Re:Viruses spread by stupidity not OS'es.
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The LSM required for SELInux has been a patch to the 2.4 kernel, but it is now been folded into the 2.6 kernel, that means it is easier for distributions to carry it.
SELinux will be standard in Fedora Core 2.
As for tools - check out Tresys, they make tools for configuring SELinux policies. Likewise, the NSA provides a variety of userland tools set up to work with SElinux. If more people would start coding the the system it can only help. So, all you open source developers - get busy working on SELinux support.
Jedidiah.
Re:Viruses spread by stupidity not OS'es.
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As we all really know viruses are spread by stupidity of users, not the OS'es, so Linux popularity on the desktop will be it's deciding factor to virus targeting.
It's possible to secure against stupidity - well, not completely, but better than MS has. Given a decent SELinux install, and an email app written for it, running an email virus would get a nice dialog:
'Tis executable has attempted to access files "addressbook.xml" and ports "25, 3169" which it is not currently priviliged to access. Please run the executable under a different domain and role to execute it properly'
Sure, someone will be dumb enough to run it anyway, but that would put a second thought into the minds of many a dumb user.
Jedidiah.
Less monoculture
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Windows is also more standardized than Linux, Mr. Friedrichs says. There are a number of distributions of Linux from different vendors, with differences significant enough that a virus or worm designed for one won't necessarily have the same effect on all the others. That fragmentation is a good thing when it comes to discouraging virus writers who want their work to have the maximum impact.
There's another advantage that they don't mention. Linux plays nicely with the BSDs, Solaris, OS X, and most other operating systems, so it really is easier to have a diverse environment - not just diverse distributions, but diverse operating systems and architectures.
Yes, Windows will work okay on a heterogenous network, but it doesn't really like it much. Compared to the shared UNIX foundations of Linux, OS X and BSD it is much easier to have all of them happily running side by side on the network sharing resources. Linux or Solaris workstations for the research division, Macs for the designers, Linux and/or BSD for the servers, developers get to choose their platform... and maybe even a nice pretty GNOME or KDE desktop for the paper pushers.
Jedidiah.
Re:Linux is not hard to use if setup specifically
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 1
However, the issue arises when an average user has to do some setup themselves.. They buy a new printer, digital camera, etc. Thats where the issues are now in linux. On Windows you put in the cd that came with the product and a few clicks later your ready to go. I think most of us are aware of the issues you can experience in linux.
This seems to be the most common complaint about Linux usability these days - it used to be about the horrible hard to confugure GUIs (ever tried writing FVWM2 config files - easy if you know how, but it can take some real work if you are learning), but now it is about not being able to plug in hardware you buy.
Except this isn't a problem with Linux - well, in as much as Windows is no better. If the manufacturers shipped with a CD full of Linux and OS X drivers and no windows drivers you'd have as hard a time on windows as you do on Linux - probablyharder in fact.
As Linux becomes more widely used - and that is happening, look at the corporate desktop) more and more manufacturers will ship Linux drivers with their product. Then this Linux usability problem will simply evaporate as if it had never existed.
I heard this story on NPR driving home just a few hours ago. They headlined it as "bringing space flight into the reach of ordinary Americans". Come on... considering raw costs alone, it'll be decades before 'ordinary Americans' can afford this kind of luxury travel.
You might be surprised. One of the main points of the X-Prize is not that it is done by private companies instead of the government, but rather that the craft be highly reusable. You can only change 10% of the non fuel mass of the craft between the 2 launches required to claim the X-Prize, and those 2 launches have to have a quick turnaround time (matter of weeks).
Basically that means once you've built a winning X-Prize craft, the only real relaunch costs are fuel. Compare that to the massive cost of each shuttle launch (between 3 and 5 hundred million dollars per launch), and you're talking about reduing launch costs by a factor of 100 or more.
If they can pull that off, I suspect they can quickly get plenty of funding to push the technology further and make it more efficient. I really do believe basic space travel could be affordable by ordinary Americans (expensive, yes, but affordable) inside of a decade - 2 at the most.
