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Linux users fret about desktop fate
CNet News ^ | Nov 4, 2003 | Robert Lemos

Posted on 11/05/2003 6:21:56 PM PST by Leroy S. Mort

Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.

On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.

For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.

On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.

For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. "When you go into a CompUSA or Best Buy, the only versions of Linux that you can find on the shelves are Red Hat and SuSE," said Jack Alderson, a Linux and Sun systems administrator for custom-chip maker X-Fab Texas. Alderson fears that Novell will stop creating consumer-oriented versions of SuSE Linux, which he uses at home. "With Red Hat's announcement, that pulled them off of the shelf and out of the general public's view. All there was left was SuSE. Now that's going to disappear also."

The moves could return consumers to a choice of Linux distributions from smaller companies--such as Mandrake, Xandros or Lindows--or from community projects such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware.

Novell appears to be planning to carry SuSE's open-source torch, but it hasn't made specific comments regarding lower-priced versions of its Linux products.

"Novell is committed to the open-source community," Chief Executive Jack Messman said Tuesday in a conference call. "With SuSE, we gain access to and will continue to actively support key SuSE-sponsored open-source initiatives."

While SuSE's high-end server products retail for $450 or more, SuSE 9 Professional--which includes publicly available Linux server packages--only costs $80.

Charles Philip Chan, a Toronto resident who has used Linux for about a decade, believes that Novell's acquisition is additional validation for the open-source operating system.

"On one hand it is good, because it looks like Linux is moving in the commercial space," he said, adding that consumers still have a lot of choice among community projects on the Internet. "There are a lot of other distributions out there."

However, Chan said the consumer market will likely expand at a slower rate, because there will be fewer versions on shelves at retail stores. While Red Hat Linux won't be available at retail, the company is supporting a community project, Fedora, to create distributions based on cutting-edge Linux technology.

Arthur Tyde, the founder and former president of the Bay Area Linux Users' Group, is optimistic about SuSE remaining a choice for consumers. SuSE Linux 9 has already been released, and he fully expects to see the next version at retail.

"I think it is wait and see," he said. "It might not affect the community at all. From a consumer standpoint, I think you will still see SuSE Linux in CompUSA."

Moreover, while some have viewed troubled Novell's purchase plans as a potential threat to SuSE, Tyde said that Novell is just getting a second chance and who knows what the company will do with SuSE.

"You have to think about what they are really buying," he said. "They are not buying the rights to all that code. They are buying credibility to that space."

And, Tyde said, for Novell to gain credibility in the Linux community means keeping consumer product on the shelves.


TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS: linux; redhat; suse
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To: 1L
Can anyone explain to me why Apple can turn BSD into OSX but nobody seems to be able to do something similar with Linux on intel?

IMHO:

Linux is a committee effort, Apple is proprietary, it can move and decide faster.

Now someone like Novel could "do something similar with Linux on intel" but then it would be a proprietary system as well.

"Free" Linux is going to be slow in arriving with a "standardized" desktop that's suitable for consumer/home non-tech users.

Remember also that Linux is not Unix, so there's still some ground to catch up for it.

I also remember in the 90s when the holy grail was to bring Unix to the desktop with a decent GUI. It broke down in the various standards battles with each vendor trying to get its product to become the standard. (It also didn't help that Microsoft joined competing groups and gummied up the works.)

So, what Apple has done is quite remarkable and gives it a lot of room to grow bringing more and more features of FreeBSD to its product through new interfaces.

It's a remarkable product, IMO, and should logically be the alternative to Windows on the desktop for non-tech users at least until Linux is able to provide the same ease, simplicity, security and functionality to the consumer market.

FWIW.

21 posted on 11/05/2003 10:22:53 PM PST by D-fendr
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To: brbethke
Panther, the latest version of OS X does not include "Classic" on its install disk. However, you can load OS 9.2 and run in Classic mode concurrently.

The last Mac I bought was two years ago, OS X 1.1 and it came with OS 9 also.

I've since installed both 9.1 from an older system onto the newer Macs, and installed Panther on a much older iMac.

If you don't have install discs for older systems, I'm pretty sure you can download them free somewhere, perhaps from Mac, the upgrades are there from a long time back, so if you ever had a Mac or know someone who does...

However, OS X has been out long enough to finish the migration from v9 for most folks. I keep an OS 9 box to run those apps I haven't been able to justify upgrading to OS X. No, I don't believe you can buy a new Apple with OS 9 installed.

As for the price, you can get OS X on an iBook for about a grand, same price for eMacs and for a few hundred more you can get into a very good basic tower that is very price comparable to PCs, when you consider all you get with it - particularly if you consider all the security costs and hassles that Wintel adds to your life.

