Posted on 10/03/2007 9:58:26 PM PDT by abt87
LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices.
But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”
That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price: Linux is free, or nearly so.
Unlike Windows from Microsoft and OS X from Apple, Linux is not owned, updated or controlled by a single company. Thousands of developers around the world work on Linux, making improvements and issuing new versions several times a year. Because the core Linux software is open source, these developers have the right — some would say responsibility — to borrow from one another’s work, constantly looking for enhancements.
But Linux has always had a reputation of being difficult to install and daunting to use. Most of the popular Windows and Macintosh programs cannot be used on it, and hand-holding — not that you get that much of it with Windows — is rare. But those reasons for rejecting Linux are disappearing.
Until recently, major PC makers shied away from Linux. Now the industry is watching as Dell is selling two Linux-equipped desktop models ($549 and $870, including a monitor) and a $774 notebook PC. (Hewlett-Packard offers Linux systems to businesses, and Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought I.B.M.’s PC division, sells Linux machines in China and says it will soon offer Linux-based computers in the United States.)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Which is the nice thing about open-source, of course.”
That certainly is. I just hope the person who gave them the original source earned some dough.
Sort of. I believe that Mac is actually built on the Mach kernel which is a BSD derivant (whether freeBSD, OpenBSD or just plain BSD, I don’t know).
Myrddin
If you really need free as in price skip fedora and go with centos..
Fixed it. Fedora is also free as in beer....
Yea but the release cycle makes it pain if you’re using in on anything other than a hobby server. CentOS has the same nice 18 month release cycle as RedHat (for bovious reasons).
Im making the cutover on my home server from Fedora to Cent (or maybe ubuntu server, anyone ever use xen with ubuntu?)
I understand all that. The way you worded your sentence made it sound like Fedora is a paid-for product.
Yea I realized I could have been more clear, thought I would expand for those not familiar with the distros..
I read it as why use beta software (fedora) when you can get a free copy of the enterprise version (centos). Most centos users likely agree.
Fedora and CentOs are both free. CentOs updates at a slower pace and tries to mirror the current Red Hat Enterprise offering. Fedora is constantly pushing the limits. I work as a member of another project team where CentOs is the Linux system in use. All the C++ code I build on that project must compile and run using VS 2003 C++ for Windows and the current compiler in CentOs. All data comes from the same SVN trunk. The code is multi-threaded with native Windows threads on Windows and pthreads (NPT) on Linux. Drepper did a good job on NPT.
I know all of this I was trying to, and it seems I did a poor job, tell the OP that centos is a poor free choice for servers over cent because of the release cycle
I would agree if we were looking at a technical problem--but we're not. In the appliance sense, you can make an easy to use computer tomorrow: just take an OS and software you can modify and strip it down. My point isn't that we haven't figured out how to make computers easy to use, it's that, to the degree you are talking about, it would make the computer quite nearly useless. Everyone does different things with their computers, which is why OSes shoot for being generic--but that same genericness or power is what makes the machine hard to use.
I also agree with another poster who stated it has a philosophical and political...quality to the use of a free OS.
I'll be honest, I don't quite know what you mean here, but I can assure you that I do not use Linux out of some bizarre ideological conviction. I use it because it is a good product.
I am the head of IT in my department so I understand technology pretty well
Just an FYI, to the techie world the former does not in the least prove the latter. For an exaggeration of why, see the Dilbert comic.
I agree that longer release cycles are desirable on a server. I can tolerate rapid change on my Fedora boxes. They aren't my baseline for building the embedded systems. I do that with Debian. Debian release cycles are long as well. I selected Fedora on the project web server to more rapidly track security fixes. The web server sits in the company DMZ. I have to comply will all manner of security scans and configuration to keep it there. Even so, I'm allowed only TCP/22, TCP/80 and one UDP that I won't enumerate here.
Bill Gates finally fired him for spending too much time on FR defending Windows, ironically.
You’ve been told repeatedly if you’re going to talk about someone or what they said on free republic its common courtesy to ping them, that being said:
“I read it as why use beta software (fedora) when you can get a free copy of the enterprise version (centos). Most centos users likely agree.”
Nothing at all wrong with fedora, its hardly beta a bit more on the edge than RHEL but I dont see any 0.x software on their.
Fedora is the first to try new things (trying new things is not beta) and they typically have a pretty qucik release cycle so for a server that you need app its not a good idea (youll be updating to the next version in at *most* 18months).
Because Cent is a code copy of Redhat (who themselves just compile most of their code from copies they took) they are slower. For my money I would use RedHat but many people don’t want to pay $ and unless its a server I give a snoot about I dont care to pay for it either so my home server which used to be Fedora is now cent.
I saw you earlier post on this subject after I posted my comment. Thx for the info. I do know that when OSX was first announced, it was to be Mach under the hood.
Nowhere did I say that YOU did, and it was not even said in a way or context to imply it. Do you agree that there are some who do/
I was going get sarcastic about your FYI, but I will assume you didn't mean it to come across as the way it did.
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