Linux-Advocacy Digest #985, Volume #29 Wed, 1 Nov 00 13:13:07 EST
Contents:
Re: Need to vent ... Red Hat 7 installation hell (Michael Szczuka)
Re: A Microsoft exodus! (Roberto Alsina)
Re: Why Red Hat is as bad as Microsoft (Michael Szczuka)
Re: Why is MS copying Sun??? (T. Max Devlin)
Re: Why Linux is great (George Richard Russell)
Re: Why Linux is great (George Richard Russell)
Re: Microsoft Speaks German! ("Ilja Booij")
Re: Need to vent ... Red Hat 7 installation hell (Jake Taense)
Re: Terminology (Andres Soolo)
Re: To all you WinTrolls (Jake Taense)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Michael Szczuka)
Subject: Re: Need to vent ... Red Hat 7 installation hell
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 17:12:58 GMT
On 01 Nov 2000 01:47:22 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Terry Porter)
wrote:
>On Tue, 31 Oct 2000 16:43:33 GMT, Michael Szczuka
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>Now, these were three long days until I had three boxes up and running
>>Red Hat.
>Hmm, I dont love Redhat either, but I've found it the *easiest* to install
>in my own experience.
I can only speak about Red Hat and SuSE:
In the last three years I was only exposed to Red Hat and SuSE and
normally both of them are quite easy to install. Getting ever easier in
fact - although that's not necessarily a good thing. But that's another
topic.
>>And from what I've experienced a fair number of the problems I
>>encountered were caused by Red Hat's distribution and not by Linux in
>>general.
>Yeah could be, but all installs have the potential for probs ?
True. However I would expect a distributor as Red Hat to handle those
problems better than a smaller Linux distribution ... especially when it
comes to hardware that is not supported by a clean kernel. SuSE here in
Germany does a lot of customization to their distribution and has had a
much better ISDN support than most other distributions. So especially
with not so common hardware I would expect the bigger players to offer
better support.
>>I'm a big Linux advocate but after these days Red Hat has to do some
>>really great things to get back on my good list again.
>I must admit, I'm always curious about posters who describe themselves as a
>Linux advocate yet post from free agent, mind explaining why you are doing
>so, just to satisfy my curiousity ?
:)
Agreed, not everyone posting in c.o.l.a is a Linux advocate ... :)
Unfortunately my personal tastes don't meet exactly with what our IT
department supports in the office environment (which in my case is W2K
and lots of other Microsoft SW). And since I posted this from the office
before my anger would've died on the way home, you won't find much Linux
software info in the header. But at least I'm using Agent and not
Outlook ... :)
>>Some problems:
>>* Frequently crashing installation program and unfortunately not
>> deterministic (about 80% of the installs crashed at different points).
>I've NEVER seen this, Ive seen installs fail to complete and were usually
>lilo/hdd probs, but Ive never seen one "crash" in 3 years.
Welcome to the club. :)
That was my first also. At the moment I suspect the problem to be the
combination of the specific hardware and Red Hat. Maybe (!) it's _only_
the hardware ... but I would've to do some more tests to verify that and
now that those systems are up and running they will be used in a series
of tests. After that I intent to come back to that problem.
(FYI: the system is an Intel server, 1 to 4 PIII 550 MHz, 512 MB RAM,
Mylex RAID Controller, Intel EtherExpress NIC)
>> And it hurts me very much to admit that Win2K installed smoothly :(
>> (When those server tests are finished I'm gonna try SuSE and Debian.
>> And if they install just fine ... no more Red Hat _ever_ for me.)
>Always a good idea, we are very fond of Debian here atm.
Although I never had much contact with Debian I'm sure gonna give it a
try soon.
>>* Trying to beat a possible problem with the CD-ROM I tried an
>> installation via the network.
>Possible problem with the CDROM ??? doesnt it read CD's ?
Not that bad, but ... although the CD drives of all three systems could
boot from CD before, they just wouldn't with the Red Hat CD's. Don't ask
why. I am still clueless to this (as all the others who saw that).
(I'm pretty sure this is _not_ a RH problem - but it's still weird)
But the main reason I tried a network install was simply trying to
identify the problem with the installation crashes. Me and a colleague
suspected that the crashes most often occured when the system tried to
access the CD. Therefore we tried to minimize this access.
>> In any case I needed a driver disk since
>> the driver for the RAID controller was not on the initial boot disk.
>The target install had a RAID hard disk config ?
Yep. Mylex acceleRAID Controller.
