Hey,
First off, thank you for taking the time to reply to all that stuff I asked about, I was trying to remember exactly what happened because, well, I'd read about it, once, but it was a really long time ago, so I couldn't for the life of me remember what had happened. So thanks very much for replying to everything:
timotheosh said:
Hi gore,
I don't remember all the details now. I can tell you that RedHat released a forked version of gcc (it was forked during version 2.95) and called it gcc 2.96. If you go to the gnu archives, you'll see, there is no version 2.96 of gcc. gcc 3.0 came after 2.95, a significant rewrite. I don't remember the version of Redhat that shipped with this broken gcc.
Wow.... That's actually incredibly shoddy of them to say the least. Lol I can't Believe they actually did that!
Perl was most definitely broken in RedHat 8. The fix, was to go and download the sources yourself and recompile.
OK now this is just priceless! I remember a while back I was reading an online article about Red Hat, and they were getting some crap from people because a very high ranking person in the company (Might have been the CEO actually) had said that red Hat wanted to be like Microsoft, and they were basically trying to down play it into "Well Microsoft is very successful and we'd like to be that successful! That's what it meant!" or something to that line.
Shipping a totally broken Perl.... And the fix being "Well download it yourself and fix it yourself" I think they've hit their goal of being like Microsoft lol!
I remember when I took Linux+ in college, the book you had to buy for the coarse, was one that came with two CDs of Red Hat 7.x something. I think 7.2 but I'm not sure since I didn't ever use it. But I do remember that this was literally less than 8 years ago, and even THEN that was out dated as crap.
Thankfully the teacher who did the class, was a good guy and actually knew what he was doing, and he allowed everyone to use something else. Like he even took the time to burn CDs for people who wanted to try something else but didn't have access to a high speed net connection. So he'd let everyone pick what distro they wanted, and then, he would let them download it at school, and then got a portable CD Burner to make the Discs for everyone.
I thought that was cool of him to say the least. At the time I took that class, I was using SUSE 8.2 I think... Anyway, I used SUSE on my Laptop, and then at home, I had a decent selection of stuff; I had SUSE Linux on a desktop, and then I had another with Slackware and FreeBSD, and then I had Ubuntu I tried ONCE.
I'm a little bit picky when it comes to Operating Systems, but, in my defense, I'll actually try them out before I bash them. I mean, I don't like Red Hat at all, but I did try it out first. In fact, when I bought "Linux for Dummies" I got Red Hat 6.1 or something with it, and I did try installing it even though it didn't work on my hardware very well at all, and actually failed during the MBR writing. Which was BAD lol.
But I then tried out Red Hat again for 9. I didn't have THAT many complaints with Red Hat 9, because for the most part, using it as a VERY minimal Desktop, it was kind of OK. I mean I didn't set up any services on it, but just using it very carefully for some basic desktop stuff, it was OK for that.
I mean, basically, I'd install KDE and Gnome, and generally use KDE, and then have Gaim (Which is now Pidgin) installed, and XMMS to listen to music, and some text editors and a web browser, and that was OK.
I didn't ever really keep it long though. I mean after 2 months I just said the heck with it and formatted the drive.
I don't like Gentoo either. Not sure why, I mean, I like the overall look of it, but the whole "Hey why not install EVERYTHING from sources in a manner that makes you wonder why you didn't just pick BSD which does this 10,000 times better and faster?" all that usually annoyed me lol. I mean I know they now have better versions, and you don't need to use the early stage ones, but I just personally don't like the installer.
Now, to be fair, being a Mod for AntiOnline.com, I do get a LOT of questions when it comes to the Operating System forum there, and when people ask, I generally won't talk about Gentoo, or Red Hat, or any other distro I flat out don't like.
I don't talk about them because I don't think it's right for me to make my opinion a decision for someone else. I mean, what if me saying it's crap means they don't use it, and then, they don't find one they truly like? So I just won't talk about the ones I don't like.
