On Jan 25, 2008 1:44 PM, Lincoln Rutledge wrote:

Hi Simon,

Lincoln Rutledge Network Engineer OSC Networking 800-627-6420

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Simon Roberts 01/25/08 10:33 AM >>> OK, I've been wanting to answer this question for ages, but there's just so much to say. In the end, I've given up trying to say everything completely cohesively, and I'm just going to allow myself to ramble and hope it helps some. First, a little background. I have a pretty good computer background. I wrote 6502, Z80, 8088, 68000 and other machine languages starting 25 years ago. I was a programmer for 15 years, writing network protocol software before the TCP stack was generally available, Unix device drivers, and a bunch of distributed control systems. Eventually I moved to corporate teaching, which I still do. I was using Linux to

Sounds like you've worked on some cool stuff :) I wrote some Z80 assembler myself. I miss it.

teach TCP and Unix system administration in 1994, and other than Linux, I'm mostly a Solaris body. I have 3 Linux systems at home, two of which dual-boot with windows so I can run Photoshop in a color managed environment. I use VMWare for some other windows stuff that's less crucial to me. I also have a dual processor SPARC/Solaris 10 system. I loath and detest bill gates and everything he stands for. I regularly point out to

I'm old school too. But Suns and SPARCs are yesterday dude :) Linux and x86-64 are NOW!

lawl. Dude Sun and Sarc are going no where any time soon... just the opposite... Sparc IV+ & Solaris 10 dance circles around Linux on any hardware.. You need to spend some time in a true top-tier enterprise class data center. Linux still has scores or limitations holding it back in the enterprise realm. There is a reason the stuff is expensive -- its damn good.

my students that his company is a marketing company (very effective one, sadly) not a technology company. I believe they've never invented anything good, and have damaged many, if not most, of the ideas they've "appropriated". Until about 6 months ago, I was on a one man crusade to try to get my friends all using Linux. Around about then (after one success,yay! :) I finally gave up :( I can't begin to tell you the heartache, sadness, and sense of failure I felt when I reached that decision. Anway, what follows are some of the key/memorable personal experiences that wore me down and made me give up. Please remember that I love Linux, I love the people who put their effort into creating and maintaining it, and I think it has improved tremendously in recent years. I blame nobody for the "weaknesses" outlined below, other than what I see as bill gates' unreasonable and amoral (but sadly, probably entirely legal) practices.

It's hard to support computers for friends and family. I had to define a boundary in my life: no PC support off the clock. It miffed some people but I needed to do it. And I like life better :) Now, if they were running Linux, I would spend lots of time fixing things :)

1) Hardware issues. If you just walk into a store and ask for a machine that will be good to go with Linux, they'll look at you blankly. It's a major effort to check the details yourself. Most off the shelf machines don't tell you exactly what cards they contain, and then it's often hard to find the devices in the HCLs. New hardware--inevitably--is most likely to be unsupported or buggy. Finding the HCLs used to be hard. I just checked, and this seems to have been fixed (thanks someone! :) HCL is online, and I don't usually have access to the internet when I'm in a store browsing! Whichever way you slice it, having to care about the exact hardware is a pain. I don't see any way (other than having the leverage of micky$loth) to get round this, and I certainly laud the efforts that have been made to improve life

This is true.

2) Photography related. I use Windows to run Photoshop CS2 in a color managed workflow. In this, Linux doesn't cut it for two reasons:

Color management. I tried to work out how to do the LCMS stuff, and a bunch of related color management options I though I was looking at, and just gave up, too much like hard work. Also, I seem to have the wrong colorimeter hardware already and am not willing to pay all over again for something else.

GIMP is only 8 bit. That's fire in theory, but when you mess with stuff much, you quickly run into posterization (I see this even in some professional's work and while those in question don't seem to care, I personally hate it).

I don't know.

3) Irritations with web plugins. Idiots out there keep writing stuff that's windows only, and there always seems to be trouble trying to get the latest Flash player. When it's available, it's tricky to install.

This is true.

4) Palm pilot-: Several versions of palm device just don't sync, needless to say, this includes some that matter to me. I don't know how to sync my palm and evolution-etc. with web calendars like google or yahoo. That's important to me. I gave up using my palm pilot because of this. Consequently, I'm appallingly badly organized and regularly double book myself and miss meetings.

