As a subsidiary of the Attachmate Group, yes. This is not disputed.

Sun Microsystems, MySQL AB and BEA Systems still exist as subsidiaries of Oracle, too.

Nortel and Norstar exist as subsidiaries of Avaya.

Softimage still exists as a subsidiary of Autodesk.

Ulead still exists as a subsidiary of Corel.

Even Sillicon Graphics continues to exist as a subsidiary of Rackmount Systems.

It’s like raising your dog as a zombie and gleefully telling everyone your dog “still exists”.

Novell still sells OS.

Novell still has “partners” selling product.

So, Novell exists.

It doesn’t mean it isn’t wholy owned and controlled by Avaya. Oracle still updates MySQL.com, it doesn’t mean that MySQL AB is still alive. Same goes for Novell.

What do you really think happens to a company after it’s bought? I suppose Norstar is alive and well as an independent compsany as well? Abaya still sells Norstar gear after all, long after it was acquired by Nortel, who was acquired by Avaya.

And all those acquisitions Microsoft made, they’re all healthy, independent companies, too right?

Did you know that Novell isn’t publicly traded anymore? Why do you think that is? Attachmade (I remember now, AM bought Novell, Rackmount Systems bought SGI) still uses the Novell and SuSE brands, but they’re at best shell companies.

What about UQAM, UdM, UdQ, Concordia, McGill or the dozen or so Universities here? I never said nobody uses it, I just said that “hotbed for adoption” is a tad of an exaggeration.

Good for UdS though.

“University of Sherbrooke has 4 labs with GNU/Linux”

Relative to how many Windows and Macintosh labs? Vanier and Dawson Colleges have a Linux lavb or three between both of them, but have about 20 Windows labs, and 3-4 Macintosh labs. Same goes for Cegep du View Montreal, Bois-de-Boulogne, Ahuntsic, Marianopolis, Rimouski, and I suspect the other two dozen.

“The government of Quebec was sued for buying M$-only and lost…”

The government of Quebec over the past decade of federalist, Liberal rule is the most corrupt government since Duplessis’ Union Nationale. It’s in bed with both Power Corp, QuebecOr and Vitto Rizzuto’s mafia. Cost estimates are purposely exaggerated on public works so that everyone gets their cut. When it comes to whom the Liberal govt was buying from or what, we have much more important considerations.

You may not immediately see the relevance of this, but half the point is that this is why government contrast cost so much public funds, and the other half ids that we, right now, don’t give a rat’s ass who the product is coming from, there are far greater concerns.

“Savoir-faire Linux became the first company in eastern Canada to join the Linux Foundation. It has 60 consultants in PQ.”

No but seriously Pogs, that’s one company out several hundreds. Either your standards are way too low, or we have very, very different definitions of what constitutes a “hotbed”.

Are you defining any environment where the rate of adoption is > 0 as a “hotbed”? Adoption here is about the same as it is anywhere else, it’s reasonablt popular in corporate deployment, though no more than anywhere else, and you’ll see a few labs in education, though no more so than anywhere else.

They have some bot publishing blog entries, just a couple of weeks ago.

(sarcasm)

• Last year, University of Sherbrooke had the most powerful super-computer in Canada. It ran GNU/Linux of course,
• University of Sherbrooke has 4 labs with GNU/Linux.
• The government of Quebec was sued for buying M$-only and lost…
• Savoir-faire Linux became the first company in eastern Canada to join the Linux Foundation. It has 60 consultants in PQ.
• Revolution Linux helps schools migrate to GNU/Linux.

How’s it FUD, precisely? Are you really that naive, Pogs? Nortel, Silicon Graphics, and others also still have public websites but have, as actual companies, been out of business since being acquired (by Avaya and I think I might be mixing up whether Attachmate bought SGI or Novell). Hell, even MySQL AB’s website is still up, but we all know the company ceased to exist once Oracle took over.

The brand and some of the products are kept alive by the new owner, but the company is long dead.

Where was the previous FUD, this is supposed to be more of?

Ha! La Bell Province is a hotbed of GNU/Linux adoption. The MILLE project was funded by La Belle Province years ago and is still going strong.

What does that have to do with the unfortunate state of the Manitoban public education system? If the funding situation in Manitoban classrooms really is in the dire straights you describe it as, this should be cause for concern, rather than an excuse to go on some irrelevant Linux tangent.

It’s amazing, if I understand it right, you use the lack of proper funding in schools as an excuse to promote Linux, which is disappointing. It’s cause for serious concern, shouldn’t you be mobilizing to petition your MPs to prioritize education? Or is it only La Belle Province that is willing to fight for better, better funded education? Use the funding to buy bigger and better or better manageable Linux systems for all anyone cares, but are you really treating it as an opportunity to sneak in Linux? Or are you simply exaggerating?

