I'm not surprised to hear this. What's interesting is redhat's statement, "too tough". What? Okay, so you do a RHEL default install, the POC installs with GUI enabled. Getting X up can be a sobering experience. But Redhat seems to do that fine! So what else can there be? Ahh, maybe it's that old rhetoric redhat used when SuSE beat them to the market with Xen. Wasn't it something like "Xen isn't ready"? Redhat wants to stay with server software, no desktops? Personally, I think their "Server/Enterprise" software is crap. The damned thing defaults to GUI mode. I've done enough remote Linux admin to know you DO NOT want to try and tunnel X over an ssh session, runs like shit. Okay, so just turn off X, set runlevel to 3. Now try and run some of their disparate system-config-splat tools, some will work, some will not, without X running. What gives? So now, Lenovo is making laptops available with SuSE Enterprise 10 (http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/systemconfig.runtime.workflow:LoadRuntimeTree?sb=:00000025:00001398:&smid=F2F5363C71FA4D61B176AD5FB80FA5D8) Gosh, I wonder what secret sauce Lenovo has that Redhat hasn't figured out yet? I've been installing Linux on laptops and desktops since the early 1990's, (ya, around kernel version 0.7) even with PCMCIA support, and I can tell you, the process can be a bitch. But everyone's doing it. So why does redhat still insist "too tough". Looks to me like Redhat's falling into the Redmond hole. Don't waste your time with RedHat, use a release that's better suited for server systems, like Debian, or SuSE. At least SuSE will give you a consistent admin interface, capable of running GUI or TEXT modes! And if you want a desktop/laptop, SuSE is awesome (I've been running it on a variety of hardware for the past 8 years).
I've spent 13 years teaching SVR4 Unix at a computer company, and the last 13 years managing, programing, tuning and troubleshooting Unix & Linux. Java coders are a dime-a-dozen, and easily off-shored. They may not write stellar, super-duper fast & secure code, but most management wouldn't know good code if they saw it. System Administration is something that's not easily off-shored, unless the data-center is off-shore as well, or you've got some exceptional data-center rats capable of following instructions, something like being able to vi a file without clobbering it. For the past twenty years, I've seen an alarming increase of bad code. I've seen developers trying to write a socket program, and not use the standard libraries to translate host & network byte ordering (htons, etc), then bitch that when they compile their code developed on an AIX PPC system onto an Intel their ports are all bass-ackwards. And these guys claim to be "network programming pro's". I see developers write perl scripts that read STDIN from the output of a command (via a pipe), and fail to check for EOF, or keep looping until they see a string that matches, not checking for error returns; only to proceed to consume system memory because the stupid program loops, and spawns 70000 copies of itself, ultimately taking down the whole server. Learning to program in C or Java isn't enough. You MUST understand the environment in which your code will run. How else do you plan on taking the best advantage of the underlying hardware? Ya, sure, Unix is supposed to be "hardware agnostic", you are supposed to be able to run your code the same regardless of the machine. Bullshit! Sure, a stupid little hello-world program will do fine, but when you've got an application that's spawning 32 children, each with an oracle connection and a few shared memory segments, and add it signal handling along with polled-selects, well, there is a difference between Unix distributions at that layer. The more you understand about the administration of a system, and HOW that system works, the better equipped you are to write applications for that platform. You'll be aware of the best way to structure your code, how the system will allocate memory for your program, etc., and this will put you in good understanding of how to optimize that code. Learn all you can about system administration. Not the basic useradd crap. Tear into the man pages for the platform, review every single manpage in section 2, 3, 5 & 8 (I'll presume you're already familiar with the section 1 commands). Tear into networking. Learn how to write a socket program, client & listener, then brach out & use polled selects and non-blocking IO (without dropping the system to it's knees). Try out the various system configurations for setting up things like drbd, heartbeat, software raid, xinetd, syslog-ng, etc. If you have an intimate understanding of the OS, and it's administration, that will make you a GOOD programmer, and this gives you a few options other than just being a programmer, you could be an admin, a consultant, a network engr., a security guru, etc. I think it's pretty lame the schools jamming all this Java crap at the students and shorting them on the theory of operating systems design. Remember Xinu? (great book!) I believe that you should be very good with C and pointers. How else do you plan on writing device drivers or system level services? And if you're looking for the most diverse and flexible environment to do all this on, choose Debian. If you're looking for ease of administration choose SuSE.
As education departments tend to operate on a shoe-string budget, many will gladly accept discounted commercial products from vendors. The vendors do this, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a marketing ploy to reel-in future customers. Why do you think Apple gave away all those computers to the grade schools? Why does Sun deeply discount their computers to colleges? My 16 year old daughter was bashing me over not having a windows system at home with a graphics package. I handed her a laptop with SuSE and Gimp installed. Within a couple of days she was creating wonderful drawings. Sure, it took her some time to learn. But now she loves it! All of the vendors offer professional training on their products. Lets keep public education in the open source category, and when the kiddies grow up & jump into the workplace, then their company can send them to the product specific courses.
