First of all Linux is merely the kernel; it's not even glibc, nor any other GNU tools, or third party packages.
Once upon a time, that was true - when you said 'Linux' it meant a kernel. These days, not so much.
Technically, the Linux Standards Base includes kernel, c libaries, and various GNU tools (and their versions and interfaces).
These days, kernel developers call themselves kernel developers. When people talk about Linux, they mean an OS. When people talk about getting a new version of Linux, they mean a new OS. Compare kernel.org with Linux.org.
It'd be more necessary for a Unix company to try and get LSB certification than for a Linux company to get Unix certification.
AIX, Solaris, Longhorn etc all claim the ability to run Linux binaries as a feature. The last time Linux did that, it was using IBCS - which nobody's cared about for a long time.
Re:Certifications that value and expect thinking.
on
Linux Jobs on the Rise
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· Score: 1
Meet some RHCEs sometime. Find out about the exam. Sure, be skeptical. But if you look into it enough, you'll probably like RHCE for the same reasons you like CCIE - they're quite simular, and the only two certs I respect (I've sat and taught a few) for much the same reasons.
Re:Certifications that value and expect thinking.
on
Linux Jobs on the Rise
·
· Score: 1
I find it sad that a certification has more emphasis on fixing things rather than making things that don't break (as often).
Then you weren't paying attention to the second paragraph. 2 1/2 hours of troubleshooting . maintenance, 3 hours of installation. This includes making sure things are set up in a secure fashion (although 'properly' is often).
As I also said above, the instructions for install and configuring only specify the end objectives - not how to install them.
But don't matter, it sounds like you've already made up your mind, and decided not to lissten to anyone else.
When Linux finally reaches the level where it gets used by managers that don't value the thinking process...then we'll see certification in more demand.
You walk in to work. Your machine has been trashed in eight different ways. Fix them. You walk in to work. Your machine is trashed again, it won't even boot now. You have 2 1/2 hours.
Your boss asks you to install and configure a box with some combo of RAID/LVM, network auth, a couple of Apache virtual hosts, some samba shares, FTP, iptables, etc. You have 3 hours.
Fix it. Don't do it any specific way - that's your own personal preference, use whatever tools you want. Just fix it.
If you can, you've just successfully completed the RHCE exam.
Someone asks if you know that 'tac' is 'cat' backwards. And various other questions. Welcome to LPI.
Again, the article does mention compositing, and does mention that its the thing everyone's hyping on about. Again, 95% of the comments here, to which I'm responding, are hyping up about compositing.
Which may not yet be finished on Linux but is, by everyone's measurements, further developed than Longhorn at the present point in time.
Just because you're on the internet doesn't mean you need to act like a fuckwit. If you voiced a similar reply to someone in real life, they'd probably slap you.
Perhaps the authors, like the Goneme guys, simply likes Gnome more? They prefer it to KDE, and with a few tweaks to let people customize it, it would be perfect.
I'm looking forward to some useful stuff from the Goneme guys. Choice Is Good. Contrary to what a lot of folk say, you can even have it without drowning people in options.
The OS-level ability to use the 3D acceleration features of the card by more than one application at a time may prove to be as important to future computing as the ability to create 2D windows at the OS level. I think we should all unite in an effort toward a new advanced graphics architecture.
Or like MacOS X. Except Apple are already finished.
Why is this such a big deal? There's already hardware accelerated compositing in beta xorg releases. The Debrix project even creates a modular X server with all the Neat Shit which you can use on top of your existing xorg/xfree drivers.
Visit http://planet.freedesktop.org/ sometime.
The next major release of Xorg will include off screen compositing. If you use Fedora, FC3 will likely include this.
Most of my geek buddies ended up working in Linux related areas too...
* Leigh: Sysadmin / Developer at IT Services company. Also does the Linux column in PCAuthority now.
* Matt: Sysadmin / Developer. Works for hosting company.
* Daniel: Young guy, still finishing Uni. Got involved in Freedestkop.org, works as a contractor on Xorg stuff for HP last time I checked, but I hear rumors he's got a new job. Tells me all the cool shit that's happening with X.
* David: Works for Transgaming coding Winex. Got to live in Canada for a couple of years to do it. Makes Apple's life hard helping people play their itunes music on Linux boxes. Wrote an OSS Warcraft 3 in his spare time once.
