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Caldera's Almost-Linux Skips The Linux Kernel
Cassivs points to this UnixReview article, which says "Caldera has released Open UNIX 8, which includes a complete GNU/Linux distribution, except that it runs on the SVR5 kernel, acquired from SCO. It uses the same packages as Caldera's OpenLinux 3.1. It should scale much better, and provides a commercial UNIX kernel with the ability to natively develop GNU/Linux applications." It sounds like a non-Linux kernel has advantages on certain hardware, even running exactly the same software otherwise -- I wonder how long that will be true. Caldera has talked about this product, with it's Linux Kernel Personality, for a long time, and this is an informative review for anyone following it.
Sounds like proprietary open source to me!
Do you suppose that maybe, just maybe, multi-threaded performance will be an improved vs the linux kernel. It would certainly help some of the java app servers that I'd like to use.
GNU/UNIX?
I guess GNU really IS UNIX after all!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
so its much like AIX5L wich caldera(SCO) helped them create as far as I can work out
(any info ?)
this might be a nice product but it runs on x86 hardware and the clustering is not something that is revelutionary you can get heartbeat for linux and D.Becker seems to have MPI + rest going nicely
But its a nice way of going about things as proved by the AIX impl
But IBM sells the hardware thats where they get the suppport contracts from where is Caldera going to get them from ?
How about geting the UDI project running nicely and chargeing vendors for drivers on unix or about the nice update stuff the caldera has?
this as far as I'm concerned is the SCO staff trying to accert their will over the company
regards
john jones
i've got a spare box waiting for an OS so I'm gonna burn a cd and give it a try.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
NFS still does not work correctly and heaps of memory problems have been bugging the series until 2.4.5
Release early, releas often is good, but please state when you have a STABLE version so distros can use that. It seems to me that the 2.4 series is just one stumble after another..
Yeah, might be flamebait, but he, it had to be said!
Hey, why does everyone bash Caldera? Because they are not 100% free like Debian? Because they try to make money off a per-plate license?
Hey, if companies want to pay the per-plate thing, let them. It will be good for Caldera, as they are just trying to survive like the other Linux companies. If Caldera dies, so does some open-source sponsorships and development (like Webmin).
I personally like the OpenLinux distro. It is very business-like (or maybe MS-like), but that is appealing to me. I don't like looking at retarded penguin animations while I login. It also has some very cool admin tools, especially for servers.
I am glad to see this Caldera UNIX distro. They are just trying something new, trying to stay in business. That is most important. Stop picking on them.
Anyone else get the feeling that Caldera is purposely attempting to undermine the Linux market by fracturing it in the same way the old school Unix corporations did?
GNU's Now Unix?
-- Steve
A latent existence
SCO were offering the GNU Tools for OpenServer for the last couple of years under their Skunkworks initiative.
Presumably, this new Unix Kernel based distribution includes the non GNU pieces of a 'typical' Linux distribution as well.
Isnt this just SCO with GNU packages installed?
The only thing I liked about SCO unix was Merge which became lin4win for linux.
SVR5 was a little different compared to the BSD and Linux boxes I was used too. Of course I was dealing with some mixed versions of SCO, some in Italian (for Olivetti)...
But now that im only using Solaris, I dont remember what those differences are! lol
test
As clearly stated in the article, there is a linux mode. After you type in "linux" is does things from the /linux partition and runs in Linux mode, including binary emulation. It can run and develop full Linux applications within the session.
It sounds quite impressive.
-Coward
This is the problem running alternative os's on x86 platforms.
Caldera needs to hook up with particular OEM's who want to create mission critical using openunix. If caldrea can't convince OEM's that openunix will sell, then the OS is doomed. No sane IT manager would buy an OS without approved hardware. Most Linux servers for example run on Dell or Compaq systems that are linux approved. This issue will not go away unless the kernel is opensourced and the gnu community can write drivers for it. I also hope it doesn't use the openserver libraries. Microsoft made Xenix as proprietary as possible and openserver was based on Xenix. Compiling gnu apps might be difficult. Hopefully OpenUnix's libc libraries are those from AT&T.
Anyway Caldera is dying. Its a shame because it was my first linux distro. Caldera was ahead in the linux and dos game but they did not have good marketing. Redhat totally took over. Also Ransome love's comments on the evils of gnu and opensource did not help. Client access licenses also hurt it severly. Caldera just got rid of one of the main arguements of using linux instead NT or Unix. The cost and licensing issues for small projects on limited budgets is what linux's key market is. Also linux runs on cheaper hardware. If Caldera keeps this up, then the arguement to use OpenLinux or even OpenUnix is moot. I chose Redhat for my servers thank you.
http://saveie6.com/
Moderate this up.
