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Mandriva Businesses

Mandrake for Alpha & UltraSPARC 75

Posted by Hemos from the rolling-out-the-distros dept.
Soko writes "Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures. The announcement was originally found on freshmeat and talks about getting help from Alpha Processors Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. MandrakeSoft has ported its latest popular version of the Linux operating system, Linux-Mandrake 7.0, to the above processors. "
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Mandrake for Alpha & UltraSPARC More

Mandrake for Alpha & UltraSPARC

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  • Internationalization and localization (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @09:37AM (#1302475)
    Mandrake has been quite proactive is adding any available support for as many languages as possible. They have a localization [linux-mandrake.com] page dedicated to it. They aren't the only organization working on it, but they are trying to make it widely available in an easily usable form. The Translation Project [umontreal.ca] and Linux International [li.org] which has sponsored mailing lists for it, have probably been doing it as actively as anyone else out there. There are other projects working on it as well:


  • I bet they worked hard on their alpah and sparc ports... Lets see, go out get a copy of alpha redhat linux, change the name to Mandrake Alpha linux and done with that, and then take a copy of Sparc redhat linux and change the name to Mandrake sparc linux and done with that. Must be nice to leech off other companies. This strategey worked for their Mandrake intel port. Wait, they added kde instead of gnome, I forgot how hard that is.

    Maybe I am bit naive here, but how hard is it to port your distro to another architecture? I thought that one of the great things about linux was that once the kernel, compiler, and libs were ported to a new architecture, all that was required was a recompile for all of the apps. I do suppose that going to a 64-bit system would require some changes in the apps, but what would that take other than just changing some definitions?

  • Are Alpha's RISC?

    Yes, umm, at least as much so as other "RISC" cpu's... the RISC/CISC terminology is actually obsolete.

    64-bit?

    Yes. Alpha CPUs have always had 64-bit virtual addressing. Physical addressing varies... newer EV67 Alphas can address 44 bits of physical memory.

    In what areas (/applications) does an Alpha beat an x86?

    The Alpha has superior floating point, higher memory bandwidth, and more registers than an x86. It handles all applications well but really shines on FP. It's excellent at certain large database applications due to the 64-bit address space (you can do things like mmap a 50GB file, if you like).

    Note that UltraSPARC has many of the same advantages of x86.

    If you're so curious, why not go to www.testdrive.compaq.com [compaq.com] and try one for yourself? You'll get a free 30-day trial account, and can test/benchmark your own applications on a 4-CPU Alpha ES40, if you like.

    (Note: I have no affiliation whatsoever with Compaq or Alpha Processor.)


  • Correct. When Compaq bought Digital, they were looking at the services division, and they probably didn't really have any idea what they were getting into. However, once looking at the books, they realized that the midrange business (Unix and VMS on Alpha) either was or could be enormously profitable.

    The funny thing is, they originally thought DEC could be assimilated into Compaq's traditional Wintel-follower PC business, but then found out in order to really get that big midrange profit margin, Compaq had to essentially become Digital Equipment. This has led to a bunch of unresolved management turmoil and strategy shifts (reminiscent of DEC in the dark days), and probably explains why Compaq's current server equipment is so nice, and their desktop PCs are so crappy.
    --
  • Y3ah, no dOuBt!!!!

    Plus, I once looked at a redhat cd, a lot of the soft-ware was the same stuff on my debian disks? Maybe someone should tell this to The Debian Corporation., then they could sue Redhat for violating all of their intellectual patents and shit like that, and the worst, is letting debian source code out, man that's gonna hurt debian's IPO, I read all about it on the veritrade site. I'm sure it will do well, but all my money is going into LinuxOne, they rock!

    bUSta gnuCKle oN tHoz chUmpZ!
  • That's nothing, SweetBaby Jesix (v3.16), and it's just as full of the gosphel as Jesix-Baby, but with kde, pentium optimizations, and the nifty WWJD server. Just telnet to port 777, and you'll get great advice!

    But I'll stick to Agnostian GNU/Linux, the non-sectarian Jesix distro.

