[MAT-devel] Re: (Linux Distroibutions)

[Ray H. <re...@up...>]

I know the feeling.  I quit RedHat with 7.2.  I use Mandrake for office 
and www stuff but there is no support unless you join their club.  For my 
office customers I am the support.  I am also the support for my 
Real-Time customers but most of that is based on RedHat 6 and 7.

The "Brain Dead Install for EMC" folk decided a while back that we needed 
to switch distributions and Debian came out the winner with the Knoppix 
and Morphix distributions.  These have a promotional advantage because 
they can run from CD with just a reboot.

Will Shackleford hacked a Knoppix (dated now) and added an RTL patched 
kernel and several white papers.   This made a very nice real-time 
sampler.  Paul Corner has been working on the Morphix distribution and 
has built an adeos kernel and a minimod that adds in all of our EMC 
capability.  The Morphix has the ability to read plain text files during 
startup so that it can be modified for a specific machine or application 
easily more easily that doing a loopback edit and new burn. 

There are a few issues with hard drive installs from these disks but once 
there, apt-get is a very capable way to maintain systems.  It will take a 
bit of work on our part but once packaged, upgrades of the MatPLC code 
and binaries should be just about trivial.  The person who installed it 
will still need to verify that any new versions will work with a specific 
configuration.

Debian info is fairly good.  There are manuals for download that carry GNU 
FDL licensing.  Their lists are active and folk are knowledgable but it 
isn't like phone support. The EMC people are discovering that we need 
active support for very basic Linux issues but mostly for machine and 
integration issues.

Hope this helps

Ray


On Wednesday 12 November 2003 10:12 pm, 
mat...@li... wrote:
> Encapsulated message
>
>
> No Subject
>
> From:
>
>
> To:
>
>
> Date:
>
>
> Content-Type=message/rfc822
> Content-Description=embedded message
> Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 21:58:11 -0600
> From: Curt Wuollet <wid...@ec...>
> Organization: Wide Open Technologies
> To: mat...@li...
> Subject: Re: [MAT-devel] How to stay free and relevant.
> Reply-To: mat...@li...
>
> The big problem for me is telling customers that now they have to
> accept the same model as Microsoft's if they want a product with
> RedHat support. That really decimates the Linux advantage. True,
> RedHat support has never been a significant need, but it's a
> comfort issue. It has made the difference in several cases and my
> integrity is on the line. Here in the US, other distributions are
> non-starters among non-Linux folks as if they've heard of Linux at
> all, they've heard of the Red Hat Brand. While I am fluent in the
> various philosophies, I typically get 5 minutes of attention, and
> that's not adequate to bring in theology. And what of folks who
> have soon to be non-supported versions. This is going to smell a
> lot like bait and switch to them. So, for my own part, it's not
> bad, I can use almost anything, but I'm going to have to start
> talking like Ballmer and dealing with PO'd customers. I don't deserve
> that. Makes me feel like Sisyphus.
>
> Regards
>
> cww
>
> Jiri Baum wrote:
> > Curt:
> > [about Red Hat and SuSE]
> >
> > I'm not sure if the Red Hat or SuSE situations are really that bad;
> > in any case, they're just two distributions. Widely used and known
> > ones, but in the end just distributions.
> >
> > This is not the end of the world.
> >
> >>cww  Who is racking his brain for a third way that remains
> >> principled.
> >
> > That would be Debian :-)
> >
> > Jiri