This is true.

5) Video; I have failed repeatedly to build a system that plays all reasonable kinds of video. Mostly this seems to be a deliberate policy on bill gates' part (and the lawyers and the evil patent system, of course). I've reached the point where I can do most file types with the exception of AVI with the type 9 codec.

This is true.

6) Strange inconsistencies ("That can't happen"):

These are really hard, time-consuming, and often fruitless to debug. My laptop (dual core 64bit Intel) won't shut down without crashing the kernel. It will hibernate, and the file system journaling means that I've been able to kill it when I have to shut it down completely, but it's still irritating, and I long-ago gave up trying to fix it.

This is true.

Updates that break things, the various methods that I've found my systems using to auto-patch seem prone to failure. Usually complaining about something incompatible. I have one machine (admittedly running 9.3) which has been trying to upgrade Mozilla for the last two years. I can't seem to stop it trying, the warning blob thingy always says updates are ready. I don't really care, but it's not reassuring.

Biggest pain for me is that it seems like every time I decide I want to use/install/build a new piece of software, I have trouble with dependencies. I fetch a package, but then it won't install because something is missing, or the wrong version. I try to find the required stuff, but that won't install because something else is missing, or it's incompatible with something I already have. It might well be that I'm doing it all wrong, but I only have so much time to give to this stuff. Mostly I want a machine to just work. Usually, I give up and accept that I'm going to live without whatever new function it was that seemed exciting.

All of which sounds like I'm really unimpressed with Linux. That's not the case. I know what work goes into this stuff, and I use it as much as possible anyway (the only things I do with Windows are run Photoshop, for the reasons given, and one check-writing program that I run under VMWare, because I always did, and GNUCash was too complicated to bother finding out about, and too much like hard work to migrate to). My problem, which is a huge personal disappointment, is that I realized about 6 months ago that I can't ask my friends to move to Linux. They just don't have what it takes still to cope. Me, sure, I can muddle through, but then again, I don't like to make this effort and I tend to accept restricted functionality as the price I pay to take my moral high ground and reject gates as much as possible. I also prefer the relative security that I get from avoiding "the Internet's petri dish"

Generally, I would prefer to see less effort on "improvement" and more on stabilization. Pin down the compatibility issues (remember the Unix wars?--I do.) between versions of libblahdyblah or whatever, so I can just fetch a package and use it. Meanwhile, Linux seems to me to be a good choice for companies where one install effort can be rolled out to hundreds of users, but less viable for intermediate home users who want to do interesting and different things, but aren't able to help themselves. The really basic users, who browse, send email, write the odd document, and look at jpeg images from their cameras have no problem. I have one such friend that is completely computer illiterate and quite happy using OpenSUSE 10.1 with ICE window manager (old, weak hardware, couldn't run Gnome or KDE adequately). All other attempts to migrate my friends were met with legitimate objections that I couldn't counter.

With thanks to all who've made this what it is, and with continuing faith that one day it'll be what it deserves to be, and have the acceptance and mainstream support it deserves. Hope this ramble helps, $0.02 Simon

I'll repeat what I read in "The UNIX Hater's Handbook": "WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE" GPL is the borg, and all will be assimilated. It's happening now. I recently bought a VIC 20, which was my first computer. Then I looked at my junky Toshiba laptop. Remember those computers from the 1980's? It's not so bad on your OpenSUSE box now, is it? :) There is no resistance. I recently listened to an interview with Jeremy Allison from SAMBA, who explained why BSD is dead, and Microsoft is dying, and Linux is taking over the world. And you know what? It's true :) It's a wild ride, but it's okay. Sometimes it's even fun!

All of the brokenness you mentioned is real. Have you ever read the LKML for a week or so? Or Alan Cox's web diary? Believe it, it's a wonder anything ever works at all. But you know what? It does. And a lot of things work REALLY WELL :)

So put on your helmet and goggles, and hold on brother!

Linc

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On Friday 25 January 2008 14:54, Chuck wrote:

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I'm old school too. But Suns and SPARCs are yesterday dude :) Linux and x86-64 are NOW!

lawl. Dude Sun and Sarc are going no where any time soon... just the opposite... Sparc IV+ & Solaris 10 dance circles around Linux on any hardware.. You need to spend some time in a true top-tier enterprise class data center. Linux still has scores or limitations holding it back in the enterprise realm. There is a reason the stuff is expensive -- its damn good.

