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On Red Hat Bashing...
The following was written by GNOME Guy, Slashdot Reader and pure energy beam, Miguel de Icaza
Recently many people have criticized Red Hat from many points of view, and during the construction of their arguments, they have ignored a lot of the work that Red Hat has given back to the community. Having personal friends at Red Hat and having talked to them in the past has given me a wider perspective on what actually is going on at Red Hat than most people who only have heard about them.
The importance of Free Software (as in Open Source).
People have complained that some ISV companies are targeting a specific GNU/Linux distribution, and that this alienates the users of other distributions. I do believe that people are looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. Many ISVs are not only targetting some particular version of GNU/Linux, they are also targetting a specific platform of GNU/Linux. They are not allowing the end user to make a choice of kernel, the choice of a distribution, or the choice of a platform.
Let me explain: people who write proprietary software are interested in marketing a software product as a piece of intellectual property that they own and that comes with a price tag, which does not provide the end users with any of the freedoms that the GNU project has identified as important for software. Without these freedoms you are not only potentially locked to a particular distribution: you are locked to a particular kernel, and you are definely locked into a particular platform. You will not get proprietary software to work on your favorite port of the operating system. Forget about the SPARC, the Alpha, the PowerPC, the Motorola, and the StrongARM architectures if you go the proprietary way.
Red Hat and Freedomware (as in OpenSource, Free Software)
So far, Red Hat is the only major visible commercial distribution that distributes all of their development under a free license (LGPL or GPL for their new work, or under the proper compatible license for packages they do not maintain). And they also manage to make money during this process.
Now, making money by giving away your intelectual property is a hard problem. Some people have just given up. Various distributions include proprietary code in their distribution to add a value to their product. The result is of course, a non-free product: you as an end user are forbidden from making copies of it entirely, you might not even get the source code in some cases, and you are definetly forbidden from making changes and redistributing modified versions of it. It comes to mind, the proprietary graphical install programs being shipped these days.
Red Hat standing for Freedomware
When the KDE desktop project started to take off, the licensing problem of Qt became obvious to many people: If we allowed this important component to be non free in a GNU/Linux system, then it would have been impossible to have a completely free (in the sense of freedom) desktop system that people could use, distribute, modify, and redistribute.
Many distributions chose to ship the non-free KDE/Qt combo as part of their systems, as it gave them a competitive advantage on the market. Concerns about a free system came in second place. Red Hat instead of going for the easy money, actually devoted a growing team of programmers to help build a completely free desktop: I am sure they lost sales while preparing for this free system to be built, and I am sure it costed them money to pay their GNOME programmers.
Still, Red Hat stood up for the free software community. To them it was more important to have a full open source desktop than making a quick sell. Given that the Qt toolkit will soon be released with an open-source license this is not an issue anymore. I am presenting this exclusively as an historical data point.
XXXX
Red Hat and Debian are my favorite Linux-based distributions. Actually, they are the best designed and open distributions of Unix from my point of view: they do ship all of their code under a free license.
This, from my point of view is very appealing. Various of my friends are involved in deploying free systems based on GNU and Linux in Mexico in a number of very different setups.
They did require modified versions of the installation program, and modified versions of the packages they use. Not all, but some of them. So the distribution is pretty much Red Hat Linux with some added features that they need for their vertical application. This is something that can be done legally thanks to the fact that the Red Hat distribution does not include "special cases".
Doing something
If you want to see commercial-grade applications on the free systems and have users have total control of the code, the platform, the operating system and the distribution, promote free software: help free software developers, contribute code, contribute proof-reading time, contribute documentation or help other people understand why free software is important.
Disclaimer
These are just my personal opinions. I am not speaking for any project I am involved with in this mail nor am I speaking for any organization I belong to. These are strictly my personal opinions.
I do not work for Red Hat and I have not worked for Red Hat in the past. I have just contributed and worked with their hackers in the past.
Miguel de Icaza.
miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx
Why is it not surprising to me that Miguel the Mouth is defending Redhat? Were it not for Redhat's considerable involvement, Gnome would be much further behind than it is. Gnome would not have the hype factor it has ridden high on. Gnome would not be able to pass itself off as a stable, mature desktop were it not for Redhat. Heck Gnome probably wouldn't have it's shiny CPU-consuming themes that everyone foams at the mouth for were it not for Redhat having Raster on staff.
Of course, Miguel just HAS to bring KDE into it again. KDE must keep Miguel up all night long, tossing and turning. Miguel, why don't you just shut the hell up about KDE? You decided long ago you didn't want any part in it...FINE, keep working on Gnome and stop making commentary on a project you have contributed ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to. LET IT DIE, Miguel. You don't see anyone from the KDE team going on about Gnome like this. Why don't you remind yourself what Linus had to say (www.kde.org/whatiskde/linus.html):
My opinion on licenses is that "he who writes the code gets to chose his
license, and nobody else gets to complain". Anybody complaining about a
copyright license is a whiner.
The anti-KDE people are free to write their own code, but they don't have
the moral right to complain about other people writing other code. I
despise people who do complain, and I won't be sucked into the argument.
But feel free to forward this as you see fit.
Linus
The criticisms directed towards Redhat are very valid. Redhat's political interests in Gnome are proof enough of that. Redhat happily shipped non-GPL software like Netscape, RealVideo and BRU without blinking, and yet they ran a big crusade against KDE and Qt while pushing their own Gnome initiative.
Yes, Redhat has been a boon to the Linux community in the past...I don't dispute that. However their current political aspirations are what cast such a shadow of doubt.
I'm going to add a small note to the foregoing discussions, with which I generally agree . . .
OK, look, when a proprietary developer decides to do a Linux version of their software, they're typically doing it with almost no budget.
That means I have to find a broken computer in the office, fix it myself, struggle with zero IS/IT infrastructure, buy a copy of Red Hat with my own money, port the damn software, and then convince management that it was all a good idea.
Now you want me to port to every distro on the face of the Earth? Forget it!
Look, when a company says "Red Hat only" that DOES NOT MEAN you can't run it on another distribution!! It just means that I (or another beleaguered developer) simply ran out of time/patience! I mean, I'd *like* to have infinite time & money, so that I could set up individual machines running every possible distro, but I don't.
So instead I port to the distribution that I installed. Which happens to be Red Hat, because that's what I already used at home. Try the stuff on a different distro, and tell us what happened! It's not like we don't *care* -- there just aren't enough hours in the day, or spare computers to go around.
Maybe the next time an NT machine breaks, I'll be able to steal it, repair it, and put Debian on there. Or Caldera. Or whatever. And if it's that all-fired important, why don't you ship me a free computer to test on.
I spend enough time fighting management about Linux in the first place; I don't need to be fighting a million 3133t hax0rs about my particular choice of distro.
Hell yeah man!!!!
I admit I think Red Hat has done some cool things,
BUT I've worked with Red Hat 4.0 and 5.2. This
guy at the place I used to work installed 4.0 and
it took an hour to just BOOT (not install.. BOOT).
Granted it was a Compaq (puke) and he installed
everything, but still, come on.. an hour??
I have 5.2 on a computer and I think the rc files
are a total mess. I don't like it much at all
and it seems slower than other distros for some
reason. I run Slackware 3.5 and it takes like
10 seconds to boot and the rc files are organized
so simply. Same with FreeBSD (except the 10
second boot). I also have Debian and Caldera
and they are all much nicer than Red Hat.
Not only that.. I was talking to some guy on
a chat server while he was trying to install
Red Hat 5.2... he couldn't get it working. He
got Slackware and had no problems...
I hope they fixed these things in 6.0.. till then
I recommend Caldera for beginners..
try grep "rm -i" ~root/.*
and then ask yourself why you spend so much time as root when you can't even figure that out.
1. The upgrade has installed Gnome and broke KDE on a couple of systems. We were very careful to say "NO" when it asked if we wanted Gnome installed.
2. Bash behaves oddly. If we have the line "set -o vi" in our .bashrc or .bash_profile, it does not work. It turns off emacs mode, but does not enable vi mode, and typeing the command at the prompt also fails to enable vi mode. If we don't try to put "set -o vi" in a file, but just type it at the command prompt, it works. This is on both updates and fresh installs.
PPP is behaving oddly. It's not setting the default route.
Given the ever increasing number of off-the-wall posts like this, here and in newsgroups, and especially since the Halloween document, I've concluded most of these are from Micro$oft FUD-goons and should generally be ignored!!! Clueless dopes are entitled to their opinions, yes (1st amendment right to make an idiot of yourself), but "I'm a former RedHat user so I do know what I'm talking about" ??? Good grief....
there is two problems i have seen w/ RH6 first it doesnt set the devpts entry into the fstab like it should, and secondly the initscripts werent bringing up the loopback interface causing all sorts of weird and hard to track down network problems, those are two very easily fixed things that RedHat should not have let slip through.
I like RedHat however, but it seems like you have to wait for the X.2 release for it to be solid IMO
So, OK - who pays you? How do you make a living? Somebody, someplace, is making money so they can pay you. Or someone, someplace, is making money to pay taxes to support your educational institution or government agency.
I write code because I like to. I sell that code because I have to earn a living. What's the problem with that?
I've been running 6.0 since the Cheap Bytes CD came out (I stopped buying the official version after 5.1 due to bad customer service at Red Hat).
/etc/smb.conf that I have a solution to try when I get home.
6.0 is largely a Good Thing, IMO. But there are some "broken bits".
Samba - This is where I spend much of my time and therefore found this out first. Printing from Windoze hosts is busted in 6.0. I think it is just a goof in the default
Gnome - This is a great example of a premature 1.0 release. It's very poor integration with Enlightenment makes for a very ugly system to try to configure.
Linuxconf - Had an odd problem where "Starting Linuxconf" would hang on the console screen when the machine was rebooting. I telnetted in, killed the PID, and was able to start. Apparently Linuxconf was looking for something in one directory, and Red Hat put it in another. Doh!
The Linuxconf problem I can understand slipping through the cracks because I haven't seen it anywhere else. The Gnome problem is a matter of either Red Hat or the Gnome guys wanting too badly to catch up to KDE and saying "See we're stable now, too" (except Gnome isn't ready yet). Patience, grasshopper. Keep coding and we'll be here when it is really ready. The Samba thing though should never have slipped through the cracks. It is a major feature of RH6 and a key component of what RH's corporate customers will be doing. Every RH6 system I've seen so far has had this problem. It was not a problem in 5.2.
Aside from the Samba goof, the other problems are probably forgivable. I do wish they had let Gnome cook longer before making the grand debut because now I have a bad taste in my mouth over Gnome and while I'm willing to try it again in the future, the first impression is a lasting impression. KDE 1.0 definitely made a stronger first impression than Gnome 1.0.
If you want a rock-solid well-tested OS go with FreeBSD. If you want the neatest and greatest new whiz-bang stuff go with RedHat. I think the average user, including myself, would rather have the latest and greatest stuff NOW rather than waiting forever for extra testing that may be unneccessary.
-Heather
PyrDeLaLuna@yahoo.com
This will happen a couple times in a row. The third or fourth attempt to startx will work. Here's another buglet: Gnome starts (for root) and the warning "danger: you're running gmc as root, blah blah" will pop-up. I close that window and the other auto-started windows, which wait on the closure of the alert window, stop loading --and we go back to opening the alert window. Close window again,go back, close, go back again--and so on. This is the default window manager/desk environment? That's a little pre-mature (maybe immature was a less than perfect choice)
Try a hard drive install.
SEE ABOVE
I'm not much of a RH fan myself, but I don't think you should blame them for the state of GNOME.
GNOME is still under development, and definitely doesn't claim to be ready for a production environment. Plus, AFAIK, the RH 6.0 CD isn't just for production environments. So bitching about its inclusion on the CD is a moot point. Plenty of people would like to play with GNOME -- imagine explaining why a RH backed project isn't in their distribution to some angry and disappointed users!
Just a note here from someone who does tech support - the huge amount of that $80 is very likely going to tech support. I have been using computers for several years and I am learning Linux, and it takes a little time even if you use and are comfortable with computers in general. I imagine that they have found ALOT of demand for that technical support, and that can get expensive.
No, you're wrong. The fact that another OS can compete at all is indicative of the fact that MS is NOT a monopoly.
Mandrake 6.0 isn't much different as far as stability and problems. There's a net story floating around that there's going to be a Mandrake 6.0.1 bugfix release. See the following link for some of the problems people are having and the fixes:
http://home.knUUt.de/tom.be/faq.html
(They are moving the site but hopefully it will be available this evening).
I'm going to be falling back to Mandrake 5.3 and put in the 2.2.9 kernel myself.
You're developing (or porting) proprietary software at work on a machine that management doesn't even know about, and offering it for sale as being from your company? Without telling Management? And you haven't been fired yet?
You do have incompetent management at your company.
A lot of technical people I know - myself included - frequently find themselves being taken advantage of because they object less to putting in extra hours.
No one can take advantage of you without your letting it happen. If you only get paid 37.5 (why not 40?) hours per week, then only work 37.5 hours per week! There's no reason for anyone to work 50-60 hours per week, unless they own the business they're building up.
Programmers who work insane hours week after week are simply helping their employer get away with not hiring the true number of people required to do the work assigned. Your boss will enjoy his/her hefty bonus, while you get kicked out after you've become so burned out that they can't squeeze anymore work of out you.
I don't run Red Hat 6.0 myself, but every 6.0 box I have logged in to have the same problem: tcsh doesn't work correctly. Arrow-up, arrow-down, ctrl-P, ctrl-N just beeps, and esc-P doesn't work either. And there's a message about coredump limit at login if you run tcsh.
He's got a different writing style. If you just read it straight through and expect the points to be saliently handed to you, you'll be left wondering, "Umm...and..?" But if you slow down, read it, and ask what is he getting to, he actually doesn't touch on a lot.
Just my opinion.
I am sorry to not see more substantive criticism of real problems with RedHat in this discussion.
/etc/rc.d/ and you edit a half dozen files to set what you want to run, and how. You can use a simple text editor.
I grew disgusted with RedHat and went back to using Slackware for one particular reason:
They've invested so heavily in GUI administrative tools that they've really screwed up my ability to get in and configure things on my own.
On a Slackware system, there is a simple set of config files. You go to
With RedHat, the GUI administration tools have forced a major obfuscation of the config files. A simple set of configuration files are exploded out into a tree of directories filled with files. It's so granular and splayed out all over as to make it impossible to configure the system, save by using the GUI tools.
The damage to clean design that RedHat is engaged in borders on sabatogue. Sure, they open-source the administration tools they provide. The question to ask, though, is why are the tools needed in the first place? Yes, there's a "Linux for Dummies" book on the store shelves. And yes, newbies should be able to run Linux without having to get their hands dirty manually configuring the system. But the way things are going, there may soon be a Microsoft-type Registry in the RedHat distribution.
I'm not impressed with RedHat. I'm not interested in poking around in a bunch of dialogues to configure my system.
Thank goodness Slack 4.0 is finally out.
what is it that they do? put together a linux installation? i can do this too, you can do this; just write yr own rc.d or whatever scripts to boot, but they also supply howtos and other stuff together, put it on a cd and charge you for that work.
i don't see how rh could hijack linux away from us. but in the same time why did rasterman leave them? he obviously thought there's smth wrong with them. (i can't see using anything but e)
lets just wait and see.
you don't need redhat for linux, they just make it easier for linux to become more popularized in the world, they make a lot of money, and maybe this corrupts, but hey our state religion is capitalism.
Besides, of course it is easier for rh to provide support for their own set of scripts;
i dont use rpms, and i think we should have big servers with up-to-date compilers where one could send source to be compiled remotely so its customized for yr cpu and yr liking (faster vs smaller or whatever). bottom line we wont let them get outta hand because they need us.
put together your own dist if you can or if you want. they are not such a scary monster.
peace.
alex
I feel sad when I see people in the computer business that don't really seem to be interested in computers, only the money.
