| riel | that is, if Sr. Vonbrand is ready for it and the scheduled time is still 22 CET ;) |
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| UniNet UNIX Meeting, (http://umeet.uninet.edu) "Linux en Chile: Una experiencia personal". in #redes there are Spanish ' |
| vonbrand | Hi! Here is Horst von Brand (got my name mangled, as I see now) |
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| vonbrand | OK, folks, this is sort of a new experience to me. UMeet was kind enough to invite me to give a speech here last year, but that was the first (and to now last) time I got on IRC. Bear with me. |
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| vonbrand | First, a little bit of history on myself: |
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| vonbrand | I was trained here at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (in Valparaiso, Chile) as a Chemical Engineer. I always liked computers, but there was no Compupter Science here in CHile then. |
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| vonbrand | Later, during my Thesis I got a job as a programmer working on Apple ][+ microcomputers, so that when the Department of Informatics here needed somebody to set un the first computer lab here, they hired me. |
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| vonbrand | In 1983 I got invited to a 3 or 4 day course on "Unix and C" by Data General. There I got hooked on Unix. |
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| vonbrand | In 1984 I went to Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I got my PhD in Computer Science in 1987. |
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| vonbrand | During my stay there I used Unix (mostly BSD, but also some weird systems like Eunice under VMS, and some emulator under the native AOS of a Data General Eclipse system). |
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| vonbrand | Part of my work there was to manage the VAX of the CS Department. |
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| vonbrand | When I came back to Chile, IBM donated several RT systems running AIX to the UTFSM, one to Informatics. |
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| vonbrand | Had a lot of fun with that (in restrospect quite broken) system. |
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| vonbrand | Later we bought a VAXstation, and then a microVAX. Both ran Ultrix. Sun donated a SPARCstation I+, we bought 3 diskless stations |
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| for that machine. That was what we had in Unix machines in 1990. |
| vonbrand | In january-march 1991 I was Visiting Professor at Georgia Tech, there I got copies of the GNU and X distributions. |
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| vonbrand | Shortly thereafter we set up a mirror site for GNU (based on |
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| what I hat gotten here on tape). |
| vonbrand | Around november 15 (we were 2 weeks on the Internet then!) a student showed up in my office saying "Look, I've found a Unix |
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| for PCs on the Internet!" |
| vonbrand | This "Unix from the Internet" was Linux. |
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| vonbrand | In this way, mostly by accident, Chile started with Linux when it was just a few months old. |
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| vonbrand | Needless to say, _nobody_ thought that we were doing history of some kind. And as I'm not the kind of person that keeps a diary, what |
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| follows is mostly out of my (very fragile) memory. |
| vonbrand | I fondly remember the days of "root + boot" disks, fooling around to get Linux to boot from a hard disk (not all worked...) |
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| vonbrand | That was the time when I used to carry around a box of diskettes: root + boot, sources for the whole thing, assorted patches, ... |
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| vonbrand | That was the time when Linux was for _real_ hackers only: You had to get binaries from a halfo dozen places; to build a working compiler |
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| toolchain you had to get certain precise versions of the individual tools from the GNU repositories, then chase for the latest set of scattered patches |
| to make it compile and work. |
| vonbrand | The kernel sources and the gcc sources took up less than a 1.44Mb diskette each... |
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| vonbrand | Later came my first distribution: SLS, from somebody in the UK. Still something like a box of diskettes (i.e., 12 diskettes: 10 were the |
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| system, 2 for kernel sources and assorted sources and patches) |
| vonbrand | Later we became a Slackware mirror. That was fun: Diskettes were _expensive_, so we had 3 of them in a loop: One being written at the machine with the mirror, one being installed and one as a buffer. |
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| vonbrand | Lots of fun, I also remember somebody asked me to copy the full distribution on diskettes (65 or so of them, each checked to make sure each file could be read). Fun, fun, fun. |
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| vonbrand | Then came Red Hat, when Slackware was abandoned by its original development team and fell into disrepair. Still a RH user, |
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| vonbrand | but somewhat miffed because they dumped SPARC (we have a dozen SPARCs around here, this machine is a SPARC Ultra 1 for instance). |
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| vonbrand | We had good experiences with SPARCs, they survived abuse by students very well. But Sun firstly is slow in fixing bugs in the system, and then discontinued support for the oldish versions of Solaris that are able to run on our coffepots here. |
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| vonbrand | So we switched them to Linux one by one, the last Solaris got upgraded in january 2001. Not before a cracker got into the machine trhough and %$#&@ "remote administration service" that some patch installed again (I had removed it). This vermin "remotely administrated" the machine, erasing almost everything on it. A fun day (10 AM to aroung 1 AM next day) setting everythinh up again, appliying patches, and making sure no "visitor" would be able to |
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| vonbrand | show up again. This was october, and so Solaris was doomed: After classes were over in december, Solaris went out the window. |
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| vonbrand | Massive use of Linux started in 1994, when a lab with some 12 i486s dual boot Windows/Linux was set up. Most users insisted on Windows... |
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| vonbrand | In 1997 the Windows part of the lab split off, it is now a Linux-only business. |
