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ESR gives up on Fedora

By on February 21, 2007 (8:00:00 AM)

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The following letter was received from ESR, who has sent it to a number of Linux-related publications and mailing lists. It is presented verbatim, except for the addition of HTML code.
After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.

The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed. But the underlying problems run much deeper.

Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels. They have included, but were not limited to:

  • Chronic governance problems.
  • Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
  • A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
  • Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.
  • Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
  • Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

In retrospect, I should probably have cut my losses years ago. But I had so much history with Red-Hat/Fedora, and had invested so much effort in trying to fix the problems, that it was hard to even imagine breaking away.

If I thought the state of Fedora were actually improving, I might hang in there. But it isn't. I've been on the fedora-devel list for years, and the trend is clear. The culture of the project's core group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more insistent on narrow "free software" ideological purity, and more disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a majority of computer users.

I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them. Canonical's recent deal with Linspire, which will give Linux users legal access to WMF and other key proprietary codecs, is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in. Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.

This afternoon, I installed Edgy Eft on my main development machine -- from one CD, not five. In less than three hours' work I was able to recreate the key features of my day-to-day toolkit. The after-installation mass upgrade to current packages, always a frightening prospect under Fedora, went off without a hitch.

I'm not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn a new set of administration tools.

Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame.

--

                                        Eric S. Raymond

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ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 10:46 PM
Why does ESR need to send out this letter to multiple news outlets when he makes a personal decision regarding his distro needs? Really, the man holds himself in too high regard. Apparently, he thinks he is so important that his use/disuse of Fedora can be used as a mode of attack.

#

Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:15 PM
It's not that he holds himself in too high regard, but that the community around him does. What if Linux.com had not bothered to reproduce the article here? And newsforge had not bothered pointing to it?

#

Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 02:11 AM
I think you're both right. ESR holds himself in too high regard, AND linux.com does too.

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Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 03:07 AM
Shut the F$!k up. ESR is publishing this because out of all the people in the Linux community, he's one of the most prominent and respected. He isn't doing this because he's egotistic, he's doing this because the amount of media attention he can get might just be a cold smack in the face for Fedora. He's doing this in the hope that someone at Fedora is listening. Sometimes it takes an outsider to beat you into seeing your world differently, and that's what ESR is.

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Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 03:17 AM
Yeah! What he said, shut up! How dare you use your free speech! ESR is a linux god! At least thats what he posted on his blog. And when god posts a letter to a company, he has every right to shove it in your face. So there! Besides everyone knows that these types of letters always cause the company in question to bend willingly to your concerns.

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Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:19 AM
Sorry dude, but each one of us must know how important we are to the group. He is really important, his opinion and his acts, performed a lot for linuxers from everywhere. Not only him, but many guys.
And he knows about what is going in there more than most of us. I guess it is good to know why somebody so known left it all behind.

#

Not so fast, there...

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 08:31 AM
Curiously, i did the exact same thing when i got sick and tired of Slackware spiraling out of control. Now obviously linux.com won't put up my fevered rantings, but i stuck them up in my own circles anyway.

This is a real problem. I don't know if Ubuntu is the right solution, or if it is even on the right track (weirdly, i switched to Ubuntu myself) but it is at least coherent.

Now, i love Slackware. And Pat (the guy in charge) has sort of had a bit of a bad time recently, so perhaps the new one (11, which i have not tried) or the one after that will be better. But in any case, my complaint was not to make myself feel better. It was to try to say this: it doesn't have to be like this. Slackware (or Fedora) doesn't have to be like this, and Linux itself doesn't have to be like this. It's through poor decisions, poor design, and general Linux-community foolishness that we get stuck with this nonsense.

Things like GTK themes requiring you to install ALL of bloody Gnome in order to work (WHY???) or configuration files having 20,000+ lines of configuration (not even CLOSE to joking about that) are just stupid. Sure it technically works, in the same way a car held together with duct tape instead of nuts and bolts technically works. But that's not the sort of thing i want to use.

Really, Ubuntu doesn't even try to address the underlying problems i had with other distributions. It's just a better distribution of the duct tape.

(But: i do believe it is better.)

#

Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:02 PM
This is exactly the kind of "realworld human feedback is evil" mentality that ESR is railing against. He's not saying anything different to thousands of people out there who are apparently too insignificant to be listened to. If he has to leverage hid celebrity status to be published on Linux.com then so be it.

Its the message thats important, not the messenger.

