Well it looks like I fannaly got the pateince to download the 5 cd’s for open suse 10.2. I will be making the switch here soon. The main question that remains is dual boot or no dual boot?

Sure it would be great to still have windows to use my skype phone (linksys CIT-200) and Macromedia/Adobe’s products but what funs is that? Wine was created with a purpose. I formerly was able to get dreamweaver working on ubuntu so I shall try again.

I will update everyone with my conclusions of windows vs suse 10.2 next week and maybe you like me can make the switch!

Following is a snapshot of Enterprise Linux :
—> What is it?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the premier operating system for open source computing. It’s sold by annual subscription, runs on seven system architectures, and is certified by top enterprise software and hardware vendors. It’s backed by a Red Hat Network subscription up to 24×7 support with one-hour response, and the Red Hat Open Source Assurance program.
—>What does it do?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux creates a reliable, secure, high performance platform designed for today’s commercial environments—with capabilities that match or surpass those of proprietary operating systems. Sold in three products that span client systems to the largest servers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers a consistent application, management, and user environment.
—>Why should I care?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the corporate Linux standard. It’s already at work running some of the world’s largest commercial, government, and academic institutions. For any deployment—from the desktop to the datacenter-Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers unmatched performance and cost savings, and the freedom of open source technology.
—>Red Hat Enterprise Linux Features and Benefits

All products in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family are based on a common software core—kernel, libraries, development toolchain, and utilities. This provides a homogeneous environment ideal for simplifying multi-system and desktop-to-datacenter configurations. The immediate benefit: simplified deployment of distributed applications, and a consistent environment for users and system administrators across the entire family.
—>New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Version 3

Introduced in September 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, version 3, includes a broad range of new features:

1) Support for seven architectures:
Intel X86, Intel Itanium, AMD AMD64 and IBM zSeries, iSeries, pSeries, and S/390.

2) 4-4 memory split:
Increased kernel & user address space for X86 systems, allowing support for 64GB of main memory and larger user applications.

3) Native Posix Thread Library:
A new high-performance multi-threading capability provides improved performance for multi-threaded applications.

4) Based on Linux 2.4.21 kernel:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses the latest stable Linux kernel with numerous additions from the Linux 2.5/2.6 kernels.

5) Improved scalability:
Support for larger SMP, memory and I/O systems allows version 3 to support servers approximately twice the size of version 2.1.

6) Forward compatibility:
Version 3 includes compatibility libraries so it can run version 2.1 applications without modification.

7) Standards support:
LSB 1.3 compliant and undergoing NIAP CC EAL2 evaluation.

Improved desktop:
Includes Red Hat’s Bluecurve graphical user interface, and a comprehensive set of personal productivity applications.

9) Enhanced security:
Includes several new security features, including support for file system ACLs.

10) Bundled Stronghold:
Red Hat’s secure web server solution, previously available as a separate layered product for Enterprise Linux AS, has been updated to Apache version 2 and included as part of the base Red Hat Enterprise Linux product set.

11) Improved compiler/tools:
Includes GCC 3.2 and debugging/profiling tools.

12) Logical Volume Manager:
Provides enterprise-strength storage management.

13) Diskless systems:
Supports deployment of diskless clients.

14) Enhanced Java:
Java implementations from BEA and IBM.

15) Enhanced networking:
Includes numerous features to improve stability & performance.

16) Support for Samba 3 provides numerous new features:

Greatly improved interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory. Samba 3.0 is able to join an ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/Kerberos
Improved Windows 2000/XP/2003 printing support including publishing printer attributes in active directory
Support for migrating from a Windows NT 4.0 domain to a Samba domain and maintaining user, group and domain SIDs
Support for establishing trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers
Support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings
Improved ACL mapping
—>For more information on these and other new features, please refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Feature-Function-Benefit analysis.

Regards,

Alex

Installing Midnight Commander -—————————————————

• First we have to install some prerequisites

1) pkgconfig is needed to compile glib, a library mc relies on. Download the latest version from its official site. Currently, it’s pkgconfig-0.15.0.tar.gz. Then unpack, compile & install:

– wget http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/releases/pkgconfig-0.15.0.tar.gz – tar zxvf pkgconfig0.15.0.tar.gz – cd pkgconfig-0.15.0 – ./configure – make – make install

2) You’ll also need GNU gettext, which can be found in this folder: gettext-0.13.tar.gz. The same tired routine:

– wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.13.tar.gz – tar xvzf ~/Desktop/gettext0.13.tar.gz – cd gettext-0.13/ – ./configure – make – sudo make install

