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TurboLinux Businesses

Turbolinux Not Dead Yet 210

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-seems-odd dept.
Abdul Nabi writes "I found this article on Linux Today which is a response from Turbolinux to the recent rumors of a shutdown. The responds contends that they are restructuring rather than shutting down." Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.
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Turbolinux Not Dead Yet More

Turbolinux Not Dead Yet

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  • A clip... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "We expect to be able to satisfy our US customers' needs for support and future products.

    "All three of them we still have."

    However, if I remember correctly, aren't they pretty large in Asia, specifically China?

  • Great!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great news!!

    I will buy stock first thing monday! I am going to make a FORTUNE!!

  • at least with me. The last I heard of them was when I bought copies of TurboLinux Workstation 3 and Corel Linux (unknown version) because rebates promised they would end up being free-or-almost, and I wanted more distros to play with. However, neither company ever sent rebate checks. I assumed the worst, and decided not to bother uninstalling SuSE (6?) for testing. Turned out to be a good decision - I'm currently on 8.0 Pro, and SuSE will be my only *nix distro for my PCs (I use Open BSD on my SPARC) and my main *nix environment until I get a Mac.

  • if they had a business model ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dlasley ( 221447 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:12AM (#3925949) Homepage
    giving them any market share outside of the pacific rim, turbolinux might have a small following of users in the u.s. and europe desiring proven IA-64 support (they were first to the linux market) or a really nice stable desktop for application development (ok, so no one i know personally ...). i get the impression they are part of united linux because of the strength of their usability - but SuSE is so gosh-darn usable i don't see that being their contribution to the group. their focus on the rim and a largely marginalized sector of this century's growth in professional and business computing is going to make it tough for them to make it on their own or as part of united linux.
    • Unhhh...
      The western pacific rim is currently one of the hottest growth areas. It includes Japan, the Phillipines, China, Austrailia, New Zealand, and the various islands in the indonesian sea. Sometimes it also includes India, and the rest of South-east asia.

      Now in the areas where English (or Filipino) is dominant, the other distributions have a reasonable chance. And in China it faces stiff competition from Red Flag Linux. But in the rest of the area TurboLinux seems to have a big advantage, even if I don't know what it is. And currently they have munisicle market penetration. So it's silly for them to ignore their potential stronghold, and they've decided not to. I do hope that they'll at least keep a mail-order presence in the US. But that's for my benefit, not theirs.

      P.S.: I am not and never have been a user of TurboLinux. Or Connectiva. And only one edition of SuSE. And only one edition of Open Linux. But, except for Caldera, I wish them well. (And if Ransome Love has left Caldera, I may reconsider my stand on them.)
  • Don't know that I should be proud of that though... I went to do some maintenance on the streaming computer for IIT's radio station, and I found it was running Turbo Linux. Unfortunately it's still giving us problems, and I may yet switch over to something else. Still looking at my options, though.

    On the bright side, before I had to start messing with it, it had an uptime of over 10 months!

    -Patrick

    • I have a bunch of turbo Linux copies that came with a bunch of ISA NICs that a coworker gave me.

      Now I can beowulf my 486s and break the 200mhz barrier!!!
    • HAH!

      I had a server at my old company that (until the HD died) was running kernel 2.0.36 on TurboLinux 1.4 with a maximum uptime of around 360 days (it was shut down annually over the New Year period).

  • I'm not... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Thrakkerzog ( 7580 )
    "I'm not quite dead yet.." :-)

  • Hmm, not one of the more popular distros, eh? I wonder if they ever have problems with clogged FTP servers. Though I think TurboLinux came with my q3 for Linux...not sure though. Might have been with the Linksys router.

    Hey, isnt it inevitable that some distros will go the way of the the dodo? I cannot think of anyone who runs turbolinux either, and in fact, I rarely se it mentioned on the web at the various websites.

    I guess the real question is, what is the business model going to be for a distro company that wants to cash out going to be? Will TurboLinux be able to sell their users to Red Hat?

    • Probably with the linksys router...that's were my copy came from...

      which never got installed. Mandrake works fine for me.
      • I'd never heard of TurboLinux until I bought a Linksys switch a couple of years ago. Also got another copy with my Linksys PCMCIA ethernet adaptor.

