Why Intel is so hot about Linux.
on
Intel on Linux
·
· Score: 4
One word: Merced.
The Intel/HP contingent has poured a nice chunk of change into the IA-64 chip. Now, what would you do if you were Intel right now, hhmmm?
Here you are. The amount of money you dumped into the chip is bigger than the gross national product of most third world nations. You are several months from shipping it. And now you ask yourself, who's going to use it?
Microsoft? Windows? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Microsoft's too busy getting their crap together with W2K. I don't remember ever hearing when MS intends to add support for the IA-64 chip in their OS. If ever.
Meanwhile, you keep reading that Linux will have IA-64 support right out of the box, for the chip. I recall that either VA Linux or Red Hat (or both) are working on porting the kernel to the 64 bit chip.
Right now, it looks like Linux would be the only OS that can actually support the 64 bit architecture of the Merced chip. I may be wrong, I don't read the trade press much, but for the life of me, I can't think of anything else other than Linux that has announced actual Merced support for the chip, when it ships.
Looks to me like Intel's putting all of its eggs in the Torvalds basket. Linux stands to be the only thing that can actually sell Merced chips for Intel.
I thought this was a wonderful parody, but as I read it, I kept having nagging doubts that maybe this person was serious.
Oh please, anyone who can come up with the "36 of D" line just can't be serious. Religious nuts like that simply don't have this type of a sense of humor.
I use the WWW Consortium's own editor, Amaya. Amaya is buggy, it crashes every once in a while. Amaya does keep its work saved in temporary files, so you can usually pick up right where you left off.
Amaya's bugs are more than made up by the fact that it generates very clean and portable HTML. That's what I consider more important than anything else.
Gee, yesterday at work our NT server went blooey. A department-wide mail stated that all changes to all the files on the network over the past day have been lost.
The article is correct. All the company jewels are kept on UNIX boxen, and NT is used mainly by PHBs to write memos and Excel spreadsheets.
The servers, running Caldera Systems Inc.'s OpenLinux Version 1.1, will deliver the applications to Windows 95 desktops running a terminal-emulation program.
Sounds to me like they're running an X server on those Win95 boxes. Which means that the only reason they still use Win95 is due to legacy apps. Make something equivalent available on Linux, and they can wipe the Win95 boxes clean.
Excuse me while I yawn. I've been using Don Becker's driver for their PCMCIA network card for over a year now. I really can't give much credit to a company who has been dragging their heels for so long. 3com is simply jumping on the bandwagon. Everyone and his mother is announcing Linux support, and they don't want to be left behind.
I really feel almost insulted when any company that has been giving me the finger for so long now turns around, announces that they'll "support" Linux (whatever that means), and expect people to pat them on the back.
Somehow, I didn't find myself worked up all over it. Like, who cares if Microsoft thinks Open Source is what it is, or if it's something else? I don't.
Despite MS's assurances that the weather is good, it's nice and sunny, and things just look rosy, MS is under siege from multiple sources, and they're simply losing their control of their monopoly, they know it, and they still haven't figured out what to do about it.
The whole concept of Open Source is just so alien to MS, that they simply don't know what to do about it, and are just trying the same embrace/extend/redefine/mutate approach, in a different venue.
The 2.2 kernel supports SMP with a simple configuration switch. The 2.0 kernel has some very primitive SMP support, and you have to specially compile for it.
If you wanna put together an SMP box, be carefull. Either buy a complete system, or be very carefull as to the chassis you select. I'm waiting for another chassis to arrive because when I put everything together, the internal 3.5" disk bay was sitting right on top of the SDRAM DIMMS. Ouch.
If it is MS, I just can't fathom the stupidity of this stunt. Even if you only have three functioning brain cells, that's two more than you'll need to figure out that this is a rather dumb thing to do. I can't see how news of MS getting uptight and suing people for saying naughty things about MS, is good PR. Especially now.
I guess that MS has finally decided to write off the ABB crowd (anything but Bill), because no way in heck they can possibly think that this development will win them converts over from the other side.