/. is actually testing code. Moderate this up at once.
Someone from
I nearly got fired last week when NFS running on redhat 7.1 nearly gobbled up all the ram in the system and needed to be stoped and restarted again. This bug is real. However NTFS is "experimental" and should not be used. But their is no reason why NFS should fail!
Linux otherwise has been pretty stable for me but if problems like this arise again due to buggy daemons, then I will happilly switch back to solaris. I believe thier is also a rumoured bug with servers with more then 2 gigs of ram that causes the kernel to panic. The trend is bothering me. Yes, linux has bugs in it just like any OS out their and this guys comments on NFS are true. Don't mod him down.
http://saveie6.com/
I can see the headlines now "Slashdot slows down the Internet!"
does it mean all the modules are compiled in? everything? i mean will i be able to get accleration on my ati 128 rage card without worrying whether it's in there bundled up?
:)
will it speed things up with better memory mgmt so wine will actually start up faster?
ok. so it's a commercial unix kernel.. but can i still download it for free.. well......honestly doesnt it matter whether it's free? everything's free anyway. i never pay for a copy of windows....
well, unless you're running a company, you cant do that...
my blog
Especially on my suns and alphas. Windows XP works much better on them than any *nix.
does anyone else the authors complaint that caldera doesnt ship gnome with the system a bit excessive? he calls the omission a "major shortsightedness" on calderas part. keep in mind that this is a 6 processor server How many people are going to acutally care if they dont have a pretty little gnome desktop by default?
With regard to the kernel itself, what are the ramifications of this structure security-wise? While I know this particular kernel has been around awhile (hell, SCO is ancient), it makes me curious.
To me, one of the primary advantages of using a Linux kernel is the "many eyes" approach to security. While I appreciate the fact that the distribution using a full suite of GNU/Linux utilities and such, I'd be somewhat apprehensive about the kernel itself (stability through age aside).
Anyone who has any insight into this, please reply!
I wish caldera would get thier naming right, how am I supposed to know which one is Linux XP and which one is Linux ME? :)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Anyone familiar with the phrase 'divide and conquer'? Thats what happening right now. Fragment the market. Spit out many *NIX variants that are different. Is this good? In the short term, perhaps. But it is this fragmentation that nearly killed *NIX 15 years ago.
Oh well. Another *NIX variant, this time, its a Linux distribution with a SCO kernel. Cute. Just don't touch FreeBSD.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
With debian we have debian on Linux and debian on Hurd.
:( Duty calls.
So in a way Caldera is a little bit like debian.
There are other ways Caldera is like debian which I would list if I had time... But I must be off.
Hot plug CPU? Hot plug memory? What?
OK, I know that there's hot-plug disks and even PCI on x86 hardware. But who makes stuff that let's you swap out CPUs and memory? I thought that was Sun territory only.
After all that talk about how scalable and powerful the system is compared to Linux, they say that a script that came with the system "locked up" the system and "forced them to reinstall"... That doesn't sound very scalable and powerful to me. I would be interested in hearing more details about the incident. Were they "forced" to reinstall because they didn't know how to fix it, or because it couldn't be fixed?
Ethan
So can I go download a Caldera Unix 8 iso image? I couldn't find one on their site. If I'm not mistaken, they still have to make the GNU tools they use available in source form, right?
Has anyone found a place where you can d/l this release, or is it only available for purchase?
Ok it runs on the X86 platform... why?
I used to run SCO, I was a SCO fanatic back in the 286/386 days I have cince replaced SCO with linux and BSD because I dont have to fork over tons of money to support new hardware, I can modify the kernel, and I got the DEV kit for free instead of $950.00!! Except for having someone to sue in case it crashes what is the use? it offeres no advantages whatsoever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This sounds to be a serious contender, if it is GPL or LGPL. I couldn't tell from the article.
Not the Win NT filing system, but the standard Network File System.
As for Solaris, its record is hardly stellar. For example, Solaris NFS for many years had a bug that would randomly replace blocks of data with blocks of nulls in big files (people often spent weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with their software until they finally traced it to Solaris). There have been memory leaks driver problems, and backwards incompatibilities with Solaris. Most production users of Solaris are a couple of years behind the releases in order to avoid the bugs in the new releases. And many people never wanted to switch from SunOS to Solaris at all (I think we are still running some SunOS machines).
