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Negroponte says Linux too 'Fat'
Cadef writes "According to a story on CNet News.com, Nicholas Negroponte says that Linux has gotten too fat, and will have to be slimmed down before it will be practical for the $100 laptop project. From the article: 'Suddenly it's like a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.'"
It's not fat. The architecture is just big-boned.
no-one's expecting you to install all of Debian on them, just get the basics on. Sheesh, DSL is great for low powered machines with small hard disks...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Doesn't he know of DSL (Dang Small Linux)? Maybe what he wants is already there!
Has he not tried Damn Small Linux... it is pretty small, doesn't really seem to be "too fat", it even works on my OLD laptop with its 167MHz processor and nearly no RAM
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I thought they were using Puppy Linux, no?
--- Duey Finster http://www.dueyfinster.com
yes, a BSD! give it a shot
Linus has gotten a little chunkier over the years too, so it makes sense.
If fat people use most of their energy to move the fat, shouldn't the extra effort make them lose weight?
Otherwise, for what the $100 laptop will get used for, probably 80% of the tools and apps can be removed. I'm sure that something like gentoo or one of the other distros with a live cd + X.org, would work just fine.
If you don't include unnecessary drivers, it should be pretty 'thin'.
i started hacking on linux around 7 years ago. rh 7.2 was the word. kernel compilation was quite easy, a few items to say N and some to say M to, to get your oracle and apache and modperl running.
install something now, you'll see 10203 dependancy packages hanging around, and 20406 items in the kernel choices that you have to say N to. and when some packages in your linux distro are broken, well tough luck mofo.
sure expanding stuff is fun, but it is becoming a burden, one that consumes too much of my time and too much of my network. perhaps it's time to just cut things off into an "internal and external" layer in the kernel ? meaning move optional modules and stuff into other distribution methods ? there's no reason for 99% of users to download and disable the code for amateur radios etc.
i played around with freebsd for half a year, and it's default install cleanness and the ease of kernel configuration just amazed me.
i vot for a cleaner linux core and cleaner gnu/linux core packages. do you ?
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Just strip out some of the useless crap like foreign language support and make everyone learn English. That should save a few megabytes...
Now, where were we going to be sending these laptops again?
(Seriously, I don't see the problem... not only is the code open so you can delete what you want but nearly everything has a multitude of options to disable large chunks of functionality to make it smaller at will, modularity at it's best. There are a few things that it would be fair to level the criticism at (OO.o for example) but on the whole most Linux software is pretty good - good enough to cram the essentials onto a USB drive at least.)
Beep beep.
on Linux. You can strip it down pretty damn small. Just build a complete custom distro just for the laptop.
If it was a micro kernel then yes it would be considered a bit fat. But it's a monolithic kernel and contains all the drivers too.
If they want it smaller, they can make it smaller, if they are talking just linux, then it is the kernel by the time you remove everything you don't need it is pretty damn smaller, if they are refering to the distro, roll your own you have developed your own hardware platform you can roll a nice small linux distro to fit on it, it can be as small or large as required.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
So Linux has something in common with Windows.
Now the Linux fanboys can claim to be a mainstream OS!
As in how 14 year old slash dotters type "first."
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
It's not like its that hard to cut off the fat for specific purposes.
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water.
Where this might be useful though is parts of highly impoverished rural America like parts of say Alabama, West Virginia, inland Oregon, etc. These are areas where people are genuinely strapped for cash and a 100 dollar good to go laptop might be genuinely useful, most particularly for kids in school, being portable. Yes the geeks among the rural population might be able to build a better computer cheaper, but lets be realistic that's what maybe 10% of the population?
Don't think there aren't areas in the U.S. that don't look like the 3rd world with shacks, and trailer homes, there are, I've lived there and those people need help too.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I have slackware-current, yes, CURRENT running on a 486 DX 33 laptop, 12 MB of RAM, 200 MB HD. It even runs X, python, gcc. Kernel version 2.6.14. It supports wireless with native drivers too. This is probably way under powered for what they are considering for the $100 laptop; so I know they can do far more. Trust me, they can really do whatever they want with linux.
If he is truly talking the OS, its not that hard to make it smaller, or even switch to something like netbsd.
If he is talking the applications, then i guess its screwed, as people want the 'bloat' of modern applications/desktops its 2006, i don't think anyone is developing 'small' applications for the general public.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While putting a windowing system in the kernel has its
pluses and minuses, there is certainly a benefit to slimming
it down so that it will fit. http://fbui.org/
From TFA: "I was the longest holdout for the crank being on the laptop. I was wrong," he said, adding, "If you're a 10-year-old, maybe you can get your four-year-old to pedal for you."
The kids are having intercourse younger and younger these days! I waited until at least 12 years old before I procreated.
TFA was void of details relating to the headline, it went on to discuss other aspects of $100 laptop per child program.
Linux is bloated? How? The kernel, or the overall lump-sum of components in most distros? I had the impression the linux kernel itself was pretty small - lending it to embedded apps in the first place. And that a project like this one should have the expertise to build all the necessary components on top.
Ah well, I really don't care what it gets as long as it isn't Windows. Since these things are to be all mesh networked together, something like Plan 9 could prove to be advantageous.
.. my friggin ADSL modem runs linux and a web server. My friggin modem!
I mean, come on, it's like, I don't know, based on Apple II or a pocket calculator processor with, uhmm, like 100-200kb RAM or something? dunno, but it was cheaper than $100 and it's friggin modem.
A friggin modem... a fri.. a fr..
Oh ok... I rest my case anyways.
Linux isn't fat, most popular distros are, but noone forces people to use them.
I really think that the money should be put towards getting things on the lower end of stuff, like sustainable food supplies, clean water, medical care, and other basic human necessities before we start worrying about getting them high-tech stuff.
but on the actual topic, there is a lot of unnessesary stuff floating around, but a little knowlage can strip most of that out.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is SOOO untrue. Linux is only as fat as you can make it.
Every time I see someone complaining "Linux is slow" or "Distribution Foo is bloated" I remind them that their system is bloated because they CHOSE to install unnecessary services (You're running MySQL, PostgreSQL, PostFix, Apache, Subversion, DHCPD, BIND. and everything else available in the distro? You have Composite enabled with KDE with ALL eye candy turned on and every SuperKaramba theme you could get your hands on? You're running a non-SMP kernel on that shiny dual core processor?
Let me tell you something: I still run dual Celeries and dual Pentium II Xeons at my office - and they're going to be wiped soon and be reinstalled with bare KDE installations for use as CSR workstations, probably with build server and 3D rendering daemons to take advantage of spare CPU cycles should we need it (those will be off by default of course). Even with full installations those machines are all mighty responsive. I don't turn on eye candy, Postfix, MySQL, apache, etc. remain turned off unless absolutely needed for testing a web or other application locally, and superkaramba is not installed.
Now, I've tried complete installations (installing EVERYTHING on Mandriva, SuSE, and other distributions) one weekend out of morbid curiousity and yes, it gets piggish, and composite made it absolutely unbearable, but I wanted to see just how much those boxes could take before Linux became unstable -- plus I wanted to have easy access to all apps because there are many, MANY Linux apps I've never even tried. And wouldn't you know it, the systems did not become unstable, but just painfully slow. That's an extreme case, but obviously it wasn't the fault of Linux that I chose to do something that many newbies do because they think it might be convenient.
Linux isn't bloated in and of itself. It's used in many embedded devices where CPU cycles, memory, and storage are all scarce. When designing embedded systems the engineers select only the bare essentials to get the job done - check out Snapgear (now Cyberguard SG) routers, some of LinkSys' routers, and Zaurus PDAs. Check out any number of the latest-generation cellular telephones, most notably Nokia's and Motorola's. Check out Tivo.
Not a lot of CPU power in many of those, and yet they do their jobs very, VERY well.
My own desktop is a little slow due to the ATI video card (video is a big bottleneck on ATI with Xinerama - I keep sticking with the AiW card in the hope that X.org's integrated Gato drivers will eventually work) but the other desktop boxes in the office are NVidia and they absolutely fly (in terms of responsiveness), despite having more toys enabled than my box, and all having slower CPUs than my system. Heck, even the dual Pentium II Xeon with NVidia card is more responsive than my system. When I switch to a single-head configuration my system is plenty fast. Even with Xinerama, Linux is more responsive than Windows is on my box.
Linux isn't bloated. It all comes down to configuration, user error, and to a lesser extent, hardware choices (imho, ATI cards should be avoided if you run a dual-head system).
By your argument, Windows bloated if you base your judgement on an OEM who installed a ton of eye candy, or if you installed something like WinFX, Desktop Sidebar, SpyderBar, or other CPU-sucking toys. Windows by itself with unnecessary services disabled is not bloated, and on the same token neither is Linux.
Want a nice responsive system? Install what you need, and either disable or don't install what you don't need. Forget about eye candy. SuperKaramba isn't a necessity. Install the right kernel for your processor (in the case of dual core systems, the SMP kernel is the right choice - or for a single-core processor with hyperthreading, an SMT-aware SMP kernel is the right choice).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
i've noticed the same thing. maybe they will have to stick to something like Damn Small Linux, but i bet someone has already pointed this out.
some linux releases are bigger than windows, especially as they are shipping new versions sooner, but at least there is this stripped down one for pc's that are meant to be 'obselete' such as reclaimed hardware in charitable organisations.
If phone makers, PDA makers, modem makers and even some calculator makers managed to run Linux on their devices, what kind of laptop finds it too fat?
Ah yea, the $100 "laptop"...
