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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat 6.0 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the coming-soon dept.
GnuGrendel sent us a News.com Story about Red Hat 6.0. Scheduled to be on shelves on May 10, it ought to be announced on Monday. Supposedly more expensive for the box, but still free for download (of course). Oh, and both KDE & GNOME.
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Red Hat 6.0 More

Red Hat 6.0

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  • E/WindowMaker/Afterstep/FVWM seem to coexist fine. I see no reason why Gnome/KDE shouldn't too. Just as with the window managers, you can still run all the apps. Drag and drop across KDE/gnome apps will probably work, OLE probably wont.
  • I could do this with RH4.2, but not with 5.0 or 5.2. I had to write a program to use that TRANS.TBL file in each dir to rename all the files to long filenames under vfat, but then still any name with all caps shows up as all lower case when you mount the vfat partition unter linux. Rename it to all caps while in linux then go back to winbloz and it looks like nothing has changed. It's like there 'all caps' and then there's 'all caps' under winsucks9x/vfat and they're not one and the same. Can't redhat use the TRANS.TBL file or keep all the filenames on their CDs to ISO9660 lowest common denominator 8.3 type filenames?

  • Will it have CA Unicenter TNG??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We *really* need a network manager for linux.
    I heard rumors of HP Openview, but nothing
    yet. RedHat and CA say they are going to
    port Unicenter:


    http://www.redhat.com/corp/p ress/current_associates.html [redhat.com]


    Does anyone know if this is going to be
    on the commercial demo disk?


    -- cary (busy today!)


  • KDE is not going to be the standard (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    KDE is farther along in its development cycle, more polished, and some say it is better than GNOME. Even if it is better it is not going to become the "standard gui for all linux mainstream apps".

    Why? It is simply because of Troll Tech's license for Qt. They came out with a new license that appeased the open source zealots, and in all this hand waving and press releases it fooled most of you /. readers. Fact is that Qt is a commercial library that costs a lot of money.

    The Qt license is fine if you want to develop open source apps, but if you're a commercial company you will have to pay. That seems fair, but that is going to be the death blow for KDE, I mean its lack of commercial apps. Just like Linus said, even if he charged $1 for the Linux kernel it never would of grow as it has. Same thing with Qt and KDE, for the commercial user it costs and for those willing to pay it doesn't really buy them anything they couldn't get for free from say Lesstif or GTK.

    Mark my words, KDE might be great, but when that commercial avalanche of Linux apps appear KDE will be dead on arrival.

  • You couldn't be more wrong. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Um. The FSF is *not* phasing out the LGPL. Apparently, you haven't read anything about the name change.

    And while the aforementioned author was, perhaps, confusing "commercial" with "proprietary," his point is nonetheless valid. Companies will have to pay a lot of cash to develop and distribute *proprietary* programs written with Qt. But why would anyone do that? Troll Tech hardly has the market clout to demand money for that purpose.

  • Pricing of RH 6 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's suggested list - should be accurate.

    The dealer is of course a bit lower than that.

    (Consequently, working at Ingram, I can see all of our stocking and pricing information. We've had 6.0 in the database since April 15th and it's already backordered over 30,000 units. :)

  • Redhat has a good rep - so does Kde (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Exactly what is so Win95ish about Kde? There are some
    similarities but also with OS/2 (templates) and Amiga (kdelnk
    files like info) and Mac. Even all windows like this and evenif
    they use different toolkits. Neat ! I use Kde with Windowmaker
    - you get all the features of Kde with nicer looking windows
    and Wmaker menus, etc. You don't have to use the kwm window
    manager with the kde filemanager and panel, etc. Windowmaker
    and Blackbox have complete support for Kde, and you can use
    most but all Kde features with any wm, even E.

    Look, I installed a recent snapshot of Gnome last week. No,
    I did not find Gnome buggy. It did not crash. However, it is
    awkward (to use). E is a disaster from usabliity standpoint.
    Gnome itself says, in its docs, that E is the only fully compliant
    Window manager. Gnome places dictatorial demands on Window
    Managers for compliance. Even icewm is not really compliant.
    Gnome's arrogance is entirely undeserved, and developers
    are foolish in rewarding it.

    If you are using a modern wm like ice or wmaker, what does the
    Gnome panel add but get in the way? There is just no reason for
    anyone to use Gnome except to be politically correct, as it
    duplicates what is already in most window managers and adds
    little desktop functionality. However, some Gnome apps are
    excellent, so I keep the libraries so I can run Gnome apps when
    I want to.

    Using E with themes and Gtk with themes (except the plainest)
    ones eats all your cpu and brings your system to a crawl unless
    you have dual P3's and 16 megs of video ram. Even then, I don't
    believe you will get much smooth functionality. The whole theme
    concept is flawed and is not what a desktop system should be
    built around (though themes in and of themselves are not bad
    and can add some personality).

    People who post here do not represent "average" users who actually
    prefer kde and find it fun and useful, and do not want to buy new,
    expensive hardware just so they can get response from a
    sluggish E/Gnome desktop when they click on a button.
    Geeks trying to outdo each other to have the geekiest looking
    desktops, with the obligatory transparent eterms and text-based
    irc's and the gimp panel that is never used) don't have productive
    desktops - but they can be politically correct and submit screenshots
    to "Themes. Most computer users that Linux is trying to attract
    don't care about that little cult, but this does not mean they lack artistic
    taste or style. They just don't have anything to prove about
    who they are in that way and have better things to do with their
    lives.

