On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:07:53 +0000, Larry Lindstrom wrote:

> I spent $180.00 on a delux box of RH 7.0. The CDs
> are too slippery for coasters, not aerodynamically
> stable enough for a Frisbee, and too bug infested to
> install. I hated to turn around and give them another
> $30.00 for RH 9 when my friends couldn't burn the ISO
> images.

RH-7.3 was a pretty good distribution, the last one where the fonts
displayed properly. RH-7.3 also installed a reasonably secure OS, but
with an OpenBSD firewall between my network and the Internet I seldom
worry about how secure a freshly installed OS is.

BTW, you could have spent that $30 plus a few more and bought a CD burner.
The last one I bought was $70 with a $20 rebate which BestBuy still has
not returned to me. Those gadgets are useful for more than just burning
Linux CDs. I have Solaris 8 and 9 on this Ultra 1, both installed from
downloaded images.

> This latest incodent, not installing ksh or a
> transparent work-alike by default, reinforces my opinion
> of them.

With a "complete" install RH-9 did put pdksh on my hard drive.

> I've wondered if that was an option. My development
> environment is a couple of PCs running Solaris. If I
> can "get" Linux, I'll add that operating system to my
> development environment. Right now it's one more
> problem I have to solve.

Well, if you have a bit of space available on one of those Solaris PCs you
can certainly use NFS on that machine for doing an NFS install. It will
probably run faster than a CD install, too ;-)


> Thanks Dave, I don't know which of the two cross-
> posted newsgroups you are reading, but I sent a
> response to Roger from an ISP that only subscribes to
> one, so you might have missed it.

Supernews does not carry the redhat NG.

> He suggested
> installing a ksh work-alike called pdksh, public
> domain ksh. It's on RH 9's second CD. I've installed
> pdksh, it seems to work fine, and now I'm moving on with
> RH 9. I'll try to never send another dime to Red Hat.

pdksh has most of the functionality of ksh88 and ksh93, but not all. As I
pointed out, one of your options is to install ksh93 from the Slackware
distro onto your Dead Rat system. If Slackware's ldd did not lie to me
you should have no library problems with it.

Unpack the ksh93 package in /tmp. Modify the /tmp/install/doinst.sh
script and execute it.

> I've wasted a bunch of time thanks to RH's decision to
> break with a standard Unix vendors have respected for a
> long time.

The Korn shell has long had a history of licensing issues and it was
only within the last couple of years that ksh93 has been made publicly
available, with license restrictions. Red Hat, understandably, does not
wish to get into any conflicts with those licenses. That reason also is
why Red Hat does not ship with the ntfs.o module or functional mp3
players.

> I appreciate your advice in the Solaris news groups and
> I'm glad to see you are patrolling Linux.

I use both Solaris and Linux, generally reasonably well ;-)