I have administred/used/installed/maintained: SuSE, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines. And I have probably forgotten a couple in the list above (Caldera comes to mind - waaaay before it became SCO).
So, yeah, I have used RPM and.deb based Linux distributions, thank you very much. And, yes, as you guessed, I started way back in 1995, when Slackware was pretty much the only game in town. Debian did not really exist yet and Red Hat was just crappy in those days. Slackware was - and still is - stable and coherent compared to pretty much all other distributions.
And that's just the free UN*X. I have also administered/installed and maintained HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64 machines.
Except for the *BSDs and Slackware, frankly, most of them suck. Big time. Which is why I am typing this past 1:00am on a (very early) Sunday morning after spending an entire day installing AIX 5.3 TL8 SP6 servers in a production environment.
Give me Slackware anytime, please. Red Hat is a mess after two upgrades, Debian packages are maintained by a bunch of clueless hippies and n00bies, SuSE just plain sucks (yast meets smit, smit meets yast), Ubuntu is for point-and-click losers. And don't get me started on so-called "professional" UN*X such as AIX, please.
For instance, here is one reason Slackware is superior to all of these lame pieces of fluff: except maybe for Debian, it is the ONLY Linux distribution that won't install an X11 server by default. Here is a hint: you don't need a freaking X11 GUI on a production machine!!
Anyhow, I am sorry if this sounded trollish - don't get me wrong, Red Hat and Debian and Ubuntu and [insert fave distro here] are perfectly acceptable, heck even Solaris or HP-UX are not that bad, but when it comes to simplicity and stability, Slackware is still the best Linux out there.
Slackware is actually a privately-held company, so it does not have to disclose profits or losses.
However, ever since it has been created, it has provided the mains source of income for Patrick Volkerding, so I guess profits must have been steady, if not spectacular.
I'll note that Slackware has been forked countless times -- probably because it provides a stable, simple and highly-customizable platform for experimentation. Just like Linux (the kernel) itself, by the way.
Besides, this is open-source. Profits, IMHO, are definitely *not* a proof of software quality (See: Software, Microsoft)... But why waste a good troll arguing rationally, right? Go back under your bridge, little troll, I have wasted enough time with you like that.
Slackware, overweight? You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Usually, you only need the 1st CD to install a minimal Slackware system, including fluxbox if memory serves well. CD2 is usually KDE and XFCE. CD3 are optional packages. CD4 through CD6 is source code.
Since I have installed Slackware on countless servers, I hope Slackware 13.0 still follows this simple rule.
And "Everything plus the kitchen sink" is precisely the opposite of the Slackware philosophy (= KISS).
Do try NetBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/amd64: both have excellent hardware detection and should be able to - at least - provide more information on what went wrong.
In the worst possible case, you can probably make sure some functions are de-activated if they crash the kernel. See here for an example - it uses OpenBSD, but the procedure should be very similar in NetBSD.
I once had to write code is a super-small stuffy room.
That's not so bad, but I had to share it with two people who smoked like chimney. I am serious, that was before all those non-smoking laws. The two smoked close to a pack a day per person. I probably "smoked" more with these two than ever before, or after... And I am a non-smoker!!
The stench was so bad that, when I arrived at the office, and I was usually the first person to come, I would open every single window in the office to make sure some of the cold tobacco odor would go out a little bit. And I did this religiously, no matter how cold or rainy it was outside, since the smell was so bad I was that close to puking every time I would go in that room.
To cut a long story short: I had -- in about six months time -- a bronchitis, followed by a sinusitis, followed by a bronchitis AND a sinusitis at the same time! Each time, my doctor would look at me, and practically plead with me to stop working in that place.
Thank goodness, that contract only lasted for about 12 months. Most horrible conditions I have ever worked in. My hatred of smokers started in that place.
Just remember: you can optimize any platform to do great on a given benchmark. And IBM has got enough engineers working on AIX that I am sure its TPCC numbers are really impressive.
But what I am interested in is not just a bunch of meaningless numbers: I want machines that just work!! And in that respect, at least, TPC benchmarks or not, AIX is just a nightmare.
And, whenever I get screamed at (which is fairly often), and I open a call to IBM (yes, we do have a corporate account opened with IBM), the answer their engineers give me is always the same: "Uh... Have you considered adding more RAM?".
These machines already have 16 freaking GB of RAM or more!! Give me a break!
Meanwhile, some midget second-hand EOLed Linux server, with a puny 2 GB of RAM, keeps chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. While the AIX big iron keeps trashing and crashing, goes into overdrive and swaps 'til it drops, Linux keeps on going. Sure, it's slow, and it also swaps, etc. But, by Jove, it works. And, yes, it runs some fairly freaking large databases (see some of my other comments in this thread).