1998 - Finished high school. Was career-minded kinda guy. Decided I'd rather get an exciting job than go to University (I'd done some tertiary stuff in year 12, but three years of Uni just wasn't my thing).
1999 - I'd already had a lot of experience playing with Windows NT out of interest, so I got an MCSE to try and prove my skills to potential employers. Volunteered to assist my local 1300-member LUG at an IT show. Met my future boss, Con Zymaris from Cybersource *. Ended up being the 'Windows guy' at a Linux / Unix / BSD shop. Spent most of my time learning Linux.
1999 - Began career as Linux journo - was initially asked to do Linux software for APC magazine's CD ROM, but I went beyong the brief and wrote a 2 page article on Linux gaming. They liked it and put it in the mag. I then worked on Linux workshop, a couple of Linux features, wrote a little under half of the Linux Pocketbook Third Edition, more than half of the Advanced Linux Pocketbook, became PC Authority magazine's Linux columnist, and then was poached back to APC briefly before the editor that got me there left and mag and me went in different directions. **
During this time, I still got half my income from Linux consulting for Cybersource.
2002 - Wrote and began teaching a Linux training course for Advanced Training, Melbourne. Again, still worked consulting for Cyber.
2003 - Got poached by Red Hat Asia Pacific. Teach RHCE courses, and the nifty new RHCA type courses (which cover clustering, packaging, cross platform authentication, etc).
Spending the weekend learning about Kerberos, LDAP and Active Directory to teach the 423 course.
* Yes, the current Cyber web site looks terrible in Moz. It used to work ok in every browser - then Moz changed its rendering technique. Since I was respomsible for the original non-standard code, there's a fully XHTML version I templated just before I left here. Hopefully Cyber wil start using that one soon.
** I've been told that APC's readers want to do 'the hard stuff'. I disagree - people want to do interesting, useful cool things, regardless of whether they're hard or not. These guys are mbasically Windows power users, who want the basic stuff (installing, setting up a web server) to be easy, so they can focus on doing the cool stuff - anything that's cool or easier / cheaper / better than Windows. I reckon showing people how to do practical stuff with cool apps like QEmu, MythTV, Liferea, etc. is more interesting than yet another guide to installing Apache (including a page of how to compile it, for no other reason than Compiling Makes You Leet).
If I was gonna wrote about Apache, I'd write about creating a blog or CMS using Movabletype, or show people how to get Apache serving ASP 1.1 with mod_mono.
I had a great time at APC, and met some cool people, including Ashton Mills (who's now the editor of Atomic) and David Flynn (an editor who's simply damn good at his job). But the mag's editors don't want what I have to offer anymore, and I don't want to write what they offer me. Pity.
I'm a terrible programmer. I can kinda read other people's perl and C sharp, but in most cases, I can't really be bothered.
Still, I find with Linux and OSS I don't run into the same brick-wall when troubleshooting that I do Windows. Tools like strace or netdump or ethereal ornc are readily available, and help me see exactly what my program's doing at a given point in time - even helping me find bugs.
99% of the time when an app segfaults, it's because there's a file missing. A good example of this is a bug I found in a closed source app - Sophos Anti Virus - using Open Source tools like strace. The app doesn't know about Great British English - if you install the English version, it requires American English is installed.
To do the the same thing on a Windows box, I'd probably pay Systernals a lot of money for a Windows strace equivalent. But the thing is, I wouldn't - cause I couldn't be sure that tool would fix the problem. Maybe I need another app to help me fix it and a Windows strace would be a waste of money? Maybe there's another, cheaper way for me to fix something? I'd be hesitant to pay for a tool that wouldn't help me fix the prob. And expensing it would be a hassle.
Linux provides me with a shitload of the troubleshooting tools I need to do my job out of the box, and it does that cause they're OSS.
Version numbers may not matter to developers, but I think this is an example of a usability problem. The old version naming was good and well understood.
I disagree - I think the new system is better aimed at users than the old. Previously, end-users used distro kernels 2.x.y. Now they still do, without kernel.org saying that the latest evenly numbered kernel release is stable. With 2.4, it wasn't (think VM changes). With 2.6, it wasn't either.
What about people, like myself, who like to use the vanilla releases from kernel.org?
