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Linux Weekly News 2004 Timeline
Ridgelift writes "Linux Weekly News has made their annual 2004 Timeline available free to the general public. " Much happens in the Linux world over the course of a year. 2004 saw ongoing legal and political fights, new distributions, big releases of major applications, a new mode for kernel development, and more. This timeline is our attempt to separate out the most significant developments of the year and present them in a concise and enjoyable format. It continues an annual LWN tradition; it is the seventh in the series.""
Was anyone besides me expecting to so, and disappointed not to find, an actual timeline, a graphical chart in the form of a line with labeled tic marks demarcating events?
The link is over-billed. I'ts only a chronologically ordered table, not really a timeline.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I was hoping to see something more technical, along the lines of:
January: support for architecture X included in 2.4
Febuary: driver tulip.o expands support for cards X, Y, Z
March: stratjakt's HP deskjet finally works like TFA says it will.
April: ATI drivers that don't suck come along
etc etc
I have a short list of hardware that I'm really eager to see supported under linux (mostly Hauppages PVR-500MCE so I can have dual-tuner MythTV goodness for ~the same price as the 250), and that can be some hard info to find when you have to google a million forums, and most of the hits are just other people asking "Does this card work in linux?"
Changelogs are too esoteric. They say stuff like "added support for Conexant B52387fdf-X341 encoder chip".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One could just as easily say "DeCSS is a known way of playing DVD's on a FreeBSD machine in the abscence of commercial DVD software".
The point is that a lot of stuff on the list is not specific to Linux.
Back in the late '80s and early '90s every year was predicted to be the year that LANs finally exploded. Never happened. A few people here and there put in a LAN, but there was no massive explosion of installations. Then one day someone looked and low and behold everyone had a LAN.
Likewise the linux desktop will not explode overnight. Instead a few companies here and there will get sick of Windows, or need something special that Windows doesn't give, but linux allows them to write. Those companies will install linux. Perhaps not even all at once, just for the few people who need it. Slowly, slowly, slowly, linux will get better while it gets a few wins. Suddenly one day we will look back and see linux everywhere.
Of course on that day *BSD people like me will sigh and go on using our better OS that never gets any press... ;)