Would you feel better if he replaced his reliable expensive Solaris clusters running Oracle with a bunch of reliable Linux blades running Oracle? It happens more than you think.
What possible connection does your bad experience with a home desktop upgrade to suse 10 have to do with Novell Enterprise linux? Apples and oranges.
In any case, throwing a tantrum because of one isolated bad experience is not very useful. Maybe there was an issue with your particular hardware, maybe the media was bad - in any case, it's always a good idea to install any *.0 OS on a test box to check it out.
My experience with suse 10.0 is that it's great on servers, it's fine on desktops, but it has problems with a lot of laptop hardware, even laptops where 9.3 runs fine. Nothing's perfect in this world, but I'd bet that 10.1 will address most or all of the issues I've seen.
The 2 phrases "truly open source" and "requires ms windoze to run" somehow strike me as oddly discordant, and an oxymoron in the making....
An open source project that is truly in the spirit of open source is something that runs not only on ms windoze, but other platforms as well, say, for instance, OSX, linux, solaris, FreeBSD and more. If it's microsoft only, I don't really consider an example of open source.
I specialize in linux because it pays the bills...
As far as the original article, I can respect any good programmer, but I've always thought that the cool thing about open source was that it was an alternative to the typical corporate bs, a breath of fresh air as it were.
I guess I just don't get the whole idea of starting an open source project, then writing it solely for ms windoze. I mean, what's the point? If your program is just for ms windoze, all you're doing is helping strengthen the would-be monopolist, and basically snubbing the free software community. Doing that is merely an attempt to provide another reason to use ms windoze, rather than helping give the alternatives a fighting chance of survival.
In 1993 I started work at the University of California, and was intrigued by the power of unix, having learned that the internet was built on that venerable OS, which had been a multi-user, network OS since the 70s. I started playing and learning with SunOS, and looked for some form of unix that would run on hardware I could afford...
I tried out a dual boot setup with linux and windows in June 1993, and after a few months I wiped windows completely from my main workstation. The lack of crashes, all the power and sophistication of the unix system and network environment, and the fact that there was a fascinating new world to learn about for free, as long as I put in the effort, all led me to make the switch.
I also found that after doing unix/linux for 3 years, I was able to switch to a new job that basically doubled my salary. BTW, I still get see expee and w2k at work on a daily basis, and I can honestly say I haven't missed microsoft at all.
"Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default , it has no chance to take over the world.
Then guess what? ms office has, by your definition, "no chance to take over the world".
Linux programmers will use.NET/C# but they won't use Java?? What's up with that?
Sam
I'm a long time linux user, and I love java - and I meet a lot of people of like mind in the course of my work. As for mono, we're all pretty much taking a "wait and see" approach. It's a neat hack, but... can we trust that microsoft won't stir up patent trouble? I dunno, java just seems a lot less risky.
Alright, so who told you that linux programers won't use java?
If you want stsble long time, corporate quality distrib you buy Novell Linux Desktop or SLES/OES. Suse 10 is for hobbyists, and like the Suse Pro 9.x releases is a quarterly release cycle roughly.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hobbyists" but it sounds vaguely insulting.
IMHO it would be more accurate to say that SuSE 10 is a full-featured distro for linux power users, while the more verticalized sles/nld are meant for the corporate market, managers who don't mind things being a little stale, and who want to have an 800-number to call, any time, should they ever have any questions.
OpenSuSE is in some ways analagous to fedora, except that you can't get a boxed set of fedora linux, nor fedora manuals, nor any fedora support from the vendor, while with SuSE, you have the option of downloading and freely using OpenSuSE, or purchasing SuSE 10.0 retail, which comes with all the extras -
BTW I know of several small businesses running their networks and services on suse linux professional servers, and are quite happy with it. No "hobbyists" they!
With SUSE releasing one suite after another. I sometimes wonder about stability. When was 9.3 released? Wasn't it only a few months ago? I wish SUSE should find a way to follow Slackware's model of stable releases without sacrificing too much market share.
Also, the software is getting way to bloated. Why all the software packages SUSE?
As has been the case for years, suse releases an upgrade about every 6 months, so I'm not sure I understand what your objection is. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade - and if you prefer Slackware, run slackware.
As to the software getting "too bloated", nobody is forcing you to install anything - you can easily install a bare bones system, without X-windows if that makes you happy. It's all in the install menu, these are all very basic concepts.