    Kde also has some excellent apps. So far most Gnome apps,
    as opposed to panel applets, work without the gnome session with
    any wm, with the libraries installed. Let's hope it stays that way
    and that compatible Gnome apps which are "nice" to other
    destops keep coming along with Kde apps, but far too many
    apps already *only* work with the gnome libraries installed and
    some go further and *only* work with the Gnome session in
    progress. They could work just as will without Gnome in 90% of
    cases using plain Gtk without Gnome "extras".

    As a desktop system Gnome is definitely not cool. It's core
    concept that a Window manager must be under a gnome
    session and that apps must incorporate gnome hooks
    is fundamentally flawed and dictatorial. This stifles innovation and
    ultimately will cause rebellion even among developers trying
    to "comply" with Gnome standards just like they were forced
    to comply to get the Microsoft seal of approval. Can you say
    bend over ? It will forever be the preferred desktop of people
    who want to be perceived as cool among an elitist community,
    but that's it. Corporations and distro packagers know this, and
    some begrudgingly include Gnome to placate a small but vocal
    minority of elitists. Of course RedHat will favor Gnome because
    RedHat is the primary party responsible for hyping Gnome to
    force the rest of the Linux community to adopt its standards,. though
    they are now wisely moderating that stance some. Kde is in effect
    the standard for almost all distros, though, and that has been
    well-earned.

    I'm not saying that Kde is the best desktop system, although in
    practice it is for users who need a productive, modern Linux
    desktop. Actually you don't really need either Gnome or Kde
    with all their panels, dodads, and "features" - just a good
    window manager and a commonly accepted Drag and
    Drop protocol for all apps, something Linux lacks. However,
    or the two Kde is useful and Gnome is an impediment to
    productivity.

    I hope that the Linux desktop continues to evolve but Gnome is definitely not it.
    (Unless you are a 20 year old geek trying to impress his college buddies.)




  • I don't understand it. If your CDROM is broke you have three options, use another media (network drives, ftp, hard drives, etc), get a different CDROM (ebay), or live with it. How/Why is RedHat (or anyone) supposed to write software that works on broke hardware?
  • RPM comes with the rpm2cpio utility. Use it to convert the package to a cpio, then use cpio to uncompress it in a temp directory. Then you can manually move things to the proper locations (/usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc). There you get the ultimate control over where it is installed. Oh, and do rpm -qp file.rpm --scripts to see what needs to be done before/after un/installing.

    That is, if you absolutely refuse to use rpm itself. :)
  • Why do so many people complain because there are choices? Out one side of their mouth they're condeming Microsoft for restricting access users have, and only giving one possible desktop, etc. Then they bitch and moan because there are so many window managers, or desktops. The beauty of Linux is that there is so many possible roads you can take, and no one person sits back and decrees "You will use E from now on, and pay me $100 for the decision!"

    Now, that said, people can chose a distribution that makes decisions for you, or sets things as their defaults, if the user doesn't want to decide right away. That being said, you are not locked into any one program (or group of programs). Once you get the hang of things and are more comfortable, format/reinstall a different distribution. And continue on learning more and more about Linux, and spreading the word.

    Maybe I should write up a paper on this and set people straight... Trust me, choice is good!
  • Come now, we all know our product (Linux) is better than Windows. So once we get world domination, the world will be at peace. It's that combination of a superior product and world domination that we are aspiring, not merely world domination at any cost.
  • I tried gnome 1.0.8 or so recently as well. It's nice overally, a few things crashed here and there. I'd equate it to Beta4 or so in KDE's line. One thing that is needed is for the gnome folks to put programs together into a handful of primary packages, much like KDE, Gnomelibs, gnomecore, etc. That way you have a core set that is easy to install, severely tested for stability, takes care of all libraries in one swoop, etc. Myself, I was able to wade through the dependencies and what-not to install everything. But certainly, someone with less experience will give up before getting to the 10th package.

    As to control-panel, it's tied to GTK. When you put a newer GTK on for gnome, it messes every other GTK app. So, just recompile and reinstall control-panel and it should be alright. Are the GTK folks ever going to just name the lib something like libgtk+.so.1? So we don't need to recompile every stinkin gtk app with an upgrade?
  • Come on, seriously. What's to stop a terrorist from already sending things strongly encrypted? It's like the hype people stir up when there's a high school shooting. Banning guns won't stop criminals/lunatics from using them.
  • There are bindings to many languages (Perl, Python, etc). But most importantly is not the programming languages, but the human ones. KDE's been built since very early to be readable everywhere. There are bunches and bunches of translators continually moving the applications' phrases to work well in the dozens of langauges.

