Well, I hate to mention that old chestnut again, but you know what happens when you assume? yup, you just did it.
After all, if you stop and think about it for just a moment, you may realize that IBMs billion dollars in linux revenue came from people spending money.
Redhat is profitable, because people are spending money - and so it goes. Numerous additional examples exist, for those who wish to take note.
Microsoft learned the hard way that the city of Muenchen was willing to pay more for linux than for ms windows, so again, it's not about the money, is it?
Finally Loki - they lived liked kings for a time, and writing checks when they should have been writing software. They offered linux software like quake 3 arena, for $50 or so, when anyone could buy the ms windows version for $15-20, and anyone with the windows pak files could easily add the relatively small executables to get the linux version going. If loki had been managed differently, they might still be around today.
So, anonymous coward, what is the basis for your ahem, view?
That's BS, Linux users gladly pull out the wallet for good software -
For instance, I haven't spent one cent on microsoft software in the last 10 years - but I've spent several thousand dollars in that time on linux software - games, scientific software, office suites, you name it.
Don't assume that because somebody expresses an opinion that it's automatically the opinion of all linux users.
I highly doubt that it will be a nice linear function, for a number of reasons -
It will most likely be exponential at the tipping point, then going more logarithmic as the market sorts itself out.
Honestly, I don't care if microsoft keeps a healthy market presence, if linux gets a good 30% share I'm happy, since that's big enough that it can't be ignored, and microsoft can't get away with the old monopoly games any more.
There are not as many games released for linux as there are for the more common ms windows platform, but the situation is getting much better. id software has been pretty good over the years, pretty much any id game (doom, quake, quake2, quake 3...) has a linux version, whether official or unofficial, and games based on the carmack 3D engine often have native linux versions as well, e.g. return to castle wolfenstein, MOHAA, BF1942, enemy territory...
Some of the more informative linux game sites:
http://icculus.org/ http://www.tuxgames.com/ h ttp://www.linuxgames.com/ http://www.linuxgamepub lishing.com/
Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.
Nope, didn't exist a year ago, you're thinking of a different product.
But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again.
I suppose if you're paranoid you could always be fearful that redhat will somehow pull the rug out from under you, despite their excellent track record.
It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack).
Nope, RH 9 is still maintained until end of april, as a quick glance at the RH web site will tell you. - and oh, nobody's forcing you to do anything - you see, that's the beauty of open source. Just because redhat isn't doing the maintenance, doesnt mean it won't be done. The fedora legacy project has already addressed your concern, and will be picking up the maintenance on RH 9 and other releases as they come to "end of life" status as far as redhat is concerned.
The move to differentiate the 100% free speech/free beer and supported enterprise products was announced, along with end of life on various lines, long ago. If you didn't get the word you weren't paying attention.
LOL the debacle was the spectacle the anti redhat activists made of themselves at every opportunity.
They call gcc 2.96 a development version, but let's look at the facts:
1. cygnus, a subsidiary of redhat, pioneered work on egcs to get around the stalled gcc development process. egcs was later accepted into the gcc tree and became gcc 2.9x. It goes without saying that redhat/cygnus were eminently qualified to develop and support a compiler.
2. redhat shipped 2.96 with redhat 7.0 - a bug was found, and promptly fixed. The way these activists went on for years and years, you'd think nobody had every had a bug in their software before. The important thing is, redhat fixed it, and that's good enough for me.
3. gcc 2.96 was the best and most standards compliant version of gcc in existence at the time, and had features not in gcc 2.5, which were needed by big customers of redhat.
Bottom line: You call it a "development version", I call it what is was: fully functional, and fully supported.
As far as being a "development OS" I think it makes a great development platform;)
With the fedora legacy project, you get at least 2 years of maintenance, after which time it shouldn't be too much trouble to upgrade to a newer release.
- especially since the upgrade can be done while the box is up and running, and in service.
I had a load of fun and games trying to get Fedora to share my internet connection (coming in through one ethernet card) to the Windows XP computer in the other room used by my family (on the other one). Despite following a nice tutorial I found through Google, I couldn't get it to work.
How odd - I am using the same iptables script I've been using since RH 7.1, and it all works like a charm here, and at the small businesses where I've set up fedora firewalls.
Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart.
