Thus spake R P Herrold on the 16 day of the 06 month in the year 2002:
***Many lines Snipped***
>
> appears to show him a SuSE dealer in the sidebar of each page:
>
> http://www.crbtechnologies.com/Business_Partner_Logo.gif
>
> ==================================
>
> I vote for 'troll' ...
>
> -- Russ Herrold
I have met Mr. David Meyer at a meeting a month or two ago. I can
assure you that he really exists, and is not a troll.
On a sort of related topic to this thread, should you want to completely
eliminate all of this licensing nonsense, consider Debian. It's
free...really. There will be no corporate office annoying you. You
don't need to license it. (You shouldn't need to license the downloaded
version of Redhat, but that's another story.) Heck...it's trivial to
install it over the internet w/o having to download ISO's.
(Ok...the installer may not be as trivial as some others out there,
but from what I understand, Dave should only need to install once, and
dd the "master" disk onto other disks after that)
If that guy from Redhat really suggested that "Debian" could go
bankrupt...he's got to be kidding. Debian isn't going anywhere anytime
soon. The Debian project is produced by a horde of part-time volunteers.
The only physical things they need to exist are a few racks of co-lo
space somewhere for their master servers, a bunch of mirrors, and
volunteers from around the world. Finding large companies and educational
institutions to donate co-lo space and mirroring isn't all that difficult.
The only complaint I hear of Debian is that their releases take too long
to occur. Yes...2+ years between releases is a long time. However,
Debian's pre-release state (called Frozen) is more stable than
what commercial manufacturers tend to ship.
Additionally, playing with apt-get is enough to make anyone who's ever
been in RPM hell to never want to go back. For example, on one of my
servers which has a minimal install, should I want to install, say Gnucash
(/Lots/ of dependencies) I type the following:
apt-get install gnucash
Which produces the following output:
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
guile-common guile1.4 guile1.4-slib libdate-manip-perl
libdigest-md5-perl
libfinance-quote-perl libghttp1 libguile9 libguppi16 libgwrapguile1
libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl
libhtml-tree-perl libltdl3 libmime-base64-perl libnet-perl liburi-perl
libwww-perl slib
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gnucash guile-common guile1.4 guile1.4-slib
libdate-manip-perl
libdigest-md5-perl libfinance-quote-perl libghttp1
libguile9 libguppi16
libgwrapguile1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl
libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libltdl3 libmime-base64-perl
libnet-perl liburi-perl libwww-perl slib
0 packages upgraded, 21 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8612kB of archives. After unpacking 26.8MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
If I answered "Y", apt-get would download all the above packages,
install and configure them in the right order, and restart any daemons
or whatnot that might need to be fixed as a result of the upgrade.
Folks I know who run ISP's do upgrades with apt-get while people are
logged in and have never had problems over the past 5 or so years.
An upgrade looks like this:
scarecrow:~# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Which means the mirror contains nothing that's newer than what my
machine has installed.
RPM, but contrast, has no easy means of working around dependencies,
nor does it have all the needed sorts of dependencies which the .deb
format contains. Have you ever done an "rpm -i foopackage.rpm" only to
have RPM tell you that "foopackage depends on packages bar and baz"...
and then baz depends on packages oob rab and a newer version of zab...etc,
etc. Things get really interesting when package "really important"
conflicts with the upgraded version of zab. Debian's apt-get and .deb
files sort these ugly situations out in a clean fashion.
Debian may not be the best choice for Dave Meyers's school, as there
are a few distributions out there which specifically cater to grade
schools, but for many other folks it's certainly something to consider.
Should people be interested, I could probably be persuaded to do some
sort of Debian presentation at the Tampa LUG.
-- Matthew MoenOutlook is as attractive to email viruses as a heap of dead and rotting cows is to a fly. So long as that maggot-filled pile of corpses is there, swatting at the flies isn't going to work. Alan Bellingham, SDM
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