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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
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
Also, try looking CheapBytes.
You aren't part of our community. Go away.
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.
Ok, if alien is too hard for you, try rpm2cpio $FILENAME | cpio --extract --make-directories
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.
Actually the new QT library 2.0 is out. The first public beta under the new LICENCE!!
And well koffice is freely downloadable and fas more advanced than Abiword or Gnumeric.
I don't see a problem mixing the two systems actually. If only Gnome/GTK apps reacted meanigfully to X hints and did not ignore every standard like session management, you wouldn't notice the difference between QT and GTK apps if you choose a plain theme.
Even Netscape looks like a native app due to krdb's style and color matching abilities.y
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.
I've used Slackware for the better part of 4 years, I think since they had kernel version 1.2.13 on it, before that I used a roll-your-own
.deb packages, rpm packages, slackware packages, own compiled stuff, and yes, it takes time to make everything work flawlessly, but that's what I like. I like the challenge of making things work, and I really don't give a rats ass what distribution is the best, or which one has the c00lest and 3l33t toys, I just want Linux. And I want it to work. I want it to do what I want it to do, and if that means having to put up with RH signing exclusive deals, then so be it, I'm still using Linux, and I'm still making it work.
distro I made with some friends.
Recently I bought a RedHat 6.0 CD. I figured it was worth a try and I wondered why everyone was
always constantly bashing RedHat.
Granted, I don't particularly *like* the new way of things, but once you look at the way it's done and read some documentation, it's actually very easy to configure your system from the shell prompt.
The breaking up of say, the entire network init in a few directories with separate scripts for each interface makes my life a whole lot easier. I just have to edit one file instead of diving into rc.inet1 or rc.inet2, finding what needs changing
and changing that.
And okay, RH 6 came with GNOME. I like GNOME. I used to hate it, but I've come to like the flexibility it gives me.
On the MetroWerks issue; who prevents you from downloading alien, and turning it into a slackware package? I've done it often enough and sure, sometimes it's symlink city to make things work,
but aren't we forgetting that Linux=Linux=Linux no matter who distributes it? I've worked with RedHat, Slackware, Debian and SuSE, and they're all Linux. All distro's have ls, gcc, etc. -- they just have a different way of packaging things, and a different way of administrating things.
So far on my RH box, the only time I did use the control panel is when I wanted to find out what files were changed when you change the settings on your Ethernet interfaces. After that I did every change by hand, on the shell prompt.
Why do we (the Linux/OpenSource) community have to war over distributions when there is so much to be learned from the different ways these people have chosen to create the distro?
Wasn't the idea behind Linux 'free for all'?
Then why bother with the trivialities of exclusive
deals made by companies? What prevents you from going out, buying the RH CD with CodeWarrior on it and installing it on your Slackware box?
Before my RH 6 installation my system resembled the product of an orgy between Slack, Debian and RH. I used
Moral of the story: Everyone STFU about the petty little distribution wars, and let's kick some ass and make Linux grow.
(Yes, I am wearing my asbestos outfit, and yes, if you bring up that RH signing exclusive deals isn't helping Linux grow, then I won't bother responding. It's time to think people...)
There is no sig...
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
I'm talking about on non redhat systems. They compiled it on a redhat system and broke glibc versions for everyone else. I've also heard the same about the RealPlayer thingy.
As the other reply indicates you cannot recompile Netscape. Secondly the entire point is being missed here. I'm NOT using red hat. Netscape did, and because they did and because Red Hat is using non standard libraries that people are distributing dynamicly linked version of software for I'm SOL.
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
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
About samba printing problems: I noticed this one as well, but aparently samba (or at least the version included w/ redhat 6) defaults to sysv printing. I changed it to bsd and everything works just fine.
--
-- 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.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
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.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
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.
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
Strangely, gtk/gnome is a better option for
commercial concerns. Suppose I am a zip-tools
maker, and I want to dock a zip-tools app into the
panel. I'm selling my tools commercially. With KDE
i now need to pay Troll. With GNOME, I just write
it. Probably not a concern for companies, but
may be one for shareware authors, small companies, as Qt is 1000+ per developer.
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
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.
Thank you very much... I was waiting for someone to say that.
-mf AKA _after_
"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.