Oh well, freeloaders get bitter when the free ride ends - or when they think it might end? or maybe they don't like the license for some reason? (I guess I'm not sure what the issue is, but I digress)
I use mysql and love it. Not only are the availability and price unbeatable (it ships with my OS, how much easier could it get?) but the performance is truly outstanding. Predictably though, the mysql-bashers who are stuck in 1998 will arise to tell us how mysql can't do subqueries, or has no transactional integrity, or whatever other fairy tales they might dig up at random
Why can't we just admit that mysql is a useful tool in many situations, and move on?
Linux is a pain in the ass from an ease of use perspective. And I honestly wish that I could use Linux, but I don't want to be a system admin.
I want something that:
* I turn on and it works.
* When I want to configure something, there is a GUI that is easily found.
* works consistently across all distros.
Hmm, sounds like you haven't used a modern linux workstation distro lately.
Now, let's look at your 3 item checklist:
number 1 - yep, already works that way - number 2 - yep, already works that way - number 3 - now that's kind of an odd and contrived requirement.
Why would you care about "across all distros?", in fact why would you even know or care that there is such a thing as other distros? You can't have your cake and eat it too - you can't say, "I don't want to know anything, I just want to sit down in front of my linux workstation and point and click" and then turn around and say "I am a l33t hacker who moves among multiple distros".
IOW, as a naive end user, your only concern is the distro you are using, period. Any demand that something be enforced "across all distros" is a red herring, and sounds like a contrived requirement.
Its not better for me as a user if I have to learn all about the differences. If I have to be a sys admin to get my document to print this is bad.
Sounds like somebody who has not looked into how easy it is to set up a printer in a modern linux desktop distro. Printing setup has been a simple point and click affair for some years now.
Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as.DOC or.RTF or export to.PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.
Of course this is all ridiculous, and the correct answer is of course "Oh, Joe is using ms office, so he can't read OpenDoc - just send him a copy in word format"
So, if everything is hunky dory in microsoft land, and star office doesn't matter, why do you suppose microsoft has struggled so frantically to stop massachusets from mandating a standard, patent-free file format for all government documents? (one BTW which star office/open office just happen to support?)
LOL, I haven't compiled a kernel in years, I've been using vendor distro, and as it turns out, they supply a kernel.
Apparently my time has even greater value than yours. I don't use ms windoze because I can't be bothered futzing around with constant virus updates, spyware removal, "hot fixes", reboots etc. With Linux, I just get the job done, and don't have to spend any time or effort trying to keep the whole thing afloat as would be the case with ms windoze.
Agreed, the mac mini is nice. I bought a mini a few months ago, and while it's a cool toy, there's no way it could replace suse linux as my primary platform - YMMV.
Since the four distros cited account for 99% of the business users of linux, as well as the majority of home users, does it really matter what the other 458 do?
Re:How does this benefit customers?
on
Oracle To Buy Siebel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Oh, I dunno... maybe finally, some semblance of linux support for siebel apps?
What this sounds like to me is a person realizing that he's not familiar with SFU (read: BSD), says it sucks, and retreats to the nice, warm, Cygwin (read: Linux) blanky and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
You lose, thanks for playing - cygwin has absolutely nothing to do with linux. It's a unix-like emulation environment that runs inside ms windoze, and is often used by windoze users who want to futz around with unix, and compile some unix sources, while remaining tied to ms windoze, rather than going with an actual unix OS.
The problem is, you're reporting something as a problem, but it's a problem of your own making. The kernel.org tarball is not meant for end-users, it's meant for kernel developers and vendors.
End users such as yourself should use the vendor-supplied kernels, which come ready to use, no patching or compiling required.
Hmm, it sounds somebody is trying to build a do-it-yourself kernel and screwing it up somehow. It sounds like somebody needs to quit trying to play kernel hacker and just use the kernel shipped by the vendor of the distro.
We've been using SuSE Enterprise server on H/P DL hardware here and it is absolutely rock solid. We've been replacing HPUX with SuSE, and no matter how these boxes are pounded they handle the load very gracefully and without any hint of trouble. We're pleased to find that the 2.6 kernel scales much better than the old 2.4, so the difference has been all good - oh and we don't bother compiling our own kernels, we leave that to Novell/SuSE since we've got other things to do, and they've been doing a great job.
Just some real world data as a counterpoint to the FUD.
Why is it so hard for these folks to grok that you just can't do that with a browser that still has ~ 90% market share? Sure if you've got some meaningless blog site, or some "pets on parade" personal site, you can do this without repercussion - going from 20 visitors a month to 4 isn't really a big deal.
We've been seeing a lot of this hysterical hand wringing in this thread, and it doesn't make any sense. The fact is, well over 95% of websites already work just fine for firefox, mozilla, konqueror, safari, opera or msie.
