in terms of OS's and GUIs. It's rarely the result of a sinister plot, usually it's just more practical that way. A developer needs to know what services are available on the client machine. A user needs to be able to know the requirements to run a certain piece of software. And if it doesn't work, one or the other has to figure it out. Having one or two distributions and GUIs dominant makes it easier for both parties.
But the neat thing about Linux is that a company like Red Hat can only stay on top as long as they stay good. Yes, they have a certain momentum, but other distributions are as good or better. If Red Hat suddenly turned ornery and ticked everybody off like You Know Who, the developers and publishers could switch distributions pretty quickly. And Red Hat doesn't make enough money selling their software to buy off publishers.
And everyone said it couldn't ever happen.
So now what? Does that mean rpm-only, or that these vendors won't support any system without a fedora at all? Does it matter to these people at all that Debian et al support rpm?
What's next? Redhat trying to embrace extend and exterminate competing standards? (Notice I said *try*)
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
This kind of balkanization is impossible with Perl? Gosh, that means that MSPerl is just a paranoid fantasy, doesn't it?
Netscape runs on all Linux distributions
not on my linux/ppc box. netscape still hasn't put out a glibc2 on ppc release of netscape. so i just use mozilla.
Quake2 runs on all linux distributions.
quake doesn't run on my linux distribution, because it's binary only, too. i was never that big of an open source nut, until i learned a couple of things that "./configure, make, make install" is a hell of a lot easier to fix/patch up for a program that reports my box as "linux-unknown"... if it needs fixing at all. most stuff compiles out of the box on linux/ppc. if rpm --nodeps doesn't work, you're usually stuck.
as for Codewarrior, i used their CRAP for BeOS/ppc, and saw how Be moved to GNU based compilers when they moved to intel, because Codewarrior couldn't keep their shit together, couldn't release updates quickly enough. i'd just like someone to put together a decent editor (a la BBEdit for MacOS)... i have yet to enjoy using a text editor in *nix.
All together now; Red hat is not Gnulix, nor is Slashdot! It's rather unfortunate to see all the bad press that Gnulix is getting thanks to Red Hat and the Slashdot gang (I'm mainly thinking of the harrassment of that poor female tech writer).
Gnulix is Linus baby and he is the one and only who should defamed in the name of Gnulix!
William S B - Better of Dead, than Red (hat that is)
Indeed, I agree, accusations and FUD is being tossed around by some people who see any sort of commercial success as the qualifying characteristic to "be the next microsoft". Some people are behaving irrationally because Redhat is doing well. And those people are incorrect.
However, just because you toss out the argument they make does not mean you should toss the platform. The point of this person's article is to show a specific instance of business behaviour that is _not_ good for linux as a whole. People should not hate microsoft because of its success, or its wide coverage of the market. That would be akin to saying that anything everyone likes should be considered evil.
Microsoft has earned the contempt of nerds everywhere for their anti-competitive business practices and outright immoral behaviour. Contracts that are not about promoting their solution, but negating the efforts of others, explicitly and with harmful intent.
This article, whether you agree with it or not, is speculating on the possiblity that Redhat has acted in that same way, making an exclusive contract to shut out the other distro's. And if a company, any company, begins to use those kind of tactics, we should object strongly. Even if some small no-name distribution with minimal circulation began to form contracts like that we would be obligated to set forth these objections. You can't hate Redhat bacause they are successful. That's fine. But if they begin the cycle of bad business and anticompetitive bahaviour, then we should object. Strongly.
Now, for the record, I don't think that Redhat can really do too much to the linux I love. It's open and out there, andI will always be able to use the version I want because I can make it into that image. But some vanity, some impulse inside makes me want to share that same ideal distribution with everyone, to give people a real alternative. And I would hate to see the Redhat dist become the version that people use because it has only replaced Microsoft as tyrant, without understanding the loving work that has gone into the philosophical changes that linux is made of.
"Without the law, there is no freedom. Without justice there is no law."
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
> Saying that it is only REDHAT is wrong.
Correct, CodeWarrior for Red Hat Linux is validated on Red Hat Linux Distribution but is not not restricted in any way.
The minimum requirement for Tech Support is Red Hat because that is what we have been validated on. We will add other distributors and there are no known reasons it won't work for any linux version.