Oh, and by the way, the FBI uses Linux (wait a minute... Do they even know what a computer is?), the NSA uses Linux, and several stock exchanges happily run Linux and open-source software. Where have you been all this time? This is the 21st century, my friend, and even Big Blue itself loves to put the penguin on its -- oh so precious -- hardware.
I like shmux a bit better when it comes to lots and lots of machines to update, but ClusterSSH is better when you need to check a few things interactively before borking things up.
Of course, both require you to configure quite a few things, but a couple of nice shell scripts, one dedicated user (TCPWrappers is your friend!) and one SSH key pairs... and you are in business.
NIS or NIS+ are also good solutions if you are using Slackware.
Smitty - though it has its uses - is the nastiest piece of manure ever to disgrace an SSH window. Everything even remotely UNXy IBM makes is, IMHO, totally over-priced.
AIX hardware is over-priced, under-powered and totally uninteresting. I have machines running Linux on Opteron right here and they simply out-perform AIX machines (including a 12 CPU Power6 P570 AIX 5.3) at least 10 times.
And don't get me started on the stability of AIX vs Linux or BSD, please. I have software here that can make any AIX machine cry and call for mommy, when most Linux distributions just suck it up and carry on.
AIX machines are essentially dull ultra-expensive big iron. Most programmers I work with would rather have a small machine with Red Hat and tons of GNU goodness on it than a huge AIX beast.
And just in case you are wondering: yes, I do administer UNIX machines for a living. Just check my Slashdot journal, and you'll get a ton of information on AIX, Solaris and so on and so forth.
This being said, I'll take AIX over Windows any day. And either Slackware or OpenBSD over everything else.
I mean, "mono-racial"? Caucasian mother and grand-parents, African father? Indonesian step-father? Indonesian/Caucasian half-brothers and sisters? "Mono"-racial?
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Oh, and just so you know, most geneticist estimate there is only one human race, and that we all come from, you know, somewhere in Africa. So we all are "mono-racial" in a certain way, right? Like, we are all the same inside? Ebony and Ivory? Kumbaya, Oh Lord, Kumbaya?
*slaps forehead*
Oh wait! I forgot: you probably wearn white sheets with holes over the eyes and burn crosses at night as a past-time, right?
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick? And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers? And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site? Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack? And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot.;-)
As a user of both OpenBSD and Gnu/Linux, I'd like to know if you share Linus Torvalds infamous appreciation of OpenBSD developpers? Or do you have good relations with all open source projects?
Nope, they don't reduce crime. They don't even prevent them. They don't deter and they are pretty much useless.
CCTV cameras are everywhere in the UK, but, according to a recent report by the CCTV manager of Scotland Yard... They simply don't work, despite billions of UKP invested. You can read this analysis here.
Putting real, flesh-and-blood policemen, on the beat is the way to go. Putting cameras (which hardly qualifies as high-tech anyway) don't work.
Slashdot Mirror
My dear Derleth, something you need to know about me: I am a system administrator.
I have administred/used/installed/maintained: SuSE, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines. And I have probably forgotten a couple in the list above (Caldera comes to mind - waaaay before it became SCO).
So, yeah, I have used RPM and .deb based Linux distributions, thank you very much. And, yes, as you guessed, I started way back in 1995, when Slackware was pretty much the only game in town. Debian did not really exist yet and Red Hat was just crappy in those days. Slackware was - and still is - stable and coherent compared to pretty much all other distributions.
And that's just the free UN*X. I have also administered/installed and maintained HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64 machines.
Except for the *BSDs and Slackware, frankly, most of them suck. Big time. Which is why I am typing this past 1:00am on a (very early) Sunday morning after spending an entire day installing AIX 5.3 TL8 SP6 servers in a production environment.
Give me Slackware anytime, please. Red Hat is a mess after two upgrades, Debian packages are maintained by a bunch of clueless hippies and n00bies, SuSE just plain sucks (yast meets smit, smit meets yast), Ubuntu is for point-and-click losers. And don't get me started on so-called "professional" UN*X such as AIX, please.
For instance, here is one reason Slackware is superior to all of these lame pieces of fluff: except maybe for Debian, it is the ONLY Linux distribution that won't install an X11 server by default. Here is a hint: you don't need a freaking X11 GUI on a production machine!!
(By the way, never ever mention the name "Gentoo" in front of me unless you really want to get a good ol' whack from my handy clue bat(tm).)
Anyhow, I am sorry if this sounded trollish - don't get me wrong, Red Hat and Debian and Ubuntu and [insert fave distro here] are perfectly acceptable, heck even Solaris or HP-UX are not that bad, but when it comes to simplicity and stability , Slackware is still the best Linux out there.
Slackware sucks. But, as far as I am concerned, it sucks a little bit less than all the others.