NEWS FLASH - White House lawyers have confirmed recent rumors that President Clinton has filed a defamation lawsuit against the producers of the "Mad-TV" TV show, and actor Wil Sasso. The lawsuit claims that the show has made numerous slanderous comments about Mr. Clinton, repeatedly hinting that Mr. Clinton is a sex-starved womanizer who regularly cheats on his wife.
In related news, there are unsubstantiated rumors about the Cat Lovers of America and the World Society (CLAWS) getting ready to file their own defamation lawsuit against the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company, claiming MGM has unfairly maligned the feline species in their "Tom And Jerry" cartoons. A CLAWS spokesman declined to comment on the rumor.
Come on - think about it. If the word got out that Microsoft is suing UserFriendly.org on basis of either some kind of a cockamamie trademark infringement, or because UF has been dumping on Billy-boy (not that I have noticed, but I haven't been reading UF for long) this would be... can't even find a good word for it except: really bad PR.
This would be akin to Bill Clinton suing Mad-TV for those wickedly funny Will Sasso skits.
Microsoft lives and dies by PR. Microsoft can't really be THAT dumb????
Can someone be kind enough to summarize the major targets that User Friendly has been mocking lately, with a brief synopsis, perhaps, of the plot?
Netsol wouldn't have to pull this stunt if they actually did a good job, and had a good reputation. Let's face it -- they done a lousy job, and they're resorting to cheap tricks like that in order to stay ahead.
They know that the jig is up, and are grasping at straws. If I ever need to register any more domains, no way I would pick Netsol, if I have a choice.
I can't help but see a parallel between Netsol's shtick, and MS forcing IE down everyone's throat, in order to kill the competition - NS.
I've pretty much went the same way myself. I cut my teeth on Slackware, now use Red Hat exclusively, except for one box that's still running Slack.
RPM is definitely a timesaver from a sysadmin's point of view. One constant pain sysadmins have is upgrading a package - remembering where all the config files are - what needs to be changed. God forbid if a directory or a file that belongs to a package has moved from one place to another.
When you upgrade with RPM, your old version is cleanly deinstalled, and a new one installed, all automatically. A few intelligent things are done with configuration files, and you have a complete record of which file came with a package.
You can certainly compile and install stuff yourself, by hand, on Red Hat. But, over time, that tends to break things. If you install a later version of something that was already installed as an RPM, when you later upgrade to a newer Red Hat version, you will find that Red Hat's installer will automatically scribble a newer RPM your installed app. Perhaps that's not such a bad idea anyway, but you may not've wanted to do that, for some reason. Plus you're likely to lose any changes to the configuration file that you've made.
It's also quite easy to stay up to date with the latest versions of everything you have installed. There are scripts out there that can automatically poll the updates directory on a Red Hat FTP site, and notify you when updates become available. I don't think that there's anything similar to that for Slackware.
Here's a real good example of what kind of a benefit you get from RPM.
I needed to repartition my main box. I dumped everything to tape, and I put together a boot disk that comes up with a bare kernel, the kernel tape drive module, and the minimum of tools that I need to load the system back from a tape. I go ahead, rewipe the hard disk, format it, partition it, then go ahead and reload everything back from tape.
I reboot, the system comes up fine, but after logging in, it's acting kinda funky. I normally have a button to run Pine within xterm. Pine comes up briefly, something flashes on the screen, and it exits. I'm getting some real weird messages from "su" that I have never seen before in my life. All sorts of things suddenly give me real strange error messages, out of nowhere.
I did some digging around. Hoo-boy -- looks like tar doesn't know how to properly restore the permission and ownership of device files. My entire/dev is completely fubared.
No problem.
rpm --setperms dev
Back to normal. Carry on.
If you intend to work heavily with a Red Hat system, I strongly recommend that you buy the book "Maximum RPM". The entire Red Hat distribution is based around their package manager. That book gives you all you need to know about creating your own RPMs, and is an invaluable source of information.
I doubt it. There's only one Patrick Volkerding to go around, unfortunately.
I still find the idea of one person putting out an entire Linux distribution to be a rather frightening thought. Brrr...
One problem that I really hope Patrick takes care of is a formal upgrade procedure. Last time I checked, the READMEs still recommend whiping the machine, and loading Slack on an empty disk. Yes, I suppose you can try reinstalling on top a previous version, but that's going to be messy.
