The IT industry is shifting away from Micro$oft

[DukeP]

Well...

Im NOT using linux as my primary OS.
Its winxp (no servicepack). The couple of times I have had problems with my windoze, I have been able to correct them from the recovery console (its the black n white doslike thingy - acces via the original install cd). It havent been easy every time, but last time was a breeze. And heres why.

I have a version of Knoppix. Boots of the CD. doesnt touch ANYTHING on the system, unless you really go out of your way to allow it.
I booted from this cd, it made a complete install, nic, usb keyboard n mouse, sound, grafix, screen, printer. I went to the winxp forum, browsed for a solution, printed it, and restarted into the winxp recovery console. Problem solved.

Having just installed a couple of versions of winxp (with slipped sp1a), Im quite envoius about the installation that knoppix makes. No hassle, no reboots (Dooh!), 2 minutes tops - complete installation, including seveal browsers, openoffice, cd burners mp3 and divx players - you name it.

Admittedly, I could have gathered all the "common" winxp programs on one dvd +r and shortened the install time. But still, it takes me several hours to complete any winxp install - with reboots into the high teens. MS office, Adobe series, winzip, Nero, updates and configurations, driver downloads etc.

This isnt exactely Microsofts fault - well the many, many reboots when installing and updating winxp and MS office IS MS's fault - but 3'party software is in fact something you buy on the Windows OS' - so kind of hard to make a unified install. I Know. But. Still. I. Hate. Reboots.



~~DukeP~~

[Wulfman]

pit - set dma for the hdd? (hdparm)

mfg
wulfman

[leech]

Originally posted by Wulfman
pit - set dma for the hdd? (hdparm)

mfg
wulfman

That's what I was thinking. The only time I've seen something like that, was due to dma turned off, or the harddrive dying.

In fact to illustrate one good thing about linux... at least it shows better error reporting. I started working on a friend's computer. When I first booted up (windows XP) I could actually watch the wallpaper draw on the display, about five lines at a time. I'd right click and it seriously took 10 minutes for the menu to pop up! And even when it did, once again I could see it redraw. Well after upgrading the computer, and putting a 40 gb harddrive in there, we took the 6.4gb drive and I tried to put RedHat 8 on it. Well, sure enough, RedHat booted fast on it. I had it at my house, since have a high-speed connection, and updated everything, and it still ran great. After I took it back to the friend's house, I booted it up and I got so many I/O errors from the drive it was scary, and it took 15 minutes just to get into X. So naturally we dumped that drive. Now we just repartitioned the 40gb, installed Libranet, and now it's working great Granted, I had to update the kernel to 2.4.22, since the 2.4.20 didn't support the nforce2 fully (no dma). Fortunately I wasn't in 2.4.20 for very long. I just "apt-get install 2.4.22-k7" and away it went.

Leech

[Wulfman]

you can use apt with redhat?

mfg
wulfman

[leech]

@ GURM

Mandrake 9's ICW did indeed lick salty ball nuts, I believe it was at that time that I gave Debian a run at doing my firewalling. (Which I thought I had screwed up later on, but after I erased it and installed MDK8.2 over it again, I realized that my Debian install was still working... oh well. I have MDK 9.2 now.) MDK9.1 and MDK 9.2 both use Shorewall. All the files for it are right in /etc/shorewall and yes even the start/stop/restart is there in /etc/init.d. Granted, I haven't tried setting it up with 3 nics, but I have learned that from the start of the install, first make sure your lan connection is 192.168.1.1, if you use 192.168.0.1 then you'll have to change it to 192.168.1.1 later on anyhow...

For a recommended Distro that does all you asked, without much hassle. I'd suggest either straight Debian, or Libranet. VERY easy to maintain, though standard Debian is a little bit harder to install. (Though Progeny is working on completely porting Anaconda (RedHat's installer) Over to Debian. And the new Debian installer project seems pretty damned sweet so far. It uses Knoppix's Hardware detection, if I recall...

Leech

[leech]

Originally posted by MultimediaMan
Leech: abandon ship.

PIT is correct: End Users will not understand. End users will not understand the concept of super user, they most certainly won't understand what it is to compile, and the Command Line is not for them, anyway. If you give them the superuser password, you've just compromised your entire installed base of systems, and you can't do that. (BTW, check out that Root Access Exploit they found the day before yesterday.)

Now, you're quick to throw up ideas for solutions, but what didn't you know (or stop to consider), is that each of your solutions actually causes more problems, because it requires someone to support it some way shape or form.

