Linux.com

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.

#

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?

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I think you're both right. ESR holds himself in too high regard, AND linux.com does too.

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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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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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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.

#

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.)

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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.

#

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.

#

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.

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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.

#

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.

       

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What exactly does ESR want to achieve by sending out this letter? It makes him sound like a total script kiddie eager for attention.

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This is a non-story.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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he also writes speculative fiction about guns and getting laid

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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

#

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.

#

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.

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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.

#

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.

#

"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.

#

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.

#

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!

#

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.

#

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.

#

I agree too.With over 100 distros are we going to ever conquer the desktop market? I don't think so.

#

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.

#

If Click-n-run is driving you away, then you're a retard. You don't have to intall it, or use it.

#

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!!

#

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.

#

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.

#

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

#

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.

#

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.

#

"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.

#

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

#

"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"

#

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?

#

The author of this thread, who claimed "average users" use a lot what fedora did, is completely wrong.

#

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.

#

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!!

#

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

#

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.

#

Yes indeed, wherever would Linux have been without fetchmail.

#

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.

#

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

#

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.

#

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.

#

If you don't know who ESR is, my dear Anonymous Reader, it's your fault.

#

"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?"

#

Sorry I guess I missed the memo about his life story while I was out getting laid.

#

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.

#

does this make george bush the esr of the free world?

#

No, but it makes you a jackass.

#

poor sheep...

#

Ah! I was about to reply the same thing<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)

#

"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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

ITYM "by ESR and Rick Moen" (and I suspect much more the latter than the former).

HTH!

C. R. Conrad

#

ESR the guy who invented Open Source, just like Al Gore invented the Internet.

#

Al Gore was misquoted. esr usually manages to not only put his own foot in his mouth, but to quote himself to conclusively *prove* he put his own foot in his mouth.

#

Everybody loves Eric Raymond
<a href="http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/" title="geekz.co.uk">http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/</a geekz.co.uk>

#

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.

#

I really dont get it. Maybe it's just the linspire money or maybe it isnt. But trolling distros seems a bit below the belt, even for ESR. OK he trashed his fedora installation and couldnt get it back on its feet. I could talk about is lack of technical skills, but my guess is that he needed a good reason to install linspire/novell/ubuntu linux. So why not trash my FC installation? I really loved the details of the problem he was having...
Mister ESR will you ever get a life ?

#

I'll just quote Wikipedia, maybe it'll give you enough to want to learn more.

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the present maintainer of the "Jargon File" (the printed version also known as "The New Hacker's Dictionary"). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation within hacker culture, after 1997 he became a figure in the open source movement, and is today one of its most recognized and controversial characters.

#

A rather passive network composed of two resistances which bridge between two power rails, in this instance RMS and earth. Earth is 'dirty', i.e. Microsoft's ethics. RMS is 'root means squared', a hacker concept of stepwise ethical refinement towards irrelevance achieved by recursion once one has gained root.

The impedance presented at the ESR node is always lower than its impedance relative to either single rail, RMS or dirt. The question which must be raised at this time, however, is, is this
Effective Series Resistance now ineffective if it appears to have gone off the rails?

#

When you install FC6 it is entirely useless to watch video... or hear your music... or play your games... unless of curse you have your video collection encoded with free codecs... your music in ogg... or very old games that doesn't need any kind of 3D acceleration.

I still remember that day when the closed the kernel in such way it was impossible to install NVidia drivers, and we all had to wait until the next release to get that working, and I wonder now "what can I do with Totem?" none of the files I regullary use can be played in it.

I understand if they don't want to give support to propietary formats, as I know about the legal stuff... but, why did they choose to close the OS entirely so nothing can be done and the real world users find the OS useless for their daily life?... I am one of their users, I still use FC in home and work (it's a great OS) but I am dissapointed too with this issues.

#

ESR's reputation speaks for itself; not only being a strong developer and contributor, he's got his pulse on more aspects of the Linux community than most individuals. He's looking out for the community as a whole, and what's impressive is the way he does it. He says what needs to be said, without fear of recourse, often expressing what we're all thinking anyhow, but he does it in such a way that it not only understood but that it gets seen. He is an effective mouthpiece, and to trivialize his technically competent frustration with Red Hat is to ignore the the very issues that plague us and the adoption of Linux by others.

We scoff at Microsoft users who stay hooked to a poor platform because it's familiar and they've learned to live with the problems while we've been fixing them. ESR has just exposed our own tolerance with problematic distributions; we need to fix them, not live with them, otherwise we're just as biased.

So, lay off ESR - he's right; Red Hat has dropped the ball, and Ubuntu has picked it up.

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It's just a tool, get over it and yourself ESR. Maybe you should switch to Windows Vista.

#

And the tool either works as advertised or it doesn't. Fedora hasn't worked as advertised in ages, if it ever has.

#

Eric Raymond is a disabled egomaniac with a history of questionable contributions to the movement to which he allegedly belongs. He often touts fetchmail as his flagship product - an obsolete command-line tool to read mail from a POP3 server and drop it in an mbox. A 2-day project--albeit a pointless one--for any competent developer.

Who fucking cares what distribution he uses? Nobody cares except him.

#

I have no idea who this guy is but even if he is a raging egomaniac with crappy development experience he is still right.

Does it matter to me personally that he is making the switch? Not at all - I dumped that POS distro long ago.

I shouldn't say it's complete crap, as a server it works very nicely (just don't try to upgrade anything).

#

Well, show me your flagship product.