As they say, "the grass is always greener". I can tell you from many years living with SunOS/Solaris that Linux isn't bad in comparison.
IBM did this last year with AIX 5L. AND, it'll run on PPC, x86, and IA64. This was IBM's fork of the fabled Monterrey project (Unix' most promising vaporware) which died as soon as SCO got bought. I guess SCO's fork is just now coming out.
Of course, when I submitted the story, it got rejected.
+++
NO CARRIER
Maybe a few years ago, the SCO kernel was a bit better than the Linux kernel, but today, I see little or no advantage. In fact, Linux has better driver support and a more active user community. And being able the modify the kernel source code is useful even for end users (a quick hack to get a slightly different version of some piece of hardware working, for example).
Caldera, from the beginning, has tried to be the Microsoft of Linux. Most recently, Ransom Love has taken to publicly slagging the GPL, and has said they were looking for ways to proprietize their stuff so they can rape the users more fully. This looks like the beginning of it.
I haven't liked, or trusted, these guys for at least 5 years. I used to use Caldera, but now, I've sworn off them more than I've sworn off Windows.
Slack, Debian, Redhat, BSD, whatever. They're all better than Caldera, just because of the "Caldera Attitude". Ransom Love thinks he deserves a stable of Ferraris for packaging someone else's code and selling it.
Bah. I'd use Windows before I use Caldera.
I maintain two SCO UnixWare 7.1.1 servers and they do run like dogs. Linux is much faster and arguably better. Granted, UnixWare has VxFS included, but these days when we have JFS and XFS ported to Linux, that's really a non-issue too.
The SVR5 implementation of UnixWare had to be rehashed in order to increment version numbers and issue a new product. So Caldera slaps in a few things:
1) Fix apparent bugs
2) Attach more integrated GNU packages to the main distro
3) Update the Linux emulator to support more system calls
But this does not in my opinion warrant a whole new major version number. They have done pretty much nothing else with the distro. I will not be upgrading the 7.1.1 servers here as they will be phased out, but also because there is really no reason to.
Caldera is doing nothing but reselling the SCO product line. Of course they are, since there is an installed base and they can charge the same as SCO charged for it. The Linux business is, just as somebody very insightfully said, hurting them. They can't demand license fees, because all one has to do is to go to RedHat. They can't fix their distribution too much, because they become incompatible with RedHat that way. They can't charge much more than RedHat for their distro either, because not that many people would buy it. Perhaps OpenLinux is a bit ahead of its time? Probably so, but that doesn't solve their problems.
I think Caldera is realising that it has at least a temporary cash cow with SCO and thus tries to get its moneys worth. It seems to be forgetting that the business practices of SCO practically brought them to their knees and Caldera is just walking in their foot steps. The only difference is the name. Which I by the way find is pretty lame. There is nothing Open about SCO UNIX and there never was. The development kit is aged and not very good at all. SCO managed to sign some contracts with third party vendors to include some apps with their distro. These are still coming for Open UNIX. Compaq has an agreement with SCO (Caldera too?) as an OEM. This means that a customer can buy a Compaq server with Open UNIX rather than Windows NT/2000. But the sales of these are very slim.
If I was on the board of Caldera, I would swiftly make some changes in the licensing schema of Open UNIX. Granted, it can't be GPLed because of thirdparty proprietary code. But I would definately make it more available. They charge for a media kit ($65) and only give a single user license to non-commercial use. That is an enforced license which means that the system only accepts one concurrent login. This is useless for the hobbyist, so they aren't spreading the word. They have to make UNIX as exciting as Linux in order to prevail. Sure, charge the big corporations license fees. But the small businesses and home users who want a UNIX server should have to pay nothing for it.
Caldera can't do this because they would lose money that way. Some old SCO shops aren't that big and would then fall under the clause of a free OS. That means that the distribution may go up but it doesn't give them a larger revenue stream right away. Look at Sun and the free Solaris offer. Lots more people use it now, but Sun can't start charging for it unless it's for a huge server (8+ CPUs). Sun has revenue from other things, mainly their hardware. Caldera only sells software. A big catch 22.
If Caldera continues like this, they will either have to sell of the SCO division or perish. What if they can't sell it off? Will SCO UNIX become abandonware or can it be opened before they close the doors? Will SCO UNIX (read SVR5) die and be buried because it can't be opened? Would be a terrible loss.
