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Kernel 2.4.2 Released
Three weeks after 2.4.1 hit the streets, 2.4.2 is now available. Here's the Changelog, and here's the download link that I know you're looking for.
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> My MS Whistler has been up 342 days loser.
Cool. So you didn't apply any security patches. Can I have the IP of this machine, please ?
Cheers,
--fred
Am I the only one who spots the spelling error here?
all your this is slashdot not freshmeat are belong to us.
This just in...
Anyone remember how 2.2.2 was released on 2/2 (99)? That was insanely cool. Too bad they couldn't have waited until 4/2...
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Oddly enough, I agree. I'm from the UK and I use UK spelling, but I've worked on a project where I had to correct my "honour" to "honor" because the standard was US spelling. This was a company founded in the UK with offices in the US, and I thought they made the right decision to standardise on US spelling. Er, I mean standardize.
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Xenu loves you!
I was just thinking of how great a compressed filesystem would be, even given the CPU performance hit, but then a bit of nastiness hit me... how do you handle the case where someone goes in and changes a middle byte in a 200 MB file and the recompressed block won't fit back into its place? Do you just end up rewriting the whole file? Or are blocks in a list and you have a fragmented file (but then what's the point of compressing files if you'll just end up wasting space anyways)? I don't think a patch is going to do it, a whole new filesystem would be needed. I wonder how current implementations do it (say in Windows 2000)?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Torvalds and Tannenbaum hashed out this argument long ago.
Tannenbaum lost . . .
hawk
This form of governmnet can only last until the hippo decides to sit on the horses . . .
hippocracy, n. The use of one hippo-like status (i.e., fat, bloated, and heavy) in the market to squish competitors. see also "Microsoft"
:)
hawk, who knows better than to flame spilling, but this was just to juicy
*cackles outrageously*
Somehow, I just don't see stability and me mixing. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's good for Linus to want to keep the 2.4.x kernels stable, but at the same time, I don't want to "downgrade" to a later kernel. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
2.5.2 (development kernel) is most likely going to lead to the 3.0 stable kernel. Skipping the ones you mention there.
I emailed him about that hours after he released the patch. No reply yet. :)
Jason.
Our (6-way) router has been experiencing stability problems for some time now. I upgraded to 2.4.2-pre4 after one of the ChangeLog entries caught my eye, and the stability problem went away. (I believe the problem was in the 3com drivers.) Finally I've found a stable kernel for our router. No more down time! :)
Jason.
Try O'Reilly.
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But have you tried cramfs? It works pretty well for systems that are relatively static - I don't think you can use it on
...well, as soon as the loopback bug gets fixed.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=cramfs
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Yah, but turning off javascript means that a large number of sites will not work (Internet banking, webmail, auto-cursor focusing) All kinds of creature-features that I'm not willing to do without. I run Javascript under Win98, WinNT4, and Win2K with no problems. Now, if I could just get javascript to work reliably with Netscape 6 or Konqueror under Linux, talk about flaky. I hope changing to Mozilla .8 will help... I am sick of dual-booting and would like to just go for the Linux uptime record instead of rebooting every time I need to do something that I cannot do with Linux browsers... :(
The text login screen displays the kernel version. If you have your machine set to auto-start X, then hit CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to text mode, look at the screen, then hit CTRL-ALT-F7 to switch back to X.
Exactly how long did it take you to figure that out? I'm sure it wasn't so intuitive that you just knew. First you have to know to right-click, rather than left-click, to get the properties menu. That alone is nothing I would call more intuitive than looking at the login screen (You don't even have to log in...) and about equal with the uname -r as far as intuitiveness.
Open you mind a bit, remember that there was a day that you were just as lost with Windows as you seem to be currently with Linux. You'll learn, it'll get easier.
They may not be able to make it fool-proof, but they can already use it to show proof of fools.
Sid is Debian's forever "unstable" release. The "testing" distribution is the one which will get a new name once "woody" is done. Ganesan
Actually, Internet Exploiter can handle gzip, as long as the web server specifies the MIME type correctly. This is how mod_gzip works. (Yes, they are slightly different things on the server side, but the same stuff happens on the client side.
What do you mean by feeding it locally? If you just opened the file with it, there was noone there to give it a MIME type.
I've compiled both 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 just fine with Debian unstable. I am completely up to date though - are you?
Ugh! It just hit me and I was up to date but not with debian.org but a mirror.
Troll, But I'm hungry.
The major problem people have with service packs is that they are huge.
A service pack is likely to introduce half the number of bugs it fixes, if you are unlucky one of the new bugs will affect you.
In the linux world we have kernel releases more often. You can upgrade if you want to, if you are satisfied with the older kernel but need a bug fixed you can usually patch just that bug.
You usually won't get much help from Microsoft unless you are running the latest service pack. If you don't they will tell you to install it.
There is another rather huge difference also, this is a kernel release. A Windows Service Pack can affect anything on the system while a kernel upgrade usually only affects the kernel.
Hi.