Definitely look at Chembook. I have a year-old chembook that has been running RH 5.2 like a charm from day one. No problems whatsoever.
True, the graphics chip is a rather vanilla "Chips and Technologies" that maxes out at 800x600, but it's good enough for me. I have had absolutely no problems with any hardware in the laptop: hard disk, video, or audio (ESS Audiodrive). My only complaint that the laptop gets really really hot after a few hours of use. Also, installation is slightly tricky - with the swappable CDROM/Floppy, but nothing that a good hacker can't figure out:-)
MS-Borg's strategy is rather obvious. Get some money from businesses who already are leaning towards Linux, and most likely would abandon their licenses anyway. Allow them to invest into the Linux platform, and make them dependent on Office.
Then, proclaim that the Linux port is unprofitable, and announce that Office 2002 will not have a Linux port.
All you businesses running Office on the Linux platform? Well, you'll just have purchase a bunch of Win2000 licenses, that's all.
But, this is not going to work for the simple reason that MS-Borg simply won't be trusted.
You can profit from something in ways that are not always monetary in nature.
Just read any mainstream press story on Linux where the reporter struggles to come up with an explanation as to why you have thousands of people hacking the kernel without getting paid for it. The inevitable conclusion is that people do it to make a name for themselves. Which is generalyl true.
I haven't gotten a cent from the five GPLed programs I wrote (plus assorted hacks), yet I most certainly profited from them.
Sun must've noticed that it's only a matter of time before the Linux Sparc port is mature enough to beat the pants off Solaris. It makes no sense to charge a sizable fee for an operating system, when you can get something else which works at least as well, and it's free.
Slashdot Mirror
One word: Merced.
The Intel/HP contingent has poured a nice chunk of change into the IA-64 chip. Now, what would you do if you were Intel right now, hhmmm?
Here you are. The amount of money you dumped into the chip is bigger than the gross national product of most third world nations. You are several months from shipping it. And now you ask yourself, who's going to use it?
Microsoft? Windows? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Microsoft's too busy getting their crap together with W2K. I don't remember ever hearing when MS intends to add support for the IA-64 chip in their OS. If ever.
Meanwhile, you keep reading that Linux will have IA-64 support right out of the box, for the chip. I recall that either VA Linux or Red Hat (or both) are working on porting the kernel to the 64 bit chip.
Right now, it looks like Linux would be the only OS that can actually support the 64 bit architecture of the Merced chip. I may be wrong, I don't read the trade press much, but for the life of me, I can't think of anything else other than Linux that has announced actual Merced support for the chip, when it ships.
Looks to me like Intel's putting all of its eggs in the Torvalds basket. Linux stands to be the only thing that can actually sell Merced chips for Intel.
I thought this was a wonderful parody, but as I read it, I kept having nagging doubts that maybe this person was serious.
Oh please, anyone who can come up with the "36 of D" line just can't be serious. Religious nuts like that simply don't have this type of a sense of humor.
I use the WWW Consortium's own editor, Amaya. Amaya is buggy, it crashes every once in a while. Amaya does keep its work saved in temporary files, so you can usually pick up right where you left off.
Amaya's bugs are more than made up by the fact that it generates very clean and portable HTML. That's what I consider more important than anything else.
Gee, yesterday at work our NT server went blooey. A department-wide mail stated that all changes to all the files on the network over the past day have been lost.
The article is correct. All the company jewels are kept on UNIX boxen, and NT is used mainly by PHBs to write memos and Excel spreadsheets.
The servers, running Caldera Systems Inc.'s OpenLinux Version 1.1, will deliver the applications to Windows 95 desktops running a terminal-emulation program.
Sounds to me like they're running an X server on those Win95 boxes. Which means that the only reason they still use Win95 is due to legacy apps. Make something equivalent available on Linux, and they can wipe the Win95 boxes clean.
... 4,000 NT licenses down the drain, oh my...
According README.NVIDIA XFree86 3.3.3.1, it includes a brand new driver for Nvidia's Riva TNT chipset, contributed by @nvidia.com
The driver does not take advantage of hardware acceleration, but actual code from @nvidia.com is a good sign.