        Never installed it, but I did browse the CD. Looked very much like RedHat 6.x to me, so I never bothered with it...

  • It points out one important fact... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:18AM (#3925968)
    If you want your favorite commercial Linux distro to survive then you'd better give it more support than Lip Service.

    Have you been downloading those Mandrake ISO CDs? Great! If you are poor and/or from an under-developed country then enjoy them in true spirit of the Linux commons. BUT, if you live in the developed countries and have disposable income each month then do your part and purchase a boxed set at least once each year. Total up the license costs of the Windows OS and apps you would have to purchase to obtain what comes in most Linux distro boxed sets and compare your annual costs.

    APP Windows Linux
    OS $200 $80
    Office $200 $0 or $60 (SO)
    CAD $$$$$ $0 to $100
    Graphics $200 $0
    Animation $$$$$$$ $0 to $$$$$
    Educational $$$$$ $0 to $50
    Math $800-$2000 $0 to $250
    Science $$$$$$$ $0
    GAMES $50@ $0 to $50@
    AntiVirus $50+ N/A
    Firewalls $50-$1000 $0
    Network tools $$$$$ $0
    etc...

    Windows base costs are more than $1000. Mandrake 8.2 base cost is $80.
    Let's ignore the crashes, lost data, stolen personal info, countless security holes, MS trojan apps that phone home or add and remove software from your box at Gate's whim.
    Better bargins are hard to find.
    • I would have to agree w/ you on that one. If you have the cash, you should support your distro, no matter if it is commercial. There are lots of ways to donate to distro companies. The Gnome foundation uses paypay, for instance, and so does Gentoo. (www.gentoo.org)

      You know, it's too bad i'm a high school student w/ no disposable income, otherwise i'd be joining up w/ the mandrake club, buying boxed sets, or simply donating to gentoo (my other favorite distro.)
    • What are you talking about? The biggest reason people have been telling me to switch to linux is because it's free. Publishing studies of cost of Windows vs. Linux, and not putting a price on Linux software. Should they go back and redo those?

      If you want your favorite commercial Linux distro to survive then you'd better give it more support than Lip Service.

      Maybe you don't understand, all these people who thought Linux was going to be *free*, because the community advertised that way, would only want it to survive so they can get free software. Please stop advertising Linux as free if companies are going to try the "we're underpaid/always in debt/working for the community/ so give us money, by the way, software is free" bit. Are they going to sell software or not?
      • Free as in speech, not free as in beer.

        The point is however, that the original poster said commercial Linux distro. If you want free as in beer use a noncommercial Linux Distro such as Debian [debian.org].

        -- iCEBaLM
      • You want free software? You get free software. No biggie. As long as the GPL (and other open licenses) exist, Linux and like will always be available.

        The point I see about Linux distros, is that they package up what you need for convenience sake. Don't want to support a Linux distro? Fine. Don't expect it to stick around.

        Even RMS doesn't have a problem charging people for convenience. The emacs manual is GPLd, but you can still buy a dead tree version from the FSF.

        So, grab what you need now and don't contribute, but no fair whining when Turbolinux bellies-up.

        An alternative to contributing $$$ is go ahead and contribute some brainpower. Nobody calls Larry Wall a leach.
    • The true cost of Windows Apps

      Windows (downloaded from usenet warez newsgroup) $0
      Office $0
      CAD $0
      Graphics $0
      Animation $0
      Educational $0
      Math $0
      Science $0
      GAMES $0
      AntiVirus $0
      Firewalls $0
      Network tools $0
    • There is a small flaw to your argument. If we are truly going to support Open Source, then we'd have to purchase all of the applications you list above as well as the OS.

      Open Office, the Gimp, CAD (I don't use this), etc., all require maintainers who I'm sure need our support also. I use Open Office and the Gimp on my Widows box, and I'm somewhat shame-faced to say that I did just download them for free.

      Adding those apps in would raise the base cost of the Linux system, although still not to the cost of a comparable Widows system.

