[Cumbria] For discussion - Is Linux really ready for the Enterprise environment?

[Schwuk]

Sorry everyone - I told him off for being too quiet yesterday... Oops! Oh
well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who was up late last night though...

> Back to Linux; NG's seem to be flooded with users stuck in RPM hell.
> There is no standard Desktop to implement across corporate enterprises
> (or SME's). Distro's have different ways of installing packages.
> Enterprise hardware is not well supported, SMP support is truly CRAP.

RPM's are not brilliant, but they are not evil either. It is normally a case
of learning the tool - this is not windows. Case in point: I like to run the
latest version of Mozilla (currently 1.2.1, definitely worth using, esp. if
your distro supports xft. If just as worthy under windows as well). There
are Red Hat specific packages that I use, and to install them I first remove
the existing ones. If I use the RH 8.0 bundled package manager to remove all
mozilla packages, it will remove them all (expect 2), plus OpenOffice and
Evolution. Without giving you the option of not removing the additional
packages I might add. If I use the command line, it only complains about
Evolution being dependant (on the two package that were no removed anyway).
To get round this I simply remove them with --nodeps (an option not
available through the GUI manager), then install the updated packages, and
everything continues working. Simple now, but a real pain when I first
encountered it. That said, I prefer that underlying libraries are not left
simply to 'keep things working' ala Windows - I would just like more
flexibility in the gui tools.

> Is UnitedLinux the way ahead? Or will this be another 'proprietary'
> implementation which we will have to pay a royalty (in more ways than
> one) for?

UnitedLinux is smaller (in perception) distros taking on a perceived 'enemy'
i.e. RedHat. It is marketing, pure and simple.

> Should Linux be wrestled away from Linus and put in the hands of, say,
> IBM? For Linux to grow any further, it needs a clear path to stride.
> Does anyone know where this leads, can anyone see through the fog
> ahead?

No. If that were the case, why are IBM putting so much effort behind Linux.
If one company/organisation owns Linux, it will slow down. As long as the
community is behind Linux, it will continue to grow, and the features you
say are lacking will be (eventually) added. That will not happen if a
commercial interest is running the show... The community will not be as
'generous', no matter what that companie's intentions are...

> Please don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but after a decade of
> development, it seems to me, that the trust still doesn't seem to be
> there.
>
> Sun are contemplating Open Sourcing Solaris. They are working on doing
> this with Java (oh bliss!). Where will this leave everyone else?

Jumping back to your comments about GUI's - Sun are going to be using Gnome2
as the default desktop environment for Solaris 10. That's a lot of weight
behind Gnome... As an aside, I fired up Konquerer last night to test a web
page, and I still don't like KDE - I know it is supposed to be a very good
DE, but it just doesn't 'feel' right to me...

Cheers,
--
Dave Murphy