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
It is worth noting that Macs can be considerably more expensive depending where you are due to exclusive distributor contracts. A good example is New Zealand where a decent high spec PC will run you in the order of $NZ1000 - $NZ2000, but iMacs start at $NZ2500 and run up to $4500. G5s, with no monitor run from $NZ3500 to $NZ6000.
That really is considerably more expensive (and no, the lowest spec iMac, and a $NZ2000 PC are not really comparable - the PC is well ahead on spec).
I do agree, however, that in the US the price differences are minmal. Just be aware that for some people (outside the US) the perceived expense of Apple is a very real phenomenon.
So fork the GIMP - each new release, just download it, unpack the source and run perl -i -pe 's/gimp/ImageStudio/gi', repackage, and post to your project's ftp site. In theory you should rapidly gain market share over the GIMP.
Think about the amount of time you spend having to clean spam out of your mailbox. Now imagine the amount of time required to clean the spam out of everyones mailbox as you try to find any useful content. In theory you don't need encryption if you're lost in the noise. Or, at least, I imagine that would have been their thinking.
Like most linux geeks, I too believe that linux is much more secure than windows, but when asked why, I can only give some rant about how the open source methodology is superior and promotes faster response times to vulnerabilities. Either that, or I point to all the recent windows virus outbreaks.
SELinux. It kicks the crap out of any other readily available OS for security (except for some BSD forks that implement the same security model). It has security through isolation and least privilege built into the kernel itself - each and every process is assigned the abolute minimum amount of access it requires.
If you want to be able to say that Linux is more secure than Windows, use SELinux, because it very definitely and quantifiably will be.
Given the steady decline in enthusiasm for these films, I would imagine you could line up on May 19 2005 and have no issues getting a prime seat, should you actually care to.
Of course, that won't stop the few remaining devout fans queueing up for days in advance. Of course, a permanent queue of 10 people does look a little strange, but then, I'm pretty sure the people queueing will look strange enough to begin with...
Ok, I want latest samba, looks good.. ok, rpms...hmm, no rpms for suse 8.1 that are up to date? can I use the ones for 8.2 or 9.0..oh well get teh source and try and compile that. ok, Install...dependancy needed, lib.so.whatever
What - the fact that there is an open development model so you can get a hold of the very latest bleeding edge of development on most apps?
Ever since apt started working on rpm the sbility to upgrade distributions with ease has been available, so you mostly don't have any excuses to be running an older version of a distribution. If the latest bleeding edge of a program you want has been packaged for your distribution yet... well, wait. It usually hasn't been packaged for a reason - which is to say, it's still being developed. In a closed devlopment environment you simply wouldn't have heard about the newer version at all and would be patiently waiting for it to be released.
This seems to be the real issue with the difficulties of installing on Linux - people can see the latest bleeding edge developments as they happen, and before they're really ready, so they always want to leap frog ahead rather than waiting for the proper packaged release, as they would with closed source.
Now - granted, there are caveats. Much of it depends on what environment your favorite app is based on... with GNOME/GTK and KDE/Qt becoming more cooperative. But then... there are certainly apps within the Windows world that behave their own way too (ironically enough - GTK-based Windows apps included).
And interestingly enough, due to it's incredible flexibility in skinnability there are now GTK+ themes available that use Qt to render widgets (thus automatically inheriting the Qt theme), or use windows native rendering if you are on windows (thus inheriting the windows theme).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they completely destroyed all the sets etc. when they cancelled the series - so are they now going to rebuild it all to make this miniseries? Now there's a lack of forward planning if ever I heard one.
Has anyone here who's posting actually downloaded it and tried it yet?
Come on now, most slashdotters don't even manage to read the article, let alone read, download, extract, compile and execute the article. I think you're pissing into the wind with this one.
If it's no big deal, then why is it nearly impossible for me to get a standard way for installing softwre on linux? I understand that most distros come with a packaging manager, but if I want to write a program, allow downloads from my site, then (to the best of my knowledge) there's no way for it to easily be installed and have menu shortcuts etc set up....
Follow this and your menu entries will show up for KDE and GNOME. Users of other DEs normally have enough nouse to add menu entries themselves (or their DEs can load GNOME/KDE menus).
As for installers, at wort you can just statically compile into an rpm - no dependency issues then. As long as you provide a source tar ball as well then most everyone will be happy (and if your program is any good, it'll get included in the package repositories of the various distributions).