#

toss yourself off, eric

#

The difference is a respected person would have posted it on their blog or said it in an interview allowing the community to decide if it's newsworthy enough to spread.

A person who wants to be heard whether anyone is interested or not would to pull a stunt like this.

He may be right, but he came off badly.

#

> trivialize his technically competent frustration

One thing he has shown in this is that he ISN'T technically competent with Fedora:

- he blew away his own files
- didn't have backup
- didn't know how to use rescue disk

Please read the whole thread on Fedora devel list if you want to know the details.

On the other hand, Fedora software warned him that what he was about to do was a big NO-NO. Of course, he didn't want to listen (like he never does) and his system got screwed by his own hand.

#

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.

#

You sir, are an idiot!

#

Who's ESR?

#

Good luck with Edgy Eft, you're going to need it. I'm currently running it right now, and I regret not sticking with Dapper Drake (the previous Ubuntu version). They don't call it "Edgy" for nothing.

All non-stable distros you're going to have these kinds of problems with. I don't know if its worse in Fedora, but things aren't perfect with Edgy.

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I'm not exactly a basic user of linux and have a mix of hardware. I'm running 3 Edgy systems here, on 3 platforms (x86, amd64, and ppc) and I don't have any problems at all.

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Good for you. I have Edgy servers that haven't given me problems either.

The problems are more on the desktop side. Try using Subclipse w/ JavaSVN. Its been broken for quite a while (since September). I was able to apply a patch and rebuild the dependency that caused the issue.

I've had other issues that I haven't been able to fix.

I still really like Ubuntu (Dapper ran perfectly), but I think Edgy has some rough edges and I hope Feisty is a lot better.

#

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

blah blah blah....Like I care at all about your complaints.

You know we Linux developers are followers right?

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Oh, please. Tell me ESR is not guilty of this disease:

I CAN'T GET IT TO WORK!! IT MUST BE CRAP!!

or the other side of the same coin

I USE THIS AND IT ROCKS!!! YOU MUST ABANDON WHAT YOU USE AND FOLLOW ME!!!

I have been using Fedora as a workstation day/in day/out. I can play movies, mp3s, etc.

Here's a little hint... No computer plateform is perfect, get over it.

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Yeah. I totally aggree, nothing is perfect. You pick a box and run with it.

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There is a huge difference between esr not getting FC to work and esr not wanting to put all the time/energy into getting it working.

#

Your choice between open or closed source drivers, and good dependancy management.

Freespire may suprise you.

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I've used Fedora from the start, and always found it well-engineered, and at a sweet spot close enough to the bleeding edge to give me the latest stable technologies, but not so close as to include unstable components.

The loss of Fedora Legacy makes me wonder whether my next upgrade will be to a version of Fedora. I like to have bugfixed packages (for security reasons), but I don't like upgrading every six months. I will likely switch to a distro that provides support for 2 years, even if this means paying.

It is probably true that Red Hat does not care about Fedora's market share - it is not a revenue generator. Fedora provides release candidates for components of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and gives Red Hat a large pool of testers.

What Red Hat loses is mindshare - today's home Linux user is tomorrow's sysadmin or IT director, and if they have been happy with Fedora, then RHEL will be their natural choice for the enterprise.

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I have been using Fedora/Red Hat for probably as long as ESR has. I remember downloading and playing with the releases that were named after holidays, like the Mother's Day release, or the Halloween release. It has always had it's issues.

I have at times tried just about every other major distribution out there. SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. My general impression is that they all suck, Fedora included. It is just that Fedora sucks the least.

SuSE's big issue for years was you could only get isos months after the official release, unless you bought the cds. Mandrake was more user friendly, but too buggy. Debian was too outdated, even in the unstable. Mostly they held back on big upgrades, because they were trying to support so many platforms. Gentoo, too much compiling. Ubuntu is probably the closest, but it hindered by their dependence on Debian. They lack multi-lib support and last I heard they were waiting on Debian to do it for them. Which is logical, but also means it will take forever. I also didn't like little things about how Ubuntu did things, like no root account, just sudo.

As for Fedora, yes, yum is slow and sucks. The core group are fairly bone-headed, like the core group of every other distribution. On the other hand for every step back they take in features, they seem to always take a step forward. Example, they kept reducing the installer options, but then added the option to install packages from yum repositories. As for breaking the system so bad it isn't usable, I would have to say it almost surely did something stupid. Like used a mix of third-party repositories, installed something from rawhide/development, etc. It also shouldn't be that hard to fix by booting off the first cd and going into rescue mode.

I think one day I might switch to Ubuntu myself, after it matures more.

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In every way shape and form.

I'm not sure why anyone would use a distro that didn't use aptitude to manage packages.

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Because defoma sucks, and using aptitude basically implies nowaways that you're using a Debian-based distro?

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Look folks, he's a leader in the community, a lot of use care what he has to say. He does not want us to know what he's using, it's bigger than that. If you can't see that, move on..

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Esr is a fucking wanna be hacker who can't do anything right. I see that you have a so called say and morons listen to you. I'm sorry that you can't even use a simple distro like fedora. If I can use it not problems and I am not a hacker then why are you having issues? I believe that you are just a fucking moron who can't even program. Hell you most likely just stole code and clam it as your own.

Also ubuntu is for fucking sheep and its users have major attitudes problems hell maybe you will fit right in. Hell I am glad go switch to Ubuntu I don't want your fake ass to be using a real distro anyway

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Paraphrasing userfriendly.org's 2005 Sep 29th: Dude. if you were any stupider you'd be on life support.