There are quite a few distributions available, montavista, etc. Even gumstix has their own build process; a very nice system for rebuilding the embedded linux in the gumstix flash. I'm very fond of "diet-pc"; it was designed for embedded applications; based on busybox, VERY easy to customize, and the author even includes example images for X-terminal clients, file servers, music players, etc. Diet-pc would be my first choice, followed with Debian. I wouldn't even consider using redhat.
And, while we're at it; lets redo the entire alphabet, but instead use symbols now. So now when I say the alphabet, I can say... " and... is the letter formerly known as A " (I'll bet Prince is big on this!) *LOL*
Hey Team,
IBM has put a new wrapper on ABC gum. All of the listed products, from DB2 to websphere to homepage builder, have been out for some time. This is just marketing babble, attempting to lure in Linux admin's to run IBM's slopware.
If you're not aware, the IBM Homepage builder is nothing more than a Windows app, that IBM tells you to install wine to use....I consider that a POOR excuse in claiming this is a Small Business Suite for Linux.
In the websphincter area, IBM provides you a script to startup websphere app-server, but no script to shut it down. In the past, IBM documented to terminate websphere, to kill all java processes. Now, in WAS3.5, they have reversed step, and say that it's unwise to use kill to terminate the Java processes, and instead to startup the GUI adminclient program and click on the servers then hit the stop button...TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE in a lights-out operation! We've attempted to work-around the problem, employing the use of their new TCL interface, wscp.sh. WSCP is a java program, that provides a TCL (Tools Command Language), interface. What I don't understand is why in the world would someone rewrite an interpreter (tcl), into another interpreter language (java). Needless to say, this thing runs TERRIBLY SLOW! But alas, having seen how much IBM has done with their other products, it's no wonder they wrote an interpreter to emulate another interpreter. As for the shutdown issue, we ended up using wscp to issue a "Node stop" TCL command, to shutdown the node(s). The GOTCHA is that when the nodes shutdown, their state is saved so that at the next startup time (startupServer.sh), the AdminServer see's the previous state of the app-servers as down, and leaves them that way! Soo, NOW you have to wait for the stupid "WebSphere Administration server is open for e-business" message in the tracefile, BEFORE you can issue an "ApplicationServer start" command via the wscp (tcl) interface....blah...blah...blah.
If you ask me, IBM is looking for the talents of the Linux community to show those bone-heads the proper way to build applications! *LOL*
Team,
I had an opportunity to spend 3 years with IBM. In that time I attended courses on AIX internals, and had my hands on some fairly hot hardware, the SP2.
One thing that IBM could bring to the table that would be fairly significant, is their modifications to the Unix filesystem; namely their JFS filesystem support and their Virtual Disk management suite. Don't get me wrong, I've seen better file system code produced by the now defunct company Data General (those boys KNEW how to build filesystems!), but IBM has built a fairly nice mechanism for logical disk management, being able to expand filesystems, etc. They've integrated that support into their systems-administration interface (smit/smitty), and it's pretty darned easy to grow a file system on-the-fly without requiring a umount. Of course you can't shrink filesystems like you could with DGUX, but nonetheless, its a start.
If you're not aware of it, IBM has been for years, using the Open Source community software. They used a modified version of Tcl/Tk in their SP2 maintenance software, and they're using a tcl interpreter (God forbid, it was re-written as a java-class jar file) bundled with their WebSphere Application Server 3.5. They're also bundling the Apache Web Server with their WebSphere distribution, as well as InstantDB.
I'd like to see IBM put up their virtual filesystem code, along with their SMIT utilities, and really start supporting the Linux community with their cash-cow products. I'm refering to their storage management software, ADSM. Yes, there is a Linux client port available, and I used it while I worked there. But their is no support for running an ADSM server on Linux. I'm not real fond of their ODM (for you IBM'rs out there...it really stands for Odious Data Mangler), but it may provide the open-source community to some insight on how AIX works. The real point here...I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Unfortunately IBM, has in the past, made their code available, but without sources. Take for example their modifications to the Apache Web Server. They added a caching module, along with an SSL module...but no source.
IBM is in business to make money...of course aren't we all? But I would be cautious about how much of my work I'd be willing to give IBM for them profit on.
One final point. When was the last time you saw AIX running on an Intel platform? IBM was involved with project Montery, but who knows what state that is in with the downfall of SCO. I think that IBM is interested in Linux as an Intel platform solution that they can market as "total-solutions". Today, you don't see AIX running on Intel, like you do with Sun.
