Domain: linux-foundation.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to linux-foundation.org.
Comments · 86
-
Good for them
Seems AMD have taken on-board what Nvidia chose to ignore.
Being the advice offered by the Kernel devs -
Re:I like the enhancements... BUT
sudden
This isn't a recent phenomenon. Gnome has always been plagued by imperious UI iconoclasts. They haven't a pragmatic bone in their collective body and they tolerate no one that does.
Don't start from the mistaken presumption that Gnome is about widespread adoption. It is not. Gnome is about submission; you will adopt the Gnome view or you can piss off. Once you have that clear Gnome makes sense.
The mailing lists and bug lists are filled with useability complaints about Gnome going back years. Most of it is ignored. Notable people have tried to deal with Gnome developers for simple things and been dismissed. They don't care and they don't listen.
-
Re:Wishful thinking?
-
let's see, what has Jim Zemlin contributed...
Calling people idiots. He's young looking, maybe not so mature? Let's see, what has Jim Zemlin done... The about him from his blog. His staff page at the Linux foundation. Seems like... a manager in marketing? Aside from blabbing off, what are his contributions?
-
Re:Already Running that Version on Ubuntu
I'm not certain that it's being too paranoid to think it's deliberate sabotage. OTOH, the developers could just be arrogant pricks.
I suppose it could be possible. Miguel de Icaza's obsession with Microsoft and
.NET technologies are downright creepy, and it worries me that he seems to have a blind spot for the bigger picture - like freedom and openness, by mostly ignoring patent threats and Microsoft's murky history in such matters. Either that or he's a Microsoft plant, in which case Gnome would be a prime target for sabotage; it's the default desktop for many of the major distributions after all. Personally though, I think it's a little too far fetched and I believe the devs are just being pricks, here's a prime example. A Gnome dev actually replied to Linus Torvalds, in spanish no less, knowing full well Linus doesn't speak the language: "Linus, you don't know how to read Spanish, so are you an idiot too?" (see thread). I know for a fact that Linus speaks at least three languages so it's not like he linguistically challenged, and implying that he's an idiot for not speaking Spanish in particular just blows my mind. I'm not even sure what point the hispanic Gnome dev was trying to make but he sure came off as an incredibly arrogant prick, and he wasn't the only dev to do so IMO. So my money is on the Gnome devs being asshats. I'm sure a large number of Gnome developers are nice and reasonable people but there also seems to be quite a few rotten apples in there too. -
Re:Karma
As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.
Funnily enough when Hovsepian took over as CEO in 2003 I remember him saying how much Novell would do for the Linux Community. Then a few years ago this Interview.
Lets look at what he did for the Linux Community and for the Developers he thinks are so great:
Novell Plans To Lay Off 20% Of Workforce
-
Re:How prevalent?
Yes, it's absolutely your fault, and there is an excuse. There's this thing called the Linux Standard Base (LSB) which was put together by all the major distros and is an agreement on how a variety of things should work in Linux to maintain a consistent platform. It's mediated by the Linux foundation. It includes by reference the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FSH) which is a map of how the filesystem should be laid out and how it should behave. The FSH recommends that
/tmp be wiped on boot. They comment that it's only not a requirement because system administration decisions are outside the scope of the document.
Gentoo is just following the appropriate standards. I know that almost all Debian-derived distros delete /tmp on boot and I believe Red Hat derived ones do as well but I'm not sure about that. Regardless, it is the proper behavior as recommended by the appropriate standards. -
Re:OLPC = One License Per Child
The answer is very simple, and strikes at the heart of what is wrong with the open source movement: regular folks prefer products they can use without much effort. It's called "usability" and for-profit companies invest a lot of money and time always finding ways to make their products more "user-friendly".