I personally junked fedora 2 years ago, swallowed my pride and jumped onto the Ubuntu bandwagon and I haven't regretted it since.

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:01 AM
The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

Re:LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 25, 2007 02:21 PM

For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.


MP3 is closed and patented source technology. Those listed distributions have to adhere to US patent laws. Doing a simple search to enable support of proprietary codecs does not take a hour. Red Hat prefers to spend money to acquire and release closed sources applications under GPL license which is much better than paying to trivial thing like MP3. End of story.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.


For the good security reason, the kernel-module-ntfs method can break the whole kernel.

the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

Trying to spread lies? fuse/ntfs-3g works perfectly under Fedora. BTW, ntfs-3g has reached version 1.0

The problem is people like you who make a Linux distribution look bad. Talk about opportunist.

#

Re:LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 08, 2007 10:12 PM
One of the purposes of distributions like Fedora is to serve as a base for commercial distributions (like RHEL.) So incorporating non-free software, such as a patent-encumbered MP3 algorithm, would be a serious issue. It doesn't matter that Fraunhoffer (today, with the wind blowing in a south easterly direction) is apparently saying that you can use MP3 as long as you don't charge for it, if it were incorporated into Fedora, and someone was to build a distribution upon Fedora and sell it, they'd risk lawsuits.

There's nothing stopping someone from creating repositories of non-free gratis software to bolt onto Fedora and similar distributions. But it would harm Fedora immensely if it incorporated non-free software, even software it is licensed to redistribute.

#

Re:ESR - professional blowhard

Posted by: Administrator on February 25, 2007 04:13 AM
Mr. Eric Raymond writes from frustration, not from jealousy or anger. Don't attack him, In my eyes he is a victim of what ails linux, and Fedora.

My predominant use of Fedora is as a desktop system user and as a web developer. I am constantly in fear that the next patch will break the system, thus I only accept patches for neutral software (software updates to non-mainstream programs). My raison d'être is that there is a rush to implement new features on new hardware, with new developers. Too much "New New New".

With Fedora Core4 (when I started), there were "N" modules (with a potential for N x N interactions), no virtualisation, and no fancy GUI extensions. Also, in the majority, linux hosts were single processors, with small drives.

With the cost of hardware being 1/3 of what it used to be, with a ten fold increase in processing power, with the number of modules increasing from "N" to "N + 200", we are looking at a N squared growth in interactions, coupled with the multiplicity of hardware platforms. And we are also clamoring for new releases every 6 months. How can one keep up in all areas and mainly, in testing with many many extra interactions, and with no increase in the time between version releases. In my view, that six month window is too small, and should be extended to 9 months, or annually. Just so that adequate testing and maintenance can prove the quality.

I also sympathise with Mr Raymond. In my office, and at home, my email attachments have "linux forbidden" formats and also, the internet sites I visit have multimedia formats that are not officially supported. So if I have to use XP or its descendents for viewing them, why in fact, bother with linux.

Eric's thoughts are that the Red Hat company are doing what IBM has done with OS/2, they are abandoning the home market, a market of more than a billion computers, and for what? In his view, and as of today, I agree with him. In my view, Red Hat/Fedora don't see the market. Mr Raymond wants to be using a distribution that is more responsive to the man on the street. I think that the switch by mainstream linux users to UBUNTU has already happened.

Let me close with the following observation:
I went to a Montreal Computer club meeting this past week. The majority of the attendees came with laptops. When we went around the room, 90% were running UBUNTU, myself and another had Fedora, and then there was two other distributions in use. It is not yum, rpm, or yumex that is the problem. Why did they not try Fedora? Some answered that it is package distribution and module/library collisions, without a inforced standard such as a well documented package installer and rollback facility.

Eric, good luck in your new endevors. I am sure that tomorrow, the sun will rise for you and for your critics. And who knows, you could be one of those who dual boots to different linux versions, one of which could still be Fedora.

       

#

So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 10:53 PM
What exactly does ESR want to achieve by sending out this letter? It makes him sound like a total script kiddie eager for attention.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:02 PM
This is a non-story.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:44 AM
Yes and no. The story itself is a non-story but the fact ESR thinks it's a story is a BIG STORY.

Speaking volumes about the fetid FOSS movement. Their demagogues at any rate.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:05 PM
Obviously, he believes that this might wake up the Fedora team so they can get their act straight.