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| vonbrand | Strangely, there has been rather little coordination among Linux users around here in Chile |
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| vonbrand | Almost every university here in Chile (at least among the "traditional universities", in 1980 the law changed and it became possible to create new universities breaking the traditional monopoly) has started using Linux independently. |
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| vonbrand | Some cross-fertilization has happened, but very little officially sanctioned cooperation. |
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| vonbrand | Because of this, the history elsewhere is quite hazy. I know they started at the Universidad de Chile somewhen in 1993, others I don't know much. |
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| vonbrand | In the same underground way, Linux started being used at various places in the "real world", mostly as server for Windows clients, managing databases, handling mail, and so on. |
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| vonbrand | I have often asked for more details on experiences with Linux. Strangely, most users are very happy with the system, but they don't want to say so in public. |
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| vonbrand | One experience (sorry, has to remain anonymous) was told as follows: "A year and a half ago or so, a friend gave me CDs. So I went to the office to check out if the Linux thing worked under Windows [sic!]. Nobody there had ever heard of Linux or Unix before. Our central database server now runs on Linux, since some 6 months." |
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| vonbrand | I thought they were completely out of their mind to go to |
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| vonbrand | But later I heard (and saw, and in a few cases even pushed a bit ;-) similar stories. |
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| vonbrand | Most organizations (a bit larger ones, not mom-and-pop-stores) I know in sufficient detail to be able to tell do use Linux internally, often for critical missions. Sure, my selection is probably biased. But even so, I think Linux is much more widespread here in Chile than is acknowledged in public. |
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| vonbrand | One particularly interesting point is that the ADS (Asociacion de Desarrolladores de Software, "Association of Software Developers", essentially a band of software vendors) started an anti-piracy campaign here in Chile. One of the results was a lot more questions about Linux... Opposing their "Zero tolerance" campaign the people of Conectiva here started a "100% tolerance" campaign for free software. |
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| vonbrand | Things are sure moving here. When we started, this was nothing more than a quaint hobby of a few nuts. Nobody (even less I myself) ever dreamed that this would become part of a worldwide movement for free software. |
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| vonbrand | I never thought there would be propietary software specifically for Linux, or that the 3-letter companies like IBM, DEC, Sun would one day jump on the Linux train. |
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| vonbrand | I knew Linus Torvalds was 1/2 serious when he said his objective for Linux was "World domination. Fast." sometime in 1996 IIRC. But I thought the 1/2 serious part of this was just daydreaming. |
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| vonbrand | Now I'm not sure... |
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| vonbrand | OK, this is in a nutshell (seems it was quite a large |
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| nut, that one) what I had to tell you. |
| > clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap |
| > clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap |
| lucipher | clap, clap |
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| hantu | clap clap clap clap |
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| vonbrand | Again, many thanks for the oportunity to share a bit of my |
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| experience with Linux with some interested people. |
| > Thanks vonbrand !! |
| cron | /me thank you vonbrand |
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| > in the channel #qc there are questions for you: |
| > <zuez> vonbrand: dont you feel Linux is falling apart from the "old school" system? |
| > <zuez> i mean, i have had to install redhat like a month ago, |
| and that was patethic. |
| vonbrand | If somebody is interested in a Spanish language mailing list on Linux (newbies to advanced users) you are wellcome to join linux@inf.utfsm.cl (send a message with contents "subscribe" to linux-request@inf.utfsm.cl) |
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| gotcha | clap clap clap clap clap |
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| > clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap |
| > clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap |
| > clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap |
| vonbrand | I don't fully understand that question. If you mean Linux is breaking apart the traditional way of doing software, I definitely think it si doing so. |
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| > zuez ? |
| > is lost! |
| lucipher | what will be the next speech about? |
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| vonbrand | I installed Red Hat 7.2 recenlty (or upgraded) quite a few machines. The installation process was smooth, _much_ better than a year or so back. Sure, the machines had been specified for Linux mostly; and the hardware has been getting better in general (true "Plug and Play" via PCI, not this %$#@ ISA crap) |
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| cron | linux also allows the liberty to make different Distributions and flavors, none has to use RH if it does not fit their needs. I think RH is a decent distro. |
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| cron | linux is the kernel |
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| cron | and that can be chaged also |
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| vonbrand | In my experience, installing Linux (in particular Red Hat, which is what I know best) has been easier than installing say WinNT or Win98se on the same machine. Sure, I know my way around in Linux and not in Win. Anyway, many things in Linux just _work_ (f.ex. the IDE interface on my Sound Blaster 16), and Win doesn't even see them. |
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| cron | s/chaged/changed |
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| vonbrand | Sure, one of the great attractives of Linux is that there are plenty of distributions around, to fit every need of whim. |
