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Leading itemsCaldera OpenLinux 2.2 is out. This distribution, released this week with great fanfare at Comdex (press release here), has been drawing some serious attention. Nicholas Petreley raved about it in InfoWorld, saying that it brings the desktop battle to Windows "51 weeks ahead" of what he had expected. And this looks to be an interesting release. Since when should Caldera, long known as the slowest and most conservative distribution in its adoption of new software, be the first to come out with the 2.2 kernel? The ability to start the installation under Windows and handle making room and repartitioning the disk for the user is a great touch. If it works as well as they say, Caldera has just addressed one of the more difficult aspects of getting into Linux - getting it installed in the first place. The "Linux is too difficult to install" attack is rapidly losing credibility. On another front, Corel has announced that its distribution will be based on KDE and the Debian distribution (see Corel's press release for details). Going with Debian is an imaginative and somewhat brave move on Corel's part, and it shows the stature that Debian has been able to attain over the last year. Corel's distribution (due toward the Fall) is looking more interesting all the time. In comparison to all this, Red Hat's upcoming 6.0 release, to be announced on Monday with a rumored May 10 delivery date, seems somewhat lackluster. Its main points thus far seem to be the 2.2 kernel (of course) and a higher price. Red Hat may yet have an ace or two up 6.0's sleeve, and, in any case, nobody need worry about Red Hat's immediate prospects. But recent developments look sure to remind the world that there is more to Linux than Red Hat, and that can only be a good thing. (We have no complaint with Red Hat, incidentally. They make a quality distribution - the one that LWN runs on - and their support for Linux development has been substantial. But much of the world has not yet caught on that there is more to Linux than one company.) The Mindcraft report. This report, which stirred up a lot of fuss last week, sure seems to have faded away in a hurry. Press coverage of the report has been minimal, and what little there has been has been almost entirely skeptical of the report. Microsoft, of course, is pushing the reportin an attempt to get their money's worth out of it, but people aren't buying it. The Linux community should congratulate itself here. The response to the report was almost entirely calm, mature, and factual. The result is that this study got debunked before it even got off the ground. This is a real victory, and it shows how much respect Linux has earned. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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April 22, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsMisconfiguration of Shopping Carts is the technical issue behind the news.com article entitled, "Privacy at risk in e-commerce rush. As a result of misconfiguration, client information, including names, addresses and even credit card information, is exposed to the Internet. Joe Harris reported the problem on Bugtraq as well, mentioning his frustration trying to get one commercial vendor to respond to the situation. "We did have a conversation with one (fairly large) commercial vendor (who shall remain nameless) and if the response we got from them was any indication, contacting the remaining vendors would have been futile. This particular vendor couldn't see the problem we had with the software that -they themselves- had installed on behalf of our mutual client. They couldn't understand why we told them to change their software or remove it from the server, even after a long and patient explanation of a little thing called 'liability'.He posted a a later message, listing six shopping carts found to be misconfigured on a variety of sites. He emphasized that all of these systems could be used correctly and safely. However, many small to medium-sized businesses are not doing so. Privacy issues involving the apprehension of the Melissa virus author came up at the Congressional hearing held to discuss the impact of the virus. In particular, the cooperation of AOL and a "a unique identifying number attached to Microsoft software" were questioned, but without receiving any useful answers, because the investigation is ongoing. This New York Times article provides more details. It is good to know that such issues aren't being overlooked in the wake of the hysteria about the Melissa virus. On a separate note, later in the article, there is even a promising quote, indicating that someone involved understands that fixing the software bugs that are exploited by a virus is critical to resolving the problem. "If the only defense is to react to a problem as it occurs, we're always going to be behind". This tends to get overlooked, particularly by vendors that make large amounts of money peddling solutions to detect, rather than prevent, such viruses. This means that commercial vendors will need to respond to such problems in the same way the open source community does: by fixing the actual problem. Security ReportsA potential problem with the Linux 2.0.X kernel series was discovered as a side effect of a Midnight Commander bug reported to Bugtraq. It seems that the 2.0.X kernels, at least through 2.0.36, do not prevent someone from creating a file with a negative size. The 2.2.X kernel series does not appear to be vulnerable. For more information and a patch, check out Chris Wilson's post, which he also forwarded to Alan Cox for inclusion in the next 2.0.X kernel.IPFilter, a freely distributable TCP/IP packet filter, has a tmp race problem, as reported on Bugtraq by Nick Garath. Darren Reed, the author, followed up with more information and a patch. Pointers to security updates from Red Hat for lpr, procmail, rsync and NFS are available on our Distributions page. Anyone running Red Hat should pull down and apply these updates immediately. UpdatesDebian has issued yet another procmail update. For details, check their announcement. If you have procmail installed, you should acquire the new package.ResourcesThe latest version of CRYPTO-GRAM, a free newsletter about cryptography issues, is now available.