    Not to rag on Gnome or anything, but are there similar efforts? Do the tutorials tell you to wrap every phrase around the gettext functions?
  • Be sure to get an OpenLinux 2.2 as well. I caught it at Comdex this week, and the installer is very nice. It's definately something to try if people tell you, "but it's too hard to install." And the tetris game at the end is certainly nice.
  • The problem with them is politics get in the way. :)

    US today is so flakey, it's depressing. Everyone gives the highest priorities to emotions (like our #1 problem as a country, being offended -- scarey, huh?) and making sure oneself is not to blame for anything. Things like tobacco rise up, people feel the companies should be punished, despite the fact that warning have been around for ages, and people decide to go to the gas station, buy a pack, light up, etc. What'll happen if you go to politicians? Most likely they'd nod their head when you're there and forget about it the moment you leave. All it would take is one person crying on TV that simple-key encryption is vital or else your kids will be killed in a high school. There is no logic, just cry and make people feel for ya. :)
  • Can someone be more specific as to why upgrades in Debian are easier than with RedHat's RPMs?

    It is not that you can't upgrade a 'running' Redhat system w/o bringing it down (or at least a few services), I hope, but Redhat is known to be not that good on this issue. Debian tries to make upgrade-paths as smooth as possible, so that you can upgrade a production system w/o much risk of services not running for quite some time. It is *not* guaranteed, but I think the 'mean down time' is lower.

  • Politicians ought to grow up, really

    It's the same as with the 'free'-use-of-weapons law: if your forbid it, it will be used illegally. Governments forbidding exporting encryption things like ssh don't want to see that, apparently.

    On the other hand, maybe the US Government doesn't want to have any encryptions things (okay, not any) exported because they feel it is American intellectual property and they don't want to share that with the rest of the world. Wasn't this the case with the PGP5 us/int versions?

    Anyways, it looks like most 'western' countries are going to have strict encryption export rules (part of the Wassenaar Agreement). It is not going to be funny :(

  • if only you knew about the debian distribution.. u'd know kde is going to be in the next version.

    Only if KDE/Qt gets the licensing issues fixed before the release (or freeze). If they don't it cannot be included.

  • You might want to consider pushing this clue into the heads of those us politics people...
  • I've been running RawHide for a few months now and it's been getting more and more stbale lately. I'd say it's about time to see 6.0. I do think that it may cause just much complaints as 5.0 though. Built on new glibc it'll probably breaka few programs and some people aren't gonna like it ;-)
    I just hope RedHat doesn't stop releaseing new version of RawHide after 6.0 comes out.
  • Well, 2.1 is not compeltely compatible with 2.0. Only external symbold match. If program uses internal symbols (which it isn't supposed to) it probably won't run. Also things like dlls/shared objects used in things like xanim and real audio have to be proper version to work.
  • From past history, any Redhat x.0 version has always been a major source of pain in upgrading since they make lots of changes in that version.
  • Can't that be used to convert to/from tgz/rpm/deb?

  • Yep, Starbuck 5.9.7 is pretty stable, but if you want the scoop on any of the problems, you can join the starbuck mailing list (starbuck-list@redhat.com) or just check the archives at http://katz.linuxpower.org/starbuck-archive/
  • E is not neccesarily slow.
    E is not neccesarily awkward.

    It can be both, but that depends on your theme; Many are very fast; Many are efficient. Remember, "awkward" is a matter of opinion. Is it not better to have an uber-configurable wm (such as E) and have whatever look-and-feel you find least awkward?

    I have a K6/2-300 with 32MB RAM and 4MB video RAM. Not a bad machine, but not that speedy either. I have some of E's fancy, expensive features enabled (transparent window dragging) and the gradiant GTK theme... Yeah, it's eye candy. But I'd rather have it available than not have the option of using it. Is it really better to have an optional GTK theme that'll slow your machine down if enabled whereis Qt (at the moment) gives you no ability to use themes whatsoever? (Yes, I know it's in development; Yes, I'm sure it'll be cool. If I did C++, I'd probably like Qt. I don't, and I don't).

    Re the gnome panel apps requiring gnome to be loaded, btw, I dislike that as much as you do. But please, easy on the attacks. GTK and E are not slow and clunky unless you make them so.
  • Posted by OGL:

    KDE and GNOME work fine together...

    check out http://www.rit.edu/~waw0573/

    -W.W.
  • Posted by DiegoGuy:

    I installed the original Starbuck release and had major problems with DHCP, and with RPM and a couple other things.

    Redhat released a new starbuck a week ago and I installed it and it runs great, not a single problem to report.

    I predict Redhat 6.0 to be a revolution for Linux. This release is going to put Linux into the mainstream, mostly due to its good hardware support with the new 2.2 kernel and with GNOME, which I love.
  • Posted by DiegoGuy:

    I had problems compiling SSH 1.2.26 under Redhat 5.9.7.

    The solution is to comment out the line that contains "#define HAVE_UTMPX_H" in config.h.

    I'm not sure though if this will make ssh not write to the wtmp correctly or not...

    Hopefully Redhat will just INCLUDE SSH in Redhat 6.0.


  • Posted by DiegoGuy:

    I'm not sure if this was discussed before, but does anyone know why Redhat isn't including SSH in their distribution?