    Rumors about that Corel might be working on a secret project called Budhix.
  • Someone IRC'd Corel's Budhix betasite URL, but I haven't be reincarneted enough times to download it legally.
  • As I just recently (last week) installed Mandrake 7, hated it on sight and then re-installed with RedHat 6.1, I have to answer to this..

    My biggest bug-bear with Mandrake 7 is that it does not hardly run any system services when it loads!! .. I mean, I had to manually add symlinks in /etc/rc.d/rc*.d for really basic stuff like inetd, httpd and sendmail .. Jeez.. that's so crap, and they say it's for novice users?? .. I've used Linux for 4 years now (Slackware 3.6 then moved to RedHat 5.1, 5.2, 6.0) The 'defaults' of the system seem to make the thing so damn unusable it's just stupid. Plus locking down outside access via telnet with an /etc/hosts.deny ALL meant it was pretty worthless and slow getting it to work as a small server (which was my plan). It problaby works great as a desktop but I thought the pentium enhancements might be quite useful.

    The actual Mandrake installer is AWFUL too .. The package selection consists solely of a tree diagram on which to get info about a package, you have to click on it. This has the side-effect of de-selecting previously selected packages or selecting those which were not, meaning an extra click is required to re-enable the install of said package. This and the fact that only a highlighted bar indicates a package is to be installed is a very poor interface IMHO.

    So then I tried RedHat 6.1 and what a JOY it was to behold. The installer asks some basic questions like Mandrake, but I found the grey gtk-looking installer to be much easier on the eyes than the horrid dark green of Mandrake .. PLUS there is the opportunity in RedHat to go BACK to a previous step .. which is very welcome if you click something wrong or just plain change your mind.
    The package installation which was so tedious in Mandrake is much simpler in redhat as although there is a tree diagram for the sections, the individual packages are listed in a separate pane, rather like glint. On these packages is a nice big red tick to indicate if the package is to be installed or not and a button to click to toggle this. Clicking a package once shows the information in the lower pane just as you would want. Summary, a much nicer install and a more pleasant experience.

    The resultant RedHat system WORKED, i mean actually ran some damn services so you could use the thing. Coupled with the linuxconf program over the web made configuration of my little linux machine very quick (mandrake also has linuxconf, but that was disabled by the /etc/hosts.deny preventing access to it, also by not running inetd too.)

    To stop bitching now ...
    I guess to each their own and if you're happy with one distro then that's great.. I know I was aggravated by the obstacles placed in my path by the mandrake setup and it seemed to not recognise the fact that with everyone wanting desktop installs there still are people that want a nice 'server' installation (I like the fact that that button is there on RedHat, even though I chose 'Custom'). I use my machine at work and talk to it over the network, so by not enabling networked use of the machine off the bat it was difficult to say the least. I can guess it's a security feature to chop off all the features but that's counter-productive if you have to UNDO all this to get it to work instead of just securing the machine after it's all working.

    Okay, I started bitching again .. sorry..

    Anyway, this is just my personal experience. Those used to playing with Mandrake probably will give me funny looks for my problems but I know I'm a RedHatter and that works for me fine.

    --
  • the quote from Bill Gates. That was the funniest thing I had ever read when I first saw it!

    Yeah, me too, which is why I took it as a sig in the first place ;)

    What is even more funny is to think that the people reviewing the book before the publication didn't catch this..or did they but found it so funny that they didn't want to correct it? Anyway, this is not by that that I would judge him, errors happen to everybody (although combining MS-DOS and Windows in one life make quite a lot of errors ;)).

  • I don't know about Mandrake's plans, but there is still room for optimization. Just as all x86 processors are not alike, all Alphas are not the same. For example, all 21164a and later Alpha processors support byte/word extensions, yielding somewhat smaller and faster binaries that won't run on earlier processors.

    Redhat's distribution is targetted for all Alpha processors. I've considered recompiling it all for my 164SX. The X server alone shrunk by about 30% when I recompiled it with BWX.

