VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

https://dfarq.homeip.net/va-linux-the-biggest-dotcom-ipo/

84 57 7 months ago

dfarq.homeip.net

Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux

Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.

gkhartman• 7 months ago

If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.

pcdoyle• 7 months ago

I just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.

cabirum• 7 months ago

MIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work

whatever1• 7 months ago

Not even high resolution screens work properly yet.

Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

ghqqwwee• 7 months ago

There’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.

ThePowerOfFuet• 7 months ago

Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

Just wait until you try this new Windows thing. Zero hardware support for anything.

roryrjb• 7 months ago

If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?

0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...

p_l• 7 months ago

It's a recurring bug in chrome

notadev• 7 months ago

Been running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.

zpr515• 7 months ago

Same. And then I upgraded to the new Dell 14 Pro Premium, where webcam does not work (as for any IPU7 laptop for that matter). The rest is fine though, but still annoying.

graemep• 7 months ago

Why did you just not buy a laptop from a supplier that preinstalled Linux?

0xbadcafebee2• 7 months ago

I did. Still issues.

Mountain_Skies• 7 months ago

Lots of things work out of the box, but yes, it's still far from being the default. Kensington is releasing an update to its Expert Mouse trackball. The MSRP looks to be USD$150, so not an inexpensive accessory. It supports Windows and Mac but has no Linux support. No doubt in time there will be community supported projects to give it functionality on Linux close to, but not entirely like, what it has on the other two OSes.

billy99k• 7 months ago

I now just use Linux in the WSL. I get Linux with a superior GUI.

grosswait• 7 months ago

Is Windows 10 still supported?

mikestorrent• 7 months ago

Ahh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.

zeruch7• 7 months ago

They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

qdotme• 7 months ago

TIL: Backstory of sourceforge! Brings back memories…

dizhn• 7 months ago

If I remember correctly they also provided free hosting to people. It was one of the only places where you could run a PHP site for free.

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself

People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.

And before that, SCCS.

Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.

rwmj• 7 months ago

I'd love to know what the "thinking" was behind getting rid of the hardware business. We bought some Penguin Computing servers after VA left the market.

wmf2• 7 months ago

A fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492

cheema33• 7 months ago

I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.

wmf2• 7 months ago

ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.

mongol• 7 months ago

I recall this. But I didn't know he nevet made real money

justin662• 7 months ago

To make money he would have needed to sell his shares, and they became worthless before the post-IPO lockup period ended.

dehrmann• 7 months ago

ESR

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I'd almost forgotten about the webcomic.

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/

Taniwha• 7 months ago

It's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it was a bubble, and also why investors were playing in a whole new sandpit and possibly out of their depth

vlovich123• 7 months ago

I’m not aware of any company that’s going public only after 5 quarters of profit for the past two and a half decades since the dotcom either.

twoodfin• 7 months ago

Especially strange and relevant here: VA Linux owned Slashdot. Depending on whether you were a Digg person—I was not—Slashdot is either hn’s conceptual grandfather or great-grandfather.

“News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”

cowsandmilk• 7 months ago

What do you view as the generations between Slashdot/Digg and HN?

heelix• 7 months ago

Likely reddit

Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.

As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.

lizardking• 7 months ago

cons0le2• 7 months ago

This article provides NO explanation of what the "VA" in va linux is for. I guess I'm just stupid and everybody else knew right away

guenthert• 7 months ago

Well, it does list the names of the founders ...

deater2• 7 months ago

way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"

Lammy• 7 months ago

what the "VA" in va linux is for

If you want to keep Up you'll have to stay Down

zeruch7• 7 months ago

Vera-Augustin, the two founders.

roryirvine• 7 months ago

The article mostly talks about VA's workstations, but I got the impression that their server line was just as important.

As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird").

Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.

styanax• 7 months ago

We had 2U VA Linux servers at a company (circa 2000), they were rock solid beasts which continued to run for years. I vaguely remember cannibalizing one chassis to beef up another / replace parts, but as you mentioned by then it was circa 2003 (?) and one could buy palettes of dotcom-bust servers off a dock in SF. A fully kitted HP DL380-G2 was around $100 IIRC, bought one it ran forever too - old Sun and SGI hardware as well, all of it. Dirt cheap, if you still had a job. :-/

zeruch7• 7 months ago

"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important."

They were far more important for the business.

VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

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