I was at the speech. The lecture was not about Microsoft not being cheap enough or Linux being too fat. It's about getting an educational tool that is a replacement for textbooks and a suppliment for six grade educated teachers. All the press I've seen on this takes the quips and jokes and makes them the subject for tha articles. How about someone in the press talking about the other 95% of the presentation. The fact the technology can be deployed at a reasonable cost. The need for content development. The mesh networking. The need for the inexpensive village server and internet connectivity. Ways to effencently power the devices..... Something of substance.
Um, I run Linux on a laptop with a 500 MHz processor and 128 MB RAM.
As long as you're not running Eclipse or OpenOffice, it's Good Enough (TM) to get work done.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Of course, this isn't really about Linux itself, but about the many Linux distributions that have bloat problems, notably Fedora and Suse. These are the guys who put everything, including the kitchen sink, into their basic installs. In other words, the Emacs of Linux distros. Whatever happened to keeping the number of required packages to a minimum? On the other hand, Ubuntu and Slackware manage to install a great OS with small footprints.
BUT... since we're talking about the exotic hardware here, why not give NetBSD a try; it's very small and has great support for all kinds of strange hardware. And it's more free than Linux! It would be very difficult to go wrong with a BSD.
-- Tux
If the Linux kernel has really gotten that "fat", just use an older version. Plenty of software will run on older Linux kernels.
After considering this story...
Yeah, it is growing a little fat, isn't it!
I want to know what X86 cpu they are using that only uses one watt!
That is like 300ma at 3.3v!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In the latest edition of the USENIX ;login: magazine, Professor Andrew Tanenbaum et. al. wrote: "As memories got larger, so did the operating system until we got to the current situation of operating systems with hundreds of functions interacting in such complex patterns that nobody really understands how they work anymore. While Windows XP, with 5 million LoC (Lines of Code) in the kernel, is the worst offender in this regards, Linux, with 3 million LoC, is rapidly heading down the path. We think this path leads to a dead end."
Currently, Professor Tanenbaum and his group are working on a new version of Minix (version 3), which is a micokernel with just under 4000 LoC! He do hope that it will be used for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) a la $100 PC.
It takes forever to start Linux on a PC compared to Windows98. And after giving the command to shut down, it scrolls dozens of lines of incomprehensible text showing its 'shut down process'. And all the distributions that I've tried work like this. I feels like I'm shutting down the entire Pentagon.
Jeez, guys, this is supposed to be an appliance. It doesn't take three to five minutes to shut of a color TV set.
Linux isn't going to be taken seriously until you'all fix this shit. A PC should be ready to work with within five seconds of power on and should shut off within three seconds. This is not an unreasonable goal. It just seems that way because everyone that is the Linux headspace is still thinking in terms of 1970's Unix mainframe mentality. Like "this is a computer system, it is very complex, it runs very important things, it is very powerful, it must not be fucked with for any trival reason, it does not shut down, it does not go down, it does not fail, it is a manifestation of the power of the gods, kneel, peasent!"
This is a horseshit attitude nowdays when 32-bit processors cost less than an hour of minimum wage. But it lingers on and on. We all have fast hard disks that load megabytes in seconds, so it's no big deal to load what we need only when we need it. And we all have flash disks that hold 256 Megabytes in non-volatile memory in a chip the size of a toenail. So there's no reason to wait and wait and wait while megabyte after megabyte is transfered from one computer memory section to another every time the power is turned on.
Negroponte is right. Linux is too fat. And it loads too slowly, and takes forever to shut down. And if we can actually fix this situation, then you'll be able to count on your fingers and toes the number of quarters before Microsoft evaporates like the memory of vile fart.
In fact, Linux with a full GUI runs fine on a machine 1/4 the speed and memory of Negroponte's design.
Maybe what he means is that Gnome and KDE require more memory and CPU power than that; well, they do: the features users apparently demand (vector graphics, theming, animation, translucency, etc.) just require a lot of CPU power. That's not Linux getting "too fat", it's Linux following the desktop mainstream, which is what a lot of people apparently want.
It's a serious problem when the self-styled designer of a $100 laptop can't figure out how to even pick an existing Linux distribution that runs on a 500MHz ARM with 128M of memory. But Negroponte's skill has always been more talk than technology, I suppose.
I have a dreambox 7020s and a 7025 (see http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/index.php). Both run on Linux within 64MB ram and with a quite slow mips CPU. Without hard disk b.t.w. (well, the disk is only used for recordings). As others have mentioned, Linux can be stripped down very much, and it has been done for usage in a number of appliances. Yes I would neither use GNOME nor KDE on a $100 laptop. twm would be nice :), or otherwise maybe xfce.
the thing is.. if you look at redhat/suse/ubuntu
the defaults are crap yes.. gnome/kde, openoffice, etc
if you want optimised.. look at the embedded market. they have to use limited resources. and my phone and pda both run linux, my pda even has a document writing app, a spreadsheet, email, browser, calender, all that you'd want on a 100$ laptop. and it's on a 400mhz PXA qith 64mb ram. workable for low resolutions (320x240, although my pda -can- do 640x480)
aslong as people learn that linux doesn't equal redhat or novell, linux is great for low speed.. and don't expect to much.. win95 ran on 486. so can linux.. but just don't expect WinXP features.
my 2 euro cent.
He's wrong.
Both software and hardware grow. Software grows in terms of functionality, hardware grows in terms of speed, memory size, etc. Software and hardware need to match. Don't run slackware 2.0 on your shiny new dual core athlon 64. Don't run KDE or gnome on that old 486 you found in the basement.
So Negroponte creates a low cost laptop. Good. Now he tries to fit contemporary software on it. He finds it doesn't work. Does that make the software bloated? No. The software just doesn't match the hardware.
People tend to forget how slow old hardware really was. Don't you remember visible slowness in scrolling on 8086 hardware in text mode? Don't you remember how long Wordperfect took to start up? Big&bloated Microsoft Word starts in under 2 seconds on modern hardware.
You probably don't remember. That's why modern software seems so incredibly slow on old hardware. That's just because the hardware is old.
Of course some software is bloated. Openoffice is extremely slow in comparison to Microsoft Office, while even lacking features (wether you want those features is open to another debate). KDE applicates take too long to start up (while their speed when stated up is good).
My point is: software is not bloated. Software is designed to run on contemporary software. Which in this day and age is >= 2 Ghz, >= 512 MB ram, >= 200 GB harddisk, fast GPU w/ >= 64 MB ram. That's a lot faster than the $100 laptop.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
What's Negoponte complaining about? Linux runs well enough on the ipod nano with an 80 mhz processor to play doom:
4 584378958&q=ipod+nano+doom&pl=true
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=403284111
Retail price 150 bucks and you can bet BOTH c=Circuit City and Apple are making healthy markups, I'd be genuinely surprised if the nano costs more than 80 bucks to make.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I guess that's the acid test isn't it? How many MB of RAM and storage am I going to need to edit a meaningful open standard document? I'll need mesh WiFi running in the background too.
:v)
Oh, I can't do this in console mode. Bugger. That means I need to haul in a GUI. Can I use a cut-down interface like direct GTK+ or am I going to have to haul in X? This gets tricky...
Vik
Speaking as a gentoo user, I think it's a particularly unsuited distro for this project. The users have no computer experience, and installing a package can force a mountain of dependencies if you don't know what you're doing with the use flags.
EG: Get the use flags wrong, and PHP requires Java, which requires Gnome and/or KDE, which requires X...
Get the Use flags wrong, and your mailserver (courier) requires Apache with PHP, which...
Really mess up (USE="courier" when you should have USE="ssmtp"), and sending mail requires courier, which requires Apache and PHP, which requires...
This may leave you with a stable, useable system, but a whole lot of bloat. Gentoo can make some really bloat-free systems, if you know what you're doing. By some people's opinion, existance of a compiler is bloat on end-user systems and production servers. I see there point, and agree with them under many situations.
According to the article, the "association hopes to distribute 5 million to 10 million of the systems." At "$100 in 2008 and $50 in 2010," that is $250 million to $1 billion if everything works out as planned.
And what will be accomplished? The kids will "teach themselves?" Because they play games?
How about spending the money on clean water, disease control, actual teachers.
You know what is going to happen? These things are going to be sold by the parents for hard cash, or stolen and sold. Or they are going to fought over. Look for them on E-Bay.
If they really think the kids are going to "teach themselves," they are ignoring what the most important, and far most difficult, part. The $100 or even $50 laptop is easy. Mesh network? No problem. Hand crank, pedal or solar power? You got it.
It is the software, stupid.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Microsoft patented FAT.
Some settling may occur during posting.
He chose the word "fat"; I'd use the word "bloated".
.5 gig of RAM like my laptop, have to swap things out due to this sort of sloppyness. This should just not be necessary.
Too many applications are hemmorraging memory. e.g. Firefox, skype,
Too many applications are just plain huge; e.g. Open Office.
Too many applications do plain stupid things, like leak pixmaps in the X Window server.
Too many applications link against libraries they don't even use, causing
gratuitous references to them, and slower startup times.
People have become downright sloppy. Our systems, even with
If you ever wondered why our intereactive response is unpredictable, just consider what happens if you have to start waiting on disk drives to page things out and in.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem
that needs to be fixed.
Jim Gettys
OLPC
The last thing an uneducated and illiterate African needs is some complex command line interface OS. Put a linux box in front of him and he won't have the slightest clue what to do with it. He would probably try to use the keyboard as a primitive musical instrument. He break the monitor and incorporate the the broken glass into a weapon to attack a nearby tribe. The mouse would be used as to tie up captured enemies prior to cooking and eating them. The ideal OS for them is Windows XP starter edition or Apple OSX.
getting smaller still than damn small linux
http://freshmeat.net/projects/baslinux/
I really don't get it about linux being fat, for it really is what ever size you want it to be,
and t9o be running live off a cd...