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I'm not surprised to hear this. What's interesting is redhat's statement, "too tough". What? Okay, so you do a RHEL default install, the POC installs with GUI enabled. Getting X up can be a sobering experience. But Redhat seems to do that fine! So what else can there be? Ahh, maybe it's that old rhetoric redhat used when SuSE beat them to the market with Xen. Wasn't it something like "Xen isn't ready"? Redhat wants to stay with server software, no desktops? Personally, I think their "Server/Enterprise" software is crap. The damned thing defaults to GUI mode. I've done enough remote Linux admin to know you DO NOT want to try and tunnel X over an ssh session, runs like shit. Okay, so just turn off X, set runlevel to 3. Now try and run some of their disparate system-config-splat tools, some will work, some will not, without X running. What gives?
So now, Lenovo is making laptops available with SuSE Enterprise 10 (http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/systemconfig.runtime.workflow:LoadRuntimeTree?sb=:00000025:00001398:&smid=F2F5363C71FA4D61B176AD5FB80FA5D8)
Gosh, I wonder what secret sauce Lenovo has that Redhat hasn't figured out yet?
I've been installing Linux on laptops and desktops since the early 1990's, (ya, around kernel version 0.7) even with PCMCIA support, and I can tell you, the process can be a bitch. But everyone's doing it. So why does redhat still insist "too tough". Looks to me like Redhat's falling into the Redmond hole. Don't waste your time with RedHat, use a release that's better suited for server systems, like Debian, or SuSE. At least SuSE will give you a consistent admin interface, capable of running GUI or TEXT modes! And if you want a desktop/laptop, SuSE is awesome (I've been running it on a variety of hardware for the past 8 years).
I've spent 13 years teaching SVR4 Unix at a computer company, and the last 13 years managing, programing, tuning and troubleshooting Unix & Linux. Java coders are a dime-a-dozen, and easily off-shored. They may not write stellar, super-duper fast & secure code, but most management wouldn't know good code if they saw it. System Administration is something that's not easily off-shored, unless the data-center is off-shore as well, or you've got some exceptional data-center rats capable of following instructions, something like being able to vi a file without clobbering it. For the past twenty years, I've seen an alarming increase of bad code. I've seen developers trying to write a socket program, and not use the standard libraries to translate host & network byte ordering (htons, etc), then bitch that when they compile their code developed on an AIX PPC system onto an Intel their ports are all bass-ackwards. And these guys claim to be "network programming pro's". I see developers write perl scripts that read STDIN from the output of a command (via a pipe), and fail to check for EOF, or keep looping until they see a string that matches, not checking for error returns; only to proceed to consume system memory because the stupid program loops, and spawns 70000 copies of itself, ultimately taking down the whole server.
Learning to program in C or Java isn't enough. You MUST understand the environment in which your code will run. How else do you plan on taking the best advantage of the underlying hardware? Ya, sure, Unix is supposed to be "hardware agnostic", you are supposed to be able to run your code the same regardless of the machine. Bullshit! Sure, a stupid little hello-world program will do fine, but when you've got an application that's spawning 32 children, each with an oracle connection and a few shared memory segments, and add it signal handling along with polled-selects, well, there is a difference between Unix distributions at that layer. The more you understand about the administration of a system, and HOW that system works, the better equipped you are to write applications for that platform. You'll be aware of the best way to structure your code, how the system will allocate memory for your program, etc., and this will put you in good understanding of how to optimize that code.
Learn all you can about system administration. Not the basic useradd crap. Tear into the man pages for the platform, review every single manpage in section 2, 3, 5 & 8 (I'll presume you're already familiar with the section 1 commands). Tear into networking. Learn how to write a socket program, client & listener, then brach out & use polled selects and non-blocking IO (without dropping the system to it's knees). Try out the various system configurations for setting up things like drbd, heartbeat, software raid, xinetd, syslog-ng, etc. If you have an intimate understanding of the OS, and it's administration, that will make you a GOOD programmer, and this gives you a few options other than just being a programmer, you could be an admin, a consultant, a network engr., a security guru, etc.
I think it's pretty lame the schools jamming all this Java crap at the students and shorting them on the theory of operating systems design. Remember Xinu? (great book!) I believe that you should be very good with C and pointers. How else do you plan on writing device drivers or system level services? And if you're looking for the most diverse and flexible environment to do all this on, choose Debian. If you're looking for ease of administration choose SuSE.
As education departments tend to operate on a shoe-string budget, many will gladly accept discounted commercial products from vendors. The vendors do this, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a marketing ploy to reel-in future customers. Why do you think Apple gave away all those computers to the grade schools? Why does Sun deeply discount their computers to colleges? My 16 year old daughter was bashing me over not having a windows system at home with a graphics package. I handed her a laptop with SuSE and Gimp installed. Within a couple of days she was creating wonderful drawings. Sure, it took her some time to learn. But now she loves it! All of the vendors offer professional training on their products. Lets keep public education in the open source category, and when the kiddies grow up & jump into the workplace, then their company can send them to the product specific courses.
