Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 19:44:00 -0800 From: "IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R" <stuart@bh90210.net> Message-id: <!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAAA6nohIbvp0RGXqACAx8VP1sKAAAAQAAAAvecPsQh0/025ESroJf7owgEAAAAA@bh90210.net> Subject: RE: [suse-sparc] Will there be a SuSE 8.0 for Sparc?
Mr. Kukuk:
Your theorem is completely misplaced. I have joined many RedHat
lists and gotten responses from RedHat employees and never paid a dime,
though they do appreciate my taking the time to inform them of the
issues with their documentation or code they wrote (something no SuSE
employee, that I have seen, has ever done here thus far).
Perhaps you ought to read some of the RedHat lists and see how
they deal with the people helping them beta test their software (which
is what you are doing buy giving it away, we are not dumb).
After all, will SuSE continue to make the Sun version of its
Linux available for free on its website like this even after it has
started to sell the product? Or are you going "I386isize" it, and never
put the ISOs on your website again. If it does not choose to keep giving
SuSE Linux for SPARC away after it starts to sell it, will we all be
thanked for debugging your code for you?
I am American, and while others in other parts of the world may
not view the GPL or its intended meaning the way we do here in the US,
many people [in the US, as juxtaposed against US legislative intent] see
the lack of SuSE's willingness to distribute (or allow the distribution,
buy clearing placing YAST under the GPL) the I386 version of its Linux
(ISOs) via the web or ftp, as a very bad faith violation of the GPL if
not legally, certainly spiritually and morally.
I must admit, I am not a lawyer, but I do believe that the lack
of YAST's GPLness, is in fact a violation of the GPL. It is (as I
understand it) a derivative work. In other words, YAST has no
functionality if you remove Linux. Therefore, as I understand it YAST is
a derivative work, and ought be properly licensed according to the
stipulations of the GPL as it applies to Linux.
I have posted a bug (not this bug, a different one), and not one
SuSE employee even acknowledged that they read it (not even personally
offlist). If you want people to believe that you care about a product
and making it work, then at minimum you must at least acknowledge you
are doing more than just reading the list and staying silent, and it
best to do this in the least arogant manner possible, not in the tone in
which your post (included herein below for reference purposes) came off
to me.
Not to mention some several weeks ago I had a client whom
installed SuSE SPARC and was WILLING TO PAY for support, but was unable
to do so. So it is just not a matter of "here its free, thank us and
good luck". It is a matter of what the mix requires. I am a consultant,
if I am able to get a distro (for SPARC, Intel or whatever hardware I
own) for free and have some assistance making it work, then I can assure
you (as I have done), I will use it at my consulting engagements and
make sure my clients pay for it.
There is a fifth bug, a dma error that occurs on the Ethernet
(happy meal) board when a large amount of network traffic flows on the
board. I personally tested and experienced this, and no such problem
exists when the same level of data is pumped using Solaris, thus, it is
not a hardware problem.
Stuart
Beverly Hills, CA
Friday, March 08, 2002 4:30 PM
-----Original Message-----
From: Thorsten Kukuk [mailto:kukuk@suse.de]
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 1:30 PM
To: suse-sparc@suse.com
Subject: Re: [suse-sparc] Will there be a SuSE 8.0 for Sparc?
On Fri, Mar 08, Paolo Marcheschi wrote:
> This is a very interesting question, It seems there is a huge lack of
> support here!! Where are the suse experts. I think There are a lot of
> bugs in the distribution, Is there a SUSE staff person to speak with,
in
> this list ?
What did you expect? That you get free support for a free product?
There are SuSE employes on this list and if they have time they
will answer questions. But even this form of support costs something,
and if it is only our free time.
Why do you think does Red Hat and Mandrake stop their SPARC support?
You cannot refinance it over selling boxes. Remember how expensive a
UltraSPARC is and which different hardware you need to support a wide
range of SPARC hardware. No Linux Distributor has so much money only
to give something back to the Linux comunity for free.
The bad news: For 8.0, as in the past, I will skip one version.
The good news: We will continue with 8.1, if I'm able to get more and
faster UltraSPARCs (Hey, where are the people from Sun on this list?
Since Sun mentioned SuSE Linux for SPARC in their Linux announcement,
maybe they can start loaning me newer and faster hardware?)
My few current ones are far to slow to compile current glibc/gcc and
qt.
But I don't think that 32bit SPARCs will be supported any longer:
it is impossible to use our current installer with kernel 2.2
and kernel 2.4 is still far away from running stable. It is possible
to configure a minimal kernel which runs on most of the 32bit SPARCs,
but this kernel misses to much important features. And I don't see
a kernel developer looking at this :-(
Now to the known, four bugs:
- Some people have problems with missing SUN labels. As already
written, at least twice, on this list: Use the expert partitioner,
select "extra options", clear the boot block and reread the partition
table. This always works fine for me.
- ADSL support: I have some reports that it works fine and some that
it does not work. Since I don't have the posibility to test it, I
cannot look at it.
- If you load the UK keyboard mapping into the X11 server, the machine
crashes. I don't know what happens here, and the X11 developers are
busy with other things and don't have the time to look at it at the
moment.
- On 32bit SPARCs the installer does not identify CD2-CD5 correct,
a problem due the fact that I had to use the 32bit kernel.
I think for the third SuSE Linux/SPARC release this is not so bad ;-)
Thorsten
-- Thorsten Kukuk http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/ kukuk@suse.de SuSE Linux AG Deutschherrenstr. 15-19 D-90429 Nuernberg -------------------------------------------------------------------- Key fingerprint = A368 676B 5E1B 3E46 CFCE 2D97 F8FD 4E23 56C6 FB4B-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: suse-sparc-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands, e-mail: suse-sparc-help@suse.com
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