I suggest changing your preferences. If you're running a biggie distro (like most people do, although as you've said you are not) then your kernel is supported. If you're not, then distro kernels have better testing than vanilla kernels anyway. The fact there's tens of thousands of people using distro kernel 2.x.y means that kernels gonna be damn well tested.
And you average computer geek and/or smalltime distro can't backport security fixes and has to go through a great deal of hassle to see which version to use.
Your average computer geek uses a mainsteam distro and the kernel it supports, which does this for him (if he needs additional driver modules, he can download packages which provide those modules).
Smalltime distros are rare these days, but most just piggyback off Red Hat or Debian (who'll also take care of that).
So, the 2.4 series has been about taking a lot of core features, freezing them, and then spending the resto of the time correcting bugs as they come along.
What's happening in 2.6 now, and since it's release, is an average of 10 -megabytes- of patch for each 2.6 kernel release. That's a lot of development. Greg has just proposed yanking all of devfs in 2.6. This isn't a minor change.
I think it depends where you got your 2.4 from.
Very few major distros (Debian, and that's about it) use vanilla 2.4.
Red Hat, for example, had around 300 seperate patches for 2.4. For 2.6, they have around 30. I imaginee Suse and Mandrake would have similar figures.
Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the evaluation?
Yes. Office 2003 Pro's XML export is exactly that - an export. According to Microsoft, certain information in.doc and.xls files can't be represented in the XML format and will be lost when exporting.
OpenOffice uses XML as its native format, and does not suffer data loss when using XML. If someone hands you an existing.doc or.xls, you could better preserve its content by using Openoffice than MS Office.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all Linux is merely the kernel; it's not even glibc, nor any other GNU tools, or third party packages.
Once upon a time, that was true - when you said 'Linux' it meant a kernel. These days, not so much.
Technically, the Linux Standards Base includes kernel, c libaries, and various GNU tools (and their versions and interfaces).
These days, kernel developers call themselves kernel developers. When people talk about Linux, they mean an OS. When people talk about getting a new version of Linux, they mean a new OS. Compare kernel.org with Linux.org.
Indeed.
It'd be more necessary for a Unix company to try and get LSB certification than for a Linux company to get Unix certification.
AIX, Solaris, Longhorn etc all claim the ability to run Linux binaries as a feature. The last time Linux did that, it was using IBCS - which nobody's cared about for a long time.
Meet some RHCEs sometime. Find out about the exam. Sure, be skeptical. But if you look into it enough, you'll probably like RHCE for the same reasons you like CCIE - they're quite simular, and the only two certs I respect (I've sat and taught a few) for much the same reasons.
I find it sad that a certification has more emphasis on fixing things rather than making things that don't break (as often).
Then you weren't paying attention to the second paragraph. 2 1/2 hours of troubleshooting . maintenance, 3 hours of installation. This includes making sure things are set up in a secure fashion (although 'properly' is often).
As I also said above, the instructions for install and configuring only specify the end objectives - not how to install them.
But don't matter, it sounds like you've already made up your mind, and decided not to lissten to anyone else.
Good luck with that.
Why does CCIE, the
Which uses MP3 natively, has an organic led video screen, and can play video. Currently on sale in Japan, UK next year. Dunno about Aus or the USA.
GIYF.
When Linux finally reaches the level where it gets used by managers that don't value the thinking process...then we'll see certification in more demand.
You walk in to work. Your machine has been trashed in eight different ways. Fix them.
You walk in to work. Your machine is trashed again, it won't even boot now.
You have 2 1/2 hours.
Your boss asks you to install and configure a box with some combo of RAID/LVM, network auth, a couple of Apache virtual hosts, some samba shares, FTP, iptables, etc. You have 3 hours.
Fix it. Don't do it any specific way - that's your own personal preference, use whatever tools you want. Just fix it.
If you can, you've just successfully completed the RHCE exam.
Someone asks if you know that 'tac' is 'cat' backwards. And various other questions. Welcome to LPI.
Again, the article does mention compositing, and does mention that its the thing everyone's hyping on about. Again, 95% of the comments here, to which I'm responding, are hyping up about compositing.
Which may not yet be finished on Linux but is, by everyone's measurements, further developed than Longhorn at the present point in time.
Just because you're on the internet doesn't mean you need to act like a fuckwit. If you voiced a similar reply to someone in real life, they'd probably slap you.
Perhaps the authors, like the Goneme guys, simply likes Gnome more? They prefer it to KDE, and with a few tweaks to let people customize it, it would be perfect.