I'm not too sure what's going on, some can someone help me: I downloaded 2.4.2 and was hapily compiling it until at the end of "make bzImage" I got an error about ld not being able to find "binary." The line in the makefile was something along the lines of:
ld -elf [..] -s -oformat binary bootsect.s bootsect.o
(forgive me if I'm a little off, I'm away from the machine at the moment..)
I quickly flipped through the ld manpage and saw that -oformat is a valid option. I then tried recompiling 2.4.1 which I had installed cleanly when it came out and got the same problem. I looked at the Makefile in 2.2.18 and there is no -oformat for the ld call there.. at last I can still compile it..
Does anyone have any ideas about what my problem is? I don't know too much about the Gnu linker, but it looks like maybe the version in sid doesn't jove with the Linux kernel..
Help?
Ben
My girlfriend has informed me that Sid was the bad kid in the first movie. I haven't seen it though, so don't quote me on it..
Ben
Maybe, but it is beginning to appear not..... We have multiple SparcStations and PC's in our house, and until this week, on couple of PCs, We had Win2K/WinME and Linux Installed on separate carriage Hard Disks. Because when it came to certain things, still it was hard to beat Win2k. As a matter of fact , just for that reason, I had been a professional subscriber to MSDN. (Last update was just this January.) However after installing 2.4.1 and then 2.4.1 with KDE 2.1.x beta and loading the ALSA drivers ( now up to version 0.9), I am totally impressed. Now I can do things with my RME Hammerfall (full) , MidiMan DIO2448 , SBLive platinum and Ensoniq 1371 cards that I could not even dream of before. We started salvaging the HDs that win2k/Win98/WinME were taking and changing them into nfs shared disks. This is a diffusion equation with exponentially growing distributed sources. Any one with some physics/math background already knows that the outcome is inevitable. With the LiVid's latest DVD players, and Matrox's support for G400 dual head(one machine) and G450 dual head (in the other) and with my Sony PCG-XG18 and my wife's Fujitsu Lifebook, we are in heaven. However I will keep all the 600 or so MSDN CDs and 50 or so MSDN DVDs for future reference. As it stands now they are relegated to the upper shelf ( and yes I did see a whistler beta there, but frankly I don't care anymore. Not with ASP/.NET concept and the secure path .... I even stopped downloading Win2k updates after they screwed up my multi region DVD player hw/sw...) I basically do not trust any closed source s/w anymore. The last s/w I am ordering is Mathematica 4.1 , but I am also coming up on Maxima (open source Macsyma). I already use {Star,Open}Office. Word 2000 came with my Sony PCG-XG18, but I never installed it. StarOffice/Cygwin/Forte/Netbeans catered to every need I had on Win2k, and they do just fine on Linux. Oh BTW, Konqueror is great. Now I no longer need Netscape or IE either....
YMMV
sinan
The 2.4.1ac series included a couple of fixes for the Matrox G450 card. The changelog for 2.4.2 says "sync up more with Alan", but it doesn't say what changes were sunc. How can I find out if the Matrox fixes went in or not?
Thanks,
Stuart.
Furthermore, you can't run NFS of a ReiserFS partition yet
I could swear that I was sharing a couple of ReiserFS volumes over NFS last summer... Yeah, I must've, because the whole lab ran exclusively Reiser (installed with SuSE). NFS doesn't care what file system is below it, it's a user-space thing (except when it's a kernel-space thing, in which case it still shouldn't even know what FS is underneath it).
Doh. I seem to have forgotten about ""
/comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
BTW, what's up with this:
Slow down cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
It all depends on what you want to spend your money on, or what you happen to have a surplus of. Processing power or disk space.
If your webserver is so busy that a compressed filesystem adversely affects your performance, then obviously a compressed filesystem would be a poor choice. On the other hand, if you have a very lightly used web server with a large volume of data, then it might be a good idea.
Nice to have the option
Don't forget web pages! Those are generally stored uncompressed, and a large web site can literally have gigs of HTML files.
If you know C++, then C's easy. It's just C++ without all the good parts.
No problem here. I compile my kernels using gcc 2.95.2 (from Debian potato).
I don't think you can compile it with the 'new' compiler that came with Redhat 7.0, but I'm not sure.
Je ne parle pas francais.
ReiserFS is generally stable and works for most persons without any trouble. I've been using it for months now on my desktop and I'm really impressed with it. Pressing reset almost becomes fun ;-)
However, last time I checked, ReiserFS didn't support quota (this may have changed, I'm sure patches exist). It also doesn't support a bad-block map, so be carefull with partially damaged harddisks.
Furthermore, you can't run NFS of a ReiserFS partition yet.
ReiserFS is very fast. You can really notice difference to ext2, mainly in large directories.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
First, try 2.4.1. Knowing if 2.4.1 works for you is fital in finding the bug.
Then, when you know what version broke the driver, you may or may not investigate further on your own. You might want to try some 2.4.2-preX kernel to futher pin down the breakage.
Eventually, just file a bug report to the Linux kernel mailing list. Be sure to be as accurate as possible: describe your hardware and the symptoms as exact as possible.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I actually have a few systems set aside for the following at home:
Open BSD 2.7, FreeBSD, and perhaps NetBSD if I have the time (Then again, I might make it a Solaris box).