-- METROWERKS Ron Liechty "Software at Work" MWRon@metrowerks.com
I do not like Emacs (too single-color for me, even under X), but it goes to the line referred to in any compiler error message. It parses gcc output (which is running under an Emacs window, in the background) and finds the file name and line number.
And any experienced programmer knows that 'parse error at line 171' means you forgot the semicolon at the end of line 170.
I'm switching to Debian...Hurd
Your difficulty in understanding the poster's point shows that geeks ought to fulfill certain liberal arts requirements in their education that might teach them the fine techniques of discourse and argumentation.
The point isn't that Debian could replace Red Hat. You're getting lost in the specificity of the example. The poster's assestion is this: there are people who will attack any distribution they percieve as becoming too powerful.
I hope that ISVs will realize that supporting only one Distro is bad for their linux investment.
there's a good reason for this. the market that rh has developed is 'developer orientated'. so it should be of no suprise to anyone that the sw houses start pointing to a 'brand' that caters for developers.
why would they for instance start to market to debian or suse for that matter if debian targets purists and suse, european users (suse is vg). this is not to say 1 distro is 'better' than other but that one distro will sell more copies of a particular type of sw.
as to what this means, well it could mean a lot of the sw houses will follow like sheep and bypassing other distributions and releasing only to rh, for instance. i dont think this is good - help balkanize the market as you put it may happen. M$ also allowed this happen under their windows (3.1,95,98 & NT) os's but used win32 api's and other such devices to unify development - meaning if u developed under win32 api's the code could be re-compiled and work from one os to another (well almost). maybe you highlight one of l*nuxes potential weaknesses (but also one of it's greatest strengths).
anyway who uses code-warrior front-end with vim,vi, emacs, gnu tools from cynus available?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I think you one of the few people that hit the nail on the head here. They are trying to sell a product (an IDE) to people who historically haven't seen much or any need for such a product, no has shown much inclination towards spending money or using non-open source products. There's a really chance that Codewarrior/Linux could bomb big time.
Furthermore, they are trying to sell to a 'community' that has agreed to disagree about any standard beyond by-the-book POSIX. Now that the product's done, your number one problem is providing support for your customers. The problem is that your customers could be running almost anything under the sun in any possible manner.
So it's a no brainer to limit your support initially to the most recent revision of the most popular distribution. They might go bankrupt otherwise. On the other hand, if the product takes off, and their phone jockeys get up to speed, supporting other distributions is the smart thing to do.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I also do a similar thing and find it works rather well:
:)
desktop 1 has xemacs20 filling up the whole screen for editing all kinds of text files
desktop 2 has netscape open looking at documentation or example code of some kind
desktop 3 has a terminal for running "configure" or "make" and also for invoking my program in a gazillion different ways
desktop 4 has ddd (or an mp3 player
Would someone care to tell me where exactly the blatant losses in usability as compared to MSVC++ are in this setup?
http://www.telly.org/86open/index.html
The 86open Project
Unix-on-Intel players work on a common binary
Netscape runs on all Linux distributions.
..
StartOffice runs on all Linux distributions.
Quake2 runs on all linux distributions. Heck. even
CW would probably run fine on my Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 box.
Saying that it is only REDHAT is wrong. They could release CW and say that it is designed for glibc2
or libc5, I understand that. If CW was libc5 my box would run it fine. If it was glibc2 my box would also run it fine since it is glibc2 based. So, I do not understand myself why they support "redhat" only. I was interested in their product, but frankly, after reading "For RedHat only" on their website I have decided not to buy it, even though I am 99% sure it would run on my Debian box. Long live gvim + gcc + make
I agree about the posts. As for moderation is general, I no longer rely on it. Famous people get a high marks even when they say the same things that an AC said a while ago. It is very easy to get high marks, just repeat the same pseudo-intellectual comments you hear on TV and it is almost certain that you will get a score of 4, 5, or 6; it is not that difficult. Saying NEW things will not get you high scores.
Bringing Windows-style computing to Linux has risks. Most people who use Linux right now probably use it because they like the way it works, not because they don't have access to Windows. But what if people start writing more and more "free" Linux software that relies on some components on the CodeWarrier IDE? What if people stop developing egcs because CodeWarrior Professional is cheap enough and most users are happy enough with it? Commercial software may displace some free software, and in the process, some of the alternative computing paradigms Linux represents might disappear.