If that doesn't appeal, you could always support autopackage.
On the other hand, how about opening an Excel (or compatible) spreadsheet, extracting all of the URLS from each row where the date in the third column is less than one week old, getting the named graphics from those URLs, processing those graphics in Photoshop (or Gimp, if you like), inserting the graphics at the proper place in a PDF document, and uploading the PDF document to the proper place on a web server? Care to script that one for me?
I'm pretty sure almost all of that can be done in perl without too much hassle. I think python could handle it quite well as well for that matter. Of course, it probably wouldn't be possible to do and Excel spreadsheet, but that's just because the format is locked up. Gnumeric, OpenOffice, of csv files would be fine.
I'm also a little uncertain as to what sort of modules or tools there are for playing with PDFs, having not done it much myself (I generate all my PDFs via pdfLaTeX), but I do recall seeing various libraies that handle such things.
In summary - no, I don't thin this would really pose much of a problem. Care to try again?
You could always try this one. It is still in beta really, but works for most QT themes very well. Makes mixing apps between desktops a lot easier too.
In sharp contrast, OS X's Interface Builder and Microsoft's Visual Studio affords the developer time and energy to think about the design of the program.
And what of Glade or QTdesigner? There's plenty of systems to provide the sort of functionality for FOSS. In the end the likes of Emacs and vi are still popular because they are unparalleled at simply editing the raw code. Of course that doesn't mean that UIs aren't built or designed with the tools above (which, it is worth noting, can stand alone, as well as being integrated into an IDE).
Longhorn is going to be entirely.NET and include things like Avalon, Indigo, WinFS, and so on. I guess what I'm saying is Microsoft is actually pushing to do a revolutionary release--this will be the same kind of change going from Windows 3.1 to 95 was.
Meanwhile there are various Linux/UNIX projects such as Storage, ReiserFS, Cairo, and Keith Packard's Xserver. It will be interesting to see which set of projects finishes first.
I was assuming some desktop boxes, and a few cluless users who need to introduced to a potentially slightly different desktop ("You need to click on the green lizard instead of the red hat now...").
Alos, there is potentially a little readjustment for admins. init script layout and other quirks in/etc can be a little different between distributions, and potentially there are some different admin tools to get to know.
None of it is serious retraining, but it might be worth a day course or so to introduce people to whatever minor changes are relevant, and save yourself some hassle later on.
Jedidiah.
Re:Cost of switching distributions?
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The differences between RH9 and SuSE 9 are significant, mostly in installation and maintenance area. The up2date is completely different, and you can run your own. Printers are done differently somewhat. Even/etc/rc.d tree is different. In a large company, such as with 100 boxes, this may be a problem - but not an insurmountable one.
Thanks, that's the sort of summary I was looking for, and was pretty much my understanding. Yes, there are some significant differences, but nothing too challenging. Unless you have a huge number of admin scripts that use a lot of harcoded paths, mostly it would seem to be a matter of learning how the new distro does things, and setting everything up according to their style - and that isn't too big a leap if your familiar wnough with UNIX.
I guess this just means: Don't write too many scripts that have hardcoded expectations of where to find things - and that's not especially difficult.
The pain of migration from Win2k to WinXP... nobody in his right mind would do that. Win2k is the best OS that MS ever came up with.
Sorry, I haven't used MS since Win2k first came out, so I was randomly guessing at versions:-)
Jedidiah.
Cost of switching distributions?
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They claim the cost of switching ditributions is very high, potentially involving rewriting a lot of code that you had written that may have taken advantage of features of the particular distribution.
That one strikes me as a little odd - I've been pretty distribution agnostic myself, and never really had any problems moving from one to another. At worst you can just install a few extra packages to cover some version differences. Then again, I'm a single user - I'm not trying to maintain an enterprise wide system, nor do I really have any experience with such things.
So, my question is, how big are the costs of an enterprise changing distributions? I can certainly understand some significant cost (potential retraining, reorgansing the system a little to work with any new structures) but I can't quite imagine it being that high. If I had to guess, I would imagine it not being overly different from say, upgrading from Windows2k to WindowsXP or some such.
Can someone with some experience in this provide some insight?