I am unfamiliar with BSD, hence why I wish to try it, what are softdeps? The term reminds me of "symlink" for some reason (as in the way a symlink appears on the inode table).
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Ummm SUSE already has a 2.4 distro out.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
What hypocrisy?
Windows service packs affect more code than just the kernel. They don't allow me to selectively fix what I want, either. And they tend to break more than they fix.
With the linux kernel updates I can update just the kernel, rather than the kernel, the webserver and the kitchen sink. If I want to upgrade the webserver I'll do that separately, thank you. Also, I honestly see fewer changes in between 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 (or 2.4.0 and 2.4.2, really) than the average service pack fixes.
It isn't about how often updates are required, it's about whether those updates are out when I need them (esspecially security fixes) and how much control I have over running them. And not breaking more stuff.
i think you should be looking at the mode rather than the average file size to determine savings to be had from shrinking blocksize. consider the situation in which you have 1e7's of 10-byte long files and a couple 1e9-byte files.
--Phil
Boy, you've got a slow system if it takes you two months to compile three releases. Maybe if you invest in some more RAM or faster hard disks, you won't have this problem.
The other alternative is to stick with 2.2.19 or 2.0.39.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
It's not the size, it's how you use it.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Bullshit.
You can't buy Whistler at Fry's or anywhere else. You'll never be able to buy Whister... only Windows XP. Unless you're using some weird pre-alpha, Whistler builds haven't even been around for 342 days.
Okay, I'll bite.
The benefits of linux release methodology over the Microsoft release methodology:
- I can quickly get a sense of what is being improved with each kernel release by looking at the changes notice that is included with each kernel.
- I can find in depth discussion of some changes by following the kernel development list or the major discussion by reading the kernel traffic summaries that are published weekly at http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html
- I can go read the code in the kernel to try to discern what is going on
- I can try to contact a kernel developer directly to seek information on a particular improvement
- I can offer my own improvements to the code
- I can tell what the benefits or a particular improvement are and who will benefit from this improvement
- I do not have to blindly go forth into the mire of a service pack and hope that it fixes a problem in a correct and well thought out manner and hope that it truly offers a benefit and does not only serve the interests of one entity
Does this mean that some bad ideas don't get brought into kernel releases? No. Does this mean that I have to expend less effort in deciding upon and then executing a update of my system? No. But I do have more tools available and better information to help me to decide if this is the right decision.
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Includes
And this really doesn't give me much to chomp on with regard to if this is a good idea for my system. And considering that I may not be running exchange, may not be serving NNTP, and may not be running two virtual NNTP servers on my box, is this something that I need anyways? And how do I judge this on it's merits? There is little diagnostic information available and basically they ask for blind trust in a situation which time and time again they have shown that they are not deserving of it.
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> So, if you're not running Exchange and don't have two virtual NNTP servers, then the bug does not affect you.
Then why should the solution?
> You can understand kernel source code, but can't read English. Are you a bot?
Yes, ofcourse I'm a bot. In fact, I'm the first bot to be able to understand kernel source code and evaluate it's effectiveness for use. You should fear for your job!
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One of the reasons 2.4.0 was released when it was was to get a larger base of testers. Distros aren't goint it use 2.4 for a while yet, RedHat started using 2.2.0 (and 2.2.1/2.2.1 were released pretty quickly after 2.2.0..)
Uhhh...it *IS* out of experimental. It was included in 2.4.1 production. I migrated my home machine and my webserver over to it. No fsck is a good thing especially when your home machine locks up from a buggy nvidia x driver ;) hehehe
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
cpeterso
I've heard the Debian's next release is codenamed Sid, but which Toy Story character was Sid? I've never seen the movies.
cpeterso
Whistler Beta 1?
cpeterso
If you'd prefer that they slow down the release cycle and include more changes in each release, then just install every other kernel.
Staying on the bleeding edge does sting, that's why they call it that...
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
> o Fix 48 misspellings of interrupt (André Dahlqvist)...
Maybe they need to add a make spellcheck step to kernel compilation.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I speak for people with small drives everywhere when I say:
When will the kernel support default compression of filesystems.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
"Well bitch, don't be so fucking lazy and code it up yourself. Isn't that the beauty of Open Source? "
Well bitch here's the rundown.
1. learning all the ins and outs of the kernel is a full time job in itself. I don't have the time to spend 6 months learning exactly what goes where.
2. C coding is not taught in any standard form in current university settings. I have learned Pascal, C++, bash, ksh, and csh but I never touched C because it wasn't formally taught.
3. Writing kernel code is approximately 200% harder and more precise than writing an application program.
4. I don't have expertise levels of OS design.
Those things being stated I feel that at least on the surface once those things have been removed it wouldn't take say Linux or Alan Cox much more than 5 minutes of their time to get it working once and for all. Basically you just have something sitting above the call to storing or writing data and have your favorite compression algorithm there to act as an intermediary.
I hope this is more lucid than your reply.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Maybe you should read the the announcements that come with every kernel release before proclaiming that:
Don't just go out and grab 2.4.2...