It seems to me that open source developers have heard of that "usability" thing, just two examples here:
http://usability.kde.org/hig/
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/And where did you get the fact that for-profit companies don't use open source development method? Just a one example, search here for 'Who is sponsoring the work'.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php. Personally I think that nobody wants this great OS is because people aren't ready to risk their existing pre-installed OS since switching an OS is a non-trivial risky thing which takes time, however good the new OS might be. And people are often content if something works just enough even tho something else might be more productive in the long run. "NOBODY in a for-profit company like Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, IBM, ect., would ever let a new computer ship without the capability to install a printer and print from within applications out-of-the-box."Can you honestly argue that every single device that you have plugged into a computer shipped by the above companies has worked out-of-the-box? If you can you're an extremely lucky individual. I myself have had nightmares with getting devices to work with, for example, Windows 98, ME and even WinXP even tho it has good hardware support. And computer/OS distributor can't have perfect hardware support because printers have drivers which need to be specifically programmed for a certain OS so if a device company decides so, it can make drivers for its device only for one OS leaving the others without support (which might be added by someone else who is willing to do reverse-engineering). "Open source projects are the opposite: they concentrate on pleasing the "experts", with the result that the products are usually good, but of no interest to the general population." The GNOME project, the other one of the biggest desktop environments for Linux, focuses on simple interfaces and actually annoys power users since cutting down on choices makes for less features. For example I am a power user and dislike GNOME applications and I also think that most open source applications are nowadays made for non-power users. As an example here, Mozilla Firefox is an open source project and it seems to be quite good for newbies too.
"One more example: installing applications on the XO often requires making use of the command line. well...99% of people out there have no idea what a "command line" is. How clueless can a team be?" I thought that 99% of people in the target areas also have no idea what a "graphical user interface" is. Command line is efficient, flexible, fast, consistent and lets user automate tasks easily so it might not be that horrible if people would learn it. But I agree that applications might be good to be installable with a GUI tool like synaptic.
(Sigh, you are a fucking troll..."Niggerponte" indeed...)
-
Re:systemtap?
How about this more recent quote from the Kernel Summit mailing list regarding dtrace and systemtap
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:23:33AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> DTrace is more a piece of sun marketing coolaid which they use to beat
> us up at every opportunity.
>
> We actually have a reasonably functional equivalent piece of technology
> called systemtap.Actually we don't, and while there's a large amount of coolaid around
dtrace there are also various very useful bits around it.Without going on the implementation level the obvious benefit of dtrace
is that it just works. It comes with solaris, there is an enormous
amount of existing static trace points in the kernel, and writing
additional traces is rather easy. Also what's actually most important
for most dtrace users I've seen is the ability to trace through
userspace programs, and not actually kernel code which is something
systemtap currently doesn't do at all, and something which to work
should not require an out of tree metacompiler to generate kernel
modules.An additional advantage for dtrace is that they actually have modified
lots and lots of userspace to support their userspace tracepoints, like
the postgres example Matthew mentioned or the X server or Java.
Duplicating all the this would be outright stupid, so we'd better have
an API-level compatible implementation, even if our underlying
implementation is different. -
Re:Link to youtube videos
-
Re:Link to youtube videos
-
Re:Business expense?
The stock price for LNUX (the owner of slashdot) has dropped from $242 at IPO to $0.82 now. Even if you look over 1 year it still seems to show a downward trend - i.e. the 52 week high was 2.18 and the low was 0.32. It's still deflating, just very slowly.
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:LNUX
In fact a few days ago the transferred ownership of linux.com over to the non profit Linux foundation.
What does it all mean? I'm not sure. You have to wonder what LNUX's business model actually is. It seems to be web based advertising e.g. from here
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4701-how-much-is-slashdot-and-thus-va-linux-worth-lnux
We nearly doubled our average CPM rate during the quarter from $11.28 to $20.63. Our top advertisers during the first quarter included AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Rack Space and HP. (Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)
The things these numbers seem highly optimistic to me. I don't think I've ever clicked on an advert from slashdot. Most of them I block and the ones I don't block I ignore.
-
Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI
Linux was designed to operate as a desktop server
... only if your idea of a desktop is a CLI.You don't know WTF you're talking about.
http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/linus-torvalds-part-ii/
Linus Torvalds: Well, I don't know about broader adoption, but the Linux desktop is why I got into Linux in the first place. I mean, I have never, ever cared about really anything but the Linux desktop.
The server market was a lot easier to get into. There's just a few loads, they're fairly simple, they're fairly well-understood, people are - have much less inertia in upgrading a server than they have in upgrading their desktop. But I have never, ever even run a Linux server and I don't even want to; it's not what I'm interested in. I'm more of a desktop guy. I've always used Linux as a workstation person.
-
Re:Stalemate.
and Linux can do it on what, 1/100th the budget (veeeery rough estimation, folks)?
Actually, you'd be surprised. Some of these numbers are coming from my own rather faulty memory, but I think it's a lot closer in cost than you think.
