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Red Hat Software Businesses Linux Business

Red Hat Linux 9 Release And Interview 345

Posted by timothy from the why-the-kitchen-sink-got-left-out dept.
Gentu writes "Red Hat Linux 9 has been released to the official mirrors, brace for impact! Additionally, OSNews features an interview with Red Hat Linux's manager, Matt Wilson and they discuss everything from mp3/dvd playback, to Randr, dependancy policies and more." Also on the Red Hat front, DdJ writes "So, I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit this morning, and checked the news to find out why. It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product. Both appear to be based on Java/Tomcat, which would mean it's not Zope-based or Zend-based. But, they're supposedly open source. Anyone have any further info on this stuff yet?" Update: 04/08 05:24 GMT by T : Don't forget that the new Red Hat release is available through BitTorrent, too.
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Red Hat Linux 9 Release And Interview More

Red Hat Linux 9 Release And Interview

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  • RedHat Enterprise Application Suite (Score:5, Informative)

    by abcxyz ( 142455 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:48PM (#5680822) Homepage
    Here's a quote from an article [internetnews.com] that indicates that the source code is include with the two products:

    "Red Hat promised that its CMS solution could get a company up to speed with content management in as little as two months. The J2EE-compliant software will be delivered with source code included, and provides a workflow-based engine for managing content on the intranet, extranet and Internet settings."

    The article doesn't discuss whether it is Tomcat based or not, but did grow froma product acquired by RedHat from Ars Digita around 15 months ago. It will be initially available on Red Hat Linux, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. (News from the AIIM Conference in MA.)

    -- Rick

  • Version 9... will the next version be called (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:53PM (#5680848)
    Red Hat Linu X ?

  • Red Hat 9 for Workstation (Score:5, Informative)

    by mahdi13 ( 660205 ) <icarus.lnx@gmail.com> on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:55PM (#5680861) Journal
    I've been using RH 9 on my laptop and Home PC for the last couple of days and if you don't mind the minor problems of no mp3 or DVD playback out-of-the-box and the new threading (and glibc 2.3.2) really causing problems with Wine...it's a great release. Much more refined then the 8 release (and the menus make more since to use)

    To get around the Wine problem you need to "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 " and "rm -rf ~/.wine/wineserver*" The Wineserver has been resolved with WineHQ's CVS and the other branches are picking up now. The threading problems with the kernel might take some time...
    • Just to add to that, if you pull Wine CVS you need to compile with the --with-nptl option - the intention is for it to become detected at runtime so the configure option will die, but for now that's your best bet.

      Good luck -mike (with my wine developers hat on)

    • OFFTOPIC - "rm -rf" hint (Score:5, Informative)

      by belloc ( 37430 ) <{moc.liamnital} {ta} {colleb}> on Monday April 07, 2003 @04:02PM (#5681364) Homepage
      Regarding this command format:
      rm -rf ~/.wine/wineserver*
      I've found that in general I am much more at peace if I put the "-rf" part of that command after the directory, so that the command given above, for example, becomes
      rm ~/.wine/wineserver* -rf
      That way, you're protected against the (admittedly rather remote) possibility that you might somehow hit the ENTER key right after you've typed only part of the command, say,
      rm -rf ~/
      which would be something of a disaster, or at least an inconvenience (backup recovery time, etc.). Of course you can do tricks like aliasing the "rf" command to include a switch that prompts you before removal, like many distros do, but that sort of defeats the power of the "-f" switch for recursive removal.

      If it helps only one person...

      Belloc
      • The '-i' option on most rm commands requests confirmation before performing each task. Which is a great option, except if the directory is a zillion files and subdirectories, in which case its too many 'y's to answer.

        I'd like to suggest an -I option, which would provide all the goodness that we've come to know and love from -i EXCEPT that answering 'YES' (all caps, full word) would cause rm to stop asking and keep rm-ing everything.

        I'd even make the new '-I' the default behavior of rm unless overridden w
    • I know there are those around here who think I am a Microsoft shill or whatever, but I have to admit my recent installation of Red Hat 8 on my laptop impressed me, from the installer to the professional documentation. A few minor errors (and no sound in TuxRacer for some reason), but all in all, the very nice look of the GUI and usable configuration tools means I will be trying 9...as soon as I can get it downloaded...