I too love technology and fiddling around with computers. I like it so much that I decided to go to M.I.T. so I could do it even more. A lot of the code I write here ends up being open sourced. But, I have news for you. In a year, when I graduate, I'll have about $75,000 in student loans that I have to pay off. Money's going to matter; there's no way around that. I just hope I can make money with computers, because at least I'd be doing something I liked.
Maybe this is a bit off topic, but it seems that Redhat's long term revenue strategy is as a portal site instead of software?
e 1999/sw90609.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun
This has quite a few implications about how it puts together it's software distribution. If it's mainly a portal, why should it care about gnome vs kde?
In the portal business, it's whatever generates page views for ads that counts.
In Marx's Das Kapital (brought to you online by altruism) he explains the transfer of money for physical goods and challenges how
worth is defined. This is extremely relevant for intellectual property because how do you measure an idea's worth?
By the amount of time it took to be thought up?
By the gluclose expended?
By the way it affects society?
Quite simply I think: whatever the market will bear. More money is better than less money for the same amount of effort, no?
Oh, grow up. Just because people choose to make their living by selling their software, doesn't mean they don't love what they're doing, or that they are greedy bastards. Those of use in the real world have to buy our own food, and pay our own rent.
I hear people complaining all the time about the lack of commercial quality software/drivers/games for linux. But, God forbid anyone should try and make any money at all providing some.
You measure an idea's worth the same way you measure the value of anything else. By how much someone is willing to pay for it. This is the fundamental basis of capitalism. People on this site (I'm thinking of the piracy discussion a few days back) seem stuck on this concept that only physical items have tangible value - and worse, that they have some inherent worth. This simply isn't the case. In a capitalistic society, everything is worth exactly what someone else is willing to pay you for it at the very moment.
Note that patents are a method for aiding an idea's first creator from making money off that idea. A lot of ideas have made people millions.
I hear people complaining all the time about the lack of commercial quality software/drivers/games for linux. But, God forbid anyone should try and make any money at all providing some.
Exactly. As another proprietary coder, I paid plenty of attention to the piracy debate on this site the other day. After hearing how many
> 2)Price, e.g, the $80 price tag for their latest
t /RPMS
> distribution. I would certainly hope they
> support further linux development with this kind
> of inflated price they're charging people. I
> think this could indicate an attitude of greed
> which justifies comparisons to Micro$oft.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, at least not until A) ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/redhat-6.0/i386/RedHa
and all RedHat mirrors disappear from the face of
the 'net, and B) ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/download/Win2000/CABs/
is suddenly accessible via anonymous FTP.
RedHat is a business, and businesses don't last
too long if they don't have any money. But
comparing RedHat to Micro$oft is quite a stretch
at this point.
Since RH is the primary funder of the Gnome project and has hired the majority of developers in order to effectively control it's development it's not suprising that the self-elected leader of Gnome comes out in support. Who pays his airline and hotel tickets? ;-) As far as the KDE issue is concerned, since when has "intent" been more important than the actual license? It only becomes more important when their is a commercial reason to ignore the license (such as RH's). This makes RH just as guilty (if not moreso because of all the noise it made), as any other distribution if KDE really is illegal. Use Debian if you are really concerned with free software. Otherwise I would really wish companies like RH would stop misrepresenting themselves.
thoroughly predictable comments are very boring.
what the hell did you expect him to say?
he's highly respected by redhat people,
and he highly respects them, and they are
good buddies etc etc. my brilliant powers of
deducation lead me to believe he will....
.
.
DEFEND REDHAT
(big fucking surprise)
I just wish that people who decry RedHat will put that energy to work in a positive way, contributing to Debian with either time or money. Ultimately, the only absolute defense against the subversion of commercial Linux, whatever its brand-name, are the existence of a strong, standards-compliant, non-commercial distribution and a fully implemented LSB. I am very happy for Redhat, they deserve the success, and their success may mean great things for Linux's mainstream acceptance. But I'd rather see the completion of the LSB than the preloading of RH on Dells or Compaqs.
PS accepting you are who you say you are, Thanks for all the fish!
I, at least, bash SuSE because their distribution is not free (as in speech). Read the YaST license and weep.
The license for KDE1.1.1 and Qt is no different in the version included in RH than in previous versions. The intent issue was just and excuse to include it because otherwise RH6 would lose mass amounts of market share. Face it, RH is a commercial company with commercial interests, and people like Miguel defending them just because they are providing them with funding for their pet projects and travel does not help free software.
David,
It's good to see that Slackware developers are so insightful. I've always thought you were an idiot, but now I know....
> And, it's not the way things have been done--until now.
Actually, it's exactly the way things have been done. Since there is no common ABI standard for Linux (yet), proprietary software companies pretty much do whatever the hell they want. I've seen tons of commercial Linux software that expects Motif shared libraries. Why the heck do they think the average Linux user would have a copy of Motif?
The solution is things like the Linux Standard Base, not to complain because a company picked the largest market out there (RedHat). Anyway, I'm sure that getting CodeWarrior to work on a different distribution would take little or no effort.
That's because NFS in Linux 2.2 is still stabilizing. I'd wait 6 months or so and then things should settle out.
But anyway, NFS sucks.
> In other words, Redhat should have released 5.9.1, 5.9.2, 5.9.3 etc. util it was rock solid before calling it 6.0.
Except that RedHat is in the business of selling shrink wrapped boxes. No one would buy a shrink wrapped beta version.
Redhat did release a beta of 6.0. It was called 5.9 and you can still download it from their FTP site if you like. It worked good. I am using it now.
> I run Slackware 3.5 and it takes like 10 seconds to boot
What kind of crack are you smoking? It takes my stupid computer more than 10 seconds to do the memory test. It takes more than 10 seconds to scan the SCSI bus. It takes more than 10 seconds just for the kernel to initialize (before init even first runs)
>The fact that another OS can compete at all is
>indicative of the fact that MS is NOT a monopoly.
Which OS would you be referring to?
Mac? Doesn't even run on the same hardware. Therefore, MacOS does not compete with Win9x.
*ix? Designed for servers, not desktops. Therefore, Unix and Unix-like systems do not compete with Win 9x, and were never intended to.
[PC|DR]DOS? These systems are ancient and you would be hard pressed to find a shop that sells them. Furthermore, Windows was designed as an extension to these operating systems. Therefore, Windows does not compete with DOS clones.
BeOS? Designed for desktop users to run on the same hardware as Windows, however it was also designed to be a secondary operating system, to be uses in conjunction with Windows. Therefore, BeOS does not compete with Win9x(yet).
OS/2? This is probably the best case you could make for competition with Win9x. However, even the company that created it will not put it on the computers it sells to the public. So can it really be considered competition?
Now for the inevitable "Real World" scenario.
Consider a construction-materiels company, lets call it MicroScrew. They make screws, and compete with other screw companies, and to some extent nails. One day, MicroScrew gets exclusionary contracts with every construction contractor in the world, giving them MicroScrew screws at a very low price, however the contractors must agree never to use nails or any competing screws when they build houses. Naturally, the nail companies and other screw companies are out of business within a year and MicroScrew's screws become the de facto standard in the construction business. Now what happens is, MicroScrew changes the design of its screw head from a 4-way groove(Phillips) to a 3-way groove. Coincidentally, MicroScrew also releases a screwdriver that is compatible with the 3-way grooved screws. The other screwdriver companies quickly rush out and release their own MicroScrew-compatible screwdrivers, but at this point MicroScrew uses its trump card; It demands that the contractors only buy MicroScrew screwdrivers, or else MicroScrew will not sell any screws to them. Without any screws or nails, the contractors would go out of business, so they give in to MicroScrew's demands and within a year, all other screwdriver makers are out of business.
See a pattern developing here?
If it turns out that someone can use the can opener on their Swiss Army knife to turn MicroScrew screws, they can use it instead. However, this is not true competition as a can opener was never designed to be a screwdriver. Besides, MicroScrew can just change their screw designs again to make the can opener incompatible.
If some kid builds a smelter in his garage and starts handing out rudimentary nails, this is not competition either, no more than Ghandi's march to the sea was competition against the salt companies. If you don't agree on this point, try using the analogy of America's national elections as competition, and of the American Revolution as not competition.
Also, note that MicroScrew's business practices are at best underhanded and at worst illegal. If you are of the opinion, as many people are, that businesses should be able to do as they please without any government interference, then don't shed any tears when the kid's garage mysteriously explodes one day, destroying the smelter operation and killing him, and what the hell, his family too. Don't tell me businesses wouldn't do this; Just last year one of the oil companies gunned down about a dozen student demonstators holding a peaceful protest in Nigeria. If you say "it can't happen here", thank the justice department for that.
Of course, too much government interference can be just as bad as not enough, but it is my belief that the government is doing the right thing in the Microsoft case.
-Perpetual Newbie
And by the way, I use Windows 95.
Keep in mind that the people who post to slashdot don't represent the average linux user. They represent a more radical sect of the Linux community. Keep in mind that most people think nothing of pirating software. Of all my friends who use computers, almost none of them think twice about pirating software. Most of them find it odd that I However most of my friends who use Linux would pay for commercial Linux software to encourage more development.
You think that's disturbing?? What about the assumption that people SHOULD get things (like OS's) for free? That has no logic, and verges on delusional. I've read hundreds of posts by angry kids who seem to think that for some reason, they are entitled to a free OS because they want one. THAT is a serious problem that isn't being addressed here.
How is this different than working for FREE on OSS stuff?
How long have you been reading slashdot? I've been here for around two and a half years (or so, I think ... man that seems like a long time). While I don't disagree with the points that you make, I do disagree with your assertion that it's the influx of new users that causes it.
.. just a little arrogant in the process). And, in a sick sort of way, those comments were pretty fun to read.
Case in point: do you remeber when the comments on Slashdot were good? Or at least most of them? Well, there were still a number of really grunpy people that hung around in those days, and they would torch anyone who got it wrong (usually journalists, but occasionally they would turn on their own). They would toast someone, and do it so convincingly that no one would bother to refute them (and, they usually were making valid points.
All that has happened with the new users coming in is that there are simply more people with bigger mouths (and generallly much less compelling). So, instead of one person flamming another, it's one person saying something (anything, really), and then about 10 people who feel compelled to flame back and forth forever. And very rarely is there any insight in the flames, which is the worst part.
Hmm. Oh well. I guess I'm just a grumpy old man.
There is plenty of money in Open Source software. You just have to use a different mindset.
Selling crappy little trivial VB applications isn't going to cut it anymore.
First of all, that's not what he said, and second, employees who push forward and do something new in a company add the most value. Hell, this poster is creating a new market for his company's product. The drones who do nothing without "Der Papers" and covering their asses don't make the breakthroughs. Substandard managers are usually threatened by energetic, creative employees who do new things. Better managers encourage them.
Actually, in a Free Software world, very few jobs of today's world would disappear, and almost none of them would be programming jobs. Overall there would probably be more jobs, and certainly more productivity.
The jobs which would stay include, all those little "customisation" jobs, in which every major company has dozens of people assigned to make software work just exactly right for them. Also all that specialist software (If you're the only company to make 100mm double-ended rotary links then no-one else will have software for them, Free or not) still needs writing.
The little problems today solved by "utility" companies, would probably become part of the ongoing work of Operating System vendors. Already Linux and *BSD users take it for granted that their favourite mini-apps are mostly included "in the box" with the operating system. Regardless, the same people will be writing that code.
What will go? Well, you've got reason to be scared if you write license daemons. Also I can't see a future for Virus Killers in a world where you can pay the OS vendor to make it properly Secure in the first place.
Finally, even in Stallman's ideal vision of a Free Software world, there are some things which don't need to be Free. The firmware in your digital watch is pretty useless as source. The microcode on PIII is too. Things like this will be probably remain proprietary out of laziness.
Nick -- A/C because he's afraid D/C doesn't travel well over long distances
Proprietary software is slowly dying. Deal with it. Yes, your business model will have to change, but that's only because it was wrong in the first place.
Dear folks,
I am an old time linux user and programmer. I have used many different distros, including RH versions 4.2, 5.0, 5.2 and 6.0. The thruth is that RH 4.2 was a good distro. RH 5.0 was a complete disaster.
RH 5.2 introduced the most horrible graphical configuration application possible. It almost looked like they wanted to discourage newbies.
RH 6.0 price is an outrage!!!
I have nothing against RedHat, but they must improve the distro to the level of SuSE 6.1 - my current distro. RH needs something at the level of YaST and SaX. I don't care whether it's GPL or not.
Now about GNOME. I have used pratically all the WM
available for Linux by curiosity. I did like both FVWM and MWM (LessTif). With the emergence of KDE I start playing with it, and it was reached a certain level of maturity with version 1.1. I'am a happy KDE 1.1 user. I'm aware of the intial problems with the Qt license, but that's no longer a problem. During the process that lead to KDE 1.0. I have also tried various versions of GNOME up to 1.0. It looked promessing, but sorry I prefer KDE. Also I have learned by some close contacts that Miguel is arrogant Mexican with the wrong attitude. GNOME is far from a match to KDE at the current stage.
My $1
www.cheapbytes.com
Moron.
Send patches, or shut up.
Just because BeOS isn't Windows doesn't mean it isn't proprietary crap.
Caledera's and SuSEs are proprietary.
That's exactly what I meant. You get what you get when you write OSS. If you don't want people to make money off of your stuff (without giving you any), or you expect some kind of return at all, then OSS is not the place. If you write OSS, you are naive to expect anything other than other people making money from your work.
Talk about naive! You think that everyone is going to start giving away their software because Linux had some flash in the pan success? Uh, I don't think so.
Although I do wish RedHat the best of luck, they seem to be the first morally/ethicly correct company in a very long time, that could be very successful.
I am afraid that while they may start off with good intentions, things could change, I don't mean they could change now or sometime soon but at some point in time, remember this is the real world, anything can happen, and its usually when we least expect it.
But I think it would be better if RedHat at least made it policy to work with LSB, with LSB software companies could make their products work with all distros, instead of picking and choosing 1 distro to support. I think if RedHat does make it policy to work with LSB, or to have a stronger relationship with LSB, will reduce some of the fear people have.... Look at microsoft, the king of, proprietary and in many diffrent ways crappy, standards. They do not create standards for everyone, they create standards for them selves, to benefit only them.
But any way, from what I remember RedHat hasn't been that strong in their support of LSB, they may have changed this and I am not informed, but if they do not have a strong relationship with LSB, then I can understand why their is fear and they get bashed... Its not about their current track record, its just the future that many people are looking at....
All I of know is that RH just decided to fund Gnome without communicating with TT or KDE at all.
One of the greatest things about Linux, and all OSS for that matter, is that if RH forks, anyone who wants to can "unfork". That is, they can grab the previous unforked distro and make it open, keeping it from drowning in corporate stupidity. I've often thought of it as trying to get ahold of water with a fork. You can get a little, but you'll never get it all.
It's all well and good that they GPL everything, but they *are* a commercial product that most people spend hard-earned dollars for. It has to be competitive and not cause problems for the users. They are making money off this ya' know?
For all of you out there who think that you're doing the Lord's work by writing free software, guess what? Free software is not the ultimate in altruism. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's pretty low on the altruism totem pole
...
...
...
LOW on the altruism totem pole? if you give someone a fish, they can eat for a day, if you teach someone how to fish, they might be able to eat for a lifetime
but if you give people the ability to teach others how to fish
ah well
Hi,
...
...
I came across this article
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,37492,00.html
Which says
Compaq and Red Hat executives indicated that a key goal of this expanded relationship is to ensure that programs can be created in a "single source code implementation, compiled on either Compaq Tru64 Unix or Red Hat Linux."
