For a stable server with reliable hardware support as given word and without annoying versioning-fetish, try a BSD-Derivate.
Using Fedora or Ubuntu as a “has-to-be-absolutely-stable” server-OS is not “world-class”. Maybe he had to many drinks at his bar recently? 
When I mentioned all the other OS’s suck, I neglected to also mention that Linux sucks just as bad.
There are things I know, and things I don’t know. Upgrades are hell, and MS Beta’s are not to be installed on a machine unless you are prepared to reinstall everything.
Due to the retro colors and copious amounts of coffee, I’ll now devolve into lamenting the loss of OS/2. A super stable and very cool OS at the time. It had a native TCP/IP stack, a GNU C compiler, and had a nice feel to it. Far ahead of Windows 3 and Win95. Too bad it was a betamax in the end.
Wow new theme, anyway…
This is common issue about Linux unfortunately another good example from Eric S. Raymond another good programmer, - http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
In case you missed it.
I hate the mistaken belief that if something is free/open, any problems with it are somehow not as important because it is free. That is nothing more than hubris.
/me tires of ‘finding’ memory leaks in Pidgin, one of the star projects of OSS.
/meta-me: 50% chance someone says “they’re probably in the GTK runtime, so its not Pidgin’s fault!”
Well, RedHat has never really been nice about upgrades and versioning, they’ve never been shy to release broken stuff as a stable release.
And I wouldn’t have chosen Ubuntu for a kiosk or other non desktop install… but…
Anyway don’t blame Linux. Would he be able to do all the stuff he does if they were running Windows (and without paying a lot for licenses, software add ons, etc.)
Zawinski famously abandoned Linux a year or two ago for OS X because he wanted a system that ‘just works’. Can’t blame him for that, but it suggests that ‘software engineer’ isn’t an accurate description of what he does.
I thought the install of Fedora Core was fairly easy. But, alas, I stick to Vista for my own development. It does what I need it to do. (which is nothing, but no one knows about that)
Another way to look at the situation of unreliable software is this. People with no family to support and no career taking the rest of their time have the time to “fiddle” with experimental stuff. When I was a teenager, I could spend hours/days on the computer coding and figuring stuff out just for the sake of computing. As an adult with responsibilities, I don’t have time to spend on such things. Granted, this guy was trying to do something beyond what normal users do, but it brings up the bigger point - adults don’t have the time or inclination to waste time fiddling with partially working solutions (except for those few individuals who substitute human relationships with technology).
P.S. This dark green text is totally unreadable on my laptop 
You can usually get pretty far by making a point of buying hardware with Linux in mind. Also, if you just want stability above all else, Debian Stable is your friend.
If you’re looking for a quality Linux desktop or notebook, Dell sells systems preloaded with Ubuntu nowadays, and you can get them with support.
Niklas Eriksson I totally agree with your insight. There are so many out there that are professed as “geniuses” and they are nothing of the sort.
If Linux in a nutshell was sooo unstable why would so many institutions such as the government, universities, and law enforcement use it to do simple daily tasks to large complex data retrieval. I have used multiple versions/flavors of Linux. Each has its unique purpose and each has its pitfalls, but I would rather work with something that I can enhance than a black box like MS.
I’ve been using Linux for several years now and, though I’ve had my problems, I’ve never had any problem that was worse than any windows bug.
As a matter of fact, if you compare the percentage of bugs in all the Linux bug reports that are marked “RESOLVED” to the percentage of those fixed in Windows, you’ll find that the Linux developers at least care enough to fix them.
Granted, Linux has the advantage that it’s easier to say “Hey guys, this bug is fixed in cvs” than try to help all the Windows users out there get the proper windows update.
The thing is, all OS’s have bugs. The thing that makes me use Linux is that I personally find the bugs in Linux less annoying than the bugs in Windows. Other people find the opposite to be true. That’s why we have a choice.
adults don’t have the time or inclination to waste time fiddling with
partially working solutions
Which is why Linux folks should cease trying to push it onto mortal users’ desktops. It ain’t ready. A pretty desktop is of no use when the sound doesn’t work and the user has to rip their hair out sifting through man pages for a solution.
/me tires of ‘finding’ memory leaks in Pidgin, one of the star
projects of OSS.
Ouch, and I like Pidgin a lot. I left the Mac a month ago and I haven’t found a great chat client yet.
some people completly missed the point of this story (hint look at the title). This is not about linux is bad or linux is worse than windows or windows is great etc.
So
he made a bad choice of which Linux Distro to use as a base
He heavily customised it
He upgraded the OS and it broke his system…
Please repeat with MacOS, Windows, SunOS, BeOS etc … and get the same results …
Operating system upgrades WILL break something
Your hardware is not as standard as you think
“Nothing Fucks Up Productivity Like Installing Linux” - Zed Shaw
Yawn.
Another “if this smart guy couldn’t use it, how could the rest of the world” post.
I expected more from you, Jeff. Especially now that this is your whole gig.
If you are a long time reader of JWZ’s, you’ll see that he does a hell of a lot of personal customizations to make the software run “just so” on those kiosk machines (and he releases it to the public, which is awesome." That sort of thing is prone to breakage, especially when the were made on a bleeding edge distribution that is 5 years old!
If JWZ read his own posts from back then, he’d see all the pain that it took to do those sorts of customizations in the first place.
But he got it working.
Tell me how he could do the same things on some other OS for the price point that he was looking at (it was a factor for these public machines in his first go round).
There isn’t a story here, but good try at making it into one.
At least you’ll get a lot of Slashdot traffic and hopefully some click-thrus on your ads.
Please change the colour scheme back, feint green on black is totally unreadable (especially as you can’t type with ctrl-a selected!) Thanks.
You can always back up what you have built using rsync, then reverse that from a secure server and hourly write out the “good” version back to the servers using rsync. If nothing changes it only takes a minute or so, and you can email reports of what changes there are, if any.
Wow Pandora’s box Jeff. It’s been found an opened. Now to await the inevitable Linux tribe come to defend their deity.
I am sure no one is really reading the comments this far into the post, but I figured I’d chime in anyway.
I have stable open source Xen virtual servers running on a few hardware boxes that host a full range of applications. These range from manufacturing production environment support, database servers, accounting server, web server, backup, etc to user desktops served to thin clients. The whole setup allows me to have dev, test, and production environments in a small footprint for the price of the hardware. My time would be spent irregardless of whether or not if I was running Windows (I do have a two of windows machines to support AutoCAD and CNC equipment) or Linux.
Oh, yeah I also do some audio on my laptop for fun. So please don’t tell me what I can’t do with linux.