Intel has stated that they will not be able to supply ANYONE with P-III CPUs in February (check TheRegister). What will Dell and VALinux do then? VALinux may actually be OK, since they aren't super-high-volume in sales, they may actually have enough parts in stock to cover it (their prices may also be an indication that they stock up, rather than buy only as much as they need to stay with falling prices as tiny computer OEMs do).
A package manager. Specifically, the Debian apt-get does all that you describe. It has a "status" for each package; since each one is configured as it is installed, instead of the files being tossed onto the drive, and good luck configuring, try starting in/etc...
If you attempt to install a package with apt-get, it will inform you of any additional packages needed in order for this package to be installed, and also if any packages currently installed conflict, and would have to be removed. If you think this is OK and opt to continue, it will do all of this for you.
Every time you run apt-get, it checks the packages installed. If there are some that were not configured (including, of course, the newly installed ones, should they need configuration), it will prompt you to configure these.
Debian is perfect; why don't people listen to me?:)
I am a big fan of accuracy, and so I think that people should probably all use "Linux" when talking about the kernel, and "GNU/Linux" when talking about the system commonly known as "Linux". But that's not going to happen...heck, _I_ don't even follow it:)
However, where can the line be drawn? Do you look at the security of Sendmail and say hey, that counts as Linux? Well, no...Sendmail is run on lots of platforms all over the place. Do you look at a hideous malformation like rdist? Not really...I don't even think that's GNU. X Windows? Not GNU, either.
What, then, is left of Linux? In my mind, Debian shows it best. If you install from floppy disks, you have your basic UNIX system, about 30MB of software. Tar, gzip, more, ftp, telnet--all the collectable charachters! THIS is Linux. Though even then, tcpwrappers is included, which is not Linux-specific...
Of course, the reason that I agree with you is that no one could use that system. OpenSSH or SSH would go first, and then Apache, Sendmail, etc. depending on the function...but, I could just as easily use AOLserver, zeuss, zmailer, qmail, etc. as those 2. That's why it's hard to nail apps to Linux...sure, there are ones that MOST people use, but there are no real DEFAULTS. With Linux, you get to pick from several GNU alternatives, each interesting in its own way. With NT, you get One Microsoft Way...not fuzzy at all. But not my style, either.
And, it is too bad about the zealots. My machine _is_ dual boot, and I know my TNT is faster under '98...but I haven't booted '98 in months, since I got the PSX...
1. Don't open-source the code. Some poor college students who love MS will waste hours poring over it, and their SO's will dump them.
2. Get rid of the required GUI. That's just asking for trouble, really. If people want the shiny happy face buttons, let them have them. But maybe if your OS overwrites the video drivers randomly, people should be able to at least boot their server to a useable state until they can comfortable fix it after-hours.
3. Actually do what they just said. Every week a new bug comes out in ActiveX. Every few weeks, an exploit comes out for NT or 9x. It always takes them a lot longer to fix it than the Linux or BSD people. Plus, when they found a bug in the Linux 3C59x driver, I hand-edited the file and fixed it myself. However, I DON'T want them to go OSS, as stated above.
4. Keep the "happy marketing" away from the server products. Servers are not named "My Computer". Servers have ugly names, so that crackers cannot guess them, unless you feel like putting up a script-kiddie magnet by naming it something like "exchange.getbent.com". I am not in a Network Neighborhood; I'm on a LAN. Blechh.
OK, let's break down the words "holier-than-thou". It implies that we're better than something else, right? OK, I think that the security of Linux is better than that of NT. Right.
"Over the years", maybe. Sorry, but I've only been using Linux for 1.5 years, so I wouldn't know about before that. But if you hang out on BUGTRAQ, the number of bugs in closed-source OSs and programs WAY outnumber the number of bugs in GNU/Linux. That's over this LAST year, anyway.
Every OS will always have security problems--an OS is a huge, complicated piece of software. The goal is to have less, and to fix them as soon as they are discovered. Linux and GNU applications have succeeded in this goal, far more than MS has.
>We all know that the W2K machine that was "naked" on the internet had no problems at all. Nooo. Uh uh. And if they gave you that Administrator password, it'd be *fine*.
>The Win2K guys posted the Administrator password, what's your point?
His point is that the machine was NOT naked on the internet, it was behind a firewall. That test had nothing to do with cracking Win2K.
Perhaps you weren't paying attention, but the Linux box was compromised due to an insecure 3rd party CGI script. That is the fault of the administrator for using such a script, not the OS.