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 22, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current kernel release is 2.2.6. Linus returned from his vacation, tossed out 2.2.6 without an announcement, then hit the road again for his midwestern speaking engagements. So not much else has happened in the area of official kernel releases. The number of complaints about 2.2.6 seems to be quite small, thus far. The NFSv3 client has moved from alpha to beta test. See Trond Myklebust's announcement for the full story. Included with the release is a new version of mount which automatically uses NFSv3 if the server offers it. Trond's plan is to push for inclusion of the NFSv3 client in the 2.3 tree, once that begins; he does not plan to try to get it into the 2.2 series. A Linux hardware test suite? Doug Ledford, master of Adaptec SCSI, among other things, sent out a message announcing a plan to gather together a set of kernel hardware compatibility test programs. The idea is to test all aspects of how the kernel works with a particular device. They are looking for existing test utilities that people might have sitting around. Please drop them a note if you have something to contribute. Performance degration after a few hours of operation was a recent complaint. Turns out that the people involved were running Compaq systems; said systems have a power management system that will slow down the CPU after a few hours of operation. Disabling the power management in the BIOS fixed the problem... Problems mounting SMB shares with smbfs have also been in the air. It appears that there are at least two different problems out there. One is that the "Windows 95 bug workaround" kernel compilation option creates difficulties if you are mounting shares from NT servers. If that is your situation, the bug workaround option should be turned off. There also appears to be an idle timeout problem that cropped up recently; that one is still outstanding. A new software RAID release is out, this is version 1999.04.21. It applies to both 2.0.36 and 2.2.6, and is primarily a bug-fix release. The capabilities discussion rages on. There is not a whole lot more to say about it here; folks really interested in the discussion should probably participate in it directly. It is worthwhile, however, to have a look at this summary of the discussionposted by Ted T'so, written in his usual clear manner. It sums up a few different views of capabilities, and argues that capability information has to be stored in the filesystem. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 22, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaAs mentioned on the front page, OpenLinux 2.2 has started to ship. Michael Lineback, a beta tester, commented, "This release is the most professional install system I have EVER repeat EVER seen. Regardless of those who would bemoan the demise of the command line in the install, it is sweet."News.com reported on Caldera's OpenLinux 2.2 as well, commenting, "The early response has been strong. High download traffic today took Caldera Systems' Web site down, and the company was working to get it back up and running..." Note that the website appears to have been back up and running within a few hours of when this article was published. If you are planning to download OpenLinux 2.2, remember that it is available from ftp.calderasystems.com, not ftp.caldera.com, which has confused some people. The exact location of the files to download is ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/OpenLinux/2.2/OpenLinux/. DebianThe Debian Weekly News for this week reported a growing number of references to postings on the Debian mailing lists by mainstream press. Needless to say, the postings weren't chosen to reflect positively on Debian. This editor strongly hopes, however, that Debian will not move from its current public development process as a result. The ability for anyone interested in Debian to get access to almost any information about it is one of Debian's major strengths. Press articles that want to portray negative information will always find some source. It is an interesting world, though, to find out how much we are all living in a fishbowl ... Also reported this week was a Chinese translation project for Debian. The debian-chinese mailing list has been created and more web pages have been translated to that language. LinuxGTHere's another new distribution for you: LinuxGT. It's claim to fame seems to be its graphical interface, which makes its appearance from the beginning of the installation process.Red HatThe Red Hat 6.0 release is the focus of this news.com articlewhich contains some information on new features and a warning of a price increase. "Another change in the new version will be a remote installation utility that lets people install or upgrade Linux on remote servers via the network..."Security updates from Red Hat were actually posted to the Red Hat updates site on April 13th, two days before we published a mention that they were lagging behind. However, their errata pages had not been updated, nor had notices been sent to their mailing lists. They resolved that quickly, on Friday, April 16th. Four security-related updates are now available, including updates for rsync, procmail, lpr and NFS. SlackwareGdb-4.18, glib-1.2.2, gtk+-1.2.2 and Qt 1.44 have been added to the current version. In addition, the kernel has been upgraded to 2.2.6.SuSEThe German version of SuSE 6.1 is indeed shipping, according to this note from Andre Fachat. Meanwhile, this press release pegs the ship date for the International version to May 3rd and contains information about the features of this latest update. The SuSE announcement contains more information, including news of their participation at Comdex and more.RPM packages of the latest Gnome software are now officially supported by SuSE and can be found on their Web site. Alexander Stohr wrote in with some details, including a mention that the packages require SuSE 6.X and that use of one of the ftp mirror sites for the download is highly encouraged. UltraPenguinAnother set up updates for UltraPenguin 1.1.9 (Linux for UltraSparc processors) has been announced. They're getting ever closer to that 1.2 release.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 22, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed in the center column.