From Linus's announcement:
The IDE driver bug that Russell found has, to my knowledge, never been shown to happen on anything but his ARM machine, but for all we know it could be quite bad even on x86. Similarly, the elevator bug could cause corruption, but probably has not actually bit people in practice. But both are definitely deadly...
I don't know about you, but I think this may be significant and worth the upgrade if you use IDE in your systems.
Remembering your name in the morning is already a good start...
Does anyone know if 2.4 still requires an old version of gcc?
Or; can anyone confirm that I'm "safe" when compiling to the i686 target with gcc 2.95.2?
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
It certainly wasn't out of it in my copy of 2.4.1.
Unless the Debian guys put it back in.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
body to body
headhunter
serial killers don't kill their boyfriends
this is the version i'll run forever now.
<duck>
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Although it's only just gone into the kernel in 2.4, reiserfs has been stable and working for a while, and is already included in a number of distros.
I use Mandrake 7.1 (current is 7.2) which has reiserfs - I use it for all my non-root filesystems to avoid the fsck checks.
but it is how to spell 'unneccessary'
Old Joke
Teacher: 'Johnny, how do you spell cat?'
Johnny: 'K A T'
Teacher: 'That doesn't spell cat'
Johnny: 'well, what does it spell?'
It works better if you say it out loud.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Glad to hear that you are going to do the rewrite. The source is all there. Are you setting up your efforts on sourceforge or will you just announce it view usenet ala Linus?
heh. can't forget the "older" kernels. does 2.2.22 count? how bout 2.0.102 ? :)
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
I hope you're not being serious.
How is following a path of clicks and right clicks any more "intuitive" than using 'uname'? That's ludicrous.
MAN are you DULL.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Actually the parent was modded down, so it could look like I replied to the original thread MOTHER.
Perhaps THIS is what INCURRED your response?
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Technically if you go by the Greek roots, a hippocracy would be a government under the rule of a horse or a body of horses.
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
Now if only you could spell it.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
I had the same problem, and unless something was upgraded in the last 2 hours I am in fact completly up to date.
treke
Some of the developers may use cvs on the sections they maintain, but eventually it all has to be sent in the form of patches to Linus who merges together the official tree using whatever voodoo he uses to manage all of the updates.
treke
.........and a serious mp3 collection is allready compressed. Any compressed fs is not going to get much more out of it.
PPPPPPPPpppppfffffffffffzz.............
Maybe you live in interesting times
after reading the changelog, I dont see EXT2 corruption mentioned anywhere..... where did you get that from?
I spent almost a week downloading Red Hat's 2.4.0 beta and getting it installed (all I really wanted was iptable support). And, after getting it installed and customizing it so it would actually work (Hey! It's a beta distro...) I was amazed at the overall speed and performance. But, iptables would not work (xinetd required a backpedel to an earlier version) and I was forced to use IPChains. As it is, the box is still sitting behind my firewall rather that on the front line.
Downloaded 2.4.1 and tried to compile it. It broke things in the RD distro. Downloaded the most current iptables and recompile the 2.4.0-99..whatever RH kernel. iptables still would not work.
Today, out of a whim, I downloaded and recompiled 2.4.2. Not only did it compile without any issues, but iptables works as well (imagine that).
Can't wait to see tomorrow if, when I reboot, that it tells me nfsstatd didn't start like 2.4.0 and 2.4.1 did when I recompiled. Well, I gotta see, recompiled the kernel from home and it just sounds too good to be true.
RD
The reason, which you and the people who replied to you seem to have missed, is because Microsoft said themselves that Windows 2000 would never required fixes. They lied to the corporate managers and other people who choose what to run on the servers in order to get more money.
That is what people don't like about MS Win2k. Linus never claimed that 2.4.0 would be bugfree (or if he did, he did it tongue-in-cheek). If MS had more truth in their advertising, I know I'd be happier.
--
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Give us a break. The whole point of linux is "do what works" not "do what's propper." Not to mention, why don't you quit gabbing about it and do it yourself. That's the beauty here. If you think Linus is doing an ass job, he actively encourages you to try and do better. You don't have to overrule him to make some changes, you just do it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
If I'm not mistaken, Debian does that at least to some degree... which means there is a whole distribution's worth of people doing that.
When will Reiser FS (or any other journaling fs) be out of the experimental stage?
I'm tired of fsck (not that I see it often...)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
You still have to select "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" to even get the option to build Reiser FS.
If it's stable then why is this?
Maybe I'm missing something, if so just let me know.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
You still can't play any cool games from the $10 bin at Bestbuy/CompUSA though.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Well, 2.4.2 fixes the ext2 filesystem corruption problem. Lots of people run ext2 :)
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
The kernel traffic editions since the release of 2.4.0. It's talked about as 'filesystem corruption', and was tracked to the VM (IIRC).