      Just for random mumblings, I'm trying to think out-loud here about what could make money for an Open Source vendor like Red Hat or Mandrake. At home, I have 3 systems: one Linux NAT-Firewall and two desk top systems. If a vendor were to offer a home support contract that automatically updated three to five machines for $30, $40, or even $50 a year, I think that would be great. Newbies could have their hand holding, and the vendor gets an assured revenue stream. Major upgrades should be available too (new kernel version, etc.) under the same contract.

      It'd work for me. In fact, I'd consider even $50 per year -- about the same as one game -- to be a good bargin. Would this work for anyone else? (Remember, it's a home support contract, not for a more complex business installation.)

    • Are you mad? (Score:5, Funny)

      by NDPTAL85 ( 260093 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @12:20PM (#3926349)
      Surely you're not suggesting that the hordes of Free Software/Open Source users actually PAY for any of the software that they use. Don't you remember? "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!". Nevermind that RENT WANTS TO BE PAID or FOOD WANTS TO BE BOUGHT, but when it comes to software all the rules in the universe are reversed and those who write software for a living are not supposed to actually be able to make a living. Those lucky few programmers are supposed to live on forestland communes where they forage for fruits and berries while their latest kernel compiles with the -hunger flag.

      Frankly you disgust me by implying that we should enable certain free software developers to live in dignity via getting paid for what they most likely spent 4 years in college learning what to do. Only EVIL people such as Doctors, Entertainers, Lawyers, OTHER kidns of Engineers and such go to college to get ew... PAYING jobs and professions. The most honorable Computer Science graduates however nobly sacrifice their highly marketable skills for the greater good. To suggest that a CS grad should be able to afford moving himself or his family out of his mother's basement is an affront to the FSF, GNU, Slashdot and the entire Free Software Community! SHAME ON YOU SIR!
    • Your just talking out of your ass. I would say that windows has just as much free software as linux. Your just bashing MS. Someone please mod this down.

    • Or you can simply use Debian GNU/Linux and contribute by helping them documenting/testing/coding.
      There is non-commercial distribution of Linux that avoid this financial problem. Debian is one - and a great one too.

      J.
    • I did my part. Just bought SuSE linux 8.0 pro last week. 80 bucks. It was WORTH IT! I agree with you wholeheartedly that our Linux companies need our support and help in order to stay in business. I have purchased SuSE 7.1 (also excellent distro), mandrake 7.1, and the aforementioned suse 8. I believe the only way we will get more hardware/software support is if we do this.
    • And TurboLinux Asia Pacific will be soon.

      TurboLinux US may be shutting down, or it may be downsizing in the same way that Suse did last year.

      In my view, the real lesson to be learned is that you should not believe things you read on disreputable web sites.

    • I don't buy Linux to support the distros. (I figure I've done my part by accepting my reduced earning potential and new, less interesting job.) I buy Linux for the packaging and cover art.

      -a

  • These comm. distro troubles are not surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:19AM (#3925970) Homepage
    While competition is a good thing, too much competition in a small market will kill some of the competitors.
    I wonder how many commercial distros will be left in some years. RedHat, Suse, Debian of course, but others ?
    Well, you'll have a steady flow of small/niche distros appearing and going bankcrupt soon after. But I doubt we'll see any other big wonks.
    • Debian, of course, is a non-commercial community supported distro.

      Obviously, however, this doesn't mean it doesn't require an influx of money to support servers, website maintainence, bandwidth for downloads and so forth.

      It would be interesting to see an article written up about the finances that go on behind a non-profit operating system, though.

    • " While competition is a good thing, too much competition in a small market will kill some of the competitors."

      It's just part of the cycle any new product goes through. A Century ago when Automobles were a new product there were dozens of auto companies for each one that survives today. The same for Airplanes.

      Anytime a new product is developed that isn't closed to new entrants the early stage is for lots of people to jump into the new market. We saw this phase deliver 100s of Linux distros. This is followed by a shakeout phase where more people get out of a crowdwed market than new entries come in. Welcome to phase II.

  • They're getting out of the US business (Score:4, Informative)

    by blackcat++ ( 168398 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:21AM (#3925979)
    Basically, they are shutting down their US dependance to reduce cost. The US market is overcrowded with Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Caldera who all try to sell support and services, too. So Turbolinux is going back to their home market where the competition is not that stiff.