    After all, most people these days use SSH on their systems, at least that I know of. Personally, I use it on my system.
  • Posted by Forward The Light Brigade:

    someone from ssh emailed me rpms for ssh 1.2.26 for glibc2.1

    if you want them, they are mirrored on my comp...

    ftp://sparky.student.umd.edu/ssh.glibc2.1.rpms/
    get everything

    [root@sparky ssh.glibc2.1.rpms]# pwd
    /home/ftp/ssh.glibc2.1.rpms
    [root@sparky ssh.glibc2.1.rpms]# ls -l
    total 527
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 172584 Apr 18 14:25 ssh-1.2.26-1us.i386.rpm
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 222679 Apr 18 14:25 ssh-clients-1.2.26-1us.i386.rpm
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21921 Apr 18 14:25 ssh-extras-1.2.26-1us.i386.rpm
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 116085 Apr 18 14:25 ssh-server-1.2.26-1us.i386.rpm
    [root@sparky ssh.glibc2.1.rpms]#
  • Posted by GhostX:

    I use AfterStep. Small footprint. Why do I want KDE and Gnome - with the latest RH? Because of the programs - not the window manager. You need the libraries to run the programs.

    So, some are saying we have a "VCR with Beta and VHS", but that is not all - we have, using the same analogy, a VCR with DVD and cable and satellite... and 8mm and 30mm...

  • If you are trying to compile ssh-1.2.26, comment out lines 437, 441, 442, and 454.



    I haven't tried the ssh-2 releases.



    Would anyone from ssh like to comment?

  • Oh damn - I forgot to say that you should do this to login.c.

    If you are trying to compile ssh-1.2.26, comment out lines 437, 441, 442, and 454.

    I haven't tried the ssh-2 releases.

    Would anyone from ssh like to comment?

  • $7 for the CDROM and shipping
    $12 for the manual

    $0 for RedHat. Maybe I'll send a donation. ;-)

  • Actually GNOME changed one of its system monitoring libraries to a GPL license from LGPL after Stallman's rant. They have mentioned they might do it for more. That would make the creation of proprietary software with GNOME impossible.

    libgtop changed it's license. It extracts info from the /proc filesystem, providing a set of routines to check things such as cpu and memory usage, active processes etc.

    It's not exactly a vital Gnome library. In fact, how many companies wanting to port their proprietary apps are going to use that? And even if they needed the functionality, their programmers could reimplement the necessary pieces pretty quickly.

    But you see, that's the point. Gnome will never change the license on core libraries. Some of the highly specialized, and non-vital, helper libraries might. So what? If some company wants to port, they'll duplicate what they need. Missing libgtop won't affect their decision...

    Second, I'm not sure you understand the economics of proprietary software. QT is somewhere in the ballpark of $1000US. To a company putting out proprietary software this is nothing.

    Exactly why your first argument is pointless. Paying a programmer to duplicate the bits of functionality they need out of a GPLed library is trivial to the total cost of the project.

    The well designed and just generally easy and lovely API of QT speeds up developement time greatly, perhaps by as much as 30-50%. The money the company will thus save by going with QT in programmer salaries will far outweigh the cost of qt by several orders of magnitude.

    I'll buy the '$1000 is trivial to the cost of the project' argument, but speeding up development time? I can write pretty functional applications in 100 lines of Perl/GTK. Translate it C and you add a bit, but it's all just duplicating Perl functionality, and not GTK.
    Maybe, MAYBE, a marginal improvement, but saving several orders of magnitude over the $1000? Qt saves $100,000-$1,000,000 over GTK? Please!

    I'd say rather than an economic problem, it's just going to be annoying, perhaps even amusing to proprietary companies. They have some Linux port requests, so they decide to look into it, and then find they have to spend $1000 for the privilege to use Qt. I think it will leave an interesting impression on a lot of companies, at the least.
  • Hopefully Red Hat has some cool stuff that they're holding back as a suprise, because at this point it looks like a more expensive version of OpenLinux 2.2 without the slick installation.

    TedC

  • Why would I pay for something I can get free?

    Installation media, manuals, and support.

    Downloading Linux isn't such a good deal unless you have more time than money.

    TedC

  • I've always considered Caldera to be going for corporate desktops

    Considering that their slogan is "Linux for Business" I'd say that's a safe assumption.

    TedC

  • I see Caldera or Suse as the only alternative. Which of these should I choose?

    OpenLinux 2.2, SuSE 6.1, and Red Hat 6.0 are almost identical -- they all use the 2.2.5 kernel (maybe RH will be 2.2.6?), glibc 2.1, KDE 1.1, etc., so they're all pretty much in sync for the first time.

    SuSE is nice because it comes with an extensive manual and 5 CDs full of software, but Caldera's new installation stuff sounds cool. I ordered them both just for fun. :-)

    TedC

  • Been waiting for this to upgrade my 4.x systems at home and work. Can't wait.
  • I know i had problems with the rpm rpm. It didn't install or create the /usr/lib/rpm directory or the files that were in it, i simply copied the files from a 5.2 system across and all was peachy, but i haven't had it wiping out my rpm database.

    Lets face it though, StarBuck was a BETA release so that long standing tinkerers like most of us are can have a good play with it and find the problems before they release 6.0 which needs to be *absolutely* rock solid if linux is going to make the required inroads in the corperate desktop market as most users won't want to have to upgrade all their machines because, as with 5.1, all the image library rpms weren't built correctly.

