> To those who say "owning your own place is so much more secure," I > have two questions:
Buy if you are paying on a mortgage you are still BUYING a house. It isn't yours yet. Some of us aren't crazy enough to live in CA where owning isn't an option, only paying forever. I finally bought last year and expect to be paid off around the end of the decade by making extra payments as often as I am able.
Compare the economics of that situation if money gets tight.
Taxes: $50/year in city paxes, zero state due to homestead exemption
Oh, and as for homeowner's associations, if you have to join one of those, read teh paperwork a little closer. You don't actually OWN anything, the holding corp that runs the "hownowners association" has first claim on all the property in your subdivision. Would never be dumb enough to do that.
> Hmm, my Gentoo on amd64 dual boots with no issues, and I'm > running 2.6.5.
I'm not suprised at all. Most people installing Fedora have no problem with dual boot. Only a few with odd things in their partition table, seems to be related to CHS vs LBA stuff. Any AMD64 machine is new enough it will only support LBA, will not have been upgraded through several incarnations of Windows and Linux and therefore work just fine.
> Isn't it funny that a very small license change in a free program like > Xfree drives everyone away within months. But NVidia binary drivers, > which I use and love, have a license 10 times worse.
Not really, two different sets of people. Set one is distro maintainers and developers. They care about Free Software. Set two is gamers who just 'have' to have the best framerate and buy the latest and greatest card and couldn't care less about licenses. After all, they are playing closed games so why not a closed video driver.
As for me, the fastest video card on the planet is the ATI Radeon 9200, although I realize there are newer cards available for Windows and other closed and hybrid platforms.
This piece is sad. The commentary is written by someone who obviously has a working mind and can write (see his published works) but is so blinded by an irrational phobia against anything connected to the N word he is blindly attacking it, and because apparently his mind shuts down in the presence of the N word he isn't even doing a very good job of rebutting the idea.
This guy can't even tell the difference between fusion bombs and modern reactor designs that are pretty darned failsafe.
If you are really concerned about global warming, dependence on foreign oil, etc, you have to at least have a rational discussion about fission power. Which is why the ultra greens are having none of that and attacking with such ferocity, to them it ia a matter of religion, not science. Gaia told them in a dream or something that "Thou Shalt not Fission the Atoms that I have given unto thee." That's religion for you though, Galieo wasn't the first to be persecuted by religious intolerance and apparently isn't anywhere near the last.
While TCL is a little odd, it isn't odder than some of the other languages you listed and it has the best integration to the wonderful Tk toolkit of any of them. Nowadays it is important to show a new programmer they can create 'real' programs and in their mind that isn't tty apps, it is graphical user interfaces. TCL/Tk is perfect for that purpose. It is also more than able to create useful programs and is cross platform.
> Redhat has always had a couple of bad releases, but never a string of > bad ones as long as this last stretch (8, 9, FC1, FC2)
All.0 releases. 7.3 was the last publicly available stable release from RH. In an earlier post you said RHEL3 is doing pretty good on what I gather are the only couple of hosts to justify the support contract. So grab a RHEL rebuild for your other machines. At last count there are three pure play rebuilds and two more mutant builds.
Full disclosure: I hatched one of the pure play rebuilds.
> Believe it or not, some of us discovered Linux _without_ the aid of a > geek friend.
Well I guess nowadays that happens more and more since you can't pull up a tech news site/open a mag anymore without hearing about the Penguin, but somebody tipped me off way back when about it and where I could get a CD. And most new users do have an experienced user help them with their first install.
> Cutting edge research and development distro? I think "Alpha/Beta > Distro" would be more like it.
Not too far from the truth. Although FC2T2 and FC2T3 weren't that much buggier than the final so calling them alpha would be unfair. But calling FC2 a higher than normal quality beta would be fair. You want the polished final product you know where they sell that.
> We are talking about simple things such as, oh I don't know, gcc and > sound and stuff that has worked for eons in 2.4 based kernels.
Tell me how GCC is broken... in your opinion. But since I have spent a night building the hell out of packages to get around the patented bits RH leaves out and the 3rd party repos didn't have for x86_64 yet, I'm not likely to be listening very hard. (mplayer won't build a package saying it can't find X but you can "build install" in the BUILD dir and get it going. xine just won't play though.)
Sound is showing problems because after being available for years, Linus making it clear it was going into 2.6 due to being generally superior and, unlike OSS, supported by active developers, it appears few tested their system for ALSA compatibility. And anyhow, ALSA becoming the new default sound system for Linux is RedHat's fault how? btw, my system is cranking out some Ozzy via Shoutcast just fine as I type so it isn't like they shipped a system that had totally broken sound.
> I had a chance to convert someone to Linux and lost that chance > because all kinds of stuff didn't work.
You mean you used a freshly downloaded copy of a distro that just came out and that you had never even seen in action for evangelism? And a distro that you should know plans a neverending series of.0 quality releases? Good Grief!
> You want my opinion? You're just in denial of your n00bness.
Ok. So just how far back does one have to have been a Linux user to graduate from n00b in your wierd world? Got my first working install back in 1993 with Yggdrasil's LGX distro, how about you? In the future please be careful when starting these petty dick size contests, eventually you get embarassed.:)
> You could have fooled me with the fancy install program and graphical > configuration programs.
Fedora is a continual series of.0 releases, pretty eyecandy not withstanding. That eyecandy is being tested for stable release in RHEL, not to make FC a n00b distro. Everything is bleeding edge releases in Fedora, a receipe for disaster when handed to a n00b. I kinda like it, but I certainly wouldn't install it for a new user and I wouldn't dream of putting it into production use.
> The fedora/redhat kernels have always been anything but stock, usually > includes 20 patches or so that aren't in the vanilla kernel...