[failure to load driver from driver disk during net install]
>Hmm complex.
Not really when you tried it. However _very_ confusing when you see the
much needed RAID driver ONLY when you install from CD, and not from the
network. :( Doesn't help very much that you can load the packages via
FTP but the system doesn't know what to do with them since it doesn't
see a system drive around ... :)
>>* I wasn't quite up to date with Red Hat's use of both gcc 2.9.6 and
>> egcs-2.91 (?) (as kgcc). Of course that undermined some kernel builds
>> of non Red Hat kernels (clean 2.2.17 source from kernel.org wouldn't
>> compile) until I figured that out.
>Fair enuff too, Ive had some troubles with egcs myself.
Well, the problem seems to lie with the gcc 2.96, which is a non release
version from GNU. Unfortunately this system tried to use this compiler
for kernel compiles ... and when I tried that on the clean 2.2.17 kernel
it would simply fail. With kgcc it would work.
Doesn't really make much sense to me to include a beta version of GCC
(which will never be released by the FSF anyway according to their own
words).
>>* Oracle 8.1.6 installed fine but wouldn't create a database. Thanks to
>> UseNet I found out that this is definitely another problem people
>> experienced with RH7.0.
>Yeah I find I dont like RH's techniques of making my life "easier", tho
>as a newbie I couldnt have done without it :)
I know what you mean. For many people new to Linux those "easy to
install" distributions really help. But they often make life much more
complicated for people who (should) know what they do. And I think I'm
one of them.
>>These were really tough days for an avid Linux supporter like me.
>>Hopefully those will be scarce in the future.
>Your installing a RAID array equipped pc with Oracle, installing via a NFS
>network, I'd think these things are not trivial ?
Well ... not exactly the kind of setup you'd find in the ordinary
household. :)
But as an enterprise setup it was really nothing very unusual.
Hopefully the system works now once it's installed.
-msz
------------------------------
From: Roberto Alsina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.unix.advocacy
Subject: Re: A Microsoft exodus!
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 14:30:16 -0300
El mié, 01 nov 2000, Marty escribió:
>lyttlec wrote:
>>
>> Marty wrote:
>> >
>> > Chris Wenham wrote:
>> > >
>> > > >>>>> "Ayende" == Ayende Rahien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> > >
>> > > > "Weevil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>> > > > news:YLxL5.508$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > >> That's quite a bit of trouble to go to, but it is not an impossible
>> > > >> scenario. Here's the same scenario for Windows:
>> > > >>
>> > > >> 1) Write a back door in any piece of software you want to.
>> > > >> 2) Upload it to shareware sites.
>> > >
>> > > > Why can't I do the same for OSS product?
>> > >
>> > > You can do the same, so in theory the potential for payoff (the
>> > > number of clients you compromise) is the same for either model.
>> > >
>> > > The only difference is that the user of the Free software HAS THE
>> > > OPTION of re-compiling the source code that he might also audit or
>> > > have audited.
>> > >
>> > > The user of the closed software does not have that option.
>> >
>> > But what does this option buy you? Is a user of a given piece of open source
>> > software generally paranoid enough to scrutinize the source code before
>> > deploying the application? More than likely, the answer is no. So the
>> > detection of any security holes usually occurs after the first act of
>> > violation (same as a closed-source scenario). At this point, the open source
>> > software user can either work on a fix themselves, locate the original author
>> > and notify them of the problem, or both. The closed source software user has
>> > to notify the author and wait for a fix. So, in essence, the only difference
>> > would be turnaround time to fix the defect, and that's only the case if you
>> > happen to be a skilled coder.
>>
>> But someone will check and notify everyone if a backdoor is found.
>> Paranoia is becoming very common. The advantage of open source is you
>> can't hide anything.
>
>If there's a backdoor buried in 100,000 lines of code, how likely is it
>to be found by someone who is unfamiliar with the application? Throwing
>a needle into a haystack is an effective way to hide the needle.
Well, something that MS claims was not a backdoor was found on windows, without
even having the source code (remember NSAKEY?), I'd say that was even more
unlikely, and that the likelyhood of finding it in Linux is higher than that of
finding it in windows in any case.
Consider that if such a thing was found on Linux, we would now know if it
was a backdoor or not.
--
Roberto Alsina
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Michael Szczuka)
Subject: Re: Why Red Hat is as bad as Microsoft
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 17:24:04 GMT
On Tue, 13 Jun 2000 12:43:21 -0700, Jacques Guy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>But, which affordable languages do you know that do automatic
>garbage collections? The first and last I used for a long time
>was Simula 67. I do not remember if Oberon did, but I dropped
>Oberon: there were only Windows versions available.
