The State of GNU/Linux in 2002: It was Good.

An anonymous reader writes "This year has proven most interesting for GNU/Linux. While there was not any amazing surprises, there were numerous events that are noteworthy for review. The upshot to all of this is that most of what happened was good overall for the Free Software community. Read the full story."

Comments

best part?

[SHEENmaster]

The Sharp Zaurus!

200+mhz in my pocket along with 64mb of ram, and Debian GNU/Linux as soon as that damn SD card I ordered comes in!

to me, Sharp is not a success story--yet

[g4dget]

The stated premise behind both the Sharp Zaurus GUI and KDE is that non-commercial open source efforts simply can't deliver a high quality GUI--open source supposedly needs companies like Troll Tech to help with GUIs. If that is true, I think it really calls into question the entire open source effort.

However, I don't think it's true. First of all, owning a Zaurus myself, I find its use of QPE the biggest problem with the device--it means I can't use it for what I primarily want to use a Linux PDA for: running regular Linux software. Almost any software that uses a GUI needs to get ported. I can't script with my favorite scripting environments (Tcl/Tk, wxPython, fltk-lua), I can't use my favorite image display programs, etc.

Fortunately, the folks at handhelds.org have been working busily on putting together a high-quality X11-based handheld distribution. And the Opie versions of the Sharp/QPE applications have been recompiled for X11.

To me, Sharp will be a success story when it really does run the entire Linux environment: command line and graphical. Let's hope that in 2003, Sharp will base their Linux distribution on X11. Because of Qt/X11, the user experience and applications will remain unchanged (well, things may actually get a little faster with X11, but that's not going to be that important on a 400MHz XScale).

Re:Fonts That Don't Suck!

[mbadolato]

Hello Nitpick, PERL still is and always has been an abbreviation of "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language"

Um, no it isn't. Right from the FAQ:

What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look OK, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.

Some highlights of 2003

[IamTheRealMike]

Some highlights of 2003

What can we look forward to this year? Off the top of my head:

• XFree 4.3 - featuring 24bit with alpha channel animated cursors, expect to see lots of cool themed cursors on the X11 theming sites. New in this release also is the R&R extension, allowing on the fly resolution switching. No, we don't have transparent windows in this release, this currently is being held back by performance issues and internal rearchitecting. Nonetheless, everybody likes eyecandy, and this release will satiate our appetites at least for now.

• GNOME2.2: Lots of goodies in this release, including Fontilus (drag and drop font installation/preview), a Network Neighbourhood style view, more font config options (as seen in redhat8), unified theming system, startup notification (but done properly this time), and more. It also features....

• GStreamer! Now with KDE bindings too, hopefully 2003 will be the year that Linux multimedia gets started. Although still some way from 1.0, some parts of the gnome2.2 desktop will be using GStreamer. Just bear in mind if you write apps that use it - it's not API stable yet. In particular, it'll be boosted by ....

• ALSA, which sports better support for sound cards and a cleaner architecture, as well as a whole host of other cool things. If only somebody would get off their ass and write a mixer/resampler server shim between libasound and the kernel, the message "another program is using this device" could be banished forever. But as far as I know nobody has picked up the gauntlet. ALSA is of course part of .....

• Linux 2.6 which will be released sometime in June/July apparently. Some key desktop enhancements in this, including low latency and preempt, which is a step forward for desktop responsiveness. Think: it always feels like there's no CPU load. Kind of.

• KDE 3.1 (I hadn't forgotten ;) which other than being a lot more secure now, sports tabs in Konqueror, better support for freedesktop.org standards, new default (pretty) artwork, folder icons that represent the folders contents, desktop sharing built in and a whole load more

• The Gimp 1.4 - much better looking now, with revamped user interface, better text support, a vector tool, named cut/copy buffers and support for more plugin langauges.

• More usability work both in and out of the desktop efforts. Expect to see the HIG mature and lots more apps become compliant, already non-GNOME apps like Gaim and XChat are getting higified (if you try their devel versions you'll see what I mean).

• Probably lots more I've forgotten about...

Mmmm, toys :)

Only a passing mention of Mozilla 1.0 ...

[Etyenne]

Likewise, while it really offers only a few major advantages (and some disadvantages) over KDE's Konqueror, Mozilla 1.0 finally did arrive on the scene attracting attention from many mainstream sources. While its impact on the "browser wars" may be minimal, it does promise a real alternative to Internet Explorer on pretty much any platform.

I think the author downplayed the importance of Mozilla 1.0 :

• It's the first closed-source program gone OSS that achieved wide success. Netscape betted on OSS in 1998 and they won. Actually, Mozilla outlive Netscape.
  
• Lot's of people where denigrating OSS, pointing finger at how Mozilla was getting nowhere, would stay in beta perpetually, etc. Release 1.0 proved they where wrong and that OSS can work.
  
• For once, we have a end-user OSS application that is the best of his class. You can argue that IE is best in this or that regard, but overall Mozilla seriously kick all the other option's butt.
  
• Mozilla is pretty much the only serious alternative to the monopoly of IE as web browser (being multiplatform, standard compliant and feature-complete).
  

For me, Mozilla 1.0 is THE event of the year 2002 for OSS.