First notice it says "Red Hat Linux", not GNU/Linux. Also, I fail to see how modifications to the distro that enable "single source code implementation" between Red Hat and Tru64 will benefit Linux. If I write to this model can I compile my code on other Linux distro's - I don't think so.
IMHO ( I accept I could be wrong ) a public Red Hat will be responsible to its share holders ( that's the LAW ) not the Linux community. So what happens when the needs of the share holders conflict with the needs of the Linux community ?
Linux is not Unix. Not anymore...
Five years ago I bought the TeX book. Today most Red Hat and Debian users will buy the Word Perfect book form the local bookstore. Only on good days, pico is used more than WP. Don't know for sure if this is all true, but the days are near for this to happen. Prise Linux, Amen!
May I ask how many people know emacs, or sed?
I found problems with:
1. Star Office on the new glibc won't work - lots of hacks are required to get it to work.
2. Gnome 1.0 is unstable (core dumps galore - and slow gnome startups)
3. Annoying enlightenment bugs (e.g. clicking on the gnome panel won't raise the selected window)
4. A hw clock adjust "feature" in the init script that is more trouble than it's worth.
5. Latest Netscape required some environment variables set to its start-up script before it stopped hanging mysteriously...
RedHat 6.0 should not have been released with the unstable Gnome 1.0. Don't get me wrong, I *love* gnome, and it works fine since I applied the rpm updates, but out of the box of 6.0 it is just unusable.
And did anyone at RedHat bother to try StarOffice? I realise the bug is with StarOffice, and not with RedHat, but at least they should have made sure that it works before including it in the CD!
Oh yeah, tens of millions of people with knowledge and expertise OUTSIDE of computers are totally going to blow Windows away and install this hash in its place.
Excuse me, I have to finish my very expensive whisky and hit the rack. I have to get up around mid-morning tomorrow and get back to the drudgery of getting rich programming for Windows.
Thank you, Linux hackers, for making my future secure. Payback? Here's fifty bucks, go scrape the hull of my boat.
There was a closed beta for a few months before the public beta appeared on the FTP server. I ran the private beta for a couple months, and ran the public beta until the 6.0 release came out.
.15 is still not as stable as I would hope, but restarting enlightenment or restarting X has been the most I have ever had to do to get back to work. Even then, my enlightenment causes me far fewer headaches than the Mac and NT developers in the same room.
:)
I had very few problems with the private beta, only a couple problems with the public beta, and have been running the 6.0 final release without interruption (with the exception of the 2.2.5-22 kernel upgrade) since.
I will admit that enlightenment
Apart from enlightenment/GNOME problems, my RH6.0 has been flawless.
I guess YMMV, and my MPG is much greater than yours
Know what?
-David
But that would make him kind of an idiot, wouldn't it? Jesus, is it too late to get involved in computers full time? I had a brilliant idea about twelve years ago and it make a lot of dough; I had no idea I could coast on it for so long if I just dedicated my time to the means and blew off the ends.
If it's worth duping a million times for free, it's worth selling. Please don't make a resume out of all the hard work you've given away: your Real Job, assuming you get one, will rent you your desk chair and make you clock out for lunch. You've been warned.
(Academic idiots and kept researchers: of COURSE this doesn't apply to you. Others: you will never be an academic idiot or kept researcher.)
Miguel will make a perfect successor to RMS. Long live Miguel! Long live Li-GNU-X!
I agree.
/var/db/pkg along with any other binary packages or ports you may have installed in the past. If you decide you no longer want the program on your system, it's as easy as typing:
*NOTHING* could be easier than installing a FreeBSD port -- I don't think I could live without the ports collection nowadays. It beats the RPM system hands down.
The ports collection combines the optimization benifits of compiling from source with package based installation/deinstallation -- all with one simple "make install" command. If you don't have the source tarball on your system (or it can't be located), "make install" even takes care of downloading it for you (including any other tarballs that the program may depend on).
If you're anything like me and are frequently compiling programs from source, this is a blessing! Having to remove a program that you've compiled from source is never an easy task, particularly if it's a library and has installed binaries, headers, info-files and man pages everywhere. You've got to locate every file one by one and delete them by hand.
FreeBSD's Ports Collection solves this.
When the program is installed, a record is kept of "what went where", and a package entry placed in
$ pkg_delete foo-0.1b
-jake
test
Because with OSS, everyone benefits, not just the company.
Unfortunately it's not just 6.0, the same applied to 5.0 and , even worse because not a x.0 release, to 5.1. .30 was not even easily installable (in contrast to SuSE, which provided excellent packages).
In 5.1 they introduced this terribly confusing dual-compiler setup (gcc/egcs) which broke a lot of programs. Instead of cleaning up the 5.0 distro, they introduced many new bugs and quirks.
Gnome
5.2 was only slightly better, and much behind the expectations I had.
6.0 is once again a M$-quality x.0 release (broken KDE pre-release setup etc.), and now it's even prohibitively expensive...
In one word: Stay clear of RedHat, in particular the x.0 releases. If you *really* need it (customer support, corporate strategy) try Mandrake, which fixes the most serious bugs and keeps the packages up-to-date.
In that case:
SOLARIS IS NOT UNIX.
AIX IS NOT UNIX.
*BSD IS NOT UNIX.
SCO IS NOT UNIX.
IRIX IS NOT UNIX.
ETC. ETC...
Linux behaves like Unix ergo it is Unix.
StarOffice does suck. It doesn't have to be installed by each user, but if you have one install that multiple users are going to use, you basically have to give everyone read/write access to its directory. I think the Office50/explorer directory may be the only one that actually needs read/write access for every user, but I've deleted the monstrosity so I can't tell ya.
The program was obviously written on Windows first and ported to Linux by people who hardly know the OS. The Office50/explorer directory is the default directory for opening and saving files (as opposed to $HOME) and the GUI library they're using is probably some kind of translation of MFC to X. One reason NT sucks so badly is that individual users need read/write access to almost every Windows program's folder, not so much because of the way NT is designed, but because developers have built up bad habits from writing for single-user systems like 95/98 or the MacOS. I only hope that StarOffice isn't the future of commercial apps for Linux.
Poets tend to be dumbasses as I imagine your mom is, look she had you.
Umm GPL allows selling of CDs in stores, Ive seen people selling Red Hat copies at computer shows and I am sure its only a matter of time they are in the stores right along the "official" red hat cds. When these companies are gonna sell them for like 10 bucks I think it will be clear RH is not out to screw anyone and the price is mostly for the guaranteed support. If other companies think they can sell CDS and support for less then they will be right along side RH cds in the stores too.
Get off the little yellow bus and join the real world
It would seem that the idea of "what someone is willing to pay for" could possibly excuse a lot of the corruption and human neglect in 1st world societies. -->" I write programs that launch missiles that kill people in foreign countries...well, my wife asked me for a vacation to Greece last week, now how in the hell can I pay for that? Of course, I need to make money. So, I'll just work for what someone is willing to pay me to do. (Rationalization ends here). "Yes sir, I will program the crosshairs in the GUI, but you better pay me dammit I'm worth it."
OK, we all need money. But it is not from a morally benevolent being, just ask any poor man.
Don't barricade the suburbs from the rest of the world or munchkin people will attack the Mercedes.
About time.
RedHat shipped with KDE until it became popular to do otherwise.....in other words after Debian and the FSF boycotted it.
Course if they had stuck to this resolution instdead of following the crowd I would have respected them more. The KDE deal was a bad thing, no claiming it as some great stand will change that fact. Everyone who hopped onto that particular bandwagon is just fucked.
That is important, but its also nice that the fact we actually own the OS, instead of lease it, and that serious security problems get solved fast, instead of downloading a huge patch, that causes problems as it corrects others. Since we own the OS, we can even solve our own problems, we can custimize it, that is not good for everyone but its good for quite a few. Other things to consider is the moral/ethics of the company you buy from, because they can effect you in the long run.
I use Redhat on two different machines. I will continue to use Redhat, and I will continue to lend my CD-Roms (purchased from CheapBytes) to my friends to save them a few dollars.
Anyone who thinks Redhat is evil doesn't understand that the market is changing. More than ever before, open standards are seen as superior. Redhat's increased brand-awareness will only serve to push the status-quo toward widespread acceptance of OSS.
Redhat is a good way for people to get to know linux. After that, Debian is also an option. Note that Debian uses RPM's (thanks to Redhat) to increase its distributability.
The biggest hurdles for linux (or any other M$ alternative) will be establishing a distribution network and providing quick and easy software updates. The OSS model has the potential to revolutionize both of these. Redhat Software is the materialization of OSS's shift into the mainstream.
...because they are selling more units and therefore control what features will become dominant in the market place. This steers development in the direction supported by the top distro. We all want a uniform compatible Linux right? If Debian were selling the most distros, I'm sure we'd all be bashing them too.
If you had read the whole article, you will notice that Miguel is satisfied that the new QT license is free, and that the QT license issue is history.
Clearly Miguel has let the issue die, and is prepared to say so publicly. You seem to be the one who is keeping it alive.
.. Well actually it does, but I couldn't think of a subject within in the size constraints that would be pertinent to the message.. RedHat sells two version of RedHat 6.0, one for $40 and one for $80. The $80 version comes with more stuff, better technical support, and is sold in stores. The $40 version still comes with technical support and manuals, but its more oriented towards repeat RedHat buyers (people who are familiar with Linux) and thus its only sold via the net. So you don't have to pay $80 for their distribution, you can pay $40 and stll give them a little support!.
I am the asshole who wrote the above drivel. I am sorry for posting it, in fact I am sorry for being a coward who does not dare to use his own name. I am sorry for quoting great Linus out of context, I now understand that even though he who writes the code can decide what the license is this does not mean the license is a good one. I am sorry for badmouting GNOME and I am sorry for giving once again bad name for all KDE users and developers. I am sorry for ever being born. Next time I will use my own name so that no one can pose as me :) No wait there will be no next time...
Ahhh.... /etc/skel/.bashrc .netscape/lock yet again when I saw this post. BTW, the rm -i aliasing was affecting EVERYONE, not just root. Didn't think to check the skel directory. Wouldn't it make more sense for this to be in /etc/bashrc so one change would fix everyone?
Now that will fix the problem for everybody (of course after I fix it for root and my own account). Sorry about the rant but my systems' been going psycho lately and I was trying to rm
Does it mean that they could take 20% of the stock they float, put it in to a trust, open up the IPO, watch it blow a hole in the roof, sell the stock on the open market and have a hacker's trust fund worth billions?
I've never understood the Redhat fear, sure they are a company and sure they are out to make money but they are about as altruistic as any software company around. Much better than any of the hardware guys you buy your hardware from... The true test will be when they get serious competition, but they've been so good about keeping things free that a lot of the competition bases their products on Redhat's distribution. I hope the money doesn't go to their head, I'm kind of inclined to think it won't because they seem to have a good understanding of the community.
The hype is starting to die down (I've noticed more non-Linux articles on Slashdot).
GNOME will never prevail over KDE. Nor will KDE kill GNOME. Development in Linux will become more split as developers are forced to choose between KDE or GNOME development. We have already seen the wheel reinvented many times. Right now GNOME developers are racing to beat KDE developers in applications. KDE already started the race with KOffice. GNOME is playing catch-up with gnumeric and misc. other hack-togethers. While KDE started development with stability a priority (don't know if it still is) GNOME started off with creating quick hacks as to catch-up with KDE.
The only reason Red Hat wanted Qt to die was because they could not sell programs created with Qt without giving royalties to Troll Tech. They are total hypocrites when they publish documents saying how Qt is bad because you can not modify source code when they shipped Netscape and others that don't even have source code.
Linux's only destiny is to fade away.
Anyways.. it's just software. Meaningless bits of bullshit. Stop fucking it all up and just use it. Before computers altogether become a nerds-only thing again. You are all taking for granted the popularity Microsoft/IBM gave to computers. Be happy you can even use a computer at work instead of insist on using your favorite OS (your favorite won't always be your neighbor's). Once Microsoft is gone I don't think Linux will be able to keep the common user happy.. and I don't think Red Hat has big enough balls to be the next Microsoft anyways.
OK, so you devote the time that you spend on a computer to volunteer work. Good for you! Volunteerism is a good thing. However, I noticed that while you're bashing on people who write software for pay, you don't bother to ask what (if anything) they do for free in their off hours.
Consider the following people:
(a) A carpenter who volunteers in a soup kitchen on weeknights.
(b) A waiter who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity on weekends.
Is one of these people better than the other? Should Carpenter chastise Waiter, simply because Waiter charges people for food? Should Waiter chastise Carpenter, simply because Carpenter charges people to build houses? Of course not.
Of course, if Waiter started building houses for the rich, then I wouldn't be surprised if Carpenter got mad. Similarly, if the Carpenter started giving away gourmet food in the lobby of Merrill-Lynch at lunchtime, I wouldn't be surprised if Waiter got mad.
Now, consider this one:
(c) You, who does X for a living, and volunteers to write software.
(d) Someone else, who writes software for pay, and does X in his spare time for free.
I bet you can do the math. You have no call to criticize Software Boy for writing software, just as he has no call to criticize you for doing X. If anything, HE may be able to criticize YOU for providing free software to people who can pay for it. That one goes the other way, of course, but I don't know what X is.
I think that I've made my point, but I'm going to go a (controversial) step further, while I'm on the ol' soapbox.
For all of you out there who think that you're doing the Lord's work by writing free software, guess what? Free software is not the ultimate in altruism. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's pretty low on the altruism totem pole, compared to, say, youth outreach, helping illiterates learn how to read, most kinds of work with the poor, and a LOT of other things. Now, hey, if that's where your particular skill lies, and you really enjoy it, then go for it, it IS appreciated. But don't get high-n-mighty about it. Frankly, I'd rather see you spending your time teaching underprivileged children the basics of computing.
And maybe the person that you criticized does just that. Maybe not, but you didn't bother to ask.
This sort of article is the type of crap I get sick of. It's not a straightforward RH bashing, but it's nevertheless plays into that mentality.
but RH is a business run by businessmen.
So what? I've heard this argument again and again and again in the Linux community, and it makes no sense.
It's a business. That in itself is not evil. It makes it different...or are you just admitting you are scared of something that is "different"? Do you really need to be reminded that *many* businesses promote research and extend technologies everyday, ranging from computer technologies, engineering, and basic science research? We buy from them as consumers _all the time_. If they're bad, we've been buying from them for ages and are implicated in their longevity.
Really--I think it's because of the threat of a "business mentality" calls up all sorts of bad images. But frankly, we view the worse and forget the best and average that businesses produce. A different mentality in the Linux community isn't going to kill us, and if we can't handle it, Linux deserves to be splintered for their incapacity of staying together.
However, should this get taken too far, Debian is right there.
And? Are people so caught up against Red Hat that they've forgotten the basic principles behind Open Source? It's been like this ever since someone modified Open Source source code. You have a choice to use it or not. You have a choice to modify it.
Not to mention, this "Debian is right there" approaches more of a _business_ attitude: there is competition. You know what? Good. I like that. Better code is written, more products are released, programs and distros improve.
All this RH bashing is simply like-MS sentiment brought into the Linux community. People use what they will and what they want. They have the right to be stupid. But, as the MetroWerks article a few days ago showed, there are people that have created RH FUD. MetroWerks NEVER had an exclusive agreement, and RH NEVER forced them to. But people here still insist, without evidence, that RH is evil because of a product's packaging. If you don't want it shrink wrapped, don't buy it.
Yes, I develop closed source applications. I support AIX 4.x, Solaris 2.5 and up, HP-UX 10.2 and up, and Red Hat Linux 5.2 and up.
No, not Linux 2.x, but Red Hat. Why? Because with 3 other platforms to develop on I don't want to take the time to see what, if any, differences I might find on Debian, Slackware, or any of the others. By supporting Red Hat, I can cover Intel, Sparc, and Alpha in a fairly straight forward fashion. Why did I choose Red Hat? It was an easy choice, I already had it and so did the customer.