The few times I HAVE talked about those, I generally will say at the very least "Hey, I don't like this one, but that doesn't mean you won't. Distros work for different people for different reasons, and if you have a certain personality, you may well be a perfect match for this one" so that way I'm at least not trying to throw my opinion down someone's throat and force it on them.
I do the same with BSD too. I don't like OpenBSD, and I just don't talk about it. I haven't ever liked OpenBSD really. Theo is a doo doo head and annoying, and the OS isn't anything special, and I've always liked FreeBSD the most. That's why I'm here lol. FreeBSD has been my top BSD pick since... Well, since I got into Unix. Even wayyyyyy back when I got my very first PC; I'd never used a Computer much, and knew nothing about them, and when I got into it more, I started learning about different OSs, like Linux, and BSD, and I bought the "BSD PowerPak" which came with FreeBSD 4.0, and The Complete FreeBSD third edition, and I liked it a lot! I stick with FreeBSD, even though I do have NetBSD somewhere on CD, I just don't use it, like ever.
And I have PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, Freesbie, and the one from UnixPunx, which I liked a lot.
I used to have a workstation at work with Redhat 5.2 installed on it. Every night, I would log out of that system, to the xdm screen, and go home. The next morning the system would be completely locked up, and I would have to reboot.
Yea RedHat is weird like that. I mean, you'd think that any given Linux distro would work close to the same, considering the Kernel and all the applications are basically the same except for some versions using different versions and customized apps, but Red Hat seems weird in that it doesn't seem to be as stable as just about anything.
I remember once a few years ago, well, actually a number of years ago.... Anyway, a guy was doing some testing, and reporting his findings on one of the SUSE Mailing Lists, and, his test was taking two machines that were exactly the same; The Hardware was identical, and everything was the same. He then installed Red Hat on one, and SUSE on the other. Then he set up a little web Server, and then used more machines to give them load balancing and all that, and he then started generating Traffic on them.
He said that it was strange, because the SUSE machine almost never used the load Balancing machines at all, and out performed Red Hat by almost double. I always liked that because it made Red Hat look bad and SUSE look good lol.
Every Redhat system I installed back then, including Redhat 5, 6, 7, and 8, I would have to tweak after the install to get everything running properly. If I installed Debian stable or Debian testing, everything would just work, with no issues.
I've had similar happen; Debian works very well for me too. I've liked it quite a bit actually. One of my machines that I used quite often, was a PC with two hard drives in it, and it dual booted FreeBSD and Debian. I totally loved that machine, and as soon as I get the Power Supply replaced in it, I'll probably go back to Debian and BSD on it.
Now to be fair, Redhat has matured into a fine product. But I still occasionally run into some nuance they added that they thought would add value to their product, and would more often than not, just be in the way.
I personally haven't used Red Hat since 9. And Fedora... I did download Fedora Core 1, and I think I stopped not long after that for a long time. I grabbed a new release of it like a year or two ago, but I don't actually remember which version it was, and I didn't install it on anything. I wasn't really a fan of it.
Later, RedHat's mistakes were being done on Fedora, and even that is far more stable than it used to be. Debian has just always been very consistent. There are worse distributions, than RedHat, today.
Yea, I know of a few that I wouldn't use either way. I mean Red Hat isn't great, but there is worse out there.
Technically, Solaris 10 (and 11) is still UNIX. But, they have done away with some POSIX standards on the system. They have totally revamped the init system (done away with inittab). I presume, much of these changes were in line with Sun's goal of making Solaris the ultimate Java platform.
I didn't know about this at all! That just seems weird to me. I didn't like when Ubuntu did away with the usual Root Account, and so changes like this, are something I don't think is cool at all. I mean I don't pretend my opinion matters that much, but I for sure don't like that.
If you need the iron, Solaris is still solid. However, with Oracle being anal about patches, it is a total waste on intel/AMD platforms. If you are not going to buy the Sparc servers, stick with Linux or BSD.
I'm very partial to SGI. They make my dream machines. If I had like, no worries about budget or cost, I'd go with SGI everything heh.
