Submitted by “I was fortunate to do a Q&A session today with Scott Crenshaw, Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product. We talked about a range of things related to the early 2007 release of RHEL 5: product features, competition with Oracle and Novell, and other things. We spent the most time, however, talking about Red Hat’s views on and plans for virtualization and how Red Hat gets product to market.”
Looks like it will be great year for Red Hat next year.
With the latest shake-up with orcale rebanding RHEL and going after Red Hat’s Support contracts, they really need to come up with something new to keep them going.
“””With the latest shake-up with orcale rebanding RHEL and going after Red Hat’s Support contracts, they really need to come up with something new to keep them going.”””
From what I am hearing, Oracle’s rebranded RedHat is pretty creaky.
http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6328/1/
Also, RedHat is not in a hurry. Although the stated release interval is 18-24 months, they tend to prefer 18 month release cycles. However, this time, they felt that Xen was not ready, and set the target date to December, placing it at 22 months. The latest I hear is that it will be January.
This is not a company in a huge hurry to release something to “keep them going”.
While I tend to frown upon “It’s ready when it’s ready” being used as an excuse as Debian used to do, as a user, I find RedHat’s unhurried approach quite comforting.
Oracle’s release was hurried and shoddy. Novell’s policies are similarly worrisome.
RedHat’s dedication to community, and to their customers will prove to be a greater asset than some seem to recognize today.
Yes, I am a RedHat admirer.
Edited 2006-11-12 23:03
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
RHEL look and feel is terrible… I mean, come on, it’s not as if they had no money to pay a graphic designer. Aren’t they ashamed to show a crappy desktop like that?
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/scaled/…
They should have a look at Windows XP or OS X to understand that their desktop is darn ugly.
Well, in your screenshot, which is old, the wallpaper is pretty hideous, in a Suse sort of way.
I doubt they will ship with that.
But while I find your suggestion to look to OS X for an example at least to be understandable, your suggestion to look at XP seems totally bizarre. They might as well contract PlaySkool to do the interface.
That said, I hated BlueCurve when it came out. Now I’m accostomed to the businesslike BlueCurve and its descendents, and find XP, OS X, and KDE themes to be hideously gaudy.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Agreed, they don’t pay any attention to how their default UI looks (compared to what Novell, Ubuntu are doing). However with a bit of tweaking and you will have GTK theme and window manager looking fine.
Red Hat’s under-the-hood work is superb though.
yeah i’m not so keen on the clearlooks theme, i prefered the old bluecurve standard.
although i think novell looks very childish, but that’s kde for you i guess, i don’t like ubuntu’s brown gnome either, and sun jds looks awfully like the old purple cde!
the fedora6 theme with rounded icons etc looks worse than the fedora5 look to me, it doesn’t seem to be antialiased or anything…..
The new fedora theme looks much better than RHEL.
Why do people care so much about the default theme? Seems stupid to me. In a server OS I want something that works and has good administration tools. I don’t care what the default widgets and background look like. And I don’t care what “usability experts” have to say about the corners of the screen being easier to get to, or about how buttons should have slightly rounded corners, etc.
Give me a solid server OS with a usable interface and I’m happy.
That said, Suse’s interface does look like it was designed by PlaySkool, but from what I have seen and heard, Yast seems solid enough, underneath.
I still prefer RHEL, though.
Edited 2006-11-13 16:42
Oracle Unbreakable Linux upgrades installs a new c library and kernel. How can they claim 100% binary compat when the two most important things for binary compatibility are different?
FTA:
Red Hat has 30-40 of its best engineers working on the Xen project, helping to drive its innovation. The original Xen team did a great job creating the foundation of the project. Red Hat and others (IBM, Intel, etc.) then came together to help push Xen to the next level. Memory management, scheduler, IO, changes in the OS to support virtualization, etc.: Red Hat has been instrumental in all of these fundamental changes.
And Oracle? How many developers does Oracle have working on the Xen project?
Oracle has approximately zero developers on Xen.
Oracle isn’t about innovation, they are about domination in whatever way they can.
Oracle isn’t about innovation, they are about domination in whatever way they can.
Oracle doesn’t exactly dominate much, but yes. Oracle is all about soundbites. I mean how hard can building a new hardware platform and OS (Network Computer) and building a replacement Linux distro (Red Hat) be?
It’s all about soundbites with Oracle. Nothing of substance, and certainly nothing you can rely on. I’m surprised people haven’t learned that.
Edited 2006-11-13 15:31
I’ve been waiting patiently for CentOS 5, myself. It should have just the right features available in applications that I want for me to use it for a long time
Yup me too, been using CentOS since 3.2 IIRC, using 4.4 now.
Having installed Fedora6 last night, I agree with RedHat not doing a SuSE and releasing Xen too early, essentially xen-kernel borked compilation of anything requiring kernel headers like nvidia, vmware, rt2x00….
Hopefully RHEL5 will be a lot better than FC6.
FC 6 is nice, but they don’t put enough care into their packages for my tastes.
Closed source can’t compete with the open source innovation machine, nor its cost.
I don’t call making free software of closed one “an innovation machine” …
I can’t believe all the whining about the desktop.
The bulk of these system run headless, and run and run. RedHat has a rock solid OS. Servers do not need a pretty GUI.
I was impressed with the replies in the interview. At least they talked to someone at Red Hat who seems to have some idea of what is what, and what’s actually going on, and he created a good impression there. Not a lot of details, but what he did say had substance and wasn’t full of soundbites.
Suse used to be a company like that, with some good technical, no-nonsense people in charge who new the lay of the land with open source software, didn’t suffer fools and who’d been involved with many projects themselves. Contrast that with the management at Novell these days, and the endless press releases and blogs about meaningless nothing, as well as what Oracle are doing. Or aren’t doing. I’m really sad about what Suse has become, because I think it would have benefitted everyone right now to have two really strong commercial Linux companies who knew exactly what they were doing commercially, organisationally and technically.
To do open source software and to get customers, you truly do have to be an open source company. The source isn’t enough, as Oracle foolishly believes. Scott made a pretty good job of getting that across.