Known Distributions:
Caldera OpenLinux |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsGcc/egcsJoe Buck, a member of the egcs steering committee confirmed the rumors that egcs and gcc would be merging in this post to Slashdot. This is excellent news for the development community. Pgcc (pentium-optimized gcc) will continue as a separate variant. If you're interested in more comments and information, you can check out the entire slashdot thread.GuileThe next stable version of Guile, version 1.3.2, is scheduled to be out near the end of this month, along with first real release of the Guile Object-Oriented Programming System (GOOPS), for which little information is currently available on the website. For those of you that haven't run into Guile before, it is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extension, a library implementation of the Scheme language. You can find out more information on Guile at the Guile website.For the most up-to-date information on Guile, check this automatically generated status page. JavaWhat are the chances that IBM's just released JVM for Win32 will be ported to Linux? That is the question asked by Shafiek Savahl on the java-linux mailing list. Reports are that it is 30% faster. He got a response to check the mailing list again in about a week ... so consider it an official rumor! We'll be checking up on this next week.PerlA new perl mailing list, perl-announce, has been created. It will carry only announcements of new stable versions of perl. For information on development versions, stable versions and other news, continue to watch Perl News.Meanwhile, on comp.lang.perl.misc, Tom Christiansen has been posting entries from the Perl FAQ one at a time ... it is an interesting way of getting people to notice what they don't know yet and maybe take the time to learn just one thing, as opposed to putting off a full read of the FAQ for later. Sometimes the entries generate some discussion and sometimes they don't. It will be interesting to see if there is any measurable change in the postings to the newsgroup as a result. Perl training courses in Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin, Australia are being held by Netizen, with discounts to members of any local Linux User Groups. Larry Wall can be found on the cover of this month's Linux Journal, which features a story on Larry which is not yet available on-line. The Mod Perl Developer's Guide has been been updated. PythonPython 1.5.2, the final version, was announced on April 13th.The preliminary Call-For-Papers for the Eighth International Python Conference, to be tentatively held December 1st through the 4th, 1999, in Washington, D.C., has been released. Here's a press release from O'Reilly saying that the new Python book (for beginners) is available. For kicks and grins, check out this controversial banner. The program for "La Journee Python France", ("The First French Python Day"), an event scheduled for May 28th, 1999, is now available (in French and some English). Guido will present the introduction for the day and the program looks excellent, so if you have a chance to stop by, please do so! Members of the community are invited to present their projects as well. The Python mailing lists are moving! If you are currently receiving or would like to receive the comp.lang.python.* groups via mail instead of newsgroup, check out this announcement. Tcl/tkA Request for Comments on the first draft specification of TkGS, the Tk Graphics System, was posted by Frederic BONNET. Here is the current TkGS specification.The first beta of AGNI, a multi-threaded middleware for scripting distributed, event-oriented applications, has been announced. Blitz.Tcl, a CGI script accelerator for ISAPI enabled web servers, was announced in its first beta form in this press release from /n software inc. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 22, 1999 |
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Development projectsGnomeMiguel de Icaza posted a note exploring the need for a truly powerful mail client, one that can keep up with high-volume mailing lists, track important people, specific conversations, archival based on multiple criteria, handle MIME messages correctly and connect up with other tools such as address books and calendars. Discussion was (improperly) spawned on gnome-announce as a result, talking about all the features of the "perfect" mail client. Some interesting ideas were mentioned, such as eliminating folders and replacing them by indexed archives and search capabilities. Further discussion should be moving to gnome-mailer-list@nuclecu.unam.mx (this note included instructions for getting signed up).The Gnome Bug Tracking system may have gone down temporarily due to a possible strike at the University hosting it, but plans were made to guarantee the downtime would be short. GNUThe second issue of Brave GNU World is now on-line. Features this month include Electric, a circuit layout program from Steven Rubin and the Free Delphi project, a Hamburg-based group of free programmers which is creating a whole ensemble of business solutions under the GPL, among other topics.KDEKDE-1.1.1 beta is now available. Barring