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!

Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3 - update.

My X problem was cured by downloading the latest versions of xorg from cooker (6.9.0 cvs 20050825 - 15 days newer than the beta).

There are some other buglets for the GNOME user, but appart from that it's pretty good. I did try KDE, but it makes me ill. :-) Seriously, I can see why people like it, but it just doesn't do it for me. If I had to use it for a job, I wouldn't complain, and maybe I'd learn to like it.

ScheduleWorld.

ScheduleWorld seems like a brilliant idea. I should be able to get all my Evolutions, work-based Outlook, Symbian S60 phone (and via Evolution) my Palm all synced together.

Bollocks will they.'

Evolution happily talks to the LDAP part perfectly. But the calendar? How?

Outlook 2003 won't give me the option of talking to the calendar - it's greyed out. It fails to log into the LDAP server too.

The J2ME app on my phone does nothing. It completely fails to start.

Obviously the J2SE 5 WebStart app runs perfectly, but that's no flaming good.

Now can I run SyncML / whatever between Evolution and my Nokia S60 phone. That would rock.

Anyone any ideas?

Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3.

Attempted to install this last night. All went well except X, which failed to put /etc/X11/X symlink in and also only draws black on a black screen (and locks the keyboard). Nice.

I don't think my Radeon 9200/Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 410 (702) is such a wild combination. I'll have to do some digging tonight/over the weekend.

Suicidal Squirrel.

Last night, a squirrel jumped from the verge into the side of my car, hitting the wing mirror I think. I stopped and went back, but it was dead. Perhaps it had been asked to document the entire searching for and burying nuts process.

Plus retro-actively fill in forms asking for permission to get nuts and log the location of each in the Squirrel Helpdesk, a spreadsheet and a word document on a weekly basis.

RHN hacking via XML-RPC

On systemo.org

Mycroft for JISC Mirror

On systemo.org.

Opening OpenSolaris; ubuntu, openSUSE vs. Fedora; yahoo.

Jonathan Schwartz seems to want to get on the right side of open source folk (at last - left hand and right hand working together). OK so opensolaris needs open source geeks to flock to its aid or opening it will have been much of a waste of energy, but the olive branch gesture and the potential to work with OSDL is nice touch. Nice one, Jonathan.

Ubuntu recently announced that they would be offering enterprise support for their distro (as I predicted) . Novell have opened up all of Suse at opensuse.org. Now the difference between these two and Red Hat is that you can download and use the actual commercial version for free. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, do not allow a binary download of RHEL itself for free. Instead they offer Fedora Core which is nearly identical or you can get a respin from another outfit (e.g. CentOS).

Now Fedora Core has a different update policy to RHEL - RHEL offers the traditional "keep changes as conservative as possible" so you don't accidentally break customers stuff, whereas Fedora offers latest versions and changes galore. But why don't Red Hat offer RHEL US - for UnSupported? You get the software and the updates (via yum through a traditional mirror instead of up2date) without all this silly respin rubbish. Might keep the community onside? I suppose that the real problem is that we pay about £7.5k per annum in RHEL licences but as it never, ever goes wrong (only one call raised and that turned out to be hardware) we don't really need the support ourselves. Tough choice.

I've switched to using yahoo for searching from google. How about that for a shock?

64 bit RHEL 4 vs. Java

Just had to install the following RPMs on a 64 bit Linux box to get Java to run for some sybase app:

expat-1.95.7-4.i386.rpm

fontconfig-2.2.3-7.i386.rpm

freetype-2.1.9-1.i386.rpm

xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm

xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm

xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm

zlib-1.2.1.2-1.2.i386.rpm

Faster boot times (plus radio silence).

Using bootchart and this information I decreased the boot time (as reported by bootchart) from 65 seconds to 32 seconds on tom, my XP2100+ box. Well OK, all I did so far was install bootchart and add in the gdm-early-login stuff. Next phase: compile custom kernel.

PS. All this geekery in my blog replaces any libelous or other content that I may want to write at the moment but realise that for reasons like "needing an income to pay the mortgage" I'd better keep my mouth shut.

Geek blog. Move along please.

Switched from Blam! to Liferea as my GNOME RSS feeder. It now works with flickr RSS feeds and doesn't use 130MB RAM (unlike Blam!).

Web browsers. Well we all know that IE blows, but the whole world is too stupid to change. But which web browsers do I use? Mainly Epiphany the GNOME Gecko-based browser on Fedora and Ubuntu; Opera 8 for Symbian Series 60 (on my Nokia 7610, and yes it is one of those few pieces of software worth buying); and Firefox when I'm forced to use the evil OS.

Laptop.next() - I've been thinking about chucking out my Fedora Core 4 Athlon XP2100+ desktop and Ubuntu 5.04 PIII 850 laptop and replacing them with (sharp intake of breath) an iBook. Specifically the £699 12' iBook. OK, so I can't afford one today, but that's not the entire point. The point is that for the first time in my life there will be a non-Linux machine in my house (excluding the big AIX boxen that didn't get much use, and the Evil OS partition I need for work). WIll I fart around and put FC4/PPC on it? Probably, but not for much. It's a proprietary OS (with open underpinnings) but it works - it's cheap and I don't have to go through the Jesus-I-hope-it-works-with-linux panic that comes with every hardware purchase.