#

Using your posting as a reference, I guess you use Ubuntu? You know, if Ubuntu users have major attitude problems you must be Ubuntu king or something, (Mark Shuttleworth perhaps?)

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Well, he IS a fucking moron. Always had. Causing a major split in the community by trying to impose that fucking "Open Source" shit is the main proof of that.

He is a greedy corporate brown nose and a disgusting racist bigot. Ever read his blog? It's like the guy is living in the 1800's or something.

He should just crawl back under the rock he came from.

#

maybe you are not so professional as you say. a professional will never use such vulgar lenguage about such a Figure! you will never be close famous figures as Raymond, you don't even know who he is!
and want a reason? if you post as "anonymous", that means that you don't even have a name in IT industry.
such a wasting of time talking with this poor minded guy.

#

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.

#

Packaging SNAFUs occur also with Ubuntu/Debian. Keeping the packaging system in working order is difficult and it's going to require expert's attention from time to time, specially if something needs to be compiled from source. Personally I install a minimal system from binary and things like ls, top, ps, that kinds of things, are never upgraded. Then I compile from source everything major like postfix, postgres, procmail, programming languages, etc. Never in 10 years has anything occurred in any of my systems that I wasn't able to explain, track and fix. Learn to compile from source (linux from scratch is a good starting point) and forget about package maintainers babysitting you. Linux is NOT for the masses, and if Linux is to be used 'easily' these things are inescapable.

#

"Linux is NOT for the masses..."

I agree. Linux is actually for people who have a lot of free time to figure out how to get drivers, codecs and other stuff, while keeping track of who's using a particular distro or desktop environment. The rest of us have jobs and families.

#

"Linux may be free, but your time wasted on it isn't."

#

I'm the original poster. You both miss my point: Windows is not free and the time wasted in it is *also* not free, so given I will spend (not waste, I'm a CS/IT professional) time with both, I choose Linux, it runs forever and does it without problems sprunging up by themselves, as in Windows. As for loosing time finding codecs, I loose zero time with codecs because Linux runs on my servers where none are needed (and yes, I have reserved a all-important task for Windows: to watch movies I use Windows). As for finding drivers, in Windows you buy something and expect a CD-ROM to come with drivers; in Linux you do it backwards: you first research what hardware will work with your kernel, then buy it. Usually the first hardware supported is among the very best for the intended task so no problems here. See. Please understand that you seem to imply Linux is for lifeless teens (and it's the case many times) but professionals also can get a huge value out of it that is not to be found elsewhere. That was my point.

#

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.

#

Chicken-and-egg situation: Do conspiracy theorists become paranoid or is it just paranoid individuals who become conspiracy theorists?

#

I am not referring to Mr. Raymond's post. He made a lot of good and valid points. He can't be blamed for killing Linux--in fact, very few people have done as much effective evangelizing for open-source.

I am referring to the arrogant fanboys who are posting attacks on Mr. Raymond here. THEY are killing Linux. One "YOU SUCK DUDE" at a time.

#

I don't have these problems with Windows Server. Hey, I know it had issues in the past, but 2003 has been rock solid for me. I don't have to worry about 5 different methods to deploy software or what of the 1500 distributions is the best. Oh, and the file system is far more logicaly layed out than Unix. What bin does my program go into again?

Linux may be free, but your time wasted on it isn't.

#

* Chronic governance problems.



That's descriptive... I'm not 100% sure what he's going for on this one. Maybe its those spirits he is fighting on the weekends.



* Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.



Wow... last time I checked "yum update" worked pretty well. Maybe he forgot to log in as root. Maybe its "maryjiloveyou" or "ihijackfreesoftwaremovements" though that last one might be a little too long.



* A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.



Again... not sure what he is going for on this one... as a used RH/Fedora since RH8 I havn't had a problem fitting this description.



* Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.



Last time I checked yum made upgrading easier. "yum update firefox" works pretty well.



* Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.



Oh that's right, fedora 7 is text-only. They must have forgotten to get the memo out to the rest of us. AIGLX has nothing to do with desktop enhancement..(well it doesn't but certain crowds seem to like the 3d effects whether or not they add any productivity but for the sake of this argument we'll say they are "far out" and amazing)



* Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.



Ever here of the Livna-repo???

As I am relatively young, I don't follow the history of open-source software development... but who the care gives a crap whether or not this guy uses fedora or ubuntu... or better yet who the fuck cares what distro of linux I am using, or you are using? Find a linux distro you like, use it, and celebrate with your linux compadres the fact you don't have to upgrade to Windows Vista.

#

I personally thought what he had to say was a pretty good description of the entire Linux movement as of late.

"People" know what Linux is now, but Linux still doesn't know what "people" are.

What I'm saying is that Linux is fucking ridiculously stupid for a `normal` computer user to pick up. You can almost see the questions forming in their eyes when they sit down at a linux terminal:

"Fuck, dependencies? Libraries? What the fuck? I have to do WHAT so I can watch a fucking movie on a fucking web page?"

My personal opinion is that if the Linux community as a whole wants to give something back to the people by offering their time and effort to change the world -- there are a few major fucking glaring holes in the way they're doing it.

If Linux wants to go further into the "home users" area you're going to have to stop circle-jerking each other going on about how this guy is "stupid" and step up to the plate and offer some real fucking content that doesn't break because your distro got some weird esoteric hair up its ass and decided to self-implode. Sounds kinda like Windows, doesn't it..?