Yes Virginia, believe it or not, most businesses aren't really all that excited about telling customers to go fsck off if they happen to be using a browser other than msie. What is that simple concept so damn difficult for these chicken little types to grok? They warn and threaten, with shrill voices, that websites must be written as msie-specific, or disaster will ensue, and msie users won't be able to access your site.
Sorry, I have to call BS on that. A gentle heads-up for the clueless: see e.g. google.com, amazon.com, ibm.com, novell.com or any number of other such sites. They all work perfectly well for me using mozilla, firefox, netscape, opera, konqueror or other browsers on linux, they work fine in OSX, and I've been told by many a windows user that they work just fine using various browsers, including msie, in ms windows.
A previous pro-microsoft poster actually beleived that only small-time sites with 20 users or less would dare to use standards compliant HTML, since that would apparently lock out msie users. His position was that all the legitimate business sites are msie-specific sites, ostensibly because they are only interested in customers from the 80-something percent of the internet that still currently uses msie. Or perhaps he just thought that it's impossible for a site to be accessible by both msie and standards-compliant browsers. Better go tell amazon.com all about it. What with their 40 million customers, they need to know this important bit of news.
I think that hpefully, we've zipped up the body bag on this silly notion that somehow, standards compliant websites will drive away all msie users and kill your business...
Actually there are a couple of basic facts to mitigate the concerns you cite above:
First of all, the developers tend to have really good communication among themselves, they know each other, and the developers know what other developers are working on. Some random john doe who appears out of the blue one day with a huge patch is not about to get his work accepted. It's also common sense to submit a patch against the current tree, not something from 13 versions ago.
Secondly, Linus uses a system to manage all these potentially conflicting changes. (For several years until just recently, bitkeeper was used to manage patches to the kernel tree - now that function is being filled by a tool called git, a version control system developed by Mr Torvalds)
In any case, these things have been thought through.
I think you misunderstood the concept. A developer doesn't have 2 weeks to insert new functionality. A developer can work on enhanced performance or new features for 9 months, but there is a 2-week window after each release in which patches will be accepted.
The two things are orthogonal. Once the code has been thoroughly tested and a patch is ready it should be no problem for the core developers to email the patches to Mr Torvalds within that 2-week window of opportunity. I see no problem here.
Slashdot Mirror
putty is not a linux program, it's only for ms windoze - it's not needed on linux though, we just use ssh.
Would you feel better if he replaced his reliable expensive Solaris clusters running Oracle with a bunch of reliable Linux blades running Oracle? It happens more than you think.
What possible connection does your bad experience with a home desktop upgrade to suse 10 have to do with Novell Enterprise linux? Apples and oranges.
In any case, throwing a tantrum because of one isolated bad experience is not very useful. Maybe there was an issue with your particular hardware, maybe the media was bad - in any case, it's always a good idea to install any *.0 OS on a test box to check it out.
My experience with suse 10.0 is that it's great on servers, it's fine on desktops, but it has problems with a lot of laptop hardware, even laptops where 9.3 runs fine. Nothing's perfect in this world, but I'd bet that 10.1 will address most or all of the issues I've seen.
The 2 phrases "truly open source" and "requires ms windoze to run" somehow strike me as oddly discordant, and an oxymoron in the making....
An open source project that is truly in the spirit of open source is something that runs not only on ms windoze, but other platforms as well, say, for instance, OSX, linux, solaris, FreeBSD and more. If it's microsoft only, I don't really consider an example of open source.
I specialize in linux because it pays the bills...
As far as the original article, I can respect any good programmer, but I've always thought that the cool thing about open source was that it was an alternative to the typical corporate bs, a breath of fresh air as it were.
I guess I just don't get the whole idea of starting an open source project, then writing it solely for ms windoze. I mean, what's the point? If your program is just for ms windoze, all you're doing is helping strengthen the would-be monopolist, and basically snubbing the free software community. Doing that is merely an attempt to provide another reason to use ms windoze, rather than helping give the alternatives a fighting chance of survival.
Why did I switch?
In 1993 I started work at the University of California, and was intrigued by the power of unix, having learned that the internet was built on that venerable OS, which had been a multi-user, network OS since the 70s. I started playing and learning with SunOS, and looked for some form of unix that would run on hardware I could afford...
I tried out a dual boot setup with linux and windows in June 1993, and after a few months I wiped windows completely from my main workstation. The lack of crashes, all the power and sophistication of the unix system and network environment, and the fact that there was a fascinating new world to learn about for free, as long as I put in the effort, all led me to make the switch.
I also found that after doing unix/linux for 3 years, I was able to switch to a new job that basically doubled my salary. BTW, I still get see expee and w2k at work on a daily basis, and I can honestly say I haven't missed microsoft at all.
"Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default , it has no chance to take over the world.
Then guess what? ms office has, by your definition, "no chance to take over the world".
Linux programmers will use .NET/C# but they won't use Java?? What's up with that?
Sam
I'm a long time linux user, and I love java - and I meet a lot of people of like mind in the course of my work. As for mono, we're all pretty much taking a "wait and see" approach. It's a neat hack, but... can we trust that microsoft won't stir up patent trouble? I dunno, java just seems a lot less risky.
Alright, so who told you that linux programers won't use java?
YHBT, my friend!
HAND
If you want stsble long time, corporate quality distrib you buy Novell Linux Desktop or SLES/OES. Suse 10 is for hobbyists, and like the Suse Pro 9.x releases is a quarterly release cycle roughly.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hobbyists" but it sounds vaguely insulting.
IMHO it would be more accurate to say that SuSE 10 is a full-featured distro for linux power users, while the more verticalized sles/nld are meant for the corporate market, managers who don't mind things being a little stale, and who want to have an 800-number to call, any time, should they ever have any questions.
OpenSuSE is in some ways analagous to fedora, except that you can't get a boxed set of fedora linux, nor fedora manuals, nor any fedora support from the vendor, while with SuSE, you have the option of downloading and freely using OpenSuSE, or purchasing SuSE 10.0 retail, which comes with all the extras -
BTW I know of several small businesses running their networks and services on suse linux professional servers, and are quite happy with it. No "hobbyists" they!
With SUSE releasing one suite after another. I sometimes wonder about stability. When was 9.3 released? Wasn't it only a few months ago? I wish SUSE should find a way to follow Slackware's model of stable releases without sacrificing too much market share.
Also, the software is getting way to bloated. Why all the software packages SUSE?
As has been the case for years, suse releases an upgrade about every 6 months, so I'm not sure I understand what your objection is. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade - and if you prefer Slackware, run slackware.
As to the software getting "too bloated", nobody is forcing you to install anything - you can easily install a bare bones system, without X-windows if that makes you happy. It's all in the install menu, these are all very basic concepts.
Oh well, freeloaders get bitter when the free ride ends - or when they think it might end? or maybe they don't like the license for some reason? (I guess I'm not sure what the issue is, but I digress)
I use mysql and love it. Not only are the availability and price unbeatable (it ships with my OS, how much easier could it get?) but the performance is truly outstanding. Predictably though, the mysql-bashers who are stuck in 1998 will arise to tell us how mysql can't do subqueries, or has no transactional integrity, or whatever other fairy tales they might dig up at random
Why can't we just admit that mysql is a useful tool in many situations, and move on?
patmoore says:
Linux is a pain in the ass from an ease of use perspective. And I honestly wish that I could use Linux, but I don't want to be a system admin.
I want something that:
* I turn on and it works.
* When I want to configure something, there is a GUI that is easily found.
* works consistently across all distros.
Hmm, sounds like you haven't used a modern linux workstation distro lately.
Now, let's look at your 3 item checklist:
number 1 - yep, already works that way -
number 2 - yep, already works that way -
number 3 - now that's kind of an odd and contrived requirement.
Why would you care about "across all distros?", in fact why would you even know or care that there is such a thing as other distros? You can't have your cake and eat it too - you can't say, "I don't want to know anything, I just want to sit down in front of my linux workstation and point and click" and then turn around and say "I am a l33t hacker who moves among multiple distros".
IOW, as a naive end user, your only concern is the distro you are using, period. Any demand that something be enforced "across all distros" is a red herring, and sounds like a contrived requirement.
Its not better for me as a user if I have to learn all about the differences. If I have to be a sys admin to get my document to print this is bad.
Sounds like somebody who has not looked into how easy it is to set up a printer in a modern linux desktop distro. Printing setup has been a simple point and click affair for some years now.
So, if everything is hunky dory in microsoft land, and star office doesn't matter, why do you suppose microsoft has struggled so frantically to stop massachusets from mandating a standard, patent-free file format for all government documents? (one BTW which star office/open office just happen to support?)
LOL, I haven't compiled a kernel in years, I've been using vendor distro, and as it turns out, they supply a kernel.
Apparently my time has even greater value than yours. I don't use ms windoze because I can't be bothered futzing around with constant virus updates, spyware removal, "hot fixes", reboots etc. With Linux, I just get the job done, and don't have to spend any time or effort trying to keep the whole thing afloat as would be the case with ms windoze.
Agreed, the mac mini is nice. I bought a mini a few months ago, and while it's a cool toy, there's no way it could replace suse linux as my primary platform - YMMV.