You want people like me to open the code? Not going to happen. You want me to support all versions of Linux? Pay me more money. Does that make me just another developer whore? I'll let you decide.
If you have worked in a Help Desk/Support environment, you'll know the importance of having a similar environment in which all your users (that you support) are working in. It is much easier to train techs to know what problems might pop up between your applications and one distribution of Linux that between your applications and all/any distribution.
At this point, it is enough of a stretch for many of these vendors to train their techs on one distribution of Linux and we should be happy with it. As Linux becomes more and more mainstream, it will become more cost-effective for these vendors to support their apps on multiple distributions and they will.
For now, be happy with what you can get.
(I speak for myself, and only myself.)
vgesgis wrote:
Red Hat convinced TrollTech? When and in with regard to what?
You misunderstood what I wrote. I said Red Hat actively tried to convince Troll Tech to Free their source, not that they convinced them.
I have no knowledge of whether or not there were direct meetings between Red Hat employees and Troll Tech employees, but there were a few public announcements from Red Hat saying in effect "We think Troll Tech should consider changing their licensing". At the same time, many other individuals and organizations were also trying to convince Troll Tech to do the same.
Since then, Troll Tech has produced the QPL, and released some beta software under it. Nobody can legitimately say "Red Hat convinced them", since that implies they deserve all the credit, which they don't. On the other hand, Troll Tech was convinced, and Red Hat was part of the group convincing them.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Anonymous Coward asks:
what is it that they do? put together a linux installation? i can do this too, you can do this;
Yes, but neither of us can do it as well as Red Hat did. Hell, I'd have trouble doing it as well as Slackware did.
why did rasterman leave them? he obviously thought there's smth wrong with them. (i can't see using anything but e)
I do not know why he decided to leave, I would think that he felt the working environment was wrong for him. Rasterman has always seemed to have more of an Artist's temperament than a Programmer's, and they put him in RHAD Labs with a bunch of hardcore programmers.
All I know is what I've observed, and I've observed a couple of design arguments on public mailing lists between him and other RHAD developers. It seemed like they had good ideas, and he had good ideas, but they just weren't speaking the same language. If he can get the backing (and I think he could) Raster would do well to start his own company.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
RinkRat asks:
How does the recent announcement(s) of software that is supported under "RH only" work into this? Is there something added/mangled by RH to enforce this or are the companies only going to offer support if you say that you have an RH release. (Purchased or dl'ed? Will there be a difference?)
There is nothing added by Red Hat to Linux to enforce "Red Hat Only" software. When you see proprietary Linux software labeled "For Red Hat Linux", all it means is that they only bothered to test it on Red Hat (and probably only a specific version of Red Hat). If you try to use it on anything else, they won't support you. This is not Red Hat's doing, it is lazy commercial developers.
And who decides these things? The software companies?
Yes.
Or RH? "We'll give you $X if you only support RH..."
To my knowledge Red Hat has never done this; not even with developers they have had special agreements with (such as TriTeal and Applix). In fact, Red Hat has actively tried to convince several companies to Free their source code (eg. Intel, TrollTech).
----
Open mind, insert foot.
RedHat would have had to pay 0 royalties to put QT in RedHat. The reason why they didn't was that it was not free (as in free speech), not free (as in free beer).
And please don't stoop to deluded paranoid ramblings about RPM.
2. Being paid to code is bad. Being paid to write proprietary code is bad. I hope I never fall so low as to need to get a job like that.
2. Being paid to code is good, being paid to write proprietary code is bad.
Back at Comdex (April 20something) Dan Quinlin and Maddog Hall said roughly in six months the first release of the LSB standards would be laid out. Then I'd expect about the beginning of 2000 for the different distributions to put the final tweaks to their dist to make them compliant with the standards.
Still, they aren't touching desktop environments at this time. So I doubt there'd be any mention of needing Qt/GTK libraries. Personally, I'd be thrilled if a second or third standards draft required both sets of libraries. Choice is the key thing I enjoy most in Linux.
but he should STFU and worry about GNOME instead... Uh, Oh yeah, I forgot RedHat's connection to GNOME.
Ah well I'm gonna burn in hell for using SuSE anyway so what do I know.
Be real..put yer _own_ distro together. After all you can just download the parts. Or better yet write your own kernel and utilities. Debians great but if I wannabee hard core I should download it, right? Why should the evil CD replication plant make any money? Or the evil CheapBytes or the evil post office? Or the evil book store? Maybe I should just shoot myself...
Seriously though, everybody should use what _they_ want and if things get out of hand... use a _different_ BRAND. Thats what the distros are anyway _BRANDS_ like any other consumer item. Whether you like it or not.
However, should this get taken too far, Debian is right there. It will run the software in most cases, is IMHO higher quality, and while it has its own problems (nothing is perfect) it is basically immune to the kind of corporate wheeling and dealing people are so afraid of. Don't think Red Hat isn't aware that if they make a big stumble Debian is right there to pick up the pieces. This will go a long way toward 'keeping them honest'.
As an interesting aside (to me anyway), I talked to an engineer a while back from a company who shall remain nameless ;) that ships a "Red Hat Linux" supported product. He said that all their development is done on Debian. Go figure.
In addition, I've heard that people are having problems with gcc. Doesn't affect me, as I'm using egcs for a compiler.
Try looking at /root/.bashrc
Maybe you should stop and learn more about Linux....
Previous RedHat releases had a value-add to the $49 version by including proprietary software. Metro-X, Real Server, BRU backup, and a few other programs (Netscape at the time) come to mind.
The result of that being that you could only install one RedHat per physical CD (again, this is for the $49 and not the power tools release).
The 6.0 release has none of these restrictions, since there doesn't appear to be any commercial software (except for on the Application CD, and each app has their own license). This then makes no difference between the FTP, CheapBytes, and $80 version, except the $80 has printed manuals and 30 days of phone support. And you can buy it in a store.
I've been a RH user since the 2.0 days, and it's an excellent distro. RPM far surpasses other package management systems. The technical support (what I've needed) has been excellent. Updates are quick, upgrading systems is easy, installation is pretty much painless. I'm not sure if the Official 6.0 is worth $80, but I paid it to show my support.
(Disclaimer: I'm writing a book on administration of RedHat-based machines - hopefully to be published late this summer)
So what? People are going to complain no matter what you do so quit worrying about it. Move on.
Just finish the Linux Standard Base specification and we can all code for the standard and it wont matter WHAT distro you use... the program will work.
Nuff said.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Posted by n0paL:
You Zealot. I don't care if you prefer Debian or not, but doing that kind of comments is by no ways fair to RedHat or whatever distribution.
Posted by Gingrich:
:-)
I also question the comments about the maturity of
RH 6.0. My experience is that it is the first time
that I've had a clean upgrade (and I've done 4.2-
5.0-5.1-5.2-6.0
Of course, I may have finally learned how to do
the upgrade correctly.
-Don
I've got to say that I've had problems with instability in RH6.
When I upgraded from Starbuck, GNOME would freeze everything (not just X) every couple of days.
Choosing an upgrade from Starbuck also somehow corrupted my XF86Config file (I had to run Xconfigurator again). With all the changes in xdm and xfs, I think that upgrade releases are of limited value.
I have since wiped and reloaded RH6, and the stability is much improved.
Something I've come across numerous times, is that I think the Red Hat distribution sucks. No offense meant here, because I admin several Red Hat machines as part of my job, but it is too far afield of UNIX for me to like. For a tiny example, the default bash prompt is unwieldy and uninformative, showing (IMHO) a lack of attention to detail that also shows itself in poorly documented and undocumented configuration files and scripts. Other things, like the default not-quite-right behavior of backspace in xterms, is as annoying as it is easy to fix. More importantly, Gnome (at least the Gnome that comes on a Red Hat 6.0 CD) is still not ready for prime time, and has annoying glitches or default behaviors that have no place in a production environment. On the other hand, I was amazed by some of the accurate system-snooping the Red hat install did on my system; for the most part I didn't have to correct it.
So, in my opinion: Red Hat is an awesome company that deserves to be commended for its staunch support of Free Software, and I welcome them the money they will hopefully make by being the most-commercially-supported distribution. Further, for anyone familiar and comfortable with UNIX and computers I recommend Debian and/or Slackware.
--Matthew
Will you Unix users stop thinking Linux is some kind of cheap Unix?
It's not a cheap UNIX, but for all intents and purposes it is UNIX. As jwz has been quoted many times as saying, "Linux is only cheap if you don't value your time." That comment cuts both ways, and the same could be said of any free quality software.
I really enjoy Linux, but not Red Hat Linux. As I think I explained already, Red Hat is not the result of as much thought as some other distributions I could name.
As for 'Linux books,' which would you recommend? I already have Slackware Linux Unleashed, Linux in a Nutshell, The Complete Linux Kit, and maybe another one or two.
--Matthew
People claiming that Red Hat only does not exist, and that Red Hat doesn't do anything to enforce that. Well what about the great libstdc++ fiasco? Right now because RedHat chose to make their version of it incompatable with everyone else's I can't use the latest version of Netscape.
Of course if I were using an open source browser in the first place I might have more luck.
I realize that there will always be competition between people. I realize that your X is better than someone else's Y.
But, give me a break people. I'm on the Window Maker Mailing list. Someone asked a question on if they could get rid of the dock & the clip through checkboxes, and how he was using E right now, but wanted to use WM. All the person got was flames. Instead of a simple 'no', or a reason for a 'no', there were several postings about how much E sucks. How much GTK sucks. Absolutley nothing constructive of this question happened. One of the last postings to the thread pointed out that the binary already has some of these flags built in.
Yes, the RedHat distribution is different of that of Debian or Slackware. I don't really care for it much. However, the fact that RedHat has brought us more choice outweighs my dislike of RedHat. Like it or not, GNOME is going to help the Linux community grow. So will KDE.
Which is better?
vi or emacs?
E or WM?
Ford or Chevy?
351 Winston or a 350 short block?
I'm also a believer that good does, in fact, come from flame wars. I know that I have learned quite a bit from them. It's also good to get various points on a specific topic.
But.
All in all. I would ask one thing. The next time you are going to flame someone about something trivial like asking what the 'ls' command does. Or if they can have checkboxes in WM to disable/enable functions. Don't flame them. Type out the message. Don't send it.
Just remember we all crawled at one time.
Also remember that (this isn't meant to be a flame, more that we all do it) 640k will be more than enough to run any computer software.
"from people who pay nothing for a product"
...except maybe hundreds of hours of voluntary work! Many of us donate a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to create something (or make it better) and freely donate it to the "greater good" of the whole hacker community. I find it offensive to think that someone is taking my work and making money off it without giving anything back to the community. (Does that make me a spoiled brat?) I don't mind someone making money from Linux, as long as they are a good member of the community.
That's the whole point of Miguel's letter. He is trying to point out that RedHat is a great member of the hacker community and continually donates to "Linux". He also seems to agree that an ISV who supports ONLY RH Linux 6.0 is a problem. Not only because they're locked into RH but also because they are locked into a kernel and platform.
Anyway, most of us are NOT spoiled brats! Most of us are thrilled to see companies making money by selling Linux distros, hardware, utils, and support. We just want to keep the things that made linux great in the first place, namely, power and freedom.
That is all,
-Derek
As far as Code Warrior is concerned, there are next to no problems running it on another distribution. Right now, I'm running a flawless commercial copy of Code Warrior on my Stampede GNU/Linux 0.89 machine. I don't use RPM, but alien solved that problem. Also, Code Warrior includes it's own libraries, so library incompatibilities are not an issue.
Let's be honest, Redhat is not a solid distribution. It is flaky. It's probably the last distribution I would consider. However, it is the biggest name, arguably the most popular, and for Metrowerks to support them is not unusual. They can't expect to figure out how their product works on every distribution on the planet, and they probably won't be releasing their killer product as Open Source. So they had to pick a distribution. So what.
Bottom line: Redhat is nearly the standard, as are RPMs. It's too bad, but it's not RedHat's fault. They're successful, and it would be silly to expect them to apologize for it.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
It is up to each one of us to make the decision on what software to use and what software to avoid. Back just a few months ago as Red Hat dropped Metro-X and all non-free software, they had to decide what to do with KDE. Since at the time KDE was GPL but the Qt toolkit wasn't Red Hat decided that this invalidated KDEs GPL.
They were right. It did!
A lot of people say "Who cares!", and "We need a fancy desktop like KDE if we are going to compete with Windows." So they stayed with KDE and the rest of us, including Red Hat, went to Gnome. They went with Gnome knowing that it would take longer to make it stable.
So now every KDE supporter compares KDE 1.2 to Gnome 1.0. They talk about Gnome being a waste of time. They even bring racism into it.
I think that building the GUI and toolkit from the ground up is a better idea for the Free Software culture in the long run. Red Hat made the decision to support Gnome at a time when KDE looked like the way to go. They did it because only FREE would do.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
interesting. i have been using rh6.0 since the day it hit the mirrors practically, and i have never seen this problem. and i only use tcsh
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
probably because of esd. just a guess, but i bet that mandrake does not use esd by default, and i think (i'm not sure) that redhat does (mine does, but that is on purpose, not by default)
on the redhat box try changing the output plugin of x11amp to libesdout.so (the audio i/o tab of the options dialog)
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Ok, in some ways I agree with you. There are a lot of self-proclaimed, so-called 'experts' out there flapping off at the mouth about things they have no clue or historical perspective on. And I think the Gnome vs. KDE thing was a great example. But I have to say 'vi vs. emacs' is really not a fad. It's part of the unix culture. Yes you still have flame-fests on this topic, from people who haven't been around long enough to know better, but the whole vi vs. emacs thing goes back so far as to be an integral part of the unix culture. It's part of our history. I love the vi vs. emacs debate. ;-)
/.
Internet Time, I ignored this one, but you are probably right.
RMS vs. ESR, yeah, though to a much lesser extent.
Jon Katz, no.
I can only assume you say that it was a fad because teh number of katz hater posts has gone down. (I don't know if this is true or not, I'm making an assumption.) If that's why you say this I would like to point out I highly doubt it's because it's a 'fad'. Frankly whether he's supposed to be a 'god' or 'insightful' he's failed miserably on both counts. I've seen one article from him that was worth reading, and that was his collection of emails regarding the persecution of people who are different in the backlash following the columbine massacre. The real reason those comments have declined is because the most vocal anti-katz people, the people who had real reasons to complain, and specific examples to cite and aren't just looking for a place to vent in general gained the option to block his articles. Out of sight, out of mind. Half the time I forget he even exists anymore. If we were all forced to see his articles again I have a feeling the number of anti-katz articles would have another huge upswing.
Sorry Jon, I'm sure your a nice guy and all. I don't hate you personally, I don't even know you. And I'm sure there's a place for your writing, but I really don't think it's
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
You could at least punctuate when you spew their press kit.
It's nice to see someone with some clout defending redhat. Redhat might not do every last little thing right, but they are certianly not the great satan that alot of misinformed users think. I think the existance of redhat has been good for the community.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
In my opinion, the redhat's rc file setup is one of the best designs that I've seen yet. Very organized. Maybe you just need someone to explain to you how it works and you might change your mind about it.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
My problem involves doing a shutdown -h now and when it gets to the end of the shutdown procedure, when it should say System halted a large number of sets of text and numbers wrapped in left and right arrows fill the screen. Anyone have a clue? I've installed it on two separate machines and have ths same problem. Very odd. Doesn't do it with SuSE 6.1 or Redhat 5.2.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Thanks a lot for the reply, I'll look into it.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Well, once development of the 5.x tree forked into 6.0, it was only in alpha/beta/whatever form on the FTP servers for about a month. Compare that to the 3 or more months most new-version distro's spend getting kicked around before full release.
