Category: Linux

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Well, that was faster than I expected. Two months ago, Linux distributors Mandrake and Conectiva merged. Last month they announced the combined product line (basically Mandrake Linux with Conectiva’s own stuff merged in.)

Now they’re changing their name to Mandriva. I know the portmanteau is a logical choice from a purely linguistic perspective, but at least to my English-speaking ears it sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Beware the Mandriva or Mandriva, the Terror from Beyond Source. Or maybe a fictional Central American country, the Republic of Mandriva.

Eh, I’ll probably get used to it. I wasn’t too enamored of Linspire, either. (Come to think of it, I still think that one’s a bit clunky.)

At least this should put to rest their long-running trademark dispute with the owner of Mandrake the Magician. Even if they started out with a penguin in a wizard hat, I still don’t think people are going to get a Linux distribution mixed up with a crimefighting comic book magician.

It looks like SuSE’s the only big-gun Linux company who hasn’t changed their name (if you count the Red Hat/Fedora spinoff), and now that they’re part of Novell, I suspect it’s only a matter of time. It’s probably the lack of corporation that’s kept the Slackware and Debian names intact.

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This is a good one. Apprently in setting up their own anti-Groklaw site, SCO has grabbed PDFs of legal documents from Groklaw and Tuxrocks.com.

In a campaign focused on intellectual property rights, where SCO is the accuser…

Groklaw’s PJ has a good take on it: “I’m sure [Tuxrocks’] Frank would want to join me in thanking SCO for this wonderful endorsement of our websites.”

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If you want to build a Linux or FreeBSD system around a RAID array, don’t use the Promise SuperTrak SX6000 controller. At least not for now.

The card used to work under Linux using the standard I2O drivers (i2o_block, etc.), but sometime last year Promise changed the firmware so that it no longer uses I2O. Now you’re stuck with Promise’s own driver, so if you want to use an old enough distribution* (say, Red Hat 7.3) that you can find a driver disk, or make your own driver disk, go ahead…but don’t expect to be able to upgrade it unless you can create a driver disk for the newer distro. This assumes the source code for the driver will work with recent 2.4 kernels—it won’t compile with 2.6. There has been talk of merging the pti_st driver into the kernel (fortunately it’s GPLed), but I can’t find anything more recent than August. Someday it might work again, but not today.

Now, FreeBSD is another matter. It has built-in drivers (pst), the installer will detect it automatically, and even let you install your entire system to it—without warning you that FreeBSD can’t boot from the SX6000. You can boot from another drive and interact with it once the system’s running, but you can’t put your entire system on the RAID array. (This information is not in the installer, not in the hardware notes, not in the driver man page. I only found the one 1½-year-old mailing list post by the driver’s author, and a bunch of “I don’t think it works” comments in other lists and forums.)

I hope this post will save someone a lot of frustration.

*Of the distributions for which Promise has provided driver disks, only one—SuSE 9.0—hasn’t already been retired.

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Fedora Core is following the path blazed by the Linux kernel: having started out as primarily an x86-based project (the 32-bit Intel-based processors from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Athlon), it’s branching out. Versions 2 and 3 added support for the AMD-64 chips (basis of the Opteron and Athlon 64), and now, with the first test release of Fedora Core 4, official support for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC.

There was a side project already, and most of the pieces that go into a Linux distribution have reached the point where they’re (mostly) platform-independent—all you need to do is recompile them. It takes fine-tuning, of course, and the actual hardware support takes effort. Yellow Dog Linux started out porting Red Hat to the PowerPC so it would run on Macs, and now builds a solid distribution off of Fedora Core, including a high-end server OS targeted for IBM’s PowerPC servers.

It’ll be interesting to compare upcoming versions of Yellow Dog and Fedora Core now that the latter is working on an actual PPC release.

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Graph (original at Netcraft)Netcraft’s ongoing web server survey has found Fedora Core usage growing 122% over the past 6 months, nearly three times the growth rate of any other Linux distribution they surveyed. (Gentoo was second with 45% growth). In absolute numbers, Red Hat remains #1 with Debian as #2. Red Hat itself is dropping slowly, having lost 1.2%. I would assume that those are switching to a mix of Fedora Core, Debian, SuSE and RHEL clones like CentOS or White Box Linux. There’s a nice graph in the article that shows the trend more clearly.

And that’s just web servers.

Tell me again how everyone’s abandoning Fedora Core in the wake of the Red Hat/Fedora split?