Slashdot posted a link to a study like this a day or so ago. It was comparing Red Hat, Solaris, and Microsoft. Red Hat blew the other 2 away, basically, proving that it takes both *NIX _and_ Open Source. The study made MS look really bad (much higher # of incidents), and Sun look really slow (up to 3 months for a fix!)
That you don't know what you're doing. Life must be so hard.
I'm not sure why buying a new video card would require you to get a new version of XFree86, unless you were using one like 3.3.3, which is completely out of date. You should already have 3.3.5 anyway, if not.6...it's not so hard to keep up-to-date with software that's free, is it? Especially such a major component of your system. If you're using an out-of-date version of Windows, expect to have a few downloads as well for any modern card. If you use Win95, you're going to need the USB patch (don't ask why! OBEY!) and AGP GART drivers, at least. Oh, and I hope you don't have Win95 A, because then you have to go out and BUY a new version of Windows. Or steal one. But either is probably going to take more time than getting a recent version of X...and let's just forget about the time difference in upgrading Windows vs. simply replacing a few X packages.
Also, I wonder what magical OS it is to which you refer that doesn't need a "specialized driver" to get to a "decent graphics mode". X will do 640x480 in 16-color with nearly any video card, just like...hey, just like Windows! Be makes it a bit more interesting: their driver does 256 shades of grey.
Also, hand-edit? Sure, you have to do that in some cases, but ever use xf86config? Since that's still text-based, which you seem to hate so much, your distro probably has a nice GUI tool to configure X.
AD does not use kerberos. They would like you to think it does, but really, it doesn't. MS, in their typical fashion, was not content to leave a great standard unmodified, and have added a bunch of proprietary junk to kerberos--which, of course, can only be exchanged between NT machines. If you're talking to a machine with REAL kerberos, you'll be "missing some information".
Also, I'm sure Novell would like to rule the world, just as MS and Sun would--along with all the other corporations, who, as my Econ teacher puts it, are dirty profit maximizers:) Debian, anyone?
GEOS was my first GUI; it booted from a 5.25" disk on my Commodore 64. It had an interface similar to MacOS with AtEase (not sure what it looks like now). It would be cool to have that interface to play with again, even if it were just that.
I do think that we ought to start treating mobile computers more like PDAs and less like desktops that you can carry. Personally, I run Linux on mine for stability, and also so that I can "code on the road". I would say that Linux is OK for laptops (has good power-saving features), but that you have to know what you're doing (eg, don't be running a bunch of processes you don't need, run XFCE instead of KDE, get enough memory so that you don't use swap space, etc.)
Here's what I've been doing, and it's worked great for me on every machine so far.
I install the base system as slink, usually from floppies (many machines don't have CD-ROMs, because they really don't need them). I go through the whole config. process as usual, except that I switch to a virtual terminal to use fdisk instead of cfdisk.
At the point where it first puts me into dselect, I immediatly quit. I hate dselect, and have only tried to use it once...never again!:)
The first thing that I do is to edit my apt sources file to use the FTP links, and also to include non-us and KDE. Of course, I also change it to use "potato" instead of "stable".
Then:
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade
This will take a while:) I then apt-get a few very important packages: less, compiler, assembler, and console-apt. Console-apt is invoked by using "capt" at the command line, and it's a million times better than dselect. Hit "?" if you need to know the key commands.
This system has made Debian installations very easy and fun for me. Every now and again, I do an "update" followed by "upgrade", to get all the latest packages.
It's not really a matter of "installing a new system". RedHat gives you this feeling by having you shutdown your computer, boot from the new distro floppy, and do an "upgrade install". And it's certainly a lot better than, say, installing Win98 as an "upgrade" to Win95.
With Debian, the difference in which version you use is in which FTP (or HTTP) directory you choose for your package source. To "upgrade", you simply change your/etc/apt/sources to point to the new FTP directory. Now, whenever you update your packages, you'll get them from the new directory. It's a much smoother process than anything else I've ever used. This is a testament to its great package management system.
When Debian upgrades a package, if it notices that you've changed any files (such as edited configuration files, which is to be expected:), it asks you:
1. Keep your version of this file? (default) 2. Install the version from the new package? 3. Show the difference between the 2?
This is only a small example; it's really quite nice. Debian is also nice to use in the same manner as you (eg, install the base 28M system, and compile everything else yourself).
The latest version does have an updated interface, which allows you to select a package and then expand it into branches of dependencies (and sub-branches of dependencies-on-dependencies).
