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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."
To my mind, the best thing, and it's a biggie, is that we finally have a distribution (Redhat 8.0 -- perhaps others?) that, out of the box, renders fonts so that they look good to non-nerds. This is the first step towards bringing Linux to the masses!
Next we need to radically cut the number of choices that the average user needs to make at install-time (Gee, which of the following 87 libraries should I install? And what the hell is a library anyway?)
If some entity (Redhat? IBM?) just grabs the bull by the horns, we'll have a good Windows replacement in a few months! Pleasepleaseplease somebody do it!
Many Linux users have been waiting for Linux to break out and start converting more users. Walmart certainly helped supporting Lindows, which i hope succedes as a desktop replacement. I think It's demize is the generally high price of the Subscription. In other light I know of schools and many other instutions switching to MS bassed mail systems due to ease of maintence and webacces they offer (Yes Many Linux solutions exist I like them myself). But a switch to MS Products is very bad for Linux on the server side...espically considering security issues as Windows is insecure.
I agree ith the PDA article. I found the Sharp to be just as usefull as the Palm software and almost as easy as WinCE. I think the Small evices market could easioly be dominated by Linux because software for those devices needs to be customized by a manufacturer and the cost quickly becomes cheaper for manufacturers due to little to no cost for the Linux and abou tthe same cost to customize it as any other OS (ie Drivers for the hardware and customicing software).
I hope the economy gets better
Happy New Year
I've only been using Linux for about 1.5 years now, and it amazes me how fast things get better in the OSS world. I mean sure Linux has been around for 10 years so maybe that's not "so fast", but in the last year I've noticed huge strides.
The first time I installed linux (redhat 7.1) it took me a few tries to get it to see my mouse, my laptop video card didn't play nice, my desktop sound card didn't get found and took like 3 weeks of teaching myself kernel compilation stuff to get it up and running, my desktop NIC was a hassle, and I thought the desktop choices were attrocious (KDE 2.2 and gnome 1.4 I Think...)
Not to mention any software to do real work (Office apps, decent browser) or to have any fun (IM, Decent mail client) had to be installed after the fact requiring more compilations, and messing with the system...
More recently I installed RedHat 8 on my desktop and laptop... Oh the beauty... Gnome 2 is a truly nice system if you ask me. the new theme is easy to look at (finally!!) All the apps I need (OpenOffice, Gaim, Evolution, Mozilla) are the defaults and are already installed. All of my hardware was perfectly and flawlessly recognized, even my wireless network card was setup during the installation (Shake a stick at that WindowsXP!).
All in all, night and day, in 1 year its gone from taking 1-3 days to get a desktop linux system really ready for production to about 30 minutes... If the next year holds as many leaps and bounds of usability MS will be in dire straights soon.
I have still done WindowsXP installs during the last few months that don't recognize all of the hardware in a box, especially wireless network cards (the linksys wpc11 most notably). Besides the fact that from a clean install of WindowsXP you still have to install all of the software (office, developement environment), it still takes at least 2 hours to get a windowXP box really ready for use, then another 4 to do all the updates it needs... (granted, it takes about 2 hours to download and install all of the redhat updates since the 8.0 release.. but it all happens in the background and doesn't require a reboot, while with WindowsXP and windows update, there are at least 4 updates that you have to download *alone* and then reboot after each one, meaning to do the updates, you are going to reboot 5 times and you have to babysit the box while the updates are happening, times reflect downloading on 1mbps DSL).
In this users opinion, its been a GREAT year for OSS and Linux, and I hope it just keeps getting better.
Doesn't look like free software will have a bad year for the forseeable future. More and more fortune 500 companies are converting to or seriously considering converting to Linux (in whole or part). And it's even more common in Europe. Not to mention the fact that many governments are in the process of or considering switching to Linux.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but free software is a growth area in IT and it will be until MS is ground to a shard of it's former self.
In 20 years, the only people using MS will be home users. Games are MS's biggest advantage over Linux. That's the one area in which it is not making headway. MS PC's will essentially be X-Box v 5's by then. They will not be used for serious business applications.
Slashdot is just more corporate media out to make profit.
If you want Free Speech and intelligent conversation search deep into the depths of Usenet. IT's in there if you look hard enough...