People give up on linux because they don't know how to install apps and games. They download stuff then say, "WTF is this shit? How do I use this?" Then, after realizing 90% of linux apps are like this just give up on linux.
Even when people can learn to install stuff they often don't know where the hell to install it to (people are used to not having to organize programs themselves, just throw em wherever it wants to go).
(DISCLAIMER: I'm more familiar with rpm, so I'm just going to say rpm here. I'm almost certain you could put ".deb" in it's place and everything would remain true.)
This mostly exists. Currently double clicking on an rpm file in either Nautilus or Konqueror will ask you for the root password. Presuming that is given correctly it then happily installs the package for you. No questions of where to put it, no install procedure, just double click, enter the password, and you're done.
Of course, the catch with this is dependencies. OSS has very good code reuse so there are often a lot of dependencies on various libraries. However, with apt and yum becoming standard in distributions these days, my understanding that using these tools to do dependency resolution and downloading and installing of any extra packages is becoming standard - that is, in the next round of distribution releases, you can mostly expect that double click on an rpm to automatically resolve any outstanding dependencies and download and install any extra required packages for you.
Finally, there is autopackage, which is still getting going, but promises to be a better system for handling installs and dependency resolution in a much more vendor agnostic way (currently you can run into problems installing third party pckages because your vendor doesn't support the required dependencies in their repository)
If you supply a good or service that can't be supplied in India, you will not find your job offshored. If someone in India will do your job for half the salary, but it takes them 3 times as long, you will not be offshored.
Are you that frightened to actually compete in a global market? Do you believe you skills are that worthless? Want to be able to work for lower wages to compete on the same skill base? Move to a country with a lower cost of living. Don't want to move to such a country? Then don't complain - you can't have your cushy US lifestyle with associated high cost of living and high paying jobs... well, not without quietly fucking over the people of all those other countries with whom you have ridiculous protectionist trade policy.
Slashdot Mirror
The LSM required for SELInux has been a patch to the 2.4 kernel, but it is now been folded into the 2.6 kernel, that means it is easier for distributions to carry it.
SELinux will be standard in Fedora Core 2.
As for tools - check out Tresys, they make tools for configuring SELinux policies. Likewise, the NSA provides a variety of userland tools set up to work with SElinux. If more people would start coding the the system it can only help. So, all you open source developers - get busy working on SELinux support.
Jedidiah.
As we all really know viruses are spread by stupidity of users, not the OS'es, so Linux popularity on the desktop will be it's deciding factor to virus targeting.
It's possible to secure against stupidity - well, not completely, but better than MS has. Given a decent SELinux install, and an email app written for it, running an email virus would get a nice dialog:
'Tis executable has attempted to access files "addressbook.xml" and ports "25, 3169" which it is not currently priviliged to access. Please run the executable under a different domain and role to execute it properly'
Sure, someone will be dumb enough to run it anyway, but that would put a second thought into the minds of many a dumb user.
Jedidiah.
Windows is also more standardized than Linux, Mr. Friedrichs says. There are a number of distributions of Linux from different vendors, with differences significant enough that a virus or worm designed for one won't necessarily have the same effect on all the others. That fragmentation is a good thing when it comes to discouraging virus writers who want their work to have the maximum impact.
There's another advantage that they don't mention. Linux plays nicely with the BSDs, Solaris, OS X, and most other operating systems, so it really is easier to have a diverse environment - not just diverse distributions, but diverse operating systems and architectures.
Yes, Windows will work okay on a heterogenous network, but it doesn't really like it much. Compared to the shared UNIX foundations of Linux, OS X and BSD it is much easier to have all of them happily running side by side on the network sharing resources. Linux or Solaris workstations for the research division, Macs for the designers, Linux and/or BSD for the servers, developers get to choose their platform... and maybe even a nice pretty GNOME or KDE desktop for the paper pushers.
Jedidiah.
However, the issue arises when an average user has to do some setup themselves.. They buy a new printer, digital camera, etc. Thats where the issues are now in linux. On Windows you put in the cd that came with the product and a few clicks later your ready to go. I think most of us are aware of the issues you can experience in linux.