  • Nobody's really backing it. Compaq just happened to acquire the Alpha architecture along with Digital, they're not really behind it. Without future NT versions, there's even less incentive for Compaq to pour more money into Alpha development. Expect Alpha to die, with or without Mandrake Linux on it.
  • Alpha, ARM, m68k, beginnings of a mips port, i386, ppc, sparc and ultrasparc. It runs pretty well on all of them, too, and they are given equal importance, even if most developers run i386.

  • I'd also love to see FreeBSD use AlphaBIOS for its bootstrap instead of SRM. I don't want to use the SRM console!

    Why not? SRM is the only one supported by Compaq now.

    Incidentally, neither Linux nor FreeBSD boot from AlphaBIOS, and never will... Linux does boot from MILO, a freeware console written for systems without SRM. MILO itself boots from AlphaBIOS (it can also boot from SRM, or directly from flash on a few systems). However once it is running, it completely replaces AlphaBIOS.

    Ugh. AlphaBIOS is nice, and why is only Linux supporting it (NT does too)??

    AlphaBIOS is history, just like AlphaNT. The current release probably won't be upgraded for newer hardware. MILO itself isn't available on many newer systems, and without MILO, AlphaBIOS is useless (unless you are still running NT).

    But if you want to port FreeBSD so it can boot from MILO, chances are there are a few out there who could use it.

  • I am using RedHat 6.1 with Gnome on an Alpha
    and I have had no problems with Gnome -- so
    Iam not quite sure what yuo are talking about.
    (Well, it's not exactly 6.1, it's RawHide from
    the time slightly before 6.1. but it's got, as far as I
    understand, the same Gnome version). OTOH, I could not
    make my SCSI card initialize properly with AlphaBIOS. With
    SRM, it works just fine. I like SRM.
  • I believe that any distro with kernel 2.2.5 or higher will run on a SS1000/SC2000. Why DeadRat's site continues to insist that they don't work is beyond me. As another option, you could pick your favorite distro, put the SS/SC disk(s) in a "supported" machine, then build your own kernel on it that is known to work with sun4d, and put the disks back in. But, as I said, this shouldn't be necessary. Give it a try.
  • Just a correction - I've left Mandrake in September to join Red Hat.

    To stop rumors before they start coming up:

    My primary reason for joining Red Hat was getting the changes that (IMO) make sense to as many people as possible. People who decide to try Linux should get the best possible distribution right away... (Instead of getting a bad impression of Linux because of the flaws of one distribution)

    Another reason was safety. With Red Hat Linux getting better all the time (and merging back changes from Mandrake), I don't know how long there's room for an extended version of Red Hat Linux.

    It's not a "rat leaving the sinking ship" thing. There is nothing wrong with Mandrake. There's also nothing wrong with Red Hat and most other Linux distributions.
  • fact that I lose GDM. That really stinks. If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.
    Have you tried wdm? I haven't used GDM (assuming it's a login manager but I really like wdm. At least in Debian it gives me the ability to select window manager and to reboot from the login screen.

  • Debian 2.1 has Alpha and Sparc. (Score:3)

    by divec ( 48748 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @07:36AM (#1302499) Homepage
    2.2 Will also add Power PC and ARM. m68k and i386 both already available of course.
  • Doesn't debian also come in nice alpha, m68k, and sparc flavors too?
    --
  • Mandrake started out being based off of Redhat's distro. Basically, it was a cleaned up, supercharged version of RH. Have they now become their OWN distro? And if so, then why does v7 still include pleanty of RH specific software? Just curious.
  • There's also Debian on HURD on Mach on i386 (!) available, but that's experimental.
  • One of Linux's major strenghts is it's ability to work on many architectures. Unfortunately it's difficult to find distributions that run on, say the amiga (not the greatest example, but you get the point). Sometimes there are distros, but they are small and only for that architecture. While those are a good thing, it is even better to have distros that work on many architectures, so that say a university with DEC's, Suns, and intels, can set them all up virtually identically.

    Having only a few distros that do that however would begin to eliminate the diversity that is such a winderful thing about Linux.