Take Knoppix: Most End-user machines in the Enterprise DON'T HAVE a CD-ROM or a Floppy Disk that is enabled, and it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to figure out why. Productivity issues, and baseline installation consideration make it unwise to let your user base install their own programs. You don't want some intern bee-boppin' to the latest 50 Cent Rap Single, either, in most places I've worked (Especially where I work now).

You don't want Tuxracer in the Enterprise, nor Freecell in any case.

I'll look at Xandros, and build a machine on it. The Specs will be, just to be fair:

AMD 1200MPx2
Chaintech 7KDD
1GB RAM
3x ATI 7000 Video cards (AGP, 2x PCI)
Intel/Ambient HaM Modem (Linux-supported)
Intel 82559 10/100 NIC
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
2x 40GB WD400JB in RAID0
DVD-ROM
CD-RW

We'll see how it goes.

In WinXP-SP1 this has been flawless for over a year. Not one crash or hang.

EDIT: It's $89 Bucks!

Well, geewhiz, but doesn't WinXP sometimes pop up with "Do you want to install this for all users?" Or "You must have administrator's privileges to install this." Give me a break, the ONLY reason that Linux is any harder than windows is because people generally learn windows first. And they do things differently in a lot of cases.

Ideas? No, right now as I speak, I can install a program under linux and it WILL pop up under my menu. Granted if it is not part of KDE or Gnome, it'll pop up under the Generic Debian menu, where everything is. Oh no, maybe after I install Crossfire I'll have to go under Applications-> Debian Menu-> Games -> Adventure-> Crossfire.

I will say they could make several levels of user expertise for Synaptic. Kind of like a Basic; just programs that a non-developer would use. Don't list libraries because non-developers don't care what libraries are installed, as long as their program works. Developer; Shows all the GCC and G++ etc, plus the -dev libraries that are needed to build various programs. Advanced; Shows everything, nothing to hide.

That would make package management even EASIER.

Leech

[leech]

Originally posted by cjolley
You mean to say that you think any* internal dev staff has time to maintain and manage their own particular copy of the OS code?
In this day & age?
Why would they devote time to that?

1, If we buy off-the-shelf, we get maintainence and bug fixes.

2, If we contract software, we get maintainence, bug fixes, and the code just in case the contractor goes belly up.

3, If we write our own, well that speaks for it's self.

But spend time bug checking and maintaining our own unique copy of the OS?
No way! That's part of #1.
What would we do when it came time to upgrade the OS?
Start over?
Meld in our prev changes and hope it didn't break something?
That would be nuts!

About the closest we've ever come to what you seem to be talking about is a bit hacking in some scanner drivers.
And that eventualy got replaced by an off the shelf driver package because it lowered our ongoing maint costs.

chuck

* By "any" I do not mean specialized graphics or science shops.
Those are special case and represent 0% of the market.

They don't maintain their OWN version of the OS. They find a bug that affects their work, they fix it AND send it back to the maintainers of the original code. That's the heart of Open Source software. That's why it's being adopted for a lot of specialized and non-specialized companies. Most anyone who is just going to throw some servers together to serve up email or websites isn't going to do any OS level coding. But the point isn't really IF they are going to start working with the code or not, but the fact that they can SEE the code and make sure there aren't back doors, or other nasty things, makes Open Source software attractive to many companies AND countries.

Especially whilst porting over say from Unix to Linux, or windows to linux, it's quite nice to have all that open source code. THAT is why ILM uses it. That is why NSA uses it, that's why NASA uses it.

Let's just face facts, none of us are going to wake up tomorrow and say "Holy S@#$, MS has gone Bankrupt! Bill Gates is selling himself on the street now! Ballmer is giving handjobs for crack! SCO stopped smoking crack!" The fact is, Linux is growing, it's becoming more popular. To some, it's a status symbol (like those jack-offs at Mandrake Expert... I have my own seperate story about them, though they weren't rude to me at all, they were of NO help, and I actually did eventually find the problem... IN THE DOCUMENTATION of the Kernel itself). To some, it's a "ME TOO", for others, it's a simple statement of freedom from oppressors. And for amazingly more and more people, it's becoming a very good replacement for Windows.