The article says that the crank is gone. That was the coolest thing about the device! I guess some kind of foot pump thing might do as well but there was something intrinsically appealing about a device that was self-contained without any dangling doohickeys.
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 04:52 PM -- Sunday April 09 2006
from the not-looking-hard-enough dept.
Cadef writes "According to a story on CNet News.com, Nicholas Negroponte says that Linus has gotten too fat, and will have to be slimmed down before he will be practical for the $100 Trimspa project. From the article: 'Suddenly he's a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And it's not just him. Linux has gotten fat, too.'"
This is the reason I awitched to Gentoo. All the garbage I didn't need (such as having kedit, kate, and kwrite installed after I did a server install of Ubuntu and apt-get install kubuntu-desktop) isn't there. My total install of Gentoo with KDE is about a gig compared to the 2-3 with some others. Granted, I still recommend Kubuntu to people who are new or don't feel like configuring things, so I don't hate the distro... there's just unnecessary bloat.
Linux doesn't have to be fat, it can be slimmed. That's how it runs on embedded systems. THe problem is X is huge, and not just the core X but once you add all of the things people expect, it takes a lot of ram and disk space.
There are alternative windowing system to X. The problem is, last I looked, none of them have gained much traction, and I believe this is because Mozilla won't work on them. So, someone needs to port Mozilla to their favorite X alternative. This is something that someone with tons of money, publicity, and connections like Negro Ponte can do.
OK, so you have a $100 laptop that you have to wind up sometimes. And a full install of pretty desktop distro will bog it down. So you get some people, go with a pre-canned setup of Debian that has only the basics and whatever educational stuff you put on it. Don't pack in drivers for hardware you'll never see, go with an old X server instead of Gnome or KDE. Wonderful.
But the point of this thing is that the child will create on this thing and share with others. This is a design criteria, IIRC. And when you have the ability to create and share, you'll want new libraries or modules so you can do that better, cooler stuff. Thus more cruft.
"Linux grew by 27.1% in China in 2005" That's quite a speed to gain weight. Maybe Tux should start smoking?
It's a project to provide an educational laptop to children in developing countries.
that's something that their governments should be working on, not MIT."I was the longest holdout for the crank being on the laptop. I was wrong," he said, adding, "If you're a 10-year-old, maybe you can get your four-year-old to pedal for you."
Kids are getting pregnant younger and younger these days...
Does this $100 laptop make my code look fat?
I have to say that I agree that X is way too big. For all of its other knocks, Windows actually has had a history of running on hardware the Unix refused to venture on until the early 1990s. I ran Windows 3.1, for all of its faults, on 386SX with 1 Mb of RAM, and it actually worked pretty well. Mind you, that was a 25Mhz chip! Or was it only 16Mhz? Of course, my Amiga had a destkop that ran fairly well 1Mb of RAM, but the Amiga's windowing engine did not have font system anywhere near as good as Microsoft's True Type...Unix wasn't really an option until PC's started to become more like workstations in their memory, speed, and CPU throughput.
This is my sig.
Instead of bickering about how to build this "$100" computer, give them a cellphone and a keyboard to plug into it. This combination will do everything the computer claims to do and has the added benefit of letting people call each other. Unlike computers, a cell phone can easily be built for under $100 and because the cellphone market is so much bigger than the computer market, economies of scale will drive down the price of such a phone much faster than computer prices could hope to fall.
How any russians know german and korean and spanish?
For gods sake, if I select English and nothing else, only install those, or rm the others, surely its
trivial to post install remove the langs you DONT NEED. Its only managing a collection of paths.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Nuff Said!
Negroponte is no fool. I simply don't buy it that he "doesn't know better". Hell, he's managed to get some of the big players of hardware and software together, including Red Hat. Anyone here buying that Red Hat didn't IMMEDIATELY tell him it's no problem to build a stripped Linux version?
So why is he saying things like that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, kids in the developing world need food, medicine, and a place to live where they aren't shot by their own government. They don't need computers. They probably don't even want computers, or any other "newest technology".
I am all for cheap computers, and I'm all for educating children in developing nations, but I don't think the two really mesh well.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC
First off, I run Linux. A lot. On lots and lots of different machines, including my PlayStation 2. For the sorts of machines I'm running it on, Linux absolutely rocks.
That said, I can also see Mr. Negroponte's view point as well. There are a LOT of competing dependancies in the Linux world these days. It can be difficult to run anything other than a very dedicated Linux system without having both Perl and Python available, or without both Qt and GTK+ available. Now for modern-day desktop use, with hard drives in the hundreds of gigabytes and a gigabyte or more of RAM readily affordable, I personally don't care so much about so many layers of duplication or dependencies -- but I wouldn't like it if I were trying to design an inexpensive system with significant limitations in terms of available memory and persistent storage space.
And while one could say "Well, why not just pick one, and leave the others out?", the problem you then run into is finding suitable OSS to run on the resulting custom Linux build. If Useful Package A is built upon Qt, and Useful Package B is built upon GTK+, you now either have a significant amount of work ahead of you to do a API port to remove one of those dependencies, you need to find an equivilent program that uses just the APIs you've selected, or you need to write your own from scratch.
Doing this for one package is significant -- trying to do it for potentially dozens of packages would be a nightmare. You have to worry about runtime environments, graphic compositing APIs, audio APIs, networking APIs, and potentially hundreds more. Picking just one of each for all the possible combinations, and then trying to find existing software that fits your needs and uses just that specific set of APIs would be extremely frustrating.
You and I may not care that we need both Perl and Python installed to run common Linux applications, or that you should have both the Qt and GTK+ libraries installed -- but then again, we aren't the target of the $100 laptop. Choice can be a very good thing for developers -- but we shouldn't pretend that choice doesn't come at a cost.
Yaz.
I think posting on slashdot goes hand in hand with making derogetory generalizations.
While some people are fat because they are lazy and don't burn off the extra fat, I think that it is unfair to say that all fat people are lazy. Also, athletic is not the opposite of lazy. Just because someone doesn't go to the track and run sprints for an hour a day, or ride their bike 10miles every week does not make them lazy.
I couldn't figure out why they hired Richard Simmons as a programmer?
One of the great things about linux is its modularization, a design choice that's usually successful. It's only as big as it needs to be. I've heard that linux started at 10k lines, and it's now XX millions of lines. But most of those millions are probably user level apps. If you stripped out every module that's possible to remove, you can probably get a pretty small fast system. There are tiny distributions of linux.
I would agree however, installing and setting up the thing can be a pain. There are sooo many modules. I have no idea what most of them do. You can only learn by experience. And next year there will be 50 more. But that's not a linux issue; it's a technology issue. As more software and hardware is developed, inevitably, systems become more complex unless they choose to simply not support the latest and greatest.
Linux responded to Negroponte by saying "I may be fat, but you're ugly and I can lose weight!"
Patently untrue!
I presume mean blatently untrue?
The literaly meaning of patently untrue could be that you'd just discovered some method for making it untrue that was so difficult and complicated that you just patented it.
This is SOOO untrue [9 paragraphs of rambling argument follow]
Woah! Overreact much? Perhaps it touched a nerve?
I still run dual Celeries and dual Pentium II Xeons at my office
I have a Pentium III machine here with 512MB of RAM. GNOME runs like absolute shit. It's terrible to the point of being painful to use - to the point that I'm probably going to try something like RatPoison.
You don't expect a modern computer (even if it's being used for education in the 3rd world) - to not use a GUI, do you?
Linux is too heavy for his weak little laptop to lift.
This guy is essentially right, although not with respect to his project where he actually has quite a bit of ram and flash memory to work with. Although linux probably suffers from less bloat than say, winxp, it still suffers from it, as do all modern operating system.
People who say things like, "oh, it's only that distro," or "you don't need to install of the graphical stuff from KDE" don't know what they are talking about. The problem isn't kde, or having mysql on your system, the problem is *the kernel*. Embedded solutions aren't going to use a standard distro or mysql anyway...
By default a lot of hardware support that you may or may not need is in the kernel. Distros also preemptively include drivers. This is a good thing for 99% of us. However, if you want to get modern linux to install and run on an ancient computer or an embedded system, it makes life hard on you. You can tear apart linux and only include the kernel modules you need, and you will get some reduction if you know what you are doing... but removing hardware support does reduce the flexibility of your device.
Really, the problem isn't linux at all, but the fact that so much hardware is out there that you probably want to support, but probably can't if you've only got 8 megs to work with.
The 100 dollar laptop project has looser constraints than many small linux projects, the main problem being lack of harddrive space for swap limits the ability to run complicated applications. I will say that even though it will be relatively easy for him, building your own distro seems like a fairly onerous task for someone trying to get things done on a budget and schedule.
This article is supposedly about a slimmer linux being needed for the $100 laptops, but really, it isn't.
There's one unsupported quote stating that linux is too fat, and the rest of the article doesn't even mention linux!
Quite the case of an article advertised as being one thing but really being something else altogether... It's just a cry for attention like saying, "I shot the president! Now that you're listening, let me talk about..."
Microsoft wants in and that's what this is all about. Read the article. He states he's working with microsoft and they're going to make a winCE version for the hardware. Microsoft wants in on it if only just to keep any largescale linux project from being successful.