      • Re:Red Hat 9 for Workstation (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bogie ( 31020 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @05:45PM (#5682015) Journal
        That's why you shouldn't prejudge something without using it.

        Most people around here who give Red Hat crap haven't used it in years and know little about it. Its just easier to parrot stupid comments like "Red Hat is bloated" or "Red Hat is like M$" then to take the time to use it and learn about it.

        Red Hat may sometimes do things "their own way", but so does every other distro. The difference is Red Hat, unlike say Gentoo, gets no slack(no pun intended) for changes they want to make. Everyone like to assume the worst and give them crap.

  • Stock Price (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BadBlood ( 134525 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:57PM (#5680883)
    The entire market is up today, so I would not base any increases in RedHat's price soley on a product release. As of closing, RedHat's price increase is not statistically significant when compared to the rest of the market.

    • SP500 up 0.2 %, RHAT up 3.0 % (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh, that is "statisticially significant".
    • A good point in general, but I watch RHAT every day, and when there's a spike of the sort seen early this morning, it's almost always the case that there is a news item that can at least partially explain it. (My officemates joke with me about how RHAT usually does the opposite of what the market does anyway.)

  • Idiot's guide to NPTL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Enry ( 630 ) <enry AT wayga DOT net> on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:58PM (#5680887) Journal
    Can someone speaking relatively technical* explain what is so cool about NPTL?

    *as in, I'm not a coder, but am an experienced sys admin.

    • Re:Idiot's guide to NPTL (Score:5, Informative)

      by pyros ( 61399 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:08PM (#5680965) Journal
      Linux has long had inferior support for threading. (please don't let this start a flamewar, it's what I've read over and over and over). So large multi-threaded applications (like huge databases) ran better on solaris than linux. NPTL is a new threading library which improves Linux's threading support. The downside is that a bunch of stuff doesn't work with it yet. If you're having trouble with, for example, Java 1.3 apps, you can set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable to "2.4.1" or "2.2.5" as a workaround.

    • Re:Idiot's guide to NPTL (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:11PM (#5680982)
      The Native Posix Threading Lib (IIRC) is something Ingo cooked up in addition to the O(1) scheduler, and a few other goodies. Previously, posix threads could only have a couple hundred threads going concurently on ANY hardware. It just couldn't scale past that.

      With NPTL, Ingo on a dual proc box (granted, a nice one) was able to get 16,000 concurent threads going, and the IO system wasn't suffocated, the CPU's wern't useless, and you could still browse the web.

      Granted, these threads wern't doing much, but they were alive, and switching in and out of context.

      This means the foundation can scale to effectivly any size, and so long as the hardware can keep up, you'll be fine. You can now unleash your massivly multithreaded java apps (and what not. That's just the easiest example).

      This doesn't help you if you need more than 4-8 CPU's on an intel platform, but it gets you a lot closer. If you want something that can parallelize that far, you really need something like Sun's e12k or e15k. IIRC, the DoD commissioned an e15k farm with a total of 4096 CPU's to model the first few nanoseconds of nuclear explosions. It had to be a single system image for various reasons, so don't go crying beowulf.
  • Where's the bittorrent link from the last article? I'm seeding it, but that won't help if noone has the .torrent file.

  • Red Hat CMS is OpenACS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:58PM (#5680892)
    IIRC, Red Hat CMS is a branded version of Ars Digita's OpenACS. Probably worth a look, as it seems to be less dependent on Tcl these days (though I'm still a Zopist).

    They also offer "Red Hat Database", which is essentially PostgreSQL. (It takes a bit of digging to figure this out.)

    It's unfortunate (to me, at least) that Red Hat insists on "polluting the namespace" by branding recognized open-source projects in this way. Are they really adding enough distinctive value to these products to justify distinction, and the resulting confusion?

    • It's not just branded - they ended up buying arsDigita last year.

    • Re:Red Hat CMS is OpenACS (Score:5, Informative)

      by Grax ( 529699 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:15PM (#5681010) Homepage
      ArsDigita never made "Open"ACS. ArsDigita created ACS as an open source toolkit supporting the Oracle database. The OpenACS project came about when ArsDigita decided to make their Java project which is what has become Redhat CCM.