I get that you’re up in the middle of nowhere, but here, neither Rimouski, Baie d’Ufre, Gaspesie, Sherbrooke or even Abitibi-Temiscamingue is worse of than Montreal or La Capitale Nationale, we fought for that, of course.

The worst part is that you get on the defensive so quickly, at no point did I berate Linux, I only argued that every operating environment has mechanisms to handle updating large deployments with trivial ease. At no point did I even mention Linux in relation to funding. It was purely a response (one of concern, might I add), to your description of the state of your hardware, being reliant and repurposed machines and hand me down.

the public system here, get government subsidized contracts from vendors, uniform hardware configurations, with the major exception being the Macs in the design programs, Mac Pros aren’t cheap, but they get phased in semester by semester. The point being that the better funding allows for better arrangements in terms of hardware.

Truth be told though, and since you mentioned it, you hardly see Linux in schools here. In the Cegeps and universities, you’ll have a lab or two for the CS students, with Linux machines alongside Unix systems, the design, artistic and music programs are exclusively Mac – you’ll see more Macs than Linux and Unix combined, and you’ll see several times more Windows machines than all three combined. *though I can only speak for the Metropolitan and the Capital)

Secondary school is almost exclusively Windows, with some Macs here and there. It’s not a hotbed, it’s really just like anywhere else in this regard.

More FUD! Novell was bought but did not go out of business. Check them out.

TJH wrote, “I do feel for you though, apparently the Manitoban school system isn’t as well-funded as in La Belle Province, it’s a shame.”

Ha! La Bell Province is a hotbed of GNU/Linux adoption. The MILLE project was funded by La Belle Province years ago and is still going strong. MILLE evolved into LTSP-Cluster and there’s a business that supports it globally. LTSP-Cluster is now a part of Ubuntu GNU/Linux and is a scalable implementation (load-balancing multiple servers with secure protocols) of LTSP. There’s a reason it exists. GNU/Linux in schools and LTSP work. Individual schools like LTSP. School divisions with multiple schools love LTSP-Cluster.

I’d love to ask Novell, but they went out of business, and i’m pretty certain Attachmate was more interested in the non-Oracle share of the SVR4 copyrights. That aside…

If we’re talking management of systems as in they manage them for you, then this whole discussion is utterly pointless. You have the vendor managing the systems for you, who cares what method they employ, and your whole argument for “wated” manpower tolling through hotfixes one at a time is made equally pointless since such support packages exist for pretty much any OS, which means ultimately, enterprises with these support contracts are not affected in the least, end of discussion.

Further, you’re flip flopping all over the place now, mooting your tangent about Debian. We’re talking RHEL support contracts here, which means you’re paying a boatloat ($2499 per socket per year, last I checked, vs. Buying your RHEL/CentOS/OUL support from Oracle for a comparatively reasonable $2499 per system per year, or Microsoft’s licences, for that matter)*

* = keep in mind that VLK licences are cheap, and only one WinServer license is required, buying support from Red Hat is not cheap.

If we’re talking about any other sort of managed systems, my general experience in the field is that they’re not testing their updates and fixzes against your sepecific hardware configuration and testing to work in your specific environment for your specific usecase (in many cases, Avaya and their RHEL/CentOS based products come to mind, you so much as blink at it the wrong way, and you void your support contract). Those that do, those plans cost several arms and several legs. Trust me, it costs a lot less to hire someone, than it does to pay Ayaya’s experts $600/hour.

” I would just type all “some command” and it was done, every PC and server updating seemlessly. A large organization can set up its own repository of stuff well tested and update from their.”

You’re not paying attention, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, this is precisely how Linux systems, in my experience, tend to be managed in enterprise environments. All that’s being argued is that technologies exist in the Windows ecosystem to achieve the same result with trivial ease. You totally underestimate the power and flexibility of GPO.

“Debian GNU/Linux runs a fair percentage of web servers and that’s the way I would handle updates with Debian GNU/Linux.”

And it’s a commonly used approach to managing Linux systems, +1 to you for taking the sane approach. I don’t find it as robust as integrating into an already existing domain controller, or using beadm on ZFS datasets, but it’s no more or less trivial to do. You work with the tools at your disposal, and make the best of it.

“TJ Hooker wrote of WSUS, “the whole process happens unattended.””

Thank you for catching the reference ^_^

“Nope, with just 100 PCs, I was having about 3% fail to update and required manual intervention to avoid hours more operation without protection from the latest “zero-day” attacks.”

Do keep in mind that while you’re talking about WSUS (which I have only limited experience with, and am not qualified to comment on) I’m talking about AD, GPO, and RIS/WDS. We’re getting nowhere with this pointlessness, I propose agrreing to disagree and moving on to other points.

