Red Hat tries again with Linux enthusiasts

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issues are fixed or not," Charles said in an e-mail interview. Almost everything in the current Fedora product works on Fedora PPC--including the OpenOffice suite for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

And Red Hat could in turn benefit from Charles' work. The company must maintain a version of its Enterprise Linux for Power processors and expects at some point to make a PowerPC version a standard part of the Fedora suite.

"Down the line, that's probably inevitable," Dekoenigsberg said. Red Hat programmers Paul Nasrat and David Woodhouse also are involved in Fedora/PPC, Charles added.

The move mirrors what happened with a version of Fedora for x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron. A version of Fedora that supported new 64-bit memory extensions for x86 chips first came from outside programmers, but now it's a standard part of Red Hat's Fedora releases.

Split personality
For most of its history, Red Hat had only one version of its operating system. That software was available as a free download and was certified by various server and software companies. But in 2002, Red Hat embarked on a plan to split its line in two and create the slow-changing RHEL, which comes with certifications, long-term guarantees for support and bug fixes, and a mandatory per-computer price tag; and fast-changing Fedora, which is free, uncertified, relatively unsupported, and packed with the latest upgrades.

Selling annual subscriptions to RHEL helped push Red Hat into profitability. But it also alienated some, such as academic customers who were attracted to no-cost Linux.

One person unhappy with the split was Brian Gilman, president and founder of bioinformatics start-up Panther Informatics, which sells consulting services to pharmaceutical companies and others.

"I was taken aback that I had to pay $999 or something for what I could download as I chose. My first thought was, 'I'm done with Red Hat. That's too expensive,'" Gilman said in an interview. But eventually he bit the bullet. "My customers started telling me they needed to know I was running an enterprise-class system."

For internal use, though, Gilman is still happy with Fedora. "I run Fedora on boxes that are not critical to the business endeavors and critical to my customers," he said.

Red Hat: the corporate power
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff believes Red Hat will continue to see competition from volunteer efforts such as Gentoo and one of the original versions of Linux, Debian.

"They (Red Hat) now are really viewed as the big commercial company," Haff said. "They can probably over time increase the user community involvement to some degree, but things like Gentoo and Debian are more natural places for the community to get involved."

But that's not such a bad thing, he added. For one thing, Red Hat still has plenty of interactions with open-source programmers of individual packages. And for another, Fedora's relative quality will help ensure a strong user base and a healthy amount of feedback.

"Fedora is a more polished and easier-to-install package than those more community-oriented efforts today," he said.

[Zerias]

em... Ubuntu? try again. Mepis

I'm just really wondering why in the world Stephen Shankland mentioned the Ubuntu distro, which is based on Debian, when the user base of Mepis Linux ( www.mepis.org ) is larger than Ubuntu's, and when Mepis is more popular ( according to Distrowatch where Mepis has achieved #1 and remains in the top 5 each week, something ubuntu has never done). Quite frankly, Ubuntu isn't an alternative for anything. Yeah, if you like exotic and funkily named Debian Based LiveCD's, I guess it's worth something. But most people will be better off just getting Mepis and not wasting their time.

je.saist

[Dachi]

No, Ubuntu :)

MEPIS and Ubuntu both use DEB packages. But unlike MEPIS and like Fedora, Ubuntu uses Gnome.

I have not yet used MEPIS but I have used Ubuntu and I can say the default install of Fedora is much much slower than that of Ubuntu.

I think Fedora 3 was a pretty good distro, but it is just hard to justify using a Linux OS that is noticeably slower and more bloated than XP.

I am nearing an upgrade cycle for the Linux OS on my primary system, so first I try out what is new on my slower crash box.

Maybe I will give MEPIS a spin despite the default KDE support :P