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Queen of England Gets Red Hat

Posted by Roblimo on Sun Sep 19, 1999 06:58 AM
from the sun-never-sets-on-the-linux-empire dept.
Software Linux
Zerbey writes "According to Linux Today The Royal Family's web site is now running Red Hat as apposed to Solaris. See for yourself on Netcraft. Congratulations, Ma'am :) "
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  • Almost true. If there is an inconclusive parliamentary election, the Queen can appoint a Prime Minister, and it can be whomever she pleases. This has almost happened a number of times. Also, she can technically dissolve parliament and call for a new election at her whim. This, as you've said, is a prerogative not exercised since the time of Queen Anne. It probably wouldn't fly today, unless some very important crisis called for it.

    All this ignores the real power of a Monarch, though. They have a sort of centrifugal effect on a country- they draw a sort of uber-loyalty that transcends mere politics. It's very valuable to have such a symbol of continuity and immutability, particularly in tough times. Ideally, they'd serve as a role model for the nation, though some royal families (the Windsors!!) have done an awful job of fulfilling this responsibility.

    Maybe choosing Linux for Her Majesty's Web Servers is a good first step on the road to Windsor redemption.

  • but ms uses bsd... and so do A LOT of isps, it's not like bsd is more obscure than linux or anything, sure less folks know about it but that doesn't make it less used. Just don't use redhat if you don't want to be using what they're using. Personally i don't find it cool to switch os'es because one is "less cool" than another. I don't use redhat- but only because i don't like a distrib that depends so heavily on their gui.
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";

  • Could we soon be kneeling and saying, "Sir Linus"?

    The rules would not permit either a "Sir Linus" or
    "Linus KBE".

    Though a "Sir Alan Cox" would be possible...
  • you're right that it could be a firewall, else why does the current ervice look like its comming from a linux 2.0.x box?

    All the static pages have the suffix .htm so its could even be running windows95 for the weserver.
  • you're right that it could be a firewall, else why does the current service look like its comming from a linux 2.0.x box? ( as seen at WTF is www.royal.gov.uk [slashdot.org] )

    All the static pages have the suffix .htm so its could even be running windows95 for the weserver.
  • Obviously you know different young British people to me.
  • Sorry. It's correct. Doubly so if you're American.
  • ...the british will stop at nothing to keep their empire.

    Not strictly true, for two reasons. Firstly, there's not much of an empire left (c.f. Hong Kong, handed back to China not so long ago), and Australia isn't part of the `empire' (on which, of course, the sun never sets :); it's part of the Commonwealth, which means that the Queen is officially head of state. Practically, it seems to mean the odd state visit here and there, to allow someone a pot-shot at Prince Charles :)

  • Well she probably has her own personal Linux guru to help her out. Hmm, wonder if I could get a job... :-)
  • That would be the current version of the old saying.

    Incidentally back in my grandfather's day the wags used to add to that ...because God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark.

    :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Couldnt it be that the Sun box was the firewall ?

    The firewall (where I work) is running Solaris, and all of the servers in the DMZ are running IIS or apache. Perhaps the firewall has changed, or the firewall was changed to linux.

    No way to tell, if they are behind a tuff firewall.
  • But the thought of having to address current Red Hat luminaries with titles is odd, "Sir Robert", "Lord Donnie", and so on.
  • Well...officially you call her "Your Majesty" when first introduced and from then on can get away with "Ma'am". Point taken though :)

  • I thought the US system was summed up well many years ago, when the Beyond the Fringe gang explained the political system in the US to a UK person: ``There are two parties in the US: the Republican party, which is the equivalant of our Tory party, and the Democratic party, which is the equivalant of our Tory party.''

    cjs

  • Not the first time (Score:3)

    by Squirtle (73289) on Saturday September 18 1999, @10:11PM (#1674692) Homepage
    She was a RedHat user a year or so ago. Then she experimented with Solaris, but now she's back.

    I bet she got sick of recompiling KDE and just installs it from RPMs nowadays.

  • Maybe she found Solaris licensees to expensive to maintain. Hmmm. Pehaps not - I guess there must have been another reason to switch to Red Hat. I wonder what.