Slackware is actually a privately-held company, so it does not have to disclose profits or losses.
However, ever since it has been created, it has provided the mains source of income for Patrick Volkerding, so I guess profits must have been steady, if not spectacular.
I'll note that Slackware has been forked countless times -- probably because it provides a stable, simple and highly-customizable platform for experimentation. Just like Linux (the kernel) itself, by the way.
Besides, this is open-source. Profits, IMHO, are definitely *not* a proof of software quality (See: Software, Microsoft)... But why waste a good troll arguing rationally, right? Go back under your bridge, little troll, I have wasted enough time with you like that.
Its purpose is to be an absolute garbage, unpolished Linux distribution. You may as well LFS.
And this "absolute garbage, unpolished" distribution also happen to be the oldest still-existing distribution in the Linux world. Surprising, that.
Hmmmm... Maybe they are doing something right, after all? Like, perhaps, being stable, complete and a joy to work with?
As opposed to, say, the RPM-Hell, bugged-to-the-bone, over-bloated and absolutely nonsensical but politically correct other distribution(s)?
Just a thought for you...
Likewise: great job to the Slackware crew, and I am waiting for my CDs to arrive!
Slack is great but overweight.
Slackware, overweight? You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Usually, you only need the 1st CD to install a minimal Slackware system, including fluxbox if memory serves well. CD2 is usually KDE and XFCE. CD3 are optional packages. CD4 through CD6 is source code.
Since I have installed Slackware on countless servers, I hope Slackware 13.0 still follows this simple rule.
And "Everything plus the kitchen sink" is precisely the opposite of the Slackware philosophy (= KISS).
should be /dev/wd0
Seems strange that the amd64 iso is only 247Mb
That's because it only includes what would be called a "base" install by the standards of most Linux distros.
Yes, but this still allows you to test a misbehaving machine, such as the one of the original commenter.
In that respect, OpenBSD 4.5 may be a slightly better choice, since the i386 CD also include some basic package.
Do try NetBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/amd64: both have excellent hardware detection and should be able to - at least - provide more information on what went wrong.
Also of interest to you: NetBSD was the first Open-Source OS with USB support, so there is hope a correct ICH7 driver is included.
In the worst possible case, you can probably make sure some functions are de-activated if they crash the kernel. See here for an example - it uses OpenBSD, but the procedure should be very similar in NetBSD.
Hope this helps!
I once had to write code is a super-small stuffy room.
That's not so bad, but I had to share it with two people who smoked like chimney. I am serious, that was before all those non-smoking laws. The two smoked close to a pack a day per person. I probably "smoked" more with these two than ever before, or after... And I am a non-smoker!!
The stench was so bad that, when I arrived at the office, and I was usually the first person to come, I would open every single window in the office to make sure some of the cold tobacco odor would go out a little bit. And I did this religiously, no matter how cold or rainy it was outside, since the smell was so bad I was that close to puking every time I would go in that room.
To cut a long story short: I had -- in about six months time -- a bronchitis, followed by a sinusitis, followed by a bronchitis AND a sinusitis at the same time! Each time, my doctor would look at me, and practically plead with me to stop working in that place.
Thank goodness, that contract only lasted for about 12 months. Most horrible conditions I have ever worked in. My hatred of smokers started in that place.
And you haven't read a single word of what I posted, right? Lame.
From the same article you dismissed:
Longest hours worked in Europe (31 countries surveyed)
1 Turkey: 54 hours; 29 UK: 35 hours (EU average: 39 hours)
UK is 29th out of 31 countries surveyed.
I rest my case.
Yeah right. Talking nonsense again, right?
European surveys have proved that French people actually work longer hours than Brits.
Don't believe me?
Check this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/mar/31/uk-long-working-hours
http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/ewco/surveys/ewcs2005/index.htm
I have seen Brits and Swiss jerks leave their office at 5:00pm while I stayed at my desk until 10:00pm past. So that kind of "joke" is truly lame.
And yes, I work in France.
Disable the beta index. It's beta for a reason.
How do you do this? I tried www.slashdot.org/index.pl but it just switches me back to "index2.pl".
You mean, this Scott McNealy? The one who said Linux is for hobbyists, not enterprise?
Teh funny, it hurts. I even think it's called "eating crow" in U.S.
When you can't beat 'em... Right, Scott?
Benchmarks.
A bit like statistics, right?
And there are three kinds of lies:
Just remember: you can optimize any platform to do great on a given benchmark. And IBM has got enough engineers working on AIX that I am sure its TPCC numbers are really impressive.
But what I am interested in is not just a bunch of meaningless numbers: I want machines that just work!! And in that respect, at least, TPC benchmarks or not, AIX is just a nightmare.
And, whenever I get screamed at (which is fairly often), and I open a call to IBM (yes, we do have a corporate account opened with IBM), the answer their engineers give me is always the same: "Uh... Have you considered adding more RAM?".