I'm on an ethernet connection at school, so I can't comment on how it handles slow connections. A friend of mine uses it with a modem, and he has a script which downloads all updates at 4am and caches them, allowing him to peruse and install them later.
You don't actually run a system with the vendor-provided kernel, do you? I have 2.2.13 running on slink and potato systems just fine--in fact, the potato system is using 2.2.13 with the ext3 patch.
If _you_ want to wait around for someone else to update some weird "kernel package", that's fine with me. But I'll continue to download the latest source and compile it myself, as I've always done.
OK, maybe I'm blessed or something, but Netscape in Linux almost NEVER crashes for me. Really! I leave it running for weeks at a time, no problem. Same thing with Mozilla. I'm not sure what everyone else is doing to crash their browsers so much...
I usually visit/., anandtech, tomshardware, the Register, and a bunch of other random sites (GameFAQs, if I'm working on a PSX game at the moment:)
Annoyed that telnetd and others are enabled by default? Why continue to use RH when there are other distros where this is not the case?
With Debian, telnetd, wu-ftpd, etc. are not installed by default. You have to intentionally put them there. Plus, Debian makes an idea distro for those who are on high-speed networks, because it's designed to be easily installed and updated on-line. Try it--install only the base system (doable even from floppies), then ignore dselect (it blows). Edit the apt sources list to point to the FTP sites (instead of HTTP), and use "potato" instead of "stable". Then:
All the schools in the University of Maryland system are working out a similar deal. Don't believe for a SECOND that this isn't reflected in the tuition bills, because it is. Now, in addition to paying for a weight room I don't use, I have to pay for software that I hate, so that Bob Loser can get it ultra-cheap. At least our servers are still IRIX/Linux...
IMO, this is just encouraging students to use bad software. The CS teachers all tell students to do their programming on the IRIX servers, and recommend not using VC++, but what do you think will happen if students can get VC++ for $10? All set for a bright future writing printer drivers...
Is Windows 3.1 free? Is Windows95? They could make those available for free now, but they won't because they are still selling licenses. It will take a VERY long time after Win2k is released for even most businesses to convert. Heck, there are still lots of machines running 2.0.x kernels...
And, even if they did release it for free, who would fix it when the next bug was discovered? MS? HA! Since it'd be closed-source, the first DoS attack or buffer overflow could render it utterly useless as an OS.
Yes, I do think that Linux is better than MSWindows. Especially for people who are supposed to be LEARNING. Unfortunately, I can't attribute this quote to myself:
It's ironic that people who are better off can afford to give their kids computers that can teach them to be $6/hr typists, but that the "less fortunate" are forced to use Linux on recycled hardware, and forced to give their kids systems that can teach them system administration, networking, programming, etc...
Linux on "about a third of the worlds webservers?" While I would love for this to be the case, it sounds dubious...
Also, I still don't understand what the schools are getting for "free" that wasn't already free. They'll still have to pay for the support, so even though it may be at a reduced rate, that doesn't mean it's free. The OS was already free, so what does this leave? The box? The manual? Perhaps the RH manual is super-stellar, I wouldn't know because I've never read it. I personally like to stick to the HOWTOs and my local users group...
It is, however, VERY cool that an entire school is being set up with Linux from the start. I think that we'll continue to see more and more of this, probably in conjuction with "recycled" PCs in some of the school districts where computer labs would otherwise be out of reach. Or:
My band used to have a song called "Corporate Rock Sucks". It consisted of fake interviews with rich rock stars during the verse over elevator music, and us yelling and thrashing guitars on the chorus. (yeah, I know:) Here's an excerpt:
Interviewer: So, you guys are really upset about Ticketmaster charging your fans all that money?
Eddie Vedder: Yeah, that's totally messed up, man!
I: Really? So your CDs really cost $15 to manufacture?
EV: Yeah, man! We're practically, like, GIVING them away!
I: If you really care so much about your fans, why don't you just start your own label and release all your own albums like Fugazi did?
EV:...uhh... EV: This interview is OVER! I'm gonna go shoot some heroin!
Slashdot Mirror
Intel has stated that they will not be able to supply ANYONE with P-III CPUs in February (check TheRegister). What will Dell and VALinux do then? VALinux may actually be OK, since they aren't super-high-volume in sales, they may actually have enough parts in stock to cover it (their prices may also be an indication that they stock up, rather than buy only as much as they need to stay with falling prices as tiny computer OEMs do).
A package manager. Specifically, the Debian apt-get does all that you describe. It has a "status" for each package; since each one is configured as it is installed, instead of the files being tossed onto the drive, and good luck configuring, try starting in /etc...