    -W
  • Actually, the young British people I know are really young Scottish people, and maybe there is a distinction there regarding loyalty to the Queen. Thing is, I lived in England for four years, and in the whole time I lived there, the only person I met who expressed support for the Monarchy was a certain technical support Bob going by the nickname of Zerbey....
  • Now that Australia is voting to remove the royal family from the ruling status, they finally do something worthwhile. Maybe we should have options like this in our upcoming referendum:
    Should Australia become a republic?
    1 Yes
    2 No
    3 No, because they use linux

    Perhaps this is the best thing related to the royal family that has happened in a long while :)

  • ...until she starts wearing a red hat instead of a crown.

  • As a Brit living in California - this is looking like a hell of a lot more of a Police State than Jolly ol' England, or most of Europe for that matter.

    Get a clue.

    j.
  • You know, I always get the impression that America would love to have colonies, if it were politically correct to do so...

    j.
  • This is truly hearsay, but I heard that the decision was made by a sub-contractor. But still it is a nice decision and Red Hat should certainly see whether they can get the standard, By appointment to... line approved. (At least for their British sales.)

    :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Yep, she even changed official protocol so that bowing etc is optional.

    j.

  • I have no idea, but I kind of doubt it was due to monetary concerns.

    I never did like SunOS or Solaris, though. At work the "time clock" runs on SunOS and is practically guaranteed to go down each and every day. I hate writing times down in a book.

  • ...which, remember, is exactly the same support we (the UK) give to the USAF when we let them fly F-111's etc. out of British bases.

    I think the proof-of-capability bombing of the airfield at Port Stanley by an RAF Vulcan was pretty cool - pitty one of them had to go and break a refuelling boom so it couldn't make it back to home soil...

    j.

  • Glad to see everyone associates the Queen with RedHat now thanks to someone at the 700+ command of power making the decision :-)

    But the queen does need a stable website like she needed that hip replacement. After all, if another one of the royals die, she can totally ignore their death on a stable server.

    Fumbling towards royalty,
    Matthew
    _____________________________________
  • ..ROTFL. As Jeremy Clarkson observed re the American war of independence:

    'It was a civil war. Therefore, we kicked our own butts'.

    j.

  • I can see it now: (Score:4)

    by ptomblin (1378) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Saturday September 18 1999, @10:25PM (#1674706) Homepage Journal
    Red Hat Linux, By Appointment To Her Majesty The Queen.
  • Nah, she's alive and well and having JFK Jr.'s love child.

    :-)

    james
  • My original headline for this was "Tux: By Royal Appointment" *shrug*
  • Ghandi was killed by a Hindu nationalist - same as those right wing BJP arseholes who seem so keen on destroying mosques at the moment. Toby Poynder

  • This may be a bit off topic, but... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 19 1999, @12:45AM (#1674711)

    ...could any of you Linux experts give an old lady a hand?

    Now that I got the server and the firewall running fine and dandy, I have been trying to set up a WWW site that would allow me to map the genealogical data of our fairly unique family tree. I'd like to find an application that would enable me to do this automatically.

    All of the software I've tried so far crashes with "Too many unreferenced child nodes", "Circular references not permitted" or "Tree does not branch".

    Any tips are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, dudes!

    st4y k00l,

    Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and West Indies^W^W^W

  • I love reading all this crap about the Queen, it's really quite entertaining! Maybe 300 years ago, it would mean something, but today? Come on! The Queen holds no power over Great Britain, let alone Austalia and Canada. It's all -symbolic-!

    BTW, most of us Brits really don't care about the Queen anyway, and whether people want or don't want the Queen to have anything to do with their country doesn't matter to us. We don't give a shit, and I seriously doubt the Queen cares much either.

    Why not rant about something that has meaning in today's world, like Tibet or East Timor or something.
  • In a move hailed by the Green Party, Christopher Hitchens, and Italian PM Massimo d'Alema, the Labour Party announced that they will use Slackware [slackware.com] instead.

    "Finally Labour is going back to its proletarian roots" an enthusiastic Christopher Hitchens was quoted as saying, expressing his hope that the adoption of OpenSource "will hasten the demise of that bunch of inbred, brain-addled morons". Asked to specify who he was refering to (Labour or the Crown), Hitchens declined to comment.

