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Linux Turns 10
An AC sent in: "The IBM PC may be 20 years old, but they're not the only ones with a birthday coming up. Check out www.linux10.org for an invitation to a birthday party on August 25 for the Linux kernel. The big bash is in Sunnyvale, just down the peninsula from the San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo, but there are also links to local parties around the globe (or if there are none near you, plan your own and add it to the list)."
Will any of these parties be put on the web via live stream?
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
...also related to infrastructure, can be found here. It's so interesting to compare what both have done to the internet. ;)
Sept. 9. at 01:46:40 GMT, the unix system clock is 1 billion seconds old.
SkåneSjællandLinuxUserGroup has a page that counts down to it (it's in danish, but most people should understand the numbers) at http://www.sslug.dk/~chlor/1000000000
Are we talking about the same OS? There is a reason that UNIX has remained essentially unchanged for the last thirty years, and that intelligent folks like Torvalds or the BSD or GNU people chose to clone UNIX instead of some other system. The reason is that UNIX is a Good Idea.
Take the API, for instance. Compared to most other systems in history it's a miracle of elegance and simplicity. In many OSes (especially those in the 60's), you have different system calls to write to a disk, systems calls to write to the printer, the display, other processes, etc. In UNIX, on the other hand, everything is a file (or more properly a file handle): regular files, directories, disks, tapes, pipes, sockets... The entire UNIX API boils down to open()/read()/write()/close(). Sure, implementations have acquired a lot of cruft of the years, but that's a property of any living system.
Take the file system. Other systems give you crap like drive letters, device names, and UNC paths. Not so in UNIX, where all your files and other stuff exist in a single unified namespace. You can use tar to write to a file, a tape, or a CD writer; it's all the same. One interface for everything.
Take the user interface. Instead of providing a lot of commands with lots of options for accomplishing some specific task, UNIX gives you a few commands that each do a particular thing well, along with the infrastructure (e.g., pipes) to combine them. Then the user can build arbitrarily complex stuff from a few simple commands.
In summary, UNIX is succesful (and becoming more so every day) because it is a work of art. Really. May it last another 30 years.
No, this is not flamebait. It's an honest (and somewhat sadened) remark by a very long time Linux fan (cfr. my signature) who just finally managed to get the sysadmins at his office (very much against the desires of their NT-minded (blinded?) boss) to seriously consider Linux SMP servers with Gigabytes of RAM for some heavy E-CAD work as a replacement for our aging HP-UX boxes. In fact, one such Linux sweety will likely be ordered quite soon for evaluation purposes. And what happens? Precisely now the 2.4 kernels are taking over the various distributions while having major trouble with their VM in exactly the kind of conditions we want to use them for.
Just to short cut one kind of replies: Of course we can use an older distribution or build our own combination of things (heck, I don't even use a distribution at home and compile everything from scratch). But at work, I'm not a sysadmin, and we have to make do with a few UNIX and NT experts and lots of people who how how to fix NT problems, but whom one might suspect of fearing that a Linux box will explode if they push the wrong key. And no, the latter is not a reproach, its an simple observation. It's quite normal given their backgounds, but it's also a major problem for us Linux zealots.
I absolulety hate to say it, but Linux still has a few more years to go before really making it, even in certain non-desktop roles. It needs a several more improvements in the technical department. It definitely needs to loose its tendency to have stable versions that aren't stable at all until several months after initial release. But most of all, it needs a whole class of people who know a considerable amount about using computers (read as: Windows machines), but don't really understand them, to get used to something which, to them at least, is completely new and exotic.
Linux user since early January 1992.