Then there is the conspiracy deal. What if Microsoft would buy the UNIX copyright and codebase? They could stash the code in the trash can and be done with that threat. Sun could have its license revoked or perhaps be charged so much for license fees that they couldn't maintain SVR4 Solaris anymore. I know they aren't paying any royalties now, but surely that could be circumvented... That would be the true extinction of UNIX as we know it. Good in one way, but bad in others.
What if Sun bought the copyright? Or IBM? Whoever will own it in 10 years, will the codebase be opened? Who knows, but I will be following this subject over the next few years.
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Someone mod this down and prehaps find this guy's address and give him a spanking of his life time he's always writing this very same message. Word for word. Just copy and paste.
you use winNT 4 for alpha? I didn't know they had a sun version though
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
If you want a stable operating system, you should not be using the 2.4.x kernel until it has matured. The 2.2.19 kernel is extremely mature and stable and secure, and it is the kernel of choice today for both home and commercial use.
"Latest" does not always mean "Best". Say it. Internalize it. Live it.
-- Guges --
Clearly thou miss understandeth my post!
Forsooth, I simply stateth that Debian is not unlike Caldera in that they have interchangeth the kernels there unto. Ye Caldera has chosen Open Unix while ye old Debian can found to use HURD or on occasion FreeBSD.
The similarities there in are obvious to all! Therefore, I must prostest vociferously the my post was most unquestionably On Topic!
Certainly, thou seemest to be on crack!
Hey kewl, i can take my CPU d...
This sig is intentionally left blank
This reminds me of when people ran OS/2 in oder to develope for Windows 3.1
This product may appeal to companies who see the need to develope for Linux but turn those nose up at actually having to run it.
As many have stated, GNU utilities are nothing new to SCO (cf. Skunkware). For those who aren't quite knowledgeable of SVR5, there *are* serious advantages to running a UNIX(tm) kernel as opposed to Linux. Not all of these are hardware related.
UNIX(tm) has TLI and STREAMS support. Linus has explicitly decided that TLI is to be passed over in favor of sockets, and STREAMS isn't to be supported at all (leading to some hackneyed workarounds regarding ptys). So for those of you who will say "big deal, SCO kernel has some better hardware/threading/${FOO}, we'll develop the drivers/mutexes/${BAR} for it," there are some things that will never, ever be put into the main source tree due to administrative decision.
Yes, TLI and STREAMS have inherent performance penalties, but they provide a much more sane API for driver development. Hardware today is fast enough to handle a small performance penalty that Linus' 386 could not.
In short: This is a good thing, because it presents a system which runs on x86 which has significant DESIGN differences. Someone has opted for the other fork of the tradeoff branch; assuming the standard utilies and libc are in sync with Linux's GNU toolkit, this means that the same application can take advantage of two different paradigms for two different situations (BSD/sockets vs TLI+STREAMS). I guess this is like the BSD/a.out vs. Linux/ELF scenario of a couple years back. Each system has its pros and cons, programs are source compatible to work with either.
Now that *that* little ruckus has been resolved...
So this really is nothing new. UNIX kernel, (optional) GNU utilities (e.g, Skunkware). Most big UNIX vendors distributed UNIX utilities (Sun, SCO/Caldera,etc) with GNU utils. Hell, NeXT made gcc their default compiler (and charged thousands of dollars for it. Ha!). And it's a good thing. I'm glad.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
In my job as a QA tester, we run many different NOS's for compatibility. OpenUnix 8.0 is virtually no different from Unixware 7.1.1, other than the fact that Caldera logos have replaced SCO ones. Big freaking deal.
The OS is still cumbersome to install, and far less user friendly than any Linux distro. Of course, SCO is a true enterprise server Unix, which is it's sole (vanishing) advantage over Linux.
I was extremely disappointed that 8.0 lacked ANY improvement in user friendliness, which is the major thing I expected Caldera to bring to SCO. Caldera's Linux distros (which I also test) probably have the best installer of any Linux (though I really like TurboLinux's text mode installer). Also, the SCO shell lacks all of the user-friendliness the GNU BASH shell has, which makes it one of the hardest command lines to master (particularly when you first Unix exposure was the friendly BASH command line).
OpenUnix 8.0 is nothing more than a "slap our new name on it and get it out" to generate new revenue release. I'd advise anyone running 7.1.1 to wait until 8.1. Unfortunately, licensing isn't the ONLY one of MS's business practices that Caldera is imitating.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
really? umm...
According to the latest IDC pre-released report - Worldwide IT spending on Linux is increasing from 3% to 9% by 2002..
So? Is Linux loosing ground? I hardly think so...