I'm looking forward to some useful stuff from the Goneme guys. Choice Is Good. Contrary to what a lot of folk say, you can even have it without drowning people in options.
This is basically a screenshot of a toolbar at the top of the browser..
Sure, if by 'basically' you mean 'not'.
It's not an image, it's chrome, as a parent poster notes, and will show a toolbar using your current theme that tellss lies in place of the real one.
I agree with the other poster who said websites shouldn't be able to disable toolbars.
The OS-level ability to use the 3D acceleration features of the card by more than one application at a time may prove to be as important to future computing as the ability to create 2D windows at the OS level. I think we should all unite in an effort toward a new advanced graphics architecture.
Yes.
Anyone find some sample compositing screenshots? I've lost the URL for the KDE ones, and I hear there was some cooler stuff shown by Keith recently...
I read the article. And many other like it. I also read the comments. And ran Longhorn 4072 for a while.
Everyone's getting excited about the compositing. Which will not be in production for ages, and doesn't do anything we've not seen before.
Or like MacOS X. Except Apple are already finished.
Why is this such a big deal? There's already hardware accelerated compositing in beta xorg releases. The Debrix project even creates a modular X server with all the Neat Shit which you can use on top of your existing xorg/xfree drivers.
Visit http://planet.freedesktop.org/ sometime.
The next major release of Xorg will include off screen compositing. If you use Fedora, FC3 will likely include this.
Most of my geek buddies ended up working in Linux related areas too...
* Leigh: Sysadmin / Developer at IT Services company. Also does the Linux column in PCAuthority now.
* Matt: Sysadmin / Developer. Works for hosting company.
* Daniel: Young guy, still finishing Uni. Got involved in Freedestkop.org, works as a contractor on Xorg stuff for HP last time I checked, but I hear rumors he's got a new job. Tells me all the cool shit that's happening with X.
* David: Works for Transgaming coding Winex. Got to live in Canada for a couple of years to do it. Makes Apple's life hard helping people play their itunes music on Linux boxes. Wrote an OSS Warcraft 3 in his spare time once.
1998 - Finished high school. Was career-minded kinda guy. Decided I'd rather get an exciting job than go to University (I'd done some tertiary stuff in year 12, but three years of Uni just wasn't my thing).
1999 - I'd already had a lot of experience playing with Windows NT out of interest, so I got an MCSE to try and prove my skills to potential employers. Volunteered to assist my local 1300-member LUG at an IT show. Met my future boss, Con Zymaris from Cybersource *. Ended up being the 'Windows guy' at a Linux / Unix / BSD shop. Spent most of my time learning Linux.
1999 - Began career as Linux journo - was initially asked to do Linux software for APC magazine's CD ROM, but I went beyong the brief and wrote a 2 page article on Linux gaming. They liked it and put it in the mag. I then worked on Linux workshop, a couple of Linux features, wrote a little under half of the Linux Pocketbook Third Edition, more than half of the Advanced Linux Pocketbook, became PC Authority magazine's Linux columnist, and then was poached back to APC briefly before the editor that got me there left and mag and me went in different directions. **
During this time, I still got half my income from Linux consulting for Cybersource.
2002 - Wrote and began teaching a Linux training course for Advanced Training, Melbourne. Again, still worked consulting for Cyber.
2003 - Got poached by Red Hat Asia Pacific. Teach RHCE courses, and the nifty new RHCA type courses (which cover clustering, packaging, cross platform authentication, etc).
Spending the weekend learning about Kerberos, LDAP and Active Directory to teach the 423 course.
* Yes, the current Cyber web site looks terrible in Moz. It used to work ok in every browser - then Moz changed its rendering technique. Since I was respomsible for the original non-standard code, there's a fully XHTML version I templated just before I left here. Hopefully Cyber wil start using that one soon.
** I've been told that APC's readers want to do 'the hard stuff'. I disagree - people want to do interesting, useful cool things, regardless of whether they're hard or not. These guys are mbasically Windows power users, who want the basic stuff (installing, setting up a web server) to be easy, so they can focus on doing the cool stuff - anything that's cool or easier / cheaper / better than Windows. I reckon showing people how to do practical stuff with cool apps like QEmu, MythTV, Liferea, etc. is more interesting than yet another guide to installing Apache (including a page of how to compile it, for no other reason than Compiling Makes You Leet).