If there is one thing I've learned through all my years working in IT (from suse to solaris you name it) -- it's that shit fucking breaks, no matter what. If you want to be the best, break less often and make it easy enough to fix that your shoelaces could do it for you.

ESR is right, redhat has become shit. Just like a lot of other distros. There are smart people out there who think "compile" has something vaguely to do with a trash heap. Make it simple on the surface, make it easy for anyone, and make it work.

#

Goddamn skippy. I've dicked around with a lot of computers for a lot of years, and both you and ESR have countersunk the proverbial nail with a sledgehammer.

I don't recall clients or friends accepting "Oh, well...that's too bad, sorry...it's gonna be THIS way, I guess that means you'll be there a while. Still might not work. I'm going to the bar now, enjoy!" and all that other happy crap.

Nooo...they generally told me "Here - I need this taken care of. Thanks." and then, well...you go fucking do it. Get the job done, be proud of yourself, have a nervous breakdown. Whatever. Something that - while I'm an ardent fan of Linux - doesn't seem to happen a lot of the time.

There's the happy fun fanboys who think we ought to give the open source community fellatio, strippers, cocaine, and endless kegs because they do things for free - and after we do that, perhaps the nobles will opt to write better code or maybe go get along with each other.

That's a worthwhile reward if and when they create this halcyon OS we've been expecting for countless years. I reckon I'll be driving a Ferrari before that happens.

Sadly, as much as Linux users rail against Windows - well, they've been around roughly the same amount of time as a usable OS; and there's gotta be a lot more people working on the former. Nevertheless, after all these years, Linux is still a giant fucking mess and lagging.

Shame, if you ask me. It's good stuff, but reminds me of some cars I've owned. Better be a greasemonkey.

#

Why does everybody act suprised when installing an update in Fedora and it crashes? Fedora is a testing platform for Redhat therefore you are a beta tester for Redhat.

The fact that you rendered your machine useless by installing some beta patch is nobody's fault but your own.

Have you ever thought about backing up the machine first?

#

> rendered your machine useless by installing some beta patch

Oh, he's gone one better! He simply blew away some very important libraries on his system after being warned by the package manager not to do it.

#

I too was a loyal Redhat/Fedora user from 1995 until 2004 when I tried the pre-release of ubuntu warty. Fedora was continuously broken, yum was a big mess. But there was quite a bit more. I was actually one of those users who would regularly download, install, test, and file decent bug reports. But the redhat devels stopped caring and the bugzilla reports languished. At that time I switched to ubuntu and have not looked back.

#

The only person he should be mad at here, is himself for not figuring all that out years ago, and continuing to use such a commercialized distro.

He should use Slackware or Debian. 6 months (if not weeks) from now we'll see some rant on Ubuntu probably.

#

Viva Windows.

#

I have been using Linux for over 10 years.

He is right but he may be over reacting. If that is the first time this has happened to ESR on a Linux box I am truly amazed. I thought it was a right of passage.

All the name calling and evangelism is useless.

All distros have problems.

I gave up on Fedora at 5 because updates were irritating and I switched to Ubuntu. Some Ubuntu OpenGL screensavers HANG THE COMPUTER...I never experienced that on a Linux machine before. I just disabled them. Ubuntu updates are better.

I am still looking for a server with a good but not bloated GUI I can use when I need to. Ubuntu server + Xubuntu failed me.

My next step will be to roll my own.......thats what Linux eventually comes down to. It will never be a one size fits all and it doesn't come in all sizes.


Insert commercial of hungry geek using a Linux box in some part of the world where there are more important issues.


At least I didn't have to pay to cuss out tech support.

#

Everytime ESR voices his opinion, a lot of guys are quick to say he is not entitled to do it. Or that he is arrogant.

I can do it, my dog can wag its tail to mean the food was tasty, my aquarium fish can jump in expectation for food, but being ESR sucks badly, for he can't say what he thinks.

Also, because he's a guy who likes to think, order his thoughts and then just present his view about reality -- which, btw, once changed history -- there's a lot of jerks who would rather stone him. That's the good part when you cannot build something great: you can always destruct something or difamate someone who can. It's waaay easier! And it can be fun, if one has really low fun standards.

That arrogant part, btw, is a nice compliment: if it were a joe sixpack, everyone would say "What a loser!". Considering ESR arrogant implicitly recognizes his importance.

Now, despite my disagreeing with ESR on a lot of subjects, he's right here. And I would venture even a little further.

The problem is that distros want their own repositories, accessible only through somewhat specific tools (yum, yast etc.). Even Debian people complain about Ubuntu using theirs.

It should not work this way! Because efforts are being divided and not shared, problems like Eric's get in the way all the time. This is totally anti-GPL in spirit, if not strictly to the letter.

[idea mode]
We need a kind a central storage, with a standard packaging system (be it rpm, pkg, deb, whatever... but one and standard!) to which, somehow, people would contribute binaries compiled form the sources in each distro.

All distros could get those binaries from this central nexus of executables (which is a good name, btw).

I know this is against the very idea of distros, which is providing comfortable to use binaries but, hey, software available for just one distro (e.g., because of exclusive libs) is just like non-free.

And I know there are security issues involved.
[/idea mode]

Back to the problem, I'd say to Eric what others already said: couldn't you see it coming?

I mean Red Hat has incredible technical resources at hand. You cannot handle things to a bunch of guys, like candies at Halloween, and expect them to make what gifted guys (paid or not) did with much more material resources.

Only even more gifted guys like Patrick Volkerding can do it, and then again with a lot of good previous simplying planning -- and help.

