[CLUE-Tech] Suse 7.3 Again

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 01-25 15:37, Mike Staver wrote:
> > Is there a reason why you can't afford to buy the distro?
> > I don't want to start a flame war, but if people don't buck up
> > for the boxed sets companies like SuSE will go out of business.
> > 
> > Yes, the code is Free, but making packages, creating ISOs,
> > documentation and all the other goodies COST MONEY.
> > 
> > Just my thoughts...
> 
> I agree, people need to buy the box sets for these companies to stay in
> business... that's why a year ago, my company bought SuSe Professional
> 7.1.  We wanted to set up a snort, mrtg, and ntop box for various
> networking tasks. I don't know if any of you have tried running ntop on
> a Red Hat (insert any version number here) or SuSe 7.1 system, but for
> the life of me, I can't get it to work under Red Hat, and it runs for a
> few minutes under SuSe 7.1 - then promptly dies after a few requests on
> port 3000 to see the stats.  So, before I rush out and buy another
> distro that I can't use, I want to try it.  My company has been great
> about buying every version of Red Hat that we use here, I just always
> try them out first.  

Well, if you have the bandwidth, point your browser here:

http://www.linuxiso.org/suse.html

The "real" ISO is not there, but they have an eval ISO that runs from CD
only. If you wanted to see what 7.3 is like, this is an option...

On the supporting open source development, I've been feeling guilty since I
haven't bought a boxed edition of anything for some time...I've been
thinking of getting the subscriptions to OpenBSD (if I get around to finally
using it) and to FreeBSD to round out the pointy edges on my karma.  :) I'd
like to support a Linux distro, too, but we'll see.

When you support a distro or distros, however, how does the money get used?
I know makers of distros such as Redhat and SuSE have to pay folks to patch
and test and select packages to put together, as well as maintain their own
distro-specific admin bits...but if I wanted to say, give micropayments that
would be distributed among several different, unrelated projects (non-FSF)
is there a way to do that? I mean, I can buy every release of RedHat but
would the KDE project benefit from that? Or XMMS?  The organizations and
companies that put together kernel + tools need to benefit, but so do the
original toolmakers themselves. I know I can donate to FSF and that will
cover quite a bit of tools, but is there someplace better, where I can
select certain projects and give money to? Just curious.

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at attbi.com Yahoo:seanleblancathome 
ICQ:138565743 MSN:seanleblancathome AIM:sleblancathome 
By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other designers 
in the thin disguise of good, clean fun. 
-P.J. Plauger, "Computer Language", 1988, April Fool's column.