If I was gonna wrote about Apache, I'd write about creating a blog or CMS using Movabletype, or show people how to get Apache serving ASP 1.1 with mod_mono.
I had a great time at APC, and met some cool people, including Ashton Mills (who's now the editor of Atomic) and David Flynn (an editor who's simply damn good at his job). But the mag's editors don't want what I have to offer anymore, and I don't want to write what they offer me. Pity.
When will real stop using .rpm for their fucking files? Sorry guys, that's taken.
I'm a terrible programmer. I can kinda read other people's perl and C sharp, but in most cases, I can't really be bothered.
Still, I find with Linux and OSS I don't run into the same brick-wall when troubleshooting that I do Windows. Tools like strace or netdump or ethereal ornc are readily available, and help me see exactly what my program's doing at a given point in time - even helping me find bugs.
99% of the time when an app segfaults, it's because there's a file missing. A good example of this is a bug I found in a closed source app - Sophos Anti Virus - using Open Source tools like strace. The app doesn't know about Great British English - if you install the English version, it requires American English is installed.
To do the the same thing on a Windows box, I'd probably pay Systernals a lot of money for a Windows strace equivalent. But the thing is, I wouldn't - cause I couldn't be sure that tool would fix the problem. Maybe I need another app to help me fix it and a Windows strace would be a waste of money? Maybe there's another, cheaper way for me to fix something? I'd be hesitant to pay for a tool that wouldn't help me fix the prob. And expensing it would be a hassle.
Linux provides me with a shitload of the troubleshooting tools I need to do my job out of the box, and it does that cause they're OSS.
This guy is a spammer, he has spammed various open source forums for a long time with his rants
;^)
You mean he wrote long, opinionated posts in a public forum?
What an asshole...
Version numbers may not matter to developers, but I think this is an example of a usability problem. The old version naming was good and well understood.
I disagree - I think the new system is better aimed at users than the old. Previously, end-users used distro kernels 2.x.y. Now they still do, without kernel.org saying that the latest evenly numbered kernel release is stable. With 2.4, it wasn't (think VM changes). With 2.6, it wasn't either.
This jusy codifies existing practice.
What about people, like myself, who like to use the vanilla releases from kernel.org?
I suggest changing your preferences. If you're running a biggie distro (like most people do, although as you've said you are not) then your kernel is supported. If you're not, then distro kernels have better testing than vanilla kernels anyway. The fact there's tens of thousands of people using distro kernel 2.x.y means that kernels gonna be damn well tested.
And you average computer geek and/or smalltime distro can't backport security fixes and has to go through a great deal of hassle to see which version to use.
Your average computer geek uses a mainsteam distro and the kernel it supports, which does this for him (if he needs additional driver modules, he can download packages which provide those modules).
Smalltime distros are rare these days, but most just piggyback off Red Hat or Debian (who'll also take care of that).
So, the 2.4 series has been about taking a lot of core features, freezing them, and then spending the resto of the time correcting bugs as they come along.
What's happening in 2.6 now, and since it's release, is an average of 10 -megabytes- of patch for each 2.6 kernel release. That's a lot of development. Greg has just proposed yanking all of devfs in 2.6. This isn't a minor change.
I think it depends where you got your 2.4 from.
Very few major distros (Debian, and that's about it) use vanilla 2.4.
Red Hat, for example, had around 300 seperate patches for 2.4. For 2.6, they have around 30. I imaginee Suse and Mandrake would have similar figures.
Distros will pick a 2.6 release.
Say, 2.6.6.
Then they'll backport security fixes just like they did for 2.4.
The difference is nothing.
He doesn't want to export DOC files as XML, he wants to use the XML authoring features. Pay attention!
His authoring tool may allow him to perform edits he can't save in his output file.
The sources for his technical doco may also include Word files.
Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the evaluation?
.doc and .xls files can't be represented in the XML format and will be lost when exporting.
.doc or .xls, you could better preserve its content by using Openoffice than MS Office.
Yes. Office 2003 Pro's XML export is exactly that - an export. According to Microsoft, certain information in
OpenOffice uses XML as its native format, and does not suffer data loss when using XML. If someone hands you an existing
I'll rephrase, not using the term 'preference':
Changing the default behaviour of someone's desktop without asking them (or even informing them) them is wrong.
Doesn't change much.