    We've already seen this with SuSE back in August last year when they layed off 30 of their US staff. [suse.com]
    • Yes, and if this UnitedLinux thing comes to fruition, there's no reason why TurboLinux or SuSE should have much of a presence in the USA - Caldera is handling this part of the world for them.

      It may have been forced on them by commercial market realities, but you could almost call it a plan.
      • Absolutely. UnitedLinux allows them to focus their resources in the strong home markets while still representing the second-most used distribution in the enterprise space.

        RedHat has to invest huge sums of money to get a presence in a foreign market, then build a userbase and hope that some day the new office will break even.
        • They are not getting out of the US, BSD is not dead, Slackware is not dead, but you are a trolling dumbass.

          Are you warm enough? See my top post.
          • I never said BSD was dead. I never said Slackware was dead. What I said was that the market for support and services in the enterprise space is overcrowded because there are

            a) already many distributions to choose from
            b) these distributors nowadays offer all support and service contracts themselves because that's where the money is.

            That's why I didn't mention the *BSDs or Slackware: they simply don't matter in this regard.

            You can always differ, and I'm certainly not always right. But the language you use shows who the troll really is.

  • TurboLinux? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by xtremex ( 130532 )
    I tried Turbo back in 2000, it was HORRIBLE. It seemed very much like a RedHat ripoff, with nothing extra. Plus, it didn't perform well for me..so I dropped it from my repertoire.
    • I tried TurboLinux and the one thing that sticks in my memory was one of the help texts in the install, which talked about a certain library being "Required for your Redhat system." Not only had they blatantly ripped RH's package descriptions, but they didn't even bother to change the name to their own. That, and the tools were mediocre... turbolinuxcfg, etc.

  • Good logic (Score:2, Insightful)

    by h00pla ( 532294 )
    Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

    I don't know of a single person I know that owns a Ferrari, so I guess they'll be going bankrupt soon!

    Your OSDN cousins over at Linuxgram screwed up - face it!

    I wonder when VA [insert latest name] will be going belly up? I don't know one person who ever bought the commerical version of SourceForge, so using the TurboLogic...

  • Recently tried it (Score:2, Informative)

    by BuBu_ ( 72690 )
    I was recently in a bit of a sporting mood so I downloaded TurboLinux 7 workstation.. I wouldn't recommend it at all to anyone, it's terrible.. sorta seems like someone takes a linux kernel, installs windows on top of it and hands it to you.. I'm running a 1ghz p3 with 512mb of ram (PC133@Cas 2) and after a standard boot of it I had something like 33mb of ram free.. thats just terrible! my xp machine isn't even THAT bad.
    • Um, you realize of course that most distros start with alot of services running and you have to disable the ones you don't need. That's step one from the linux security book. Also linux precaches many things and if another app needs the ram a sleeping process is using, it gets written to disk and the new app gets the ram. It's called efficient memory usage, you should read up on it. Coming from a windows world you may not be aware of it.

      • If you run debian, check out these meta-packages:
        harden
        harden-environment
        harden -servers
        harden-remoteflaws
        harden-localflaws
        h arden-clients
        harden-nids
        harden-remoteautdit
        h arden-surveillance

        Each of these packages declares "Conflicts:" with other packages that have some security implications. For instance, here is the description of harden-remoteflaws:
        Harden-remoteflaws is intended to help the administrator to avoid packages that are known to have security flaws that allows a remote user access to the system without permission. Normally an update manages this but sometime you just want to check for security changes and then this package can help.
        .
        If you want to avoid packages that local users can use to compromise the system you should look at the harden-localflaws instead.
        .
        If you want to avoid packages that can compromise computers on 3rd parties you should look at the harden-3rdflaws instead.
        .
        NOTE! This package will not make your system uncrackable, and it is not intended to do so. Making your system secure involves a LOT more than just installing a package.
    • You are so much smarter than the Turbolinux coders, the investors, and the companies that sell Turbolinux preinstalled on their servers (IBM, Gateway, Compaq, HP, NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, SGI...)