I suspect that this is just the preliminary announcement and the real anouncement forthcoming is that Microsoft will be providing the operating system.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
It DOES actually take a little while for a television to warm up. It is just that TV's these days have components inside that are on all the time, so it "warms up" faster. Kinda similar to a standby function on a computer, which is usually only a few seconds.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
OK, let's start sharing some "slimming tips"! I'm interested because my new PC, from which I'm sending this, has no moving parts: it has a fanless VIA C3 processor and 4 GB of flash disk. The disk cost as much as the rest of the system put together. This might not be that different from what the "one laptop" will have. Here are my thoughts:
- Compression would make the limited flash space go further, but a read/WRITE compressed filesystem seems much less common than a read-only one.
- I've avoided installing Gnome or KDE, and I hope that one of the lightweight window managers will suit; I'm comparing BlackBox, FluxBox and OpenBox. All have their strengths and weaknesses.
- A fine-grained package management system (this runs Debian) helps more than a more "all-or-nothing" distribution; so far I've filled about 1GB with a carefully-chosen set of basic packages plus gcc/g++ (native, and for cross-compiling to my even smaller machine!), emacs, gimp, inkscape, imagemagick, firefox and thunderbird.
I think that working within 4GB will be OK as long as I can keep on top of where the space is going (it would be great if 'dpkg -l' listed space used. Does anyone have any more slimming suggestions?
Where the hell are those kids coming from?
Maybe not ODF, but you could certainly edit a Latex file with a floppy distro that includes Nano. ;-)
Throw in TeTex and you'll increase it a few megs, plus you'd need something that could render the final PDF in DirectFB or something. (Anything like that around?)
It would be nice actually if there WAS a way for Latex to be rendered to ODF... maybe there is, I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm sure a system like that would come to under 20MB.
(Hypothetical yes, but not far-fetched.)
Anyways, I think your comment is pretty good.
The system will use a 500MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices with 128MB of memory. It will use 512MB of flash memory and no hard drive, he said. The biggest remaining cost is the display.
Before RTFA, I thought they were talking about the kernel. Clearly based on the flash drive size, what they mean is just the size of having so many libraries that often do the same thing!
I am somewhat skeptical of there being a real problem, though. Knoppix fits many, many things on 700MB using compression. Many of the things that Knoppix includes would probably not be much use for the laptops, such a development tools. The nice thing about "Linux" (being purposely vague as the article) is that you can choose what "Linux" is. If you don't like something, take it out!
It is interesting to note that they mentioned they are currently working with Microsoft to modify Windows CE to operate on the laptop.
OpenZaurus linux distro runs just fine on 64MB+ memory (ram/cf/sd), on a 266MHz arm processor. How much more slimmer can it get? Seems to do ok on a WRT-54G also.
1) ucLinux & other embedding Linux systems
The systems these distributions have been developed for run on far less than the 128MB and 512MB flash drive available in the $100 PC.
2) live CDs
If you can fit a full Linux environment onto a 650MB CD-ROM, it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to slim that down to where there still remains some space on the flash drive for files, etc. Assumedly the ability to map the flash memory in which software resides directly to memory should help out with the 128MB RAM situation...
Negroponte just doesn't have a clue. That's all. Nothing to see here, move along.
RedHat is one of the sponsors. So the laptop will be shipped with some version of Fedora most likely. Maybe someone that doesn't have a clue either tried to install Fedora on a limited machine and noticed that it runs damn small. Or he checked for the recommended configuration on the Fedora web page. Either way, we all know that almost any distro (and certainly the kernel) can be configured to run on almost anything. Including X11. Maybe not with the latest KDE/Gnome or a default Fedora, which is what he meant.
I'm not sure what the intended functionality of this $100 laptop is, but I imagine it includes browsing the web, sending email (possibly using the web browser) and word processing. The fact that lots and lots of scientific work was done on much, much less powerful computers than the one Negroponte proposes is probably irrelevant to the intended audience. Unfortunately, many of them will fill that their web experience is being compromised by an inability to run all of the fat plugins demanded by so many web sites that nowadays don't even bother with providing thin alternatives.
Be honest, now.... does this distro make my kernel look fat?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The weakest two of my 20+ Linux machines are a 486SX/8MB and P166/16MB, both a laboratory notebooks, with X11/fluxbox (640x400x16/grey and 800x600xcolor) and networking and pretty lot of lab equipment on parallel and USB ports, not just some tiny consoleless routers. That's order of 1000 in scale of spec comparision with my hugest desktop. My iPaq runs Linux from 64MB internal flash and my Jornada from a 512 CF card, both supporting a big assortment of CF and PCMCIA stuff and outperforming original WinCE.
I am rather asking, why is Negroponte saying such nonsense that Linux is fat? $100 project has 128MB RAM/512MB flash. I believe I could seriously run xen with 20 linuxes on it.
There you are, staring at me again.
...why not start from something skinny and build up from there?
I've regularly gotten OpenBSD to fit very nicely into a 500MB drive with room to spare. I'm sure it could be squeezed down to about 200M or so if you left out the compilers.
But X is probably overkill for what these laptops do, anyway. You hardly need the networking bits, for example, and you only need to support a single chipset. And with networking gone, there's no need for X's voodoo flavour security either...
Yes, X is hard to use. How many end users do you know who have mastered xauth, for example? I know none. The usual solution is "xhost +localhost", coupled with "SSH will take care of it" for remote access.
I'm an old Amiga user. The Amiga's windowing system fit in a 256 or 512K ROM, together with pretty much all the other parts of a multitasking operating system. X in 700K? I'm not impressed.
OK, so I'm just a whining ex-Amiga user. Fair enough. Let's see what else is on the menu. QNX's Photon is, what, 40-50K? Plan 9's Rio? I don't know the size, but 8 1/2 apparently was around 100K. What about GNUStep/Display Ghostscript? I bet that if we shop around, we can do better than 700K. So let's do it.
My point isn't "X sucks"; it is that Linux, or BSD, or any free/open OS does not necessarily have to run X. And if you think about this laptop not as a standard desktop Unix platform, but as something that has to do just a few specific tasks well, it becomes an embedded system, with a whole new set of priorities. It just doesn't have to be able to run all existing applications. And that gives us (well, them...) freedom to pick whatever lets them minimize the cost of the hardware.
Sorry if this turned into a long rant, it's not meant as an attack on you or your implementation of X. I'm sure it's great for where it's meant to be used.
is negroponte one of those people who - when asked which distro they use - say they use linux 9.3 (because they mean suse 9.3)?
there is damn small linux, you know... its 50 mb big - if you have 128mb ram you can run it from a damn ram drive!
besides - whats the alternative? windows? then your 100$ laptop comes without the laptop and without any useful software like compilers and office software... which I would say are the point in the whole project, because its for educational purposes
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I had one of these $100 laptops 4 years ago.... I went on Ebay... found a 100 dollar laptop... and put linux on it. What's so freaking special about these 100 dollar laptops...
He's partnered with Red Hat to provide software. A distribution so big it's now unweildy to install from CDROM. Even if you say you only want KDE, you'll still get Gnome whether you want it or not.
So of course he's going to gripe about bloat. He's starting from one of the fattest Linux distributions around.
You just made my morning with that post :). Funniest thing I've read in a while :).
If you don't go up to +5 in a minute, I shall just have to accept that There Is No Mod.
Still laughing,
Gaurav
Linux is the KERNEL, which is modular enough to run in virtually no memory at all. You can literally choose only what you need.
What I expect he meant was that all the popular distros are big.
Well, duh... It's normal that when you put together a distro for everyone, it's going to be big.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
'Net connections are how things get done these days. If your village needs water, you need to go online and get an idea for how your government works. You need to then climb some latters communicating with people, in a combination of E-mail and F2F, and having searchable databases of people online make that much easier. You can also alert the media to the problem, and the media love "Danger! Danger!" stories.
If you don't have access to the internet, you have to rely upon libraries for information. And libraries are quickly out of date, especially in poor rural areas (if there are any at all).
It is much easier to setup businesses and distribution networks if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to find and utilize resources if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to keep up with your family if you have access to the 'net. It is easier to let people know about your plight if you have access to the net.
The internet is not an end unto itself, but a way of getting things done. There are people who already try to get food for people in starving areas. I'm glad someone is trying to get information appliances to them, so that maybe, just maybe, they can progress and manage to get food for themselves.
The ______ Agenda
I used to be really for this guy, but he's really being ungrateful turning down all this help he's been offered. Linux ain't bloated -- it is possible to roll a distro with only what the thing needs! Does he realize that?!
here i am, trying to install debian. i have downloaded and burned the first dvd three times. each time i try, the download is corrupt (the download claims to be successful and the dvd burn is successful, but there is always at least 1 critical file that can't 'download' from the dvd properly...) and i have to try again. why does debian need a full dvd to install? in fact, the full install is 2 dvds (8.4GB). i tried the bittorrent dl as recommended, but i get no more than 8kbps down. not too good considering i have a 15Mbps+ pipe... if it would fit on 2-3 cds, then i don't think this would be as much of an issue. looks like i'll be installing my old redhat installation (6.2 i think?), because i have that in hand already (2 cds) and can't see payimg $10 + s&h for a copy burned somewhere else whn i easily have the bandwidth to get it for free.
ps: i know folk are going to recommend a net install, but my onboard ethernet is not supported without a third party driver, i don't have any room in the syustem for an additional card, and the folks who support the driver no longer supply/support the driver.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
links tries to be all fancy, trying to render fancy layouts as a graphical browser would. It then falls on its ass because, well, you CAN'T DO THAT PROPERLY WITH ASCII ART.
lynx accepts the limitations of text, and works within its means.