To tell the truth, the reason I first got into linux is because I saw Enlightenment and said "Damn, that looks F'in cool! It's like an operating system made out of a video game!" That was back in the RedHat 4.2 days, I bought this HUGE book (it was all the HOWTO's that were on the net at the time) and it had all the current distros. Debian 1.3, RH 4.2, Turbo Linux, Caldera Linux (which by the way would let you play Tetris while it installed, more modern distros need this I think, it RULED.... oh wait, they're owned by SCO now, so it would be stolen code....). I had to compile Enlightenment, and even then, it was pretty easy for me, though time consuming. There was enough documentation for me to figure it out. Considering my previous OS experience was NOT unix, but was instead the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST's. I did run MiNT on the ST for awhile, and that's when I saw my first X server. Though all I could get was the X and the gray/black background .

Leech

[leech]

Originally posted by Wulfman
you can use apt with redhat?

mfg
wulfman

Yes, I do believe so. At least you could set it up with RedHat 8 and 9. Though it doesn't come pre-installed as with Debian. Mandrake has their own thing called urpmi which is quite handy.

http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net

Leech

Edit: PS. Sorry for all the long posts, since I work for a living (otherwise, I don't have a cushy job in front of the computer so I can't look at MURC during the day... :P) I have to throw in my arguments in one big chunk.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Wulfman
pit - set dma for the hdd? (hdparm)

mfg
wulfman

Erm but why should it have turned it off between one day and the other. Still worth a look.

[runderwo]

DMA will be disabled by the IDE layer as a recovery strategy if problems occur.

You might see something like this in your system log:
hda: dma_intr: status=0xd0 { Busy }
hda: DMA disabled

Repeated disabling of DMA could mean anything from flakey cabling, bad hard drive, BIOS problems, IDE driver problem, kernel IRQ management problems, etc. Posting both /proc/pci, /proc/interrupts and dmesg output would give a clue of what's going on to someone interested in helping (or to your vendor's tech support).

[cjolley]

Originally posted by leech
They don't maintain their OWN version of the OS. They find a bug that affects their work, they fix it AND send it back to the maintainers of the original code. That's the heart of Open Source software. That's why it's being adopted for a lot of specialized and non-specialized companies. Most anyone who is just going to throw some servers together to serve up email or websites isn't going to do any OS level coding. But the point isn't really IF they are going to start working with the code or not, but the fact that they can SEE the code and make sure there aren't back doors, or other nasty things, makes Open Source software attractive to many companies AND countries.
...

But that would put them in the position of HAVING to maintain their own copy.
How else would they be able to know that their changes got incorporated in the next version they install?
How could this possibly be cheaper than buying XP or Unix off the shelf?

As for checking for back doors in the OS by reading the source:
That is a total fantasy. Maybe someone like NSA does that out of nessecity.
But, I'd like to hear one example of a private company, not primarily a software company to start with, that devotes programming resources to that.

I just don't buy that as a real world argument for Linux.
Chuck

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by cjolley
But that would put them in the position of HAVING to maintain their own copy.
How else would they be able to know that their changes got incorporated in the next version they install?
Because the maintainer replies and says "Thanks, we've incorporated your changes", or makes a note to that effect in the changelog. Or in the worst case, you check the next version when it comes out (or a pre-release, or whatever) to make sure it doesn't still have that bug (which you should do anyway). And if it does, you still know how to fix it.

As for checking for back doors in the OS by reading the source: That is a total fantasy. Maybe someone like NSA does that out of nessecity.
Agreed. But at the same time, it gives you the ability to, say, put any NSAKEY-type fears to bed if you need to.

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Ribbit
...you check the next version when it comes out...

No, YOU check it.
Personaly, I've got work to do that pertains to our actual business.
chuck

PS You finding that example for me?

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by cjolley
No, YOU check it.
Personaly, I've got work to do that pertains to our actual business.
chuck
If your software had a bug, which was important enough to be worth the effort of fixing (or having fixed), isn't it equally worth checking that it's actually been fixed? If it's important to your business to ensure that Microsoft/Oracle/whoever fixed some specific bug for you, does it not also pertain to your business to check that they did actually fix it?

PS You finding that example for me?
Hey, I agreed with you on that point! YOU find the example

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Ribbit

If your software had a bug, which was important enough to be worth the effort of fixing (or having fixed), isn't it equally worth checking that it's actually been fixed? If it's important to your business to ensure that Microsoft/Oracle/whoever fixed some specific bug for you, does it not also pertain to your business to check that they did actually fix it?

In other words, you admit that what you are talking about is our programmers taking ownership of the OS code.
I can't wait to see that item in the next MIS buget proposal.
chuck