the discovery of any serious problems, KDE-1.1.1 should follow shortly.LotharEasier hardware configuration is the goal of the Lothar project, the open source project (GPL) sponsored by MandrakeSoft, the company behind the Mandrake distribution. To reach their goal, they are developing a graphical interface and automated hardware detection using the "detect" library. Ethernet and sound configuration modules are in progress and screen shots are available on the project web site. Linux kernel 2.2.X and GTK+ 1.2.X are required.This announcement from Gael Duval provides pointers to the Lothar mailing list. They have room for lots of people to help out, so if this is the type of project that would interest you, be sure and check it out! Mozilla/NetscapeMozilla M4 was released on April 15th. There are still a lot of bugs, as is to be expected with pre-release software, but the response to the latest beta appears to be favorable.Documentation on building Mozilla has been completed, after weeks of hard labor. Instructions cover OS/2, Linux and Windows platforms and the fruits of their labor are now available. The Instant Messaging Project was a new Mozilla project, announced on Monday, April 19th, and then quickly pulled from the Mozilla site per Netscape's request, who had contributed the Instant Messaging API document. As an indication that the media spotlight on Mozilla is not yet gone, news.com quickly followed up with an article on the action. Speculation runs the gamut from a political move by AOL to protect their position as leader in the Instant Messaging arena, to a result of negative feedback to the project as a potential distraction from the main goal of getting a working browser out the door. All of it remains speculation for now, until Netscape or someone within Mozilla chooses to speak more. BusinessWeek ran a more positive article on the Mozilla project, having taken the time to talk to a number of people directly involved in the project. Chris Nelson, editor of MozillaZine, is heavily quoted. ZopeThis week's Zope Weekly News covers, as major news, the release of ZServer beta 1, followed immediately by a couple of bug fixes. ZServer "integrates Zope with the Medusa internet server framework, and allows Zope to speak multiple internet Protocols".Also included are a number of pointers to spontaneous and elicited testimonials from people currently using Zope, including the implementation of the IDG Now! Brazilian website. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessHP is jumping into Linux in a big way. Perhaps most significant this week was their announcement of a 24x7 support offering for Linux. No longer is it true that there is no big company to call to try to get problems fixed. Significantly, HP's support is a multivendor offering: they List Caldera, Pacific HiTech, Red Hat, and SuSE. HP also announced OpenMail 6.0, their competitor to Outlook which runs on Linux. Another sub-$500 Linux system offering has been announced, this one from The Computer Underground. A reasonable-looking 64MB machine can be had for $494, making it, perhaps, the least expensive Linux-installed system on the market. Logitech announces Linux support. Logitech has announced the availability of Linux drivers for all of its game port products. Source is also available via the Linux Joystick Driver page. See also brief articles in Next Generation and GameSpot. (Thanks to Damon Poole). A popular, eight-headed penguin. Penguin Computing has proclaimedthat its eight-way server is a "surprise hit" at Internet World this week. "'We've been overwhelmed by the expressions of interest we've had in the Penguin Linux server,' said Penguin's founder and president, Sam Ockman. 'We have already received well over 500 serious inquiries from prospective buyers of the system.'" An open source e-commerce project. A new company called RSDi.com has surface and proclaimedits intention to create a free E-Commerce server system. "This first product includes integration with Cybercash (www.cybercash.com) and PaymentNet (www.paymentnet.com) for credit card processing, shopping carts, rewards programs, coupons, online auctions, automatic XML catalog publishing, business to business XML transactions, a GUI Java applet for building stores and auctions over the Internet..." They have a minimal web site up, but there's not much there yet. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
April 22, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThis was a relatively busy week for Linux in the press, more so than the last few. The expected flurry of articles about the Mindcraft report did not materialize, but Linus' Comdex keynote was good for a few, and a lot of other topics popped up as well. An increasing amount of the press coverage has turned critical of Linux, but it's still treated quite well by any standard. Here is this week's recommended reading:
Mindcraft was not entirely absent from the press; here's the articles we were able to turn up.
Staying on the subject of Comdex, Caldera chose that forum to make their announcement for OpenLinux 2.2. Red Hat and SuSE are also headed toward big releases, and there were a number of articles that reflected this.