      You should get a cookie!
      You probably are certified A+ !

      Can you feel the heat around you?

      fdisk3hs
    • No, what apparently you guys didn't get before you came back here and flamed me (oh.. thats right, look at where I'm posting, why didn't I realize). I did strip down not only what I installed (ie so I didn't have anything extra running) but I also disabled unneeded services, and I turned off anything I didn't need, I didn't just "hop" into linux yesterday kids, I've been doing this for a while so I naturally assumed thats what one should of done out of the box so I didn't feel the need to mention it.
  • I was using Turbolinux 6.
    Until I heard they were shuting operations down last week. :-)

  • CmdrTaco? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tahpot ( 237053 )

    Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

    Since when was CmdrTaco the be all and end all?

    • It's not just Taco. Go to alt.os.linux and ask who is running TurboLinux. I doubt you'd get many responses.

      Red Hat (my personal favorite), Debian, Mandrake, Slack, and SuSE seem to be the big players.

      I'm not saying there's no place in the world for Turbo - just that I've never known anyone who uses it.
    • Not for nothing, but he does run a giant linux oriented technical blog that has tens if not hundreds of thousands of readers. He probably receives more personal email than many of us recieve in spam. His position has taken him to many convensions and talks that have linux users from around the world recongizing and talking to him.

      So, yeah, if *I* say I can't think of anyone who runs TurboLinux, it's really not a big deal. If CmdrTaco says it, it does mean something.
  • Come on - everybody who is capable of reasonable thinking knew that this just might be a restructure or that they are only closing American offices, or whatnot. Similar thing happened with SuSE and they still operate just fine. Well, maybe the fact that Taco doesn't know any TurboLinux users means that nobody runs it. And just maybe closing American offices is the same as going under. Until now I foolishly thought that these were not necessarily the same thing but I sure am glad that the better educated news reporters of slashdot enabled me to see the light. Gladly this is not exactly the first time that we see pure rumours posted as news. After all, who gives a damn whether news people check their facts or not?
  • "Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems."

    Isn't that what this Linux business is all about? Where anyone can build their own flavor of the OS, modify it, etc? Star-power shouldn't be a measure of a distribution's signifigance. Plus, I can think of several companies that have/have had "big names" and still tanked.

  • Who uses turbolinux? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    TL ain't too bad ...

    My company has something like 20 TL servers, 5 of which are using TurboCluster for clustered management (used to be more, but, now we use Tomcat and it does its own load management)...

    We have not had any problems with the TurboLinux *nixware...
  • It was the first linux I installed myself, and it was almost amazing that the thing worked. I was using version 6, which was pretty tolerable once it was working.

    It was a RedHat derivitive, and the utilites sometimes randomly ceased to work. The package management accounted for dependencies, but was so intertwined that even little installs would become huge downloads quickly.

    I stopped using it when the various Turbolinux RPM mirrors ceased to exist, and when it's version of RPM became outdated verses the rpm packages that were becoming predominant.

    After using it, I switched to Slackware, which I still happily use. Turbolinux was just too annoying and lacking as far as a userbase and support base for me to stay with it.

    ~geogeek

  • Pixie dust (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sneakums ( 2534 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @11:04AM (#3926092)
    Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

    Yeah, like your friends are so special.

    • Well, I can't either, but then I live in the US, and their major stronghold is in Japan. I suspect that if I used Japanese, I would see strengths in them that totally pass me by as an English user. E.g., it was only with around Red Hat 7.3 that I started seeing hiragana in my spam. Now either I didn't get it earlier, or either KMail or the font system was upgraded to display it quite recently.

  • big in japan (Score:3, Insightful)

    by oktaya ( 267014 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @11:06AM (#3926098) Homepage
    As far as I know Turbolinux is pretty 'big in Japan'. After Redhat and SuSE (in europe), they might even be the most 'sold' distribution.

    • Yeah, but Bon Jovi are still 'big in Japan'

    • Re:big in japan (Score:2, Informative)

      by BJH ( 11355 )
      Not really. Japan is pretty much sewn up by VineLinux (a Japanese-only distribution, which is why you've never heard of it).