I seem to be running Netscape 4.6 on RedHat 6.0... As a matter of fact, it's a RedHat RPM if I remember correctly. What seems to be the problem when you get it?
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 had the same problem with samba. After trying a few different things I commented out the "printcap name" and "load printers" options and set "printing = bsd", and now all is fine.
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
Boy was i suprised when I went to the linux mandrake page, and found screenshots of KWM configured with themes just as wild(ugly) as E. They just don't advertize it much.
Anyway, the E that came with redhat was stable, though it seems to ignore the fact that the gnome panel is there, and maximizes apps over it. Kinda weird they let that slip through. Fix this by getting icewm, works find right after installing the rpm
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
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.
It makes sense to mention KDE because his whole point is that RedHat stood up for free software by refusing to include KDE while there were serious issues with its license. It is clear that this is no longer an issue; his last paragraph in this section says so clearly. It is only relevant to his article because it represents RedHat's stance on free software in the past, which is important to evaluate RedHat's stance on free software in the present.
About Netscape, BRU, and RealVideo: these are very different from KDE. They are not core system components. RedHat is not against commercial software being used on Linux; after all, they used to sell Applixware, they are making deals with commercial distributors, and they still include an "Applications CD" with the $80 RedHat 6.0 that includes many commercial apps.
The difference is that you can have as many commercial apps on top of the OS, and that's not a problem. The real problem is if any core component of Linux is not free... then it becomes possible for an external entity to take control or subvert Linux in some way.
Again, this is apparently no longer an issue with KDE, but the point is that KDE is fundamentally different from typical applications, which is why it's not hypocritical or wrong in any way of RedHat to have discriminated against a non-free KDE/Qt while being kosher with other commercial apps. Yes, we all understand that from a very technical standpoint, KDE, GNOME and the window manager (even X) can be considered to be just other applications on top of the kernel. But they are critical enough to the overall use of the system that they can be considered a more integral part of Linux as a whole than Netscape or other "standard" apps.
----------
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.
Except that the source RPM doesn't contain any real source. :) If you take a look into the SRPM file, there's a spec file, and the tarball you normally download from netscape's servers. All the RPM build does in this case is copy the files into a directory tree, and make the binary RPM. There's no recompile done - Netscape 4.x is only free in the "free beer" sense.
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
===============================================
Free software is actually the point, sorry.
If you don't think so, then you cannot even attempt to understand what Miguel was saying.
It may be an expensive CD from redhat, but it IS still downloadable for free.
As a developer who has worked with Miguel I find he is neither arrogant nor does he have a bad attitude.
Incidentally, neither KDE or Gnome are window managers, they cover a very different problem space.
Perhaps you should go back to Windows?
__// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
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...
QT with the old license ships as part of the base RH6.0 set.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is exactly my point! There is no doubt that RedHat is a good distribution, but that is all what it is! Investors and companies are being lured to belief that the RedHat distro is something different from everybody else, and when push comes to shove they will demand that. RedHat for better or worst will not have any saying on that. Once the IPO is out, RedHat CEO will have even more bosses than he has now, more investors. Microsoft should be laughing at all this, because it doesn't need a lot to realize that our community model will be broken without repair as these events unfold. Note that I don't have anything against the current RedHat distro; but as events unfold, this will change dramatically. At the end of all, RedHat top execs will be multimillionares, and will be able to retire and send everyone to hell! This is not a matter of good or evil, even when we joke with these terms, it is a matter of practical business sense. There is nothing else they can do, but screw everyone they have to in order to maximize profits. I remember a few years ago, when RH was nothing, that they had more contact with other distributions. Do you see that now happening? Everything is changing dramatically, as in limiting the ability of finding software not expressively RPM formated. Try to use Debian or Slackware, and you will run into problems trying to find software formated in "deb" or "tarred and gzipped." "Tarred and gzip" are in better standing because of the many projects that are being developed. Still, little by little commercial software is only being RPMed. Is this happening by pure coincidence. Think again!
Sadly, but true. Alien doesn't work with every RPM package. Even the author states so. If you knew better, you wouldn't say something so dumb!
No, I've only used Linux for the past four years. I've design software for the Linux arch in the past, and whenever I have a chance from school, I'll do it again! No, it is true, I'm not part of your user-only community!
- 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.