    From now on the big distro's, SuSE, Debian, RedHat et al. are going to be under the spot light with every release they make, where as before they may have got away with not building rpms etc properly
    becuase a larger number of the users were linux literate and could therefore sort out the problems, with the more general interest in linux and now everybody and his mum is talking about trying linux this kinda' thing won't be exceptable.


    Things are going to be interesting over the next few months.


    Just my $0.02 worth.

  • I know this is probably not the best place to ask but here goes anyway.

    Does anybody know of any sites here in the UK where they are doing cheap GPL disks of RedHat, SuSE, Debian etc like CheapBytes is in the US ??

  • Ever since RedHat 2.0, it's always been upgradable. When you run the CD installation, you're given the option to Install or Upgrade. I've successfully upgraded many RedHat systems with few if any troubles.

    On the other hand, I can't recall ever upgrading a Windows-like system to its next release without hosing up half of the applications.
  • if I contribute code to an LGPLed project, can someone else change the project to GPL without my consent?

    Yes. See point 3 of the LGPL [http].

    --

  • Interesting... I've always considered Caldera to be going for corporate desktops (net ware tools/support, other things I can't remember right now) more than Red Hat.
  • Can you get SRPMs? I can't see many people accepting RPMs from a completely unknown source (you may be trustworthy; on the other hand you may have added a whopping great backdoor). And if SSH provided RPMs wouldn't they be available at the usual places?

    axolotl
    --
    Call me skeptic...

  • KDE isn't a window manager. KWM is a window manager.

    dylan_-


    --

  • Uh, I don't know about you, but I doubt it will cost more. Red Hat as of 5.2 started "parting" it out, and now there are several ways to buy Red Hat Linux, you don't need to buy just the boxed set of CD's, manual, and stickers anymore, AFAIK. So, I suspect it will be like 5.2, and avaliable directly for less than the "boxed set" use to cost in the past.

    Yea, you can still get the same package, and that may cost more than before, but it's misleading to just say "it will cost more." It might, it might not, and it might be avaliable in diffrent "bundles" that make comparing it to the previous versions somewhat difficult.

  • I have been running Starbuck (5.9) on two of my systems, and it has some bugs (like e and gnome GUI configuration is flaky), but it's stable. I haven't seen the rpm thing your talking about happening. Over all, I would call it stable, and querky (mostly some user apps that act funny, not like a kernel panic or rpm database whip-out).
  • Check out the 5.9 ("Starbuck") redhat release. Install both Gnome and KDE. They exist side-by-side just fine.

    --

  • Starbuck was horrible. I installed it twice, left it running overnight and both times found my rpm database had somehow been wiped out.. couldn't install or even query for packages

    This problem was widely discussed on the starbuck mailing list. There were some corrupt RPMs distributed to the mirrors. If you're gonna play with beta software, it helps to join the mailing list. =)

  • That's likely why we won't see total KDE integration for most commercial apps. Why? Because for an app to be consistent with KDE (not to support it, true, but most people consider "integration" to include a similar look and feel) you need to use Qt. That puts Troll on the recieving end of a hell of a lot of cash, cash you don't have to pay to develop on any other graphics toolkit, or even any other platform.

    My guess is that future commercial apps will support KDE and Gnome both, and be coded in GTK. Towards this end, I would really like to see the KDE and Gnome groups work together more in terms of developing standards. They managed to agree on drag-and-drop, at least, but what about things like object models (as previously mentioned in this thread somewhere)? If the two would work together better I think everything would turn out much better in the end. Those who prefer KDE's interface for whatever reason (there must be one, though I can't figure it out for the life of me) could stick with KDE, those who prefer Gnome's interface could use it, and everyone uses the same apps on both DE's, so everybody's happy.

    As for me, I prefer Gnome but keep KDE's libs on my hard drive; I'll probably run across an app I want that needs them someday.
  • If you're upgrading from 5.2 to 6.0 by reformatting, you shouldn't even need to use Disk Druid. Keep the same partitions are before. It'll ask you which partitions you want to format, and you just select all partitons you want to be deleted (making sure not to choose your home directory).

    Just make sure that your home directory is actually on a seperate partitions.
  • Don't worry, RawHide is a continuing project.

    In fact, once Red Hat Linux 6.0 is released, RawHide will be even more useful that it has been in the past. Folks running Red Hat Linux 5.2 have had to recompile source rpms from RawHide in order to run them on their 5.2 systems because RawHide is glibc-2.1-based and 5.2 is glibc-2.0-based. With Red Hat Linux 6.0 based on glibc-2.1 and RawHide based on the same, folks running Red Hat Linux 6.0 will be able to download and use RawHide binary rpms without recompiling unless they want to.

  • Its not a bug, more of a feature. it runs "esound" which i belive uses libaudiofile (written by the one and only mike pruett), it allows more than one sound to be played at one time, and a bunch of other features. the catch? the app needs to be compiled with support for it, but a lot of apps out there have been modified to use it (a lot of wav players and most popular mp3 players, etc etc).
  • Even better:

    If you can, boot from the CD or a floppy to get a shell. Usually, you can hit F2 for the shell. mknod the hard drive device and mount your hard drive and cp from there.
  • Why do I buy it from the box? For the cool stickers. As an added bonus, it comes with a manual and even the source code CD that I might not download.