This seems to be the most common complaint about Linux usability these days - it used to be about the horrible hard to confugure GUIs (ever tried writing FVWM2 config files - easy if you know how, but it can take some real work if you are learning), but now it is about not being able to plug in hardware you buy.
Except this isn't a problem with Linux - well, in as much as Windows is no better. If the manufacturers shipped with a CD full of Linux and OS X drivers and no windows drivers you'd have as hard a time on windows as you do on Linux - probablyharder in fact.
As Linux becomes more widely used - and that is happening, look at the corporate desktop) more and more manufacturers will ship Linux drivers with their product. Then this Linux usability problem will simply evaporate as if it had never existed.
Jedidiah.
I heard this story on NPR driving home just a few hours ago. They headlined it as "bringing space flight into the reach of ordinary Americans". Come on... considering raw costs alone, it'll be decades before 'ordinary Americans' can afford this kind of luxury travel.
You might be surprised. One of the main points of the X-Prize is not that it is done by private companies instead of the government, but rather that the craft be highly reusable. You can only change 10% of the non fuel mass of the craft between the 2 launches required to claim the X-Prize, and those 2 launches have to have a quick turnaround time (matter of weeks).
Basically that means once you've built a winning X-Prize craft, the only real relaunch costs are fuel. Compare that to the massive cost of each shuttle launch (between 3 and 5 hundred million dollars per launch), and you're talking about reduing launch costs by a factor of 100 or more.
If they can pull that off, I suspect they can quickly get plenty of funding to push the technology further and make it more efficient. I really do believe basic space travel could be affordable by ordinary Americans (expensive, yes, but affordable) inside of a decade - 2 at the most.
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Jedidiah.
It is worth noting that Macs can be considerably more expensive depending where you are due to exclusive distributor contracts. A good example is New Zealand where a decent high spec PC will run you in the order of $NZ1000 - $NZ2000, but iMacs start at $NZ2500 and run up to $4500. G5s, with no monitor run from $NZ3500 to $NZ6000.
That really is considerably more expensive (and no, the lowest spec iMac, and a $NZ2000 PC are not really comparable - the PC is well ahead on spec).
I do agree, however, that in the US the price differences are minmal. Just be aware that for some people (outside the US) the perceived expense of Apple is a very real phenomenon.
Jedidiah.
So fork the GIMP - each new release, just download it, unpack the source and run perl -i -pe 's/gimp/ImageStudio/gi', repackage, and post to your project's ftp site. In theory you should rapidly gain market share over the GIMP.
Jedidiah.
It is so easy to monitor InterNet plain text communications, that I ALWAYS presume its been done since the start of the Net.
Because there's hardly any of it, and the signal to noise ratio is really good. Trivial I'm sure.
Why do we have a problem with spam again?
Jedidiah.
Think about the amount of time you spend having to clean spam out of your mailbox. Now imagine the amount of time required to clean the spam out of everyones mailbox as you try to find any useful content. In theory you don't need encryption if you're lost in the noise. Or, at least, I imagine that would have been their thinking.
Jedidiah.
Like most linux geeks, I too believe that linux is much more secure than windows, but when asked why, I can only give some rant about how the open source methodology is superior and promotes faster response times to vulnerabilities. Either that, or I point to all the recent windows virus outbreaks.
SELinux. It kicks the crap out of any other readily available OS for security (except for some BSD forks that implement the same security model). It has security through isolation and least privilege built into the kernel itself - each and every process is assigned the abolute minimum amount of access it requires.
If you want to be able to say that Linux is more secure than Windows, use SELinux, because it very definitely and quantifiably will be.
Jedidiah.
Given the steady decline in enthusiasm for these films, I would imagine you could line up on May 19 2005 and have no issues getting a prime seat, should you actually care to.
Of course, that won't stop the few remaining devout fans queueing up for days in advance. Of course, a permanent queue of 10 people does look a little strange, but then, I'm pretty sure the people queueing will look strange enough to begin with...
Jedidiah.
Ok, I want latest samba, looks good.. ..oh well get teh source and try and compile that. ok, Install...dependancy needed, lib.so.whatever
... well, wait. It usually hasn't been packaged for a reason - which is to say, it's still being developed. In a closed devlopment environment you simply wouldn't have heard about the newer version at all and would be patiently waiting for it to be released.
ok, rpms...hmm, no rpms for suse 8.1 that are up to date? can I use the ones for 8.2 or 9.0
What - the fact that there is an open development model so you can get a hold of the very latest bleeding edge of development on most apps?