Mod parent up! And add Haiku and Zeta to the list. Or maybe Palm would be willing to license BeOS R5.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Multitasking OpenOffice and Firefox with a dozen tabs open, on the other hand, will be problematic.
What do they mean with 'too fat' when it fits on a floppy?
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Dis tributions/
make xconfig #removing lots of crap there cp cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz
cp System.map /boot/System.map
mkinitrd /boot/initrd 2.6.16.2
# then fixing grub a bit
shutdown -r now
And off we go!
Sorry, I read "Linux" and assumed it meant teh kernel (since, technically, that's the only thing called Linux). Jumped to conclusions somewhat!
Yes, applications for the platform are somewhat ill-suited to the task (definately moreso) at present.
Excerpt from http://www.minix3.org/
MINIX 3 is initially targeted at the following areas:
* Applications where very high reliability is required
* Single-chip, small-RAM, low-power, $100 laptops for Third-World children
* Embedded systems (e.g., cameras, DVD recorders, cell phones)
* Applications where the GPL is too restrictive (MINIX 3 uses a BSD-type license)
* Education (e.g., operating systems courses at universities)
they'll be able to more efficiently produce food and use resources, which they can then use to conquer or kill their poorer neighbors
These are humans, not angels or little green men bringing peace.
That's not a flame, you assholes. Man, I am sick of idiot moderation.
Install COX in your backend today!
A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.
Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least.
Embedded versions of linux start up in a couple of seconds, but most distros start a lot of stuff that people might find useful which means it takes a long time to start. A generic kernel with hundreds of modules is going to take a while just to check to see if you've made any hardware changes and need new modules - sometimes useful but adds a while to boot. I think the philosophy is to take a while to start up instead of running slowly later when a user asks for something that isn't ready yet is why all of this stuff starts by default - the same reason behind MS Office loading into memory and making MS Windows startup slow but launching Excel later fast.
Has anyone compiled Opie for something like a P133 laptop? I am curious to know how a distro designed to work on lightweight platforms works with older heavyweight hardware with the same specs.
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
Tell me the kernel is too fat, I say okay let's compile the kernel to work with our specific hardware. This should be easy in a case such as the $100 laptop. Zero bloat on the kernel end!
Tell me the GNU Operating System programs are too bloated, and I'm sure something can be done about this as well. Maybe we could be a little more specific on what programs need to be installed on the intial installation. Leaving the option for the user to add more later.
Lastly, of course KDE, Firefox and OO.org aren't suitable for a system like this. Why do you think the big companies are so concerned? Not that this software is big company software by any means, it's that they try to compete with their corresponding proprietary counterparts. Instead the $100 laptop should focus on good efficient software to get the job done, and not worry about trying to incorporate all those extra features out there. I don't know about you all, but when I run GNU/Linux on older hardware, I think long and hard about how to go about getting my work done from the beginning. I use XFCE, and write all my documents in text or LaTeX. I can't get myself to pry firefox off the machine, so in my opinion web browsing should be a major focal point.
What you meant to say was a kernel of large stature
Here's the problem:
T he_software
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#
Their software partner is RedHat. I have much respect for RedHat - they have done amazing things for enterprise grade support of our beloved Penguin. But they are not lightweight. RedHat hasn't ever been about lightweight. That's not a condemnation, it's just not their area of expertise. I don't know if it's possible to break that tie to RedHat, or to get RedHat to agree to base the distro on something other than RedHat, but as long as square one is RedHat/Fedora, it is not going to work.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I don't know about anyone else, but the eMate sounds like a perfect solution to this problem. I'm sure by now the innards are less than $100. It would only need a handcrank attached, a colour screen added (if necessary) and possibly USB added.
Seriously, these things had pen input, a decent word processor (akin to Wordpad, but with image capabilities), a web browser, spreadsheet, graphics program, email program. They are an excellent substitute.
My 0.02 AU cents.
Yes, commercial Linux distributions are fat (although not in comparison to any other mainstream user OS)....if you go with default installs and the most bloated applications avaliable. However for his project it is entirely possible to trim down and remain highly functional. A lightweight, yet attractive and relatively easy to use WM like windowmaker, or icewm, are perfectly capable and work well for what he wants to do.There are lightweight yet capable word processing and other standalone office applications, like Abiword...which can take the place of Open Office in most cases. Email, basic photo viewing and manipulation, web browsing....all have light weight applications avaliable for them that'll do a fair job.
He's just bitching because his $100 laptop can't use the cool eyecandy filled environments with the exact same application base as most modern expensive computers....and still fit the hardware footprint and budget. He wants the magic GNU Fairy to come and sprinkle pixy dust and wave a magic wand and instantly make Firefox, OO, KDE, and GNOME run on his hardware requirements.
"I was the longest holdout for the crank being on the laptop. I was wrong," he said, adding, "If you're a 10-year-old, maybe you can get your four-year-old to pedal for you."
Evidently he's not complaining about just kernel being fat...
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Linux what? Linux kernal too big with vanilla compile? Or does he mean GNU/Linux distros are optimized for resource rich systems?
I first started using linux (and the 1.2.13 kernel) on 25 MHz 386's (Compaq Deskpros) and it ran quite comfortably. A few years later I came across a rooted 486 in the office that was running an old 2.0 kernel based distro that was one of the top ten most popular anonymous web proxies on the internet at the time. Linux is as bloated or lean as you make it. This applies to all other F/OSS operations systems as well (*BSD, Kontiki, etc).
Yes, partnering with Redhat to make a distro is going to make things difficult. But if you give it a brief amount of love, it can easily work. Until two years ago, I ran Debian on a machine with very similar specs, although it did have more disk space. The base install of Debian takes up over 500 megabytes. Localization for a langauge other than english may require up to another 200. The "desktop task" on Debian takes up almost 2 gigs. Although this installs both KDE and GNOME, clearly this system isn't designed for a 100 dollar laptop market that doesn't exist. If rather than install you cook up a single image for all these devices, then KDE+GNOME is down to 1.3 Gigabytes. This is still too damn big. I don't know offhand what eats up a lot of debian's base, but its clear the big guys aren't after this non-existant market at the moment.
However, its not impossible, moreover, its been done before. Fuck, theres even a HOWTO on the subject. There's also several distros and projects on the subject, but many of them have died out as the need for them has waned. In short, you cant just put fedora core on your 512M CF card, and if you expected this, you're much further from done than you think.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Seriously, if you think Linux is too fat for a 128MB 500MHz system, yea, you need to take notes from the embedded world.
Linux is fine.
Linux is scalable.
Linux is adored for its small device workability.
Xorg is fat.
Gnome/KDE are fat.
Unix design is fat (although modern devices have made that seem like small potatoes).
A computer scientists understands why this isn't really a problem. It's asymptotic. Today that software is a little laggy on the low-end. Tomorrow it runs great. It's not really a problem unless the extra crap is unecessary or the slowness is a design issue (Windows registry scalability issues).
Of course, now, these poor folk will get thrown down the same rat hole we went into: Badly designed integrated software to get a little more speed out of cheap hardware, which in 3 years won't matter anyway.
Linux + e/wmaker/xfce all run fine on a 500 K6-2, I've done it.
What we are discussing here is a simple, slim, expandable and manageable OS. We have an ideal situation here; Unified platform, virgin audience, some very strong constraints and the opportunity to effect something really significant with a currently windows-ignorant userbase. This could be the Linux marketing coup of a lifetime.
I suggest that we look at what has gone before:
In my experience, I have owned and used PCs, Newtons, Amigas and a variety of other devices even more obscure, all of which have provided some base functionality. What I suggest is:
Now, considering that network connectivity is not a given, it's quite possible that - in the beginning, at least - most distribution will take place over sneakerNet, it is far more important that the applications/expansions be stable. Given that we have this unified platform, distribution of binaries is not an issue, but stability is imperative as these end users can't just dial up laptop.org for a patch....
Given also that distro media may be shared, even the install media may be inaccessible for much of the time, so our end user must choose wisely and the disc creator must ensure that all dependecies are catered for, assuming at all times that this person is installing enhancements to a vanilla box.
Essentially my position is this: Keep the install choices to the above list (although net-reliant apps may be redundant in some areas) or of that range of functionality. A distro such as Gentoo would be eminently suitable as the binary results would be what is being distributed, although gcc is probably a good idea, regardless. Regardless of all our patronising comments here, we are dealing with a population here that may never have seen a computer before, let alone have one in their lap.
I am posting this on an HP4150 currently running DSL which occasionally struggles (64MB not quite enough) and previously ran Gentoo but due to a mis-configuration would no longer update (I never said I was an expert) hence my suggestion of a binary installation process.
In summary I repeat. This is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate that FOSS can work. We are not trying to convert windoesn't users here, we're installing a whole new user base. Lets show that the experience can be better this way. Oh, and I am not suggesting that binary distro makes anyone closed-source, just that that this saves the 48 hour compile (having been woken by the laptop fan at regular intervals...) This is a chance for the FOSS community to extend itself insanely, let's get it right.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
But just the other day I was able to get past a kernel panick by promising to hand over the leftovers.
OpenEmbedded has exactly what he wants. My Sharp Zaurus C-1000, running OpenZaurus (built from the OE build system) has: a real x server, pretty desktop icons, gaim, abiword, gqview gaim, sylpheed, some games, an ebook reader, gftp, firefox and some other programs. All this takes up ~90MB flash. Also, the system is fairly comfortable to use even with only 64MB of RAM. I did setup swap on an SD card but that only gets hit when firefox and something else are running at the same time. With 128MB of RAM and a leaner browser (galeon or epiphany maybe?) I don't see a reason to use swap. :gasp: even *hired* to put prioritize OLPC support).