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
.technomancer
.technomancer
.technomancer
.technomancer
someone mod Androsyn up! the original poster is clearly a troll and has never read Linus famous arguements with Tannenbaum.
see the archive at ORA
Could have something to do with the fact that his wife, Tove, was pregnant and gave birth in late November I believe. I think that would take a bit more priority over tbe release of 2.4.0
Obviously you never read the flame war between Tannenbaum and Linus that took place in 1991. Theoritical design is one thing, but writing something that works and works well is another.
But, if you don't like how things are going with the linux kernel, nobody is stopping you from starting your own fork of the linux kernel. Import the whole source tree into your own CVS repository, get some developers and get some work done.
Just for the record, if someone was curious as to exactly what was fixed in a Windows service pack they could go to The Windows Service Pack Home Page and from there see What was fixed in Win2K Service Pack One which plainly lists problems with a detailed description.
rob.
Yeah, he said javascript DEBUGING.
So, if you're not running Exchange and don't have two virtual NNTP servers, then the bug does not affect you.
You can understand kernel source code, but can't read English. Are you a bot?
In the changelog it says "USB and Firewire updates". Does this mean IEEE1394 patches are now included in the kernel source so this actually works.
Ciao
----
FB
Let's see if we can flood the download mirrors by all downloading the kernel at once!!!
Yaaaaay!
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Don't just go out and grab 2.4.2. Odds are you don't even need it. It's merely another stable release that spreads what Linux can run on.
You haven't read the fscking Changelog have you?! 2.4.2 fixes a serious IDE multimode write bug. If anyone has even somewhat-modern IDE hard drives in their system, it is certainly worth their while to get it.
I think SCSI-only boxen can wait, though -- but Linux was (and still is, to a degree) all about Unix on low-cost x86 hardware, so methinks there be plenty of IDE-based Linux systems around...
--
From the changelog:
-pre2:
- Russell King: fix serious IDE multimode write bug!
If you have IDE hard drives, I recommend you pop 2.4.2 into place purdy quick. Write bug == bad.
--
Maybe you're right, maybe I do just know where the workarounds are under Linux. But that does come back to Linux's basic openness...there are lots of diagnostic tools available (ps, strace, ltrace, gdb, lsof, netstat, lspci, /proc, etc) and the source is available, so it's very, very easy to see what's going on in the system and where problems are. So if I do know where the workarounds are under Linux...I think that's why. Windows just doesn't ship out of the box with those kinds of tools. Some I've managed to find (PrcView is a decent approximation of ps, for example), some I haven't.
As to my specific problems...I just checked, the "JavaScript debugging disabled" option is on. I assume that means debugging is disabled. So, that doesn't seem to be my problem, but thanks anyway.
For the curious, here are a couple of the weird problems I'm having with IE5.5 right now:
Buy windows 2000 and you have to download 1 service pack and thats means its a terrible OS that needs constant patching. Download linux 2.4.0 then 2.4.1 and then 2.4.2 in less than half that timespan and rather than meaning that 2.4.0 was a terrible OS that needs constant patching it is an innovative OS with a rapid turnaround. Am I the only one who spots the hipocracy here?
I see no hypocrisy.
First, when I make a judgement like that about a Microsoft product, it's not because of the number of service packs. I realize that all software of that complexity has bugs. It's instead that their software doesn't work well for me, even after applying all the service packs. Their service packs just don't seem to fix all the important problems for me, no matter how many I apply. For example, I've patched my Windows 98 system to the latest Windows Update stuff, but I'm still having some weird problems with Internet Explorer.
Second, Linux x.y.z releases are not just bugfix releases. In this case, it probably is...x.y.[1-5] typically are. But there are many new features introduced in point releases. 2.2.18 (or was it 2.2.19?), for example, backported USB support to the 2.2 series. I see a lot of important new features introduced in new Linux point releases, which I don't see in Windows service packs. Having a specific x.y just means the basic architecture is constant, not that the feature set is.
Third, as someone else mentioned, you don't need to upgrade to a new kernel revision to fix a bug. You have the source code, and you have the full patches. If you just want to fix one bug, you can do that. You don't have that option with Microsoft code, since it's not open-source.
Netware has a compressed file system that works very well. It background compresses files that have not been accessed in x hours/days. When read access to a compressed file is necessary, one of two events occurs. If the file has been read accessed less than y times in z hours/days, the file is uncompressed to a temporary space and deleted a while later. If the file is accessed y times, the file is uncompressed and remains that way until the initial compression criteria is again met. This works extremely well, frequently accessed files are not compressed and the space used by infrequently accessed files is minimized.
maru
windows 2000 is a finished, final product. they said, hey, we're done. this to me seem a promise, that it is finished. i understand of course that nothing is ever bug free, and patches are expected. but.... i doubt that microsoft tells you, 'hey, this is still under development, expect major bugfixes all the time!'.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Ummm....releasing the 2.3.x series at about this same pace?
Looking at some of these other posts you'd think it were a bad thing to have bug fixes and updates in a timely fashion.
forgot 02.4.20
Je t'aime Stéphanie
until 2.5.2 (or 3.0.3)
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Read the Kernel Traffic and find out!
Too ... many ... patches ....... system ... always ... compiling ....
SLOW THE HELL DOWN OVER THERE!!!!