      Red Hat purchased all of ArsDigita's assets and this project belongs entirely to them now.

      OpenACS [openacs.org] currently is a TCL/AOLServer based project that supports Oracle and PostgreSQL.

      RedHat has made what looks like an effort to reduce confusion by renaming the "Red Hat Database" project as "PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition" http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/ [redhat.com]
      • ArsDigita never made "Open"ACS. ArsDigita created ACS as an open source toolkit supporting the Oracle database. The OpenACS project came about when ArsDigita decided to make their Java project which is what has become Redhat CCM.

        This is true. In fact, ArsDigita's new VC-installed managers decided the original ACS, written in TCL, wasn't buzzword-compliant enough, so they had the whole thing rewritten in Java. But in fact the Java version was never really finished when ArsDigita went under.

        Red Hat purc
    • "It's unfortunate (to me, at least) that Red Hat insists on "polluting the namespace" by branding recognized open-source projects in this way"

      I don't think so. This way, no matter what they do with it, it doesn't negatively impact the given product. If they do a great job, then it will keep people from having too high of a view of the base project. If they do a bad job, it will keep people from thinking poorly of the base project.

  • Zope? (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by The AtomicPunk ( 450829 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:58PM (#5680893)
    So what, because it's not Zope based, it can't be open source? I don't follow your flippant remark at the end.
    • So what, because it's not Zope based, it can't be open source? I don't follow your flippant remark at the end.

      The submittor probably did the typical if ( $Language == Proprietary ) OpenSource = false; style logic. Because Java is owned by C, anything written in Java is evil. You can apply this formula to most things around here, actually.

      The submittor could also have some hard on for Zope and PHP, like those people who think that there is only one language for all problems.
  • Too bad I couldn't get the bloody thing to work. I was finally convinced on giving Red Hat Linux a try, so I went so far as to buy a Red Hat Network subscription last week just so I could go ahead and download and burn Red Hat 9. Once that was done, I went ahead and started installing Red Hat 9. Once it reached the part fairly early on where the GUI installer was to take over, my monitor went blank, and it displayed an error message saying the video signal was out of range. I rebooted, and tried install
    • Call Red Hat for installation support, it should be free with your subscription IIRC. If you don't want to do that, you good read the online documentation to find the boot loader options to set the installer's resolution manually rather than by probing.

    • Re:That's All Nice and Dandy, But... (Score:5, Informative)

      by blind_abraxas ( 446151 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:18PM (#5681031)

      Redhat's GUI installer isn't the greatest, in my experience.

      Installing 8.0 and 9.0 in most scenarios I've dealt with weren't that difficult, and anaconda had no problem detecting the monitor and video to run the GUI install, but several times it just didn't work out. I've experienced snafus trying to install 8.0 on a brand new out of the box HP machine from CompUSA. Intel P4 2-something Ghz, 512MB ram, so on, so forth. The installer had some sort of issue with the monitor or video card. Since failure was not an option, I did it the hard (not really) way, and installed in text mode. No big deal, install went great, Xconfiguration was just fine.

      Snafus happened with a Micron PC with an AMD Athlon something or other and an Nforce chipset with integrated what-have-yous. Installed in text mode, after that it was easy as pie. Unfortunately the machine was unstable (probably a faulty power supply), it developed a nasty habit of rebooting or freezing in the middle of navigating Apache.org (apparently when running windows previously similar behaviour was exhibited).

      Moral of the story: If you want it bad enough to actually pay attention to what you're doing and the pretty install doesn't work, do what Windows can't, and text install. It's basically just as clean and smooth as the GUI, you just have to navigate with the keyboard a little more than with the mouse. No big loss. Xconfiguration and testing are carried off with no problems for the most part with no problems.

      Beware, of course, if you have a POS monitor that's so old you can't even find the refresh rates in the specifications on the web. Xconfiguration is a bit more difficult there (so far I've had no luck) and you're SOL if you can't get past the no GUI install (Windows 98 had no problem installing and using the POS ancient Panasonic monitor).