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| vonbrand | There is lots of software available, it is quite legal (and |
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| widespread practice) that the distributions "steal" from each other, be it bugfixes or even whole packages. |
| enrique | what is your opinon about linux suse |
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| vonbrand | This is one of the things I like most: I'm not _forced_ to use a particular piece of software. Red Hat comes with Gnome and KDE, but I'm happyly running XFCE <http://www.xfce.org> on this coffepot. |
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| vonbrand | Other give you exactly _one_ choice, and to get anything else running used to be a terrible ordeal. I remember having to rebuild X11 on our Suns because the packages from Sun where lacking, or just too heavyweigth. One full day compiling, after setting mysterious parameters in a buch of Makefiles. Life sure has gotten easier now (in part through using Linux, in part because the availability of Linux made the vendors wake up from their dreams) |
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| zuez | well |
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| zuez | first off, you don4t run a x86 based OS on a sparc. |
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| zuez | solaris will run just 10x smoothest, thats for sure. |
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| vonbrand | Sure, Linux is just a kernel. But what is normally understood by "Linux" is a distribution, or even the explosion ofn open source software that Linux spearheaded. |
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| zuez | dude |
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| zuez | let linux run on x86 and solaris on sparcs. |
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| zuez | ;) |
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| cron | linux is the kernel, the distro is the glue that puts the GNU applications together in a pakage |
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| zuez | theres no reason to run linux on a sparc, unless you dont have the money to buy solaris. |
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| cron | solaris 8 is free for non comercial use |
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| cron | it runs on spark and intel |
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| vonbrand | Strange... Linux (at least RH 6.2, also Debian) runs fine on SPARCs. Much better than Solaris. Even to the point that Linux happyly handles the mail of some 600 users, FTP, RSYNC, some WWW services, and routing, on a SPARC Station 4. That machine won't boot the latest Solaris in your lifetime. |
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| zuez | no |
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| zuez | it doesnt |
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| zuez | go through branches |
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| vonbrand | "No" what? |
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| * cron has to go, hasta luego gente, gracias vonbrand |
| timeout) |
| zuez | that4s the main problem with the linux population.. |
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| zuez | i bet some folks are trying to run Linux on gameboy pocket ;) |
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| zuez | brb |
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| vonbrand | Last time I checked, some 60-80% of software on Red Hat has GPLed. Note that GPLed is _not_ necesarily GNU software. The Linux kernel is GPLed, but not GNU. Several large packages (TeX, X11) are not GPLed. |
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| zuez | this is not a GNU session. |
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| zuez | i have been running solaris for quite long time now |
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| zuez | and i know it will perform just about 10x better than Linux |
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| zuez | and i am quite sure most of the folks here can say the same thing |
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| vonbrand | If you think Linuxers are nuts because they will thry to get their toaster to run Linux if it's got a CPU, you might well be rigth. But the world moves forward not through "normal, law-abiding, tax-paying and grey" people, but through nutcases. Sure, not all crazy ideas work out, but some do. |
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| zuez | theres a fine line between being nut andbeing silly :> |
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| vonbrand | Zuez, have you tried Linux on SPARC? It works fine, much better than Solaris. Besides, the record of Sun in bug fixing is *horrible* (mean of some 2 years, IIRC). There Linux distributions (of *BSD for that matter) are _much_ quicker. If you depend on a machine on the Internet, don't trust Solaris. |
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| zuez | "I am leaving Solaris for Linux" |
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| zuez | with that said, brb, food! |
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| zuez | vonbvrand |
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| zuez | www.solaris.com |
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| zuez | i am out. |
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| * zuez is now away: horror and madness i have seen here.. |
| vonbrand | Zuez, at least try it out. I think you will be pleasantky surprised. As a bonus, it is very similar on you home PC and the server machine. |
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| * zuez sighs |
| gotcha | :) |
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| vonbrand | Any more comments? Questions? Anybody has tomatoes handy fro throwing at the speaker? |
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| > jejejejejejejejej |
| > thanks !! |
| (Aplicación Saliendo) |
| vonbrand | OK, again many thanks for your patience. Hope to see |
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| you next year around here |
| > vonbrand ... very nice !! |
| > we invite you to next conferences.... |
| Mangollo | cuando |
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| Mangollo | y de que |
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| > tomorrow at 20 hours, please, at http//umeet.uninet.edu |
| vonbrand | Next year, around this time. |
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| vonbrand | Dn't ask now about what specifically, maybe I find out that Linux is too stressfull and I go over to potato planting... |
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| Mangollo | ok |
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| vonbrand | Good by. |
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| Jose M. Gomez Vergara (Spain) Programación con sockets en PHP. At |
| 22:00 David Richard Larochelle (USA) Methods for Statically Detecting |
| Buffer Overflow Vulnerab' |
| End of #linux buffer Sun Dec 09 23:50:44 2001 |