IIRC, Vista took about 5 years and $5 Billion to make. At a loaded labour rate of $120,000 per year, that's 8,333 employees. I don't know if that is all R&D, but let's assume it is.
According to the Linux Foundation there are more than 1000 active developers and between 70 and 95% are paid (IIRC, another report found that 75% are full time paid developers).
So the total cost of developing the kernel is already 1/10 of that of developing Vista. And we have to take into consideration that Vista is more than the kernel (i.e., we can lump in gnome or KDE, GTK or QT, etc, etc). So, probably the actually amount of money spent is closer to 1/5th of that of Vista.
The big advantage of open source software from the developers point of view is not the overall cost reduction (there may not be any). It's that each individual contributor only pays a portion of that cost. IBM, Redhat, Novell, Canonical, are only paying a very small fraction of the overall development cost, while enjoying the benefits of the whole.
-
Re:Problems:
Like it or not, RPM has been declared as the standard.
http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3.2.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/book1.html
-
Re:Time LimitsAre you interested in the truth at all? Yes; that's why I asked for correction in case of error. However, not all of us have the time to research everything we say the moment we say it. When I wrote that post, I was heading out the door for a haircut appointment. My brief perusal of Linus' wikipedia page (which I had open at the time) turned up nothing, but since I recalled reading something along those lines in an article, I used it as the example. In any case, I was not far off; see below.
In addition to being interested in the truth, I am interested in helping other people, which you seem very bad at doing. You are just recycling FUD and stating completely baseless opinions. Please point out what I posted that was "FUD" and "completely baseless opinions". You clearly don't know anything about the history of communism, anarchism, or free software; and your grasp on psychology doesn't seem too strong, either. It was strong enough to tell you were trolling, and it's strong enough to know the following:
Communism has never worked, historically, unless it has been enforced by violence or the threat of violence (as I stated elsewhere), making it more a dictatorship than anything. Please point to an example of a truly communist society in history.
Anarchy cannot work, since it is the lack of government, and given the selfish and power-hungry nature of some of the human populace, some would seek to assert their will on others, and we'd be back into Feudalism pretty quickly. If you think I'm wrong, please point to a truly anarchic group of people in history that did not fall into feudalism or something similar.
As for free software... Being mistaken on which foundation pays Torvalds so he can maintain the Linux kernel does not qualify as "knowing nothing about the history of free software". I'd wager I know as much as most /.ers.
For reference, it is the Linux Foundation (formerly the Open Source Development Labs before they merged with the Free Standards Group) that pays Linus. Exact reference here. Your post was a colossal waste of time. You seem to be saying this based on one assumption: that an erroneous fact invalidates my argument.
The fact remains, Torvalds is paid to maintain the kernel. Other organizations do the same thing. Google pays employees to work on open source software. Mozilla funds the development of Firefox and Thunderbird.
So, my original point is still valid. You may disagree with it, but that does not make it a "colossal waste of time."
Learn to interact respectfully with society. You obviously need it. -
Re:Four years?
Don't tell the Linux Standard Base group that.
:( -
Re:Interesting way of describing "Efficiency"
Willing to give work away for free?
First of all, let me say that the companies we are talking about in the context of the article (FLOSS companies) are most definitely selling something. They may not have a copyright monopoly on what they are selling (MySQL, Linux Desktops, whatever), but they are selling software+service. Are they using a different business model than the Microsofts of the world? Of course. But these are for-profit business.
Second of all, I can think of _many_ industries where participants are handing away their work for free. My cable company, WOW Internet and Cable, is quite willing to do free technical repairs (wire replacements indoors, splitter replacements, etc . . ), while Comcast charges for these things. The company I work for, BioGenesis Enterprises, is quite happy to give away service-style consulting as long as there's a possibility we'll make a chemical sale. I've seen many a mechanic who will check things out free, and refer you away to another organization (or nothing at all) if that's warranted, and not make a dime. And that doesn't even come close to covering the huge amount of work done in the private academic and non-profit spheres, sectors of our capitalist economy which filter down into commercial develops without needing patents/copyrights.
Simply put, there are many, many people out there who are willing to "give away intellectual work" 'for free', as long as their making money somehow. Google Engineers probably have no problem working on FLOSS projects, because A) It builds their resume, B) Their encouraged to work on it during company time, and C) It is a form of creativity and self-expression.