Sorry for being a little bit off-topic for this group but:
1) Yes, Oberon has garbage collection.
2) I worked with Oberon on SunOS 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.5+
-msz
------------------------------
From: T. Max Devlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
Subject: Re: Why is MS copying Sun???
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 12:31:01 -0500
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Said Erik Funkenbusch in comp.os.linux.advocacy;
>"Bruce Scott TOK" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> A big event occurred here: the crash of comet SL/9 into Jupiter in July
>> 1994. What made that one new is that due to the speed with which
>> observatories were putting up press articles and pictures, much of the
>> material was available _only_ via WWW. I had heard of it for a bit less
>> than a year before, but this event was what made me install Mosaic under
>> my home directory. A _lot_ of people got to know the web during the
>> month or so all this was going on.
>
>Hmm.. Are you sure it was 94? I thought it was 95...
You figured it was Microsoft. Turns out you were deluded. (Again.)
>> Only to the people slaved to MS. That is changing, now. Had the 386
>> been available cheaply 5 years earlier than it was, we'd have had a
>> Linux type thing that much earlier and then MS would have been swamped.
>> As it happens, we made it just in time so that _we_ didn't get swamped.
>
>Uhh.. the cheap 386 *WAS* available more than 5 years before the first
>release of Linux. First release of Linux was in 1991, while the 386 was
>released in 1985. And the 486 in 90.
He didn't say "if the 386 had been available more than 5 years before
the first release of Linux", he said if it had been available 5 years
earlier than it was. Linux isn't bound to a certain processor set, like
Windows. If bigger hardware had been available on the PC platform
earlier, MS would have been swamped. As it happens, we made it just in
time so that Linux users didn't get swamped, though obviously Windows
users did.
>> To me the thing came of age in 1994. Before Win95.
>
>Remember, there were something like 100,000 copies of Win95 "Final beta"
>available since late 1994.
LOL.
--
T. Max Devlin
*** The best way to convince another is
to state your case moderately and
accurately. - Benjamin Franklin ***
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------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (George Richard Russell)
Subject: Re: Why Linux is great
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 17:42:11 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Terry Porter wrote:
>On Tue, 31 Oct 2000 23:57:37 GMT, George Richard Russell
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
><snip>
>
>>Every few years, Unix gets another GUI. Its a shame the cli isn't
>>replaced / improved as often.
>>
><snip>
>
>There are reasons for the cli George, low overhead making the remote
>admin of Unix easy, is one.
Easy? The cli maintenance of Unix is so easy we've seen dozens of
frontends to it - Linuxconf, Webmin, COAS, SMIT and more.
If you want a low overhead, easy admin system then something like
Sambas swat or webmin is the way to go - no need for remotely invocable
root shells and less of a security risk.
>Your lovely high overhead GUI's will always be less effective that way, (in
>os's where remote admin is possible at all, this naturally includes any Windows
>os except NT and Win2k, and the Mac) until we are all using 2000mhz cpus and
>have fibre everywhere.
The Unix cli needs an overhaul for reasons entirely unrelated to
remote use.
The best thing that happened to Unix cli tools was to be reimplemented
by GNU. Sadly, it was mostly a clone job, so while some improvements
were made ( long options ; help switches ; better output formatting)
others were not - copying inconsistencies and downright bizarre
options syntax. Used dd recently? Its got very strange syntax. How
abouit find vs locate? Is it -R or -r for recursion in ls vs others?
Some tools take switches , options and filenames in different
orders. Why does tar behave differently accross Unices? Why is z used
for gzip but I for bzip? (I guess they ran out of letters to options)
Why does biff not have standard switch format but rather single letters?
Can we please finally change shell syntax so filenames with spaces
are not so awkward to deal with with escaped characters and all the
rest.
Unix cli tools are full of odd special cases. It makes learning far
harder and usage far less intuitive.
George Russell
Registered Linux user 61117
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (George Richard Russell)
Subject: Re: Why Linux is great
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 17:42:12 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, mlw wrote:
>George Richard Russell wrote:
>>
>> All hidden behind a backwards UI for 70's teletypes.
>
>I hardly think 'X' is for '70 teletypes. None of the office packages
>would run on '70s teletypes.
X is so old and cruddy that it has been the bane of modern Unix
gui's for years.
