Gentoo Quick Install Guide!!!!

[LouTheBlueGuru]

Maybe thats why I like Distros like Arch Linux & Rock Linux So much because there great linux Distros without the hype and are not trying to make money off of you.

This is one of the stumbling blocks to the wide spread use of Linux. Example - I have my company all set up with Mandrake and Open Office etc. Now Mandrake goes belly up! Yikes! Lets deploy Rock Linux or never upgrade Mandrake? Give me a break. For a hobby type this is just an inconvenience. For a business this is a disaster!! As a hobby type, all the different distros are really interesting. From a business perspective this is not a really good thing. A businness needs stability and assurance of long time support.

[64Bit]

Originally posted by LouTheBlueGuru on 04-12-2004 at 09:29 PM
This is one of the stumbling blocks to the wide spread use of Linux. Example - I have my company all set up with Mandrake and Open Office etc. Now Mandrake goes belly up! Yikes! Lets deploy Rock Linux or never upgrade Mandrake? Give me a break. For a hobby type this is just an inconvenience. For a business this is a disaster!! As a hobby type, all the different distros are really interesting. From a business perspective this is not a really good thing. A businness needs stability and assurance of long time support.

Why should it be a disaster? For Mandrake all you do is upgrade and your all set. If every company had your mentallity they all would be running Win95. Why not give your people the very best thats out there. The only disaster is that some people dont want to put in the extra effort to do this. Probably because they are too busy giving orders.

Btw I am a General Manager for a local graphics supply company and we just upgraded our linux server and we are already looking to upgrade our workstations also.

Bottomline: For the minor inconvenience as you put it , your people will be running the latest software out there and you cant complain about the price, even if you where a cheap person, not saying that you are. LOL

Peace.

[jpmoney]

Well if we're going to talk about business, things are very different.

Originally posted by 64Bit on 04-13-2004 at 07:01 AM
Why should it be a disaster? For Mandrake all you do is upgrade and your all set. If every company had your mentallity they all would be running Win95. Why not give your people the very best thats out there. The only disaster is that some people dont want to put in the extra effort to do this. Probably because they are too busy giving orders.

It will be a disaster because of numbers and available support. Our central datacenter has over four dozen linux servers doing various things - some in a cluster and some standalone. And then there are the 19 that I am putting in China... and the 128 node cluster we have in Germany... and the... you get the idea. Overall we have around 10-12 sites around the world that we've converted to Linux over the past 3-4 years, and we're a medium sized company.

So I'm supposed to upate my servers with a NEW OS every 6-8 months? As much as I like to fly around the world and play with computers, its simply not going to happen. We do have local site support, but they are busy actually working with the people and the OS they have doing maintenance.

We also have a change management process for a reason. If I want to put in a new version of CUPS on my print servers, I need to test it locally, add it to an environment that mimics production for testing, and THEN I can add it to production. Why so much labor over a simple service? Money. Money is lost when services are down due to a bug in a new version.

Btw I am a General Manager for a local graphics supply company and we just upgraded our linux server and we are already looking to upgrade our workstations also.

Bottomline: For the minor inconvenience as you put it , your people will be running the latest software out there and you cant complain about the price, even if you where a cheap person, not saying that you are. LOL

Peace.

Upgrading to the latest and greatest may work for you, but that is very rare in business. As much as upgrades fix things, they also break things (IE: WinNT SP2). There is no way that I can just get on one of our production servers and upgrade the OS when I want to. Of course it will be in use by the users, but theres also the need to TEST software. We have both in-house and 3rd party software that is integral to our business. If it is not available due to some strange bug in a new version of perl or a change in the way a library is called, we lose millions while the problem is fixed. Bugs arent just in the software package - they can also be in the underlying system that it runs on. That is not free software. Ideally everything will work, but the reality is that it just doesnt. Do you know the extensive testing that many companies are now doing on Redhat Enterprise 3 and SUSE SLES 8.x?