      TurboLinux was reasonably popular a couple of years ago, but they switched from selling a packaged distribution to having it pre-installed on servers sold by large manufacturers. I don't actually know anybody using it, though...
  • It's sleeping.

  • turbo, not so turbo ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <<kt.celce> <ta> <eb>> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @11:13AM (#3926123) Homepage Journal
    Well the reason that turbo linux came out way back in the day was because it was optimized for higher end machines. Something that RedHat, Caldera, Slack, and Debian hadn't done, yet. The basic demise of Turbo's market hold came out when Mandrake came out. Mandrake took the ease of RedHat and brought the optimizations that RedHat users wanted. Along with a few extra packages that RedHat wouldn't carry (IE: KDE), Mankdrake brought about where linux would be going.

    Turbo to this day has an installer that can compete only with slackware and debian, if you noticed neither of those installers are actually what anyone would call "user friendly". But they weren't designed to be user friendly they were designed to install their distribution. Turbo's marketshare is in Asia and Southern America. Europe and the US see RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian and think that the other distros of the past are dead.

    Has anyone here every looked at the list [linuxhq.com] of linux distributions out there today? It's not like there is a perfect distro for everyone. I wouldn't say Turbo was dead, just like I wouldn't say that and OSS project is dead. A dead OSS project is unknown because someone has forgotten about it. If there is at least one person who knows and uses a distro/software then it's not dead.

    On a wee bit of a side note, if you want to count how success and whether or not something is alive by monetary values. How much money can one really expect to make on something that is free? I'm not trying to start a Open Source flamefest, but just identifying the original intent of Open Source, freedom. Can you put a price on freedom? I can't.

  • It's too bad, really. I remember running TurboLinux 6.0 and loving it. I gave up on them because a year went by and there wasn't anything new. Actually, that version of TruboLinux ran better for me than any other distro that I had tried at the time.

  • Man, I love that line. I'm going to try it:

    "Dad, er. You know all that money you sent me? You know how I promised that it would last me the full term? Well, uh, I'm not broke *exactly*, but I'm currently restructuring. Yeah. And food would help the process, yes. I expect to be cashflow-positive by Q3 2003. "

  • Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

    Just because you aren't personally aware of something does not mean that it doesn't exist.

    CmdrTacoKnowledge != { SumAllHumanKnowledge(); }

  • Ya know.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sir Joltalot ( 66097 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @12:04PM (#3926292) Homepage
    I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Connectiva. But that doesn't mean they're in trouble. Connective just isn't all that popular where I live (Britain). Similarly, Turbolinux isn't that popular stateside or here. But just like Connectiva is really popular in Brazil, Turbolinux is really popular in Korea, China, Japan and other areas of Asia.

    < rant > I know this is slashdot, but for some reason I was under the impression that the blokes who actually posted the stories had something at least partially resembling a clue. Maybe the reason that you don't know anybody who uses Turbolinux, dear poster, is that you almost certainly live in the states! Sigh. < /rant >
    • I know this is slashdot, but for some reason I was under the impression that the blokes who actually posted the stories had something at least partially resembling a clue.

      I find your faith refreshing.

      Maybe the reason that you don't know anybody who uses Turbolinux, dear poster, is that you almost certainly live in the states! Sigh.
      Hmmm, I don't know anyone who requires insulin injections, so I'm going to assume that nobody on earth does.

  • "Slashpot, Trolls Wrong Again" - AP Wire Report (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fdisk3hs ( 513270 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @12:08PM (#3926302) Homepage
    Turbolinux is dead, eh? Then why is their distribution preinstalled on servers from these manufacturers:

    IBM x135, xSeries
    Gateway
    Compaq Proliant
    HP (duh) tc2110 rc7100
    NEC
    Hitachi
    Fujitsu
    SGI

    They are also working with these manufacturers to customize code in the kernel and various apps to increase performance / reliability under heavy load under specific configurations for specific applications.

    This whole discussion is absurd, don't think it's time to retire the Turbolinux icon yet, Captain Burrito.

    Google search Turbolinux+preinstalled+server would give you a free clue, but then what would everyone do with all their spare time...

    Why aren't you people coding?