But, in the main, you're right, Apple is a hardware/software business model. There are efforts to port the OS to Intel, it's not that big a deal, but thus far Apple has been gunshy, likely for the reasons you indicate.
22 posted on 11/05/2003 11:50:58 PM PST by D-fendr
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Comment #23 Removed by Moderator

To: Uno Animo
I have Lindows. It may be the only survivor of the Linux desktop wars. No telling if Novell's SUSE or Xandros' Version 2 will give it a run for the money.
24 posted on 11/06/2003 12:03:42 AM PST by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: Leroy S. Mort
I'm running RH 8.0 on one of my computers. It was a Windows 2000 machine before a win32 PE virus burrowed into the firmware on one of the cards in the machine. Once that happened, the virus would re-appear even after low level format of the hard disk, zero of the CMOS memory and re-flash of the motherboard BIOS. Very irritating. I put RH 8.0 on the machine so it wouldn't be a total loss.

The RH 8.0 is less likely to get nailed by a Windows virus floating around. It also gives me a UNIX like OS to host stuff like CVS. My python code runs portably between Windows 2000 and Linux, so it is fine either way. The loss of support for RH 8.0 will probably cause me to migrate the box to be a dedicated QNX 6.2.1 development system. I won't miss the goofy Ximian e-mail reader. It is damn irritating when I'm trying to clear the daily spew of SPAM.

25 posted on 11/06/2003 12:11:35 AM PST by Myrddin
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To: rdb3
This might interest you ping.
26 posted on 11/06/2003 12:59:07 AM PST by Cacique
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To: Myrddin
Sounds like you have some experience with QNX. I tried it and found that it ran slower - even slower than Windows.

Comments?
27 posted on 11/06/2003 7:33:32 AM PST by taxcontrol (People are entitled to their opinion - no matter how wrong it is.)
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To: taxcontrol
Sounds like you have some experience with QNX. I tried it and found that it ran slower - even slower than Windows.

I use QNX for real time data acquisition tasks. It runs beautifully on my 100 MHz 486 PC104 CPU. I wrote a device driver that allows sampling of 2 accelerometer channels at 50 KHz each and 16-bits of resolution. You can't even tell it is running. Concurrently with that sampling, I have a PPP process managing an internet link over a Kyocera 200 module (1XRTT), a Garmin GPS monitoring time and position, a TCP server feeding data to the locomotive over an 802.11b wireless LAN, DSP processes crunching the accelerometer data, a serial process talking rs485 to pull data off 7 bearing transmitter units, a PIC processor monitoring wheel speed and other processes. All that going on on a 100 MHz 486 in 32 megabytes of RAM and a solid state 128 MB disk module. Try that with Windows.

The only slow performance that I've witnessed on QNX 6 has been the Arcom VGA board during shutdown. The Arcom driver isn't particularly good at graphics on the PC104 stack. My development box is a PII 350 MHz Pentium with 384 MB RAM and 30 GB of disk. That machine has an ATI graphics board. It is MUCH snappier than my Windows 2000 machine running a similar ATI card on a 1.1 GHz Athlon CPU with 512 MB RAM and a 60 GB ATA100 disk.

There is one other area of slow performance that I need to fix in my current hardware suite under QNX 6.2.1. The boot process is managed by the "diskboot" executable. It appears to be probing for SCSI controllers, but I have only the Apacer solid state disk module (EIDE). The Apacer is ready to go in 1 second, but the SCSI probes for 7 targets with mandatory timeouts of 2 seconds per target causes a big delay in boot up. The "sloginfo" analysis program exposes the source of the delay, but doesn't explain what diskboot is touching. QNX 4.25 booted to fully ready in 20 seconds.

28 posted on 11/06/2003 10:00:08 AM PST by Myrddin
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To: Myrddin
Try getting 99% of PC users to understand a word you have said.
29 posted on 11/06/2003 10:06:37 AM PST by wattsmag2
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To: Leroy S. Mort
SuSE 9.0 for the desktop. Installed the Pro version last night. Very easy, no problems, very few clicks. Installed it along side Win2K. Now have a dual boot system. Plus 9.0 resizes and reads NTFS partitions. Makes migration easy.

As for long term implications I think the Novell/SuSE is positive. Novell brings channel, SuSE and complete Linux product. This is a IBM / Novell+Ximian+SuSE partnership.