Ever since apt started working on rpm the sbility to upgrade distributions with ease has been available, so you mostly don't have any excuses to be running an older version of a distribution. If the latest bleeding edge of a program you want has been packaged for your distribution yet
This seems to be the real issue with the difficulties of installing on Linux - people can see the latest bleeding edge developments as they happen, and before they're really ready, so they always want to leap frog ahead rather than waiting for the proper packaged release, as they would with closed source.
Jedidiah.
Now - granted, there are caveats. Much of it depends on what environment your favorite app is based on... with GNOME/GTK and KDE/Qt becoming more cooperative. But then... there are certainly apps within the Windows world that behave their own way too (ironically enough - GTK-based Windows apps included).
And interestingly enough, due to it's incredible flexibility in skinnability there are now GTK+ themes available that use Qt to render widgets (thus automatically inheriting the Qt theme), or use windows native rendering if you are on windows (thus inheriting the windows theme).
All quite impressive really.
Jedidiah.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they completely destroyed all the sets etc. when they cancelled the series - so are they now going to rebuild it all to make this miniseries? Now there's a lack of forward planning if ever I heard one.
Jedidiah.
Has anyone here who's posting actually downloaded it and tried it yet?
Come on now, most slashdotters don't even manage to read the article, let alone read, download, extract, compile and execute the article. I think you're pissing into the wind with this one.
Jedidiah.
If it's no big deal, then why is it nearly impossible for me to get a standard way for installing softwre on linux? I understand that most distros come with a packaging manager, but if I want to write a program, allow downloads from my site, then (to the best of my knowledge) there's no way for it to easily be installed and have menu shortcuts etc set up....
Follow this and your menu entries will show up for KDE and GNOME. Users of other DEs normally have enough nouse to add menu entries themselves (or their DEs can load GNOME/KDE menus).
As for installers, at wort you can just statically compile into an rpm - no dependency issues then. As long as you provide a source tar ball as well then most everyone will be happy (and if your program is any good, it'll get included in the package repositories of the various distributions).
If that doesn't appeal, you could always support autopackage.
Jedidiah.
On the other hand, how about opening an Excel (or compatible) spreadsheet, extracting all of the URLS from each row where the date in the third column is less than one week old, getting the named graphics from those URLs, processing those graphics in Photoshop (or Gimp, if you like), inserting the graphics at the proper place in a PDF document, and uploading the PDF document to the proper place on a web server? Care to script that one for me?
I'm pretty sure almost all of that can be done in perl without too much hassle. I think python could handle it quite well as well for that matter. Of course, it probably wouldn't be possible to do and Excel spreadsheet, but that's just because the format is locked up. Gnumeric, OpenOffice, of csv files would be fine.
I'm also a little uncertain as to what sort of modules or tools there are for playing with PDFs, having not done it much myself (I generate all my PDFs via pdfLaTeX), but I do recall seeing various libraies that handle such things.
In summary - no, I don't thin this would really pose much of a problem. Care to try again?
Jedidiah.
You could always try this one. It is still in beta really, but works for most QT themes very well. Makes mixing apps between desktops a lot easier too.
Jedidiah.
In sharp contrast, OS X's Interface Builder and Microsoft's Visual Studio affords the developer time and energy to think about the design of the program.
And what of Glade or QTdesigner? There's plenty of systems to provide the sort of functionality for FOSS. In the end the likes of Emacs and vi are still popular because they are unparalleled at simply editing the raw code. Of course that doesn't mean that UIs aren't built or designed with the tools above (which, it is worth noting, can stand alone, as well as being integrated into an IDE).
Jedidiah.
Longhorn is going to be entirely .NET and include things like Avalon, Indigo, WinFS, and so on. I guess what I'm saying is Microsoft is actually pushing to do a revolutionary release--this will be the same kind of change going from Windows 3.1 to 95 was.
Meanwhile there are various Linux/UNIX projects such as Storage, ReiserFS, Cairo, and Keith Packard's Xserver. It will be interesting to see which set of projects finishes first.