;-) ). But then we both installed 6.0. He now runs mandrake and I am going back to Slack.
I have associates running quake 2/3 servers on 5.2, with uptimes of 120+ days. That includes them HUPing init and all sorts of crazy stuff (Kevin
As stated, I have no problem with Red Hat, I just have seen some things in version 6.0 that should not exists, especially with it sitting on the shelf at Best Boy. (ha ha)
PS: Quote from my boss: "You reading that slapshot page again?!!?!" Hillarious.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
I dont know the particulars of that distro (mandrake). Like I said, my friend tried it. He said it is really clean and stable, but I have not worked on it yet.
./configure etc.
The greatest thing about Red Hat has got to be RPMs. I know that Debian has their schtik and other distro's can user RPM's. It is a cool system, though sometimes kind of unreasonable. I never had too many problems with
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
Specifically, I had the following issues:
:-)
1) Gnome would quit and take X with it
2) Netscape crashed consistantly (waybe not RH's fault)
3) xconfigurator chowed my settings a few times during reconfiguration, leading to a busted X
4) Minor small stuff
I understand and agree with the release early, release often methodology, but my real point was that if they are going to sell this distro and try to sway people to linux with it, it should be rock solid. Even idiot proof, but I know that that is impossible, given the vast number of creative idiots out there
PS: Things like 'Apache Default configuration' do not baffle me. In fact, the only thing that bothered me about the included apache was that I did not compile it.
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I fully understand capitalism and expenses. The only point THAT I HAVE CONTINUALLY TRIED TO MAKE is that people look at Red Hat as the commerical linux leader for the desktop market, and thus any release that they make available to the average joe should be as solid as humanly possible.
I dont care if my install crashes. i do care if a marketing VP of billiondollar co. tries redhat to see if it is ready for the million machines in his company, and it crashes.
Get it? I can crash my own computer, thank you very much. My OS does not need to help.
PS: That was a fairly insightful comment, coming from a possible warez d00d (L1zard_K1n6).
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
I have no problem with the business practices of Red Hat. I think that a commercial linux is a good thing. I do, however, feel that the version of 6.0 released (and sold!) was immature, and not ready for commericial distribution. If PHB's are going to be swayed by a commercial distribution of linux, it should be rock solid. I have had many persistent and perplexing problems with 6.0.
.14 version. It is a shame that development and integration of Enlightenment will no longer be a part of Red Hat.
On the flip side, the distribution is feature filled, including many great packages like Gimp, Gnome and Enlightenment. Which, by the way, has matured vastly since the
A distribution with a de facto window manager is important, and Enlightenment is not only visually attractive, but powerful as well.
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While not a Red Hat user myself, I have no complaints that companies are using it as a "supported" platform. I think one of Miguel's main points, that the platform supported should be an issue as well, is something many people overlook. While people may complain because something is supported only under RH, or because a program doesn't have a libc5 version released as well, for some reason many people forget that there are a minority of Linux users who aren't using x86 platforms.
As for what *truly* proprietary would be, imagine this scenario:
A new company, JoeCool Linux comes out. They start out with a distribution not unlike Caldera or SuSE, in that they have both open source software and some bundled commercial apps. But the newest version of JoeCool suddenly has a libjoecool with the distribution. While no one knows quite what this does, everyone runs out to buy the new version of a commercial word processor that was "supported" only under JoeCool with past versions. They assume that "runs only on JoeCool" on the box is just wording, since the app will be obviously compatible with any other distribution. But after installation, the user tries to run the program, and finds that it won't work because it seems to be linked against a certain libjoecool, a library that is closed source and only comes with a licensed JoeCool distribution.
So you see, if you find anything disagreeable now, things could be a lot worse.
A small, vocal minority of the community is worried about Red Hat suddenly becoming an evil, "bad guy" company that will take over Linux and ruin it for everyone. I think this is a joke. Let's take a look at the facts, shall we???
* Red Hat releases all software they write under the GPL, period.
* Since their distro-specific software is GPL'd, Red Hat relies on their brand name to drive sales. The only thing keeping their customers from switching to another Linux distro is our satisfaction with their product. The last thing a company in this position wants to do is to piss off their clientele! They will continue to do what their users' request, or they will go out of business.
* Success has not corrupted Red Hat. They continue to produce useful, GPL'd software. Their distro is still available for free FTP download.
I guess in this case, some believe that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc, it must be The New Microsoft. Maybe some people will never let the facts get in the way of severe paranoia.
Instead of speculating what Red Hat *might* do, let's instead look at what their trackrecord is extrapolate the future from there.
Wish I could pre-moderate this as flamebait.
Sorry, just couldn't resist.
Sorry 'bout that. Just feeling contrarian.
But really, didn't Linus develop the original linux kernel because he wanted an inexpensive way to learn/hack UNIX? It's UNIX enough that you really don't HAVE to buy a Linux book, although it's different enough that it's certainly a good idea.
MY ADVICE: Fart Proudly.
**>>BELCH
You want people like me not to clone your product and create an open-source version, thereby forcing you out of the proprietary software business.
And there you have it. The reason that small vertical market closed source software is the only closed source software that will ever survive.
Anyplace where there is a sufficient market to draw programmers from OSS will necasarily triumph. Nothing can stop that. It's almost like natural selection.
** Martin
Miguel seems to claim in this article that Redhat is a distribution with only OSS, while others mix and match the commercial and the free, and thus make free distribution impossible. This is absolutely false. Anyone who has recently bought a CD from Redhat, S.u.S.E., or Caldera knows that all three ship with closed-source software. I think this is great, many people *want* Wordperfect, Sybase, DB2, ect. and many distributions offer this out of the box making linux an easier system to get up and running as a server than the commercial unices or NT, and that's a plus. Everyone also knows that all three distributions offer themselves free for download, minus those commercial apps. The only noticable difference is that Redhat offers its commercial apps on a seperate CD, thus saving ones time in creating a seperate OSS-only ISO9660 image. This does not, however, mean that one can not distributed one of the other distros, and rather easily.
Personally, I do not think Redhat is evil or anything. They make some very major contributions, are pretty cool, and quite good in general. However, Redhat has become known for having extremely unstable x.0 distribs. 4.0 and 5.0, although featureful were so broken that I won't even look at 6 for a system I install until the next minor version is released. Furthermore, their install process in 5.* was often braindead, not restoring its connection with an ftp server until after it had already lost its first package, without which the system could not boot. Furthermore, Redhat has upped the cost of cds, has yet to get anywhere near S.u.S.E. in choice of software, nor anywhere near Caldera in easy of use. Their premature adoption of glibc was great for those of us who didn't adopt it until leater, but terrible for the newbies who got stuck with their system. I've never exactly been a big fan of rpm either.
I have no complaint about Redhat's corporate nature. However, the idea that they are more free than any other distro is absurd. Furthermore, Redhat has had plenty of technical shortcomings to fuel the disdain of Redhat naysayers without even getting into corporate motivations.
Saying something GNOME is more stable than Windows is saying a cute little bunny rabbit is more fiece than a stalk of cellery. Sure its true, but the comparison is worthless. GNOME 1.0 was less stable than KDE 0.7, let alone KDE 1.1.1. If you want a good example of software reachine stability, look at the mutt mailreader. Mutt is the most stable and most featureful mailreader out there, IMHO, and it is still listed as beta.
Red Hat has made strides and helped in many ways.
I have supported Red Hat in the past and continue
though not in my use of Linux.
I see Red Hat as the #1 packager of a free OS, and
retail arm of the Linux community. This does not make them perfect in the dealing with custmers, packaging, etc. Red Hat has in it's biggest need, marketing to win the Linux community, not just the
IPO related community.
I don't use Redhat's distro, NONE of my servers are Redhat,
I use Debian, but I will NOT bash redhat for three very simple reasons.
Alan Cox
David Miller
Stephen Tweedie
They Make LINUX better every Day and Every way,
I as a Linux USER benefit directly from their work.
If they thought that Red Hat was Evil in any way, these people wold not WORK for Redhat.
Redhat is a company, even great company's make mistakes, or do things that I do not agree with.
Oh and one other thing, Redhat has contributed SOURCE over and over again, how many people can claim that?
As a Debian user I use software that redhat helped develop, it makes my system MORE secure and easier
to use, the software? PAM.
This is just another example, of Redhat ability to produce source that I use every day and benefit.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
All this just means they are a company that has to make money, but it is completely useless to judge a company by these criteria. The crucial point is whether they open source (preferably GPL) all the software that they write, i.e., whether they contribute back to the community.
So far, they seem to be pretty good at that. They fund the development of GPLed code. As long as they do this, what is the problem if they charge a bit more for a CD. This only means that all the non-programmers and non-documentation writers give, indirectly, something back to the community.
Chilli
PS: And if you don't like their installer, why not write a better one?
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
I bought an official copy of RedHat 4.2, having used Walnut Creek compilations up until then. I didn't need the manual or the support, but I felt RedHat deserved some payback for liberating me from SunOS around about the time of version 3.0.3.
...
I slavishly upgrade whenever a new version of RedHat comes out, but since 4.2 I've burnt my own copies. Then came a change of job, and no more access to a CD writer. How was I going to get a copy of RedHat 6.0 (both Sparc and Intel)?
Easy. I bought them both at Cheapbytes for less than the cost of a blank CD in the UK.
I still buy my copies of Motif (sorry about the non-free software, but I need it for work) from RedHat, so they're getting something back from me using their distro.
The moral of this is:
Regardless of the price of an official boxset of RedHat, I don't have to pay that price, unless I want to
As for RedHat bashing, I agree that they only get slated because they are so popular. And the 'made for RedHat' syndrome also afflicts SuSE - Informix originally released their database only for SuSE Linux. But this is only a problem when you don't get the source. Even with semi-free packages like Qt, thanks to Troll Tech providing source, I can compile it on SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux, FreeBSD or even NetBSD.
Chris Wareham
The mere fact that some other product may, at some distant future point, gain dominance over a market does not indicate that a monopoly does not exist *now*. The fact that Microsoft could, right now, double the price of its Windows 98 without losing a significant portion of the desktop OS market is an indication of its monopoly power. Whether it can sustain its monopoly position for an extended period of time is another question.
They do a pretty good job at doing newish builds at the normal gnome mirrors. Look in gnome/gnome-1.0/redhat/i386 for base and devel sets...
jf
When, OH WHEN! are we going to have a distribution standard? When?
Is it really that hard to do for RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SUSE, and TurboLinux (Pacific-HiTec) to agree on a base set of libraries and partial system layout?
jf
I find RedHat good overall. Havta say I dont /usr( eg they mucked around with the KDE setup) for NFS mounting /usr/local are so lovable...:-) (or relocatable ones)
like all my software in
and multiple copies of same software(versions) reasons. I'm ok for most system stuff, but I'm sure most of you remembered hown GNOME rpms mucked wih libgtk, and thus gimp, and how you had to go through a song and dance to get both to co-exist.
rpm's which install into
My worry is not about Red Hat's motivations, but (a)possibly about market share arrogance..."we own most of the market so our standards are defacto standards and these are the ones we'll use"?
(b) with a IPO, they must care about their shareholders, not about us. Will their investor base be savvy enough?
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
> No, you're wrong. The fact that another OS can compete at all is indicative of the fact that MS is NOT a monopoly.
dude you have no fricking clue what you are talking about. the king of all monopolies the world has ever seen, standard oil, (rockefeller ring a bell?) NEVER had more than 90% of the oil market, and I'm talking ONLY about the United States. Standard Oil suffered heavily in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Monopoly does not mean 100%, where did you get that idea from?
By your definition, Standard Oil didn't have a monopoly, but he had plenty of competitors. Just because he didn't exterminate all of them doesnt mean he wasnt plenty powerful (or rich)...
Case in point, the old story about when the US government fined him $100 mill (note that this is before WW1, what would that be in today's money?!) Rockefeller raised the price of gasoline a penny the next day, and made it all back...
unc_
First: edit your /root/.bashrc to change this.
Second: If you didn't know this already, then you are exactly the person that this "are you really sure?" safety net is designed for. Remove it at your own risk.
Unnecessary testing? Let somebody know that next time a RH6 install crashes from some remote crash condition that exists in certain versions of the 2.2 kernels. BTW, your email account runs under FreeBSD. Aren't you glad for the "unnecessary" testing involved there?
Likewise, the point is not whether CodeWarrior will work with other Linux distributions or not. The problem is that it is being marketed as exclusively Red Hat. Other major binary Linux product releases have not been marketed this way.
Let's look at the facts.
Why specifically put for Red Hat in the name of the product when that will only result in undercutting the sales to all the other distributions, especially in a market where the number of customers could be significant?
I'm not trying to bash Red Hat but this makes absolutely no sense. More important, it divides the community. And, it's not the way things have been done--until now.
The rules have changed. I want to know why. Don't you?
First, I'll just say that Miguel is on target. I did work for Red Hat in the early days (employee #6) and the core values of the company were then, and remain, to be true to the GPL. IMHO I think the marketing layer at Red Hat has started to obfuscate those core values, and that is a shame, but the techies at Red Hat still work hard to do the "Right Thing". All the code they produce is GPL, Erik even maintains rpm2cpio so folks without rpm installed can use Red Hat packages if they choose.
On stability of x.0 releases, it all boils down to the simple fact that there isn't a beta program that has ever eliminated 100% of the bugs in a release. We've had problems with LILO in 6.0 on the laptops LHS sold. It just *won't work* for some reason, the 5.2 version is fine. When we shipped Red Hat 3.0.3 (the one that won awards for "Ugliest Packaging in a Major Distribution") there was a network issue that got me flooded with support email. IIRC it was NFS-related. The ironic thing was we had everything but the kitchen sink NFS mounted to the point that we could kill the entire network by bringing down any one of about 4 machines. (There were only 4 of us in the NC office then so it was a simple matter to torment the guilty party.
Now, with the IPO stuff going on comes the most disappointing thing to me. People at Red Hat who have opinions that they used to share freely are now somewhat gagged. Part of this is due to the simple fact that they don't want to give the SEC any reason to get upset. That's understandable. However it seems to run a lot deeper than that, and I can only attribute that aspect to the new management structure that apparently doesn't seem to "get it" quite yet. They've got an "IPO Cookbook" and they haven't fully figured out how to make it gel in this atmosphere. I'm pulling for them to get it worked out so they don't have to worry about backlash from the community.
These comments are strictly mine, any indication otherwise is unintended.
--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
on mine, it's in .bashrc:
alias rm='rm -i'
stygg
As the others have pointed out, it only means that the software is "certified" to work with the RH distribution by the proprietary manufacturer. If it were libre source, it would be meaningless, but the companies have chosen to release proprietary binaries, and thus the junk phrase.
It almost certainly means only that they certified with a specific set of libraries and directory structure. You should be able to get it running on just about any Linux system with the proper libs.
FUDmeisters are enamored of the phrase because they can raise false alarms. Pay no attention to them. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find some of them part of M$'s astro turf FUD campaign.
--
Infuriate left and right
The content of Miguel's message aside, I just wanted to remark about how classy his message was. No flaming, no nastiness, just a quiet and reasonable editorial about one way to look at the situation.
Thank you, Miguel.
I think he meant "releasing something as X.0 when it really has beta quality is against the spirit of open source". It should be released early and often, but it should be labeled beta until it is really stable. In other words, Redhat should have released 5.9.1, 5.9.2, 5.9.3 etc. util it was rock solid before calling it 6.0.
Seems that the version of NFS on the Red Hat 6.0 distribution is badly broken. My friendly local sysadmin spent some unpleasant hours figuring out why remote filesystems kept disappearing ...
I'm a poor player, but I'll strut and fret for an hour, if you like.