Hundreds of people make their distro preferences publicly known all of the time on their websites or discussion groups, etc. If you think that it is not news when ESR speaks out, then blame linux.com

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:18 PM
A totally personal decision of switching to a different distribution of Linux sounds like a perfect story for a personal weblog. But sending it to different news outlets...?

Anyway, if this letter really does bring a positive change to the Fedora Linux distro, so it be. I personally gave up on Fedora about a year ago after being a loyal user of it for quite a time, for almost the same reasons ESR did now.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:43 AM
This whole non-event has a big 'who the F cares' aura about it. So ESR switches platforms. YAWN. So he's just about as happy today as he was yesterday - but HE CAUTIONS US HE WILL HAVE TO LEARN NEW TOOLS.

Is this a sequel to Lost? Do we really f-ing care? No we do not.

It is possible to bring up this issue in the public arena so it's obviously a provocation to debate but thinking that's what ESR did would be shortchanging him too much.

Akin to claiming RMS can't hold a tune.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:04 AM
What's the big deal. He is a script kiddie eager for attention. The only difference between him and other script kiddies is that he's a lot more eloquent, charismatic, and gets laid. As a result, he's become the spokesman for the Slashdot script kiddie. Sadly, the business world equates "Slashdot script kiddie community" with "GNU/Linux developer community."

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:41 AM
Correction: ESR doesn't get laid. Have you ever seen him? He plays with GUNS, man! ESR doesn't get laid and there you have the explanation for almost all things with him in a nutshell.

#

Re:So???

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 05:22 PM
he also writes speculative fiction about guns and getting laid

#

I'll tell ya

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 04:41 PM
He wants the RH devs to get their heads out off their asses. I dumped RH years ago, when I started noticing that RH didn't succeed in following the great inprovements other distros made. Fedora makes me remember the dependency problems and lack of polish one could find in Linux _years_ ago. And every time I try it, I fail to be impressed, at all. So, why do you even ask these stupid questions, if not to try to shoot the messenger?

Jaap

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:05 AM
The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

Feel Better Now?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:02 PM
Well, that's a nice rant. Do you feel better now?

While I've not used Fedora, I gave up on Red Hat when they started Fedora, I feel your pain. But, the fact of the matter is that I have had the same experience with every distribution I have ever used and felt the same way that you describe about each of the distributions. If you use any distribution for a while, sooner or later, you will encounter the dependency nightmare described. Ubuntu and Debian are no exception. Sooner or later you'll break the system with some package or module that you have to compile from source.

In fact Debian and to a lesser extent Ubuntu are even more guilty of the inward looking purist mentality that you describe. It is a wide spread disease spreading throughout the open source community. 'My way is the only way and if you don't like it, you can write your own.' Or, 'my way is superior so, I'd rather reinvent the wheel, even if it hampers development for another ten years'. Just look at the recent spat with Linux and Gnome!

You can rant all you like, they won't miss you. They're probably muttering good riddance right now. Remember, their way is the only right way. So says Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSuSE, Gentoo, Gnome and most of the others.

Finally. Just to head off the fanboy posts:
You would never have had this problem if only you had used my favorite $DISTRO_NAME Linux.

#

+10. I agree. Mostly.

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:22 PM
ESR missed the point of Fedora. It is not made for people - it is distro for RedHat to experiment on people and then to improve their RHEL offering.

Just like RawHide - Fedora is pain to use if distro development hasn't happened to be your job.

> In fact Debian and to a lesser extent Ubuntu are even more guilty of the inward looking purist mentality that you describe.

You guy seem to be absent from RedHat/Fedora land for far too long. You are welcome to lists/bugzilla to experience first hand what is it to communicate with RedHat when you paid them no money. "Arrogance" is only word coming to my mind.

#

Re:Feel Better Now?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 04:40 AM
Got to agree.

I used Red Hat for a while, but not that much since at that time I wasn't heavily using Linux.

Then I installed Mandriva 2005 Lite and switched my day to day work to Linux.

I upgraded to Mandriva 2006 a few months after it came out - so the upgrade went without a hitch, as the early bugs had been patched out - so I never saw them.

I upgraded to Mandriva 2007 SOON after it came out.

Big mistake. Hosed the installation. How do you recover from a couple hundred megabytes of upgrade? You don't.

I dumped Mandriva and tried to switch to SUSE 10.1. Their package management was hosed. Syonara, SUSE!

