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Linux Showdown, Or What Do You Want to Know in Linux?
So, little_bird sent in some information about the upcoming LinuxWorldExpo in February, talking about the program but also a "Linux Showdown". It's a feature panel consisting of "leading commercial Linux providers" with questions being field from a panel of experts, the audience and one another about Linux. My question - what would you want to ask these folks? What's on your mind?
BTW, I've also been told that if you register for any conference package by December 4, you're in a drawing to win one of twenty-five autographed copies of the upcoming Jon Katz book, GEEK. How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. But the book is dedicated to Rob and I, so I dunno... *grin*.
Now that RedHat has funding, why do i see more adds for turbo linux and other unices out there?
When will Java be a part of Linux? Lots of enterprise systems, such as Oracle, Veritas and other programs require JVM's and Java Plugins that don't exist
Again, now that there is money, who is lobbying for core support? Like Java, Hardware and Software drivers?
Who will take the lead on core system? - Don't give me an .1 upgrade because a new kde is out, what underlying technologies push your distribution outside of money?
Vendor Support - What are existing and future plans? Do you offer help to Palm Computer, Handspring and other Handheld devices for integration?
I guess my questions all lead to the same thing, there seems to be lots of money out there, but only enough to pay for what we got.. nothing is being pioneered except a "movement" and well, when things do get pioneered such as KDE 2.0 they get bitched at for vering off from other GUI's when it supposed to be a choice to begin with..
If you were the only distribution around, how would you change your goals/policies toward development?
How do you feel that a technical OS like Linux can compete with the ease of use of MacOS or windows?
-- Moondog
Would the commercial and non-commercial distributions consider forming a united front to target hardware vendors to supply Linux drivers for their new hardware?
Now that ATI and 3COM have decided to become Linux-friendly, how about targeting input device vendors, monitor vendors, printer vendors, etc?
* Linux needs a unified and coherent High Availability Solution. The guys at HA-Linux are doing a great job (thanx, Allan!), but this project still lacks a lot of functionality.
A good High Availability Solution involves both software and hardware. As being used mostly on Intel platforms, Linux lacks adequate hardware to do things like disk sharing, and on the software side, it lacks a good journaled file system that also uses a LVM
Any of you guys has a real solution, or at least some effort being put into it, to show us? I am an AIX worker who works a lot with HACMP, the IBM product for High Availability. My company also does some jobs for Linux, too, and it is not uncommon for some customer to be interested in High Availability for Linux. The customer gives up as soon as it sees the obstacles for getting the software and hardware for it.
* Linux Certification. I've heard that IBM will be offering certification in Linux too. Are any of the technical guys in your company certified? If so, which exact certification do they have? The RedHat certification? Or other company's one? How important do you feel being certified is in the Linux market today? Do you also feel the lack of a strong, internationalized, unified Linux certification?
* Lovely distributions vs. Good distributions - As an Unix professional, I feel very sorry for the today distributions. Even the most corporate ones seems to be targeted to the home user and general services, being bloated with several daemons and applications which really aren't necessary or even desirable in most practical situations. This makes all the Linux distributions which I know very slow compared to the real power of the kernel.
A good distribution that could be tuned in installation time would be a gift from the heavens for technical people. Something that doesn't follow the redhat standard (sorry, redhat, but your distribution IS bloated) and don't make dumb mistakes like when you ask it not to install X in the installation menu and it still installs it because it is a prerequisite for most administration applications.
Do you plan for implementing something like that in your company? My boss proposed a while ago that we could make such a distribution, or at least an internal-use only version of it to ease our work.
* Corporate database using.It is fine to see that Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2 and so on have versions for Linux, it is nice to see SAP R/3 shipping for Linux too, but has ANYBODY having REAL experience with it? We are willing to work with Linux like we work with AIX, but we don't know anybody who has real experience with Linux in this database world so that we could use this knowledge to help clients to migrate to Linux.
Do you have any experience in Linux using these products in serious, mission-critical environments?
* Drivers, libraries and software issues - One of the shiny points about Linux is the availability of very good open-source software. The bad point of this good point is having to compile almost every application you get. To worse things up, you are on your own if you have trouble with shared libraries -- many software products use libraries in beta stages, and sometimes you can't use one of them because the other requires just the other version of that same library, and you can't have both on the same system. How do you explain that to a customer when you are providing support?
I guess these are my points. Hey, I could use these answers for the real world if I get them!
Thanks in advance,
Cláudio Sampaio (Patola)
Solvo IT
Patola (Claudio Sampaio)
Unix System Administrator
Multimedia codecs and applications are more prevalent in the Windows world.
Is a time foreseen when Linux could become an equal in the multimedia arena?
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
There seems to have been something of a "trainwreck" with respect to Java. There are lots of "nearly done" Java environments out there, including Kaffe, GCJ, Jikes, "Blackdown," and likely others.
Unfortunately, none are truly useful without some combination of classes (ala GNU Classpath) and some combination of AWT/Swing. And that has been rather less rapidly forthcoming in the "reasonably free form" that is necessary in order for it to be ubiquitous enough for people to really use it to deploy applications, or to use it as a layer on which to build further infrastructure like EJB.
Is anybody near to deploying a complete "libre" Java for Linux?
There's Linuxconf. There's COAS. There's cfengine. And Ganymede (tho it needs Java; see above...) and bunches of other system config tools one one degree of incompleteness or another.
Big, expensive things like UniCentre are also getting ported, although they're not likely of great interest on the home front.
Is there any intent to try to have some useful protocols to allow intercommunications of some of these systems, or to perhaps pick an existing one rather than recreating the wheel?