” My system was set up by a professional with M$’s certification but it did not happen unattended.”

Come now, we both know all it takes to get an MSE Cert is being able to tie your own shoelaces (and in fairness, RH and Novell certs are no much better – the Sun, IBM and HP certs however, are what nightmares are made of). But again, you’re talking WSUS, I’m talking AD, GPO and RIS/WDS, this is going nowhere. I get it, in your experience WSUS sucks, I’m neither agreeing or disagreeing, but I accept your position on it.

“The slipstreamed image is useless when a new batch of PCs come in with different motherboard, drivers, etc.”

Well, like I said, I come from a background in the enterprise. Deployments are usually (and I mean almost always) homogenous hardware configurations, with variances from department to department.

You could either maintain separate images for different hardware deployments, or you’d maintain the same base image (slipstreamed with hardware agnostic updates and hotfixes) using the cache of generic drivers included in the base install, and they’ll receive the drivers appropriate to their configuration as updates from the domain, it’s a stupidly powerful and flexible solution, and it’s trivial to setup and maintain.

The catch is that it’s a moot argument, disparate hardware configurations introduce the same problem to deal with on large Linux deployments, this is something that needs to be addressed in any operating environment.

” You have to install on some random PC that “purchasing” or in the case of schools, some donor, inflicts on you. ”
fortunately, I work in a much more organized and dare I say, predictable environment. I need new hardware, I requisition it, then I get it according to spec. Suppliers are pretty steady, configurations are steady. I can safely assume a homogenous hardware configuration within any given department. There’s a reason we do this, and we do this regardless of operating environment for the same reasons. I think we can agree that in any environment, the less entropy the better, the more variance there is in configuration, the more complexity is added to the task of administration and maintenence.

I do feel for you though, apparently the Manitoban school system isn’t as well-funded as in La Belle Province, it’s a shame.

“What’s on the PC could be junk, wrong OS, or a year out of date.”

My closest experience with that is having 4-5 configurations in a dozen departments (not all of of then under my watch, but we help each other out), it was really just a case of slipstreaming updates and hotfixes into a base image, letting the driver cache handle the hardware, and sending out configuration specific stuff out as updates, by department, it’s fairly trivial, especially in large corporate environments where tasks are tiered off (which becomes necessary when your overall deployment numbers in the thousands, spanned across a few dozen departments).

Stop. Right. There.
Interix is vanilla OpenBSD ported to the NT kernel. You don’t get much more POSIX than that. What makes it a better solution than Cygwin is that it isn’t tacked on, and it’s native and integrated. It uses the NT architecture’s ability to tap into multiple parallel subsystems.

What you have to keep in mind is that while Cygwin is geared toward running Linux applications, Interix is geared at providing not only a POSIX environment, but one that integrates into the NT environment (There’a difference between a Linux environment and a Linux one, but I don’t expect you to understand that).

It’s not for running POSIX applications (we use POSIX systems for that), and if you were paying attention, cygwin was mentioned as a means to run ssh and cron. Your argument is as pointless as it is irrelevant.

“Yes this way apt functions only have to run once. Since there is only 1 OS copy and its on central file server you don’t have any machines drifting behind.”

What is it about managing configuration on a central machine and pushing out updates or whatnot to evry workstation needing them, simultaneously (protip: this means at the same time) that is too complicated to understand. You waste a paragraph pretty much explaining the same process in a much more convoluted setup. I manage Linux systems too, I know how it works.

I’m not arguing that one is “better” than the other. Only explaining that mechanisms which achieve the desired end exist across operating environments, and that with the right tools, the right knowledge and the right skill set, they’re equally trivial to manage. If it seems complicated or impossible to you, I don’t mean to condescend, but perhaps your skillset is lacking. Versatility is key.

Though since you mention rsync, I’ll take VSS or incremental ZFS send/recv streams over it any way. It’s not that Rsync is bad at what it does (it isn’t), it’s just not as robust as the other two. It’s tough to beat simply beadm’ing in a ZFS dataset exposed via the Jumstart/AI server.

“Tiberius James Hooker when with WDS do you find out a image is missing a key driver for a machine.”

Do you even understand what slipstreaming is? Go, google it, or better yet, look it up on Technet. But I’ll give you a spoiler: You slipstream the bloody driver into the image, hell you wouldn’t even have the drivers in the slipstreamed image on large scale deployments with multiple departments (single departments tend to have homogenous workstations and this is not a problem). Hell, you wouldn’t even bother slipstreaming the drivers in, you’d use the generic driver cache (you know, the ones with basic functionality that are bundled in) and push the specific drivers to the requisite groups the same way you would push updates.

Again, this is not rocket surgery. Anyone who’s spent time managing a corporate environment knows how to do this.