      One more thing: Install on a Dell P4 1.3 with 128MB RDRAM was fine, even upgrading from an existing Redhat 7.2 installation. Reconfiguring the video settings within Xwindows was nice and smooth in 9.0, while I did not have the time/inclination to figure the same out in 7.2. Bluecurve is nice though, for a windows manager.



    • Re:That's All Nice and Dandy, But... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:24PM (#5681070)
      It's a known bug [redhat.com] in XFree86 4.3 when using DVI. Switch to your monitor's VGA port, install nVidia's current drivers, switch back to DVI. Or do a textmode install. I'm using RH9 with nVidia's drivers on my ViewSonic VG191b w/DVI now.

      It is likely that other distributions using XFree 4.3 will have the same problem. I didn't have this problem with Red Hat 8 (XFree 4.2).

      Be sure to pick up the "missing" RPMs on freshrpms.net [freshrpms.net] when you're done.

      I do wish nVidia would update their platform drivers. I had to build the nvnet driver for my nForce2 board the hard way rather than use their RPM. I'm using ALSA (thanks freshrpms!) for audio.
    • All you had to do was type linux text at the boot to boot up into the just as easy to use text mode gui. It is placed there for those rare instances where X can't be loaded with reasonable defaults.
    • It is a shame, but people have problems on occassion.

      Me, peronsonally, I haven't had a problem with the RH installers since 6.0 and even then it wasn't a problem I could not work around.

      I always have a few friends who have some odd hardware configurations and get around to trying a RH install on occassion and sometimes they are happy and sometimes not. Last night, a friend of mine came to me and was fairly happy everything went OK right out of the box.

      I'm still scratching my head on how his foobarred his
    • Kinda ironic that the Linux distribution everyone loves to hate, Lindows, worked right out of the box when Red Hat 9 failed miserably.

      Not really. Linux is a large software project. Regressions happen. This is more a problem with XFree than Redhat especially, it's just that Lindows use ancient versions of everything.

    • And here all this time I thought that Redhat was the Linux distribution everyone loved to hate. Do you mean that Lindows has actually managed to take the top spot in some category?

      It's kind of creepy how similar our systems are. I have one 80GB WD disk, same processor, same ram (specs anyway), a GF4Ti4200 128MB from Inno3D... Cue twilight zone music now.

  • Installing it on my third server (Score:3, Informative)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @02:59PM (#5680903) Homepage
    I am upgrading my servers to 9.0 since last week. So far it has been very smooth. On RH 8.0 I had problems with dual CPU Compaq Proliants 3000. Seemed like during the install the RH 8.0 disabled the 2nd CPU on these particular servers. RH 9.0 does seem to have aany problems.

    I just use the core OS files, and then compile everything from source code. So for me there is not much incentive to go form 8.0 to 9.0. I moved just because of the Compaq Proliant issues.

    • Actually, you had a great incentive: Red Hat will pull the plug of security updates of RH 8 by the end of the year. Upgrading to RH 9 will give you 3 more months - in their new policy, Red Hat has stated that it will support "consumer" OS for 12 months. If you think it is not enough, you have to pay for the Enterprise Linux server. If you don't want to upgrade your computers so often, I suggest you moving away from plain RH - either to RH Enterprise or other distribution.

  • Yet another upgrade (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:00PM (#5680911) Homepage
    Yay another Redhat update. Reading the article I can't seen any reason to upgrade apart from the normal updated packages. However it is nice to see RedHat at least following a sensible, if slightly unpopular, route with regards to pantents such as MP3

    Rus

  • using RSYNC to get ISO files (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:01PM (#5680926) Homepage
    I am faithful RedHat Network subscriber. However last week I had lots of trouble downloading the ISO files. I think RedHat should allowing RSYNing to d/l ISO images. CURL and WGET are not good as RSYNC.
    • For first past on large files from a single source, rsync has much more overhead. Try bittorent, and do distributed d/ling. See here http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html [bitconjurer.org]
    • How is rsync better for downloading ISOs? It's a single file. rsync only offers substantial value when updating a group of files, some of which may or may not have changed.

      curl and wget both support resume; hopefully the iso is already compressed. I guess there's not too much point to compressing it since most of what's on it is compressed anyway.