    Besides, I have been in the workforce for several years, so I do not mind paying for good things.
  • When I installed from a cdrom full of errors, it took a very long time. It would keep retrying the same sector and reseting the controller. If I remember, it was several minutes for each bad sector. You can watch any errors while it copies by tailing forever the message log in the background while you copy:

    tail -f /var/log/messages &

    and see the bad sectors as the drive keeps trying. Sometimes all that effort manages to get data out of a bad sector; however, if I knew a way to turn off all those retries, I would turn it off. Its not worth the time to make a 15 minute install a whole day.
  • Oh, your really missing out.

    Here [gtr-access.org] is a picture of the redhat sticker perfect for slapping on your box.

    And here is a coveted redhat bumper sticker [gtr-access.org] that my car sports.

    Not to mention the cool geek software t-shirts and hats they have. Let me tell you, red gets attention.
  • Why not distribute ssh freely? The License. From the /usr/doc/ssh-xxx/COPYING:

    For commercial licensing please contact Data Fellows, Ltd. Data Fellows has exclusive licensing rights for the technology for
    commercial purposes. Data Fellows offers commercial versions of SSH with maintenance agreements in addition to various licensing options for the technology itself. You can contact Data Fellows at
    ,
    http://www.datafellows.com/, tel Int.+358-9-478 444 or fax Int.+358-9-4784 4599.

  • There are a few ways to upgrade that I use:

    Normal upgrade by booting the cd,

    Try out a fresh install on a spare hard drive,

    or not recommended unless you like to hack:

    the quick brute force method even worked from the 4.x to 5.x distros was go to the .../RPMS directory of the install cd and do a brute force upgrade rpm --nodeps --force *.rpm and repeat if there were errors.

    I always copy my home directory, etc, and /usr/local to a safe place so I have a fallback if I get careless. This can be done by:

    cp -ar /home /backup
    cp -ar /etc /backup
    cp -ar /usr/local /backup
  • As of 5.9.10 you'll come directly up to a nice looking GDM screen if selecting "start X on restart" during the install. GDM defaults to launching Gnome. However, there are a sweet set of scripts that'll allow you to switch back and forth from Gnome to KDE easily. Very Nice.

  • I've almost switched from RH to Debian a number of times for this very reason. But there are a few reasons holding me back. First is that RPMs are the standard. While some developers make rpms available, very few make debian packages also. I just installed junkbuster [waldherr.org] from rpm the other day, which saved me a lot of time in installation and a lot of headache later if I want to uninstall it. For many fringe projects not included with Debian, I'd be giving that luxury up. I also found Debian information hard to find and usually out of date. Certainly a common problem, but really important given Debian's added complexity.

    I can think of only two solutions to the problem. Switch to rpm format, but extend rpms to do what you need it too, while keeping the format backwardly compatible. Or make Debian package creation easy for a developer unfamiliar with Debian, so they aren't forced to run Debian to understand how to create packages for it.

    As it is, rpms work good enough. I've had few problems with them. And RH, in turn, is good enough too.

  • Just a quick question... I'm evaluating whether to move our hosts up from libc5 to glibc and was hoping to hop over glibc-2.0.
  • Are we looking at a VHS/Beta fight with KDE and Gnome? How can we avoid this?

    No, we're not looking at a fight here.

    Red Hat 6.0 uses gdm at runlevel 5, not the normal xdm. This features a combo box which allows you to select a KDE or a GNOME login environment. Whichever you select, the menus for the others are also available. For example, the KDE menu tree lives in the "KDE Menus" option of the main menu on the GNOME panel.

    The default theme of GNOME co-exists quote pleasingly with the way thet KDE looks, so you can use both sets of apps without things jarring.

    Red Hat 6.0 blends KDE and GNOME together pretty well. These observations are, in fact, based on red Hat 5.9, which I am assuming wil be pretty similar.

  • I upgraded from 5.2 to 5.9 (this is the beta for 6.0). The beta version of inn and of tetex had problems which are now fixed. Other than that, the only other problem was that the upgrade installed Sendmail, replacing Postfix (which was not installed as an RPM).

    Uninstalling sendmail and putting the /usr/local symlinks in fixed that, and now the system works fine.

    My NFS mounts seem to have turned themselves read-only, but I haven't figured that one out, yet.

  • ... with the apparent exception of RealVideo again.

  • Themes (Score:1)

    by Mawbid ( 3993 )

    You can't really say that E is ugly. E doesn't have one particular look. It's themable. Even if all the themes are ugly, that's not a complaint against E.
    --

  • i just tried Gnome 1.0.
    overall I really like it and I hope it's included in RH6. But since it's been released so recently (Apr 12?) I am afraid it will not get enought testing by the time of RH6 release (May 10).

    the one problem I had:
    my crude install of gnome-1 somehow broke the 'control-panel' program.
    /gigi
  • Actually GNOME changed one of its system monitoring libraries to a GPL license from LGPL after Stallman's rant. They have mentioned they might do it for more. That would make the creation of proprietary software with GNOME impossible.