"Linux would have 100% of the server market"
Seriously, do you think that linux is the only open source unix OS out there? Then I guess that you have never heard of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... And as a matter of fact, all of those operating systems have a lot more security out of the box and are much better suited for the server market... I'm not saying that linux shouldn't be in the server market, I just think that it should definetely not be the only one.
Just my 2 cents.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
What does this say about your theory that Red Hat cares nothing for stability?
It says that you don't know what you are babbling about, that you are raving without knowing what you're talking about. Red Hat typically does not release kernel upgrades -- except for security reasons. Does that sound like they care nothing about stability?
A four-month code freeze does not guarantee that bugs won't exist. Debian was bitten by the latest remote crash bug in the kernel just like everyone else. Debian had a bug in their ipopd daemon (just fixed) that allowed remote users to get a shell. What good was the code freeze?
I'm not saying a code freeze is a bad idea at all. But you sound like nothing but someone with a chip on his shoulder. You don't make any sense.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
heh you all are dumb, im talking to redhat bashers, redhat HELPS the Linux OS community, it makes great programs, it helps majourly with GNOME which was created lets not forget so wewould have a FREE alternative to KDE they contribute toLinux and give people cool jobs, propietary software needs to work out of the box, no problems at all, so they pick the most popular distro and design it around that, why because they need it to work perfect in that one not near perfect in the rest, most likely redhat designed software will work on ost other distro's maybe a few quirks that have to be fixed but thats all, distro's have many differences and its hard to be compatible with everything so people go with what has the top userbase, plus RPM is cool and i can think of at least 3 popular distro's made from redhat's core, so that brings you to compatibility with almost anyone.
Kaoslord [quote goes here] define("slashdot purity","67.5");
Who do you blame here? If the programmers who wrote Codewarrior felt the need to target a specific distribution, that means that there must be a difference in distributions that one release could not address. If that's the case, then let's distribute the blame evenly, not just at RedHat's door.
Exactly. And after we're finished blaming each other, let's do someting about it. Perhaps Metroworks, if politely asked, would provide a list of the specific items they found to be inconveniently different between the various distributions. We take that list, compare it to the LSB, and decide what to do about each item on it (perhaps even going so far as to ammend the LSB if justifiable). Then, we go back to Metroworks, tell them it's all taken care of, now where's our *LINUX* release of the product??
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Everybody likes to diss the guy on top. I run redhat 6.0 and I like it. When my Mandrake CD get here I'll probably run that, but that's built on top of redhat anyway, so yea!
Redhat has a great install process. Better than the others, excluding OpenLinux 2.2. OL 2.2 hasn't installed on most of my machines, so I quit it for RH 6.0.
As for CodeWarrier being RH only, so what. Use GNU C you wimp! And installing tar files IS harder than RPM's. Yes, I can install anything, but I'd rather waste my time playing with it after the install, thank you.
As for them making tons of money, great! They're a business. And they're building a great distro. They're also helping to convert NT admins that have better things to do than twist thier minds into UNIX-space. That's a good thing.
And (and, and, and) they GPL thier $80 distro. I get mine from linuxcentral.com for $1.95. Great! More power to them.
I'm gonna buy a bunch of thier stock, too. So nyah!
-=nft=-
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -Gandhi
No..I think you missed his point on the "good with the bad"...
Good...by writing Open Source Software you can take pride in the fact that you are contributing something back. You can pat yourself on the back and give yourself an "Attaboy!" for the fact that you are helping to make proprietary and closed source software a thing of the past.
Bad...by using the GPL license you are agreeing to letting other people/companies take your software and modify it, redistribute it and basically take your work with little or no effort on their part.
That being said, I disagree with your original statement that RedHat does nothing to give back to the community. As they employ a certain number of hard-core hackers who in turn release ALL of their work under the GPL I find your ignorant statement disturbing but about par for the course for someone who tries to disparage a computer users experience (your pithy 5 year comment) when you in fact have absolutely no idea who or what you are talking about. For all you know that could be Dennis Ritchie himself in disguise.
> This goes against the whole phylosofy of Open
> Source! On the contrast, Debian undergoes a 4
> month code-freeze so it is rock-solid when it
> ships.
All I can say is: Release early, and release often.
You guys bich to much about distros. Distros are just code freezes IMHO. Focus on the real code.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
This brings to mind concerns I've had about the overloading of the word "support". Does "we don't support that" mean "you can't do that on our product/system/service" or "we don't provide technical support for that"?
.htaccess files to restrict access to web content served by our web server. (You can use .htaccess files on our service.) But we don't support the use of .htaccess files. (We don't provide technical support on the use of .htaccess files.)
In my job as an internet tech. support rep. I've learned to be very careful about my language when using the word "support".
For instance, my company does support the use
We need to pay more attention to what exactly is meant by "support" in corporate press releases, and maybe begin to expect corporate ppl to be more careful with their language.
Well, I was just pulling quick random examples out for that list..... /. ... He does it for his freedom forum website, it just gets copied and pasted over here on /. .... He could go off on a story not related to computers and freedom in any way and it would get posted here. It's not meant for /., and if he's not going to work one audience at a time, he shouldn't post here anymore. My thoughts :)
As far as Katz goes. He does not do this for
However you say it, there's one big important point missing. :).
Red Hat bashing *IS* a fad.
Linux is finishing the first of what will probably be several stages of bandwagon jumping. In the last two years, an enourmous ammount of technically-oriented people have jumped on the Linux bandwagon. Whenever these "surges" take place, many people, generally the type that jump off after using it for a short period of time, declare themselves as experts and throw thier opinions around as if they were the next messiah. This is especially evident in the case of GNOME -vs- KDE, where tempers and passion were high but the meaningful dialouge was amazingly hard to find. I dare say that most of those flamers and trendsetters have moved on to other "K-rad" things
examples of other Flamable Fads:
vi vs emacs
"Internet Time"
GNOME vs KDE
RMS vs ESR
Jon Katz bashing (he's meant to be insightful, not a God)
most recent joke: Raster vs Red Hat
Face it, Red Hat bashing is a fad. It probably started as meaningful insights from prominent members of the community intended to fix what was broken and improve the not-quite-perfect, but now the sentiments have degraded to the stuff flames are made of.
I'd rather spend my time writing code than spewing out meaningless, energy-wasting flame. I'd like to see most of ya'll doing the same.
I switched to RH 5.1 then upgraded to 5.2 then 6.0 as I found out that RH is contributing to the community, and giving back. They are on our side. THey are of course a business and want to make money, but so do most ofther distros. I see them a sa good thing right now. Besides, it is our code, it is not like they can take it away from us.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I was going to upgrade my 5.2 system to Mandrake, but in Miguel's article he makes it sound as if ONLY Redhat and Debian are fully GPLed. I obviously won't upgrade to a less free system.
However, I always thought that Mandrake was 99.99% RedHat. Irespective of Mandrake 6's PowerPack application CD(I believe RH6 also has a CD of non-GPL stuff (Corel?)), is Mandrake as GPLed as RedHat(or Debian)?
Also, the word is that Mandrake6 is more stable than RH6. Is that true?
--Dante
And the robot says: "In the begining was man. Man created all things. Man, with his infinite skill, created machines
Codewarrior was initially announced as being targeted to RedHat. A bit more research tells us that, in fact, the initial release will be a RedHat-centric product, followed by releases supporting other distributions.
Who do you blame here? If the programmers who wrote Codewarrior felt the need to target a specific distribution, that means that there must be a difference in distributions that one release could not address. If that's the case, then let's distribute the blame evenly, not just at RedHat's door.
But somehow, I feel that there is not such a substantial difference. I believe that the issue here is that a distribution had to be selected to test against and RedHat won out by virtue of its popularity and large installation base. Nothing sinister, here!
I would much rather have Red Hat getting most of the focus from commercial companies, since they are very insistant on the GPL. Red Hat is dedicated to the GPL, and open source. They do not release any of their software as proprietary. In fact, their installation utilities are GPL, unlike others. That is why you see so many small distros that are based around Red Hat. You can't do that with Caldera and a few other Distros. Basically, Debian and Red Hat work to ensure that the GPL is followed. Many other distrobutions seem to feel that the GPL is a hinderance, and that they need to make their money off of proprietary parts of their distrobution. I don't worry too much about Red Hat's strength in this market, I just hope MS never gets controlling shares of their stock, now that would suck.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
It's really funny. Nearly everybody seems to be bashing Redhat.
Here in Germany it's SuSE, not Red Hat.
Don't know why, perhaps every distribution that dominates a market (SuSE in Germany, Red Hat in the US) is suspected to do something evil.
Red Hat and SuSE both want to earn money, but both give the Open Source Community something back(e.g. the SuSE X-Server or Red Hat and Gnome). Both sides gain something.
Here in Germany I tell friends who want to try Linux to start with SuSE (better ISDN Support and the german language), but personally I don't like it so much and use Debian.
Just my opinion,
KeefR
Calm yourself down. Just look in your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc or ~/.tcshrc (or whatever the rc file is for your favorite shell) for "alias rm='rm -i'" - perhaps you've heard of this "-i" flag? It's the remove interactively flag. Take out this alias and re-source the rc file. There will be no more asking questions when you remove a file.
RH has it's quirks, but when I can set up a RH 5.2 box in 45 minutes with DHCP for my cable modem and firewall and all of my apps (like ApplixWare) I have no reason to switch. I've been using Linux for 5+ years (starting with Slackware and moving to RH in the 3.x days) and while I do have to make some mods to get RH to behave like a good like Linux box (i.e, not using the crappy RH print filters), I prefer that over wasting my time (the little of it that I have outside of work) learning a new distro. Just my two pennies.
nick
It's certainly true that RH 6.0 as released has its share of problems, but take a look at the historical patterns here: both RH4.0 and RH5.0 were equally unstable, to the point that I know people who avoid RedHat's major revision releases and wait for the x.1 releases to come out before they upgrade.
/is/ still free, and it's a distro that I find very useful, both at home and at work. I certainly keep my eye on them to see what direction they're headed, but all the accusations of dirty dealing and over-commercialization have not convinced me that Red Hat is hurting the Free Software community.
Truth be told, I've found RH6.0 to be the most stable release of RH that I've used to date. And by this I mean that I consider it very stable, although I have a cache of my own update rpms nearby that I add immediately to all new installs.
Despite the bad reputation Red Hat is acquiring within the community, their distro
I think many people forget, in their eagerness to criticize anyone making a profit, that the concept of open source software is more widely accepted now than at any previous moment in history, and that Red Hat is actively gaining us even more mindshare through their commercially viable distribution. They are a business, yes, and like all businesses their ultimate goal is to make money. But we as a community have much to gain from being cautiously optimistic about Red Hat's role in the grand scheme.
And who decides these things? The software companies? Or RH? "We'll give you $X if you only support RH..."
RinkRat
Now my apologies for something slightly off-topic but very useful. For all you GNOME and RedHat users: I just discovered an extremely useful place where you can find RPM updates of GNOME:
This site is extremely useful; I don't know why GNOME and RedHat don't publicize and mirror the RPMs that are built there. (Miguel, are you listening? :)
If you have RedHat 5.x, there are SRPMS there too which you can use to build these 6.0 RPMS for your system:
One of my main complaints with RedHat (and GNOME) is that they don't put enough effort into providing updated RPMs for key system components. Especially for GNOME, for which stability has always been the key complaint.
Enjoy...
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Opinion heard... it would be nice if you substantiated it. Why is it so badly designed?
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
1. The open-source movement parallels the 1960's and early 1970's free-love environment. The stage was set for this explosive event to happen: the ease of source sharing on a newly evolving internet, the kindling; a set of eager and energetic bright young programmers, the fuel; and a the GNU/Linux platform to use as a foundation, the spark. What a nice little fire we have now?
Unfortunatly or fortunatly, we are dipping far into the pool of liberalism today, as people did in the 1960's. Everything is set now to swing the other way. Just as STD's, buisness school, and age ended the free-love period: money and timeless conservative wisdom will bring opensource to market and open-source to age.
2. RedHat is good. People who pay to get coded are good. To draw from a study (which I do not have a proper reference to) which I read about way back in Psychology class: when the economy is richer charity is more popular. If writing free software is charity, than doing more buisness is better for it.
-AP (amoebapr@remotepoint.com)
I was in some computer stores recently, and I saw the official Red Hat 6.0 (nice box!) and next to it the MacMillan (I think it was them) boxed version of RH6.0. Now I have nothing against places like cheapbytes or linuxmall selling ~$3 versions of Red Hat, but that made me kind of mad that someone was selling for $35 what the original packagers had selling for $70 and which could be had for $3. Of course, they're in their rights to do this, but it seems kind of lame. Is there any license like GPL but not quite that would allow things like Mandrake to continue but not cheap knock-offs like MacMillan? I guess not, but it just seems like such a shame.
Sorry about that. It seems like a stupid idea which could cause much more trouble than it's worth. I need to spend more time working and less time here.
Will you Unix users stop thinking Linux is some kind of cheap Unix?
I am tired of these stupid comparisons.
Linux is the result of thought. Take whatever is best wherever it is!
Yeah, some of it comes from Unix, BUT I really wouldn't want it to stay there.
MY ADVICE. Go get yourself a Linux Book, ok?
And I said LINUX book and NOT unix book!
The kernel needs a Gtk/Gnome-based post-install device configuration tools "a la" make xconfig. (Better sig coming soon
Issues of who installs what asside
It is very easy to make non-portable software
that dosn't work between chips or even Unix clones
but RedHat Linux is not so diffrent from other
destrobutions that a program can work on one and
not the other.
Instead of saying "Requires RedHat" it should
say what libarys the pacage needs.
If the destrobution the user prefers dosn't
have it the user CAN just download it.
RedHat is not blameless for this sence they do
justify the practace.
In the Desto wars RedHat isn't the only one
that gets slammed but RedHat dose get slammed
a lot. The price of popularity.
I slam Slackware a lot and thats my destro of choice. RedHat second SuSE third.
When I rebuild computers for sale I install RedHat
I know people call RedHat "The Next Microsoft"
let's be realistic there will be no "Next Microsoft" just like there is no "Next Apple" or
"Next IBM" or "Next AT&T" the next big bad guy will be something compleatly new and compleatly diffrent.
Who knows maybe Slashdot is the next bad guy...
But thats a long ways down the road.... lets worry
about today instead of phantom menaces [duck run]
I don't actually exist.
Rock solid compared to what? The GNOME stuff shipped with RedHat 6.0 is hardly perfect, but as far as core functionalities, it's light-years ahead of Windows. I haven't had any bugs in RH6 that rendered my system anywhere near unusable, and I've been running it since the day it became available for download (and I was running Starbuck almost since it had been released).
Heck, if we're to evaluate this by the strictest of standards, then Netscape 4.x and KDE aren't release-ready on my system, since they both bomb out (although NS 4.6 has done well so far).
I used KDE for about a month on ym box, and decided that as post-1.0 stabilizations rolled out, I liked GNOME more and more...it just works more the way I work, which is ultimately what's important. You can argue technical superiority with me until I'm blue in the face, but I've tried both environments for an extended period, and I like GNOME.
I've got this problem as well.
/etc/hosts 110% correct, but still waiting for it to hang again.
I think I have fixed it by making my
Never happened in 5.2 though.
Actually, Debian doesn't use rpms at all. Debian supports the rpm format so that proprietary software (or free software that hasn't yet been debianized) that is distributed in rpm format can be easily installed. Debian uses the deb format, which is considered by many to be superior to rpm.
Don't flame, i've just stated a simple fact: many consider deb superior to rpm. Others consider the exact opposite.
-----
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.
As someone who "stupidly writes free software" and
= == = ==
who co-founded a software company who "writes real
(non OSS) software I found your comments both
humorous and displaying a certain lack of
maturity.