Yes, in the past RH has had a terrible rep for shipping horrors like the RHEL3 kernel's mismash of 2.4 and 2.6. But according to posts to fedora-devel by RH kernel dev folk their goal for Fedora is to minimize the patch count. It should be obvious that creating and maintaining those wonders of mad science can't be easy for them and they would prefer to work toward a future when the important patches go into the mainline kernel.
> There are precompiled modules but the nvidia installer downloads the > source and compiles the module on the spot to work with whatever > version of X and Kernel you are using.
No it doesn't. It downloads the source to a thin shim that interfaces the binary blob with one of a select set of kernel/XFree86 combinations. When new versions appear you get to wait for them decide the new version is important enough to bother supporting.
> How about their the fastest cards on the market and include the best > linux support of any high performance video card out there.
Wrong. The fastest supported 3D card in the Free Software world is the Radeon 9200. Anything newer requires binary drivers and is therefore outside the scope of the Free Software or even Open Source movements. If you, as someone outside of these closely allied movements, manage to get a binary driver working, great for you. Free Software is for everyone, even thouse who disagree with the goals of the developers. You can power a puppy masher with Debian and not violate the license but you should not expect anyone else to abandon the goals of the FS/OSS movement to help keep it running for you. Same for Nvidia support. It just isn't on our radar and you should be bright enough to figure that out.
> Not being ok with Nvidia is one thing, making a decision without > significant benefit that breaks 70% of your overall userbase
Being someone who lacks the skills to be a kernel hacker, but who does read LWN's excellent features explaining kernel issues, I'd say you are just wrong. The 4K stack thing appears to be pretty important to solving some serious scalability issues and appears destined for the mainline 2.6 kernel. Which is probably why RH slipstreamed it into FC2, to get the 'issues' hammered out before shipping it in RHEL4.
Anyway, Fedora Core is developed in the open. Nvidia has know about the situation for months, so why isn't the lack of an updated driver their problem?
> No problems here. I am happy they included it in the distribution; > it's fantastic interface for older pcs.
I'm running it on an Athlon64. Mostly because Nautilus is currently borked on AMD64 and besides, I don't really like the dumbed down interface of either GNOME or KDE.
> Are you saying it's not their responsibility to look through bugzilla > and clear out the showstopper's before release?
Again you are rating it as a 'showstopper' bug but they don't. Neither did Mandrake when they released their version 10 with the same problem. I'd actually consider it more of a problem for Mandrake since RH had already been lit up by several loudmouthed flamers over the issue and because Mandrake users tend to newbies who dual boot more (gotta play [insert latest Windows game])
Not really. RedHat users were sundered into three groups.
1. Those who were hacker types, interested in the latest and greatest. Who could not only tolerate 'issues' but could fix them and put the fixes into bugzilla. I run Fedora Core at home.
2. Those who used RedHat for high value production machines. They were 'encouraged' to buy into RHEL. You fall into this group.
3. Those in the middle who used RedHat and found it to be stable and useful, put on machines doing real work but could never in a million years justify RHEL's fees. This group was discarded as not profitable and not providing enough bug fixes to justify the expenditure of effort to keep in the RedHat camp.
Being firmly in the third camp I rebuilt RHEL3 as WhiteBox Enterprise Linux for use on my machines at work.
> All I wanted from FC2 was FC1 with a 2.6 kernel that didn't turn off > preemptive kernel and didn't include a patch that breaks the nvidia > drivers.
Then apparently you didn't want Fedora. If the preemptive patch made it into 2.6 you would probably have it in Fedora or could fix it with a simple recompile. Fedora wants as stock a kernel as is practical, you don't.
As for the Nvidia drivers, so what? It has been clear for years that binary drivers are tolerated but not a single finger will ever be lifted to make their life easier. There is a reason for this. If a single exception is ever made the decision of where to stop gets very fuzzy. Every victim of closed hardware will scream equally loud that breaking THEIR system is unacceptable and we would have a frozen kernel. Once you admit you are a second class citizen who accepted a list of Linux kernel/XFree86 versions approved by Nvidia you can STFU and leave the rest of us in peace and go camp on the Nvidia website awaiting their permission to upgrade to new versions.
> If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro...
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro. Fedora isn't one, it is a cutting edge research and development distro. Don't be confused by the fact it has pretty eyecandy because they are cooking that for eventual rolling into RHEL. It would be just as daft as giving a newb Debian, Gentoo, Slackware or OpenBSD. Instead give them Mandrake, or one of the other newbie friendly distros.
But beware, ALL of the 2.6 kernel based distros are currently dealing with the dual boot problem. Fedora gets the abuse heaped upon them because a) a lot more people seem to be running it and b) every week slashdot seems to hold a 'hate redhat day' event.
> They knowingly released fedora core 2 with what I would consider a > "show stopper".
Who decides it is a show stopper? Some idiot was raving the same thing on fedora-testing every couple of hours. But he was yelling it days after the ball had started rolling on syncing mirrors, export control regulatory compliance, etc. Too bad, so sad, document the errata and move on. Fedora is intended to be a fast moving cutting edge distro. It shipped with several known issues, including Nautilus being totally borked on AMD64 machines. These will be fixed midstream.
Dual boot is just as 'unsupported' with Fedora as it is with Windows XP. They include the ability to add other OSes to the boot menu because the functionality is readily available but they make it clear they aren't expending great amounts of engineering resources testing and debugging every possible interraction between various OSes/partitioning schemes, etc. Five years ago dual booting was a must have feature, it just isn't anymore. Linux is way beyond the "try out this promising new OS" phase and into the "How many seats is it ready to take over" phase.
> That wasn't one of those Panasonic drives with its own driver card, > was it? Aaach! What a mess!