Geez, these kernels just keep popping out. Can you folks give us a month or two to get used to 'em first?
Like you can't have 10 simultaneous connections on NT4 Workstation, but if you buy Server... That's the hardest part of building an NT server for me. I can configure DNS, DHCP ,etc, but I can never remember if I want per seat licensing or whatever.
Back to the topic though, what is up with the frequency of these releases? 2.4-test releases never came out so quick, and the changelogs aren't that long. Just curious, is it customary to release a slew of maintenance releases weeks after an x.x.0?
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
apropos kernel (gives a list of manpages that have information about the kernel)
in the list you'll see:
uname (2) - get name and information about current kernel
then of course:
man uname
etc...I'd say that's more intuitive, next apropos rocketscience...
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
André Dahlqvist is fusing the line between English major and CS major.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Rocket science?
No, a simple "uname -r" will suffice.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I knew uname returned system information, but I didn't know what option to use for just the kernel version. However, here's a very simple way to find things like that. The --help option is fairly universal, so I just looked at the help output and found my answer in a matter of seconds.
And anyway, if you're using GNOME, you can check your kernel name/version, dist version, processor type, your username, and your hostname by looking that the main screen of the GNOME Control Center (gnomecc).
I would bet money that KDE gives similar information in it's incarnation of a UI preferences system.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
.. still appears to be broken :-/
/neurox
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
*nt*
If you are truly being serious, the reason is because a kernel number makes it MUCH easier to understand the sort of kernel you are using.
The first number is a major code change, fundamental in nature. After about 7 years we are now up to 2.x.x. The second number also shows major revisions, but of a less fundamental variety than the first number. An odd second number denotes a development series, not intended to be used for production computers. This is why most users went from 2.0.x to 2.2.x to 2.4.x, because 2.1.x and 2.3.x were development versions. When the development version is deemed stable enough to be used in some production platforms, it moves to an even second number, like the recent 2.4.0. However, the 2.2.x kernel series is still being maintained for use as an ultra-stable kernel, while the 2.4.x is more cutting-edge for the latest hardware support and performance.
The third number indicates a small change, usually bugfixes but some small amounts of new features supported. When going to purchase new hardware it is easy to tell if you have a "2.2.0 or later kernel".
Finally, a service pack generally implies a large set of bugfixes, as Microsoft had somewhere around 7 (maybe 8) for NT 4. The Linux Kernel version system allows for a few small changes to be made at every release, decreasing the waiting time for users to wait for a desired bugfix or feature (instead of months for a new service pack).
If my overgeneralization of the Linux kernel was incorrect, my apologies, but I think an overall understading of how the Linux Kernel numbering system works is important for those who don't know yet.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
That said, I'm a happy Linux user who just wants his OS of choice to be intelligently defended...
MS engineers are carefully sheilded from the public for this sort of reason.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I am 95% sure that you have debug on javascript option enabled. TURN IT OFF (it doesn't do what you think it does anyway). I used to have all kinds of flakiness with IE in Win 98 until I learned of that problem (it comes disabled by default, I turned it on thinking it did something different than what it does, should have rtfm).
I'm not chiding you, but most linux people I know read all sorts of stuff about how to workaround problems in linux. I know very few people who are willing to put forth that effort in Windows. Both linux and windows are extremely buggy. I suspect the bug metrics for both pieces of software are similar. My guess is OpenBSD probably has much better metrics -- mind you I can handle the bugs and so I run both Win 98 and linux.
Clearly, you and I had different degrees of flakiness in mind. I'm sorry that I can't help you.
Having just gone through a fairly rigorous review of the possiblity of using Linux for our production environment, a couple of things I've found.
NFS works, but can cause lots of grief (file handle cache, etc.)
Their are apps that cause problems with ReiserFS (Qmail has to be patched)
Root filesystem is pretty iffy
None of the journaled filesystems support nfs locking, also using a journaled fs on the root partition is pretty much use at your own risk for all of the fournaled fs at this time. Qmail has some issues with synchronous tasks with ReiserFS (FAQ at Namesys explains this)
People are throwing up ReiserFS in front of me, when I say production Linux with lots of storage of storage (we deal in lots of terabytes here...) is a "no" right now. I just throw back that if I have to worry about the app not working with my filesystem and by the way don't do any writes over NFS, then I don't feel comfortable running it in production (not to mention that nasty root compromise with ReiserFS just a few weeks ago).
Don't get me wrong I'm running both XFS & ReiserFS currently and like both, but they ain't getting anywhere near my production EMC storage, until they grow up a bit more. (on a side note we are using Linux in production, but only on things with 50 gig of storage or less, and can sustain some downtime, with limited revenue loss)
Agreed.
Well ladies and gentleman, assuming that such an endanger species somehow made it into this discussion......
You and Tanenbaum seem to share the belief that the architecture of the OS is the highest priority. Linus seems to focus instead on practicality and performance, although he does value architectural simplicity and elegance very highly too.