      As others have pointed out, if you are looking for a better way to download it, use bittorrent. P2P/mesh downloading is the only thing that really makes sense

      • The problem with curl or wget is that they handle only the most simple transmission problems. They can resume a file that got cut off before the end.

        Rsync can handle any form of corruption: even the file somehow gets bad bits in the middle of it, you can just rerun rsync and it finds the corrupt sections and fixes it up.

        Of course, newer P2P apps like BitTorrent are just as good as rsync at fixing corrupted files, but with the additional advantage of being able to download from multiple peers at once. R

  • Dependencies. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BHearsum ( 325814 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:08PM (#5680967) Homepage
    The article states that "if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have dependency problems".

    I don't see how any guidelines would change the fact that the non-RH RPMs are based on older libraries, (or newer, as the case may be). That is by far the biggest problem.

    Example:
    I wanted Eterm on my RH8.0 install, couldn't find any RH packages for it, so I tried a generic one. It depended on some Perl modules, no big deal. I grab those -- one module depended on an old version of Perl (it would only accept that version).

    The only solution to this is for the RH packages maintainers to make RPMs for _everything_, which of course isn't possible. But that's part of the reason Debian has less of a problem with that, sid has about 8500 packages last time I checked, a LOT more than any version of RH.

    Which brings us to another problem. All the RPM distros I've seen have big version differences in all their 'releases'. Which makes it hard for developers to release packages for the distro. They need one for 7.x, 8.x, etc.

    • Re:Dependencies. (Score:5, Informative)

      by pyros ( 61399 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:26PM (#5681077) Journal
      The problem you are facing is the thrid-party packages depending on other packages, rather than other files. The RPM format supports giving a dependency of /path/to/perl/module.pm instead of bobs-perl-package. If the apps are packaged conformant to the LSB (module.pm is in the standard location) then it doesn't matter if you installed it from source, freds-perl-package, or bobs-perl-package. So your thrid-party Eterm package was done incorrectly, which is what the article was referring to.
      • Not really, file deps have quite a lot of problems, for instance, they are not portable (debian has problems importing them) and they assume that every file has a standard place, which of course isn't the case.

        File deps lead to big problems further down the road because you effectively end up managing a namespace of every file on the system, instead of every package. Every package is hard enough thanks!

        File deps can be useful when carefully used, but at least in my opinion package based dependancies ha

    • The article states that "if application writers followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have dependency problems".

      Yes, slightly misleading IMO, the LSB currently says you can only have 1 dependancy, on the LSB itself, so presumably he meant "if they followed the guidelines provided by the LSB, you would not have dependancies". That's one way to solve the problem. It's not a very good way though.

      I don't see how any guidelines would change the fact that the non-RH RPMs are based on olde

      • "I suspect a lot of packages meant for rh8 will work on rh9"

        I have used more than a few RPM's destined for 8 on 9 already, and the work without a hitch. The only problem I had was needing 1 compat library and the fact that I couldn't get NTFS support until a few days ago, which is totally ok, since it means a different kernel version.

  • Interview? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Milo Fungus ( 232863 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:12PM (#5680985)

    What was up with that interviewer? The interviewer was either being a little too confrontational or just had an overall lack of tact.

    Some Examples:

    • Don't you think leaving out the mp3 codec makes it less convienient [for the user] and less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users? Is there any way around this limitation of Red Hat Linux 9 for future releases?
    • Why was there no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat 9?
    • Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?
    • Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs?
    • Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too?
    • Currently, no matter how I turn it, downloading RPMs from the web can create many dependancy problems most of the time.
    Where did they learn their interviewing skills? This is terrible. "Why don't you do blah and blah? Your software doesn't do blah. I always have problems with blah. Blah blah blah." I was very impressed with Matt's answers, though. He didn't get mad and say, "Well, why don't you fork the project then?!!" He just cordially and politely explained the concepts of open source and their development efforts. Nice work.
    • Yes, the interview was sort of a giant troll - the author appears to still not understand many of the reasons why people use Linux. The most annoying points were about mp3 and DVD licensing - sure, it's a pain in the ass, but RedHat's motiviations in this regard are both reasonable and obvious. Not very business-minded, perhaps, but he has a point.
    • He didn't get mad and say, "Well, why don't you fork the project then?!!"

