Slashdot Mirror
Towards Linux 2.6
An anonymous reader writes "The impending release of a new stable kernel promises greater adoption for Linux, as it becomes more reliable and scalable over a larger variety of processors. This article highlights some of the changes, both big and small, with some code samples."
One of the biggest problems new users face expecting Linux to be "faster" than Windows, and booting up for the first time to a slow and klunky desktop with either Gnome or KDE. When things get real slow, having the mouse and keyboard unresponsive make the system feel really rough and unpolished. The more I think about this one the more I think 2.6 will start the next generation of distributions that are finally going to feel like an operating system as opposed to a midnight hack session.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend thinks the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Well, it's about time-- I've been waiting years to run this Linux thing directly on my original IBM AT. Now I can yank out that Intel Inboard/386 hack I had to add in to get it to work. That has always bugged me.
At least it can just be unplugged with no regrets. Unlike cutting my other original IBM AT case with the Dremel to get that stupid ATX motherboard in there; no going back on that one. Stupid progress.
My son's 5th grade teacher actually assigned them "write a limerick about a planet". I'm not kidding.
How about some serial ATA support? I just built a new gentoo this weekend, and it does it all. Except for serial ata, which I need.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Not wasting time idling the CPU but not wasting time jumping CPUs all the time is a tricky balance to strike, but the design goal is to NOT have an unbalanced load on the processors.
The worst case is N+1 CPU hogs on an N-processor machine; there isn't really a good solution.
From the article:
Processors should affine to one CPU and will not bounce between CPUs.
Affine is not a verb!