    BTW I was using Turbolinux as a desktop before I relegated the machine to more mundane tasks, and describing the distro as 'horrible' is just silly. I actually found it much more flexible at install time than Slackware (in 2.2.x days), although with the five-disk-Slack install now there are lots of module options etc...

    Home users trolling about what is largely a server distribution is again, silly (slaps your wrist)...

    fdisk3hs
  • >> Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.
    In the Central Florida LUG, Linux Enthusiasts And Professionals [leap-cf.org] there is at least one user according to our latest informal poll. [leap-cf.org]

    Results from the October 2000 and July 2001 polls are here:

    Oct. 2000 [leap-cf.org]
    July 2001 [leap-cf.org]

    Over the years, Red Hat, Debian, and Mandrake have consistantly been the top distros of choice...
  • Redhat:
    1998 - Lost $3 million
    1999 - Lost $6 million
    2000 - Lost $42 Million
    2001 - Lost $86 million
    2002 - Lost $140 million (Redhat's fiscal 2002 has already ended)

    Mandrake:
    Lost 3.6 million euros in the 1st 6 months of this year, lost 7 million euros in the 6 months before that.

    Yep, that "give the product away for free and make money on service and support" businesss model is really working well.

    Open Source is great for amateur programming geeks who like to tinker with code, but it is failing miserably as a business model.
  • I think it is about time they merge and get more done instead of wasted efforts. I am not saying "make one Linux distro", but that there are many that are pretty much alike, and they would be stronger from either cooperating or merging. It was save some people that could do better stuff (write documentation is no 1 on my list any day).
  • Thus spake CmdrTaco:

    Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux.

    Oh my friend, is that perhaps because you live in the US, and Turbolinux is strong in the Asian Market [google.com] ?

    Cheers,
    Don Inodoro

    • Amazing how a simple Google search is always more informative than a Slashdot story...
      Hmmm...
      I think I used to just read news.cnet.com and it was real journalism...

      What the hell,

      Good bye.

      fdisk3hs
  • Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

    Actually, from what I understand, they are very popular in the Asian markets. Just like Redhat is to the US, or SuSE to Germany/europe. And honestly, I like it that way. It fits with the "locally produced" theory of higher quality, better understanding of the end user, and local economy.

    • The reason you think that way is that Turbo focused on server rather than desktop Linux. They had several good server products including IA64, IMB's eServer Linux for mainframes, better than Red Hat's, in my opinion. SuSE was the other solid player in that space. When RH finally released their GA S/390 Linux it had a lot of problems, still IBM went with RH and SuSE as the second. IBM to some extent played a role in the demise of Turbo, in my opinion, because it didn't reliably back up Turbo as its Buss. Partner. The other part was mismanagement of financial reserves Turbo had in the amount of over $15ml only 1.5yr ago. When you rent two almost empty huge building floors in the Bay Area and keep paying big rentals, what do you expect of you cash reservers to become? It was 100% waste, the other was failed merger with Linuxcare that took several $mls as well.
  • The LinuxGram article is deliberately misleading.

    The first line of the Linuxgram article says, "Turbolinux, one of the four main Linux commercializers, closed down on Monday, multiple sources say." However, Maureen had already talked to Ashok Pandey and Koichi Yano thus there is no way Maurene O'Gara seriously believed that TurboLinux was closing.

    "The company could not be reached for comment late last night when reports started filtering in." And yet she managed to talk to the presidents of the Asia Pacific and Japan operations.

    "So has the so-called TurboLabs in New Mexico where it was supposed to be working on storage, high-availability and HPC." Cue the X-Files theme song... What did you think they were working on???

    "By some reports, the company's Asian operations in Japan and China, its original base, have also been closed." Except that Maureen O'Gara already knew that these reports were false.

    "Employees have reportedly not been paid for the July 1-15 period yet and the company supposedly owes a half-million dollars to its lawyers Morrison Forrester." At my last job, I worked two weeks, handed in my time card and got paid two weeks later. Perhaps it works the same way at TurboLinux. Only Maureen O'Gara would try to make the ordinary process of getting paid every two weeks a sign that Linux business was not viable.

    The rest of the article is the same blend of biased half truths with a misleading spin.