    Anyway, I'll stop rambling. Basically I think this is a great move for Mandrake, and a good thing for the Linux world. It moves us one step closer to the goal of "world domination fast."
  • I don't get it! Correct me if I'm wrong, but mandrake == RH && compiled to pentium. I guess the RH alpha port already is optimised for alpha, so what additional value will Mandrake offer?

    Szo

  • Who's Behind Mandrake? (Score:4)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @07:40AM (#1302506) Homepage
    That's what I want to know: We know about all these stars at Redhat, and VA, and from everywhere else...

    But who, I ask, is behind the smoothly polished quality of Mandrake?

    The creator of BeroLinux joined the Mandrake project a long time ago, this much I remember. BeroLinux was not only a one man distribution but the first out of the gate with Kernel 2.2 up and running. Mandrake has alot of the feel of some one guiding force trying to catch all the loose ends--and it shows.

    Yes, Mandrake 7.0 has areas of weakness that show up more than in any other Mandrake Linux distribution. Growing pains happen, and Mandrake's actually striking out with its own code this time around--and it's impressive code at that. Are Lothar and DiskDrake being ported to Alpha and Sparc as well?

    You know, one of these days I'm just going to put up a clock "Days till Redhat acquires Mandrake"...

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • Well one thing I do know is that our beowulf cluster runs Debian (Power PC arch).. it has stood up very well. :)

    And they said that they just changed a couple compile flags .. ha! It's a good port!

  • Yes (Score:1)

    by divec ( 48748 )
    Yes. And soon PPC and ARM.
  • All I know it's a distro based on RedHat, but what are the major differences between RH Mandrake? I've heard a lot of people say they really like Mandrake, and would like to know just why it is so good. Thanks in advance.
  • This is offtopic I know, but I felt I had to share this here.

    It looks as if Microsoft is expanding their internationalization of Windows! This should be particularly amusing to East Coast Canadians.

    Enjoy!
    --------------------------------
    Notice from Microsoft:

    It has come to our attention that a few copies of the Nova Scotia/Newfoundland version of Windows 98 may have accidentally been shipped outside that area. If you have one of these Editions you may need some help understanding the commands.

    The "East Coast" Edition may be recognized by looking at the opening screen. It reads WINDAS 98 with a background picture of a Cod fish superimposed on a slice of baloney. It is shipped with a Jimmy Flynn screen saver (Newfoundland versions only) (Nova Scotia versions were shipped with alternating Rita MacNeil/Anne Murray screen savers). As well, disks were packaged in a Windas 98 Sou'wester.

    Also note:
    The "Recycle Bin" is labeled "Frenchies".
    "My Computer" is called "Dis godamned almighty ting".
    "Dialup Networking" is called "trawling".
    "Control Panel" is known as the "de other godamned almighty ting".
    "Hard Drive" is referred to as "4-Wheel Drive."
    "Floppies" are "Dem Jesus Little tings."

    Other features: Instead of an Error Message you get a pick-up truck, covered with a garbage bag and duct tape and full of broken lobster traps.

    Terminology:

    OK = right some good.
    Cancel = oh migod no.
    Reset = oh my oh my.
    Yes = wha.
    No = christ 'n jesus mighty no.
    Find = ecum secum.
    Go to = goin' down.
    Back = arse side.
    Help = lord tunderin jesus bye.
    Stop = cod end.
    Start = anchors away.

    Also note that Windas 98 does not recognize capital letters, punctuation marks, spelling or grammar. As well, half the time, it won't work.

    We regret any inconvenience it may have caused if you received a copy of the "East Coast" Edition. You may return it to Microsoft for a replacement version. Although, I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to return it, after all it is a genuine real right some good East Coast ting.

    Thank you.

    May yer cod end be full.
    Bill Gates
    --
    You're still using Windows?

  • Hmm, interesting point. Yeah, I have typically recompiled most of the RPMS (it took sooo long for RedHat to release the Alpha RPMS after the SRPMS were available).

    But, I still have not had any luck compiling a kernel for my Alpha other than the standard RH kernels. Either that, or they would be remarkably unstable. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem.