There has been some lipservice about Linux Standard Base (LSB), but it is not evident that anyone has either deployed substantially changed systems as a result of attempting to conform to some common guidelines, nor to actually provide ways of conforming systems to standards.
There are lots of tools out there to run systems through automated test suites; that is apparently one of the major tasks of one ACLs for Linux project. In other contexts, we find ANSI Common LISP Conformance Tests. The folks at Cygnus run EGCS through testing, and provide EGCS Test Suite Results. Greg is being used to validate that GnuStep conforms to its documentation.
And then there's the Extreme Programming approach (particularly associated with Smalltalk) where one of the core requirements is of Continuous Integration Tests that are integrated in with the development process.
But it is, often enough, not clear that people are depending in much more than merely the notion that Because it's Open Source, naturally bags of people will want to spend their weekends testing my code.
We badly need to have some regression tests so that some testing takes place as distributions are constructed. Debian does some of this with dpkg-related tools; it is highly unfortunate that similar tools have not cropped up around RPM.
Question: What are you doing to help contribute to the public body of test suite code?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
* Why is man5 always out of date WRT /etc
:)
:) ;)
/usr/doc /usr/share/info, man, going to be integrated into a single help system? /usr/doc into one interface.
in my experience, its not, but it doesnt document even 1/4 of whats there. So incomplete is a better description.
* Why does Linus still hate the GGI project
He believes that X is good enough, and its his right to think that. He's not actively against GGI, but more against the inclusion of KGI in the mainstream kernel. I doubt the clueless newbies even know about GGI
* Will DOSEMU ever run Windows98
No. Not in its current incarnation. Win98 requires access to protected mode, which isnt availible when you're running an x86 VM.
* Why isnt BERLIN integrated into the kernel
For the same reasons X/Gnome isnt. It'd be daft
Imagine how long a 20meg kernel would take to boot
* If I disassemble a proprietry driver module, is it Open Source(tm)?
No, you'd not have the copyright for that thing, so you wouldnt be allowed to declare it open source.
* When is
Debian has a neat package, called dwww which translates pretty much any documentation into one search engine, running locally. It basically pulls info2html, man2html and
* If I piss off Linus, will Tove kick my ass?
Hmm, dunno, I think its hard to piss off Linus.
PS: apologies for any misquotings of the questions, mozilla's copy/paste isnt currently working.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I would ask them how they would market their products for the customers to seem them as a good alternative to MS OS's. Many customers seem to believe that Linux is not something for them. But maybe it is. These customers must be convinced by they Linux distributors for Linux to become a realistic alternative to Microsoft. Another ineresting question is technical support. I bet there isn't a Linux user out there who hasn't had any problems at all with Linux. Of course, this issue is in other operating systems as well, but Linux is so much more complex. Therefore, the time given to technical support is quite a bit more using Linux. That means that the sellers can't set a very high price for support, or the customers can't afford it! And, as Linux user-friendliness eventually increases, and therefore the nned for technical support, how will they handle that? By raising prices?
Welcome to Slashdot. Please don't feed the trolls.
He makes the best arguments for Micorsoft Windows I've ever heard.
George
Worse than an untouchable, when I reincarnate I'll be lucky to return as bacteria.
What features do you see adopting in the next year to make Linux more desktop friendly?
And do you think these features will come from the OSS movement, or will they be produced by the corporate sector of the Linux community?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Which distribution, other than your own, would you recommend to (a) a newbie user from the Windows world, and (b) an experienced corporate Unix user? Do you feel they need to be different recommendations?
/* (Found in xscreensaver/hacks/screenhack.h) */ .plan file:
/* Found in Don Hopkins'
*
* The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to
* device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVax framebuffer
* on acid. A truely portable X application is required to act like the
* persistent customer in the Monty Python ``Cheese Shop'' sketch. Even
* the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions, like:
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR ROOT?
* root = RootWindow(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* AND WHAT IS YOUR WINDOW?
* win = XCreateSimpleWindow(display, root, 0, 0, 256, 256, 1,
* BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)),
* WhitePixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)))
* OH ALL RIGHT, YOU CAN GO ON.
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR COLORMAP?
* cmap = DefaultColormap(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR?
* favorite_color = 0; / * Black. * /
* / * Whoops! No, I mean: * /
* favorite_color = BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* / * AAAYYYYEEEEE!! (client dumps core & falls into the chasm) * /
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR VISUAL?
* struct XVisualInfo vinfo;
* if (XMatchVisualInfo(display, DefaultScreen(display),
* 8, PseudoColor, &vinfo) != 0)
* visual = vinfo.visual;
* AND WHAT IS THE NET SPEED VELOCITY OF AN XConfigureWindow REQUEST?
* / * Is that a SubStructureRedirectMask or a ResizeRedirectMask? * /
* WHAT?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?
* AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!! (server dumps core & falls into the chasm)
*/
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
What... is your name?
What... is your quest?
What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
ACK, i forgot to finish the last line of my first question so here goes:
:)
"Do you think there will/should be any attempts to create a standardized version of Linux in order to solve the issue of potential incompatibility between different distribs?"
I guess preview is my friend after all
You're right! We could ask someone like Alan Cox except for the fact that he works for the company that just figured out how to make money off free stuff. Actually, we could ask anybody and see where a large group of people thinks Linux should go. Some of 'em are bound to be right, and it'll be readily apparent that they're right. If it's not, it's probably not a good direction to take.
The people to ask about the future would include a kernel developer, one person from KDE developement, one from Gnome developement, a person from Corel, a person from SGI, a person from VA, a person from Linuxcare, a person with IBM, and a person from at least two of the following hardware vendors: Creative, ATI, Diamond, AMD, Intel, 3COM, Sun (involved in hardware), and Compaq (involved in Alpha).
That's a panel I'd like to see.