3) Install glib
With Panther, the only additional library you have to install for mc is reduced to glib. Opening the GTK+ home page, click on the topmost Source link and download the latest .bz2-compressed version of glib from the FTP directory which appears. At the time of writing, this file is called glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2. Compiling and installing it couldn’t be any simpler:

– wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.2/glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2 – bunzip2 glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2 – tar xvf glib2.2.3.tar – cd glib-2.2.3 – ./configure – make – make install

4) Install mc
Time to obtain a copy of mc, at the time of this writing, it was up to version 4.6.1-pre1. Compiling is again quite simple, with the one notable exception of the ncurses switch for ./configure, which makes it all work properly with Panther. You might want to experiment with the mc Autoconf script’s other switches for enabling/disabling features; the list of available switches can be read by invoking ./configure—help | less as usual.

– wget http://easynet.linux.tucows.com/files/mc-4.6.1-pre1.tar.gz – tar zxvf mc4.6.1-pre1.tar.gz – cd mc-4.6.1-pre1/ – ./configure—without-x—with-screen=ncurses – make – make install

Now we have successfully installed Midnight Commander from source now just try “mc” command on shell…....
That’s all,

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Shane Bewick

Pssht! Luke, I am your father…. No, just kidding. People have often asked me:
“Joshua, What linux distribution is the best for ((insert end of question here))?”.

Well, that’s a great question, but a very broad one. I’m glad more people are coming on
over from the darkside of the Computer Operating System arena (namely MicroSoft).

The major questions you need to ask yourself are:

Do I require Reliability, flexibility, user-friendliness, and/or simplicity and ease of operation?

Reliability/Flexibility        User Friendly        Simplicity    Windows (Plus)
-----------------------              -------------               ----------         --------------
RedHat                         Lycoris                 Mandrake    Lindows
CentOS                        Xandros
Novell Suse

I personally use the OSes in the Reliability/Flexibilty category.

But, in order to keep me from babbling head on over to:
http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html

for a comparison Linux vs Windows

First lets explain what “fsck” means in geek terms. The system utility fsck (for “file system check” or “file system consistency check”) is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in unix and its clones. You can compare this action to that of the windows defrag tool on your windows machine. Of course what linux is actually doing is a bit more than rearranging blocks but its the best most common visual concept I know to reference so most users can understand. Some people use the term as clean play off of a common curse word which ironically enough is often spoken during an fsck check and is also a 4 letter word .

Ok so whats going on during an fsck check, why is needed, and why does it sometimes take sooooooo long? Back when ext2 filesystems were more common place linux would often force you into and extended check after a power outage or sudden reboot. Fsck’s could also take quite some time on an ext2 file system. Lucky for the linux community things improved drastically with the release of ext3 filesystem. The ext3 filesystem is a journaling extension to the standard ext2 filesystem on Linux which makes recovery times much faster on crashed systems.
When a computer powers off (or reboots) unexpectedly, data in memory is lost, and the operating system “forgets” what it was doing. This is the same reason you need to “shutdown” your home pc or the system can become unstable. There are thousands of files in use at any given moment. When a server suddenly loses power those files can become fragmented and/or corrupt and create bad inodes on the drive(s). The server will automatically mount the filesystem as read-only to prevent further damage when that happens. To bring the filesystem back up an extended fsck will be needed to scan every single ionode/file and repair any corruption. Extended fsck’s can only be performed while the filesystem is unmounted and can usually take hours depending on the level of corruption.

If there’s a LOT of inodes with problems, it could easily take a while to fix. This can be exagerated on systems where large arrays are used such as most common vps (virtual private server) nodes or in our case every new machines we build. Fsck has to keep quite a bit of information in memory, so that it can perform consistency checks between different parts of the filesystem (e.g. orphaned files ). For a huge filesystem, this information could overflow physical RAM in some machines. Luckily we’ve packed ours full of 8gig ram per node and this has yet to be a problem. The time for doing an fsck will increase exponentially with number of files on the system. This unfortunately can still mean a real nasty wait for large arrays like our own if theres extensive corruption.
You can minimize data corruptions by using dual everything to keep the system live in event of failure of one peice, using ECC ram (required on opteron and xeon systems), and running on ext3 or another journaling filesystem. Also while raid 1 or raid 10 can save you with a disk failing, it can also copy corruption to its counterpart if things realy go awry. Sometimes it might be faster to restore the data from a backup than fsck-ing it but you really won’t know that until your neck deep into the fsck and start to see no light at the end of the tunnel !