Excuse me while I yawn. I've been using Don Becker's driver for their PCMCIA network card for over a year now. I really can't give much credit to a company who has been dragging their heels for so long. 3com is simply jumping on the bandwagon. Everyone and his mother is announcing Linux support, and they don't want to be left behind.
I really feel almost insulted when any company that has been giving me the finger for so long now turns around, announces that they'll "support" Linux (whatever that means), and expect people to pat them on the back.
Somehow, I didn't find myself worked up all over it. Like, who cares if Microsoft thinks Open Source is what it is, or if it's something else? I don't.
Despite MS's assurances that the weather is good, it's nice and sunny, and things just look rosy, MS is under siege from multiple sources, and they're simply losing their control of their monopoly, they know it, and they still haven't figured out what to do about it.
The whole concept of Open Source is just so alien to MS, that they simply don't know what to do about it, and are just trying the same embrace/extend/redefine/mutate approach, in a different venue.
The 2.2 kernel supports SMP with a simple configuration switch. The 2.0 kernel has some very primitive SMP support, and you have to specially compile for it.
If you wanna put together an SMP box, be carefull. Either buy a complete system, or be very carefull as to the chassis you select. I'm waiting for another chassis to arrive because when I put everything together, the internal 3.5" disk bay was sitting right on top of the SDRAM DIMMS. Ouch.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.cnn.com
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/2.01
I doubt that cnn is running the Linux version of Netscape ES.
Redmond (WA) - Today Microsoft announced that the source code for Windows 2000 will be released under the Gnu GPL...
If it is MS, I just can't fathom the stupidity of this stunt. Even if you only have three functioning brain cells, that's two more than you'll need to figure out that this is a rather dumb thing to do. I can't see how news of MS getting uptight and suing people for saying naughty things about MS, is good PR. Especially now.
I guess that MS has finally decided to write off the ABB crowd (anything but Bill), because no way in heck they can possibly think that this development will win them converts over from the other side.
NEWS FLASH - White House lawyers have confirmed recent rumors that President Clinton has filed a defamation lawsuit against the producers of the "Mad-TV" TV show, and actor Wil Sasso. The lawsuit claims that the show has made numerous slanderous comments about Mr. Clinton, repeatedly hinting that Mr. Clinton is a sex-starved womanizer who regularly cheats on his wife.
In related news, there are unsubstantiated rumors about the Cat Lovers of America and the World Society (CLAWS) getting ready to file their own defamation lawsuit against the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company, claiming MGM has unfairly maligned the feline species in their "Tom And Jerry" cartoons. A CLAWS spokesman declined to comment on the rumor.
I just remembered seeing a couple of panels a few weeks ago where one of the characters is downloading porn off the Internet.
Look at that Sun logo right there. Sun may not be too happy about their trademark in the archives, associated with net.porn.
Everything fits, except for the "Death Star" reference.
Come on - think about it. If the word got out that Microsoft is suing UserFriendly.org on basis of either some kind of a cockamamie trademark infringement, or because UF has been dumping on Billy-boy (not that I have noticed, but I haven't been reading UF for long) this would be ... can't even find a good word for it except: really bad PR.
This would be akin to Bill Clinton suing Mad-TV for those wickedly funny Will Sasso skits.
Microsoft lives and dies by PR. Microsoft can't really be THAT dumb????
Can someone be kind enough to summarize the major targets that User Friendly has been mocking lately, with a brief synopsis, perhaps, of the plot?
Netsol wouldn't have to pull this stunt if they actually did a good job, and had a good reputation. Let's face it -- they done a lousy job, and they're resorting to cheap tricks like that in order to stay ahead.
They know that the jig is up, and are grasping at straws. If I ever need to register any more domains, no way I would pick Netsol, if I have a choice.
I can't help but see a parallel between Netsol's shtick, and MS forcing IE down everyone's throat, in order to kill the competition - NS.
RPM is definitely a timesaver from a sysadmin's point of view. One constant pain sysadmins have is upgrading a package - remembering where all the config files are - what needs to be changed. God forbid if a directory or a file that belongs to a package has moved from one place to another.