Worse The controller was a Tandy custom job built by Creative Labs. Halfway between a SB Pro and an SB16. Creative/Panasonic CD interface but mapped at some totally oddball address and on a 16bit interrupt. The bitch was finding out where it was since the DOS driver specified the usual 0x220 or 0x240 base address of the soundcard and it just 'knew' that the CD port wasn't at 0x230 or 0x250 like it would be on a real SB and to look at 0x628 or some bullcrap like that. Finally located a faxed copy of a spec or something like that and could then add that address and a patch of some sort (can't remember what I had to patch anymore) and I could get Linux to see it.
> Whatever the motivation these folks have for writing this particular > piece of software, it fulfills one aspect of hacking that you haven't > addressed yet: it scrathes an itch.
No problem with that, plus it increases their knowledge of both Win32 and POSIXish/GNU systems. The subject of the interview appears to have found employment based in part on said knowledge which is always a good thing. But every time ReactOS gets mentioned on/. everyone seems to be salivating over "Free Windows!" coming "Real Soon Now![tm]". Just recommending folks not to hold their breath and NOT to stay on Windows in the hope that it can be replaced with Free Software. And even if it DID happen, how much Free Software is available on Windows and not on Linux/GNU/X? So ReactOS isn't the path to Freedom, only running the same propreitary apps on a different OS.
> with the exception of just about everyone who doesn't want to pay for > old versions of MSDOS, IBM PCDOS, or DRDOS to make a system run
I think someone is confusing FreeDOS and DOSEMU. FreeDOS is indeed valuable to the embedded community. And DOSEMU is probably used by a select niche. But back in the mid 90's they had such grand dreams. And so did the Wine team who spent ten years contributing code to a project that is only available in a readily usable form if they now write checks to CodeWeavers and TransGaming. (And this, boys and girls, is why picking the right license is something that needs to happen before the first release of code.)
> I mean, who cares who writes the drivers, or whether they even > get written?
Kinda hard to boot without the basic device drivers. So yes, it is important unless the plan is to leach off of the Windows driver set and that really isn't the GNU way.
> Free software is about freedom.
Agreed. But just how much Freedom does one expect to find chasing Microsoft's tail lights?
> to OSIers, it's all about how useful it is...
Well it does need to boot and run programs ya know. That sort of fundamental functionality is what I'm questioning the ability to create in a useful timeframe. If DOSEMU and Wine are a guide, ReactOS will be more of a MAME/MESS sort of nostalgia trip. Don't see how that advances the cause of OS/FS other than increasing the skills of the developers.
> Maybe you're a new Linux user, or maybe you aren't one,
Examine the URL at the top of my posts. WIth a shrinking list of exceptions, my current working set of software would pass the RMSLint test.
> It was a pain in the ass, but we did it,
Hey, the first time I saw a blurb in Byte about Linux I had a boner for it. A year or so later I actually found a boot/root disk of.02 or something like that on a BBS and tried it. It wouldn't see my HDD and I was too poor at the time to go buy new hardware so I put it aside. Finally in 1993 I found the Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X CD and after hacking around and doing much research managed to get it to see my funky Tandy Outlet store scrounged 1X CD drive. (Borrowed a different drive to initially install from, had to compile a patched kernel on a 386sx-16 so don't even try talking to me about pains in the ass because I have the t-shirt.) It was another year and more hardware upgrades before I reached a point where I could start planning to move most of my day to day operations over.
The point is that even ten years ago, a two column inch mention of serious work on a Free OS was more than enough to get me interested, but I just don't feel any such burning need for ReactOS. And I tend to doubt many others will either.
Linux was possible because of the decades of UNIX tradition, a published POSIX standard to write to, almost a decade of GNU's work before Linus ever wrote version 0.01, the X Consortium's codebase, etc. Where is the great body of enabling work that ReactOS is to draw from? How many Free Software types care about Win32 enough to write code for it? Hard enough to even get most to support Win32 as a port because Win32 is fugly and makes for messy code.
It runs more and more apps every day, but the developers haven't declared it 1.0 yet. I'll trust their assessment of the project's status over yours if you don't mind.
> It runs office if you want to,
With a lot of fussing it will, or a check to CodeWeavers.
> but why bother when it also runs star wars kotor (winex)
Or a check to Transgaming. But how much does WINE run? Not Crossover Office, not WineX, Wine itself. I haven't checked in on them in a couple of years, I really don't know. Probably because I don't have any Windows apps I have a burning need to run anymore.
> Huh? how do you figure the method most people use to connect to the > internet isn't all that usefull.
Anyone hackish enough to be working on the HURD probably isn't using PPP. I live in a rinkydink little town in Lousiana and am nowhere near leet enough to be working on the HURD and I haven't used PPP outside of hotel rooms since 2000. And even if someone is so unfortunate as to be forced to use a dialup, real hackers have home networks so only the gateway router needs to know PPP.
But this has wandered pretty offtopic so enough of PPP, ok?
> once it has compatibility with windows you have a massive application > base on a libre os.
Don't see it. Wine has been trying for ten years just to get the Windows APIs recreated. So lets assume these guys get to 1.0 by 2009, five years from now. How much Windows NT 4.0 software do you expect anyone to be itching to run in 2009?
> point is porting to windows proggys to it will be trivial
Winelib is already feature complete enough to port most Windows proggys. Haven't seen em busting down CodeWeaver's doors to get help porting much of anything.