--
A.C. wrote:
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
The problem with this is its subjectivity. And that's where capitalism runs into trouble. If i want/am able to pay more for something that does not increase its inherent worth. And that's tragic because someone who can't afford the increase, but still needs the product may be stuck paying more for it if it suddenly goes into demand.
Part of what Marx argued for was an objective measurement for worth so that everyone would be assured of fair treatment. The situation he proposed isn't terribly practical, but it does have merit.
A.C. wrote:
No! That's the brilliance of it. Society can support just about anything which it deems valuable. That value drives the society to utilize whatever that thing is. The utility, at the very least, drives and motivates some sort of action, which drives and motivates some other action.
This is, of course, assuming that society at lareg makes correct assumptions of value, which it doesn't.
This incessant chain of action, is what feeds, clothes and houses most of society.
But what about the portion that isn't fed, clothed, or housed at all? The system certainly isn't perfect. It's not a cuase for overthrow, but possibly reevaluation, but the problem se4ems to be that no one is willing to question the ffectiveness of a system that works so apparently well (in first world countries)
This is not a cry for socialism in any way, nor communism because i think both of those are even more flawed.
It is certainly true that not all members of the society thrive or even survive for that matter. But its better than the alternative of the entire society failing.
Is it? I'm not so sure our obsession with spreserving the current incarnation of 'society' has done us any good. If society collapsed, it wouldn't mean the end of humanity, and just maybe we would come up with a system with fewer bugs in it by starting from the beginning again. (NO, i'm not a terrorist or anarchist either)
The fact that everyone doesn't have to farm their own food makes it possible for the diversity of things that exist in our society.
If you've been watching farm prices lately, farmers aren't doing too well (at least in the U.S) Apparently people are willing to pay very well for the luxury of this diversity. And farming (unless it's on a huge, depoleting scale is never massively profitable. My gradfather often says "It's the occupation with the highest gross income, but the lowest profit" and he's pretty accurate.
"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.
That's nice, get off the little yellow bus eh?
See i can kinda see where you are mis-reading my post and pulling CDs in stores out of your hindend, but my comment about the download was to the previous poster tellin me that my mother could find somewhere to download redhat on redhat's site.
was that to hard for you to grasp?
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
Comparing RedHat's release of some proprietary software, such as Netscape and Real Audio, and their desire to use an open-source desktop is not really valid.
The desktop is a more central component of the system, whereas user applications like netscape just perform a task. People don't write applications based on netscape, but they do write apps based on the desktop.
I think Red Hat had a legit concern that if people wrote free software based on QT (the old non free QT at least), then the software wouldn't really be free because it would be based on code not freely available.
I think from this perspective it makes sense for Red Hat to take the stance they did.
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.
--//--
So why don't you go get the source rpm and recompile it for whatever version you're running?
People seem to think that using RPM means you can't recompile from source. This is incorrect. Just get netscape-x.x.x-src.rpm and rebuild it:
rpm --rebuild netscape-x.x.x-src.rpm
This will give you the binary rpm that you can install on your system, compiled with your dependencies.
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'.
And that's one place (of many) where Marx was utterly wrong. There IS no such thing as "objective worth". Worth is a value measurement that people make, and varies from person to person, and even from one time to another.
I have no need for, oh, an air compressor. Therefore, it's not worth anything to me. You couldn't unload one on me unless you *paid* me. But, if you have a need for one (say you run a mechanic's shop that uses compressed-air-powered tools), you're probably willing to pay some amount for it. And that amount is what *you* consider it to be worth.
To explain the time variability: a 50 MHz intel-compatible processor. When that was the fastest speed available, people were willing to pay handsomely. When that's less than one tenth the bare clockspeed of the newest processors, people *aren't* willing to pay much for it - because it isn't worth much anymore.
If you still buy the "objective worth" concept, answer this - how would you go about determining the objective worth of a product or of labor? And *who* would do the determining?
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.)
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
apparently the "." key is not functional on all systems, where's the redhat RPM for that? ;-)
The other change I had to make to get printing working was to define a print command, lpq command, and lprm command, the tech side of which is available in the /usr/docs section I think. Once I'd done that, I didn't have any issues.
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.
Not just a net story actually.
There *WILL* be a bugfix release soon.
This needed to be said, Enough Red Hat bashing.