Linus has good reasons for the decisions he's made. You can read about them at Kernel Traffic. And in the end Linus appears to have been proven correct, after all Linux has far higher market share than the other OSes you mentioned: BeOS, QNX, and Plan 9. There are people who agree with you (see the Buy Linus a Spine page), but no one has stepped up to the plate and tried to take over which I think indicates that most reasonable people are willing to live with Linus' "quirks" because his usually his ideas have turned out to be right.Because the linux advocates constantly criticise microsofts service packs means of upgrading. Buy windows 2000 and you have to download 1 service pack and thats means its a terrible OS that needs constant patching. Download linux 2.4.0 then 2.4.1 and then 2.4.2 in less than half that timespan and rather than meaning that 2.4.0 was a terrible OS that needs constant patching it is an innovative OS with a rapid turnaround.
Am I the only one who spots the hipocracy here?
You're the only one who sees any hypocracy here, mainly because you're the only one who believes in that statement about Windows 2000 you made. The complaint I keep hearing about MS OSes is that they have bugs, and that you can't download patches for them until the next service pack arrives. Notice the difference between what I heard and what you've claimed. I don't think that anyone actually complains that MS OSes are buggy because you can only download patches as a big service pack. That complaint doesn't even make sense. But people do complain that 1) MS OSes are buggy and 2) They hate waiting for a service pack to get their patches for those bugs. The problem with Windows 2000 is that "it's a terrible OS which needs constant patching" but we can't constantly patch it, because there are no patches for many problems." Also, big service packs tend to create multiple new bugs, but that's another issue.
"Rapid turnaround" is the key here. We all want "rapid turnaround" for bug fixes. If a bug is out there, we want it fixed now! Which OS gives you this, Linux or Windows 2000 (gives you this more often, at least)?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Currently, 2.4.1 is the latest "something for everyone" kernel, and only because of a change in memory handling. Read the changelogs before downloading the kernels and see if there is anything you'll actually USE!
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Aparently this has been known about for a couple weeks and a patch has been made but for some reason didn't make it in 2.4.2
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Garett
Now, I know this probably is not the place to ask, but I would need the sym53c500 module for my PCMCIA SCSI card....Doesn't seem to be supported since 2.2.14...At least I don't manage to compile a tarball that I found for 2.2.14 under kernel 2.4.1 (Which doesn't surprise anyone) :-(
I really use my SCSI card quite a lot, and a link would be most helpfull. I really get fed up dual booting W9x to backup my data
Yes, I know...offtopic, sorry...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Because the linux advocates constantly criticise microsofts service packs means of upgrading. Buy windows 2000 and you have to download 1 service pack and thats means its a terrible OS that needs constant patching. Download linux 2.4.0 then 2.4.1 and then 2.4.2 in less than half that timespan and rather than meaning that 2.4.0 was a terrible OS that needs constant patching it is an innovative OS with a rapid turnaround.
Am I the only one who spots the hipocracy here?
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
I prefer to use solid state disks (CF card with PC card adapter) because I don't like the noise that a hard disk makes in my laptop in a quiet room. A 128 meg CF card is around $200. That's enough space for a reasonable Linux system and some user files, but not enough to let you be wasteful. So a compressed fs would be helpful.
There is support for the via82c686 in the 2.2.18 kernel and has been in 2.4.x since at least 2.4.0pre10 (that was the first one I tried).
It's in patch-2.4.2-ac1
I don't know if that makes much difference. Let's say SP 1 == kernel x.y.1 through 5. How many people will be running x.y.5 without the changes introduced in the 2->3 transition? Yes, I know you can do it and yes, I know how to do it. But realistically there's almost no one doing that. For most users, using kernel x.y.z means using all the patches introduced between 0 and z.
How does the fact that an NT box somewhere has a 3 day uptime means the guy you're responding to doesn't have a 342 day uptime?
And why are you assuming that whatever web server Netcraft is tracking is part of the Datacenter Server setup that's supposed to be providing the 99.999% uptime?
Come on, my Linux box at home isn't even on now - does that mean Linux doesn't run at all?
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Alan Cox is doing that voodoo he do do: LWN report on 2.4.2ac1. Also, the ftp link.
More on 2.4.2 from the LWN is here.
Having just got my aged P90 to compile 2.4.2, I was slightly disappointed to find that support for its equally aging SCSI card (AIC7xxx onboard) seems to have been broken.
.2 changelog.
Because I have upgraded straight from 2.4.0 (which worked fine) I am not sure whether this problem first surfaced in 2.4.1, because I can't find anything particularly SCSI controller specific in the
It claims my controller is "disabled" during bootup (although it finds its IRQ), and then kernel panics with lack of a root file system.
I've never had compatibility problems with kernels before - where is the best place to report this issue?
Yay, so FINALLY a Linux kernel will recognize my Celeron's chipset correctly. Microsoft got its 82c686 driver set finished about a year ago. That was back in the days of 2.2.14.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
There is a reason it's huge. A MS Service pack will patch all versions of Windows. SP1 for Win2000 will patch Pro thru Advanced Server. And it has replacement files for all the components even if you don't have all of them installed.