And remember the hardware problem. How much effort in the Linux camp goes to getting hardware working? How much new hardware in 2009 is going to be shipping with NT4 drivers? Or assume they get NT5.1 (XP) drivers running somehow.... without rewriting the internals of ReactOS too much. Longhorn is going to ship by 2008/09 so driver availibility will already be drying up for XP by then. So are they going to be writing their own drivers? And how about drivers in general? NT/XP ships with drivers for most common hardware, so the vendors don't bother shipping one with the actual products. But those are (C) Microsoft and non-redistributable so where does ReactOS get drivers for all of that common hardware? Yea in theory it is possible to be able to load the Nvidia driver for the GeForce 10000 Belchfire 1GB that will be shipping by then and will include a driver disc, but what about USB webcams and firewire hard drives, onboard sound chips, ACPI, etc. Who writes those drivers?
> According to the article ReactOS will be truly usable for the rest of > us within the coming year
No, according to the article, within a year ONE of the developers hopes to adopt it as his primary OS. Think about that a minute. Within a year it might reach dogfood status. Up to now it appears none of them actually run it much outside of emulation. That is a hell of a long way from being ready for the 'rest of us'.
But hey, like I originally said, it is an ambitious project and good luck to em. Don't really expect them to succeed but there will likely be some good spinoffs like a better Wine and perhaps some other useful code.
And how can you compare it to Hurd now having PPP? At least it has working ethernet and ReactOS is still working on a TCP stack. PPP really isn't all that useful anymore in case you haven't been paying attention.
But after defending the Hurd, might as well slag it a bit too and say that it is another product that is looking to be obsolete before initial delivery. By the time it ever gets finished I suspect Microkernels will be an outdated concept, replaced by some other impractical but fashionable trend in research OSes.
Wine is almost 10 years old and yet to ship a 1.0. And already bitrotting away because parts are still win16 (from reading the article) because they were coded pre windows95.
DOSEMU did eventually ship their 1.0 version... and was promptly deleted from the RH disks in the next rev as obsolete. It 'succeeded' because they were cloning a dead OS that didn't keep changing. If you count success as finishing long after it would have been widely useful.
Now we have ReactOS cloning Windows NT4. And will perhaps get it 90% feature complete in another few years. And then spend the next half decade completing the remaining 10% by which time NT4 will be so obsolete nobody will care. Of course they are already trying to shift their target to NT5.1 (XP) but like Wine, they just can't code as fast as the infinite monkeys at Microsoft.
As for their retort of "Why clone UNIX?" I have an easy answer. Because it is USEFUL. Microsoft's stuff isn't worth cloning and by the time a clone is finished they will have either won, forcing everyone into a DRMed hell where only their signed OSes even boot or we will have made them moot.
> Lumping Chirac in with Usama and Saddam is a bit rich.
Really? Compare the goals and motivations of each. Saddam is really the odd man in the group since he was motivated by the Will to Power more than anything else. He probably only hated the US for slapping him out of Kuwait and supporting Israel.
But Usama, Chirac, Kofi Annon and Kerry are motivated by a the shared desire to end Western Civilization as we think of it, and have as a first goal to end US dominance of world affairs. Chirac wants to restore French "Greatness" and be the leader in bringing about a Socialist world order. Usama wants the US out of the way so they can kill some jews without interferrence and establish Islamic theoracies as far and wide as possible. Kerry wants to solve the embarrasment of being an American by turning the US into a European style Welfare Socialist hellhole no longer able to afford to project power on the world stage.
> There was no way that the USA could have "won" Vietnam, the US were > just trying to prop up a southern government to block the northern > communists.
It would have been nice to have made a real try at winning before allowing the pro Viet Cong voices dominating the Democratic party of the day to prevail. And you state our purpose of propping up the South Vietnamese as if it were a bad thing. We were in a cold war with Soviet Russia and Communist China. Of course we were using a puppet on our side just like the NVA and Viet Cong were creatures of our enemy. But riddle me this: Which outcome would have been more desirable?
1. A Korea solution where we drove the barbarians back and kept them at bay.
2. What actually happened.
The question is moot because history has rendered it's verdict on Vietnam and walking away cost millions of people their lives across the region in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. True numbers will never be known because the Communists were not the sort of bookkeepers the Nazi's were, but to say it rivaled the Holocaust would not be hyperbole. And a fair share of the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of each and every 'protester'. Go watch a documentary on the protests, all I have seen are politically cleansed so that you won't hear the narrator say it, but LOOK at the signs and you will see abundant pro Viet Cong sentiment. But none of those fools want to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions, including the current heir apparent to the Democratic Party, John Kerry.
> Thats the first time I have ever heard anyone say that We won the > Vietnam war.
I said nothing of the sort. I said the Viet Cong won the war through a very innovative strategy of shifting the battlefield to US college campuses and the halls of Congress, and that one of their leaders in said irregular action was John Forbes Kerry, A former decorated US soldier who switched sides and started fighting a propaganda war on behalf of the Viet Cong.
History has had time to render it's judgement on the Vietnam War. Kerry's side won and millions of people went into mass graves, just like in each and every case where Socialists rise to power. He must accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions as a first step towards redemption and I have yet to hear him apologize for anything he did during his 'protester' phase.
> Kerry wants to destroy individual liberty?
Yes, like Socialists everywhere. Individualism is 180 degrees out of phase with their worldview of the rights of the state and groups.
> Osama destroys the world trade centers, so we pass the Patriot act.
Predictable overreaction to an extreme provocation. At least we have matured enough we didn't put all the arab-americans in camps this time. In case you don't follow politics, the Republicans are determined to allow most of the odious bits of PATRIOT to quietly expire. But a lot of what was in PATRIOT wan't all that objectionable, like the roving wiretaps to bring wiretap law up to the age of disposable cellphones so it will probably be renewed.