:)
If you attempt to install a package with apt-get, it will inform you of any additional packages needed in order for this package to be installed, and also if any packages currently installed conflict, and would have to be removed. If you think this is OK and opt to continue, it will do all of this for you.
Every time you run apt-get, it checks the packages installed. If there are some that were not configured (including, of course, the newly installed ones, should they need configuration), it will prompt you to configure these.
Debian is perfect; why don't people listen to me?
This is HILARIOUS! Really disturbed, but HILARIOUS!!
I am a big fan of accuracy, and so I think that people should probably all use "Linux" when talking about the kernel, and "GNU/Linux" when talking about the system commonly known as "Linux". But that's not going to happen...heck, _I_ don't even follow it :)
However, where can the line be drawn? Do you look at the security of Sendmail and say hey, that counts as Linux? Well, no...Sendmail is run on lots of platforms all over the place. Do you look at a hideous malformation like rdist? Not really...I don't even think that's GNU. X Windows? Not GNU, either.
What, then, is left of Linux? In my mind, Debian shows it best. If you install from floppy disks, you have your basic UNIX system, about 30MB of software. Tar, gzip, more, ftp, telnet--all the collectable charachters! THIS is Linux. Though even then, tcpwrappers is included, which is not Linux-specific...
Of course, the reason that I agree with you is that no one could use that system. OpenSSH or SSH would go first, and then Apache, Sendmail, etc. depending on the function...but, I could just as easily use AOLserver, zeuss, zmailer, qmail, etc. as those 2. That's why it's hard to nail apps to Linux...sure, there are ones that MOST people use, but there are no real DEFAULTS. With Linux, you get to pick from several GNU alternatives, each interesting in its own way. With NT, you get One Microsoft Way...not fuzzy at all. But not my style, either.
And, it is too bad about the zealots. My machine _is_ dual boot, and I know my TNT is faster under '98...but I haven't booted '98 in months, since I got the PSX...
1. Don't open-source the code. Some poor college students who love MS will waste hours poring over it, and their SO's will dump them.
2. Get rid of the required GUI. That's just asking for trouble, really. If people want the shiny happy face buttons, let them have them. But maybe if your OS overwrites the video drivers randomly, people should be able to at least boot their server to a useable state until they can comfortable fix it after-hours.
3. Actually do what they just said. Every week a new bug comes out in ActiveX. Every few weeks, an exploit comes out for NT or 9x. It always takes them a lot longer to fix it than the Linux or BSD people. Plus, when they found a bug in the Linux 3C59x driver, I hand-edited the file and fixed it myself. However, I DON'T want them to go OSS, as stated above.
4. Keep the "happy marketing" away from the server products. Servers are not named "My Computer". Servers have ugly names, so that crackers cannot guess them, unless you feel like putting up a script-kiddie magnet by naming it something like "exchange.getbent.com". I am not in a Network Neighborhood; I'm on a LAN. Blechh.
Come ON, people. This is NOT insightful! This is a self-contradicting post which says nothing, poorly!
OK, let's break down the words "holier-than-thou". It implies that we're better than something else, right? OK, I think that the security of Linux is better than that of NT. Right.
"Over the years", maybe. Sorry, but I've only been using Linux for 1.5 years, so I wouldn't know about before that. But if you hang out on BUGTRAQ, the number of bugs in closed-source OSs and programs WAY outnumber the number of bugs in GNU/Linux. That's over this LAST year, anyway.
Every OS will always have security problems--an OS is a huge, complicated piece of software. The goal is to have less, and to fix them as soon as they are discovered. Linux and GNU applications have succeeded in this goal, far more than MS has.
>We all know that the W2K machine that was "naked" on the internet had no problems at all. Nooo. Uh uh. And if they gave you that Administrator password, it'd be *fine*.
>The Win2K guys posted the Administrator password, what's your point?
His point is that the machine was NOT naked on the internet, it was behind a firewall. That test had nothing to do with cracking Win2K.
Perhaps you weren't paying attention, but the Linux box was compromised due to an insecure 3rd party CGI script. That is the fault of the administrator for using such a script, not the OS.
What do you know, Zico? I wonder...
Slashdot posted a link to a study like this a day or so ago. It was comparing Red Hat, Solaris, and Microsoft. Red Hat blew the other 2 away, basically, proving that it takes both *NIX _and_ Open Source. The study made MS look really bad (much higher # of incidents), and Sun look really slow (up to 3 months for a fix!)