From Yahoo http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=2&u=/cmp/20031105/tc_cmp/16000245

"One mid-Atlantic Microsoft certified partner, who asked not to be named, said he was stunned by the news. "I'm desperately worried about Novell's acquisition. This gives them a Linux server story in a spot where Microsoft has been struggling to compete. If Novell can bridge its still-large installed base of NetWare and this new Linux stuff, and integrate with Active Directory--which they can via Samba--they have a story," he noted. "The fact that you can now connect Linux and Windows environments without the CAL [client access license] implications is, or should be, frightening to Redmond. This is Microsoft's worst nightmare: a dedicated competitor that hates their guts and has the resources to fight."


30 posted on 11/06/2003 10:35:00 AM PST by mpreston
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To: Leroy S. Mort
While Red Hat Linux won't be available at retail, the company is supporting a community project, Fedora, to create distributions based on cutting-edge Linux technology.

Everyone seems to be overlooking this. From what I've been reading, Fedora is pretty darn good, and the support for it is community based.

31 posted on 11/06/2003 10:45:22 AM PST by RogueIsland
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To: snooker
Now as far as Novell and SUSE, this is a big deal.

Decidedly. Novell is positioning themselves for a serious run on corporate accounts with SUSE as the desktop and applications server environments, Netware (still incredibly stable and efficient) for file and print services, and they gave in to the Webserver standard some time ago (either v5.1 or 6.0, I forget) by incorporating Apache instead of something proprietary - they were playing with WebSphere for awhile in there too. Starting at Netware v5.1 it even looked like Linux when it booted up (greenie-weenies inside brackets, that sort of look).

The longterm goal is to offer corporations an integrated computing environment that does not need a license from Redmond. They now have the makings, but the integration part still has years to go, IMHO. In the meantime the marketing problem is still there. It'll be quite a challenge.

32 posted on 11/06/2003 10:52:25 AM PST by Billthedrill
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To: Explorer89
LOL
33 posted on 11/06/2003 11:10:15 AM PST by MrConfettiMan (George Clooney is the male Julia Roberts.)
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To: Myrddin
I am thinking about using QNX for my CNC router. Do you know of any QNX / software URLs?
34 posted on 11/06/2003 11:12:44 AM PST by taxcontrol (People are entitled to their opinion - no matter how wrong it is.)
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To: B Knotts
"Linux works well for me on the desktop. But, go ahead and keep paying out the nose for Windows if you prefer."

Windows came with my computer. Since there is no discount without an operating system, it was free. I had to pay to get Linux. It's way to big to download.
35 posted on 11/06/2003 11:16:24 AM PST by Poser
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To: Abcdefg
"Drop back to version 8, if you aren't already flustered."

Am I going to be able to get a Windows network printer to work with version 8? If so, I'll reformat the drive and start over (again).

And how big a download should I expect. I have a T1 line, but 8 hour downloads are not acceptable.
36 posted on 11/06/2003 11:18:32 AM PST by Poser
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I never could get everything to work that I wanted to on a Linux platform. I would spend all my free time on weekends trying different versions of Linux and desktops, but there was always something lacking.

One day I took a step back and realized that most of the open source applications I wanted to use (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firebird, MySQL, etc.) had Windows ports. So I bought a retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional and installed all the open source applications I wanted to play with.

Now I spend my free time playing with the applications, rather than the operating system. I would agree that Linux is not yet ready for home prime-time.

37 posted on 11/06/2003 11:34:12 AM PST by vollmond
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To: taxcontrol
Try http://www.qnx.com as a start. You can download a free, non-commercial version of QNX 6.2.1 that comes with compiler, browsers, support for a variety of video cards, networking (IPV4/IPV6). All you need is a CDROM burner and some patience to download the CDROM image.

The folks at QNX decided to change their distribution model when the moved from QNX4.25 to QNX 6. I paid over $10,000 for my initial QNX4 commercial development licenses and deployment licenses were nearly $1,000 per node. The QNX 6 release offers free non-commercial code to encourage developers to use it and become proficient. Commercial developers can buy the Momentics Standard Edition or Profession edition packages to deploy custom kernel images for commercial use. The deployment price is $80 per node. Much more reasonable. If you plan to deploy hundreds of thousands of nodes, they make a very good deal, so it scales commercially.

38 posted on 11/06/2003 12:07:51 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: wattsmag2
Try getting 99% of PC users to understand a word you have said.

The home PC user is NOT the target audience for QNX. QNX has been king in the world of real time process control on the factory floor. They share a portion of the embedded systems world with VxWorks. pSOS, Windows CE, Symbian and a few other players.

Frankly, I hope QNX never achieves broad acceptance for home users. That would just invite the litigious idiots in government to attack the company.

39 posted on 11/06/2003 12:13:31 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: Leroy S. Mort
There are still plenty to choose from.
40 posted on 11/06/2003 12:18:02 PM PST by dyed_in_the_wool (Slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch...)
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