Fedora can be made right, but it cannot work like Debian, for instance. Maybe one day, but with a different more expanded structure...

Ubuntu builds on Debian's, and now Linspire's, too, which is a lot of leverage by any measure.

Maybe ESR's fault was he was too competent to quit earlier. Or to jump ship when Fedora was created, like I did.

#

He distributed his opinion as news. HE did it, not those that might think it's important.

Not a lot of class in that decision.

Maybe if ESR reads this, he'll think twice abour marginalizing himself.

#

> Maybe ESR's fault was he was too competent to quit earlier.

Remember, he deleted those files _himself_, after being warned by the package manager _not_ _to_. Then he started whining how the system is bad. If anything, he was the incompetent one.

#

I am a little lost... I thought the best thing about Linux was choice and freedom!?

#

Choice can be a way to limit freedom.

E.g., if you have a lot of standards to choose from, less products will be interoperable and so, one will have less choices in applications.

Another example, if we used several languages over here, I couldn't choose to answer any comment, but only the ones I understood.

Sometimes, to keep freedom you have to draw limits, like the GPL does.

Also, to keep choice you got to have a common basis.

#

Well fucking said, ESR. Fedora developers should join the *Buntu development team, enough time has been wasted already. Great move by ESR, this man speaks the truth!

#

after I got a rash playing with my fedora, but I could never get my ankles behind my ears, not with Debbie, not with Ian, not even wearing a red hat. Maybe if I'd had slacker underwear. I could always ask Suzy for some help, but really, who cares<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...

#

He blew away some very important files _by_ _himself_ on his own system and then wrote this rant to Fedora developers, who had _nothing_ to do with his own, self-made disaster. Wanker!

#

At the same time, some opportunists back stab the whole Fedora project with . Talk about hypocrisis. Such attitude is no better than this Eric S. Raymond's idiotic rant.

#

Gosh! Now that the big question of which distro ESR is using has been answered, (and we will all sleep better tonight knowing!), that leaves the other big question:

Boxers, or briefs?

#

Why in God's name (not that there is a God) would Eric not have been using CentOS if he wanted a sane Red Hat workalike?

But glad to hear he has broken through and moved to Ubuntu. Anything is better than Red Hat with its accounts, "entitlements" (f u, too, Red Hat) and fees.

#

"making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency"

Clearly, ESR is exaggerating to an extreme. I don't know what the definition of "nontrival upgrade" is, but pretty clearly it is possible to performs lots of nontrivial upgrades without them "foundering". Maybe some will, but not all, and certainly not all of them are "certain" to happen in any case.

Take everything else he says with requisite grains of salt.

#

Who is ESR and why should we care that he uses Ubuntu? I like Fedora, have never had any problems with it and will never switch.Until SCO wins in court, I am a Fedora man.

#

I've been using Linux since 1992, and Redhat since before the turn of the century. I would say that it is correct that the latest Fedora is becoming a real dependency mindfield.

I'm currently experimenting with Kubuntu in a virtual machine. I suspect it will be just as bad a dependency minefield, but if it isn't I'll likely switch away from fedora.

#

Hmm... Did I miss something, or is his whining about the fact that we can't use WMF and other proprietary formats?

Doesn't the word proprietary mean... proprietary?

Ya know, when I think of installing Linux and picking a distro, the first thing I say to myself is, "This Windows (insert whatever here) had better work or I'm going to throw it away and publicly blast them"

If you want your Windows (whatever here) to work, then guess what? Go use Windows.

I for one tip my hat to the Fedora team and I personally hope that they continue to keep impoving the system. Every release of Fedora has always been a huge improvment over the last. The fact that they will not take the time to get the WMF's playable in Linux is just fine by me.

(Besides there are a number of step-by-step instructions avalable to quickly get most of your Windows (whatever here) working.)

As for Yum, I have had no major issues with it. As a matter of fact it's one of the key elements that finally made me move from Suse to Fedora. I can't say it's been ALL rosey, but hey I'm not going to bitch about free software and all the time the contributers put in to getting the packages posted in the first place. (don't bother to point out that Debian has more mature tools then YUM. I have my own reasons for not using Debian.)

#

And you know why? Because the money isn't on the consumer desktop. It's in the corporate environment. And Red Hat has done a FANTASTIC job of positioning itself to provide services to corporate customers. If you paid Red Had $1,000 per year (or maybe $1,000,000?) I'm sure they'd be happy to send a tech over and upgrade your system and resolve your dependencies.

It is a shame that they've abandoned the consumer desktop. I used Red Hat Linux 7.0 back in the day and it was great, until they discontinued it. Fedora is nothing more than a nod to the OSS community, and an attempt to take advantage of the community for testing and evaluation. It appeals to no one except hard-core, bleeding-edge propeller heads. It was never intended to be a marketable product like their corporate solutions. If I was a CIO, I'd call Red Hat. As a home consumer, I use Kubuntu.

But compare the market cap of Red Hat to the market cap of Ubuntu. Red Hat is in it for the money and they're doing a damn fine job. Good for them.

#

I switched to FreeBSD 7 years ago and never looked back. I have yet to break my system using ports. Debian and RedHat would go unstable all the time. I don't miss them.

#

Who cares if ESR gave up on Fedora? The great thing about free software is the sheer amount of choices available. After trying several distros, I've settled on Slackware, it's what works for me. And from what I've seen from the other posts, Fedora works for other people as well.