      Because he runs a business and has customers. That kind of response goes well with the unwashed masses around here, but not in the corporate world.

      "If you don't like it, fix it" is not what a manager at a Fortune 500 gig wants to hear when he figures out that the 1,000 licenses of RH desktop he just purchased don't support the legacy printers everyone uses at the company. Or whatever.

      Amazing concept, customer care.

    • Guess you weren't around when she joined the phoebe (RHL9 beta) mailing list...she wasn't a subscriber for very long, but man did she start up one hell of a flame fest in her short time there.

    • Re:Interview? (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      He probably learned his interviewing skills from Barbara Walters or something. Of course, she's known for getting the goods, which is why we all know her name.

      Some of those are definitely questions I would want answers to if I hadn't sworn off Redhat. I started with redhat 5, which was okay, but redhat 6 (and EVERY subsequent release) has screwed up on me in some major way that convinced me that redhat was annoying. Then I swear I'll never install it again, and then a new release comes out and I install i

      • The topics of the questions weren't bad. Indeed, they are important questions. I was objecting to the tone of her questioning. She was belligerent, manipulative, rude. "While it is easy for a user to install the needed codec manually (if he/she knows where to get them) and while it is known the GPL incompatibility with mp3, don't you think that 'making it less convienient [for the user] and with less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users' as a Red Hat Linux user said

      • Wow. If I keep saying Redhate and trolling about Red Hat will I get modded up too?

        Someone whose computer hasn't been screwed up in a major way by Red Hat and doesn't think its annoying...Of course I have ACTUALLY USED Red Hat recently, but go ahead mod up some idiot troll.

    • Re:Interview? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @05:48PM (#5682029) Homepage

      The answers to almost all of those questions comes down to one single point, one that I'm sure that the Red Hat folks are tired of repeating: they are committed to a policy of pure open source/free software in the distro, period, and they won't include anything that will make them subject to patent licensing or the DMCA. That means they won't ship MP3, proprietary NVidia drivers, or DVD playback, or Microsoft fonts. However, you can get these all from the net if you want them. If your Nvidia driver crashes the kernel, then complaining to Red Hat is complaining to the wrong party: Red Hat can only see their source, NVidia can see all of the source.

      Since the OSNews people have been around enough to already know these answers, since we had this same discussion when Red Hat 8 came out, it is rude and pointless of them to repeat the same questions. Are they hoping that, one day, Red Hat will wake up and say, "OK, we agree: open source was a stupid idea. We've negotiated licenses from all these folks, and now Red Hat X is a proprietary distro, but it plays MP3s and DVDs out of the box, and we support NVidia drivers. We've tweaked every pixel to match Eugenia's suggestions, too. But no more free ISO downloads, it costs $150, and there's a per-CPU license"?

      And yes, I'm aware that some non-US-based distros made different decisions on some of these matters. Note, though, that not being based in the US, they don't need to worry as much about liability from bogus software patents. In the meantime, Red Hat users can install apt, then install MP3 and DVD playback support with a single line. Read all about it [freshrpms.net].

  • BitTorrent (Score:5, Informative)

    by Enucite ( 10192 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:15PM (#5681008)
    Help distribute the load.. use BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org]
    When it's installed, click the following link to begin downloading: RedHat 9 [207.44.142.96]

  • > It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product.

    That's neat and all, but how about a Developer's version, Lite version, or Demo? The CMS sounds cool.

  • I tried BitTorrent, it was really slow, and while people say that it speeds up over time, I was still getting 10k/sec after 2 hours. I tried the mirrors - they were also dead slow. Eventually, I tried Shareaza [shareaza.com], that P2P app which tried to hijack the "Gnutella" brand, and I actually got really good download speeds. I plan to upload to Freenet [freenetproject.org] once I get the files (hopefully within 24 hours). If anyone with a really fast connection has the files, please consider uploading them to Freenet and letting us kn
    • I keep my favourite mirror a secret (for obvious reasons), and with every release it's always maxed out my connection (downloading now at 580kbps) even when I start a download immediately after a new version of a distro is announced...
    • Probably you have one of those cable/dsl routers and/or a firewall (program) and you forgot to open and/or forward port 6881. That would keep the bittorrent speed low.