Do your homework before you past such a crap! most Unix shop that used to work with SCO are moving to Linux. Why? because the client doesn't want to pay the $1000 license price tag if he can spend $60 on RedHat which have 70% market share..
Hetz (Heunique)
Linux is number 27 in server uptimes. Don't believe me? see
l
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.htm
Its all *BSD and some Irix before linux even shows.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Great. Another article that as a lot of technical possibility, and all I hear are license considerations and politics. Anybody want to enlighten the rest of us as to why exactly this release is significant? Is the OpenUNIX kernel somehow better than the Linux kernel? At what things? What's the VM system look like? Real meaty stuff that nobody seems to talk about...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You dolt
The whole concept of drivers being inside the kernel suck.
The kernel should be small and be completely seperate to most drivers, the drivers can have a common well defined strong long lived api so that they are not tied to X.X version.
We should have linux kernel 2.x.x, and drivers should be in a seperate source tree.
Wheres our object orientation? Out the window?
What is almost-Linux? If it doesn't use the Linux kernel, it is NOT Linux. So, some BSD distros use GNU libraries, compilers and utilities, and now you call this distro almost-linux? If an OEM vendor distributes Windows and bundles it with GNU utilities, you'll call it almost-linux too?
¦ ©® ±
you haven't heard this is a last gasp effort of Caldera to get the few remaining SCO customers to transition to linux.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
So were is the GNU less Linux?
Is available at http://www.gcom.com/home/linux/lis/index.html
>Since Linux sucks, I didn't download it in the first place.
If you've never downloaded it and tried it yourself, how do you know it sucks?
Ahhh, TrollTelepathy (tm)
This is called a microkernel and is apparently popular with OS researchers. Linus Torvalds explicitly rejected this view, much to the disgust of OS expert Andrew Tannenbaum. Read more here.
Most good software, including Linux, is not object oriented. The idea that software must be either object oriented or chaotic spaghetti code is wrong. To put it simply, Linux had to be fast in order to win. OO code tends to be slower.
You seem to want a microkernel, object oriented operating system. This is the opposite of Linux.
I'm happy to hear that you read each and every of these postings word for word. This will only soak you with the cold hard truth.. ;)
But I would settle on a close-source kernel (after all, nobody should know their CPU better than themselves) toghether with all the open-source goodies which I love, officially compiled and supported by SUN.
Thanks to sites like freesolaris ( once openly linked by SUN, but now no more ), I already have somethink like this ( also because most SUN software has orrible price/quality ratio. Take Forte, for instance ...).
Ciao
----
FB
I had to set up a server running SCO Unix for a large web site. It was years ago, in the Linux 1.2 days. /etc directory. I had to reinstall everything from scratch. One day of uptime, wow.
SCO was a pain to install, there was even no driver for our classical adaptec adapter. We had to call the support and wait during one week to have a fucking floppy disk with the driver.
Then, compiling anything on the box (like the first release of the "Apache" server) was a pain. A lot of libraries like 'crypt' were missing. I had to tweak the source code a lot, port external libraries, etc. to have something that worked on SCO.
And the kernel crashed. I rebooted, and a lot of files were corrupted, including almost everything in the
It finally worked, I just had to import the existing web pages and images from a DAT tape. Guess what ? Only 2 Gb tapes were supported by SCO, and the support center was unable to help.
I ended up wiping the hard disk, and installed Linux. Everything worked perfectly, and what took me an entiere week of work with SCO was redone in 3 hours with Linux.
SCO has probably improved since, but I don't trust that operating system any more. It was dog slow, it was a hell to compile anything on it, the default shell was an horror, it didn't support common hardware...
If you don't like the Linux kernel, watch out for Debian/OpenBSD instead.
{{.sig}}
Actually, most of the Linux source tree this days is written in a quite OO-ish style (still in C, but with lots of function-pointer structs to give OO-style development without the most nasty speed hits). Anyone who has read Amiga development headers will recognise similar OO-in-C design patterns.
GNU's Now Unix
now, your joke was funny
Here on the dot, people bray frequently (and sometimes rightfully) about how monied trademark holders try suppress other people's speech. But take another look at the Caldera site and you'll see what they're up to. The shoe's on the other foot, and it's a little uglier.
They are tempting to put the Linux label all over a product that's not... well as you put it,
Open Unix's not Linux, but you could never tell that from the way they've labelled it. They are attempting to live in the shade of Linux's good reputation. This is why trademark law allows trademark holders fairly broad rights. If a competitor is allowed to use the name, they'll put it to work in their own interest, not in the interest of customers who depend on the name to mean something: in this case, Linux.