#

I've used RedHat/Fedora for many years. I've even recommend it to my colleges and friends years ago. But not now.

In the last year, I change to Ubuntu becouse rpm nithmares. I then, I discovery a simpler world. Now, I love Ubuntu.

Cheers,
Paul
(Sorry for my poor English<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:) )

#

Unfortunately, recent years have seen a great rise in the number of people on the internet and therefore the number of people involved in the linux community. Many of these people are young and have little knowledge... the guy above posting "who the fuck is this guy (esr). what has he ever done etc...". wtf??? it's always the same in any area of life, as soon as the idiot masses move in, it all goes to shit (the discussion, at least).

i agree with everything you say (on this issue) eric. and to the people who are asking why you would post this...? why do you fucking think you ignorant fucking twats.

#

No, it's not ignorance. When people are saying "Why the fuck do we care what ESR uses", they mean it. So some "celebrity" decides to troll a mailing list and cc: the rest of the world, and this is news? In other news, the sky's still blue, and water's still wet.

Perhaps ESR needs to see a proctologist about his headache.

#

dear ESR why don't you move to windows?
it's the right operating system for you...

#

The funny thing about this is, as many people have said, "who care which distro ESR uses?" It's like how people got their panties in a bunch when Linus Torvalds dissed Gnome. Linus, ESR, and rms, gifted though they may be, are not gods; they are mere men.

I think it's hilarious that we care if Linus uses KDE the same way that "normal people" care about what handbag Paris Hilton uses. If Eric wants to use Ubuntu, let him. If he then moves to SuSe, let him. Sure, it makes for nice marketing for Shuttleworth to say that ESR uses Ubuntu, but the hardcore among us won't give a darn.

That being said, I think that, given his hacker reputation, perhaps he was trying to install something that a regular user wouldn't be trying to install. I've never had my system get trashed by installing anything from the repos using yum. I've had problems crop up when mixing livna and freshrpms, but nothing that uninstalling and reinstalling packages from only one source coudln't fix.

People get mad at Debian and Fedora for not supporting MP3s and all that. I don't get mad for two reasons. 1) Red Hat is a US company and could get into big trouble for including MP3 playback. Other distros created by guys outside the US can perhaps include this stuff. (Also, apparently in FC7 they will FINALLY have a popup tell people that the programs aren't broken - it's software licenses and they can fix it by adding repos)
2) Someone has to hold the high ground. You know that when you install a Debian or Fedora system that you are free of any and all possible proprietary software and, thus, all potential legal action resulting from thus software use. (Whether Linux infringes on M$ or SCO stuff notwithstanding)
This may be important in certain situations and in certain countries. If we can get more people to use OGGs now, the MP3 license holders won't have the power they have now. What if they suddenly demanded tons of money for MP3 encoding and decoding. Now your music can't be played anymore. Mine can, because I've been encoding in OGG.

#

What happened to you is like getting a flat tire and you didn't pay for AAA. Yet you want someone else to change your tire. Put the install disk in, boot into rescue and fix it (i.e. get out and change your own flat yourself). You should know Fedora isn't a production run. Try using Ubuntu's beta stuff and when you get screwed complain about that too. Stop pretending Fedora is production stuff. You really should know better.

Oh by the way, thank RedHat for your free sound drivers, free printer drivers and many many other things that Ubuntu wouldn't have if it weren't for them. Maybe you forgot about that too? Perhaps I should also point out that RedHat is, as far as I know, still the ONLY company in the Linux space to actually make money.

#

In his "Fedora Multimedia Howto" he dismisses Xine and Totem as "broken." Totem IS broken, but Xine isn't. It works perfectly. I watch DVDs in my notebook with no glitch whatsoever.

- JCCyC

#

"(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"

Translation:

"(2) the fact that I was dumb enough and careless enough to remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed"

It's also not unrecoverable (rescue boots exist for a reason) but that's another story

#

I'm struggling to recall something worthwhile that ESR has done. He wrote a replacement for the Linux kernel build system that was over engineered, umaintainable and ran like a dog. He edited the Jargon File, which I always understood to have been started by others. On a personal level he's a loud mouthed gun nut. And here he is, thinking he's so important that his rant about how Fedora can't cope with his own stupidity is worth sending out as some sort of "official press release". He installed something that overwrote a system package, and then wonders why it screwed up his setup. Someone who can't even install a third party package into<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/opt or<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/local, and can't understand the upgrade or security implications of static linking system binaries is not qualified to comment on the quality of the Fedora distribution.

Chris

#

ESR's rant, while puerile at best, does highlight some of the problems and challenges of the open-source movement. Highly decentralized and loosely maintained packages will *inevitably* break things... On the other hand, any attempt to somewhat standardize and maintain a more disciplined approach just frustrates people (i.e. the recent Gnome flare-up).

It's all part of life in the open source souk.

#

esr has encountered a frequent problem with the bazaar, the merchandise sold isn't always of the quality desired by the buyer.

maybe doing a rosary would help, eric!

#

we all know that Red Hat gave up the desktop market years ago, and most linux fanboys are NOT really interested in taking linux mainstream - they consider linux as "separating the men from the geeks" by constantly sucking up all your home and leisure time to get everything working, keep it working, and keep upgrading to the bleeding edge. That can never be mainstream - because most people have subjectively more important things to do with their spare time and getting down and dirty with bits and bytes - eg. their spare time should be free as in beer<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)

 

#

Thats what Raymond is, God damn I am a Loyal SuSE fan, and I admire Red Hat/Fedora for all their hardwork at creating a truly awesome, free distribution. He admires Ubuntu/Linspire for including proprietary media codecs, TWAT!! They can walk that path, thats fine with me, but don't bad Fedora/Red Hat if they don't want to. Their choice, their decision, Raymond, keeop you f'n opinions to yourself, and if you want to air a grievance, air it with the Fedoar/rad Hat team, not the f'm world you TWAT!!