    As far as SRM goes, I didn't realize that Compaq dropped the support for it. Maybe I should look at SRM again. It might be worth checking out. I believe I read somewhere that you could not switch back from AlphaBIOS->SRM. I still have AlphaNT installed on one of them, and I'd like to keep it around (Office is installed...).

    Later,
    Justin
  • Unfortunately, inferior Digital/Compaq owns the superior Alpha whether superior Sun owns the inferior UltraSparc :-(

    If Sun would own Alpha, it would have a "momentum" and marketing push strong enough to survive.

  • Re:What will it offer on those processors? (Score:3)

    by Jerenk ( 10262 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @08:21AM (#1302515) Homepage
    The RH6.1 Alpha is relatively stable, but does have some problems. GNOME is particularly horrific on RH Alpha (causes HARD crashes - absolutely insane). Pretty much forces the use KDE. Also, the GNOME issues requires the removal of ALL Gnome RPMS (it still tries to tie in with KDE). Since I use KDE most of the time, it doesn't bug me except for the fact that I lose GDM. That really stinks. If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.

    The GNOME issues that I see have occurred on both Alphas that I use. It is not something that I am doing wrong. =/

    I'd also love to see FreeBSD use AlphaBIOS for its bootstrap instead of SRM. I don't want to use the SRM console! Ugh. AlphaBIOS is nice, and why is only Linux supporting it (NT does too)??

    Later,
    Justin

  • Compaq just happened to acquire the Alpha architecture along with Digital, they're not really behind it.

    Yes, they are. They have 3 reasons: Linux, Tru64 and OpenVMS. And they have done more already for Linux than Digital ever did. They ported their commercial math library to Linux, their Fortran and C compilers, and now they even provide Netscape on Alpha/Linux for downloading (that's what I'm typing on now).

    Without future NT versions, there's even less incentive for Compaq to pour more money into Alpha development.

    Nonsense. Compaq dropped Alpha/NT because they discovered it doesn't sell well, and they don't need it to market Alpha successfully anymore.

    Don't forget either about Alpha Processor Inc. (www.alphaprocessor.com) [alphaprocessor.com]), the Samsung division who exists only to provide Alpha motherboards running Linux.

  • <I>it seems like Mandrake is always a step ahead of Red Hat</I>

    Not necessarily. It's always a matter of when a release is made.
    Usually the one who made the last release is a steap ahead. ;)

    <I>if Red Hat acquires Mandrake, I'm honestly not sure if those type of innovations would continue</I>

    I don't see this acquisition happening anytime soon (DISCLAIMER: I'm a programmer, not a business person. I don't know about future acquisition plans. I haven't said it won't happen, I haven't said it will.) - but even if it happened, innovations would go on.
    Check out all the work Red Hat has been doing in the past (and is doing right now - have you seen the new configuration tools we're working on? Check Raw Hide).

    Red Hat IS a place for innovation.
  • You answer your own question. In general, the difficulty of porting depends on the sanity of the hardware and availability of specs. Hardware that is better in this regard tends to see rapid, complete ports (many examples). Hardware that is worse (sgimips, sgimips, sgimips) tends to see partial ports to small subsets of hardware that aren't totally inscrutable.

    In most cases, the kernel can be easily ported to a well-documented architecture, but only once gcc is working properly on it. And even for well-documented architectures, porting gcc is a good deal of work; not because of gcc shortcomings but just that there is a great deal to do. Then libc must be ported, which is less work than it once was, but still can be a fair amount. Once gcc, libc, and Linux are done, the rest is pretty straightforward.

    If the processor manufacturers know that they can port a mature OS with lots of tools to their new architecture with little effort, then the risk goes down.

    Indeed. A sufficiently interesting architecture might well have a full port before a product even ships. Unfortunately, this requires the mfr to release more or less full documentation for the processor, bus(es), and supporting hardware in advance, or at least simultaneous with product release. Most refuse to do this, so their products aren't adopted very quickly. We'll see how well intermediate models (for example the IA-64 effort) work around this.

  • But, I still have not had any luck compiling a kernel for my Alpha other than the standard RH kernels. Either that, or they would be remarkably unstable. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem.

