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

Posted by michael on from the well-duh dept.

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."

10 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Fonts That Don't Suck! by occamboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Fonts That Don't Suck! by psamuels · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Hello Nitpick, PERL still is and always has been an abbreviation of "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" and as far as I have learned, abbreviations are spelled with all caps.

      Little credit here? Duh, I know what Perl (once known as "Pearl", by the way) stood for. But no, abbreviations are not always spelled with all caps, and they are not always treated nunc et semper as abbreviations. In this particular case, nobody in authority - from the legions of Perl hackers out there to Larry Wall himself - refers to it as PERL any more. I believe that practice died out well before the release of Perl 5, say '93 or '94. Indeed, referring to it in all caps, like prounouncing Linux Lienux, is a very efficient way to telegraph the fact that you are out of touch.

      What, praytell, do you propose to replace it with?
      Something else.

      As I thought.

      Like I stated before, who here actually USES the client-server capabilities of X? Apart from a small bunch of people, I presume almost none.

      I do, as do many people I know, but that's not really the point. The point is, you have not yet proven or demonstrated that X is bloated to begin with - or, if it is, that its bloat is even measurable on current desktop setups - or, even if it is, that the client/server design is to blame.

      It's old, it's archaic and it's in need of something sleek, small and fast to follow it up.

      Nice set of assertions you got there, backed up with some lovely handwaving.

      My counter-assertion is that while X is old (and "archaic", whatever that means here), it was designed so well to begin with that it has aged gracefully and is not at all in need of replacement. I further assert that your miserably slow experience with Linux on your Athlon has little or nothing to do with X per se and should be blamed on something else.

      designing an graphics sustem would be quite impossible for me atm.

      Then, pardon my bluntness, but you're not really qualified to comment on whether an existing graphics system is even good or bad, much less whether its design and implementation are so horrible as to warrant a complete redesign. I happen to think that X's shortcomings (yes, it has some) are for the most part fairly easy to fix or work around, thanks to its excellent original design.

      And hey, aren't you the one who thinks all abbreviations should be in caps? What's with "atm"? (:

      I'm pretty sure there are people working on alternatives atm though.

      Yes. The best-known would be Fresco, which (though I have no first-hand knowledge of this) looks to be a lot more feature-rich / bloated than X. (I believe Fresco uses CORBA throughout, for one thing. If you thought network transparency was an unnecessary layer of abstraction, aka "bloat", check out CORBA. And yes, it's spelled in all-caps.)

      --
      "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
  2. PDA Good || Server Bad by fozzy(pro) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. I think its amazing by pavera · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Other reasions why 2002 was great by Znonymous+Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Who is kidding who? by Woodrow+Stool · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Who is kidding who? by markov_chain · · Score: 3, Interesting
      We have:
      • mplayer/mencoder
      • open office
      • mozilla
      • gnome 2 and kde 3
      These apps make me very, very happy.

      I hope IBM is itching for revenge after OS/2.

      --
      Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
    2. Re:Who is kidding who? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I hate to throw unchecked stats around, but even if this is remotely the case, then opensource companies have a long fight ahead of them.

      I think we all knew that. What amazes me is just how frigging many of them there are. There's no way the market can support as many commercial distros as there currently are.

      I'll stick my head out and predict that 2003 will see the herd thinned somewhat: I can't see a good future for Mandrake (as a company). Out of Lindows, Lycoris and Xandros, only one will remain (I'd bet Xandros). Geographical dominance will continue to be the name of the game, with Redhat taking America and parts of Europe, and SuSE taking Europe and parts of America, Conectiva in Latin America etc.

      On the other hand, those that remain will be stronger, which can't be a bad thing. RedHat will start making money reliably I hope - their standing themselves in good stead for taking over the corporate desktop at this rate.

      Hmm, while I've got the post comment page open, I'd just like to throw in some anecdotal evidence of my own. I started using Linux in early January of last year, so I've seen exactly a year pass in Linuxland. The progress I've seen is unbelievable: Linux got pretty artwork, got usability, speed, good fonts, a good office suite, a good web browser (moz1.0), KDE3, GNOME2 (and GTK2) and an easy to use "just works" version of Wine came out (no, really!), and finally I started my own project [grin]

      It'll be fascinating to see where 2003 gets us. Look out Microsoft!

  6. Re:/.ed? - Here's the text by packeteer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  7. Re:Software Installation by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Okay, I'm not going to say things are perfect, but I'm sitting here with a RH 8.0-based box with apt-get.

    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.