#

Here's a typical ESR gem, "there are four or five things I want to package and submit myself, but higher-priority tasks ate my bandwidth."

BWAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAHHHHHAAAAA.

Slashdot rejected the submission so I guess it goes here. Reddit.com is covering it anyway. Enjoy.

<a href="https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01051.html" title="redhat.com">https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> 2007-February/msg01051.html</a redhat.com>

#

<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...Dick.

Why no mention of the package he was trying to install?

You know, I bought his book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Yeah, most of it made sense but its only profound if you're still working for the man. Whats that open source project he took over and keeps blagging on about? Ah yes - fetchmail. A big fucking turd for sending and receiving mail.

I just wish I could get my money back for the book cos the thought of him buying another gun to use as a dildo on himself or a strap-on for his cowboy buddies from the profits makes me sick.

#

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.

#

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.

#

Eric use linspire 1 click evil codecs<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. the works

<a href="http://www.linspire.com/" title="linspire.com">http://www.linspire.com/</a linspire.com>

#

Man, It's about time that you realized that and adopt Ubuntu. I've used RPM distros for years too, but gave up on them about at least 2 years ago now. Which is about the time I discovered Ubuntu. I already loved pure debian for stable server but wasn't satisfied with debian base for desktop... Until I tried Ubuntu and been pleasanly surprised with it. I tried Fedora core 6 recently to see where It's at, but gave up after less than a week... RPM is just not yet at APT level, in my opinion...

#

I too had an episode with RPM dependency hell last evening. what it really boiled down to was official FC RPMs were wanting to upgrade over my livna RPMs and some ATrpm RPMs were wanting to upgrade over both official and livna stuff.

I removed livna and ATrpms from my yum repos and tried again, and was finally successful. This weekend I'll see if I can get my livna and atrpm packages updated.

I don't think I could blame the Fedora team for this one, it more appears a lack of communication between AT and the Fedora team. Maybe if I had to blame someone/something, it would be YUM/PUP for not keeping straight what repos should be the source for which package.

#

I am a long-time power user of Slackware. I gave FC6 a go this week (after years of having left RH and Fedora behind), and, suffice it to say, the experience left me pissed. I've stuffed my ramblings here: <a href="http://ayaz.wordpress.com/2007/02/21/fedora-core-6-a-few-quirks-you-need-to-watch-out-for/" title="wordpress.com">http://ayaz.wordpress.com/2007/02/21/fedora-core-<nobr>6<wbr></nobr> -a-few-quirks-you-need-to-watch-out-for/</a wordpress.com>

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I'm sorry I don't intend to be mean spirited BUT
Eric has always had a bit of a maturity problem and this latest bit is just such and example.
It's fine if he has a problem with his distro and finds a solution in another, it's fine that he can point out the problems with his old distro and the good things about his new one - but to condemn Red Hat?
Eric can't seem to stop from slipping over the edge here and there and I love him for it, elsewise he wouldn't be Eric.

Redhat has had the problem he describes forever and it needs to be seriously addressed by the comany, but a live CD that installs and gives him his basic tools?
Eric, Redhat has that but you've been buried in your single track too long to have noticed.
I suspect and you should consider that you are as much a part of your problem with Redhat as Fedora is. You used to enjoy and revel in challenge and now you just want to moan and complain about it.

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the reason i'm using fc is because eft gives a chronic kernel panic on my box, and the fix is a dependency nightmare. i've learned what esr missed: if you install it into an rpm OS, you get what you deserve if it isn't an rpm. if it won't install because of dependency conflicts, ramming it in Will break the system. you wanna compile it in? use gentoo. wait'll he uses alien, and ubuntu update skips that pkg because it's not in the repo header list...
also: for the 80 percent that are still on dialup, a 1-cd full-size distro is a horror story to install; you need a multi-cd set as an option.

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From 2003

<a href="http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/26/1442215&tid=13&tid=27&tid=99" title="linux.com">http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=03/1<nobr>2<wbr></nobr> /26/1442215&tid=13&tid=27&tid=99</a linux.com>

And you folks are asking who is ESR? I'm wasting my time here...

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The lesson here is: Don't send email when you're pissed at something.

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For those of you who haven't had one of these moments, then you must be new to the Linux world.

Many of us have had times like these. I used to use RH religiously, then found Debian, then went back to Fedora. I have been using Ubuntu now for some time and it is working for me at the moment.

I sit in front of my system all day. It has to do what I need it to do or I won't make money. If I spend too much of my time dealing with maintenance issues then I can not do my job.

Let the man rant. Most of us know exactly how he feels.

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Well, I can't say I agree entirely with the gentleman who wrote the letter. As a home user, I have found that Fedora has been improving quite a bit with each release and I look forward to them continuing to improve it. I've welcomed the addition of YUM, and found it has made it a good deal easier to install and manage packages. In fact, where RPM used to be a bloody nightmare, I've found it so easy to use in the past while that I haven't even given it any thought, which is wonderful - it's a tool to get things installed and working, rather than the dreaded opponent it once was.