When you upgrade with RPM, your old version is cleanly deinstalled, and a new one installed, all automatically. A few intelligent things are done with configuration files, and you have a complete record of which file came with a package.
You can certainly compile and install stuff yourself, by hand, on Red Hat. But, over time, that tends to break things. If you install a later version of something that was already installed as an RPM, when you later upgrade to a newer Red Hat version, you will find that Red Hat's installer will automatically scribble a newer RPM your installed app. Perhaps that's not such a bad idea anyway, but you may not've wanted to do that, for some reason. Plus you're likely to lose any changes to the configuration file that you've made.
It's also quite easy to stay up to date with the latest versions of everything you have installed. There are scripts out there that can automatically poll the updates directory on a Red Hat FTP site, and notify you when updates become available. I don't think that there's anything similar to that for Slackware.
Here's a real good example of what kind of a benefit you get from RPM.
I needed to repartition my main box. I dumped everything to tape, and I put together a boot disk that comes up with a bare kernel, the kernel tape drive module, and the minimum of tools that I need to load the system back from a tape. I go ahead, rewipe the hard disk, format it, partition it, then go ahead and reload everything back from tape.
I reboot, the system comes up fine, but after logging in, it's acting kinda funky. I normally have a button to run Pine within xterm. Pine comes up briefly, something flashes on the screen, and it exits. I'm getting some real weird messages from "su" that I have never seen before in my life. All sorts of things suddenly give me real strange error messages, out of nowhere.
I did some digging around. Hoo-boy -- looks like tar doesn't know how to properly restore the permission and ownership of device files. My entire /dev is completely fubared.
No problem.
rpm --setperms dev
Back to normal. Carry on.
If you intend to work heavily with a Red Hat system, I strongly recommend that you buy the book "Maximum RPM". The entire Red Hat distribution is based around their package manager. That book gives you all you need to know about creating your own RPMs, and is an invaluable source of information.
I doubt it. There's only one Patrick Volkerding to go around, unfortunately.
I still find the idea of one person putting out an entire Linux distribution to be a rather frightening thought. Brrr...
One problem that I really hope Patrick takes care of is a formal upgrade procedure. Last time I checked, the READMEs still recommend whiping the machine, and loading Slack on an empty disk. Yes, I suppose you can try reinstalling on top a previous version, but that's going to be messy.
If all the dominoes fall in the right place, a suitable response to this FUD should appear shortly. :-)
It's a start, but Dell shouldn't really be that stupid. Give them time, hopefully they'll figure it out.
Definitely look at Chembook. I have a year-old chembook that has been running RH 5.2 like a charm from day one. No problems whatsoever.
True, the graphics chip is a rather vanilla "Chips and Technologies" that maxes out at 800x600, but it's good enough for me. I have had absolutely no problems with any hardware in the laptop: hard disk, video, or audio (ESS Audiodrive). My only complaint that the laptop gets really really hot after a few hours of use. Also, installation is slightly tricky - with the swappable CDROM/Floppy, but nothing that a good hacker can't figure out :-)
Then, proclaim that the Linux port is unprofitable, and announce that Office 2002 will not have a Linux port.
All you businesses running Office on the Linux platform? Well, you'll just have purchase a bunch of Win2000 licenses, that's all.
But, this is not going to work for the simple reason that MS-Borg simply won't be trusted.
You can profit from something in ways that are not always monetary in nature.
Just read any mainstream press story on Linux where the reporter struggles to come up with an explanation as to why you have thousands of people hacking the kernel without getting paid for it. The inevitable conclusion is that people do it to make a name for themselves. Which is generalyl true.
I haven't gotten a cent from the five GPLed programs I wrote (plus assorted hacks), yet I most certainly profited from them.
Although I'm not very familiar with Dell's product line, I'm sure they sell a bunch of laptop models.
Now, if Dell were to also officially bundle Linux on a bunch of laptops, THAT would make people take notice.
Don't forget that IBM also will outsource the support -- to Red Hat.
Sun must've noticed that it's only a matter of time before the Linux Sparc port is mature enough to beat the pants off Solaris. It makes no sense to charge a sizable fee for an operating system, when you can get something else which works at least as well, and it's free.