    Second, I'm not sure you understand the economics of proprietary software. QT is somewhere in the ballpark of $1000US. To a company putting out proprietary software this is nothing. The well designed and just generally easy and lovely API of QT speeds up developement time greatly, perhaps by as much as 30-50%. The money the company will thus save by going with QT in programmer salaries will far outweigh the cost of qt by several orders of magnitude.
  • As I understand it, KDE 2.0 will seperate most of the window manager functionality into a library. Thus, wm writers can simply link their wm to libkwm, and get 100% of the KDE compliance without having to implement an imterface like Windowmaker and Blackbox have.

    Personally, I'm not to fond of kwm either, but not because it looks like Windows, that's a myth. What bothers me is its not that configurable. Yet the other 2 wms that are kde compliant don't integrate quite as well. Hopefully the library design will change this.
  • The only reason libgtop came to mind was that some friends of time were using it for a little system monitoring app they were writing and planning to release under a BSD license. The license change screwed those plans.

    You claim GNOME will never change the licensing of their core libraries. One of the major pro-GNOME, anti-KDE arguments is that you can't trust troll tech not to pull the rug out if KDE gets dominent. Yet the KDE people and TT have been making less and less restrictive licenses in order to combat this fear. On the flip side, the GNOME people are tightening their licenses. Why should I trust them to keep the license the same on their core libraries.
  • I would recommend SuSE 6.1 which ships May 3rd.
    Seems the folks here at Slashdot push Red Hat mostly but SuSE is a very nice distro.

    Best Regards
  • Um, I run debian potato with the gnome staging area debs. Its stable. I have never crashed with pretty heavy usage. (1.0.8 Gnome and .15 E I believe.) Your claims are based on very un-tested ideas. GNOME is weird sometimes, but thats expected from its archetechure. It is more complex and flexible than anything else out there. As for the resorce argument -- I /know/ E with Clean Theam and gnome use /less/ memory than KDE and probally CDE. Go figure.
  • GNOME IMHO uses less resources than KDE and is more configurable than KDE. (read - toolkit skins, E skins, MDI control, etc) It also has better licensing than KDE (with the whole qt thing going on, and kind of finished. *no*flames*please*) KDE doesn't seem to manage pesudo-color half as well as gnome either.

    GNOME for me please.
  • I use E + Gnome

    I simply *do not* have problems.

    I did have some problems resulting from constantly upgrading gnome since ver 0.20, but when I wiped all old config files, it worked like a charm.

    Oh, and the Enlightenment 0.15 RPMs have been rock-solid.
  • sure, don't forget to tell your "commercial" software company that they have to pay Troll to make apps that use QT

  • Which is a sore point because this is something I regularly make fun of windows users for.

    However, it can be easier, if you know where all your stuff (should be in $HOME) is, don't have too many apps to reinstall, and have an easy way to back the stuff up.

  • Starbuck, anyone? Download from your favorite mirror. RH 5.9.x -- sounds like a 6.0 prerelease to me.

    Its been a while too btw... I hope they arent getting slow because of the corp idealogy red tape crap. Its always the case, the bigger the company the slower they get till they are damn loosers
    I don't think that you understand. They don't want another RH 5.0 fiasco. Ya know, rawhide has been improving rapidly for a while. Taking a little bit of time to make sure it works is not a bad thing.

    ObFlamebait:
    At least they're not rushing it like Gnome 1.0... hmm... printing is usually a feature of a 1.0 release...

  • > Gnome isn't an ad hoc design, like kde.

    Although at first KDE kind of fell in around the Qt toolkit design-wise, from a design standpoint, it's getting pretty well structured and documented now. GNOME, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in an implement-first document-later cycle.

    If you look carefully, KDE's (SOM/OpenDoc-influenced) object model is of a rather nicer design than Baboon (a cleaned-up COM), too.

    At some point in the future, I strongly suspect that KDE and GNOME's object models will have to merge, in much the same way they finally ended up agreeing on a DnD protocol. Honestly I'd best like to see KDE's model adopted by both.

    That being said, aside from the object models, it looks like the GNOME standards that _are_ specified are definitely turning out better than their KDE counterparts, both in terms of design and implementation.

    I personally prefer GNOME, but they really need to get their design act together a little more.

    (by the way, it's refreshing to see someone who can spell "ad hoc" correctly; it saddens me to see so many people who spell "fare" as "fair" and "their" as "there" and so on...)

  • Gnome (Score:1)

    by axeman ( 5485 )
    I used the version of gnome shipped with 5.9, and recently upgraded to the latest version. It's very usable!!!
  • I have to agree here... it really sucks to do a fresh install on a box and have to go hunting for ssh. :-)
  • I guess this means kde should be the standard gui for all linux mainstream apps (but people will always have the _choice_ to use gnome). Having one standard gui is very important for alot of people coming into linux who demand consistency.
  • but you weren't part of the battle. The battle is about how linux will look like to the outside world. It will look like kde. But that doesn't mean gnome isn't cool
  • well if you like what they're doing it makes sense to support them with your money. Then they'll be able to support the things you care about (like paying people to work on gnome,etc)
  • that's for redhat. But when commercial software companies note that all major linux distros have kde (Caldera, Suse, Corel and redhat), everything will be for kde
  • I've gotta agree here. I've been trying to keep an open mind on KDE vs. GNOME, but the truth is, KDE's a long long way ahead right now.