Also, the result of bringing Windows-style computing to Linux may well be that Linux gets a lot of Windows-style users. Is that good? On the one hand, it means that a large number of users finally work on a Linux-based platform, a platform with decent APIs (POSIX, CORBA, etc.). On the other hand, it likely means that the ratio of users to open source developers gets even more skewed, and that will push the free community support models to their limits.
The second question of whether it matters that this is tied to a particular distribution doesn't seem that serious to me. In fact, I would find it kind of useful if RedHat became the Linux for ex-Windows-users and, say, Debian became the choice for the traditional Linux community. That would make it much easier to distinguish users when it comes to bug reports. RedHat may become the AOL of Linux distributions, and that's just fine with me.
I'm suprised that in 200 comments i didn't see one mention of Cygnus' IDE offering. Their site left me very impressed, and so im wondering if theres something i don't know about? Anyone who hasnt heard check it out at
http://www.cygnus.com/gnupro/
Ill be interested to hear the someones response to it.
"Ahh... The net is vast..." - Maj. Motoko Kusanagi
hes a major programer that uses code warrior. it makes me wonder about him.
LBJM
Could it be that Metrowerks might be coerced into making an exclusionary agreement with an Open Source vendor by one of the vendors of Proprietary OSes it supports - in a blatant, cheesy attempt to slow/halt the momentum of Open Source software?
"Gee, isn't it good enough just to have products ported to Linux?" No, Nicholas, Tim and Eric, It isn't.
Actually, i will make that contention. StarOffice works with any Linux, WordPerfect works with any Linux, Netscape (consider 3.x) works with any Linux, RealPlayer works with any Linux, Opera will probably be for any Linux when it's released, all as long as that "any Linux" has the proper libraries. None of these release the source (remember, Netscape didn't release the 3.x sources). So why can't CodeWarrior do the same? Then again, for all we know they do and they're just going with the "RedHat==Linux" mentality suits tend to have when labeling the box.
And Red Hat *does* support the FSSTND and they are actively supporting LSB.
Defensive, aren't you? I never said RedHat didn't follow the standards, nor did i even imply it. Although a number of possibly unofficial rpms do install config files in strange places, mess with /usr/local, and such...
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kernel: lp0: using parport0 (polling).
kernel: lp0 off-line
kernel: lp0 out of paper
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Yes.
/.ers treat the REST of the OpenSource world as non-existant.
You.
When you ask for software to be ported, do you ask for Linux?
Or do you ask for the software to be ported to OpenSource OSes?
Do you ask for the port to be done to Linux? Or do the port such that it works with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and even SCO. All these OSes are willing to INCLUDE Linux emulation. They seem to believe in a rising tide can lift many boats.
All you have to do is meet the rest of the OpenSource world 1/2 way.
When People ask about Linux point out there is a whole BODY of working OpenSource solutions. And even some commerical solutions(SCO, Solaris and no shocker if Apple makes a Linux PPC/*BSD option). When people ask about Linux, determine if they are asking about Linux or OpenSource OSes. And frankly, most of the vocal
So *RIGHT NOW* you are reaping what you have planted. If you are un-willing to DEMAND of vendors that their products work with *BSD, SCO, Solaris, then you deserve the bitter fruit out of a red hat.
Their claims of not being able to support 39 distributions insipres absolutely no confidence in me. There is no way in hell I would pay for a product that is so poorly supported that its open source competitors look good in comparison. A commercial company's idea of support is different than the open source idea of support. People have a number of expectations with a piece of commercial software that they do not have with a piece of GPL software. For example, just because Perl is "supported" in Debian does not mean that Larry Wall is knowledgable about how to make a .deb package, or how to get Perl to compile on a Debian system. It just means that someone on the net has managed to compile, and perhaps make a .deb package for a single version of Perl. It doesn't mean that the particular 5.00X release you need to make all your scripts work will compile in Debian, much less that there is a .deb package of the version of Perl you need compatible with the version of Debian you have. Compare this to the expectations of commercial support. If MetroWorks said "Debian" on the box, you would expect that there were .deb packages suitable for all releases of Debian currently in use. You would expect that MetroWorks technical support hotline would be trained in Debian-specific issues. You would expect that there would be no nasty bugs that only pop up because of Debian's particular eccentricities. Which, to MetroWorks, means they would have to perform an additional SQA (Software Quality Assurance) testing round for the Debian version. When it comes to commercial software, "Support" does not just mean "it can work with a little hacking" or "We managed to compile it for this distribution". It means a large investment of time and money. - Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Linux is a revolutionary product, forget how it used to be done, this is a new playing field.