Slashdot Mirror
> To those who say "owning your own place is so much more secure," I
> have two questions:
Buy if you are paying on a mortgage you are still BUYING a house. It isn't yours yet. Some of us aren't crazy enough to live in CA where owning isn't an option, only paying forever. I finally bought last year and expect to be paid off around the end of the decade by making extra payments as often as I am able.
Compare the economics of that situation if money gets tight.
Monthly payments: utilities & food, optionally continue homeowners ins.
Taxes: $50/year in city paxes, zero state due to homestead exemption
Oh, and as for homeowner's associations, if you have to join one of those, read teh paperwork a little closer. You don't actually OWN anything, the holding corp that runs the "hownowners association" has first claim on all the property in your subdivision. Would never be dumb enough to do that.
> Hmm, my Gentoo on amd64 dual boots with no issues, and I'm
> running 2.6.5.
I'm not suprised at all. Most people installing Fedora have no problem with dual boot. Only a few with odd things in their partition table, seems to be related to CHS vs LBA stuff. Any AMD64 machine is new enough it will only support LBA, will not have been upgraded through several incarnations of Windows and Linux and therefore work just fine.
> Isn't it funny that a very small license change in a free program like
> Xfree drives everyone away within months. But NVidia binary drivers,
> which I use and love, have a license 10 times worse.
Not really, two different sets of people. Set one is distro maintainers and developers. They care about Free Software. Set two is gamers who just 'have' to have the best framerate and buy the latest and greatest card and couldn't care less about licenses. After all, they are playing closed games so why not a closed video driver.
As for me, the fastest video card on the planet is the ATI Radeon 9200, although I realize there are newer cards available for Windows and other closed and hybrid platforms.
This piece is sad. The commentary is written by someone who obviously has a working mind and can write (see his published works) but is so blinded by an irrational phobia against anything connected to the N word he is blindly attacking it, and because apparently his mind shuts down in the presence of the N word he isn't even doing a very good job of rebutting the idea.
This guy can't even tell the difference between fusion bombs and modern reactor designs that are pretty darned failsafe.
If you are really concerned about global warming, dependence on foreign oil, etc, you have to at least have a rational discussion about fission power. Which is why the ultra greens are having none of that and attacking with such ferocity, to them it ia a matter of religion, not science. Gaia told them in a dream or something that "Thou Shalt not Fission the Atoms that I have given unto thee." That's religion for you though, Galieo wasn't the first to be persecuted by religious intolerance and apparently isn't anywhere near the last.
While TCL is a little odd, it isn't odder than some of the other languages you listed and it has the best integration to the wonderful Tk toolkit of any of them. Nowadays it is important to show a new programmer they can create 'real' programs and in their mind that isn't tty apps, it is graphical user interfaces. TCL/Tk is perfect for that purpose. It is also more than able to create useful programs and is cross platform.
> Redhat has always had a couple of bad releases, but never a string of
.0 releases. 7.3 was the last publicly available stable release from RH. In an earlier post you said RHEL3 is doing pretty good on what I gather are the only couple of hosts to justify the support contract. So grab a RHEL rebuild for your other machines. At last count there are three pure play rebuilds and two more mutant builds.
> bad ones as long as this last stretch (8, 9, FC1, FC2)
All
Full disclosure: I hatched one of the pure play rebuilds.
> Believe it or not, some of us discovered Linux _without_ the aid of a
> geek friend.
Well I guess nowadays that happens more and more since you can't pull up a tech news site/open a mag anymore without hearing about the Penguin, but somebody tipped me off way back when about it and where I could get a CD. And most new users do have an experienced user help them with their first install.
> Cutting edge research and development distro? I think "Alpha/Beta
.0 quality releases? Good Grief!
> Distro" would be more like it.
Not too far from the truth. Although FC2T2 and FC2T3 weren't that much buggier than the final so calling them alpha would be unfair. But calling FC2 a higher than normal quality beta would be fair. You want the polished final product you know where they sell that.
> We are talking about simple things such as, oh I don't know, gcc and
> sound and stuff that has worked for eons in 2.4 based kernels.
Tell me how GCC is broken... in your opinion. But since I have spent a night building the hell out of packages to get around the patented bits RH leaves out and the 3rd party repos didn't have for x86_64 yet, I'm not likely to be listening very hard. (mplayer won't build a package saying it can't find X but you can "build install" in the BUILD dir and get it going. xine just won't play though.)
Sound is showing problems because after being available for years, Linus making it clear it was going into 2.6 due to being generally superior and, unlike OSS, supported by active developers, it appears few tested their system for ALSA compatibility. And anyhow, ALSA becoming the new default sound system for Linux is RedHat's fault how? btw, my system is cranking out some Ozzy via Shoutcast just fine as I type so it isn't like they shipped a system that had totally broken sound.
> I had a chance to convert someone to Linux and lost that chance
> because all kinds of stuff didn't work.
You mean you used a freshly downloaded copy of a distro that just came out and that you had never even seen in action for evangelism? And a distro that you should know plans a neverending series of
> You want my opinion? You're just in denial of your n00bness.
:)
.0 releases, pretty eyecandy not withstanding. That eyecandy is being tested for stable release in RHEL, not to make FC a n00b distro. Everything is bleeding edge releases in Fedora, a receipe for disaster when handed to a n00b. I kinda like it, but I certainly wouldn't install it for a new user and I wouldn't dream of putting it into production use.
Ok. So just how far back does one have to have been a Linux user to graduate from n00b in your wierd world? Got my first working install back in 1993 with Yggdrasil's LGX distro, how about you? In the future please be careful when starting these petty dick size contests, eventually you get embarassed.
> You could have fooled me with the fancy install program and graphical
> configuration programs.
Fedora is a continual series of
> The fedora/redhat kernels have always been anything but stock, usually
> includes 20 patches or so that aren't in the vanilla kernel...