I imagine that's standard, in any case, you really want to fo to runlevel 3, install the nvidia drivers, then go back to runlevel 5.
Spoken like a typical anonymous troll - but I suppose that in a pinch, expee makes a passable dumb terminal for accessing your remote linux system, but I don't enjoy using it - I'm always glad to get back to the comfort and power of my linux desktop.
IMHO, microsoft has a long way to go before I could consider it a credible alternative to linux.
Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.
um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...
But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.
indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....
So, what do either of them have to lose by simply releasing all of their newly acquired copyrights and licenses into the public domain? Perhaps not a lot. What they have to *gain* though, is phenomonal; for a start the OSS community is going to see them as the heroes that set UNIX free
um, no - if they abandon it to the public domain they would not considered idiots, not heroes -
The public domain dumping ground is the absolute _worst_ place for anything of value, since it's then open season. Some crappy monopolist could just grab the whole thing, put a few incompatibilities into it, call it "new technology", get it patented, and lobby to have laws passed which would make it a crime to attempt to interoperate or reverse engineer the protocols.
Better, much better, if it were all placed under the protection of the GPL. Then they might be considered heroes, and rightly so.
Not a troll? perhaps, but quite a few folks find OO fits their needs just fine.
To address your comments, RH 9 has a number of annoying bugs and can be quite slow in certain situations if you haven't done the standard tweaks, which a linux newbie would not know about.
And, as everyone has mentioned, you are complaining also about the speed of the old OO 1.0, which everybody complains is too slow to start up, so welcome to the club.
In any case, I'd say that upgrading that RH9 to fedora with the accompanying newer version OO will go quite a way towards improving your opinion of it.
spoken like a man who hasn't used any recent version of openoffice...
I would have agreed with this having used openoffice 1.0 and Staroffice 6, but I find that with version 1.1 all the complaints I had with openoffice have been fixed.
Your comments about openoffice are about as relevant as somone today complaining about ms windows 3.1
Even though I've got ut2000, ut2003, RtCW, enemy territory and some other great games, I find that the good old quake 3 arena demo is still great after all these years. Nothing complicated to learn, just aim well, move fast and kill the bad guys more than they kill you.
It's a free download (around 50 MB) from ftp.idsoftware.com for mac, linux and peecee platforms, and there are a lot of q3demo servers still out there with plenty of users, and continuing mod development (muckleball and freezetag are especially fun)
After a stressful day, there's nothing like tossing back a few cold ones, firing up q3demo and fragging some hapless win32 quakers for a while. it's not uncommon to see mac and/or linux players on popular servers, and there are also some good female players out there, so at times q3a can become basically a chat room with 3D effects.;)
Note well, the man didn't say he wanted to use "only open source on every desktop", he said "linux and openoffice", which leaves plenty of room for conventional, closed source apps as well.
Speaking of religion, the frantic need to somehow include microsoft software in every scenario smacks of a cultish devotion, does it not?
i wouldn't use neither Suse nor Redhat as server. Both work just fine for me!
Seems just too way insecure & hard to manage. In what way does it "seem" insecure? It's been excellent over the past several years that I've had production servers running it. In what way does it "seem" hard to manage? compared to windows, or to traditional unices, it's a breeze.
Debian is the way to go IMHO, i've been using it for a long time now, and when i first changed to it, i noticed immediately how much easier it is to handle, you have the choice, not the installer/distro scripts etc. You would probably benefit from trying something different. I rans sls in 1993, then slackware from late 93 to early 97 when I switched to redhat. I've also tried some debian derivitives like progeny, and have admined solaris, hpux, and irix. OK, apt was a nice debian tool, but that's been ported to redhat so I'm not sure what benefits you are claiming for debian.
I like that Red Hat is taking steps towards in security:) dude, they started taking steps many years ago, what they are doing now is taking the lead in security.
certainly a possiblilty, although he could be a freebsd or solarix x86 user - it just seemed odd that a windows user would be talking about needing a linux distro to depend on.
And I suppose the Linux kernel is whats stopping that from happening?
No, it's more than that, it's something called the unix design philosophy - a very different mindset from the peecee culture of the microsoft crowd. There are a number of differences in the way things are done, and the result is much better security - microsoft is just now thinking about taking some baby steps, the ones taken by unix in the '80s.
I wiped it off my dual-boot machine (now single boot).