Jedidiah.
I was assuming some desktop boxes, and a few cluless users who need to introduced to a potentially slightly different desktop ("You need to click on the green lizard instead of the red hat now...").
/etc can be a little different between distributions, and potentially there are some different admin tools to get to know.
Alos, there is potentially a little readjustment for admins. init script layout and other quirks in
None of it is serious retraining, but it might be worth a day course or so to introduce people to whatever minor changes are relevant, and save yourself some hassle later on.
Jedidiah.
The differences between RH9 and SuSE 9 are significant, mostly in installation and maintenance area. The up2date is completely different, and you can run your own. Printers are done differently somewhat. Even /etc/rc.d tree is different. In a large company, such as with 100 boxes, this may be a problem - but not an insurmountable one.
:-)
Thanks, that's the sort of summary I was looking for, and was pretty much my understanding. Yes, there are some significant differences, but nothing too challenging. Unless you have a huge number of admin scripts that use a lot of harcoded paths, mostly it would seem to be a matter of learning how the new distro does things, and setting everything up according to their style - and that isn't too big a leap if your familiar wnough with UNIX.
I guess this just means: Don't write too many scripts that have hardcoded expectations of where to find things - and that's not especially difficult.
The pain of migration from Win2k to WinXP... nobody in his right mind would do that. Win2k is the best OS that MS ever came up with.
Sorry, I haven't used MS since Win2k first came out, so I was randomly guessing at versions
Jedidiah.
They claim the cost of switching ditributions is very high, potentially involving rewriting a lot of code that you had written that may have taken advantage of features of the particular distribution.
That one strikes me as a little odd - I've been pretty distribution agnostic myself, and never really had any problems moving from one to another. At worst you can just install a few extra packages to cover some version differences. Then again, I'm a single user - I'm not trying to maintain an enterprise wide system, nor do I really have any experience with such things.
So, my question is, how big are the costs of an enterprise changing distributions? I can certainly understand some significant cost (potential retraining, reorgansing the system a little to work with any new structures) but I can't quite imagine it being that high. If I had to guess, I would imagine it not being overly different from say, upgrading from Windows2k to WindowsXP or some such.
Can someone with some experience in this provide some insight?
Jedidiah.
People give up on linux because they don't know how to install apps and games. They download stuff then say, "WTF is this shit? How do I use this?" Then, after realizing 90% of linux apps are like this just give up on linux.
Even when people can learn to install stuff they often don't know where the hell to install it to (people are used to not having to organize programs themselves, just throw em wherever it wants to go).
(DISCLAIMER: I'm more familiar with rpm, so I'm just going to say rpm here. I'm almost certain you could put ".deb" in it's place and everything would remain true.)
This mostly exists. Currently double clicking on an rpm file in either Nautilus or Konqueror will ask you for the root password. Presuming that is given correctly it then happily installs the package for you. No questions of where to put it, no install procedure, just double click, enter the password, and you're done.
Of course, the catch with this is dependencies. OSS has very good code reuse so there are often a lot of dependencies on various libraries. However, with apt and yum becoming standard in distributions these days, my understanding that using these tools to do dependency resolution and downloading and installing of any extra packages is becoming standard - that is, in the next round of distribution releases, you can mostly expect that double click on an rpm to automatically resolve any outstanding dependencies and download and install any extra required packages for you.
Finally, there is autopackage, which is still getting going, but promises to be a better system for handling installs and dependency resolution in a much more vendor agnostic way (currently you can run into problems installing third party pckages because your vendor doesn't support the required dependencies in their repository)
Jedidiah.
If you supply a good or service that can't be supplied in India, you will not find your job offshored. If someone in India will do your job for half the salary, but it takes them 3 times as long, you will not be offshored.
Are you that frightened to actually compete in a global market? Do you believe you skills are that worthless? Want to be able to work for lower wages to compete on the same skill base? Move to a country with a lower cost of living. Don't want to move to such a country? Then don't complain - you can't have your cushy US lifestyle with associated high cost of living and high paying jobs... well, not without quietly fucking over the people of all those other countries with whom you have ridiculous protectionist trade policy.
Jedidiah.