You state "By (stupidly, imho) writing free software, you have to take the good with the bad." I'll assume that you mean that there are some good free software and some bad free software. Well
welcome to the real world. Indeed there are both
good and bad free software packages out there but
guess what ?? This phenomenom isn't limited to
Open Source Software, it can be found in many
"real (non OSS) software applications". I guess
that you've never really used a computer for a
long time (5+ years) or you would've run across
this phenomenom several years ago.
Just my 2 cents....
===============================================
If it was easy to understand they wouldn't call it
code. --anonymous
===============================================
1)The hype. Both their latest 6.0 release, and 5.0 were somewhat hastily put out with more than a few glitches in them.
5.0 yes, 6.0 no. 6.0 was tested in the Rawhide versions and does well for me (but then 5.0 did too).
2)Price, e.g, the $80 price tag for their latest distribution.
Oh, geezus, knock it off. Buy the $35 version from their site.
3)A number of accounts of a growing arrogance from within the company.
Hmmm, most have been hersay and the one "real" one that I heard of resulted in the offending person getting fired.
It's still just bashing...
I think kernel 2.2.9ac4 has some major NFS fixes...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Shipping beta quality code is against the spirit of open source software ?
Where did you get that bizarre idea from ? A huge proportion of GPL'd software is what you'd call beta quality. The idea being that it being open source means you too can contribute to making it better.
I don't suppose you've ever seen seen the phrase 'release early, release often' ever mentioned ?
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
So what's your point? You didn't say anything either. "if you read it straight through you'll see he says nothing, but if you read it carefully you'll see he says nothing."
:)
-David
Is it just me or did anyone else notice that Miguel managed to say NOTHING in about a two page essay? He seems like a nice guy...but dammit, he needs to have a point to his essays.
Just my opinion.
-David
I think that many of you are right on the money! But in the case of others...in what world do people live in? Don't they see what is going on? RedHat is competing like any other commercial software company in the planet. Provide something that the competition cannot compete against, and little by little kill it. What happened with MetroWerks didn't happened by accident, and neither their deal with Cygnus and many other companies. Why do their packages come, at least in the case of Cygnus, with a RedHat transparent sticker on the front? Did that get there by mistake? Absolutely not!!! RedHat is moving hard against the other distros, which are it's main competition. Why did they hired all these executive shotguns if they are not in for the kill!!! (I bet a lot of people didn't know about this!!!) I have to give it to them. RedHat has done a lot of very intelligent business moves in order to get more market share, but is that what we want? Isn't this what everyone complains about Micro$oft? I mean, if you don't see this as something bad, then don't open your mouth about anything else that M$ does because that would be a huge double standard. In my case, I have a problem because I do contribute everytime I can, and it bothers me not that they are making lots of money, but the way they are doing it. They are doing it just like the software companies that we in many cases despise.
In general, I have to say that many of their contributions are laughable. Let's see:
1- RPM format: This without any doubt gives them an edge. Doesn't this sound like Micro$soft? They can change the format any time, and trust me they will if they need the edge just as M$ from Word95 to Word97. Yes, they are giving it away, but for how long! Eventually they are going to change the format, and make it more exclusionary. And if not, still they will have the edge by having everyone else feed from their hand. Why do people think that they have helped in making more programs RPM formated. They point here is that if everything has RedHat in it, who are you going to buy stuff from? Caldera?
2- Gnome: Look at the format! Doesn't this look like a better, more modern version of AnotherLevel. Yes, again you can use many window managers with it, and do on! Whatever money RH is investing, it surely is going to pay off for their distribution, because again they are calling the shots! Also, you can bet your life that if KDE didn't have the license it had before, Gnome would be history as far as getting backed up by them. RedHat just didn't want to pay. Not because they would have had to bring up the price of their distro, as we can see they were going to do it either way; but because when they did, they net profit was going to be less. Even though it is a better product than Gnome. Again, Gnome is under control, and KDE it not.
3- What about giving RedHat stocks to Linus and employment to Alan? I'm not saying that they were bought or anything like that (lets be very clear on that), but it is a smart way of having them as alies. Are they going to complain about RedHat? Unless RH goes way too far, I doubt it! Everytime they go to talk to another possible investor, do you think that they don't bring that in the conversation. They have top two main guys on board for the long run. Not even Micro$oft can say that!!!
4- What about all the different accords with Intel and all the other major companies? Do you think that they don't want any return on their investments? Again, I doubt it! And again, this brings up the topic of: either RedHat wants it or not, they are going to have to maximize their profits to bring they promised returns for their investors, specially when they go public! At that point, who the hell is going to care about Open Source, Free Software or whatever. The bringing up the bottom line is the game, and there is only one way to play it. KILL THE COMPETITION!
If people don't care, so be it! I do care because I'm making a serious investment in time and money in Linux in general, when I could do it in (*)BSD, or somewhere else. I know. It is my choice, but the totally Open Source nature of the community is one of the most alluring things for me. And if it is gone, then it would have been a waste of time, not only for me, but for everyone who contributed! I hope that I'm wrong! But to all those History major grads, I ask: does history always repete itself?
Just one comment - BE REAL, BUY DEBIAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- The notion that everyone runs Red Hat, or that everyone has rpm (or knows where to get rpm, or what rpm will do to his system, or what installing random upgrades from some other distro will do to his system) is false and annoying.
- The notion that you fix problems by slapping in one upgrade after another until something works is both dangerous and esthetically offensive. I want to understand the problem and fix it, not just throw a rug over it. "Run the wizard and be happy" is the MS way, not my way.
Whatever you want to make of it, the fact is that RH has garnered a large share of the distro market. Whenever that happens, some people will just give up thinking and assume that vendor=market. I hope that RH does nothing to foster this view, but some will take it anyway and that is what bugs me.Of course, someone had to call Miguel, Miguel the mouth. When you call someone a fourth grader-like name, people tend to discount everything you say.
And then there are people who like stereotype people: "Well, I noticed that Debian users tend to flame Red Hat users." or "Never has a KDE developer flamed Gnome." The bad thing about stereotypes is that they are never true. There are always exceptions to the rule (Well, actually the moment there is an exception to a rule, the rule is no longer valid.)
Too many people like to assert artificial boundaries. They take sides, defend their side, and attack the other side. They like fight in some sort of heroic endeaver. This is not how a community should work.
I use Red Hat. Not because it is Red Hat, but because it is Linux. Understand this. Red Hat needs no bashing.
I use Gnome. Not because there is anything wrong with KDE, but because I like Gnome.
I use Cooledit. There is nothing wrong with Emacs or vi. I do use Emacs and vi at times for what it is worth.
Ordinarily, I would have five or more responses to this post, in flames. They don't flame because I have expressed my opinion. They flame because they know what side I am on. When they see I am on the other side, they attack.
So I urge everyone to vanish all artificial boundaries, to unite as a comminuty again. If you have a technical problem with Red Hat, tell them about it or fix it yourself. Complaining does nothing but fight an imaginary war. In fact, if you tell them about it, you may improve the distro, which helps everyone who uses Red Hat, and Linux in general.
Do not stereotype people. It simply adds another artificial boundary. Red Hat is my distro, not my religion, not my country, and I have no reason to fight for it or against it.
My point is, this community we are all fond of, need not be divided. Accept another persons's preferences like you would another persons clothes: something that separates you from everyone else.
Don't talk about choice when you bash the choice of someone else.
--
"You seem to have forgotten that even RH 6.0 is released under the GPL ! "
... /free speech/) -- you gotta stop and thing, just as there are 'dumb (as you all call them)' windows users out there, there too will be 'dumb' linux users out there.. how many windows users know there is a trial going on? prolly 30% maybe less hell.. and you think all these people that MAY BE considering coming to linux know wtf GPL is? No they dont, nor do they care.. they were, and are sold on M$, just as they will be sold on the 'name thing' with redhat (if redhat is successful), you all can argue, piss, bitch and moan, but if it gets to the point that (number is fake) 20 million linux users out of 21 million use 'Official Redhat Linux', what are most apps going to be codded to, whether proprietary or not. (redhat if you didnt know the answer). Even the apps that arent, but have rpm's -- you say 'they can just dld and rpm -ahuesacuge90a file.rpm, and boom it's installed - you think its that easy? you think people do that kind of thing? lets see..
.rpm?
You are either blind, ignorant or just
not everyone knows, understands, or gives a f*ck about this thing called GPL/GNU (im not saying im one of those people) -- but you, and others like you act as if everyperson big and small, young and old around the entire planet are aware of, and understand the meaning of terms such as 'GPL, GNU, FREESOFTWARE (your version, you know the -not beer- but
*RING*
*RING*
hello?
hey mom it's your son..
what do you need?
mom do you know what linux is?
something to do with that unix stuff
that you do right?
yah, and i was wondering what is GPL?
GTL?
no mom GPL - 'pee' as in PETER.
oh no, no idea..
do you know where i can get the latest
quit it, you know i dont know anything
you are talking about!!
im sorry mom, tell me though, how do you
get the latest and greatest software?
i buy it, put the cd in the drive and it
installs!
thanks mom.
you see, my mom isnt 'dumb' or 'stupid', she is actually quite brilliant.. she writes books, and poetry and does art.. ALL ON THE COMPUTER!! no shit. and she dont know GPL! or RPM!
i doubt you will even see my point, because most of you where blinders, (you know those things on the bridle of a horse that cover the perifial(sp?) vision) you need to push them off, take a look around.. every computer user is a developer, a h4q3r, or ever technical, not even enough to understand all the things you say here.
Wow, mom, mind you, is gonna sit with her 56k modem, download and install redhat? Is that what people do? oh no, the blinders again. 'normal' people, you average joe, buys packaged software, he or she may download it if it's not to big, and IF they arent to worried it will mess up their system. -- so after that search who do they buy? oh yah redhat, and they get support (yipee).
.. it does all the government and the people with the louder voices say it does. but do people that dont smoke it care? or the people that are so accustom to what they've learned as the truth care? nope, they think your a liar no matter what truth, and facts you have.. thus is the same with you method of educating the masses, at work each day there are folks htat are all hype on m$, i dont care what you tell them to make linux all shiney and sweet, it aint m$, its not a product of m$, so it aint something they want to try. Ive had people argue with me time and time again, sure its 'ignorance' (used appropriatly -- why? because they dont know, to chose not to know, where as mom knew of these things yet they hold no relevance to her so she dont care) -- so after a while i started looking from their perspective.. people are cozy with what you got.. take tv's and vcr's .. hell.. i got a nice fancy tv, a remote that controls both vcr and tv, and my stereo... it's the best.. oh but i hear there is a 'free' tv (free as in free speech), it dont have no features like my current one, heck i gotta get up, turn it on, cable works half assed, and most of the programs are unfinished. but its a DAMN FINE BOX, according to the people selling it. The most educating you're gonna do is letting them know there is an alternative out there, they like most folks will simply watch it until to them it is a viable alternative, when it has all the bells and whistles their current os has.
ignorant? im aware of the definition, i still think you used it inappropriatly, yes 'she just dont know' makeing 'ignorance' seem like the correct word. I suppose you too are ignorant, im pretty confident you dont know everything there is to know in the world, heck im pretty sure you dont want to know everything, maybe everything about what you do and all that it incompasses but not everything. so you to are indeed ignorant. My mother dont give a rats ass about GPL or RPM, she just wants it to work, does redhat work? gnome? for my mom? hah come on. but that autorun on the cd, or the setup.exe sure does come in handy. oh yah this is about the gpl part, well she dont know the licenses on her software either, then again she isnt a fanatic about licenses.
educate the masses eh? cannabis advocates around the world have been trying to 'educate the masses' for years, yet i still hear 'pot kills brain cells', 'pot does this', 'pot does that'
that's nice you work tech support, im proud you got a job, but it aint just tech support where you deal with people that are 'ignorant', im a nice cozy engineer, and yet other 'engineers' i work with, are extremely good at what they do (unix/sybase) work -- then go home to a win box, and you can tell them all you want till you are blue in the face, they still will not succumb to the 'linux movement', as you get older people are less 'risky' and less 'adventurous', they like the nice comfortable ways in which they live. will the future be different? will the next generation kick m$ in the ass, prolly, with linux? i doubt it, but with various alternatives, be, linux, mac, *bsd - yah.. because this generation is different and nothing is set in stone for them.. most adults grew with m$, from dos, 3.1, 3.11 all that up to what they do now. and they anxiously await win2000, -- what its been delayed AGAIN? they dont care.. they sit and think, just good ole m$ making sure its ready for me!..
sorry if i got off topic, i just wish you wolud look around, i dont care if you help 1001010 idiots a day, try walking in their shoes, look at things from their eyes, try to do this literally, FEEL what they feel when you look throw their eyes.. then you'll understand a bit more where im coming from.
"As for your pot reference, get a fucking grip, pot doesn't kill but it makes people stupid."
really? you too i see only know what you've been taught, open you eyes, get out, learn a little more than what your, gov, parents and schools tell you.
http://www.cannabis.com/faqs/cannabis.faq
"Flame me all you want for that comment I couldn't care less, but anyone who needs drugs to cope with reality needs serious help."
I'll then assume, you've never taken cough syrup, aspirin, tylenol.. you've never drank alchohol, never smoked a cigarette, never drank a soda pop (coke, pepsi stuff), and of course, you've never drank coffee right??
lemme guess, all these things are legal right? So because they're legal they are better for you than what's illegal? read the history and the facts on cannabis, it's illegalization is imo illegal in and of itself, it does not make you stupid, it dont kill brain cells or any of that shit, it's better for you than BEER, cigarettes, aspirin, and caffiene.
i dont have to flame you, anyone reading your comments towards pot, understands your ignorance on the matter, and how you've been literally programed by the system to think 'drugs are bad', 'they make you stupid', 'anyone that needs drugs to cope needs help' -- btw where did i say i couldnt cope so i need pot? hell i never even said i smoked pot.
Asshole? excuse me if i stepped on the wrong nerve..
/see/, are you telling me that there is nothing more in /your/ world then that which you can see? You have to look beyond that which you can easily 'see' to learn anything... but i suppose if that little world you live in is that good heck, kick it there =)
Since you friends have no 'drive' from smoking pot, i suppose if they snorted coke and did 5 times the work they do now coke would be 'OK' right? since the determining factor in your statistical evaluation of what you see is their laziness. 'pot' doesnt make you dependent as you imply, possibly psychological but definatly not phisical.. if you have a weak mind i suppose anything could make you dependent, and that's besides the point, many people have psychological adictions that are of no 'drug presense' whatsoever... caffeine on the other hand, does in time cause you to form a physical addiction to it, at that time you will _need_ it.
oh and a note on the article, you are correct it is put on by cannabis advocates that voice their feelings, precisly why it holds water with our current discussion, because linux is nothing more than a collection of people advocating it's usefulness. Note, none of either comes from one source 'linix - comes from a collection, vs m$ coming from one big company' as is the faq i sent you -- notice the rather large bibliography at the end it to is a collection of people advocating what they believe and feel to be more useful vs one src the GOV. But since you didnt bother to read it, you wouldnt know that. close minded? afraid you could be wrong in your 'opinions'. You say you base your opinions on what you
When and in with regard to what?
When I upgraded from Starbuck, GNOME would freeze everything (not just X) every couple of days.
/.
I am running 5.9 and have been since shortly after it was publicly available. With as much updating as I've done to this system, I am not even considering an update to 6.0.
The window manager freezing problem wasn't an X or gnome problem for me. It went away for me when I compiled and installed a different Window Manager(WindowMaker).
This also happened under RH 5.2 here at work, where they're paying me way too much money to browse
If anything I'm more inclined to yearn for a distribution modelled more closely on Free/NetBSD. Cvsup, 'make world'.
