Harry bitched at me for making that Red Hat joke the other day, so just to be an ass I went ahead and downloaded the Fedora Core 3 ISOs. Finally got around to installing it on a machine today:

Dual P3 900-something, 512MB RAM, SCSI, Ensoniq something or other, NVidia something, Intel EEPro.

It's a Penguin Computing workstation, so all the parts are pretty much guaranteed to work, or they're bad.

Anyway, it booted, saw stuff, installed.

So far it's not awful. I just went with the Workstation install, just to screw with it, since it's just a toy to me. The up2date tool is nice. The fact that it's in the menubar at launch is good stuff. I just pulled a 130MB of updates just now and it's installing.

Netfilter defaults to on, as does SELinux, so there's actual Workstation Security stuff going on, which is pretty awesome.

GNOME 2.8 is fast. The menu layout still sucks. After using OS X for the past two years, I'm not used to wading through menus to get at things anymore, especially not simply configuration/preferences. There should be some sort of central location for that stuff. (Is there? gconf doesn't count.)

The keychain icon in the toolbar when you auth to root is good stuff as well.

Overall, thus far, I would say it's a pretty good product.

That said, some people have run into problems with the install or various other things. Perhaps I'll hit those, but probably not before I install something else on the machine. :)

It should also be noted that the Windows Browser thing is still broken. I've never seen a distro where it actually does work, though, so you can't really hold it against RH (I guess).

I had initially intended on getting some RH server action and doing a real review, and how it stood up against other server OSes (Sol10, OpenBSD, etc), but obviously I can't get at the RH Enterprise bits, and reviewing FC3:Server against those just doesn't really seem fair.

I would reccommend it to someone who just wants a workstation, anyway.

[Full-disclosure] Local user to root escalation in apache 1.3.34 (Debian only)

Well, it looks like Debian 4.0 (Etch) has been released. And they have a new project leader. And they're talking about trying to get releases out every two years.

* bda peaks out the window, looking for amphibian precipitation or airborne porcine.

The whole dunc-tank thing was, in a lot of ways, the final straw for me. Not the fact that some Debian leads and devs got paid for their work. Who cares, as long as they were doing the work? No, the fact that a bunch of essentially commie programmers jumped ship from the leading commie Linux distro to work on Ubuntu, which is pretty damn far from the Debian project's ideals (regardless of the noise Ubuntu people make).

But when it all comes down to it, I don't care about this crap anymore. I don't care that an OpenBSD dev goofed up and commited GPL'd code to the public CVS repo, I don't care that there was a huge flame-out on linux-wireless@, I don't care about ridiculous community in-fighting.

At the end of the day I want two things:

• Something that works
• Something with a stable release cycle

Maybe Debian can get there again, though as Ian Murdock recently said during one of his interviews about being hired at Sun, Debian is all about the process these days. And their process is broken.

While I was at the colo tonight doing other stuff, I installed Debian 4.0 on one of our SuperMicros (older rev SATA cards which aren't supported by Solaris). The install was relatively painless. I got my metadisks and volumes set up with ease, it didn't ask any stupid questions, and there wasn't any post-install setup.

I chose the "standard" install, as I didn't want www, mx, or anything else going on. I just wanted the standard base Debian install I've been used to for the last ten years. The system gets to a login prompt, I unplug the display, and go back to my other tasks.

When I finally get home, I log into the... wait. What?

I... What?

So I think to myself: Maybe I am crazy. Maybe there were some post-install setup questions and I just wasn't paying attention. After a quick install into a Parallels virtual machine, it's quite apparent that, at least in this particular context, I am not insane.

No OpenSSH by default in Debian 4.0.

But hey, nfs-common, portmap, and inetd are all running! So ... that's something.

It's like Debian is saying "We need to be more like Ubuntu. How can we do that? Hey, they don't ship with sshd by default, let's do that!"

This is a load of bollocks. It's an incredibly basic policy change (one I've relied on for as long as I've used Debian -- ten fucking years!) and it wasn't mentioned in any of the fucking release notes or announcements.

This is total bullshit.

Let it be known that I am not a fan of reiserfs. I have had it screw me over too many times at all hours, force me to sit around while it's had to fsck repeatedly to get anywhere, yadda yadda...

So when people start talking about why reiser4 isn't in the Linux kernel yet I just have to grunt and go back to working on getting all our stuff on Solaris.

And, the bastion of hilarious insanity that it is, the first comment on osnews?

Reminds me of those birds from Mostly Harmless. The ones who were like flying goldfish: Constantly surprised by the most inane things.

Based on Albert Lee's howto:

[20071015-08:38:52]:[root@clamour]:[~]# uname -a

SunOS clamour 5.10 Generic_120012-14 i86pc i386 i86pc

[20071015-08:38:53]:[root@clamour]:[~]# zoneadm list -cv

  ID NAME             STATUS     PATH                           BRAND    IP    

   0 global           running    /                              native   shared

   3 control          running    /export/zones/control          native   shared

   4 lunix            running    /export/zones/lunix            lx       shared

[20071015-08:38:56]:[root@clamour]:[~]# zlogin lunix

[Connected to zone 'lunix' pts/5]

Last login: Mon Oct 15 12:37:28 2007 from zone:global on pts/4

Linux lunix 2.4.21 BrandZ fake linux i686

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;

the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the

individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent

permitted by applicable law.

lunix:~# 

After I stop laughing hysterically, visions of collapsing Linux boxes into Solaris zones dancing through my twitching little mind, I'll have to see how twitchy the install itself is. Already it appears that some stuff is unhappy, though most of it seems to revolve around things that don't matter (ICMP oddities, console oddities wrt determing how smart it is for restarting services -sigh- and a few other easily surmountable or ignorable things).

Overall: Hello, awesome.

(Update: It appears that 6591535 makes this a non-starter. I am now, again, a very sad bda with a bunch of crappy hardware and nowhere to move their services to.)