But this place, well, it's just a relic of the dotcom era and as the economy plummets and the tech industry moves to third world countries where labor is easier to exploit they are only going to feel the pressure more and more.
Usenet is not for profit and not owned by anyone, there is no moderation and no censorship, why don't you just go there and be happy?
Slashdot is just a front for a run of the mill money grubbing corporation i don't know why you expect it to somehow up hold these ideals. They're just out to make a buck like every other corporate website.
It's not GNU/Linux. The state of Linux was good. The state of GNU was probably also good since it piggybacked on Linux by definition. They are not the same thing, however. Why not say Linux and GNU? Why do you listen to that nutjob that says it must be called GNU/Linux?
Other reasions why 2002 was great:
Phoenix 0.5 - http://mozilla.org/
Chimera 0.6 - http://mozilla.org/
The Open CD - http://www.TheopenCD.org
GNU Win II - http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html
yEnc - http://www.yenc.org/
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Microsoft has $40B in the bank and is still making money like they have a license to print it.
The Linux vendors have fallen to beg mode, "please give us money or we will vanish" (Mandrake). VA Linux Labs, now VA Software (stock symbol: LNUX) says "We are in no way a Linux company - we are a proprietary software company". Red Hat made a $300K profit last quarter, first ever, on a market cap of about $1B, what a complete joke.
Yes, yes, we have Apache, we have MySQL, we have numerous charity cases, but there is no way in hell that this has been a "great year" for Linux. If you can't make a buck, you can't eat, and sooner or later, you will stop breathing.
In the meantime, Borg-like entities like IBM (for Christ's sake) are adopting Linux (should I say "swallowing up Linux"?) and this is somehow a twisted victory for "the cause".
I want to throw up.
First of all posting article text is illegal. So for one thing i dont want slashdot to make web sites angry for taking their content without them getting ad revenue. Also you need to watch out for people who are karma whoring. People have said they dont care about karma whoring but i think they need to. People can get their karma up to the level where they get a +! bonus and troll away. That DOES lower to level of quality on slashdot and its something that i would like to not see happen.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Since when does OfB.biz have the power to write laws? That's not a law, that's just a copyright statement. Umm, as I'm sure you know, the New York Times also has a copyright statement. Regardless of what the New York Times says, I can still give a photocopy of an article to my friend.
It's called fair use.
You still haven't quoted me any law.
Software installation can be a nightmare.
./configure and make install are simple and beautiful when they work, however lately when I have upgraded some core system software as well as installed some new projects I run into some problems.
/usr/lib/bleh.so. Or you upgrade the library and the upgrade is installed to /usr/local/lib but the older version is in /usr/lib or /lib.
./configure and make install with it working, you're an IDIOT. But this method is not perfect and the errors mentioned above do occur. Distributing binaries, NOT the best solution to the installation problems. The supported systems by linux are just too different. A binary compiled for your system is more efficient, additionally linkage problems can come into play with pre-compiled binaries. But with binaries, the real convenience in not providing them is for the poor developers. Maybe they do their code on a PowerPC or something, why should they have to go through the trouble of cross compiling for you. I will say one thing though, automake has certainly improved tremendously. A few years ago there were many things it didn't detect and it was necessary to go into the source code and make modifications to get MANY programs to work. Most of my installations once I have the correct libraries work perfectly.
./configure script which will check your system as it does now. Library not found comes up, you are presented with a set of information about the missing option required to get the program to function, and a list of options(Exit setup and install it yourself, Attempt to auto download and install the library online, Adjust path to the library, etc.). This way there is no web searching for the library, you will see the URL where you can get it in the info. Furthermore it could download and install it right away. If that library has depenencies they could be installed. This method would be extremely convenient, even more so than windows. And it shouldn't be too hard, except that authors of software would have to keep track of where they got the libs from and make sure their URLS are still valid. Additionally the test would give detailed information, not only on the missing package but why the test failed. Hacking an auto generated configure script is NOT FUN.
The project depends on other libraries which either
A) Are not mentioned in the software documentation at all, so need to look at messages and do some searches to find the libraries.
B) Are linked to on the web page but the link is bad so need to search them randomly, then most of the links from the search engine are bad, but eventually get to the right page.