I switched to Kubuntu. Their installer page for changing mount points wouldn't even let you leave the page! NO testing had EVER been done on installation, obviously!

But I persevered with the text installer. I now run Kubuntu. But there are bugs. I frequently get a stupid "server overload" error that appears to be a KDE problem going back YEARS. Recently Adept offered to upgrade my kernel headers - then told me it would break my system if I did! Thankfully it did catch the potential break.

I wanted to install Kerry Beagle - Synaptic told me it would have to remove my Pan newsreader to do this. WTF?

ALL the distros are in trouble. Linux and its apps are now FAR too complex for the limited manpower and testing possible for most of the distros. The situation will get worse unless there are redesigns and rewrites of how core operations of testing, upgrading and package management are done.

This won't stop Linux from being useful - but we are entering a "period of pain" where using Linux is going to be nearly as bad as using Windows - until somebody gets a clue and fixes the problems - instead of ignoring them or denying they exist.

#

Re:Feel Better Now?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 05:05 PM
"Sure, If you use any distribution for a while, sooner or later, you will encounter the dependency nightmare described."

Are you very sure that those problems weren't self inflicted? From what i've seen (and, yes, experienced) most dependency problems result from too-eager installations of non-official packages. The moment you start rolling your own packages from dodgy sources, or worse, 'making; installing' you're setting yourself up for a fall. And really, I've seen _very_ few dependency problems the last years. If Fedora still has them it suprises me it's still so popular. (but then again, just read those responses)

Yes finally, please don't try to pull other distros down to Fedora's level. Most are _stable_ nowadays, unless you don't know what're doing.

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:07 AM
This is being repeated because linux.com refused to publish it at the top level (where I attempted to publish it a number of times).

The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

MOD this MORON down

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 09:36 PM
It's a good thing that you were not able to top post your tripe, despite your efforts. You are off topic and completely wrong!

You obviously don't know what you are talking about. What you describe as crippled, is in fact abiding by the law. It doesn't matter that you don't agree with the law, it is the law none the less. Red Hat et al realize this and operate their businesses responsibly. They cannot and do not behave like morons living in their mother's basement, such as you.

There are copyright, patent and licensing issues that affect everything that you describe. And making assertions that five figure licensing fees are inconsequential to Red Hat et al, a statement that YOU pulled out of YOUR ass, is positively asinine. Why should any company pay $60,000, or any amount for that matter, to license a codec that they are giving away?

<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8NFAO7G0.htm" title="businessweek.com">Seen the news lately?</a businessweek.com> Microsoft paid Frauhoffer $16 million dollars for licensing, not the $60,000 that you pulled up. In return they now face a judgment against them for $1.5 billion dollars!

#

Can you follow a link?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 24, 2007 06:55 AM
Geez, you idiot. Just follow the link.

Since you clearly need the help, I'll repeat the link to make it easy for you

<a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>

A one-off payment of $50,000 - $60,000 per decoder.

$2.50 - $5 per codec (encoder).

Linux has its own encoder, so only the decoder needs licensing.

Learn how to read.

As to the censorship,... well you would agree with it wouldn't you? Ya turkey.

#

Likewise

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 24, 2007 10:44 PM
The irony of your statements and the way that you prove my point is incredible. Perhaps you should learn to read.

Perhaps you should follow the links that you provided and the links that I provided.

Perhaps you should get a clue.

Perhaps you should avoid spamming boards with your asinine and COMPLETELY INCORRECT drivel.

#

Re:Feel Better Now?

Posted by: Administrator on February 22, 2007 04:56 AM
I agree too.With over 100 distros are we going to ever conquer the desktop market? I don't think so.

#

Bye Eric!

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:15 PM
Amusing that the stuff driving me from Ubuntu to Fedora - the proprietary apps in the installer, click-n-run, launchpad - is exactly what's sending Eric in the opposite direction.

A one disk installer is useful, but I find the package quality better on Fedora (but not as good as Debian). yum is rubbish, but then 'smart' does everything I want and more.

#

Re:Bye Eric!

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 03:30 AM
If Click-n-run is driving you away, then you're a retard. You don't have to intall it, or use it.

#

Re:Bye Eric! Call us when U change toilet papers!!