Similarly, HP's announcement drew a couple of articles:
There were some introductory pieces this week:
Here's a set of business-oriented articles:
A few articles about specific projects:
And after all that, what's left is:
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet |
April 22, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesBill Henning has added results for the K6-3 400 and Celeron 400A processors to his Linux kernel compilation benchmark at CPU Review. He has also reorganized things and added a chart of his results (up to 52 processors now).The Linux Newbie Administrator Guide has been updated, with the contents increasing by a third. It also has a new location, having moved from http://www.magma.ca/~bklimas/ to http://sunsite.auc.dk/linux-newbie/. Another administration guide recently announced is Linux Administration Made Easy ("LAME"); it aims to produce a comprehensive document on the administration of Linux systems. A FreeDOS CDROM is now available from SuperAnt, a a Linux and Open Source technology provider and packager. For more information, check out their press release. More jargon. Eric Raymond has announcedanother release of the Jargon File, incorporating comments brought out by the previous round. "PC Upgrading and Maintenance" from Smart Computing is reviewed by Rob Slade this week. Web sitesThe home of the "Linux Powered" logo, of which we are very fond, has moved to http://www.ericson.net/linux-logo/, according to Matt Ericson.Pinguim News is a new daily Linux news site in Portuguese. User Group NewsThe first meeting of the Sao Paulo Linux Users Association (LinuxSP) will take place on April 24th. Here is their announcement and their website (in Portuguese). |
April 22, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekLinuxnewbie.org is a site dedicated to helping those who are transitioning to Linux from proprietary systems. Look to this site for an increasing collection of newbie-oriented information. Notes on libre software is an extensive and growing document on all aspects of free software. It is available in both English and Spanish. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 22, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to editor@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 11:32:41 -0600 To: rowan@shandwick.ca From: Maurice Hilarius <maurice@harddata.com> Subject: An article:Linux won't have its day yet In a recent article at: http://www.canoe.ca/MoneyColumnsRowan/mar31_rowan.html You (Mr. Geoffrey Rowan of Shandwick Canada) wrote some comments that we felt demanded a response: Hello sir. We recently read your article with great interest. We do, however, wish to respond to some of the comments contained therein. Such as: "In fact, there are very few true anarchists on the Linux bandwagon. You'd have to classify most of the fervent supporters of the new operating system as hopeful opportunists. These are people who see a pyramid scam-like possibility and want to get in quickly, make some money and get out before everyone else realizes that the Linux base will never expand broadly enough to support the kind of market it needs to become something other than a niche technology." We feel a need to respond to this comment: We have built and supported Linux based computers for a wide variety of clients for over 4 years. These clients include organisations in Canada such as the University of Alberta, University of Toronto, Queens University, University of Western Ontario, Telecommunications Research Labs, the Alberta Government - Dept. of the Environment, the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and so on. In the private sector we sell to various corporations, including San Francisco stores ( 113 stores Canada-wide) and CN Rail. In the U.S. we supply the U.S. Navy, the Department of Commerce, the NOAA/ATDD weather satellite organisation, The National Institute of Standards and Technology, Stanford, MIT, and others. The list is FAR more extensive than this, but we feel that this small selection demonstrates the scope and quality of our client base. We believe that our clients are competent, and not likely to be "taken in" by some sham. They have bought Linux systems from us for years, and continue to do so now, in ever-increasing numbers. We do not "foist this off" on them, they come to us and ASK for these products. Simply put the concept you have stated in your article is untrue, unfair, and verging on slanderous. We look forward to your response, and hope that a retraction and correction may be forthcoming, in at least as public a forum as the original article. Best regards, Maurice W. Hilarius NEW! Telephone: 01-780-456-9771 Hard Data Ltd. NEW! FAX: 01-780-456-9772 11060 - 166 Avenue email:maurice@harddata.com Edmonton, AB, Canada - T5X 1Y3 http://www.harddata.com | ||
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:01:24 -0400 From: Jeff Hecker <Jeff_Hecker@dpc.senate.gov> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Some more comments on NT vs. linux Greetings, I just finished reading Hajo Smulders' <hajo@mindspring.com> comments in LWN. I've heard similar comments from others. I'd like to suggest that these comments indicate a basic misunderstanding as to what an operating is supposed to do -- at least in my opinion. Hajo says, "I get a Blue Screen Of Death about twice a week; but that is usually because of my own stupid programming." Unless Hajo is writing kernel modules or device drivers, what kind of stupid programming crashes an enterprise-class, high-end operating system? One of the main functions of an operating system is to separate various programs from interfering with each other and with the