How do you explain the Googles and Amazons of this world, whose stock OS platform for customer-fronted services is Linux? I'm not saying Solaris is on its way out, but one can most certainly run very-large-scale enterprise operations on Linux. I tend to doubt it's "held back."

... -- Chuck Carson - Sr. Software Engineer Galileo Educational Solutions

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On Friday 25 January 2008 19:43, Kai Ponte wrote:

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Oh, and FWIW, Amazon runs everything - Windows, Linux, UNIX, MacOS. They have no "platform of choice" and run "whatever works" for the API. I remember reading that one amazon.com webpage may be loaded from 50 different servers running ten different OS's and variants.

It's true there's a mix, but the workhorses of their on-line presence are all Linux. Their data warehouse is based on Oracle, but I'm not sure which OS platform runs it. Many desktops within the organization are Windows, of course, but the software developers mostly use Linux. They do use virtualization, but it's Xen and both the host and guests are Linux. But the preponderance of their operational IT infrastructure is vastly dominated by Linux. And yes, I worked for them as a software engineer for a year and a half (in 2005 and 2006), so I have first-hand experience.

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-- k

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Joe Sloan wrote:

Chuck wrote:

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lawl. Dude Sun and Sarc are going no where any time soon... just the opposite... Sparc IV+ & Solaris 10 dance circles around Linux on any hardware.. You need to spend some time in a true top-tier enterprise class data center. Linux still has scores or limitations holding it back in the enterprise realm. There is a reason the stuff is expensive -- its damn good.

I work for a fortune 100 company, and we run AIX, HPUX, Solaris, and SuSE Enterprise Linux in our data centers. I have to smile at the idea that solaris is somehow more robust than linux. Solaris is great, but so is linux.

More and more, we're moving apps off of the old school legacy unix platforms onto HP/Compaq servers running linux. And the results have been very very good.

We have dozens of busy linux servers with over 500 days uptime - and the uptime champ, by far for our whole enterprise? Take a guess:

root@ashpool:~> uptime 5:32pm up 1016 days 1:24, 1 user, load average: 2.47, 2.56, 2.36

An very busy old compaq 2450 running DB2, apache and websphere on SLES 9

Dude, there is *nothing* holding linux back here, other than fear and ignorance - and now that the SCO lawsuit has all but died, that fear is

It's dead. You can buy several shares of SCOX (oops, it doesn't have listing symbol anymore) for a penny. Maybe they should change the name to "Solidified Hydrogen"

giving way to a new boldness - and I'm doing everything I can to fix the ignorance.

Joe

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M9. pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

Joe Sloan schreef:

| root@ashpool:~> uptime | 5:32pm up 1016 days 1:24, 1 user, load average: 2.47, 2.56, 2.36

More than 3 years, is quite impressive...

It might be impressive, but it also shows that no kernel security updates have been performed in a looooog time which _could_ make the machine vulnerable to attacks. -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Joe Sloan schreef: | Ken Schneider wrote: |> M9. pecked at the keyboard and wrote: |>> Joe Sloan schreef: |>> |>> | root@ashpool:~> uptime | 5:32pm up 1016 days 1:24, 1 user, |>> load average: 2.47, 2.56, 2.36 |>> |>> More than 3 years, is quite impressive... |>> |>> |> It might be impressive, but it also shows that no kernel security |> updates have been performed in a looooog time which _could_ make the |> machine vulnerable to attacks. | | | Right, thekernel was updated in 2005 - there might be some sort of | theoretical local vulnerability, but not every kernel security update is | even relevant to our application. | | In the corporate world, you find that IT managers don't rush out and | update software all that often. When something works, the attitude is, | do not touch the production system. | | Joe | | Which is the only right attitude imo..to keep things going. If something breaks, time is there to do the things that are nessesary. - -- Have a nice day, M9. Now, is the only time that exists. ~ OS: Linux 2.6.24-rc8-git2-3-default x86_64 ~ Huidige gebruiker: monkey9@tribal-sfn2 ~ Systeem: openSUSE 11.0 (x86_64) Alpha1 ~ KDE: 3.5.8 "release 36" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.8 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkebfvgACgkQX5/X5X6LpDhHWwCfQdkxylP2+2HXdVB9E6ejBQVX TPIAn3Rcv/mUiO+d7pFgXx4G1rKXaDWX =jKG2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

M9. wrote:

Joe Sloan schreef:

| root@ashpool:~> uptime | 5:32pm up 1016 days 1:24, 1 user, load average: 2.47, 2.56, 2.36

More than 3 years, is quite impressive...

