Re: [ossig] Government sector standardize on SuSE Linux?

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 14:53 +0800, Nur Hussein wrote:
> > For example, if Linus Torvald use Apple, many Linux users may want to try it too.
> 
> Anyone who tries to run Linux on any non-x86 architecture will find
> themselves in, uh, odd situations. For one thing, any architecture
> besides x86 is a second class citizen. You will experience the
> following:

Eh, excuse me

> 1. You won't get any closed source programs for Linux ordinarily
> available on x86. No Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 (recently released for x86
> Linux), no commercial games, no VMWare, etc.

Yes you can. With a qemu setup, and an i386 binfmt_msc, you can run the
wonderful x86 software for you

Flash player works on Linux/ppc. Adobe Acrobat Reader does too. How hard
is it to setup? Simple yum install qemu if you're running Fedora (okay,
not rawhide, there are same failed deps with gcc4 iirc)

> 2. There are hardware manufacturers who *insist* on closed-sourcing
> their drivers. You won't get the nVidia drivers for PPC.

You get OSS nvidia drivers that work just fine

> 3. You might not find binaries for some OSS stuff, which means you
> need to compile it yourself. You *may* get compile errors if the
> original author did not test his software on your architecture, which
> means you get to debug it yourself (oh fun!).

Use Ubuntu or Fedora, where the "universe" seems to get built rather
well (okay, I'll add Debian to that as well)

> Using a non-x86 Linux is a fun challenge (I developed my entire final
> year project using Linux-SPARC back in the day), but not many people
> might enjoy it when they run into problems.

That's why we (developers) aim to make the experience as easy and fun as
possible. Sure, we've still got quirks to work out, but its getting
better
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi


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