Yes, in the past RH has had a terrible rep for shipping horrors like the RHEL3 kernel's mismash of 2.4 and 2.6. But according to posts to fedora-devel by RH kernel dev folk their goal for Fedora is to minimize the patch count. It should be obvious that creating and maintaining those wonders of mad science can't be easy for them and they would prefer to work toward a future when the important patches go into the mainline kernel.
> There are precompiled modules but the nvidia installer downloads the
> source and compiles the module on the spot to work with whatever
> version of X and Kernel you are using.
No it doesn't. It downloads the source to a thin shim that interfaces the binary blob with one of a select set of kernel/XFree86 combinations. When new versions appear you get to wait for them decide the new version is important enough to bother supporting.
> How about their the fastest cards on the market and include the best
> linux support of any high performance video card out there.
Wrong. The fastest supported 3D card in the Free Software world is the Radeon 9200. Anything newer requires binary drivers and is therefore outside the scope of the Free Software or even Open Source movements. If you, as someone outside of these closely allied movements, manage to get a binary driver working, great for you. Free Software is for everyone, even thouse who disagree with the goals of the developers. You can power a puppy masher with Debian and not violate the license but you should not expect anyone else to abandon the goals of the FS/OSS movement to help keep it running for you. Same for Nvidia support. It just isn't on our radar and you should be bright enough to figure that out.
> Not being ok with Nvidia is one thing, making a decision without
> significant benefit that breaks 70% of your overall userbase
Being someone who lacks the skills to be a kernel hacker, but who does read LWN's excellent features explaining kernel issues, I'd say you are just wrong. The 4K stack thing appears to be pretty important to solving some serious scalability issues and appears destined for the mainline 2.6 kernel. Which is probably why RH slipstreamed it into FC2, to get the 'issues' hammered out before shipping it in RHEL4.
Anyway, Fedora Core is developed in the open. Nvidia has know about the situation for months, so why isn't the lack of an updated driver their problem?
> No problems here. I am happy they included it in the distribution;
> it's fantastic interface for older pcs.
I'm running it on an Athlon64. Mostly because Nautilus is currently borked on AMD64 and besides, I don't really like the dumbed down interface of either GNOME or KDE.
> Are you saying it's not their responsibility to look through bugzilla
> and clear out the showstopper's before release?
Again you are rating it as a 'showstopper' bug but they don't. Neither did Mandrake when they released their version 10 with the same problem. I'd actually consider it more of a problem for Mandrake since RH had already been lit up by several loudmouthed flamers over the issue and because Mandrake users tend to newbies who dual boot more (gotta play [insert latest Windows game])
> Fedora was billed as a replacement for RedHat.
Not really. RedHat users were sundered into three groups.
1. Those who were hacker types, interested in the latest and greatest. Who could not only tolerate 'issues' but could fix them and put the fixes into bugzilla. I run Fedora Core at home.
2. Those who used RedHat for high value production machines. They were 'encouraged' to buy into RHEL. You fall into this group.
3. Those in the middle who used RedHat and found it to be stable and useful, put on machines doing real work but could never in a million years justify RHEL's fees. This group was discarded as not profitable and not providing enough bug fixes to justify the expenditure of effort to keep in the RedHat camp.
Being firmly in the third camp I rebuilt RHEL3 as WhiteBox Enterprise Linux for use on my machines at work.
> All I wanted from FC2 was FC1 with a 2.6 kernel that didn't turn off
> preemptive kernel and didn't include a patch that breaks the nvidia
> drivers.
Then apparently you didn't want Fedora. If the preemptive patch made it into 2.6 you would probably have it in Fedora or could fix it with a simple recompile. Fedora wants as stock a kernel as is practical, you don't.
As for the Nvidia drivers, so what? It has been clear for years that binary drivers are tolerated but not a single finger will ever be lifted to make their life easier. There is a reason for this. If a single exception is ever made the decision of where to stop gets very fuzzy. Every victim of closed hardware will scream equally loud that breaking THEIR system is unacceptable and we would have a frozen kernel. Once you admit you are a second class citizen who accepted a list of Linux kernel/XFree86 versions approved by Nvidia you can STFU and leave the rest of us in peace and go camp on the Nvidia website awaiting their permission to upgrade to new versions.
> If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro...
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro. Fedora isn't one, it is a cutting edge research and development distro. Don't be confused by the fact it has pretty eyecandy because they are cooking that for eventual rolling into RHEL. It would be just as daft as giving a newb Debian, Gentoo, Slackware or OpenBSD. Instead give them Mandrake, or one of the other newbie friendly distros.
But beware, ALL of the 2.6 kernel based distros are currently dealing with the dual boot problem. Fedora gets the abuse heaped upon them because a) a lot more people seem to be running it and b) every week slashdot seems to hold a 'hate redhat day' event.
> They knowingly released fedora core 2 with what I would consider a
> "show stopper".
Who decides it is a show stopper? Some idiot was raving the same thing on fedora-testing every couple of hours. But he was yelling it days after the ball had started rolling on syncing mirrors, export control regulatory compliance, etc. Too bad, so sad, document the errata and move on. Fedora is intended to be a fast moving cutting edge distro. It shipped with several known issues, including Nautilus being totally borked on AMD64 machines. These will be fixed midstream.
Dual boot is just as 'unsupported' with Fedora as it is with Windows XP. They include the ability to add other OSes to the boot menu because the functionality is readily available but they make it clear they aren't expending great amounts of engineering resources testing and debugging every possible interraction between various OSes/partitioning schemes, etc. Five years ago dual booting was a must have feature, it just isn't anymore. Linux is way beyond the "try out this promising new OS" phase and into the "How many seats is it ready to take over" phase.