Not quite. Three years is 1095 days, ignoring leap years. -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Chuck wrote:

On Jan 25, 2008 1:44 PM, Lincoln Rutledge wrote:

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Hi Simon,

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teach TCP and Unix system administration in 1994, and other than Linux, I'm mostly a Solaris body. I have 3 Linux systems at home, two of which dual-boot with windows so I can run Photoshop in a color managed environment. I use VMWare for some other windows stuff that's less crucial to me. I also have a dual processor SPARC/Solaris 10 system. I loath and detest bill gates and everything he stands for. I regularly point out to

I'm old school too. But Suns and SPARCs are yesterday dude :) Linux and x86-64 are NOW!

lawl. Dude Sun and Sarc are going no where any time soon... just the opposite... Sparc IV+ & Solaris 10 dance circles around Linux on any hardware.. You need to spend some time in a true top-tier enterprise class data center. Linux still has scores or limitations holding it back in the enterprise realm. There is a reason the stuff is expensive -- its damn good.

That might have been true 5 years ago.... Sun is going to abandon the SPARC soon. As much as I despise the Intel x86 with its architecture and annoying instruction set, it IS the future of high- end computing. HP-UX was ported from PA-RISC to x86 AIX is being ported from the p5 to x86 Solaris has been ported to x86 -- and the x86 version is no longer a crufty toy like it used to be -- Sun has thrown in a well-rounded effort to finally provide the x86 version with all the drivers as the Sparc version. The only major Unix that I'm unsure of at this point is SGI. Sun doesn't have enough sales to keep the SPARC performance competitive with HP and IBM machines loaded up with x86's which have the development overhead spread over hundreds of millions of units rather than tens of thousands for SPARC and whatever SGI us using lately. Intel and AMD won the CPU wars. (and the field can't be reduced below two, because every competent military purchasing department on the planet requires that all electronic components be "2nd-sourced" -- so if AMD fails, then Intel is cut out of that lucrative market until such time that another company is up and running as a "2nd source" of Intel-like CPUs -- This is why Intel keeps AMD abreast of their future designs -- if AMD can't duplicate Intel functionality, then Intel loses). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

James Knott wrote:

Aaron Kulkis wrote:

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Intel and AMD won the CPU wars. (and the field can't be reduced below two, because every competent military purchasing department on the planet requires that all electronic components be "2nd-sourced" -- so if AMD fails, then Intel is cut out of that lucrative market until such time that another company is up and running as a "2nd source" of Intel-like CPUs -- This is why Intel keeps AMD abreast of their future designs -- if AMD can't duplicate Intel functionality, then Intel loses).

According to an IBM Linux presentation I attended a couple of years ago, IBM manufactures many CPU's for AMD. This means that even if AMD fails, the chips are still being made elsewhere.

Chips these days are designed using standard libraries, which make it easy for another company to start producing CPU's from a failed company.

IIRC, in the 64 bit world, it's Intel following AMD, not the otherway around.

Kind of ironic, isn't it. And AMD is generally less expensive, too. Other than this laptop I'm on, I've never owned an Intel CPU... my first machine was Cyrix, and then I switched to AMD. Intel has always had the worst price/performance evaluation. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

James Knott wrote:

Aaron Kulkis wrote:

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Other than this laptop I'm on, I've never owned an Intel CPU... my first machine was Cyrix, and then I switched to AMD. Intel has always had the worst price/performance evaluation.

My first CPU was an Intel, an 8080 in my IMSAI 8080. My 2nd was an 8088, in an XT clone, which I replaced with a NEC V20. Currently, my main system is an AMD64 4000+.

From when I first started programming, I always had access to quite powerful machines, and it wasn't until the mid-1990's that PC's came within an order of magnitude of what I was using outside the home. Before that, I had no interest in actually owning my own computer. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org