    I do not know why LinuxGram prints this kind of crap all day long. Their other stories are exactly the same. It's all misleading, and I can't think of any motive for it.

    I do hope they go out of business soon. To paraphrase CmdrTaco, "I can't think of a single person who reads LinuxGram." I can't imagine how they stay in business as it is. Perhaps they have some other source of income.

    • They had this last layoffs at Turbo from what was left from the last year's layoffs, what was left from the prev. y's layoffs, etc. So, when the Turbo's current CEO Ly Huang Pham says they're still surviving how credible that is? What is surviving?, few managers who mismanaged their resources? Obviously, in the series of layoffs managers were able to keep their positions, some left on their own, but the bottom line is that managers had no credible buss model for that company in the time like this, the only solution they have is to layoff more people. So, LinuxGram's reporting that Turbolinux is going under is not far from the truth even if they missed something.
      • "the bottom line is that managers had no credible buss model for that company in the time like this,"

        Please post again when you aren't high.

        "So, LinuxGram's reporting that Turbolinux is going under is not far from the truth even if they missed something."

        My point was not that they missed something but that they completely and deliberately missed everything. Should you trust a website that tries to misinform at every turn?
  • Turbolinux Not Dead Yet

    Of course not. That won't happen until tomorrow, silly.
  • People wonder about why TurboLinux is still around when they know nobody who uses it. The reason it's still around is because it has one killer feature: Japanese support. It is the only distro with good Japanese support. Other distros have a hodgepodge of Japanese implemented but they are nowhere near as thorough (sure Japanese might work in the installer, but will it work in your shell? Will your file manager let you easily see Japanese filenames? etc.)

    In addition it also supports other East Asian languages better than any other distro but Japanese is the most important since Japan has the best track record for actually paying money for software.

    You see, supporting languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. is not just a matter of translating the text in your application. The big problem is actually supporting the multibyte text format itself in every display. Most applications expect text to be one byte per character, and they format text that way and always render as ASCII. You can patch the graphical text rendering functions to render Japanese automatically but if the application still assumes that the text area is a certain size it will look fucked up. Not only that, but Linux uses a real hodgepodge of display mechanisms so you have to frantically patch to get them all.

    TurboLinux is still behind Japanese Windows and Japanese MacOS in terms of ability to use Japanese/Chinese/Korean text anywhere you can use Roman text. This has really hurt the acceptance of Linux in East Asia.... but TurboLinux is getting better at least.

    So far no other distro has come anywhere near as close as Turbo in support. If Turbo dies then Linux in East Asia will suffer a major blow from which it may not recover. (Red Flag Linux might survive, but RFL *STILL* not as good in terms of Chinese-language support as Turbo).

    If you want to find a user of Turbo in the U.S. to see, look for someone who speaks Japanese. :-)
  • Since the beginning of the last year, when Ly Huong Pham took over as the CEO at Turbolinux Inc., there's nothing but problems for that company. Some of the problems were created before she became the head, but on the other hand whatever was left was mismanaged, in my opinion. She didn't react fast enough to the changing reality of the broader global market while let the Asia-Pacific operations in China, Korea and Japon to create their own independent business entities. Therefore, when the US division in Brisbane, CA, became short of cash there was no way to rescue it by reallocating assets from Asia. As it turned out it was the Asian divisions that had better cash flow than the US' Turbo. But she herself created this situation in the first place. When she went to Korea and talked to Samsung's managers everyone admired her intelligence. But that meant really nothing business wise. It was a PR on-the-road show.

    The other point is that in the latest disclaimer by the Turbo's CEO on Linuxtoday.com, she was "...blaming the reorganization on the withdrawal of a still unidentified investor from a round of funding." What kind of round finding?, they already had III rounds of funding of which nothing is left. Now, when someone pulls out from the next round of funding and that means the new round of layoffs (called "reorganization") what does that say about the company's health? It means they're so strapped for cash that even one investor means making it or else. It's a dire straits situation. So, let Ly Huong Pham better stop deluding other people that Turbolinux Inc. in the US can survive, I wouldn't mind if she stepped down altogether, because there's no basis to show that her reign will do any good.

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