FreeBSD and NetBSD have that part right. Too bad it's not friendly to companies who like quarterly upgrade CDROM sales to those without a fast net.link or the patience/time to download it.
i honestly beleive that the moment red hat was successful it became a possible target of scapegoating ... you have to realize w/ anything that has to do w/ geeks/hackers/gamers/etc you are going to run into some people who feel totally ineffectual and so are going to be nasty, bitter, little twirps ... not to say red hat doesn't have problems, but then who doesn't?
-
if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
On the other hand, if you buy it, you get three months installation support. As you say, it's the people who dont know linux who will pay $80. The same people who think the community is full of bull-shit when we say it's easy to install, just ftp it and go...
Me, I'll pay every once in a couple of versions to show support, but the rest I'll just ftp or copy.
1)The hype. Both their latest 6.0 release, and 5.0 were somewhat hastily put out with more than a few glitches in them. Compared this to Debian which puts out new releases according to when they think it's ready, not when their marketing or sales dept say so (like all commercial software companies).
And GNOME can be accused of this too. GNOME may be getting a lot of attention, and the support of RedHat, but let's face it, KDE is much more stable and much less hyped.
It has been said before and I will say it again-
Release early, Release often.
I have RH 6.0 installed and running on over 10 machines with nothing other than minor problems, I have VERY few intelligent responses when someone is aked why the 6.0 release has glitches, maybe you could point some out for us.
2)Price, e.g, the $80 price tag for their latest distribution. I would certainly hope they support further linux development with this kind of inflated price they're charging people. I think this could indicate an attitude of greed which justifies comparisons to Micro$oft.
I am now convinced that you just didn't read any of the previous comments, lets see $80.00 USD gets you manuals and support for 1 year, 1.99 gets you the same distro less manuals and support, or if you have a modem it's just d/l time that you spend. So quit bitching about the price and move on to something that matters. You seem to have forgotten that even RH 6.0 is released under the GPL !
3)A number of accounts of a growing arrogance from within the company. This is what it all boils down to. If RedHat is not appreciative of the fact the what they "produce" is the result of the generous work of a whole community of people, and if they are only looking out for RedHat making a buck then there is definite reason to keep a wary eye on them.
Could this also be pride, I think RH has every right to be a little proud, they are the best at bringing Linux to the unwashed masses. If you want to see this as arrogance then fine. Any time someone is on top people will find fault with them.
You are either blind, ignorant or just ... /free speech/) --
not everyone knows, understands, or gives a f*ck about this thing called GPL/GNU (im not saying im one of those people) -- but you, and others like you act as if everyperson big and small, young and old around the entire planet are aware of, and understand the meaning of terms such as 'GPL, GNU, FREESOFTWARE (your version, you know the -not beer- but
A simple search for Red Hat on any mahjor search engine will reveal their homepage, if you look around for maybe two seconds they have a list of mirrors for free download of their product. I've never looked but I bet they have at least a link that talks about the GPL.
you see, my mom isnt 'dumb' or 'stupid', she is actually quite brilliant.. she writes books, and poetry and does art.. ALL ON THE COMPUTER!! no shit. and she dont know GPL! or RPM!
No actually your mom would be ignorant (check the definition before you get all pissed off) and if she really knows computers that well she could easily find out.
i doubt you will even see my point, because most of you where blinders, (you know those things on the bridle of a horse that cover the perifial(sp?) vision) you need to push them off, take a look around.. every computer user is a developer, a h4q3r, or ever technical, not even enough to understand all the things you say here.
So maybe it's time to educate the masses, most everyone I have ever heard ask about Linux has looked it up on the net and knows a little about the free software concept and wants to know more. As you mentioned in your post there will be "dumb" Linux users out there, but they can get help if they want. As for the blinders, I think not buddy boy, I am tech support I see the end user every single flippin' day so don't YOU ever think I don't understand the lowest common denominator, you have assumed way too much about me and I pity you for that. One last thing five years ago the "conversation with mom" could have been about winsock apps, now mom uses them daily (she might not know what winsock is but that doesn't matter). Linux is a good OS it's being ready for the masses is up for debate, but if ignorant people want to buy a new OS without at least looking at the company's homepage then how much pity am I supposed to have, i can't sure stupidity.
P.S. Network broadcast news has had coverage of th MS trial as has CNN, most newspapers, and a plethora of web sites, so again if they don't know there is a trial IGNORANCE.
If you had ever read anything wlese I have written then you would have seen me say that Linux is not ready for the masses, all I was saying is that RH is the closest to being ready. I have my nice cushy tech support job because of MS, I am MS certified and support MS products at work, but use a Linux box at home and at the office. You seem to have a low opinion of the public at least I gaive them credit for being able to learn. I have helped plenty of my users get Linux up and running at home, and showed them where to get free tech supprot online.
Just as a point of reference my mom runs Linux now because of me. I have been over to her house ten or twelve times since the install and she has never had to ask me a question or get me to fix something. It was just the opposite when she was running MS productds. My wife had never used a computer to do anything besides play solitare before we got married now she designs webpages on her own Linux box.
I don't consider my users idiots, by they do make up part of the lowest common denominator. We all do it's all part of the whole. Even most die hard MS users I know hate having to re-boot their syste,s all the time and want something better. If the people you know are complacent then thatis a problem. As for your pot reference, get a fucking grip, pot doesn't kill but it makes people stupid. Flame me all you want for that comment I couldn't care less, but anyone who needs drugs to cope with reality needs serious help.
Allright asshole, look I have plenty of friends who smoke, and they have very little drive to do anything else. Yes I use caffiene but I don't need it. You want me to go look at a webpage that was designed by an advocate group, please, just like the gov't I'll bet they use statistics to prove their point. Tell you what I can prove just about anything with statistics, so can any college grad. that took the right course. I don't base my opinions on what I've been taught, I base them on what I see.
OK folk, this reminds me of the motif v openview debate oh so many years ago. ,is a good idea that should be taken seriously.
The fact is that RedHat has done a lot to get Linux into the public eye. I don't think it's the god of distributions, but thats a pointless argument anyway.
The idea of a SUPPORTED dist of linux was such a god idea, RedHat should be commended for giving users of other os'es a chance to experiment with a new animal, in this case linux, with the comfort of knowing that if they ran into trouble, help was just a phone call or email away. That is good for Freenix in general.
Now I will say that I prefer FreeBSD as a server, but on my personal workstation is SuSE, nothing against RedHat, I just like SuSE. But what I see are people that should be a solid group working towared a goal, are instead bickering about what window manager somebody uses, or if one person likes elm better than pine. Grow up people, this kind of division in the linux community only re-enforces the idea that Linux and free unix's are a hobby os, and not a serious attempt at a stable, full featured, customizable, and FREE operating system.
Don't be dumb, quit whining if RedHat is good or evil, and start showing people that Linux (read freenix) regardless of which distribution
My opinion yes, humble no.
otoPICO
p.s. GO SETI@HOME !!
... have you had with RedHat6.0?
so far it's been the fine for me. ( other then geting my ppp up NOW there's something that could use some work!!)
i just whated to know what problems others are having cause im about to lend my CD to a friend new to linux. and dont want him scared off...
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
The main problem here is not about Red Hat being for the Open Source issue or something else like that. It's also about the price. Have you seen the price for the latest 6.0 distro ?? In Canada, it's 115$, which is like more than twice the original price.
People who don't know linux and will hear about Red Hat (obviously) will probably think the community is full of bull-shit when we say Linux is free, and these people don't know about FTP downloads and other distributions...
"Code free or die!"
Unfortunately, I have to agree that I've found 6.0 to be problematic. 5.2 was rock solid for me, but even with a clean install of 6.0 (freshly formatted hard drive) the parallel port Zip driver wouldn't work on my system - it gave some errors about unresolved symbols. A quick recompile of the kernel fixed the problem, but I feel I shouldn't have had to do that just to get it working.
I still have some problems with Gnome pausing for 10-20 seconds on startup/shutdown that I haven't tracked down yet. I'm sure it's some config thing, but I don't like having to hunt down problems on a base install that I haven't hacked at all.
My final solution to all this: I'm trying my freshly burned copy of Mandrake tonight.
Ditto.
I'm a Debian user, and I highly appreciate
what RedHat has done for the Linux community.
I get pissed off at juvenile script kiddies who've
been told by their friends that "RedHat is for lamers"
and then keep on bashing RedHat with no valid reasons.
--//--
I've never heard so much complaining from people who pay nothing for a product (you can ftp red hat gratis).
So they want to make some money with special deals and CDs? Is that a crime? Once most of you college grads get out there and start getting bills for your loans, making money is going to be a motivation that dogs you night and day. I say kudos to Red Hat for figuring out how to make a buck from all of this.
Red Hat is good--they have given back a lot to the Open Source community, they deserve their laurels.
:-\
lets just hope they can resist the temptation to fork linux with an "embrace and extend"...
this is set up for the root account by default, in the file ~/.bashrc. just kill the line aliasing 'rm -i' onto 'rm'.
alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
lines from your
(For the pickers of nits: That will remove the prompting from both mv and cp, as well as the requested rm. But I figure that if you want to loose it for one, you're ready to rid yourself of it entirely.)
that the leader of Gnome, which is the desktop environment that Red Hat has chosen to run with, feels so compeled to defend their reputation.
Miguel is a great guy, but I think you'd have to admit his opinion has been biased by RedHat's support of his project.
True, RedHat has contributed a lot to Linux, and they do make a good distribution, but let's not turn a blind eye to any potential criticism.
Some of the "bashing" I've heard about RedHat that I think is valid is this:
1)The hype. Both their latest 6.0 release, and 5.0 were somewhat hastily put out with more than a few glitches in them. Compared this to Debian which puts out new releases according to when they think it's ready, not when their marketing or sales dept say so (like all commercial software companies).
And GNOME can be accused of this too. GNOME may be getting a lot of attention, and the support of RedHat, but let's face it, KDE is much more stable and much less hyped.
2)Price, e.g, the $80 price tag for their latest distribution. I would certainly hope they support further linux development with this kind of inflated price they're charging people. I think this could indicate an attitude of greed which justifies comparisons to Micro$oft.
3)A number of accounts of a growing arrogance from within the company. This is what it all boils down to. If RedHat is not appreciative of the fact the what they "produce" is the result of the generous work of a whole community of people, and if they are only looking out for RedHat making a buck then there is definite reason to keep a wary eye on them.
How many distros do we need? Only 5-10 distros are needed for competition. Everytime a distro is added the linux market gets fragmented a little more. I can't personally see linux on every desktop, for that matter most of the desktops. In an ideal world Linux would have 100% of the server market and 50% of the workstation market. BeOS would have the other 50% of the workstation market and 100% of the home market and a stripped down version of BeOS would be used in all embedded devices. Oh and a suped up version of linux would be used for stuff like the military's networks, embedded systems, etc. The tank and flying batmobile work so well together and victory over the facists @ M$ and Apple can only be achieved if the linux and beos users work together.
---Got Coffee?---
You're wrong on that one.
in an ideal world the open source advocates would be realistic and realize that the average mom and pop will never be able to use linux and that if you insist on linux or nothing then the average joe will choose nothing.
---Got Coffee?---
I was very happy to see this article concerning RedHat. I am quite fed up with the latest round of RH bashing that has been going on in the Linux community. It has to stop.
I've also noticed something of a trend among some RH bashers - they are Debian users. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to start a religious war here, I'm just saying that many of my friends who use Debian feel the need to bash RH simply out of spite.
I have three friends who avidly use Debian either at home or at work. Every time I talk to them about the latest Linux news, one of them has to ask, "You still using that piece of junk RedHat." To that I reply, "Yeah... of course." And I'm not afraid to admit it. I just want to know why it is that more often than not (in my experience) do Debian users feel the need to constantly put RedHat down? It doesn't make sense that the Linux community should fight over such things.
Debian is a great distribution - but so is RedHat.
I also have a few friends who use other distros such as Slack, and Caldera. They don't bash RH. In fact, they are quite happy with their distro and thats where it ends.
The great thing about all these distros is that we have the freedom to choose. Thats a great thing. We should revel in it - not fight about it.
To that I would like to add that I'm sick of hearing about vi vs. emacs, gnome vs. kde, etc, etc... its all a waste of time. Pick what you like and support it - believe in it - contribute to the development - but please, for god's sake, stop the pointless bickering over which distro is better than another!
The Linux community has the last word on what stays and what goes. If we don't like it, if it violates our philosophy, if it goes against our beliefs, we don't have to support it. Just like we don't support M$ or the closed source software community.
Disclaimer: Please don't construde this response to mean that I hate Debian, Slackware, or any other distro - I don't. I love them all and I wish each of you the best of luck with whatever choice you have made. Just stop the arguing - please.
Mark
i for one agree with miguel. the red hat bashing has gone on long enough or just plain overdone imho. i hope they continue to produce a quality product and their ipo should help ;)
i plan on buying their stock, but good luck getting any before it skyrockets.
Sensei
Sensei
Linuxnewbie.org home of the NHF's
All the Redhat bashing that's been going on is ridiculous. I for one second Miguel's comments and quite a few of the replies to his post. I was VERY impressed with Redhat 6.0. As far as I'm concerned, the GNOME / enlightenment desktop is almost ready for the unwashed masses and that is an amazing step from where things were when I started with open source. Redhat has had a major impact on the development and rounding out of these open source projects, and as they say, has still "kept it real" by respecting and promoting open source.
Spencer
I'm not sure how much people know about these rc files and the way they are set up, but redhat uses a system v style approach to starting up the system (like irix and solaris) that uses loads of files, each of which has a single purpose (start nfs, start samba, start snmp, kill snmpd) Slackware uses a bsd style approach (like bsd and sunos) where each of the 5-10 rc files has a more general purpose (start the network interface, load ALL the network services, load ALL the modules, etc)
.02
Each one has its pluses and minuses. Envision having to configure a solaris box over a serial port. The sheer number of cofiguration files makes it a pain to configure over a console. If you had a monitor and graphics card plugged into it and a pretty display it would be ok, but having to vi multiple files sucks.
Bsd style is easier to configure, since you only have 5 files to edit period, but is also more succeptable to those annoying topy's (I once accidently delted an "f" out of "fi" and boy did that screw things up, especially since it was in a remote machine in a script that dealt with the network services, had to drive over there and sit down in front of the box to fix it...)
To say one is better than the other is a religous debate and I choose not to partake. I have to use both, so I learned to deal with both.
anyways... just my
I my self am a RedHat user, and I have thougt alot about going back to slackware over a few issues that seem serious to me, these are: :( In either case, DOCUMENTATION would have made these non-porblems.
1: CHANGES, redhat seems to have changed alot of things (although change IS good) these digressions from what is normally done with other distros SHOULD have been documented. IE: they way cron is handled (the whole run-parts bit) and init, which I still dont fully understand
2: CONTROL: under all distros that I have used in the past, with almost any tool, you can do something the easy way, or just go hacking about by hand. RPM does not allow one to hack its database by hand, an option I have needed a few times..would have made life soo much easier
3: COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE SUPPRT: (ok, so this isnt really an anti-RH argument) its commercial, let them do what they want. if you hack your system enough, it will run..its still linux.
4:Arguably, one of the best things about *nix is that it is NOT windows. Why the heck does the default WM under RH look like windows? Im sure its great for amking new users feel more comofrtable at first, but they ARE new LINUX users, show them linux, NOT windows.
5:do-all-tools: One of the founding pricipals of unix (correct me if I wrong) is the ability to use a numbers of small, efficient tools together to get a job done, allowing versatility and control without monster programs. things like linuxconf and netcfg and thier kin are somewhat contrary to this concept.
Digressions from compatability with other systems is a MickySoft stratagy and does not reflect well on Linux, as the formost name in Linux in the general public's eyes, they should be setting a better example. Fragmentation and in-compatability were the downfall of the early *nixes, lets not suffer the same fate.
This needed to be said, Enough Red Hat bashing.