    Others were not so thrilled. An angry Richard Stallman summoned the British consul to his Boston office and upbraided the diplomat for "the imperial arrogance" shown by the crown by not referring to "Red Hat GNU/Linux".

    Meanwhile the Conservative Party expressed regret that the Queen had not "shown support for free enterprise and Capitalism" by adopting Microsoft's Internet Server. A spokesman for the Tories added, "we'll have lots more to say about this on our web site, just as soon as we reboot".
  • Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
  • I bet she doesn`t even know her server`s running RedHat. Someone somewhere will have the job of sorting it out silently, and as long as it works (or even if it doesn`t), she won`t know or care what the webserver is being run on.
  • Well, that is nitpicking, but why should anyone that is not a citizen of the UK address her as if she was their queen?

    To me, a Greek citizen (that has lived for several years in Scotland btw), she is just another person. I would probably ignore her or just say "Hi there, what's up?" if I met her.

    Just FYI, The Greek constitution prohibits Greek citizens from accepting titles of honour. Which makes sense. After all, how can all people be equal if some are more equal than others (as George Orwell put it very eloquently)?

    No offence, but in my book absolutely noone has to address British Lords, Sirs, Dukes and whatnot with their title. If they are offended, tough. I don't care. If they are disappointed that people in other countries don't treat them in a special way, again, that's tough. Expecting to be treated as royalty outside the empire (what's left of it anyway) is really backwards. They should just be glad that the majority of the brits still do them the courtesy of using their titles and maintaining monarchy, for it will not last long IMHO.

    -W
  • She don't look too majestic to me.

    You do realize that most of the world sees the queen as the mascot of the Great Britian. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wears a title of nobility deserves disrespect, regardless of what she represents. But then again, that's just my Yankee egalitarianism talking.
  • Who Yahoo and Walnut Creek CD-Rom are?

    Face it.. they're both great operating systems.

    ...
  • The real argument for BSD is the mascot. The daemon is *way* cooler than the penguin. Figuratively.
  • Maybe she just thinks she looks better in a red hat? :)
  • They think "Oh, we can read the source, so they can't
    erally be serious, they said they were joking.. meanwhile, they keep missing that one
    single, all important line of perl code in linux v2.2 ... bwaahahaha :)
  • I know where finland is, and if the finnish government switched all their computer to linux that would be wonderful. But it is ALSO wonderful that britian and the us are using linux, right?
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
  • > As an American I can think of nothing that we could contribute more to our friends the Canadians and Australians than helping to eliminate the shackles of the British tyranny.

    Since the IRA stopped taking money to blow up busloads of schoolchildren you Americans just don't know what to do with yourselves.

    > Break free of the obsolete monarchy

    You're living in the past, man.

  • I noticed that www.netaid.org is also running Red Hat, cool since their claiming to be expecting 60 Million hits a day...
  • I don't have a problem calling the president of a corporation or a country 'president'. I have a problem with calling someone "Your Majesty". Greece for example is a presidential republic. I do refer to our president as "president". Difference is, he is:

    1) elected by the people
    2) remains an equal person, paying taxes and all.

    In that sense, it's nothing more than a job title. I can't really say that about "Majesty" -it is VERY different. I am quite confident that the majority of people out there can discern the difference, and I wouldn't like to explain it in detail.

    As for not addressing a queen as "Her Majesty" I don't find that disrespectful, since I simply don't recognize "Her Majesty" and I have no reason to do so. I am not being a troll here - don't misunderstand me. I'm just trying to make a point - I am a citizen of a country that all people are equal, and I find titles of honour redundant and offending. You wouldn't find me using them, and if a Queen of some other contry is offended or something if I don't address her as "Your Majesty", well, that's none of my business, she should get over it.

    -W
  • ...After all, what else would you expect redcoats to use? ;)
  • The OS upon which the sun never sets.

    Does anyone else think it's ironic that an operating system with designs on "world domination" is being embraced wholeheartedly by governments around the world?
    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!
    "An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein

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