These machines already have 16 freaking GB of RAM or more!! Give me a break!
Meanwhile, some midget second-hand EOLed Linux server, with a puny 2 GB of RAM, keeps chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. While the AIX big iron keeps trashing and crashing, goes into overdrive and swaps 'til it drops, Linux keeps on going. Sure, it's slow, and it also swaps, etc. But, by Jove, it works. And, yes, it runs some fairly freaking large databases (see some of my other comments in this thread).
Oh, and by the way, the FBI uses Linux (wait a minute... Do they even know what a computer is?), the NSA uses Linux, and several stock exchanges happily run Linux and open-source software. Where have you been all this time? This is the 21st century, my friend, and even Big Blue itself loves to put the penguin on its -- oh so precious -- hardware.
You use awk?
Python+Tomcat+Apache+Oracle+some fairly hairy back end.
600 GB of data (at the very least) in Oracle. Multiple database replication.
I have seen AIX 5.1 machines crash with only 60+ connections on that setup.
Two solutions I use all the time when it gets to large scale (25+ servers) Slackware deployment :
I like shmux a bit better when it comes to lots and lots of machines to update, but ClusterSSH is better when you need to check a few things interactively before borking things up.
Of course, both require you to configure quite a few things, but a couple of nice shell scripts, one dedicated user (TCPWrappers is your friend!) and one SSH key pairs... and you are in business.
NIS or NIS+ are also good solutions if you are using Slackware.
AIX is horrendous. I mean, truly horrible.
Smitty - though it has its uses - is the nastiest piece of manure ever to disgrace an SSH window. Everything even remotely UNXy IBM makes is, IMHO, totally over-priced.
AIX hardware is over-priced, under-powered and totally uninteresting. I have machines running Linux on Opteron right here and they simply out-perform AIX machines (including a 12 CPU Power6 P570 AIX 5.3) at least 10 times.
And don't get me started on the stability of AIX vs Linux or BSD, please. I have software here that can make any AIX machine cry and call for mommy, when most Linux distributions just suck it up and carry on.
AIX machines are essentially dull ultra-expensive big iron. Most programmers I work with would rather have a small machine with Red Hat and tons of GNU goodness on it than a huge AIX beast.
And just in case you are wondering: yes, I do administer UNIX machines for a living. Just check my Slashdot journal, and you'll get a ton of information on AIX, Solaris and so on and so forth.
This being said, I'll take AIX over Windows any day. And either Slackware or OpenBSD over everything else.
Err...
Sorry, in the immortal words of Lewis Black " I had to remind myself to breathe " after reading your comment.
I mean, "mono-racial"? Caucasian mother and grand-parents, African father? Indonesian step-father? Indonesian/Caucasian half-brothers and sisters? "Mono"-racial?
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Oh, and just so you know, most geneticist estimate there is only one human race, and that we all come from, you know, somewhere in Africa. So we all are "mono-racial" in a certain way, right? Like, we are all the same inside? Ebony and Ivory? Kumbaya, Oh Lord, Kumbaya?
*slaps forehead*
Oh wait! I forgot: you probably wearn white sheets with holes over the eyes and burn crosses at night as a past-time, right?
Sorry, never mind me. Carry on.
Oh, my goodness! Finally someone who took the time to try and understand what I was trying to say.
Thank you.
And, I might add (as a Frenchman) that that Churchill quote you wrote about was also a close second... :-)
Rev. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream".
What about the radios that don't make any profit?
I am specifically thinking of SOMA FM and WCPE. I know that WCPE is a non-profit, for instance, and they are two of the best radios I know.
Are these exempted or not? Does anyone know?
I can see it from here: TRUTHINESS WARS!
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick?
And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers?
And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site?
Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack?
And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot. ;-)
... But it has to be asked.
OpenBSD's developers (including OpenBSD 'benevolent dictator' Theo DeRaadt) have praised VIA Padlock functions in the past.
As a user of both OpenBSD and Gnu/Linux, I'd like to know if you share Linus Torvalds infamous appreciation of OpenBSD developpers? Or do you have good relations with all open source projects?
Nope, they don't reduce crime. They don't even prevent them. They don't deter and they are pretty much useless.
CCTV cameras are everywhere in the UK, but, according to a recent report by the CCTV manager of Scotland Yard... They simply don't work, despite billions of UKP invested. You can read this analysis here.
Putting real, flesh-and-blood policemen, on the beat is the way to go. Putting cameras (which hardly qualifies as high-tech anyway) don't work.
I have an 8Mbps/1Mbps ADSL connection to the Internet here in Paris.
My friends make fun of me. Most have got 18Mbps to 100Mpbs connections. At least one of my friends has got multiple connections.