    I haven't. But I haven't tried a 2.3.x kernel either. 2.2.14 has worked very well for me. Are you trying to build a generic kernel, or one tailored for your machine?

    As far as SRM goes, I didn't realize that Compaq dropped the support for it.

    You mean they dropped AlphaBIOS...

    Maybe I should look at SRM again. It might be worth checking out. I believe I read somewhere that you could not switch back from AlphaBIOS->SRM.

    Nonsense. I don't have the SRM info offhand, but you can probably find out from www.alphalinux.org [alphalinux.org]. Changing your console firmware means simply flashing the new version in. Some systems (Multias) have the capacity for both in ROM, most don't. You don't want to flash too often though, the flash ROM has a certain lifetime. Also you probably will not be able to run NT once SRM is installed.

  • yeah, but what about logo? Red hat has their cool little guy with the hat, so Mandrake decided, "hey! we want a hat!" so, they went and got a blue top hat! what a concept! with a magic wand.. ("do you believe in magic, and i hope you do...")

  • Windows NT already runs on alphas (no comment on "runs"), albeit not as well as on comparable X86 hardware, since it has to go through a translator first.

    No, it doesn't. NT runs on Alpha in its native instruction set, though they had to bastardize the 64-bit address space to do it. The VC++ compiler for Alpha was really written by Digital, and is quite good. But AlphaNT has been abandoned, so none of that matters anymore.

    It's probably true that Microsoft used Alphas extensively for their 64-bit development. (Win2k certainly existed for Alpha, but it's not 64-bit yet.)

  • Mandrake was based off Redhat. Thats why they include RH software. But, they've seperated from RH. LM 7 is out and RH is still on 6.1 I think. They are after compatibility with RH while doing their own distribution.
  • >If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.

    There is wdm and kdm.
  • You know, someone has a complete set of these, customized for each area of North America. I'd love to find this person and nuke him.

  • As well, half the time, it won't work.

    I don't think this is part of the internationalization.

    Mike
  • Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures

    You mean they ported their changes to Redhat Linux to the Alpha, right?

    Mandrake Linux are clever in the way they produce their distro by basing it on RedHat, this make less development cost and is compatible with one of the best distros around (ok, some will prefer Debian (or Corel?), Suse, Caldera or Slackware, I know, no need for a flame war) but at least they play the game by contributing to the development of Linux contrary to a certain society that doesn't seem to be able to understand the spirit of the community on behalf of which they wish to make money (do i need to give a name?), furthermore they are French, like me ;)

  • mandrake is unstable redhat. it simply copies redhat and bolts on unstable code (dev releases) onto redhat to make it seem the latest and greatest distro. of course they did some minimal polishing and compiled for pentiums and above. personally, i stay away from this crud.
    BTW, anyone know of any linux distro that works on the sparccentre 2000 and 1000e ?? i'd love to put my old dual cpu machines to work under linux.
  • Here's my understanding of the situation. Mandrake is literally Red Hat, plus enhancements (DiskDrake, Pentium optimizations, etc). This is, and always was, its own distro: "Linux Mandrake".

    The reason that there's so much Red Hat stuff in there is that, at the heart of it, it is Red Hat.

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • These Linux products ported for Alpha are potential Microsoft killers. As Compaq quit their project on porting Windows NT to Alpha (and MS said 'we don't care anyway') Microsoft's future could get very rough.

    If you look at the problems of Intel, trying to get their Merced up and running (last I heard they got about 450 Mhz clock speeds?), there could be a problem in the evolution of ever increasing processor speeds.

    The ports of multiple Unices / Linuces to the Alpha in combination with the Intel / Microsoft problems could change the rules.

    Well, we won't see anything of it by tomorrow, but maybe within 2 years or so?

    ....these were just some thoughts

  • Not Just Redhat (Score:4)

    by Ryandav ( 5475 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @08:59AM (#1302532) Homepage Journal
    Mandrake is no longer just Redhat with pentium optimisations. If you bother to go look at their website [linuxmandrake.com]
    or at the spinoff site mandrakeuser.org [mandrakeuser.org] (a good start page for many a newbie), you detect all the signs of
    something that is more than Redhat.