Linux is a trademark, however, so I hope that the owner has some success enforcing it against a clear "theft" (not of the name, of the reputation) that Caldera is attempting.
Linus should object to this use of the name he coined. It could be interpreted as a proprietary Unix incorrectly using the name Linux to their marketing advantage. Not that their system might not be better than Linux in many ways, but still...
Technically, I could install a Linux distribution and a FreeBSD distribution on the same partition and then run the Linux userland using the FreeBSD kernel (although it would require quite a bit of editing of the boot scripts). What should that be called? I certainly wouldn't just call it "Linux" or "FreeBSD", I would call that "running Linux binaries using the FreeBSD kernel".
I wonder what they would make of a Lites system?
Strange comment, considering Caldera is a contributing member of the Linux Standards Base.
Missed that, didn't you?
Caldera LKP is targetting LSB compliance. Make it go on LSB, it'll run on any LSB-compliant system: Caldera, or otherwise.
It's not Caldera that fractures the market -- it's people opening their uninformed mouths and belching forth incorrect speculation as truth.
Right. You ofcourse speak for the entire community now i guess.
Since there isnt any alternatives to rapidly develop other enterprise appications than doing it on java, thats ok to me. The coolest thing is that i dont have to use MS products since it can run on Linux.
Is it just me or does this sound a lot like a port of User Mode Linux to the SVR5 kernel? (yes I realize there are other differences in SVR5 like the hot swapping stuff, threads, etc.) ie, you enter a Linux "subsystem" which is, in effect, a complete linux distro running under another OS.
Not really revolutionary but IMHO somewhat technically interesting.
Glenn
I didn't know that. But I guess the dividing line is the use of methods to get/set members of a structure. This trades off speed for encapsulation. Linux isn't doing that, is it?
in many places yes, but its no speed hit. GCC supports inline functions in C too.
"Real men use wm2." "I switched from linux to freebsd ... too many people are using linux today."
Oh, grow up, you obnoxious little twerp, and find something constructive to say. The irony here is you obviously run UNIX because of it's complexity (or reputation for being so, as you may not have experienced real UNIX complexity first hand) -- that sometimes meaning poor ease of use -- to give yourself some pathetic amount of ego boost, and at the same time condemn the masses out there who have lept on the bandwagon, claiming they run it because it's "elite." Care to explain the difference between you and them?
Your attitude makes me cringe, though it is forgivable because you sound very young. I've run Linux extensively since I was 17 -- toyed around with it when I was 16 but not really getting into it deep enough -- turning twenty one in a few days. This morning I went through manual pages, Orielly books, everything, to both refresh my memory on commands and to have dialin PPP working the way I want it to work -- I'm also a KDE 2 user.
You are so stereotypical of the little "I'm-cooler-then-you" people. "I switched from Linux to FreeBSD because Linux has too many newbies!" says it all, dude. Linux has so much more available for it then FreeBSD -- games, better sound card support, more drivers, journaling file systems, better X windows support, constantly improving TCP/IP stack, more software, and, most noteably, better documentation and user support.
Now, go back to the troll cave -- troll cave, plain and simple -- as I'm sure the FreeBSD community doesn't look at you too fondly with that type of attitude.
One of the purposes of the Library GPL was to provide a less-Stallmanized environment, so you could compile code using gcc without it becoming infected by the Gnu Public Virus - particularly libc, but also other libraries whose authors didn't feel the need to control everything they touched. RMS prefers to call it the Lesser GPL, since he doesn't like that kind of flexibilty.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Additionally, the Free Software Foundation is providing GNU-based delivery for full-sized CD sets. Gnus travel more slowly than carrier pigeons, but have the advantage of being able to carry a complete set, reducing the need for retransmissions, and they support for multicasting and parallel processing if you need to ship a whole HURD of the things at once.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some other features that Unix System V concentrated heavily on were support for symmetric multiprocessing (not just 2-4 processors but much larger numbers) and schedulers designed to handle hard real-time constraints, e.g. aircraft control or chemical process control applications that get really grumpy if you don't handle them every millisecond, on the millisecond. The real-time *has* gotten much easier since the days of the 386 and its ~5 bogomips, but it still takes grunging through the entire kernel and finding anything that blocks critical resources and makes sure the blocking is limited to short enough time periods to meet the constraints.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Women are nuts. and if her mother is really nuts then run like hell! because they will turn into their mothers.
This is a problem all over the world, but it is especially intense in the U.S. Try another country.