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 03:50 AM
Funny you mention your move; I did the same going from Kubuntu to Fedora on my desktop dualboot and SUSE to Mandrivia on my laptop dualboot.
My wife who uses both win/linux portions of our desktop was at first worried but after I set everything up the way I liked it, she asked "isnt this the exact same thing? There is my Firefox, rss reader, email, OO just like before."
Switching distros is a daunting as someone at work who has to go from XP to the win2K box to the Vista interface.

As for Raymond, I have to take any such comments with a grain of salt when we know he swings the Linspire way now. When Pepsi buys you, they sort of prefer if that you dont drink Coke.
When you are on the leadership board of one distro why should people care that you arent using another one?
Wouldnt you find it weird that someone well placed in (name your favorite distro) hierarchy doesnt actually use it his main distro?

But it doesnt matter, ESR's name might still have a cachet to some because of past fame but I dont see what he has offer.

Next week Eric Raymond switches to two ply toilet paper!! Stay tuned!!

#

Re:Bye Eric!

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 03:19 AM
Do you hear about <a href="http://www.ekaaty.com.br/" title="ekaaty.com.br">Ekaaty</a ekaaty.com.br>? It's a Fedora based distro that can be installed from one disk, have limited support for multimedia (based on livna) and comes with smart, KDE and BROffice packages.

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:09 AM
This is being repeated because linux.com refused to publish it at the top level (where I attempted to publish it a number of times).

The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

Is someone having a bad hair day or what?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 21, 2007 11:42 PM
I really don't understand this rant at all. My primary machine has always been RedHat or Fedora and the other machines have run any number of other distros. Currently running Fedora 6 and frankly it is nice!

It is nice but I haven't had any of the issues spoken to in this rant either. This on a AMD64 system running 64 bit Linux. Further the make up of my system is not run of the mill either. So I can't see where he is coming from. Considering how terrible 64 bit ubuntu has been over the years I think there is a question of honesty here.

Sure it would be nice if I didn't have to go to external repositories for non free stuff, but I can fully understand RedHats point of view. If something is questionable then avoid the question and concentrate on your business.

Dave

#

Re:Is someone having a bad hair day or what?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:09 AM
Considering how terrible 64 bit ubuntu has been over the years I think there is a question of honesty here.
I'm using 64-bit Ubuntu Edgy and the only issue I've had is the lack of 64-bit multimedia codecs, a misfeature that all 64bit linuxes share. I used Redhat for years and liked it, but I drifted away after they went corporate and began the Fedora public beta program. As a distribution, Ubuntu is different but it is not worse in my experience than Fedora. And the forums and community are better, as good as Redhat used to be back in the day.

#

Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 12:04 AM
The culture of the project's core group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more insistent on narrow "free software" ideological purity,

Right. There is a very pragmatic argument for not including binary drivers or software: you can't support it. If it is buggy, and breaks, you rely on a third party vendor (often with low interest in Linux) to fix it.

and more disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a majority of computer users.

Actually, Fedora is arguably one of the distributions that makes most technical advantages. E.g., it made SELinux, encrypted disks, and numerous other things usable for the average user.

I don't really buy the "64-bit window opportunity" argument that ESR uses to push the use of proprietary software. It doesn't take much looking to see that the real window of opportunity is the web, and Red Hat/Fedora clearly invests a lot there, e.g. with their investments in open-source Java technology.

When the web becomes the application, companies and users don't need powerhouses as their desktop. Low-power and low-cost hardware will be a lot more in demand (why would you want to buy expensive computers to run a web browser?). With cheap "web terminals" the marginal cost of Windows or other proprietary systems will become to high, giving a lot of room for competition to Linux and BSD.

#

Re:Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 12:34 AM
"Right. There is a very pragmatic argument for not including binary drivers or software: you can't support it. If it is buggy, and breaks, you rely on a third party vendor (often with low interest in Linux) to fix it."

He is not talking about proprietary software. He is talking about patent-infringing FREE software, such as ffmpeg and lame or DMCA-infringing FREE softwate such as decss.

#

Re:Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:10 AM

Actually he is talking about proprietary paid software too. Obviously you dont understand the history of all that he mentions. He wanted fedora to add a lot of proprietary software. The project folks refused and this is the result

#

Re:Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 02:26 AM
"Actually, Fedora is arguably one of the distributions that makes most technical advantages. E.g., it made SELinux, encrypted disks, and numerous other things usable for the average user."

Tell me you don't actually believe this?!? The "average user" that you speak of doesn't even know what any of these things mean!