    The problem with GNOME (and I do keep trying new versions) is its speed and memory consumption. Instability's still a problem, though definitely improving.

    With anything other than the default Gtk theme, and with E running as well, performance drops through the floor, and memory consumption rises dramatically. An X server using 64MB of RAM, 32MB resident? No thank you!

    Things are somewhat better with IceWM rather than E, but GNOME is still way too slow to be usable.

    I'll probably get flamed on two counts here:

    1) Get a faster machine? This is a PII-400 with a Millenium G200 graphics card. If that's not fast enough to run GNOME, then I won't run GNOME, simple as that.

    2) Don't use themes or E. Fair enough, but since themes are touted so much as a super-cool GNOME feature, and the default Gtk look is well, plain, that's a pretty ridiculous argument too.

    I can't help feeling that GNOME has been paying far too much attention to cutesy looks, and neglecting those little details like performance, stability and functionality.

    But it does look nice, I'll give it that :-)
  • use the one you like the most. i betcha it'll work out just fine. i promise.

  • Themes (Score:1)

    by ruud ( 7631 )
    You can't really say that E is ugly. E doesn't have one particular look. It's themable. Even if all the themes are ugly, that's not a complaint against E.

    The configuration language is ugly, IMHO.

    A year ago, it took me about half a day to get fvwm2 to look exactly how I wanted. A few months ago, it took me about half a day to get WindowMaker to look exactly how I wanted. I'm afraid it's going to take weeks to get E to look the way I want it to.
    --

  • "seems to work just fine..."

    Sell THAT to a suit.

    "Mister Biggerstaff, I have a solution to the
    problem with this critical security component...
    it /seems/ to work fine..."

    I can actually see someone getting fired in this
    scenario, not that they would be dumb enough to
    have the conversation like that... But this is the kind of trouble we are always up against.
  • The really big download is not something that
    everybody can take for granted. It is very nice
    to have the physical media. The deadtree documentation that comes with RH is really good.
    This appeals to some people. It does not appeal
    to *me*, but then again, I have a t-3 and great
    contempt for deadtree documentation... It's not
    as if the linux distributions are particularly
    expensive in the stores. Besides that, you'll
    be able to get RH6 from cheapbytes for .
  • Stickers? I never got any STICKERS.
    And come to think of it, Linux Journal never
    sent me a sticker either.

    (I want stickers)
  • So how can I become glibc-2.1 based?
    ftp.gnu.org/pub/glibc/glibc-2.1-README says:

    glibc-2.1 has been (temporarily) removed, until some political issues are worked out.

    So much for freedom, openness, and widespread
    availability of the software. I feel quite
    locked out of the "cathedral" because of this.

  • why are "people coming into linux who demand consistency?"

    Weren't they instructed to leave their preconceived notions of computing at the entrance to the bazaar?
  • Yes, and of course *we power user types* don't do GUI installs. I don't mind one bit -- it's still Linux, after all, and every CLI tool you could ever want is right where it's always been.
  • If it becomes impossible to write software that
    is proprietary Linux will have no future in the
    industry. I don't understand the stand of some
    people who would want us programmers who make a
    living on programming to go on welfare. I sure as
    hell am not interested in just giving software
    support.
    This works for systems where people are at loss on
    a problem. Usually it doesn't work that way. We
    write programs that people need and software
    support is almost always never needed as the help
    files are good enough.
    In a way, fanatics who want nothing but free
    software want us in the poor house because
    they're too cheap to buy software or just
    some comies who think those working for a living
    don't deserve to get paid for their hard work.

    On Linux there is room for both proprietary
    and non proprietary software. We write code
    to earn money and we contribute some free
    software to help people who can't afford or
    are too cheap to buy software.
  • I believe gnome will mtake even more user share of the linux desktop after redhat 6.0 come out. Gnome isn't an ad hoc design, like kde. Have you not seen all the gtk+ apps out? hello... I'll never use kde.
  • I remember a while back, when I wanted to make a GNUStep app and couldn't get any development pacakges. Has it opened up to public coders? I'm all for a NeXt desktop. If not I can keep using the GTKStep gtk theme... ^_^
  • I know RH is good too. I can't wait for cheapbytes to have it so that I can install it on a spare system and play with it.

    But if you want to have a computing future where upgrades are no longer a headache, you must switch to Debian. Apt/dpkg are a combination in computing bliss. Most people switch to Debian once they learn about this feature. Linux is easy as pie once you know that your system is under control.

    I'm not knocking other distros. The recent Caldera and now RH announcements are very encouraging. I think both of those markets are corporate. Debian's install can take getting used to, but once you learn it, the mailing list support at debian-user@lists.debian.org are excellent. IRC at irc.openprojects.net #debian can be a good resource as well if you catch a developer in a generous mood.

    I know RH is the most popular, but if you are looking for a practical reason to pick a particular distro, then debian is a choice where you can learn a lot, there's a lot of help, future upgrades will not be any problem at all. Finally, debian's stability and speed can only be matched by the *BSDs. KDE and GNOME both run in debian quite well. Try it.... If you choose to run RH 6.0, email me and tell me about your experiences. C-ya...



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