    Cooker is the CVS version that gets devel work. They have several ambitious projects like Lothar,
    DrakConf, DiskDrake, and more, all independant of anything really from RH, and in my opinion,
    nicer too. The system really has a different feel top to bottom, one that I appreciate more for a desktop system.
    I'm not aware of any security level presets in RH, and there are no "preferred ftp access" type areas as per RH
    (a way to charge for updates, hello?).

    A system can be made into anything you want, distro comparison can only be based upon presets and defaults,
    and the harder to quantify "feel" of the set. This is my favorite dist of linux for home and personal use.
    It also has a very good response rate on the newbie and expert mailing lists, high Signal-to-Noise ratio.

    • You know, one of these days I'm just going to put up a clock "Days till Redhat acquires Mandrake"...
    I dunno about you, but I sure hope that Red Hat never acquires Mandrake. Currently, Mandrake is one of my favourite distros; in many ways, I consider it to be a "better Red Hat than Red Hat".

    Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Mandrake is always a step ahead of Red Hat, in terms of its extra enhancements [linux-mandrake.com] and such (DrakX, DiskDrake, DrakConf, etc). And, if Red Hat acquries Mandrake, I'm honestly not sure if those type of innovations would continue.

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • According to my information Compaq quit NT on Alpha because they had to run it through some sort of emulator to create a 32-bit environment, the resulting overhead would be so high that it would end up with speeds we're used to on an ordinary pentium.
  • I've used LM for about 7 months now. I started out with version 6.0. LM 6.0 through 6.1 used the RH installer. The main differnce between two are LM's pentium optimizations and the use of KDE as the standard desktop. This was my first experience with Linux. LM put a icon on the desktop to download and install updates. It was simple to install and it work right away for me. LM also added X configuration during the installation. That made setting up the system easy.

    LM 7 seperated from the RH install tools infavor of a pretty graphical install. It also added a tool (DraxConf) that put a lot of configuration options in one place that was easy to understand.

    LM seems to want to be a cutting edge distribution. That allows the distro to ship with features that would require the user to download and install things seperatly. That can be good and that can be bad. There are some problems with supermount that for some, seem to require disabling supermout. The installer also appearantly recognized I had a CD-R and setup SCSI emulation and set up my CD-R on /dev/scd0, but then setup fstab to mount it on /dec/cdrom.

    I like LM because it is simple to install, made updating easy, and is stable.

    Richard

  • The only emulator that ships with AlphaNT is the NTVDM, which emulates real-mode x86 for 16-bit Windows and DOS apps.

    You can download FX!32 for AlphaNT, which emulates 32-bit x86 Windows apps. It's an optional part of the system however.

    Perhaps you are referring to the fact that most ISV's didn't port their x86 apps to Alpha, so an emulator was needed for most packages (e.g. MS Office). Too bad the ISV's don't think anything but x86 exists... that I suspect is the real downfall of AlphaNT, and Microsoft's whole "NT portability" strategy.

  • Quoting from the article you link, "Currently, the industry is concerned that Compaq might turn everything right around and become the chip monopoly in the year 2000."

    Hell, what kind of stuff have those guys been smoking?

  • Thats' the general idea.

    The company I work for standardized on the NT/Alpha platform several years ago. Now that we have no OS, we have to pick out of 3 scenarios to get file and print services to our many Mac and Windoze client machines:

    Win2K on Intel
    TRU64 and a package called TAS on the Alpha's
    Alpha Linux with netatalk and Samba

    We're just starting out on our descision making process, and if I have my way, it'll all boil down to value - bang per buck spent. Last year, NT4.0 on Alpha provided the answer to that equation. One machine could serve 80+ G3 and G4 clients without breaking a sweat - I've seen Intel boxes of equivelent MHz and RAM melt with just 20 G3s. Seems to be a result of the huge I/O requirements. I can't see _anything_ in the IA32 architecture coming close to that while staying in the right price range.