Mozilla changed my subject at the last minute, without asking, AGAIN! BAD mozilla! Sit in the corner!
Someone is on some serious crack! OK, smoke your crack and waste your moderation points:
At 5:19AM, vectro wrote:
Linux and the BSDs(especially OpenBSD) have a poor(ie, all-or-nothing) security model which is very well implemented.
Windows NT, on the other hand, has a really good security model, but the implementation sucks.
That you don't know what you're doing. Life must be so hard.
.6...it's not so hard to keep up-to-date with software that's free, is it? Especially such a major component of your system. If you're using an out-of-date version of Windows, expect to have a few downloads as well for any modern card. If you use Win95, you're going to need the USB patch (don't ask why! OBEY!) and AGP GART drivers, at least. Oh, and I hope you don't have Win95 A, because then you have to go out and BUY a new version of Windows. Or steal one. But either is probably going to take more time than getting a recent version of X...and let's just forget about the time difference in upgrading Windows vs. simply replacing a few X packages.
I'm not sure why buying a new video card would require you to get a new version of XFree86, unless you were using one like 3.3.3, which is completely out of date. You should already have 3.3.5 anyway, if not
Also, I wonder what magical OS it is to which you refer that doesn't need a "specialized driver" to get to a "decent graphics mode". X will do 640x480 in 16-color with nearly any video card, just like...hey, just like Windows! Be makes it a bit more interesting: their driver does 256 shades of grey.
Also, hand-edit? Sure, you have to do that in some cases, but ever use xf86config? Since that's still text-based, which you seem to hate so much, your distro probably has a nice GUI tool to configure X.
AD does not use kerberos. They would like you to think it does, but really, it doesn't. MS, in their typical fashion, was not content to leave a great standard unmodified, and have added a bunch of proprietary junk to kerberos--which, of course, can only be exchanged between NT machines. If you're talking to a machine with REAL kerberos, you'll be "missing some information".
:) Debian, anyone?
Also, I'm sure Novell would like to rule the world, just as MS and Sun would--along with all the other corporations, who, as my Econ teacher puts it, are dirty profit maximizers
GEOS was my first GUI; it booted from a 5.25" disk on my Commodore 64. It had an interface similar to MacOS with AtEase (not sure what it looks like now). It would be cool to have that interface to play with again, even if it were just that.
I do think that we ought to start treating mobile computers more like PDAs and less like desktops that you can carry. Personally, I run Linux on mine for stability, and also so that I can "code on the road". I would say that Linux is OK for laptops (has good power-saving features), but that you have to know what you're doing (eg, don't be running a bunch of processes you don't need, run XFCE instead of KDE, get enough memory so that you don't use swap space, etc.)
Here's what I've been doing, and it's worked great for me on every machine so far.
:)
:) I then apt-get a few very important packages: less, compiler, assembler, and console-apt. Console-apt is invoked by using "capt" at the command line, and it's a million times better than dselect. Hit "?" if you need to know the key commands.
I install the base system as slink, usually from floppies (many machines don't have CD-ROMs, because they really don't need them). I go through the whole config. process as usual, except that I switch to a virtual terminal to use fdisk instead of cfdisk.
At the point where it first puts me into dselect, I immediatly quit. I hate dselect, and have only tried to use it once...never again!
The first thing that I do is to edit my apt sources file to use the FTP links, and also to include non-us and KDE. Of course, I also change it to use "potato" instead of "stable".
Then:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
This will take a while
This system has made Debian installations very easy and fun for me. Every now and again, I do an "update" followed by "upgrade", to get all the latest packages.
I hope that it works for you.
It's not really a matter of "installing a new system". RedHat gives you this feeling by having you shutdown your computer, boot from the new distro floppy, and do an "upgrade install". And it's certainly a lot better than, say, installing Win98 as an "upgrade" to Win95.
/etc/apt/sources to point to the new FTP directory. Now, whenever you update your packages, you'll get them from the new directory. It's a much smoother process than anything else I've ever used. This is a testament to its great package management system.
:), it asks you:
With Debian, the difference in which version you use is in which FTP (or HTTP) directory you choose for your package source. To "upgrade", you simply change your
When Debian upgrades a package, if it notices that you've changed any files (such as edited configuration files, which is to be expected
1. Keep your version of this file? (default)
2. Install the version from the new package?
3. Show the difference between the 2?
This is only a small example; it's really quite nice. Debian is also nice to use in the same manner as you (eg, install the base 28M system, and compile everything else yourself).
