[WBEL-devel] Availability of Whitebox Linux on 64bit processors

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 02:55:14PM -0500, William Hooper wrote:
> Milan Keršláger said:
> > And yes - this is wery sad that the effort like this has been trown
> > away by people at beau.org. It's useless and disillusion.
> 
> >From your comments I believe you miss what Whitebox was created for...
> "White Box Linux's initial creation has been sponsored by the Beauregard
> Parish Public Library in DeRidder, LA USA out of self interest. We have
> several servers and over fifty workstations running Red Hat Linux and were
> left high and dry by their recent shift in business plan. Our choices were
> a difficult migration to another distribution or paying RedHat an annual
> fee greater than the amortized value of our hardware. So we chose a third
> path, made possible by the power of Open Source.... White Box Linux."
>
That's a very selective quote; carry on to the next few paragraphs on the
same page and you'll find this:

"What can you do to help? ....  I only speak English and only have access
to ia32 hardware. So help with getting the other languages re-translated
and porting to AMD64/Itanic are welcome."

Only it's not is they? That text on the _front page_ of Whiteboxlinux.org
is what made people think that their help would be welcome, and that 64
bit ports were wanted. It's hardly surprising that people got pissed off
when help that had been asked for was ignored or thrown back in ther face.

> I'm doubting Beauregard has any x86_64, ia64, or s390 machines so of course
> they don't care. 
They don't - yet. I can't find the quote right now but I do seem to
remember John saying that he was thinking about having some AMD64s in the
future. Besides which, the bit above that I've quoted from the web page
shows that there is (or was) interest in things that the library doesn't
actually need for itself.

Ewan