RHEL licence is wrong

Seriously, what is the point of the RHEL licence?

There are so many "respins" (effectively identical versions) of RHEL (CentOS, Tao, WBEL) then why don't Red Hat bite the bullet, gain more market share (even with the same revenue base) and allow people to download and install RHEL itself.

What Red Hat are charging $349/£200/€279 per Basic ES server per annum for is access to RHN (without grouping a.k.a management) and updates. I am perfectly capable of fiddling the updates so that all servers can gain access them (I don´t - we have over 50 Basic ES licences and use CentOS for less critical machines) so why don´t Red Hat allow other sites to mirror them, and then non-licenced hosts to use yum/apt to get hold of them that way.

You can see bugzilla reports from the CentOS folk in Red Hat´s Bugzilla, so come on. Stop fannying about and bring Red Hat back to the masses.

Ubuntu all the way.

Well, all three of my machines now run Ubuntu Breezy (5.10). I gave up on Mandriva. Yes I still love Red Hat and Fedora, but Ubuntu is just that little bit more polished than FC4 which is a shame.

question.next() - will we support Ubuntu on the server when 6.04 comes out?

Français, s'il vous plait

Yay, I've registered with Alliance Française to study French.

Distro Tart 2000

Mandriva 2006.0 RC1 is a let down. The installer is very pretty, they've remembered to include gdm, but now it fails to notice my Intel eepro100 network card. (Obviously, I can fix this, but Mandriva is supposed to be easy). And epiphany crashes on exit every time.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10 preview release) is damned good. I can't praise it enough. How come the Ubuntu people keep delivering, when Fedora is too slow (honest) and Mandriva looks like it just doesn't have enough developers really. Perhaps they

Perhaps 2006.0 will be better when it's released. Perhaps I'll be running Ubuntu on that machine soon too.

Distro tart

Recently, I changed tom (my XP2100 box) to run Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3. Now, RC1 is out but there's no official torrent. No real worry I suppose, but if you want people to use torrents please put them up at the same time as the ISOs...

Today, I upgraded my desktop at work from Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 preview release with brand new GNOME 2.12 goodness. Yummy (or "apty" :-). Note: Synaptic may bomb out during an upgrade, forcing an apt-get -f dist-upgrade to be necessary, but other than that, schweet. No latest x.org with Ubuntu, but hey.

Sylvester (the aging laptop) still runs Ubuntu 5.04.

So I don't have any Fedora Core boxes at the mo'. This is weird as I'm such a huge Red Hat apologist/fan-boy. I also recommended to a friend to use Ubuntu for a desktop for his church as it "just works". I mean - it is dead, dead easy.

Can Fedora ever get equal with Ubuntu? Can Mandriva ever catch up? Who knows.

The Governor

Apparently, I am now a governor of my local school. Go me! Time to go in and tell them to install Linux everywhere :-)

Bloglines

If you're interested: here's the list of RSS feeds that I read,

Computer Books

Why are computer books so heavy? For example, the Microsoft 70-291 book (which I'm meant to be studying) weighs in at 3lb 9oz (1.614kg) which I am not going to lump around, just for 20 minutes of travel-sick inducing studying on the park and ride.

I really like O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series though - they're neat and to the point.

Linus on slashdot:

"I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."

opensolaris

Built opensolaris on Solaris Express Community Relase Build 20 (uname: SunOS edu-any-any-d07 5.11 snv_20 i86pc i386 i86pc) under VMware GSX Server on a dual 3GHz HP Proliant DL380 G4. It took 6 hours and 24 minutes. Speedy!