So, you're saying pretty much just a windows user now? it seems odd, unless you weren't doing much with linux anyway.
Unfortunately, I can't wait for them to figure it out.
It sure looks as though they've figued it out - Let's see, redhat has been profitable of late, their stock has gone up, their enterprise products are solid and selling well. And the kicker, their fedora distro is a beautiful gift to the community, essentially a very nice, snappy successor to RH 9, let's call it RH 9 done right.
I need a stable linux platform that I can count on.
Did I miss something? Last time I checked their supported platforms are as supported as ever, with 24x7 phone support if you need it. The fact is, redhat is as stable as ever - if you had to bet on one distro to be around for the long haul, redhat is it. Suse would be the other distro.
In the past months, I've found fedora on the server to be as solid as RH 7/8/9 ever were, if not more so. Naturally redhat would like you to buy RHEL for the server room, which is fine if you have the money, which most businesses do, but if you demand a free speech/free beer distro, fedora fits the bill quite nicely - and the fedora desktop is quite nice, once the required toys are installed.
BTW I have remotely upgraded a number of RH 8/9 boxes to fedora, and the boxes remained accessible and in service the whole time - just try that with windows!
taustin: Then you don't want to run a business, you want to preach a crusade. And the two are mutually exclusive.
Sorry, but I just don't buy the idea that using something other than microsoft windows automatically makes you a religious crusader, and I reject your assertion that using something other than microsoft products, and running business, are "mutually exclusive" -
Amazon.com is running a fairly successful business on Linux. IBM, Oracle and Novell are are moving to linux on the desktop, but taustin is itching to set them straight, because according to him, their current direction is "mutually exclusive" with running a business.
taustin, perhaps you should contact the CIOs of those firms and have a word with them about the impossibility of running a business on Linux?
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Well, I hate to mention that old chestnut again, but you know what happens when you assume? yup, you just did it.
After all, if you stop and think about it for just a moment, you may realize that IBMs billion dollars in linux revenue came from people spending money.
Redhat is profitable, because people are spending money - and so it goes. Numerous additional examples exist, for those who wish to take note.
Microsoft learned the hard way that the city of Muenchen was willing to pay more for linux than for ms windows, so again, it's not about the money, is it?
Finally Loki - they lived liked kings for a time, and writing checks when they should have been writing software. They offered linux software like quake 3 arena, for $50 or so, when anyone could buy the ms windows version for $15-20, and anyone with the windows pak files could easily add the relatively small executables to get the linux version going. If loki had been managed differently, they might still be around today.
So, anonymous coward, what is the basis for your ahem, view?
However, you could play with Debian by downloading a Knoppix ISO
LOL, if he likes knoppix and then decides to go with debian based on that, he's in for a rude awakening.
That's BS, Linux users gladly pull out the wallet for good software -
For instance, I haven't spent one cent on microsoft software in the last 10 years - but I've spent several thousand dollars in that time on linux software - games, scientific software, office suites, you name it.
Don't assume that because somebody expresses an opinion that it's automatically the opinion of all linux users.
I highly doubt that it will be a nice linear function, for a number of reasons -
It will most likely be exponential at the tipping point, then going more logarithmic as the market sorts itself out.
Honestly, I don't care if microsoft keeps a healthy market presence, if linux gets a good 30% share I'm happy, since that's big enough that it can't be ignored, and microsoft can't get away with the old monopoly games any more.
There are not as many games released for linux as there are for the more common ms windows platform, but the situation is getting much better. id software has been pretty good over the years, pretty much any id game (doom, quake, quake2, quake 3...) has a linux version, whether official or unofficial, and games based on the carmack 3D engine often have native linux versions as well, e.g. return to castle wolfenstein, MOHAA, BF1942, enemy territory...
h ttp://www.linuxgames.com/b lishing.com/
Some of the more informative linux game sites:
http://icculus.org/
http://www.tuxgames.com/
http://www.linuxgamepu
Do you successfully run other 3D games and apps e.g. ut2003, q3a, 3D screensavers?
The question here is whether your openGL is misconfigured, or there is simply something weird about the ut2004 demo...
Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.
Nope, didn't exist a year ago, you're thinking of a different product.
But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again.
I suppose if you're paranoid you could always be fearful that redhat will somehow pull the rug out from under you, despite their excellent track record.