Why do users also need the latest and greatest? If it works, don't break it. Again, businesses don't have the same mindset as tweakers because work needs to be done and by a certain time. Survival depends on it. You can bark orders all day as you say, but you then need to follow up on the assignments to be sure everything is done.

As a note, all of this assumes that upgrades are made for security reasons. Of course you patch ssl/ssh when a bug is found, but you don't wait for it to be in the new version of nifty-gui-linux's update program for it to be patched.

And that doesn't even begin to touch the 50+ Solaris servers that we are in charge of upkeep on, or the backup systems, or the systems management hardware we use. We're lucky enough that we have a separate networking and Microsoft group - otherwise there would be four of us in charge of all of it and there are only 24 hours in a day.

You can upgrade your desktop every day, but when it comes to businesses, all the rules change.

[64Bit]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by jpmoney on 04-13-2004 at 08:56 AM
[B]Well if we're going to talk about business, things are very different.



Why do users also need the latest and greatest? If it works, don't break it.
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Real Simple Answer = TIME and we both know TIME=MONEY , if you can get better productivity out of your workers by upgrading their system. Why not and why not be up to today standards. See I am in the Graphics Arts business and when there is a TIFF file sent to a printer it has to be in a specific format. Usually Quark or Quarkexpress but could be a few others. ANyways if our system isnt up to date and doesnt read the information right it screws up everything at the printers. So we HAVE to have the very latest software out there. And Our Software packages runs anywhere from 15K to 150K , so any way that you look at it , its expensive. But its alot more expensive if the printer has down time because your server is messing things up.

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Again, businesses don't have the same mindset as tweakers because work needs to be done and by a certain time. Survival depends on it. You can bark orders all day as you say, but you then need to follow up on the assignments to be sure everything is done.

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Your right but in my business You have to stay up with everyone else, or it creates more problems for yourself down the road.

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Security isnt a major problem we really dont have people wanting to do anything with the business other than the customers. And they just want their product yesterday so they are not going to do anything to slow down productivity.


Bottomline: Like I said above maybe in your business you can get away with NOT upgrading but in MINE, I have no choice.

Peace!

[LouTheBlueGuru]

I don't mean to mix up the pot, but look at what Red Hat did! I wonder why they would take this route? Probably out of a real philanthropist spirit? Open source, uh huh, uh huh! I think they know money means business and stability, open source or not.

[jetblackz]

jpmoney, totally. The places I've worked at were always running 1-2 years old software. At one place, I was given the crappiest machine with less than half the memory and 1/5th the power of others. I had no complaints, since I was paid hourly. The longer the wait for the computer to finish a task, etc., the more money I got for less work. One came to me after some observation, "You are quick."

Especially financial institutes, they still run W2K, Photoshop 5.x, etc. One thing is consistent: the larger the size of a company, the longer the wait for software/hardware upgrades.

64-bit, my friend is a silver MDK member. He just got and installed 10.0. However, he was asked for 20-60 U.S. for upgrading any software. Though he can install binary tar-balls from other sites. Can you confirm this?

[64Bit]

jpmoney, totally. The places I've worked at were always running 1-2 years old software. At one place, I was given the crappiest machine with less than half the memory and 1/5th the power of others. I had no complaints, since I was paid hourly. The longer the wait for the computer to finish a task, etc., the more money I got for less work. One came to me after some observation, "You are quick."

Especially financial institutes, they still run W2K, Photoshop 5.x, etc. One thing is consistent: the larger the size of a company, the longer the wait for software/hardware upgrades.

64-bit, my friend is a silver MDK member. He just got and installed 10.0. However, he was asked for 20-60 U.S. for upgrading any software. Though he can install binary tar-balls from other sites. Can you confirm this?

I am typing on it as we speak and I wasnt asked for anything, Downloaded it from free like everyone else can using Bittorrent.

So I am not sure what your friend is doing?

Anyways your quote was perfect to what I was saying about upgrading and such. But I disagree with you about bigger companys. I know some companys that dont upgrade there software , they upgrade their whole systems every other year.

Thats an Insane about of money!