Take a look at the Linux kernel. Fully 60% of contributions are directly "big company" corporate sponsored, and if I'm reading the chart correctly only ~25% of the contributions are not corporate funded (and half of that is in the "unknown" category").
Capitalism assumes that everyone wants to be compensated for their work, but that doesn't mean we are all lawyers that demand itemized compensation for every little activity we've ever conducted. That's a slimy, nickel-n-dime model that is surprisingly inefficient. The better capitalist model is where people do the work they way to do, and receive sufficient pay for their total set of efforts sufficient to pay the bills, and have a moderate sum left over at the end of the month. In fact, that's how capitalist markets work when you don't have monopolies; like the copyright monopoly, or patent monopolies. Think about it: When you go to a small consultant, or a local general mechanic, or HVAC person, you can negotiate with them. You come up with a price that doesn't represent a direct itemization of time/parts+margin, but rather is a fair "market" price between your demand and their supply. That's how FLOSS works. -
Corporations have been key to Linux development.I'm not sure if "being supported by giant corporations" was such a good idea for the so called "linux movement". The percentage of code contributions to the Linux kernel from individuals and volunteers working in their spare time is now down to 13.9%, and still falling. The vast majority of work is now done by companies (mostly Red Hat, Novell, and IBM). To quote directly from that Linux Foundation's April 2008 Kernel Development Report, "Even if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' [and untracable] contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work" (source).
Or take distros. Look at the well-put-together and widely used distributions, and they all have one thing in common: whilst being community efforts, they are usually sponsored by or affiliated with a corporation. Ubuntu - Canonical; Fedora - Red Hat; Madriva - Mandrakesoft, etc. The only major exception I can think of is Debian.
The fact is that without the support of corporations, following from the efforts of people like Bruce Perens to persuade companies of the benefits of following an open-source business model, Linux would be vastly behind where it is today. -
Re:And if they said this about linux?
Windows is a packaged, supposedly complete product that costs real money (a lot of it), is extremely widespread, and most importantly to your point, used by almost everyone in North America at some point in their lives
I was in Las Vegas recently and watched on of these experience maintenance. It ran Linux. Apparently lots of people use Linux that don't know it. Little better evidence can be offered than that legendary pillar of the FOSS community Volkswagon submitting a major module for the latest kernel release.
In short, although the Vista experience is horribly broken you could be having a linux experience and not even know it. Some people would even say that's the goal. If you have to know the branding on the software then you're interacting with the brand, not doing stuff you want to do.
-
Re:Differences
It seems pretty accepted that RPM has "dependancy hell" issues. The HUGE problem with package management, for me, is that there are a lot of people saying RPM should be ditched in favour of Dpkg or some yet-to-be-made system, but ALL of those arguments are essentially arguing for a packaging standard.
Well, RPM *IS* the packaging standard in the Linux Standard Base (see http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3.2.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/pkgformat.html ). Thus a standard Linux system should either use the RPM package system or have an equivalent system which can install RPM packages in addition to its own (note: dpkg can't do this, and alien doesn't count).
Therefore the call for standards is essentially a call for everyone to use RPM, whilst it seems pretty well known that RPM has serious problems. Of course, RPM has a *HUGE* inertia which means it won't be leaving anytime soon either.
PS: When I used Fedora back in the Core 3 days I used Apt4RPM and Synaptic (this is before I discovered Debian), don't know if it's still going though. -
Roughly Drafted is not a credible source
Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.
Let's stick to numbers and press releases when we start talking about market share and company's official positions on operating systems, not the musings of some apple-phile.
Besides, we know that IBM quite plainly supports linux and unix. They're a top linux contributor:
https://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
Chances are much greater they'll be using linux internally more and more as time goes on, not relying on yet another proprietary OS vendor they have no influence over. They probably use about as many macs internally as microsoft does- and that's not an ironic statement.
-
Re:Why would they even bother?Actually, there is some form of gratification going on there, though with all the corporate sponsorship I wouldn't portray it as simply "fun". Its serious, and the arguments that the kernel devs get into w/each other is further proof of something much more than a passtime. Why should Linus do anything for you? Me? Moi? I don't need him or his cohorts to take extra steps for my sake; I'm an experienced admin.