Just my $.02
-Mr. Lizard
If I was interested in a lightweight, maintainable Linux distro for this project, I'd make sure that the OE devs got hooked up with a development system (or
^I'm with stupid.^
I think I put it best in an older post on this matter of software getting “bloated” or “ramshackle”. A load of nonsense from people attempt to appear as if they possess an understanding of technology, but really do not.
Join Tor today!
...on whether Negreponte is a novice or not. If he is, then yes, he's very possibly out of luck, since software designed for novices needs more functions by definition, and thus, has to be bigger.
If on the other hand he already knows a thing or two, (or isn't afraid of learning) then he will find that minimalistic systems are actually one of Linux's primary strengths, at least in my observation. He could probably use this as a base, and then for X use apt-get to install ROX Filer, metacity, (as a background for ROX) and fbpanel as his start menu. Or, if he wants most of that done for him, he could install FVWM instead of metacity and fbpanel, and still use ROX as an explorer clone. Mind you, this is only one possible option, and most people reading this would probably think I'm insane and ask why I don't simply advocate fluxbox/xfce etc. This is a problem with myriad possible solutions.
He'd probably also need to install gtk for Abiword etc, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. There are also any number of lightweight image viewers around as well...he should check freshmeat. For web browsing, there's also dillo.
Hence, what he wants is more than possible. He might have to do a bit of surfing, but then again, with the magic of apt-get, he probably doesn't even need to do that.
According to Gizoogle, you be frontin'. Dawg. And stuff...
He must have meant the kernel. If he had meant a distro he would have said "RedHat" or "Debian" or "Suse". The kernel is way too fat for the device, after all, but it's trivial to trim it down. The trick is to make sure you're matching the kernel features you want with the userspace you want. If you wanted really small, you'd go with uCLinux, but I think they'll want to support a broad range of modern applications, so it will be a reasonably recent standard kernel, with very few device drivers and network features. I'd argue for a 2.4 kernel myself, just for the slim comparison to 2.6. I don't know of any 2.6 features that are compelling for this device.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
They want a full gui. This is supposed to be easy to use for school children, not command line based.
The article wasn't even about him calling linux fat, it's just a comment he happened to make. All it means is they can't use any of the major GUI distros as is right now, they'll have to customize it. (Note: They had to do that anyway. The hardware specs aren't very average.)
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.
Imagine you were stranded on a desert island. No idea how to build a fire, no idea how to make potable water, no idea how to build a trap, no idea what plants were edible. How well could you survive? Now imagine you had a survival manual. How much better do you think you could survive?
The idea behind the laptop is to help educate the population so they can work on building their own infrastructure. Your idea of building their infrastructure for them is the flawed reasoning behind most current forms of welfare. If you simply give things to people, there is no incentive for them to improve their own condition. You are handing them freebies, and if they improve their own condition you will take the freebies away. What the hell kind of incentive is that? c.f. ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon. If you take away all the bad things about being in poverty, there remains no incentive to rise out of poverty.
The key to eliminating poverty is to give people the information and tools to climb out of it on their own. With information, you've given them the tools to get out of poverty, but they themselves have to make the effort to utilize those tools. Doing it this way, they don't feel beholden to foreign powers or grow dependent on foreign aid, and you aren't stuck babysitting a perpetual 3rd world nation.
Seriously, somebody needs to lead these people out of the desert.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Its only natural that Linux is too fat for that $100 laptop. Because that $100 laptop is so thin it doesn't even exist yet. When someone shows working hardware, then Linux can be shaved down appropriately.
I get a kick out of these stories. If this were Microsoft talking about a $100 laptop, everyone in Slashdot would be downing them because its vaporware at this point. But since its *not* Microsoft, its Way Cool and everyone acts like its the discovery of the fucking Holy Grail, the Second Coming of Christ, and secret documents about aliens stored at Roswell all rolled in to one.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Advocates of Linux stress choice but the end user experience is somewhat different to the rosy picture given by hobbyists & otherwise technical advocates.
.rpm, .deb etc - I've tried them all. .tgz based Slackware 9 system, but even there, my configurability was limited to minor package alterations, any thing beyond that quickly broke the system.
The fact that there are so many specialist distros such as DSL & Puppy is ample evidence that it is beyond the capacity of 'Joe Sixpack' users to successfuly configure a Linux system by adding or removing packages & recompilng the kernel to suit their particular hardware thereby reducing bloat.
Dependency management & Package management in general in Linux badly needs looking at, its easily broken & requires too much technical knowledge to fix.
I don't care which is your favourite
As a non expert user i actually had the least amount of trouble tinkering with a
* The folks at Gobo Linux have made what I regard as the sensible decision to emulate the 'Fat Binary' concept of Mac OSX. A far less troublesome way to handle the issue of dependencies.
Loking at the source code reveals a shambles of poor cpu & ram management - Gnome 2.14 goes a long way to fixing this thankfully.
There are almost 500 known distributions of Linux now, most reimplementing previous was, sometimes to the betterment of Linux but often just out of vanity or personal preference.
Some distro's have exceptional hardware detection on a par with the commercial rivals, for example Knoppix... Some distro's have simple uncomplicated software management eg Gobo... Some have a simple BSD style undeprinning eg. Slackware... Some have very good gui managemnet tools etc etc but no one Linux combines all the myriad good ideas in one usable system. Linux appears to be a crazy 'free for for all' for programmers to indulge themselves in.
This is the greatest strength & the greatest weakness of Linux.
++ Our household & small security business experimented in switching to Linux for 12 months because we craved choice & abhored the M$ monolply like many others. After 6 months we were forced to look for something else due to fustrations of limited driver support for hardware & limited application availability. (We liked Linux overall)
We switched to Mac OSX for 12 months & really liked the system but noticed some hassles with drivers & applications.
We replace our Computers in our business annually so upon the adoption of Intel CPUs & Enabling WinXP on Mac's we decided to just replace the Mac's with inexpensive quality (Acer etc) Wintel machines (mostly laptops) & just take a very proactive approach to managing security (investing in really good firewalls etc). After all, the Mac's are fast becoming just as vulnerable now (thanks Mr. Jobs) but at greater cost of hardware.
So here we are back on the despised Windows platform bitterly awaiting the day when we can find a Linux that truly substitutes for Windows at favourable cost.
p.s. I have been trying out Linux distros since the days of multi floppy img's downloaded via 9600 bps modems back in the early nineties.
Your points are exactly correct. Even though it is possible to avoid all KDE applications and all GTK+ applications, there are some instances where you need to use a different application. For example, I use KDE as my main desktop, but I use OpenOffice as my office suite. Different applications require different interpreters (Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, and now C#), which takes up even more space and memory. Each project wants to do everything its own way, which is a major duplication of effort and requires lot of space.
My solution? Applications need to be standardized by the two leading GUI toolkits (GTK+ and QT). KDE and GNOME has already lead the way with standardization, but they need to go further. KDE and GNOME apps should standardize on interpreters so that way users shouldn't have to download a new interpreter whenever they use a new application. It would be nice if they stuck with a few interpreted languages instead of adopting every interpreted language under the sun. Applications also need to standardize on APIs; there should only be one audio API, one graphics API, one networking API, etc. Don't duplicate effort unless you have to. Applications that meet these standards should be marked "KDE-approved" or "GNOME-approved" so that way users can stick to one desktop environment.
If applications were standardized with GTK+, QT, common sound/graphics APIs, and just Perl and Python as our interpreters (don't bring C#, Ruby, Tcl, Java, and other languages into the mix unless you compile them in native code; yes, they are great languages, but do we really need n+1 interpreters for n projects?), then it will solve some major issues in the *nix world, especially bloated code. Then we can talk about other issues, such as consistency.
My $65 WiFi/Router with 16M Ram and 4M Flash boots and runs Linux just fine.
However, the newer version from Linksys- WRT54GS V5 only has
2M flash. Can OpenWRT be slimmed down enough to fit and still
do something useful? Just maybe...
Brian Bouchard has already got this problem all figured out you morons. And the answer is wood. Brilliant!
Linux
There are a number of things that suggest that he is a schill for Micro$oft:
Given the exposure he has had in the press, 100's of people must have already told him all of this. He is either the world's biggest moron, or the public criticism by Gates is a staged show. Ultimately, Negroponte will ignore all of this and announce that he was going to go with Linux, but it has gotten just as 'Fat as - nay, even fatter than - Windows, and it makes more sense to go with Windows CE
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I can't think of many other OSes that I can fit on a few floppies...
Saying "linux is too fat" is like saying "processors are too slow"
What processors? Too slow for what?
Simiarly, his blanket claim is so ambiguous as to have laughable comprehensability - let alone veracity.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Many modern computers don't. And although GNOME would rock on my amd64, I use Fluxbox, and you could too. It absolutely rocked on my 200 mhz eMachine with 128 megs of RAM.
And you can take you usability argument and shove it. In the 3rd world, no one's heard of Windows, so they don't need something to pretend to be a Start menu. 45% of the "usability" issues with Linux are people expecting it to look and act exactly like Windows. Another 45% are when it looks too much like Windows, so the same people wonder what the point is. The other 10% are real usability issues, most arising from trying to walk that fine line of "like windows but different".
Give them Fluxbox, or RatPoison, or WindowMaker, or even a terminal. They'll figure it out faster than you did GNOME.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You sir, have drank the anti-globalization Kool-Aid. If you hadn't been so quick to denounce somebody that makes you uncomfortable with your views, you might try doing some actual research.
>>"A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution."
>Liar. Post proof or shut up.