The average user would disable SELinux the moment it caused a problem, encrypted disks wouldn't even enter their minds, and there is almost nothing other then the GUI (KDE,GNOME) that is even close to useable by the "average user". How do I know this? My family uses Linux, some of my friends have switched to Linux and they ALL call me from time to time. Hell even I have problems with Linux, and I'm not your "average user". I run 3 HPC labs at a major University. My "average users" in the labs run Linux and most of them wouldn't even use SELinux or encrypted disks on their systems.

Pl;ease define your "average user"

#

Re:Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 05:58 AM
When the web becomes the application, companies and users don't need powerhouses as their desktop.

Why does it all of a sudden feel like 1992 again?

#

Re:Open drivers

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 10:26 PM
The author of this thread, who claimed "average users" use a lot what fedora did, is completely wrong.

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:10 AM
This is being repeated because linux.com refused to publish it at the top level (where I attempted to publish it a number of times).

The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

Let him be

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 12:05 AM
use the right thing for the right job<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... If eric feels fedora is not suitable for what he does , juz switch to ubuntu<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. nothing wrong with that (except that it might indirectly says binary blobs and proprietary codecs are now more acceptable in linux considering one of the OSS figure is accepting it)<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... but then again<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... its all about choice

ESR stop using fedora and join ubuntu?<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. let him be<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... and fedora ppl, do your best in making Fedora the best 100% Free & Open distro and make ESR regret it<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:P<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. Ganbatte!!

#

Re:Let him be

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:21 AM
Hey ESR, try Gentoo Linux, its all you need:

- Portage (best package manager in actually)
- All Codecs<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)
- Toolchain by default
- Customized by you (try to compile your ubuntu kernel and you'll understand me)
- Install only packs that you need

#

Re:Let him be

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 10:57 PM
I met ESR about two years ago and we had a discussion about issues related to installing FC4. Even then he seemed disapointed in the lack of development by the fedora team. If he feels that he needs to change distros then let him be. And as for the fellow requesting that ESR go to his local school to find a kid to help him--you obviously have no idea who Eric Raymond is and should do a little research before saying something disrepectful about one of the men who helped bring Linux to where it is today.

#

Re:Let him be

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 12:23 AM
Yes indeed, wherever would Linux have been without fetchmail.

#

LINUX often DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 10:16 AM
This is being repeated because linux.com refused to publish it at the top level (where I attempted to publish it a number of times).

The first stage of understanding some of the strange happenings in Linux, is to notice that many so-called Linux people, are deliberately undermining Linux.

There are an incredible number of examples of this, for example,

Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE/Novelle and others refuse to support MP3s.
For Fedora, supporting MP3s costs nothing (Thomson does not require a royalty for free software).
For Red Hat, supporting MP3s is a one off royalty of between $50,000 and $60,000 (ie a few cents on the cost of each install (ie essentially nothing)).
See <a href="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html" title="mp3licensing.com">http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html</a mp3licensing.com>.

Yet, Red Hat, Fedora, and friends, refuse to satisfy their customers wishes and support MP3.

Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to support the Windows filesystem NTFS, even though a good read-write NTFS-solution now exists.
In fact, Red Hat and Fedora, refuse to even support the read only NTFS support that has been available for nearly a decade.

This subtle crippling/subverting of Linux is to make sure that it will never be a real threat to Microsoft or the music or film industries.

Many "Linux developers" are subtly crippling Linux, through various mechanisms, bad code, programs that you cannot compile without jumping through a million hoops, etc, etc. Most subversion is designed to look like it could have been an honest mistake. However, when such "mistakes" are never fixed (in some cases for years) the game is given away.

NTFS, music and video support are among those most regularly crippled. Another favorite, is cross-compilers (as they can be used to compile Linux programs that will then run on Microsoft windows). Another filesystem these people are currently crippling (by restricting its distribution and lying about its abilities) is Reiser4 (even to the extent of framing Reiser for murder).

Another three examples of crippling NTFS support:

1) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project (<a href="http://www.linux-ntfs.org/" title="linux-ntfs.org">http://www.linux-ntfs.org/</a linux-ntfs.org>) has always worked to stop NTFS from working well on Linux. Their latest effort in this direction being their refusal to incorporate Szakacsits' fork, which allows writing to NTFS partitions (as it works too well, and too easily). They say they want it. They say NTFS-3g works extremely well. But, they are in no hurry. It has been 7 or 8 months, now. NTFS-3g will only be incorporated when it becomes too obvious that they are really a group, that has been devoted to making sure Linux and NTFS do not work well together.