OTOH there are any number of people other than me who would like to know the purpose behind this. If the userspace coders have to document their software interfaces for the sake of distro interoperability, then why doesn't the kernel group document the supported hardware interfaces? -
Linux Foundation response
Howdy, I may be a little late, but I wrote a post about this discussion on my blog at the Linux Foundation site. It may clarify this: http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/2008/04/15/on-embracing-the-linux-desktop-at-the-lf-collaboration-summit/
-
Should we assume users are stupid?
To make an OS available to the 'casual user' you have to make some decisions for them.
Linus hates this and has sworn off Gnome because he feels Gnome makes too many decisions for the user. He feels that the Gnome project is taking the stance that the users are stupid but unfortunately this may be just the thing to get Linux desktops into the public mainstream and is part of why Ubuntu is so successful.
Users need a machine that just works out of the box and since Vista doesn't this is a great opportunity for Linux.
-
Re:And just WHO is this "Linux Foundation"?
You will notice that almost all their platinum members are hardware manufacturers, which explain their emphasis on big iron.
Adobe only recently joined Linux Foundation, in connection with their decision to port AIR to Linux. -
And just WHO is this "Linux Foundation"?
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Members
I notice some Linux supporting companies there, but a lot of companies whose support is, at best, half-hearted.
(I'd have copied out the list, but it's all pictures of the names. Look if you care. IBM and Red Hat are there, but so is Adobe. And a bunch of companies I've never heard of, as well as many whose position on Linux I don't know.) -
Re:Stay away annoying journalists.
Calling yourselves "The Linux Foundation" suggests a degree of breadth and openness that this group clearly does not demonstrate. I don't have a problem with corporations holding meetings to determine what they might undertake collectively, but then call it what it is, the "Corporate Linux Users Foundation" or something like that. It's nice that they pay Linus's salary, I guess, but do you really think Novell or RedHat or IBM would tell him to take a hike if he offered to work at one of those places instead?
I wonder what kind of access you get for an individual affiliate membership of $25? Somehow I doubt they'd pay much attention to me compared to those Platinum sponsors at $500K. Reading the Bylaws tells me only that as an affiliate member I can't vote for members of the Board, vote to dissolve the Foundation, etc. Other than that, whatever privileges Affiliates get is determined by the Board. I didn't see a list of those privileges, but I can't claim to have scoured the site.
And, doesn't Adobe have a few interests on the desktop? -
Re:Stay away annoying journalists.
Calling yourselves "The Linux Foundation" suggests a degree of breadth and openness that this group clearly does not demonstrate. I don't have a problem with corporations holding meetings to determine what they might undertake collectively, but then call it what it is, the "Corporate Linux Users Foundation" or something like that. It's nice that they pay Linus's salary, I guess, but do you really think Novell or RedHat or IBM would tell him to take a hike if he offered to work at one of those places instead?
I wonder what kind of access you get for an individual affiliate membership of $25? Somehow I doubt they'd pay much attention to me compared to those Platinum sponsors at $500K. Reading the Bylaws tells me only that as an affiliate member I can't vote for members of the Board, vote to dissolve the Foundation, etc. Other than that, whatever privileges Affiliates get is determined by the Board. I didn't see a list of those privileges, but I can't claim to have scoured the site.
And, doesn't Adobe have a few interests on the desktop? -
This story is factually incorrectWhile I respect Joe, he unfortunately missed the fact that on the other two days that he _wasn't_ at the conference, there were all-day desktop Linux meetings.
The focus was split pretty evenly between the desktop and the server - although journalists were only invited to the first day and that session was, admittedly, weighted towards the server. However, the two all-day desktop meetings and many of the other sessions (Printing in Linux, virtualization, energy efficiency) involved significant Desktop content. I'm not sure that his claim can be substantiated.
From the conference agenda:Wednesday, 9-5: Desktop Linux Architects Meeting
- State of the Linux Desktop - Linux Distros
- OEM vendor round table: what they need to have a successful Linux desktop
- Building a Desktop Environment Ecosystem - Gnome / KDE
- Linux Desktop Implementation Case Studies
- Virtualization on the Desktop
- State of X
- OpenPrinting Joint Session
- Creating Portable Linux Applications, Joint Session with the LSB Workgroup
- Desktop kernel requirements
- Desktop project Lightening Talks
-
Lack of Desktop Focus?!