It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack).
Nope, RH 9 is still maintained until end of april, as a quick glance at the RH web site will tell you. - and oh, nobody's forcing you to do anything - you see, that's the beauty of open source. Just because redhat isn't doing the maintenance, doesnt mean it won't be done. The fedora legacy project has already addressed your concern, and will be picking up the maintenance on RH 9 and other releases as they come to "end of life" status as far as redhat is concerned.
The move to differentiate the 100% free speech/free beer and supported enterprise products was announced, along with end of life on various lines, long ago. If you didn't get the word you weren't paying attention.
LOL the debacle was the spectacle the anti redhat activists made of themselves at every opportunity.
They call gcc 2.96 a development version, but let's look at the facts:
1. cygnus, a subsidiary of redhat, pioneered work on egcs to get around the stalled gcc development process. egcs was later accepted into the gcc tree and became gcc 2.9x. It goes without saying that redhat/cygnus were eminently qualified to develop and support a compiler.
2. redhat shipped 2.96 with redhat 7.0 - a bug was found, and promptly fixed. The way these activists went on for years and years, you'd think nobody had every had a bug in their software before. The important thing is, redhat fixed it, and that's good enough for me.
3. gcc 2.96 was the best and most standards compliant version of gcc in existence at the time, and had features not in gcc 2.5, which were needed by big customers of redhat.
Bottom line: You call it a "development version", I call it what is was: fully functional, and fully supported.
As far as being a "development OS" I think it makes a great development platform ;)
With the fedora legacy project, you get at least 2 years of maintenance, after which time it shouldn't be too much trouble to upgrade to a newer release.
- especially since the upgrade can be done while the box is up and running, and in service.
I had a load of fun and games trying to get Fedora to share my internet connection (coming in through one ethernet card) to the Windows XP computer in the other room used by my family (on the other one). Despite following a nice tutorial I found through Google, I couldn't get it to work.
How odd - I am using the same iptables script I've been using since RH 7.1, and it all works like a charm here, and at the small businesses where I've set up fedora firewalls.
Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart.
I imagine that's standard, in any case, you really want to fo to runlevel 3, install the nvidia drivers, then go back to runlevel 5.
Spoken like a typical anonymous troll - but I suppose that in a pinch, expee makes a passable dumb terminal for accessing your remote linux system, but I don't enjoy using it - I'm always glad to get back to the comfort and power of my linux desktop.
IMHO, microsoft has a long way to go before I could consider it a credible alternative to linux.
Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.
um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...
But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.
indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....
What gives - Is the linux version not out yet?
Guess I'll just have to be content with ut2003 until they get it together...
So, what do either of them have to lose by simply releasing all of their newly acquired copyrights and licenses into the public domain? Perhaps not a lot. What they have to *gain* though, is phenomonal; for a start the OSS community is going to see them as the heroes that set UNIX free
um, no - if they abandon it to the public domain they would not considered idiots, not heroes -
The public domain dumping ground is the absolute _worst_ place for anything of value, since it's then open season. Some crappy monopolist could just grab the whole thing, put a few incompatibilities into it, call it "new technology", get it patented, and lobby to have laws passed which would make it a crime to attempt to interoperate or reverse engineer the protocols.
Better, much better, if it were all placed under the protection of the GPL. Then they might be considered heroes, and rightly so.
Not a troll? perhaps, but quite a few folks find OO fits their needs just fine.
To address your comments, RH 9 has a number of annoying bugs and can be quite slow in certain situations if you haven't done the standard tweaks, which a linux newbie would not know about.
And, as everyone has mentioned, you are complaining also about the speed of the old OO 1.0, which everybody complains is too slow to start up, so welcome to the club.
In any case, I'd say that upgrading that RH9 to fedora with the accompanying newer version OO will go quite a way towards improving your opinion of it.
spoken like a man who hasn't used any recent version of openoffice...
I would have agreed with this having used openoffice 1.0 and Staroffice 6, but I find that with version 1.1 all the complaints I had with openoffice have been fixed.
Your comments about openoffice are about as relevant as somone today complaining about ms windows 3.1
A quick gander tells me the one you'd want is MacQuake3Demo.bin -
See ya on the net
Even though I've got ut2000, ut2003, RtCW, enemy territory and some other great games, I find that the good old quake 3 arena demo is still great after all these years. Nothing complicated to learn, just aim well, move fast and kill the bad guys more than they kill you.