  • Mirror (Europe) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yenya ( 12004 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @03:36PM (#5681140) Homepage Journal
    My mirror [linux.cz] still have lots of free bandwidth (and is accessible also by IPv6 [linux.cz]).

    This is probably the first release of RedHat Linux, which generates on my mirror less traffic, than a corresponding release of Mandrake Linux.

    • Hey Yenya, thanks for the link. Your mirror is (was?) fast :)

      Unfortunately wget doesn't support IPv6 or I'd snag it over v6 just for the hell of it.

  • Ohioedge CRM [ohioedge.com]
    Compiere [compiere.org]

    Compiere needs an Oracle database for now.

  • I can tell you that: "I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit" is meaningless in terms of attributing it to "Redhat in the News." Redhat stock goes up and down like a rubber ball in a game of jacks. For every shift in price that seems attributable to some news, there are 20 days a month where it shifts based on the vagaries of the market. Be careful of attributing changes in price reflecting news about a company with a low priced stock like this. Its all over the map and wil be for some t
  • I'm still using 7.2!!?? Jeeze! The only thing that comes out with more new versions more often than redhat is hardware!

  • great release (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brsmith4 ( 567390 ) <brsmith4 @ g m a i l .com> on Monday April 07, 2003 @04:28PM (#5681534)
    I have been playing with some of the new features in redhat 9, one of those features being that CD burning deal built into nautilus. That is a really cool feature, drop-n-drag files and click burn. I also like the additional eye-candy with the custom mouse cursors. They have greatly improved the menu system so you don't have that gay extras menu anymore. The greatest added feature of all is the increase in performance. On both of my dells, performance has increased at least 4 fold with regards to the UI. A suggestion to you all who bitch about dependency hell: download apt-rpm for RedHat 9. Its at http://shrike.freshrpms.net. Then, apt get update && apt-get install synaptic. Synaptic is a bad ass front end for n00bs who want a nice point-n-click gui for apt. Once installed, you can quit bitching about your mp3 support and lack of a dvd player since all those packages are located on the freshrpm's apt repository.

  • Question 9 evaded (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @04:40PM (#5681597) Homepage
    9. Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too? Is Red Hat open regarding licensing technologies and services from other sources?

    Matt Wilson: We will not include technology that prevents Red Hat Linux from being freely distributed. Including software that places these kinds of restrictions on our community of users does not help drive Open Source software.

    This evades the question of DVD playback.
    No license is required to play DVDs on a linux computer. DVD players such as Ogle and Xine are GPL.

    And no, it is not a violation of the DMCA to employ DeCSS to watch media you have purchased or rented on hardware that you own.

    No matter, these programs can always be added post-install.
    • No license is required to play DVDs on a linux computer.

      MPEG-2 is patented. If they don't support MP3 because of patents, then they shouldn't support MPEG-2 either.

    • Re:Question 9 evaded (Score:3, Informative)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      sure it might not be violation to use it..

      but try selling it and calling it a dvd player (which 'happens' to miss some important features and not being licensed properly), by design there can't be a dvd player software that's free, open and distributed for free endlessly afaik..

      **And no, it is not a violation of the DMCA to employ DeCSS to watch media you have purchased or rented on hardware that you own.**
      i thought the whole point of dmca was to make such viewing protection circumvention illeagal?

    • Re:Question 9 evaded (Score:5, Informative)

      by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Monday April 07, 2003 @06:33PM (#5682279) Homepage

      For Red Hat to ship code equivalent to DeCSS in source form would be a DMCA violation, no question; courts have already so ruled. Since Ogle is GPL, Red Hat is forbidden from distributing binaries if they don't distribute source. Therefore Red Hat can't distribute Ogle, period.

      The DMCA prohibits "trafficking", not use, so it's legal for an American to download and run Ogle, but if you give it to someone else, you might be risking a five-year jail term. Crazy, but until some court decides to toss the DMCA, that's what you're dealing with.

  • Not that I'm surprised. Anything that wants a true relational backend, much less an object-relational DBMS, much choose a REAL database.

    FLAME ON!

    At any rate, another portal entry brings on fits of yawns. None of the portals currently available do what people want them to, and all of them provide nearly identical feature sets. Whooop-dee-do.

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