I was at the Collaboration Summit and am surprised by the comment of "Lack of attention to desktop Linux." According to the agenda, there was a Desktop Panel on day 1, and all day Desktop Workgroup meetings on days 2 and 3. That doesn't seem like a lack of attention to desktop Linux to me. I attended the Desktop Panel and part of the Desktop Workgroup meeting and they seemed like attention to desktop Linux rather than a lack thereof.
-
Re:No Desktops
What I found equaly interesting in the report is the lack of mention of Dell and Ubuntu in the list. From most estimates Ubuntu leads the pack as far as desktop installs are concerned, and Dell had promised better driver support for their Linux PCs.
What I found equally interesting in your post is that in the report (not the press release), the very first paragraph explains why Dell and Ubuntu are off the list.
The kernel is a relatively small part of the software on a full Linux system (many other large components come from the GNU project, the GNOME and KDE desktop projects, the X.org project, and many other sources), but it is the core which determines how well the system will work and is the piece which is truly unique to Linux.
I doubt Canonical is populated by a bunch of kernel hackers. They might contribute a whole lot for Free Software, they just don't work on the kernel.
-
Re:Is this real? - Umm yestorvalds said it himself:
I get asked a lot, which this probably won't surprise you, why doesn't the kernel have a stable device driver ABI?
Linus Torvalds: Well, there's - the lack of an ABI is two-fold: one is we really, really, really don't want one. Every single time people ask for a stable ABI, the main reason for wanting a stable ABI is they want to have their binary drivers and they don't want to give out source and they don't - certainly don't want to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel.good article, short read. enjoy
-
Are you joking?
This is the list of members:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Members
You can call it whatever you want, but not a scam for sure. -
Re:No such thing as a closed source port to open O
That is why they established the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and freedesktop.org. You say "My software runs on LSB 3.2 IA32 and IA64" and provide a
.deb and .rpm for each and be done with it. It's no more difficult that supporting Win32 and Win64 and providing a .exe and .msi for each. -
Re:Make it Short and Fast and Snappy
>Interrupt loads can be greatly reduced by switching to a polling-driven architecture. See FreeBSD.
New API (NAPI) takes a mixed approach, read: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_API ], and for more information: [ http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Net:NAPI ]. -
I learned "Settings" once...
Fact is, you can configure KDE to work pretty much the way GNOME does, if you really want to.
The reverse is not true. Maybe the GNOME people have better defaults, according to you. But they have a nasty habit of removing functionality because it might confuse someone. Classic example: In KDE, I can configure what clicking my title-bar does. Or double-click, or middle-click, or right-click, or mouse-wheel. In GNOME, well...
Here, Linus said it best. -
Re:We can only hope...
Yeah, I didn't realize how much further they had come(3.1 looks to have reasonable distro support). Note that almost no applications care yet:
https://www.linux-foundation.org/lsb-cert/productdir.php?by_lsb
Maybe in a couple more years. -
Re:We can only hope...
That already exists: http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/LSB
-
Re:Why specifically Ubuntu?
Linux is Linux is Linux
While that is the case superficially, every release of every distro comes with different versions of the various shared libraries. That leaves the following possibilities:
- Ship software as source and expect customers to compile it
- Provide source and get popular enough so that the distros do the compilation for you
- Provide the software yourself, and pick some subset of all Linux distros/versions to support
Note that for Windows you can provide a single setup.exe and it will run on everything from Windows 98 through Vista.
Here are some examples of Linux applications:
- Opera where they pick a sizable number and versions of distros
- pidgin CentOS/RHEL/Fedora
- skype where they have 8 variations
- Oracle supports RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Asianux
Basically a closed source vendor has to pick a limited number of distros and versions for logistical reasons. You'll also notice that they typically only support x86 processors, but it is rare indeed to see something like PowerPC Linux support. The Linux Standards Base was supposed to address this, but for example they said RPM is the standard packaging mechanism. That annoys anyone using Debian, Slackware etc. If they had picked Deb as the standard then it would have annoyed Redhat/Fedora/Suse etc instead.
So in summary, Linux is only Linux is only Linux if you provide your software as source. Even then, if the distros don't package you then you'll still end up supporting a subset of all versions of all distros of all processors.