;)
It's a free download (around 50 MB) from ftp.idsoftware.com for mac, linux and peecee platforms, and there are a lot of q3demo servers still out there with plenty of users, and continuing mod development (muckleball and freezetag are especially fun)
After a stressful day, there's nothing like tossing back a few cold ones, firing up q3demo and fragging some hapless win32 quakers for a while. it's not uncommon to see mac and/or linux players on popular servers, and there are also some good female players out there, so at times q3a can become basically a chat room with 3D effects.
Note well, the man didn't say he wanted to use "only open source on every desktop", he said "linux and openoffice", which leaves plenty of room for conventional, closed source apps as well.
Speaking of religion, the frantic need to somehow include microsoft software in every scenario smacks of a cultish devotion, does it not?
i wouldn't use neither Suse nor Redhat as server.
:)
Both work just fine for me!
Seems just too way insecure & hard to manage.
In what way does it "seem" insecure? It's been excellent over the past several years that I've had production servers running it. In what way does it "seem" hard to manage? compared to windows, or to traditional unices, it's a breeze.
Debian is the way to go IMHO, i've been using it for a long time now, and when i first changed to it, i noticed immediately how much easier it is to handle, you have the choice, not the installer/distro scripts etc.
You would probably benefit from trying something different. I rans sls in 1993, then slackware from late 93 to early 97 when I switched to redhat. I've also tried some debian derivitives like progeny, and have admined solaris, hpux, and irix. OK, apt was a nice debian tool, but that's been ported to redhat so I'm not sure what benefits you are claiming for debian.
I like that Red Hat is taking steps towards in security
dude, they started taking steps many years ago, what they are doing now is taking the lead in security.
certainly a possiblilty, although he could be a freebsd or solarix x86 user - it just seemed odd that a windows user would be talking about needing a linux distro to depend on.
And I suppose the Linux kernel is whats stopping that from happening?
No, it's more than that, it's something called the unix design philosophy - a very different mindset from the peecee culture of the microsoft crowd. There are a number of differences in the way things are done, and the result is much better security - microsoft is just now thinking about taking some baby steps, the ones taken by unix in the '80s.
I wiped it off my dual-boot machine (now single boot).
So, you're saying pretty much just a windows user now? it seems odd, unless you weren't doing much with linux anyway.
Unfortunately, I can't wait for them to figure it out.
It sure looks as though they've figued it out - Let's see, redhat has been profitable of late, their stock has gone up, their enterprise products are solid and selling well. And the kicker, their fedora distro is a beautiful gift to the community, essentially a very nice, snappy successor to RH 9, let's call it RH 9 done right.
I need a stable linux platform that I can count on.
Did I miss something? Last time I checked their supported platforms are as supported as ever, with 24x7 phone support if you need it. The fact is, redhat is as stable as ever - if you had to bet on one distro to be around for the long haul, redhat is it. Suse would be the other distro.
In the past months, I've found fedora on the server to be as solid as RH 7/8/9 ever were, if not more so. Naturally redhat would like you to buy RHEL for the server room, which is fine if you have the money, which most businesses do, but if you demand a free speech/free beer distro, fedora fits the bill quite nicely - and the fedora desktop is quite nice, once the required toys are installed.
BTW I have remotely upgraded a number of RH 8/9 boxes to fedora, and the boxes remained accessible and in service the whole time - just try that with windows!
taustin: Then you don't want to run a business, you want to preach a crusade. And the two are mutually exclusive.
Sorry, but I just don't buy the idea that using something other than microsoft windows automatically makes you a religious crusader, and I reject your assertion that using something other than microsoft products, and running business, are "mutually exclusive" -
Amazon.com is running a fairly successful business on Linux. IBM, Oracle and Novell are are moving to linux on the desktop, but taustin is itching to set them straight, because according to him, their current direction is "mutually exclusive" with running a business.
taustin, perhaps you should contact the CIOs of those firms and have a word with them about the impossibility of running a business on Linux?
I think they're a tad behind schedule.
(shrug) guess you're not privy to the schedule -
Torvalds back then always spoke in terms of things really happening 10 years down the road - 5 years to go, seems good so far...