Companies have to learn and adapt to this new technology, not vica versa.
If the mountain wont come to mahummad, then it can go get stuffed
What tricks would those be? According to all the people actually involved in this alleged black deal, MetroWerks decided to market their new version of CodeWarrior as running on Red Hat Linux ENTIRELY OF THEIR OWN ACCORD. I ask again, what MS tricks has Red Hat been pulling?
alien is a package that converts .rpm to .deb (it can do some other conversions, like .rpm -> .tgz, too). It uses rpm internally (Debian has an rpm package). However, you can run into problems with hardcoded paths to things that are done differently in Debian and RedHat (some of them can be fixed with 'hints' files, some can't).
The Right Way: use only real Open Source.
I with you, buddy! CodeWarrior is just horrible. I'm of the growing opinion that commercial software ported to Linux is virtually worthless. CodeWarrior is unstable on other platforms and having it ported can't help it. Netscape Navigator is also one of my most hated apps. I have to use it because it's the only full-featured browser in Linux, but it crashes all the time, not to mention that it's also a resource hog and ridicuously slow.
Red Hat doesn't wish it was SuSE, because (correct me if I'm wrong) SuSE isn't free to download and duplicate as many times as you want. Precisely because of their proprietary YaST tool, no?
I buy Red Hat because it's free.
As Arthur Miller writes in the Crucible, "...and there might be a five-legged dragon living in my house!". Maybe RedHat has more in mind than just exclusive contracts -- perhaps they've secretly inked deals with Microsoft to distribute non-free versions of Office 2000 for Linux in RH6.1! Or perhaps their next step will be to develop a Linux personality running on the NT kernel, and move focus all development on Win32 apps.
I don't see why people are so envious of RedHat's excellent products and business savvy. This envy results in a weird paranoia that is very harmful to the Linux effort.
Actually, emacs could do that first one. The neet theing about it was that I got the function right off of dejanews.
The second one, I dunno.
Most imprtantly, it would be nice if emacs had some project management. Nothing fancy, just for some project load x.el lisp file. Their is something called EDO, but, it won't compile.
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
...would like to point out that, while I am a Red Hat user, if a product (like MicroWerks') tries to lock me into a given distribution, I will not buy it.
I might be happy with Red Hat now, but I was a Slackware user before, and who knows what distribution I'll decide I like better a year from now? Oh...my $500 development tool no longer works just because I switched distros?
Sorry, but even the ever-lovable gnulix guy don't play that game.
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
I believe that view is shared by most people.
But picking the OS or distribution that has the most software availiable is rather pointless. I think what really should matter is chosing those having what one *needs*.
It is the same as with cars. It isn't the car with the most options that one should chose, but the car that makes ones transportation most practical and easy.
Especially with free software. If it happens that needs change, where's the big deal?
Pick the distro that works best for *you* not the distro that works best for everyone.
I may be wrong, and sorry if I am, but Did they not make a deal with ibm to port via voice but only for the RH distro?
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
Well, I'm not sure if this is the same thing or not, but the recent 1.1.1 KDE release has some RH6 'strings' if you will that kinda pissed me off.
:-)
I was running 1.1 on my 5.2 setup and when I upgraded with the 6.0 distribution, I had trouble with KDE. Some digging at kde.org and I find a snippet that says the RH6 distro has its own 'flavor' of KDE and I need to use the RPM's supplied on the CD.
Not a real big deal, but I *did* have to nuke KDE from my system completely to install the RH6-supplied 1.1.1 version. Moreover, the 'generic' kde 1.1.1 rpms would not install when I first tried them since the installer script checked the version and reported that it would only work on versions 5.2 and before.
Now I guess there's nothing to stop me (and I probably should, anyway) just grab the source and compile/install myself, but some of the convenience of using rpm packages is lost.
So, I'm thinking about switching to Gnome. If RedHat ticks me off enough, I may take a deep breath and switch to Debian, anyway.
So use a distro from a group that isn't a company. *coughdebiancough*
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kernel: lp0: using parport0 (polling).
kernel: lp0 off-line
kernel: lp0 out of paper
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.