Sun tried to use NeWS instead.
NeXT tried Display Postscript
Apple is using Quartz / PDF for Mac OS X
And Wordperfect, btw, has a console Unix version that probably would
run on a teletype.
George Russell
------------------------------
From: "Ilja Booij" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Microsoft Speaks German!
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 18:43:21 +0100
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "chrisv"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Charlie Ebert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>Europe is the heart of our Western Culture.
>
> No it's not. Western culture is more and more American culture.
>
>>Anything which comes forth from Europe generally ends up spreading
>>across the world.
>
> No it doesn't. America's influence is much stronger than Europe's.
>
> Don't want to start an argument. Just stating facts.
Nice facts..
do you have any proof of these facts?
of course there are a lot of things from the US spreading in Europe,
mostly to do with popular culture. now look at (the more important
things like) politics, business, etc
not to much US-like-models to be found there!
Ilja
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jake Taense)
Subject: Re: Need to vent ... Red Hat 7 installation hell
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 17:54:21 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, No-Spam wrote:
>>I'm a big Linux advocate but after these days Red Hat has to do some
>>really great things to get back on my good list again.
>I must admit, I'm always curious about posters who describe themselves as a
>Linux advocate yet post from free agent, mind explaining why you are doing
>so, just to satisfy my curiousity ?
I'll answer for some of us, although the question wasn't directed at me.
I'm a linux user at home (well, dual-boot), but I post from News Xpress on
Windows NT because I generally read Usenet on breaks at work, where my main
workstation is NT.
I suspect that is the case for many here.
------------------------------
From: Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Terminology
Date: 1 Nov 2000 17:53:15 GMT
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> What the heck does MNU stand for? I checked their site, and can't find
> out what MNU stands for. Maybe somekind of wacky acronym for
>From http://www.kondara.org/index.html.en :
| co, Ltd. "MNU" is an expression of a sound made when you touch a
| penguin (phonetic symbols available here), and also stands for "Mount
| is Not Umount". The word "Kondara" is not a proper Japanese but a
| wordplay from an old Japanese TV animation, and indicates their
| resolution to devote to this distribution. Let's work together! We
--
Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Experience is what causes a person
to make new mistakes instead of old ones.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jake Taense)
Subject: Re: To all you WinTrolls
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 18:08:17 GMT
In article <MRJL5.1640$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Weevil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
>> I'm not fond of ANY help lines - as a person who spent 6 years servicing
>and
>> supporting systems, I have yet to find one very useful.
>>
>> However (and this isn't a pro-Microsoft statement, just a fact) the one
>single
>> time that I used a Microsoft support line, I got a good answer
>immediately.
>>
>
>Don't take this personally, but virtually everyone here knows that the
>likelihood of that happening is small. Everyone also knows that the
>likelihood that you, as a Windows advocate, are lying about it, is much
>larger. The reason we know that is we regularly see lies coming from
>Windows fanatics, and we hardly know anybody who has had a good experience
>with Microsoft's support lines.
>
Just for the record, here was the problem I called concerning:
Administering SQL Server, I found I could not increase the database size. It
would kindly inform me that the system had -2GB of available drive space.
So, after a quick search through the knowledge base, I called their tech
support. The gentleman who took my call knew the solution immediately. Turns
out there is a bug in the interface (surprise!) that prevents growing a
database if you have more than a certain amount of free space.
He immediately faxed me a document containing the workaround, and actually
CALLED me when the patch came out. That was what impressed me. The bug was a
little infuriating, but the service was good.
Worst tech support line I ever dealt with on a regular basis was Apple's.
But I am NOT a Windows advocate, and stating one positive experience with
Microsoft tech support does not make me one. Plain and simple, I advocate
whatever does the job. Windows sucks for some things. Linux sucks for others.
Mac sucks for some things too. Use the best tool for the job. I know - that's
a concept foreign to you. I, for one, view the OS as a means to an end. I
don't restrict my computer needs based on the OS I possess, I choose the OS
based on my needs. That is why I dual-boot.
Kindly point to me where I stated that Windows is superior. Search UseNet all
you like, all you'll find is some claims I made concerning the fact that I
can't get rid of Windows because the tools for audio editing (a requirement of
mine) on linux are extremely immature compared to their Windows/Macintosh
counterparts.
Or, alternatively, simply point where I stated that people should abandon
linux in favour of Windows (which would be "advocacy") - you won't find it.
Of course, like a good many linux advocates, you simply can't read for
content.
------------------------------
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