> That wasn't one of those Panasonic drives with its own driver card,
/. everyone seems to be salivating over "Free Windows!" coming "Real Soon Now![tm]". Just recommending folks not to hold their breath and NOT to stay on Windows in the hope that it can be replaced with Free Software. And even if it DID happen, how much Free Software is available on Windows and not on Linux/GNU/X? So ReactOS isn't the path to Freedom, only running the same propreitary apps on a different OS.
> was it? Aaach! What a mess!
Worse The controller was a Tandy custom job built by Creative Labs. Halfway between a SB Pro and an SB16. Creative/Panasonic CD interface but mapped at some totally oddball address and on a 16bit interrupt. The bitch was finding out where it was since the DOS driver specified the usual 0x220 or 0x240 base address of the soundcard and it just 'knew' that the CD port wasn't at 0x230 or 0x250 like it would be on a real SB and to look at 0x628 or some bullcrap like that. Finally located a faxed copy of a spec or something like that and could then add that address and a patch of some sort (can't remember what I had to patch anymore) and I could get Linux to see it.
> Whatever the motivation these folks have for writing this particular
> piece of software, it fulfills one aspect of hacking that you haven't
> addressed yet: it scrathes an itch.
No problem with that, plus it increases their knowledge of both Win32 and POSIXish/GNU systems. The subject of the interview appears to have found employment based in part on said knowledge which is always a good thing. But every time ReactOS gets mentioned on
> with the exception of just about everyone who doesn't want to pay for
> old versions of MSDOS, IBM PCDOS, or DRDOS to make a system run
I think someone is confusing FreeDOS and DOSEMU. FreeDOS is indeed valuable to the embedded community. And DOSEMU is probably used by a select niche. But back in the mid 90's they had such grand dreams. And so did the Wine team who spent ten years contributing code to a project that is only available in a readily usable form if they now write checks to CodeWeavers and TransGaming. (And this, boys and girls, is why picking the right license is something that needs to happen before the first release of code.)
> I mean, who cares who writes the drivers, or whether they even
.02 or something like that on a BBS and tried it. It wouldn't see my HDD and I was too poor at the time to go buy new hardware so I put it aside. Finally in 1993 I found the Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X CD and after hacking around and doing much research managed to get it to see my funky Tandy Outlet store scrounged 1X CD drive. (Borrowed a different drive to initially install from, had to compile a patched kernel on a 386sx-16 so don't even try talking to me about pains in the ass because I have the t-shirt.) It was another year and more hardware upgrades before I reached a point where I could start planning to move most of my day to day operations over.
> get written?
Kinda hard to boot without the basic device drivers. So yes, it is important unless the plan is to leach off of the Windows driver set and that really isn't the GNU way.
> Free software is about freedom.
Agreed. But just how much Freedom does one expect to find chasing Microsoft's tail lights?
> to OSIers, it's all about how useful it is...
Well it does need to boot and run programs ya know. That sort of fundamental functionality is what I'm questioning the ability to create in a useful timeframe. If DOSEMU and Wine are a guide, ReactOS will be more of a MAME/MESS sort of nostalgia trip. Don't see how that advances the cause of OS/FS other than increasing the skills of the developers.
> Maybe you're a new Linux user, or maybe you aren't one,
Examine the URL at the top of my posts. WIth a shrinking list of exceptions, my current working set of software would pass the RMSLint test.
> It was a pain in the ass, but we did it,
Hey, the first time I saw a blurb in Byte about Linux I had a boner for it. A year or so later I actually found a boot/root disk of
The point is that even ten years ago, a two column inch mention of serious work on a Free OS was more than enough to get me interested, but I just don't feel any such burning need for ReactOS. And I tend to doubt many others will either.
Linux was possible because of the decades of UNIX tradition, a published POSIX standard to write to, almost a decade of GNU's work before Linus ever wrote version 0.01, the X Consortium's codebase, etc. Where is the great body of enabling work that ReactOS is to draw from? How many Free Software types care about Win32 enough to write code for it? Hard enough to even get most to support Win32 as a port because Win32 is fugly and makes for messy code.
> You make it sound like wine doesn't work today.
It runs more and more apps every day, but the developers haven't declared it 1.0 yet. I'll trust their assessment of the project's status over yours if you don't mind.
> It runs office if you want to,
With a lot of fussing it will, or a check to CodeWeavers.
> but why bother when it also runs star wars kotor (winex)
Or a check to Transgaming. But how much does WINE run? Not Crossover Office, not WineX, Wine itself. I haven't checked in on them in a couple of years, I really don't know. Probably because I don't have any Windows apps I have a burning need to run anymore.
> Huh? how do you figure the method most people use to connect to the
> internet isn't all that usefull.
Anyone hackish enough to be working on the HURD probably isn't using PPP.
I live in a rinkydink little town in Lousiana and am nowhere near leet enough to be working on the HURD and I haven't used PPP outside of hotel rooms since 2000. And even if someone is so unfortunate as to be forced to use a dialup, real hackers have home networks so only the gateway router needs to know PPP.
But this has wandered pretty offtopic so enough of PPP, ok?
> once it has compatibility with windows you have a massive application
> base on a libre os.
Don't see it. Wine has been trying for ten years just to get the Windows APIs recreated. So lets assume these guys get to 1.0 by 2009, five years from now. How much Windows NT 4.0 software do you expect anyone to be itching to run in 2009?
> point is porting to windows proggys to it will be trivial
Winelib is already feature complete enough to port most Windows proggys. Haven't seen em busting down CodeWeaver's doors to get help porting much of anything.