Sure. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NYT reporters, in 2000, actually took the time to move to Asia and live amongst its poor and destitute. They came in with the same preconceptions of "sweatshops" that you seem to have that came out journalism in the '80s and '90s. And then they actually talked to the workers.
>>"Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least."
>Nike is helpful in the same sense that Abu Ghraib prison was a 'reforming influence'. What you think is useless to anybody (yourself included) unless you occasionally try to align it with what is true. May I suggest that you read No Logo by Naomi Klein for a start?
Excerpt from the article:
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't customization the whole point of open source? So that if Jimbob decides he does not like how the kernel is, he can either
tweak it himself
hire a programmer to tweak it for him
or hope that like minds out there somewhere have already tweaked it?
geesh!
Sorry, the tag was broken and I didn't catch it in preview.
This is the article.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I'm guessing the people these laptops are targeted towards wouldn't be able to afford a $100 laptop, and the slack would be provided by companies willing to donate.
In that case just make the laptops $200. Sure you can't get as many of them, but they would be much more functional. I doubt the current version even has enough room or power for open office. Upgrade it to 733mhz celeron or AMD equiv, 800x640 display, 256mb ram, and a small 20gig harddrive. No reason to gimp the 3rd world, the specs above would result in a MUCH more functional laptop that could run most modern software, including open office. That and in a couple years I'm sure they could get it down closer to $100. Heck, you could get a bottom of the line dell for $499 with double the specs listed above and dell makes profit from that; it shouldn't be that hard with some generous companies to get the specs I listed for under $200.
Soooo, you *are* saying it's fat! I knew it!
Seriously, this machine would be fine with 2.4 system.
In fact, I want one. Too bad, they will not be for sale.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
NT
What, when Stallman wants you to call it GNU/Linux he's a jerk because he didn't write KDE, GNOME, OO, etc..
But when Negroponte says Linux is fat, all of a sudden Linux is just the kernel and all the rest is optional, distro kinda stuff?
Sheesh. Fanboys!
Lose the fat and go with Hurd!
GNU Hurd, barely lean.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I am fat. You know why? Because I eat too many calories, and do no excercise. Why don't I do anything physical? Because I am lazy. It really is that simple.
I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't heard about it; I hadn't heard of it. You could have mentioned that DSL stands for Damn Small Linux, a 50 MB desktop Linux distribution intended for use on a business card PCs, flash drives and other small portable media.
he's been packing on some pounds though... first time my wife saw my linux penguin on my im client her quote was something like 'oh, the fat boring penguin again' so, there you go :)
sig goes here!
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
...crank the wheel for six weeks straight when the time comes to do an emerge?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
500 mhz isn't too bad for oo.o, actually. The startup times can be painful, but that's not the real problem. You've got a 500 mhz laptop and 128M of RAM. Now throw away all your hard drive space, or create a new 512 meg partition on the leftover space on your drive. That swap partition should do nicely, and it's suitable because you wont be using a swap partition at all. dpigs puts oo.o in at around 300 megs between openoffice.org-bin, openoffice.org-core, open-office.org and openoffice.org-common. My distro default linux image clocks in at 50 megs on disk, but there's a lot of driver code for devices I don't own in there, and probably some other useless stuff that an integrated vendor can ditch.
This is why they're looking at Abiword and Gnumeric, which are a bit more lenient on the storage space. And that 512 disk space really is a barrier that has to be overcome. It's not impossible, but it will be an uphill battle. Modern software and distros typically assume the ludicrous amounts of disk space available today. Hell, people put 40 gig drives in THEIR MP3 player! But this is something that has to be sacrificed to make the system work.
To me, the biggest question will be whether Linux and computing in general will recieve any lasting benefit from their experiences and efforts, or if it will all be lost in time like a tear shed in the rain.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
What about qTopia or one of the other graphical systems designed for small devices like Open Zaurus? This small device seems to have a lot in common with, say, a Zaurus. Flash storage, small footprint etc... It seems that that would be the ideal solution for something like this.
Idiot. Look on wikipedia, in the sweatshop article. If you still don't believe it, take up the issue there. Quoting from wikipedia:
According to a UNICEF study an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the US banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," - "all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production" according to the UNICEF study.
Reference: http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/
I was just trying to find where I can download a Debian Potato ISO that I can install on my PII 128MB. Not even debian has it linked from its own site. Browsers like firefox are so heavy but Mozilla Phoenix (0,4) is still available on mozilla's site and would be sufficient to do most things.... Would anyone know where I can find potato?
my blog
Your computer wasn't trying to draw a 1024x768 or greater resolution screen. Face it, the reality of computer modernity is not that the software has gotten too bulky, but that the environments we're accustomed too are far more complicated now.
Software has grown to take advantage of the hardware, like you said, and this is a Good Thing(TM). If we used something a lot less powerful we wouldn't be able to "waste remaining cycles on eyecandy" as they would be too busy actually doing something useful like redrawing your current window.
A $100 laptop might be great if you don't need/want to do much, and you wont be able to anyways. If you want to browse the web and send email this things for you. Just don't complain when you can't do X or Y or Z with it because it doesn't have enough {ram|CPU|disk space|screen size}.
And the OS was what was BUILT upon the kernel. I could be wrong.. but seriously, how large can a generic 2.4.x kernel be? It's not like you have to run the latest version of fedora or suse on these machines, just a simple base system with common dependancies, xorg, fluxbox and a few standard apps. Negroponte needs to get himself a copy of DSL or Knoppix-STD. Both are small, lightweight operating system with just as much use as my P4 running debian with gnome.
11 years ago I was using OS/2. In 6M RAM it'd do a gui, networking, applications, and multitask well. It ran a web browser, email client, word proc, spreadsheet, and development of desktop applications. Windows 95 needed 8M just for the gui + networking if you only run 1 application.
Linux protagonists at the time were boasting they could run GUI + networking + good multitasking in 4M.
At the time, getting 16M into a machine was often impossible even if affordable.
Hm. Why is my mobile phone 10x more powerful than those desktops, yet even with a video connector it wouldn't be a desktop substitute.. something sucks about that.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
In soviet linux all your dependencies are belong to the government.
I hope you're a troll, rather than an ignorant nay-sayer....
Nope, just ignorant. Guess I didn't do my research. I thought DSL was that distro that ran off a floppy, but I guess that was something else entirely.
"I said, 'That's too bad, because I need 100 million a year.'
at $100 a pop, that's $10 billion CASH, per year. 1. that kinda cash isn't floating around in the poor communities of the world and *nobody* will donate anything close to that on an annual basis.
i would've hated to be Negroponte's parent when he was a kid... when he ordered food at a restaurant, i bet he tried to order 3 entrees, 4 drinks and 4 desserts - a steroidal version of "eyes bigger than the stomach" syndrome.
queue Quagmire:
"Fat OS's need love, too... they just have to PAY!"
For example, try telling your mother (or his) that she 'uses most of her energy to move fat.' Would you expect this to be received well?
It's true that Linux has evolved into something not suitable for his project, and that everybody knows this, and that most people are quite happy with the fact that Linux does nice things on modern hardware. But his reaction to this state of affairs is not a mere description of "what the challenges of the software side of his project are," it's an insult that he hopes will persuade someone to turn Linux into something that IS suitable. This demonstrates a remarkable lack of social skills on his part.
This does not bode well, coming as it does from the leader of a project whose success depends on hundreds of millions of dollars of charitable donations. And regarding an area that depends on a loosely knit organization of people who write code for the fun of it.
Theres a decision that needs to be made. Is linux to be a basis embedded style OS with minimilist features that really only suit the most basic of desktop needs if its very useable as a dsktop OS AT all and as a server OS.
OR you want to compete with OSX and Windows on the desktop and windows in the server space. You cant have it both ways with a minimilist attitude. Thats reality, and thats what killed Novell.
nt
From the description of the article, it looked like an issue with the architecture of the 2.6 kernel might have been the problem, producing kernels too large for that device. Were that the case, of course, there are tweaks that can be made for small devices.
Same deal with distros. You don't need to install everything, and you certainly shouldn't choose a distro that would encourage installing everything. If disk space is at a premium, you don't need Gnome or KDE there. A simple window manager like Icewm with the Menu package would easily suffice.
If XFree86 is too large, either cut it down to size by removing support for things you don't need or dispose entirely of the GUI concept and only support CLI. The Western world managed perfectly fine in the 1980s and early 1990s with libcurses or character based apps like WordPerfect, Wordstar and Lotus 123. The Internet is perfectly accessible (on an information level) to apps like lynx and w3m.
Essentially, there are plenty of options to cut down to meet any low-end hardware, provided you're willing to be selective.
Who the hell modded you up? Well, I hope those guilt get meta-moderated to smithernes...
/dev? Was hotplug used? Was kudzu used? Were they using all the same hardware init scripts and settings??? I highly doubt you even bothered to look that up.
The linux kernel is "versatile", not "fat".
What is the difference? You can compile the linux kernel without the stuff you on't want. You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc. A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them. But a Linux user can.
Are you absolutely sure you are making a fair comparison? (The apparent simplicity is not enough justification). Perhaps more recent redhat kernels either compile more things in (instead of modules) or they cause more modules to be autoloaded by default... And what about changes in default memory management policies (e.g. memory mapping, disk cache, etc)??? And you even go as far to compare different Distributions??? Were they using udev, devfs, or a manually configured
Also note a lot of "Free Memory" is not very desirable... Memory not being used by applications can used for disk-cache. I've noticed that recent kernels only keep a little memory free, probably to have some "on hand" without incurring the delay of flushing disk cache pages.... This makes a lot of sense. Thus, you cannot simply look at "MemFree:" and draw conclusions. The same applies to the results in "top".