OS. Hajo's program might crash, but it should't take the entire system with it. I have similar experiences with NT. Our office runs some software which is (so far) only available on NT. On a good week, the system only crashes once. The "fault" is with the application which has a runaway memory allocation error in certain circumstances. The "responsibility" is with Microsoft Windows NT to keep that application error from crashing everything else running on the system. The all-too-common workaround to this problem is that people don't run more than one application on an NT box -- and justifiably so. Microsoft sales staff even use its unreliability as a sales tool -- "If NT isn't reliable enough to run your two programs at once, then buy two!" And people do. I run both NT and Linux servers at two locations. The server I mentioned above sometimes runs for days without dying. Other lightly loaded NT servers running only file and print service sometimes run for weeks at a time before failing. The Linux systems, which run everything under the sun, run for months without interruption, and then its usually a power failure. The current uptime on the Linux machines is about 260 days. And the las restart was for a disk installation. Microsoft's products might be be more colorful and have more sound effects, and have more lemming sales staff pushing it, but when it comes to reliability, there is no comparison. Jeff Hecker Washington, DC | ||
From: Craig Goodrich <craig@ljl.com> To: sales@varesearch.com Subject: NT vs Linux on Insanely Fast Hardware Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 10:13:13 -0500 Fellas, OK, there's been an awful lot of flaming (inevitable and regrettable on the 'net) and serious discussion of Mindcraft's Linux/NT benchmarks. The consensus seems to be that Mindcraft was reasonably honest and fair but that tuning parameters for Linux and its associated software on such high-end equipment is hard to come by. I read about you guys showing off at some Linux trade fair your cybernetic Godzilla that built the 2.2 kernel in something like 45 seconds, with memory and FWSCSI that started in Santa Clara and stretched to somewhere around Albuquerque, and quad Xeons whose heat output could handle a small Minneapolis suburb in February. So I'd assume that if anyone knows all there is to know about tuning enormous Linux servers, it's you. How about getting together with Mindcraft (or some NT-oriented OEM) and rerunning the benchmark, so at least both the Linux and NT communities would have some more realistic numbers on which to base their advocacy, flames, and (oh, yes, I almost forgot) actual purchasing decisions? And, incidentally, how about having some documentation guy pick the brains of your best engineers to come up with a central source for Linux server tuning information? Thanks, Craig Goodrich ============== Freeing software is a good start. Now how about people? http://airnet.net/craig/g4c | ||
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 15:11:49 -0300 From: Leandro =?iso-8859-1?Q?Guimar=E3es?= Faria Corcete Dutra To: flux@microsoft.com, editor@lwn.net Subject: Free Software. Is it Worth the Cost? I understand Douglas Boling is writing for Micro$oft, who does not love free software. But that gives no right to him to write such blunders. "If intellectual property isn't property, then just what is property? Why not just give away cars, houses, and everything else?" Intellectual property was never property in the sense of goods. It is a concession in form of patent or copyright to explore something you created for a limited time, so that you would have some incentive to continue creating. The difference between goods property and intellectual property is that ideas (or software) carry negligible copying costs. There is no logical reason to create scarcity where naturally there's none. "If they actually succeed in making software free, no one will be willing to employ them to create a product with no value." In fact, most money in the software industry is made in support. This won't disappear with free software. "If software is free, why does it matter who takes credit for it?" This is for fairness, a greater value in any ethical system than success. Also, it is for the practical purpose of highlighting the role the GNU Project has in the success of GNU/Linux in particular and free software in general. "I'm not saying that Stallman is anticapitalist, I'm saying the whole free software movement is." That is a lie without fundament. I'm part of it, and I'm "capitalism-agnostic". Capitalism was never a value in itself, it is just a natural social system that happens to foster (to some degree) freedom and prosperity. And nothing in the free software goes squarely against neither capitalism nor its founding values freedom and prosperity. "I just want the folks who write that software to be paid—and paid handsomely—for writing it." This is obvious. Even Richard Stallman gets paid for writing software, as well as many others in the free sofware movement, and they write only free software. If you are still using your logical capacities after so much richness ambitions brainwashing, you will see that free software will kill at most 20% of the revenues of the software industry, while creating great value for everyone else, improving the availability of technology to poor people and countries, and providing a much better -- and open -- foundation for the software maintenance and service industry, as well as for the content industry which depends on reliable, useful software! -- Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete Dutra Brasil http://www.terravista.pt./Enseada/1989/ | ||