C) And the worst is when there is an entire tree of dependencies, and most of them have to be installed in a specific order. Installing one package results in a few hours of compiling all the required libraries in the specified orders.
D) some of the libraries you need to install/upgrade are installed to directories other than the program searches. The libraries are in the path, but the program has hardcoded into it
Software installation can be a nightmare. It's just the way it is. In windows more often then not, when a program needs a library, the library is bundled with the program and installed by the installation program. Errors like required DLL's missing are less and less. This is because many of the windows programming environments include package programs to put all the required dll's with the software and to install them if they are not there. Many games that use additional programs(ie DirectX or what nto) will offer to install it if it is not already there. Whereas with Linux I must go cruising the web, downloading the libs I need, compiling them, then the software.
However, distributing the source code is a better option than the binaries in most cases, because of the multitude of systems linux works on. Assuming the program is written without machine dependent parts, if a binary is made for a different system than yours, you have to emulate it and it is much slower than if it was made in your native format. Furthermore code optimized for a 386 does not work as well on a Pentium IV as code optimized for a Pentium IV in many cases. Additionally in the past I used some software in binaries, and many libraries had newer versions made without regard to backwards compatibility, so that because my distribution was newer my old binaries stopped working. This hasn't happened for a long time, probably because libraries are mostly backwards compatible, but still there are no guarantees, so compiling the source and relinking libraries is the best option.
So to sum things up, if you are whining because you can't
A vision for the future:
Source code comes with a
But, even without these changes installation the way it is, is not too hard to learn. For some library heavy software, it can be a pain, but hang in there and you'll survive. Recently I installed a program which required me to update about 15 libraries, it was a pain, it wasn't mentally challenging, the program is installed and works now. If you stick in there you will succeed with your installations too. There is a higher learning curve than with windows since if you don't know what a directory is you'll have trouble in linux, whereas in windows pop cd's in and many autorun and install themselves. If that's the type of user you are, maybe linux is not for you.
But overall the free software programs have made leaps bounds. Autoconf is working better than ever, the compilers are faster than ever, configuring the linux kernel has gotten much simpler, Gnome and KDE are very convenient and come with a slew of applications that are well functional. Office software for Linux has made many advances since the days of Applixware. Even installing the linux kernel source has gotten simpler. make xconfig is a dream come true. The kernel this year has made tremendous advances. The new pre-empting package alone makes 2.5 worth downloading. ALSA support is absolutely wonderful, configuration was almost a breeze. Compare to the old days where I needed much more specific info and addresses for my sound cards, along with DOS driver hacks to initialize them and that is improvement. The community has had many great years in the past, and will continue to have them in the future!!!!!
You just described the ideal scenario, one that unfortunately doesn't happen very often. In particular, the number of RPMs available via apt4rpm on RH8 is incredibly small. When apt works, it works great, hence the fact that we're stealing from it liberally in autopackage. Usually though, it doesn't work, unless you use Debian, and then the inertia that attempting to package nearly every piece of software on the planet implies (gentoo are having problems with this too) means packages are often out of date.
The Windows scenario as described is also sort of unusual, although as Windows software installation was grown rather than designed yes, it too is far from perfect.
What's needed is for developers to be able to produce portable binary packages, and then have a distributed and decentralised DNS style network to replace apt. The interface is still the same: "package install galeon" and wait, but unlike apt it scales.
Of course, that makes it sound easy. It isn't. For instance, the GNU ld.so (dynamic linker) contains design, ah, issues which make producing portable binaries quite hard (to do with link trees). We're figuring out what to do about that now, talking to libc-alpha, distros etc. We may (worst case scenario) end up having to distribute our own linker, luckily ELF allows for plug and play linkers.
Then you've got the myriad differences between distros. Every distro except debian uses the FSF version of install-info. Debian based distros use their own, slightly incompatable version. File locations differ and most packages built with automake are not relocatable. We have solutions for those things too.
OK, end rant. It's going to be a long haul, but believe me, we will end up with the most kickass software management system in the world. It'll be like apt, except it works more often (hopefully one day, always works), and it'll look good too. Will we make v1.0 in 2003? Hmmm, maybe so, maybe no. We'll have to wait and see. If not 2003 then definately 2004.