However, his letter also highlights one of the many wonderful advantages to using Linux. That is, the distribution he has been using no longer was what he wanted, but he found and has moved to another distribution that works for him! I think that's beautiful. I've only ever used Slackware, Gentoo and Fedora, so can't speak as to how Ubuntu is, but I've heard exciting things about it and apparently it's causing a lot more people to try out Linux with the same excitement that used to surround Red Hat Linux. That can only be good.

As for him posting about his move publically? Well, I've read some comments indicating that he's just make noise and bluster, and perhaps to some degree this is true. But at the same time, it may server to alert the people behind the Fedora project of concerns that he and others may have so that they can move on them. Sometimes, suggestions and complaints can get buried in the very system that was set in place to handle them efficiently, and so little flare ups like this are good once in a while to shake things back in motion.

As for me? Well, I'm using Fedora 6 right now and am happy with it. I've switched distributions before, and maybe once day I'll switch again. And I'm happy that there is the freedom for me to switch!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)

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I have run into the same problem and when I went the author of the program to inform him about it, I got nothing but grief. Just like the flame war that is going on now. I had such great hopes for Linux. I spend more time trying to update then I do getting work done.

Eric you have been a leader in the Linux community and I for one thank you for all of your hard work.

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Ok, so, ER is having a bad day, in history it has often been necessary for someone with some significant notoriety to stick their necks out to foster change and fix problem. The problem, though, and real focus should be beating the competition, which isn't other distros but M$. Someone in this list mention that Fedora isn't the only distro with the same problems, I can attest to that after using Slackware,Redhat,Fedora,Gentoo,Ubuntu among a few. I would add to this statement that M$ windows had some issue with this in thier initial phase of over the internet patching. I've personally set deny firewall rules in fear of the cursed BSOD from patching!

My hope is that everyone on the list can look past "obvious attack" on Fedora's technical prowess to realize that we should all just keep focusing on the prize. I use Linux today for the same reason I started with Windows and Solaris. Tools that got the job done. I left both for Linux when the tools no longer die the job done. So now that ER's let the cat out of the bag, what do we do?

Create a certification process for RPM respos? Make sure that companies like Redhat enforce thier vision of how their distro should work across all repos supporting their products? Holding mirror/repo sites accountable? Maybe RPM(Yum, up2date, emerge) etc. could do a better job at informing the end user?

So what's it going to be? Let M$ dominate the planet or kick the stuffings out of them at every turn? Better means at everything, and with M$ its everything or nothing at all.

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As a dedicated try hard linux user,I have come to the conclusion that most computer users could suffice with puppylinux and that one day someone or group will do to plan9 what linus did to unix and the perfect set of numbers may be achieved.
personnally Ive been stuggling to get T2 to build
because I want to learn and use YADE as a module for puppylinux, its a personel thing.
zenwalk vectorlinux pclinuxos & sayabon are all useful but my interlecual limitation mean that that I just cant alway make then do what I think they should do .
It must be extremly fustrating for those that experience the same fustration that ESR has relying on an upgrade and have the system fall over especially when time constains exist in getting output from F.R.E.D ( f..kn' Rediculus Electronic Device.

peace be to all

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I think ESR is a pompous asshole.

He knew fully that Fedora is the way it is because it is the latest _bleeding edge_ and you _must_ expect everything to be broken. You try it at your own risk. Heck, it is not even cared for once a new release comes up.

So what changed suddenly? nothing!

ESR just wants a pretext to get out of fedora dev.

That's it.

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Go Fuck yourself you lazy cunt!!! This man has achieved something which you would'nt be able to even comprehend with the kind of attitude that you and your WANKING mates here have shown. Thin before you talk you PIECE OF SHIT!!

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ESR was hired by Mark Shuttleworth to plug Ubuntu.

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For all those MF's and Spineless sugar titted SOB's who have little or no knowledge in and about the Linux OS , stop your 'FUCKING' ranting about ESR and work on something usefull you shit headed morons.

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I'm totally with Eric on this subject and, isn't this a wonderful remark!:

"I think ESR is a pompous asshole. He knew fully that Fedora is the way it is because it is the latest _bleeding edge_ and you _must_ expect everything to be broken."

Why bother to release it then?

I've been using RH/Fedora since RH4 (i'm talking about the second half of the 1990:s now, before ES et all) but my latest try has been a disaster, nothing works.
Bought a Dell XPS 420 and tried FC 8. Welcome to the world where nothing works ...
Fonts looks like sh*t despite the fact that I'm using the lastest native driver from ATI.
Can't even logout and get a login screen .. (kdm hangs)
Internal soundcard won't work (expected since it's Intels latest) but even tossing in an old Creative
with a well known ES1370 doesn't won't work (used to work in FC2/3/4 ...).
After moving the card to another empty slot it works (once, haven't dared to reboot yet) but
despite all efforts, I cannot get any sound from flashplayer (and believe me, I've tried all tips on the net)

I'm about to leave Fedora for good, it just shouldn't be this much problems with the latest release
(and I'm not saying a word about the missing support for mp3 etc). Since I work with customers running
RS ES (or Cent-OS) It was a natural for me to run it at home/work too and believe me, I've invested a "few hours"
in knowing how to configure/run RH/Fedora.

And before you jump at my throat, let me remind you that I've been using Linux since 1994 ..
(Yggdrasil if anyone remembers?!)

Now that I've got that of my chest, what is an alternative desktop distribution?
I prefer KDE over Gnome but not really a fan of Debian and a still like a "major dist" so there
might be a new version at times.

Suggestions welcome ...

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And who cares?

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