[Kde-i18n-fa] farsi in RedHat 9

[Hossein S. Zadeh]

On Sat, 3 May 2003, Aryan Ameri wrote:

> I don't care weather they are big or not. Infact they are only number 
> one in US, in Europe SuSE is No 1, in Latin America Connectiva is No 1, 


Hi there,
This is not intended to start a flame war; I actually agree with some of 
the things you've said. OK, that said, here we go:


Well, I do care if some distro is big in the US or not (even though I do
not live in the US). This is because most of my clients want applications
such as Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc. The geek-factor alone doesn't cut it
unfortunately. I have been trying to convert most of my clients to
PostgreSQL, but sometimes we just don't have a GPL replacement. For
example, I have a client with more than 15,000 customers. They use a
distributed database system. The database gets more than 200 heavy hits
per second (on each server). Just having the systems working under such a
heavy load, sync-ing the data between different servers in different
geographical locations, making "point-at-time" backup and recovery, etc.  
is not something that any software besides Oracle and/or DB2 can do (at
this point in time). 

I personally am following PostgreSQL development closely, and will deploy
it as soon as it has these features, but I know that it is still a few
years off :-(


> is the biggest one is just myth. From the financial point of view they 
> are strong, (Because for example Gentoo and Debian do not care about 
> finance). But many admins and developers prefer non RedHat distros.


I agree.

> 
> Yes, there are many things wrong with RedHat, I will list a few of them 
> here:
> 
> 1) RedHat patents it's software. They have used this method before 
> (Regarding Ingo Molnar's work on kernel). Patents are heavily disliked 
> in the GNU/Linux world.

There has been lots of discussions on this very issue lately. Some GPL 
developers started to talk about patenting their software, as defending 
patents is legally much easier than defending GPL in a court of law 
(especially under current climate in the US legal system).

That said, I agree with you.

> 
> 2) Their distro by default runs too many services in the boot sequence. 
> Like M$ they assume the the user is dumb, and therefore they start all 
> the services by default, so that they make it *user friendly*. Sorry 
> but I am not dumb. Services make the boot sequence take longer, and 
> they are also a security risk. Why does RedHat for example always start 
> CUPS even though I have no printer? Not mentioning that CUPS is a great 
> security treat.

I agreed with you up to a couple of versions before. I beleive they now 
only start the services you chose during installation, and they also 
instal and activate a decent set of IPTables rules (if you choose "high" 
security during installation).


> 
> 3) They enable all kernel modules. Again, following the *user is dumb* 
> policy they enable all the kernel modules by default. That means 
> RedHat's kernel support things that are never going to be used in the 
> system. This makes the kernel bigger and slower.


I agree. The first thing I do after installing RH, is compile a fresh new 
kernel (from the official source tar ball).

But please do note that this does not affect the size and/or speed of the
running kernel (just read the kernel docos on pros and cons of use of
kernel modules). The only user-noticable effect is during boot up (when
the system runs "depmod -a"). But as I said, I do compile my own kernels 
right after installation (this is mainly for optimization purposes ("-O9 
-mcpu=athlon ...") and making some features compiled-in rather then 
modules (SCSI, etc.)).

> 
> 4) They are slow with security upgrades. When applications announce 
> security patches, it usually takes RedHat two months to incorporate 
> these patches back into their distro. For Debian, it takes about 48 
> hours. Sorry, but many can't run a system with known vulnerabilities.

I cannot comment on that. I am under the impression that most Linux 
distros (except TurboLinux) have been very good with security updates. Do 
you have any example of otherwise?


> 
> 5) RPM : They invented this bloat, and they seem never like getting rid 
> of it. If you use a RedHat box for a long time, you will know what a 
> pain it will be to install new applications. Each application depends 
> on something else, with the dependency it self depends on something 
> else. And you have to search in all this RPM repositories scattered 
> over the net, just to find these dependencies. The solution, Debian 
> found the solution years ago with apt, Connectiva ported apt to their 
> RPM based distro and (partly) solved the problem. Gentoo solved the 
> problem from another route (From FreeBSD's method). While RedHat seems 
> to like screwing it's users.


I feel a sense of passion about apt, and a sense of haterade of rpm; so I 
am not going to comment on this. I just would like to mention that both 
rpm and apt have been new tools (at their time) to achieve the same goal. 
apt is more advanced than rpm, but they still have a long way to go to get 
to the same level of maturity of estblished Unix tools.

> 
> 6) Recognition, Their software is just a distro right? They use software 
> made by other people, they use these software, and they make money with 
> other people's software. Nothing is wrong until here, but they at least 
> don't give the original writers recognition and credit. They changed 
> the famous Linux Kernel logo (tux), they changed KDE logo, they removed 
> about KDE menu from all KDE applications and so on. As Hans Reiser 
> (God) puts it, they just want show off their own brand name. Never care 
> other people.


I cannot agree more. This has really pissed me off. This alone has put me 
in the verge of converting to another distro... 

If I want to use KDE, I want to use KDE, and I don't need someone else
decide what menus I am going to get. No, but thanks no!


> 
> 7) Problems with KDE. It was no secret that RedHat doesn't like KDE, but 
> from RedHat 8, they really pissed off, and made it ... Ooops, a bloat. 


See my answer to 6. But, I am curious about how you have used the term 
"bloat". 

Probably not the right place to say this, but as far as I am concerned KDE
is already bloated (well, just compare it to other GUIs such as
AfterStep). That said, this is a kind of "bloat" I am happy to live with.


> 9) Their system is not stable. RedHat 9 comes with a 2.4.21 kernel, 
> while 2.4.21 hasn't been released yet. Which simply means that they are 
> using a beta kernel. Not to mention all the features they added from 
> unstable 2.5 to 2.4. Everybody still remembers how they screwed things 


Agree, but remember that 2.5 is not as "unstable" as the name implies. I 
was using 2.3 for over 18 months before 2.4 was released, and I have no 
problem with it. The same can be said for 2.5 (not 18 months, but long 
enough).



> in 7.0 with using a beta glibc. Unfortunately many people still say 
> that 6.2 was their last good release, to date.

I reckon 7.3 has been their best offering so far. I have had it on many 
servers (some with more that 3000 active users) with no problem. 

Of course I don't compile any software I come across on the servers. Not 
all software are good for the health of a server, you know ;-)


> GNU/Linux is not Unix, every single application which runs on RedHat 
> also runs on all other GNU/Linuxes (and vice versa). And talking about 

I don't agree with this point (unfortunately). Applications rely on system 
libraries, and as each distro comes with its own set of libraries, 
applications are not (unfortunately) movable from one distro to another. 
Have you tried to run a, say, Suse application of a, say, Mandrake system? 

Of couse it you have the source, it is only a matter of recompiling the 
application. But this is not always feasible. Have you ever wondered why, 
on KDE ftp site, there are releases for Debian, and Suse, and RedHat, 
etc.?

Alternatively you can get software which is statically linked. But this 
defeats the purposes of having libraries (not to mention the software 
will be much bigger to run and slower to load). 

> the number of available binaries, nothing perhaps beats 8000 binaries 
> which come with Debian Woody.

I think Suse is the clear winner here, but this is not a pissing contest, 
is it?  ;-)



cheers,
Hossein