    Myself , I want to keep the Alphas and get the benefits of Linux. Using Linux sweetens the bang/buck equation even more. I just have to embark on an anti-FUD campaign - you know, counter the "Who's supporting this? Can we sue if it doesn't work?" and other PHB talk. Oh, and prove netatalk 1.4 is stable, even though it's a beta.

    BTW, I have a lengthy paper on why the Alpha, it's instruction set and architecture are superior to the Merced (every time I say Itanium I get a twitch X-/), and when I find the URL for it, I'll post it - seems to have disapeared from the Compaq web site.

  • Okay ... off-topic, I know ... but I just had to
    comment on your signature line ... the quote from
    Bill Gates. That was the funniest thing I had
    ever read when I first saw it!! An easy way to
    factor prime numbers ... man, he almost sounds
    educationalized.

    Anyway, that's Microsoft's chief software
    architect for you.

    D
  • Given that the Linux kernel has been ported to a number of different architectures, and gcc supports lots of processors, my question is: How portable is Linux and the software that runs under it? The GNU tools are extremely portable. That has always been one of their design criteria. But how easy is it to take all of it and port it to new hardware?

    One very good reason for asking this question is that widespread use of highly portable free software might encourage innovation in new processors. If the processor manufacturers know that they can port a mature OS with lots of tools to their new architecture with little effort, then the risk goes down.
  • Actually, that's not entirely correct. Windows NT already runs on alphas (no comment on "runs"), albeit not as well as on comparable X86 hardware, since it has to go through a translator first. Compaq decided a while ago that since MS was not really helping it with AlphaNT, they were going to stop working on it. So, it is already "ported", but there were going to be no more updates. However, I believe Compaq may have done an about-face on this after much howling from their customers (not sure about this one). Also, for a very long time (maybe still?) Win2K would not boot on IA-64 CPUs, so the 64-bit development was being done on Alphas. This means that it's certainly possible to see Win2k on the alpha CPU, but we shall see.

    Personally, I have a Multia running linux, and it's a decent X-terminal. All this Windows-whatever doesn't really affect me, I'm waiting for someone to compile Linux with DECs compilers (shown to produce plenty of speed improvement over compiling with gcc for Alpha).

  • I have to say that Mandrake was one of the best things to happen to Redhat. Here's why. Let.s start with redhat 5.2 (which is the first distribution that Mandrake used to my knowledge). Redhat had a solid system going there. But what was it missing? That feel that would allow new-to-linux users to get a feel for the whole thing. They had that FVWM95 interface in the gui. Yucky...So Mandrake says, "Hey...let's put Kde on Redhat!" and what do you have? A really nice way to get the average windows user into linux (trust me, I pulled 20 this way). So Redhat says, "Well, sheeeet! Look at Mandrake...we gotta get some interface action going here guys!" and then the saga of enlightenment and gnome happens. And we have redhat 6.0. Well, Mandrake says, "yea, ok, they got a gui now, we can concentrate on bug fixes and updating kernels" and then we have mandrake 6.0 (with 2.2.x kernel). So then Redhat says, "Well, damn! Those Mandrake guys are on the ball!" And Caldera says, "Heh, ok guys, we'll do ya one better...We'll have a GUI INSTALLER! Hah! Top that!" And redhat says, "Ok, we gotcha there...and now we offer gnome AND kde! Eat it!" And mandrake says, " ok ok ok! You know what sucks about linux? It is such a pain to repartition your hard drive (you gotta actually BUY something to resize!) So here it is, DiskDrake! Stuff it! And here's Lothar to kick you when your down! Oh yea, redhat? We're gonna take your Sparc and Alpha ports and do the same stuff that we have been doignto them TOO!"

    I really really love open source for this...it speeds up the development cycle! Next thing you know, Redhat is going to have all of this and probably Xfree86-4 for it's next version. Of course, mandrake will follow suite shortly after, but probably with 2.4 kernel...oh, it is so cool ;)
  • I was wondering if someone could tell me the main differences between the Alpha architecture and the x86 arch? Are Alpha's RISC? 64-bit? In what areas (/applications) does an Alpha beat an x86? What about vice versa? Thanks in advance.

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