There are quite a few distributions available, montavista, etc.
Even gumstix has their own build process; a very nice system for rebuilding the embedded linux in the gumstix flash.
I'm very fond of "diet-pc"; it was designed for embedded applications; based on busybox, VERY easy to customize, and the author even includes example images for X-terminal clients, file servers, music players, etc.
Diet-pc would be my first choice, followed with Debian. I wouldn't even consider using redhat.
And, while we're at it; lets redo the entire alphabet, but instead use symbols now. ... ... is the letter formerly known as A " (I'll bet Prince is big on this!) *LOL*
So now when I say the alphabet, I can say
" and
Geeze, this sounds like Ghostbusters...???
Dr. Peter Venkman: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. Remember that?
Dr. Egon Spengler: That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.
Hey Team, IBM has put a new wrapper on ABC gum. All of the listed products, from DB2 to websphere to homepage builder, have been out for some time. This is just marketing babble, attempting to lure in Linux admin's to run IBM's slopware. If you're not aware, the IBM Homepage builder is nothing more than a Windows app, that IBM tells you to install wine to use....I consider that a POOR excuse in claiming this is a Small Business Suite for Linux. In the websphincter area, IBM provides you a script to startup websphere app-server, but no script to shut it down. In the past, IBM documented to terminate websphere, to kill all java processes. Now, in WAS3.5, they have reversed step, and say that it's unwise to use kill to terminate the Java processes, and instead to startup the GUI adminclient program and click on the servers then hit the stop button...TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE in a lights-out operation! We've attempted to work-around the problem, employing the use of their new TCL interface, wscp.sh. WSCP is a java program, that provides a TCL (Tools Command Language), interface. What I don't understand is why in the world would someone rewrite an interpreter (tcl), into another interpreter language (java). Needless to say, this thing runs TERRIBLY SLOW! But alas, having seen how much IBM has done with their other products, it's no wonder they wrote an interpreter to emulate another interpreter. As for the shutdown issue, we ended up using wscp to issue a "Node stop" TCL command, to shutdown the node(s). The GOTCHA is that when the nodes shutdown, their state is saved so that at the next startup time (startupServer.sh), the AdminServer see's the previous state of the app-servers as down, and leaves them that way! Soo, NOW you have to wait for the stupid "WebSphere Administration server is open for e-business" message in the tracefile, BEFORE you can issue an "ApplicationServer start" command via the wscp (tcl) interface....blah...blah...blah. If you ask me, IBM is looking for the talents of the Linux community to show those bone-heads the proper way to build applications! *LOL*
Team, I had an opportunity to spend 3 years with IBM. In that time I attended courses on AIX internals, and had my hands on some fairly hot hardware, the SP2. One thing that IBM could bring to the table that would be fairly significant, is their modifications to the Unix filesystem; namely their JFS filesystem support and their Virtual Disk management suite. Don't get me wrong, I've seen better file system code produced by the now defunct company Data General (those boys KNEW how to build filesystems!), but IBM has built a fairly nice mechanism for logical disk management, being able to expand filesystems, etc. They've integrated that support into their systems-administration interface (smit/smitty), and it's pretty darned easy to grow a file system on-the-fly without requiring a umount. Of course you can't shrink filesystems like you could with DGUX, but nonetheless, its a start. If you're not aware of it, IBM has been for years, using the Open Source community software. They used a modified version of Tcl/Tk in their SP2 maintenance software, and they're using a tcl interpreter (God forbid, it was re-written as a java-class jar file) bundled with their WebSphere Application Server 3.5. They're also bundling the Apache Web Server with their WebSphere distribution, as well as InstantDB. I'd like to see IBM put up their virtual filesystem code, along with their SMIT utilities, and really start supporting the Linux community with their cash-cow products. I'm refering to their storage management software, ADSM. Yes, there is a Linux client port available, and I used it while I worked there. But their is no support for running an ADSM server on Linux. I'm not real fond of their ODM (for you IBM'rs out there...it really stands for Odious Data Mangler), but it may provide the open-source community to some insight on how AIX works. The real point here...I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Unfortunately IBM, has in the past, made their code available, but without sources. Take for example their modifications to the Apache Web Server. They added a caching module, along with an SSL module...but no source. IBM is in business to make money...of course aren't we all? But I would be cautious about how much of my work I'd be willing to give IBM for them profit on. One final point. When was the last time you saw AIX running on an Intel platform? IBM was involved with project Montery, but who knows what state that is in with the downfall of SCO. I think that IBM is interested in Linux as an Intel platform solution that they can market as "total-solutions". Today, you don't see AIX running on Intel, like you do with Sun.