The Near-Term Future Of Open Source Desktops

securitas writes "eWEEK has two related articles on the growth of open source software. The first article is about the growth of desktop Linux, featuring Lotus and the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) founder Mitch Kapor, who says (among other things) that call centers will be where the next wave of growth for desktop Linux happens and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years. He bases his statements on a report by Eazel and GNOME Foundation co-founder Bart Decrem entitled 'Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview' (PDF) mentioned last week. The second story is about open source software growth in the government sector where government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau have embraced OS software for projects like the State and County QuickFacts site. Based on Perl, Apache, MySQL and Linux, the site gets 200,000 page views a day."

Comments

Re:Open Source? More like Open Sores

[sflory]

This sounds like you are running a kernel that does not do dma on your ide drives. Try a newer kernel. Most linux distros have a 2.4.20 kernel. The ide support in 2.4.21 may be a beter choice if you like the idea of compiling your own kernel.

root@somewhere RPMS]# hdparm -d 0 /dev/hde /dev/hde:
setting using_dma to 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
[root@somewhere RPMS]# hdparm -t /dev/hde /dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 31.28 seconds = 2.05 MB/sec
[root@somewhere RPMS]# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hde /dev/hde:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
[root@somewhere RPMS]# hdparm -t /dev/hde /dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.75 seconds = 36.57 MB/sec
[root@somewhere RPMS]#