I had just gotten my system all up on 2.4.1 from 2.2.x. What an experience it was getting the dsl/pppoe, iptables and nat all switched over. I saw the new 2.4.2 last night and was kind of pissed, wondering if 2.4.3 would be out before I got this one installed! But, I had my system patched and running in about an hour. It was rather pleasant knowing I had a kernel running just 2 1/2 hours after the thing was released.
how can the windows wistler have over 300 days uptime, its still hasn't finnished booting
"...the kernel can effectively take on modern kernel implementations, such as BeOS and QNX, and Plan 9's kernel."
1 346238&mode=thread
Maybe they are too busy taking on operating systems that people actually use to worry about conforming to an academic's idea of how software should be architected..
That sounds like I'm advocating market share over correctness, but I'm not. I'm saying that "correctness" is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholders who agree with you and Tannenbaum haven't made much headway in the Real World whereas Linus has.
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http://www.geekizoid.com/article.pl?sid=01/03/03/
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Try SuSE 7.0. I used to be a Slackware fanatic, then I tried all the rest and settled on SuSE. I started with 6.1 and applied the upgrades one after another and now I'm up to 7.0 with the 2.4.0 kernel and I'm impressed with how the SuSE distro gets more and more refined with each release. Just like Humphrey Bogart's line in the old "African Queen" movie: "Them Germans, they lay down a system and they stick with it."
:)
If you really want a free unix that works right out of the box with no headaches, try FreeBSD. It's a much more refined product than most all Linux distros. (let the flames begin
FreeBSD... different. (picture a Dodge car/truck TV commercial ripoff with little Chuck daemons dancing around instead of peppers)
I am still walking my l4m3r friends through compiling 2.4.1. :-)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
You use Whistler? And you call typical geek a loser? Read the blurb at the top, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Microsoft so doesn't matter!
Can't we ban these Microsoft idiots?
Mandrake has allowed RieserFS installs since at least version 7.1 in the ``expert'' install mode. [My laptop is currently drake 7.2 with ``RieserFS everwhere'' except for a 20M /boot.]
SGI provides a Modified Red Hat 7.0 Installer that allows installing linux on top of their XFS filesystem. I haven't tried the XFS under Linux, but I've been impressed with XFS under IRIX. [One of the larger machines I currently admin has several terabyte-sized XFS filesystems.]
On http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/server/ solutions/overview/reliable/default.asp Microsoft explains how Windows 2000 is "Five nines 99.999% uptime", and on the right is a link to a Starbucks Windows 2000 study.
r bucks.com indeed says "The site www.starbucks.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000." not a big surprise.
It goes on to say how much better the coffee is and how much happier customers are because of Windows 2000.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.sta
However, this is one of the sites that netcraft tracks for uptime.
Note: Uptime - the time since last reboot is explained in the FAQ
Plotted Value : Windows 2000
No. samples : 250
Max : 215.28
Latest : 3.18
3 days uptime is not something to brag about, Microsoft. Do some research before you stick your foot in your mouth, but only after shooting it.
I remember when a M$ rep came to talk to our usergroup. He told us that the service packs for win2k would be under 5MB! It's not that I actually believed this guy though, so I guess I wasn't too surprised when the service pack came in at 85MB (or 17 times the promised size).
ahh, but besides a few registry entries and a couple of programs, win2k pro could do the same thing as advanced server. The EULA and the registry and the cost really ARE the biggest differences. Of course, Redhat has two different installs you can do depending on what the primary use of the machine will be (server or workstation), but the kernel and basic features (like memory support and load balancing) remain the same. In addition to that, linux distros do not intentionally cripple their installs just to force the user into paying them huge sums of money for an "advanced server".
I remember reading this. If memory serves, Tannenbaum was bitching that Linux wasn't a microkernel. The arguments have been made and repeated over and over. If someone doesn't like the Linux kernel, there is no reason why they can't use Hurd. But the next time someone says that Minix is so much better, tell them to read the book. I did. Tannenbaum's opinions are formost opinions and should be treated as such.
You are all fartheads.
Why can't Linux just name it, like Linux 4, Service Pack 2?
He spelled it wrong, is actually called 'softupdates' and AFAIK is only available for FreeBSD.
> ...and start seriously thinking about proper
> change control - perhaps a CVS system instead
> of randomly throwing out tarballs.
Are you seriously saying that they don't use CVS?
Running ident(1) on some of the kernel files shows that atleast someone is using either RCS or CVS.
Perhaps I am missing your point. Do you mean that there should be a public anoncvs that allows the users to check out the newest version?
That is the reason I switched over to linux. Linus and others make it a priority to fix *bugs* whatever they are in the code. Not merely spending time on surface issues that would affect *most* people. Every bug is important. Every change to the kernel that improves its functionality with obscure hardware is an improvement. My .02
Bør bør bør, din mama er af smør...
.NOT
No, Linux
(I know)
Will work for bandwidth
I find it interesting that it took a relitivly large amout of time to finalize the 2.4.0 release, and now here we are around 2 months after the release and we already have 2.4.2. Makes you wonder what linus was doing in those days leading up to the 2.4.0 launch ;-)