-
Re:Video drivers
And the DRM kernel stuff will be getting upgrades soon
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast/hardware#The_TTM_memory_manager
http://www.x.org/wiki/ttm
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DRI2 -
Re:Still dreaming of an aggregated connectionSounds like your talking about bonding,
The Linux bonding driver provides a method for aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical bonded interface. The behavior of the bonded interfaces depends upon the mode; generally speaking, modes provide either hot standby or load balancing services. Additionally, link integrity monitoring may be performed. Net:Bonding
I've never did it but its supposed to do what your talking about. -
OS/2 printer driversAnyone else remember this announcement from about 2000? "Mark VanderWiele then presented his project, which frankly took most of us by surprise. IBM has over the years written printer drivers for essentially all printers to support OS/2. They are porting this project to Linux and releasing it as free software: probably GPL or perhaps LGPL."
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/PrintingSummit2000#OMNI
-
Re:The state of Packagage Managers
Not just me complaining about it.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Packaging
There is a problem with the current state of packaging in Linux. It shouldn't be so difficult, not only for end users but for developers. Common APIs need to be created so that packaging formats can compete and developers and users can have easy access to a simple system that does the things they need. OK, so RPMs work, why is it then that they are often not available? Maybe it's a format that could use some improvements, but regardless of the ease of use or power of RPMs, depending on one type is silly. The fact is, RPM isn't as common as it could be, regardless of the reasons for that, and that's a pretty critical part of the "Linux platform" for developers wanting to port or create programs for all LSB-compliant distros and for users wanting to just get to their programs without any fuss.
What defines a system should be the APIs so that you have modularity instead of being locked into one kernel, program, library, or format type. -
Re:Yes, OS X is hurting Linux Desktop Development
It's nice that you fail to specify anything I said which you specifically claim is a lie.
Well, looking at what you wrote,
Ha. LSB, what a joke. When was the last time there was an accepted LSB proposal to make Linux work better as a desktop instead of a server. Oh yeah, never.
Then she gives this link and calls you a liar:
http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Desktop-generic/LSB-Desktop-generic/book1.html
I understand where she is coming from and to me your intent seems to be towards 'bashing Linux' when I read that too. -
Re:Yes, OS X is hurting Linux Desktop Development
Ha. LSB, what a joke. When was the last time there was an accepted LSB proposal to make Linux work better as a desktop instead of a server. Oh yeah, never.
This statement alone is proof you are not worth talking or listening to.
Troll. -
Linus Torvalds on Gnome vs KDE
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2007-February/001127.html
"I did something better than any Gnome user has apparently ever done: I actually wrote the code to fix the thing." - LT
Does he really think he's that much smarter than every Gnome user and developer?
"I want something very simple: I want to configure my mouse button window events. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? Everybody else can do it, gnome does not." - LT
You already have that with KDE. Gnome developers can do what they want. It's really a design choice. "And I find it *offensive* how Gnome people can never just admit that they can't do something." - LT
How absurd. Sounds like a really simple UI feature. Does Linus really think Gnome developers are incapable or is he just trying to taunt them?
Torvalds posted on the GNOME-usability list that "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html
This, I find kind of odd. If he feels so strongly that KDE is the best, why attack Gnome incessantly?
Why should he try to make Gnome into KDE when KDE already exists? I guess this is a turf battle and he's pissed that Gnome has more market-share. He seems kind of ambitious beyond the scope of merely making his Kernel the best it can be. -
Skype, Windows Media Player - WTF?!
From https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/2007ClientSurveyResults (English results):
13. Which Windows applications would you like to see ported to a Linux environment to enable Linux desktop/client deployments? (Select all that apply)
Adobe Photoshop - 47.1% ...
Skype - 17.3% ...
Solitaire - 2.0%
Windows Media Player - 10.1%
Windows Movie Maker - 3.7%
Norton AntiVirus - 3.5%
McAfee VirusScan - 3.8%
14. Which best represents your plans for running or replacing Windows applications on a Linux desktop/client?
Use virtualization and run native Windows applications - 31.5% 2511
Use a compatibility layer (e.g. WINE) to run Windows applications on Linux - 31.5%
That's right! Emulate Windows and run Skype and Media Player! And don't forget Solitaire! -
Wrong address
The right address for the foundation is http://www.linux-foundation.org/ Please correct. The other domain is the usual parked domain full of ads...
-
Bad link
Although I'm sure everyone here doesn't need a link to remember the URL. . .
The link to the Linux Foundation in TFS is broken, it links to http://www.linuxfoundation.org/. A true slashdotter would know that it's http://www.linux-foundation.org/.