And remember the hardware problem. How much effort in the Linux camp goes to getting hardware working? How much new hardware in 2009 is going to be shipping with NT4 drivers? Or assume they get NT5.1 (XP) drivers running somehow.... without rewriting the internals of ReactOS too much. Longhorn is going to ship by 2008/09 so driver availibility will already be drying up for XP by then. So are they going to be writing their own drivers? And how about drivers in general? NT/XP ships with drivers for most common hardware, so the vendors don't bother shipping one with the actual products. But those are (C) Microsoft and non-redistributable so where does ReactOS get drivers for all of that common hardware? Yea in theory it is possible to be able to load the Nvidia driver for the GeForce 10000 Belchfire 1GB that will be shipping by then and will include a driver disc, but what about USB webcams and firewire hard drives, onboard sound chips, ACPI, etc. Who writes those drivers?
> According to the article ReactOS will be truly usable for the rest of
> us within the coming year
No, according to the article, within a year ONE of the developers hopes to adopt it as his primary OS. Think about that a minute. Within a year it might reach dogfood status. Up to now it appears none of them actually run it much outside of emulation. That is a hell of a long way from being ready for the 'rest of us'.
But hey, like I originally said, it is an ambitious project and good luck to em. Don't really expect them to succeed but there will likely be some good spinoffs like a better Wine and perhaps some other useful code.
And how can you compare it to Hurd now having PPP? At least it has working ethernet and ReactOS is still working on a TCP stack. PPP really isn't all that useful anymore in case you haven't been paying attention.
But after defending the Hurd, might as well slag it a bit too and say that it is another product that is looking to be obsolete before initial delivery. By the time it ever gets finished I suspect Microkernels will be an outdated concept, replaced by some other impractical but fashionable trend in research OSes.
Ambitious, but not likely to be relevant.
Wine is almost 10 years old and yet to ship a 1.0. And already bitrotting away because parts are still win16 (from reading the article) because they were coded pre windows95.
DOSEMU did eventually ship their 1.0 version... and was promptly deleted from the RH disks in the next rev as obsolete. It 'succeeded' because they were cloning a dead OS that didn't keep changing. If you count success as finishing long after it would have been widely useful.
Now we have ReactOS cloning Windows NT4. And will perhaps get it 90% feature complete in another few years. And then spend the next half decade completing the remaining 10% by which time NT4 will be so obsolete nobody will care. Of course they are already trying to shift their target to NT5.1 (XP) but like Wine, they just can't code as fast as the infinite monkeys at Microsoft.
As for their retort of "Why clone UNIX?" I have an easy answer. Because it is USEFUL. Microsoft's stuff isn't worth cloning and by the time a clone is finished they will have either won, forcing everyone into a DRMed hell where only their signed OSes even boot or we will have made them moot.
> Lumping Chirac in with Usama and Saddam is a bit rich.
Really? Compare the goals and motivations of each. Saddam is really the odd man in the group since he was motivated by the Will to Power more than anything else. He probably only hated the US for slapping him out of Kuwait and supporting Israel.
But Usama, Chirac, Kofi Annon and Kerry are motivated by a the shared desire to end Western Civilization as we think of it, and have as a first goal to end US dominance of world affairs. Chirac wants to restore French "Greatness" and be the leader in bringing about a Socialist world order. Usama wants the US out of the way so they can kill some jews without interferrence and establish Islamic theoracies as far and wide as possible. Kerry wants to solve the embarrasment of being an American by turning the US into a European style Welfare Socialist hellhole no longer able to afford to project power on the world stage.
> There was no way that the USA could have "won" Vietnam, the US were
> just trying to prop up a southern government to block the northern
> communists.
It would have been nice to have made a real try at winning before allowing the pro Viet Cong voices dominating the Democratic party of the day to prevail. And you state our purpose of propping up the South Vietnamese as if it were a bad thing. We were in a cold war with Soviet Russia and Communist China. Of course we were using a puppet on our side just like the NVA and Viet Cong were creatures of our enemy. But riddle me this: Which outcome would have been more desirable?
1. A Korea solution where we drove the barbarians back and kept them at bay.
2. What actually happened.
The question is moot because history has rendered it's verdict on Vietnam and walking away cost millions of people their lives across the region in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. True numbers will never be known because the Communists were not the sort of bookkeepers the Nazi's were, but to say it rivaled the Holocaust would not be hyperbole. And a fair share of the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of each and every 'protester'. Go watch a documentary on the protests, all I have seen are politically cleansed so that you won't hear the narrator say it, but LOOK at the signs and you will see abundant pro Viet Cong sentiment. But none of those fools want to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions, including the current heir apparent to the Democratic Party, John Kerry.
> Thats the first time I have ever heard anyone say that We won the
> Vietnam war.
I said nothing of the sort. I said the Viet Cong won the war through a very innovative strategy of shifting the battlefield to US college campuses and the halls of Congress, and that one of their leaders in said irregular action was John Forbes Kerry, A former decorated US soldier who switched sides and started fighting a propaganda war on behalf of the Viet Cong.
History has had time to render it's judgement on the Vietnam War. Kerry's side won and millions of people went into mass graves, just like in each and every case where Socialists rise to power. He must accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions as a first step towards redemption and I have yet to hear him apologize for anything he did during his 'protester' phase.
> Kerry wants to destroy individual liberty?
Yes, like Socialists everywhere. Individualism is 180 degrees out of phase with their worldview of the rights of the state and groups.
> Osama destroys the world trade centers, so we pass the Patriot act.
Predictable overreaction to an extreme provocation. At least we have matured enough we didn't put all the arab-americans in camps this time. In case you don't follow politics, the Republicans are determined to allow most of the odious bits of PATRIOT to quietly expire. But a lot of what was in PATRIOT wan't all that objectionable, like the roving wiretaps to bring wiretap law up to the age of disposable cellphones so it will probably be renewed.