Or capt, as the command goes...
The latest version does have an updated interface, which allows you to select a package and then expand it into branches of dependencies (and sub-branches of dependencies-on-dependencies).
I'm on an ethernet connection at school, so I can't comment on how it handles slow connections. A friend of mine uses it with a modem, and he has a script which downloads all updates at 4am and caches them, allowing him to peruse and install them later.
You don't actually run a system with the vendor-provided kernel, do you? I have 2.2.13 running on slink and potato systems just fine--in fact, the potato system is using 2.2.13 with
the ext3 patch.
If _you_ want to wait around for someone else to update some weird "kernel package", that's fine with me. But I'll continue to download the latest source and compile it myself, as I've always done.
OK, maybe I'm blessed or something, but Netscape in Linux almost NEVER crashes for me. Really! I leave it running for weeks at a time, no problem. Same thing with Mozilla. I'm not sure what everyone else is doing to crash their browsers so much...
/., anandtech, tomshardware, the Register, and a bunch of other random sites (GameFAQs, if I'm working on a PSX game at the moment :)
I usually visit
This is puzzling to me, though.
Annoyed that telnetd and others are enabled by default? Why continue to use RH when there are other distros where this is not the case?
With Debian, telnetd, wu-ftpd, etc. are not installed by default. You have to intentionally put them there. Plus, Debian makes an idea distro for those who are on high-speed networks, because it's designed to be easily installed and updated on-line. Try it--install only the base system (doable even from floppies), then ignore dselect (it blows). Edit the apt sources list to point to the FTP sites (instead of HTTP), and use "potato" instead of "stable". Then:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install console-apt
Type "capt", and install away. You'll always get the latest packages, and every few days you can do:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
To make sure you've got the latest of everything. Download the latest kernel source and compile, and you're set! I love ethernet!
All the schools in the University of Maryland system are working out a similar deal. Don't believe for a SECOND that this isn't reflected in the tuition bills, because it is. Now, in addition to paying for a weight room I don't use, I have to pay for software that I hate, so that Bob Loser can get it ultra-cheap. At least our servers are still IRIX/Linux...
IMO, this is just encouraging students to use bad software. The CS teachers all tell students to do their programming on the IRIX servers, and recommend not using VC++, but what do you think will happen if students can get VC++ for $10? All set for a bright future writing printer drivers...
Is Windows 3.1 free? Is Windows95? They could make those available for free now, but they won't because they are still selling licenses. It will take a VERY long time after Win2k is released for even most businesses to convert. Heck, there are still lots of machines running 2.0.x kernels...
And, even if they did release it for free, who would fix it when the next bug was discovered? MS? HA! Since it'd be closed-source, the first DoS attack or buffer overflow could render it utterly useless as an OS.
Yes, I do think that Linux is better than MSWindows. Especially for people who are supposed to be LEARNING. Unfortunately, I can't attribute this quote to myself:
It's ironic that people who are better off can afford to give their kids computers that can teach them to be $6/hr typists, but that the "less fortunate" are forced to use Linux on recycled hardware, and forced to give their kids systems that can teach them system administration, networking, programming, etc...
Linux on "about a third of the worlds webservers?" While I would love for this to be the case, it sounds dubious...
Also, I still don't understand what the schools are getting for "free" that wasn't already free. They'll still have to pay for the support, so even though it may be at a reduced rate, that doesn't mean it's free. The OS was already free, so what does this leave? The box? The manual? Perhaps the RH manual is super-stellar, I wouldn't know because I've never read it. I personally like to stick to the HOWTOs and my local users group...
It is, however, VERY cool that an entire school is being set up with Linux from the start. I think that we'll continue to see more and more of this, probably in conjuction with "recycled" PCs in some of the school districts where computer labs would otherwise be out of reach. Or:
http://agape.qis.net
My band used to have a song called "Corporate Rock Sucks". It consisted of fake interviews with rich rock stars during the verse over elevator music, and us yelling and thrashing guitars on the chorus. (yeah, I know:) Here's an excerpt:
...uhh...
Interviewer: So, you guys are really upset about Ticketmaster charging your fans all that money?
Eddie Vedder: Yeah, that's totally messed up, man!
I: Really? So your CDs really cost $15 to manufacture?
EV: Yeah, man! We're practically, like, GIVING them away!
I: If you really care so much about your fans, why don't you just start your own label and release all your own albums like Fugazi did?
EV:
EV: This interview is OVER! I'm gonna go shoot some heroin!