2) the Linux-NTFS/FUSE project in its entirety, is an effort designed to have NTFS preform poorly under Linux. By design, NTFS/FUSE is a user space driver, and thus will never compete favorably with Microsoft's kernel drivers. The Linux NTFS kernel driver was knocked on the head some years ago, after claims, probably false, of how dangerous it was to use. Anyway, instead of fixing the supposed problems, the work to that point was just thrown away and the NTFS/FUSE project started.

3) the NTFS program Captive (reads and writes to NTFS, but poorly). Szakacsits wrote a patch so that Captive would function better. The author of Captive, Jan Kratochvil, refused to accept the patch (as it might have made Captive work somewhat more like it should have).

The above are just the tip of the iceberg,...

So, all is not as it first seems. Understanding this, is the first step to Linux's eventual success.

Jade @ <a href="http://linuxhelp.150m.com/" title="150m.com">http://linuxhelp.150m.com/</a 150m.com> (<a href="http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/" title="domaindlx.com">mirror</a domaindlx.com>)

Where there are also HOWTOs on:

1) cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux (back-ups),
2) installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux,
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux,
4) a script to walk you through a Gentoo Linux installation,
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs,
6) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" as a single web-page (ie in HTML format),
7) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE and Mandriva and Debian),
8) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules,
9) compiling the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder),
10) some politics, eg: Israel Fakes a Provocation for War (the "kidnapping" of Cpl Shalit),
11) and a detailed comparison of many common filesystems.

#

Here's what you should do...

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:11 AM
Go over to the local elementary school, put a sign on the bulletin board requesting help from any kid who knows how to put in a CD and click a mouse. Return home, wait for knock on door. If you were a parent you could have just asked your own kid for help.

Rob Malda

#

Sorry it didn't work out for you.

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:16 AM
Well sorry your relationship didn't work out for you, may you have better luck with your next.

Personaly my relationship with Fedora is still going strong and seems to be getting stronger every year.

#

esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:33 AM
Forgive me. but who is this guy? i have never even heard of him and what has he done that his opinion even matters. i see improvements every cycle with fedora. so this random ass guy wants to move to Ubuntu. so a lot of people have. he could of left RH/Fedora along time ago, i could care less i'm happy with my distro.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:54 AM
If you don't know who ESR is, my dear Anonymous Reader, it's your fault.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 01:58 AM
"Forgive me. but who is this guy?"

It seems you are a newly-arrived Linux user with little or no understanding of the all-too-brief history of the open source movement.

Any of us who've been around for even a few years know ESR and at least some of what he has contributed. Ever hear of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar?"

So, the real question, is "Who the **** are YOU?"

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 02:10 AM
Sorry I guess I missed the memo about his life story while I was out getting laid.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 05:10 AM
It's OK -- you didn't miss much.

esr is somewhat like the Chiang Kai-shek of software. Just like Chiang was holed up on Taiwan and claimed all of China, and Mao's Communists would falter and fail "any day now," Eric's been saying proprietary software will collapse "any day now" for ten, fifteen years.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 05:17 PM
does this make george bush the esr of the free world?

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 11:52 PM
No, but it makes you a jackass.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 06:01 AM
poor sheep...

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 02:26 AM
Ah! I was about to reply the same thing<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 10:30 PM
"Any of us who've been around for even a few years know ESR and at least some of what he has contributed. Ever hear of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar?"

I am not the author of the thread but I was using Linux since late 2003.

I have never heard of ESR, and I am watching freshmeat since two years.

WHO THE FUCK IS THIS GUY?

People know Linus.

People dont know ESR.

Who can blame them for unimportant guys.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 02:03 AM
You may want to read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Steven Raymond" at
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" title="catb.org">http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.htm<nobr>l<wbr></nobr> </a catb.org>

- then do what it says to find out yourself.

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 04:35 AM
What a pity he's never gotten around to writing, "How to *Answer* Questions the Smart Way."

Of course, that would require him to be smart.

Oops.

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"by ESR"?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 24, 2007 08:55 PM
ITYM "by ESR and Rick Moen" (and I suspect much more the latter than the former).

HTH!

C. R. Conrad

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Re:esr?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 22, 2007 02:56 AM
ESR the guy who invented Open Source, just like Al Gore invented the Internet.

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Re:esr?

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