Four down, only 458 to go.
Since the four distros cited account for 99% of the business users of linux, as well as the majority of home users, does it really matter what the other 458 do?
Oh, I dunno... maybe finally, some semblance of linux support for siebel apps?
What this sounds like to me is a person realizing that he's not familiar with SFU (read: BSD), says it sucks, and retreats to the nice, warm, Cygwin (read: Linux) blanky and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
You lose, thanks for playing - cygwin has absolutely nothing to do with linux. It's a unix-like emulation environment that runs inside ms windoze, and is often used by windoze users who want to futz around with unix, and compile some unix sources, while remaining tied to ms windoze, rather than going with an actual unix OS.
The problem is, you're reporting something as a problem, but it's a problem of your own making. The kernel.org tarball is not meant for end-users, it's meant for kernel developers and vendors.
End users such as yourself should use the vendor-supplied kernels, which come ready to use, no patching or compiling required.
Hmm, it sounds somebody is trying to build a do-it-yourself kernel and screwing it up somehow. It sounds like somebody needs to quit trying to play kernel hacker and just use the kernel shipped by the vendor of the distro.
We've been using SuSE Enterprise server on H/P DL hardware here and it is absolutely rock solid. We've been replacing HPUX with SuSE, and no matter how these boxes are pounded they handle the load very gracefully and without any hint of trouble. We're pleased to find that the 2.6 kernel scales much better than the old 2.4, so the difference has been all good - oh and we don't bother compiling our own kernels, we leave that to Novell/SuSE since we've got other things to do, and they've been doing a great job.
Just some real world data as a counterpoint to the FUD.
Also, you can run windows "sans-AV". it's called "don't have services you don't need on" and "don't install software you don't trust".
Whoops, you forgot, "don't click on links", "don't open emails", and "don't go on the internet"!
Why is it so hard for these folks to grok that you just can't do that with a browser that still has ~ 90% market share? Sure if you've got some meaningless blog site, or some "pets on parade" personal site, you can do this without repercussion - going from 20 visitors a month to 4 isn't really a big deal.
We've been seeing a lot of this hysterical hand wringing in this thread, and it doesn't make any sense. The fact is, well over 95% of websites already work just fine for firefox, mozilla, konqueror, safari, opera or msie.
Yes Virginia, believe it or not, most businesses aren't really all that excited about telling customers to go fsck off if they happen to be using a browser other than msie. What is that simple concept so damn difficult for these chicken little types to grok? They warn and threaten, with shrill voices, that websites must be written as msie-specific, or disaster will ensue, and msie users won't be able to access your site.
Sorry, I have to call BS on that. A gentle heads-up for the clueless: see e.g. google.com, amazon.com, ibm.com, novell.com or any number of other such sites. They all work perfectly well for me using mozilla, firefox, netscape, opera, konqueror or other browsers on linux, they work fine in OSX, and I've been told by many a windows user that they work just fine using various browsers, including msie, in ms windows.
A previous pro-microsoft poster actually beleived that only small-time sites with 20 users or less would dare to use standards compliant HTML, since that would apparently lock out msie users. His position was that all the legitimate business sites are msie-specific sites, ostensibly because they are only interested in customers from the 80-something percent of the internet that still currently uses msie. Or perhaps he just thought that it's impossible for a site to be accessible by both msie and standards-compliant browsers. Better go tell amazon.com all about it. What with their 40 million customers, they need to know this important bit of news.
I think that hpefully, we've zipped up the body bag on this silly notion that somehow, standards compliant websites will drive away all msie users and kill your business...
Thanks, I checked that link out - the low latency mods from Dr Kolivas are available for gentoo kernel builds, that's very cool.
Actually there are a couple of basic facts to mitigate the concerns you cite above:
First of all, the developers tend to have really good communication among themselves, they know each other, and the developers know what other developers are working on. Some random john doe who appears out of the blue one day with a huge patch is not about to get his work accepted. It's also common sense to submit a patch against the current tree, not something from 13 versions ago.
Secondly, Linus uses a system to manage all these potentially conflicting changes. (For several years until just recently, bitkeeper was used to manage patches to the kernel tree - now that function is being filled by a tool called git, a version control system developed by Mr Torvalds)
In any case, these things have been thought through.
I think you misunderstood the concept. A developer doesn't have 2 weeks to insert new functionality. A developer can work on enhanced performance or new features for 9 months, but there is a 2-week window after each release in which patches will be accepted.
The two things are orthogonal. Once the code has been thoroughly tested and a patch is ready it should be no problem for the core developers to email the patches to Mr Torvalds within that 2-week window of opportunity. I see no problem here.