And I would suspect even Windows does something similar (but Taskmgr.exe is probably rigged to only show memory used by apps).
Note to moderators: The parent post is truly nothing more than flamebait at best. Shame on you for modding otherwise.
Too many applications are just plain huge; e.g. Open Office.
.5 gig of RAM like my laptop, have to swap things out due to this sort of sloppyness. This should just not be necessary.
OpenOffice is a cross-platform office suite developed by a commercial vendor; I really don't see how you can lay this one at the feet of "Linux" just because they changed the license at one point.
However, in general, the thing is: OpenOffice is fast and small enough and developers don't have unlimited time to improve aspects of the software that satisfy requirements. They may not satisfy the OLPC requirements, but they aren't intended to.
Too many applications do plain stupid things, like leak pixmaps in the X Window server.
Applications do stupid things because people don't have time, tools, and incentives to find and fix all the bugs. If you want people to fix this, you have to include diagnostics and error messages into the libraries, or just solve the problem with distributed garbage collection.
People have become downright sloppy. Our systems, even with
Even if that were the case, so what? Just put 1G in it.
If you ever wondered why our intereactive response is unpredictable, just consider what happens if you have to start waiting on disk drives to page things out and in.
I don't know about you, but I use Linux, OS X, and Windows regularly, and Linux+Gnome and Linux+KDE overal still beat OS X and Windows hands down in terms of performance and predictability. A few things are slower on Linux (like OOo startup and boot), but not in a way that matters.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
I don't think there is anything that needs to be "fixed", although performance can always be improved. One thing you can do is advocate the switch away from C/C++, because the use of C/C++ is one of the fundamental causes of software bloat.
As for OLPC, well, you have correctly observed that the machine you are designing is not the target machine that most developers are writing to. So, a lot of today's Linux software will not be usable for you. That will not be fixed because there is nothing wrong with that state of affairs. Fortunately, Linux offers a wide range of software, so you can, in fact, find software that will transform your underpowered laptops into useful machines.
My personal recommendation, however, would be to rewrite a lot of the software in a good higher-level language than C/C++; if you choose a reasonable language and runtime, you'll find that not only is it easier to write the software, it will also run more efficiently.
I am writing this in an internet cafe in Khartoum Sudan. I had to bite into this one. Nicolas Negroponte is a brilliant guy but I think he has been listening too much to RedHat.com executives. They think only in terms of Gnome or KDE desktops which are bloated. After all Red Hat mainly produce for Multinational Businesses who can afford state of the art hardware. You can run lighter desktops such as fluxbox or xfce. Incidentally the Chinese might beat Negroponte to the finish. They are looking like making a linux laptop for US 187 already: http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/A-Linux-Laptop- for--187-/story.xhtml?story_id=10000B5Y3P5W
Plus this:
http://cebitvideo.com/?p=20
I can tell you my Local Sudanese Security Officer would give anything to have my HP laptop multi-booting Ubuntu/Fedora/FreeBSD and dare I say it Windows. At the moment teaching him the Linux Professional Institute tutorials from the IBM website. The guy is a sponge for information. Probably try to get him a job at my organisation in The Hague so he can afford an education at Leicester University's Security Management Program by which time he can go back into the UN System as a Professional Grade Officer. He will probably finish up being my boss!
I have been surprised by the number of Linux/BSD nerds I have met in the
internet cafe!
Two sites of interest for Low Resource Linux for the third world or poorly funded non-profits in the developed world:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.rule-project.org/
There seems to be a lot of Americans on this site who think all Africans live in mud huts and are all starving. There are a lot of smart people here and a when the government gets out of the way quite a lot of entrepeneural skill. Africa's problem is predominantly corruption and our Western Governments are pretty much responsible for that. In particular big oil companies. There are a lot of evil people in government here...but the same could be said of the USA, UK and Australia for that matter. For the record I am dual/national Australian/British and if I could I would denationalise altogether.
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
...says Negroponte too Linux.
RedHat, Mandrake and Suse are all very obese no doubt.
Try instead {insert your favourite fast-thin-optimized Linux distro here}
Unix in all its incarnations has always been a highly modular architecture; like a hi-fi system composed of separates rather than a ghetto-blaster. If you know you won't be listening to any LPs or Walkman cassettes, just CDs, you can build a hi-fi system with just a CD player, amplifier and speakers -- and you haven't got the excess baggage of sound sources you won't be using.
..... 4 ..... 3 .....} And, of course, everyone experiments with several different applications in the same sphere till they find the ones that suit them. The end result is that almost every GNU/Linux installation ends up containing more than is required: a kernel with unnecessary device drivers, and some applications that never get used.
The Linux kernel is also modular. You can build device drivers right into the kernel for speed, or have them as loadable modules for convenience.
A distribution's "standard" kernel must by necessity incorporate enough drivers to be able to boot up on a wide variety of hardware, because the distributor can't know in advance what it is being used on. And most distributions don't start by compiling a kernel tailored absolutely to your system. {Gentoo fanboys in 5
In that respect Negroponte is spot-on. We're just a bunch of spoilt, lazy westerners who can afford plenty of RAM and drive space. That's a sign that Linux is becoming successful: in the early days, Linux was run mainly on older kit, sometimes even salvaged from skips, because that was the best anyone could afford. Success will change you, however hard you try not to let it.
But since these machines will be electronically identical, it ought to be easy to create a custom kernel with drivers for only the devices actually installed. It might even be worth hacking X so as to support only the built-in display {sure, it's fun running printerdrake to set up someone else's printing from your desktop; but the way these things will be networked wirelessly, chances are they'll be near enough as you can just walk across and sort it out}.
If you want to see what can be done in not much disk space, check out Slax Popcorn Edition or Damn Small Linux.
Those who are prepared to take the time, can still shoehorn a lot of functionality into not much space. There are already appliances running customised versions of Linux on microcontrollers; and these are being made in much smaller numbers than the proposed Negroponte laptop. So it will definitely be worth the effort to trim away some of the excess, even if nothing else comes from it that can be applied to other areas.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
How would you put together a cheap computer with only 512MB of hard disk? Last time I looked, the smallest-available hard disk for consumer computers was about 20 gigabytes. You just couldn't buy a smaller mass-produced hard disk.
Negroponte says "We're heading to the point where 50 percent of the world will have a cell phone or some kind of (communication device) within 18 months. It's too voice-centric, and I could campaign to make it more data-centric, but that's going to happen, too."
That's seems to me to be unaware of the presence of GSM. 90% of the world's cell phones are GSM, an inherently digital-data format. Sure, it allows 9K6 data transfers or 28K8 if you use High Speed Circuit-Switched Data (HSCSD) mode, which I doubt will be available in too any developing nations. People aren't going to be downloading too much multimedia to the limited storage of these systems, so I don't see a low data rate as a problem.
I agree with your point. Isn't this whole thing part of the whole micro- versus monolithic kernel issue?
Oh dear, you're definitely a Linux zealot. Do yourself a favour, get out and smell some fresh air. Really. My example is treating Linux as a whole, even though I was trying to be fair to it and used the Kernel as an example. Note that the article says "Linux". It does NOT say the Linux kernel. It says Linux. Read it again.
:-)
As I said to another pro Linux zealot, find me a Linux distribution that lets you customer a Linux kernel at install time. You're being very unrealistic, I'm being very realistic. Sure, post install you can trim a kernel down, I'm not arguing there. The question is, how many Linux users do so? I spent the past 3 and a bit years helping out on some Linux distribution forums (the Linux distribution shall remain anonymous), and you wouldn't believe how many of the users didn't either want to compile a kernel, or were scared shitless of doing so (and thus never attempted it).
Quote: "Note to moderators: The parent post is truly nothing more than flamebait at best. Shame on you for modding otherwise"
Read up
Have a nice day!
Dave
Slashdot can go and get fucked.
You agree that the Linux kernel can be stripped down to a smaller size so I don't understand why you think it would be too "fat" for this $100 dollar laptop project since its likely that they would be using a customised distribution which they could easily ensure was of an appropriate size for their purpose.
Well, if he don't like what's out there - he's the prof with lots of grad student slaves, ah - I mean assistants.
IF Damn Small Linux, at 50 MB is still too big for him,
he can reverse engineer some GEOS type O.S. user interface.
Anyone up for making a GEOS Linux distribution?
Strip all the extras from Linux, and give it a GEOS type interface instead of KDE or Gnome,
add in color, firefox, and a trimmed down version of the Open Office Suite, it should be good to go.
Considering the GEOS GUI was running on C>64 machines back in 1985,
he should have no problem hand coding his own version of DCLL [Damn Cheap Laptop Linux]!
I thought some of these MIT guys were tech geeks, after all ?
Yo linux machine so fat cause you looked at the package choices and went "okay!" to all
Yo linux machine so fat she's got to have *two* IP addresses
find me a Linux distribution that lets you customer a Linux kernel at install time.
*Raises hand* Me me! that one is easy!
Gentoo, slackware
Or what about NeoMagiclux
Neat uh?
Look, the problem with the article and almost all the articles is that they try to add labels and properties to "Linux" as an operating system. Linux is not an operating system it is a kernel, Mandriva, Gentoo or whatever you want is an operating system, some of them are Fat, some of them are bloated, some or them are insecure and whatever.
But you can not say that "Linux is a fat operating system" because linux is not an operating system.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
> You can compile the linux kernel without the stuff you on't want.
I'm guessing their talking about users. Not software developers.
> You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc.
> A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them.
> But a Linux user can.
No you can't. You have to recompile the kernel to do that, which 95% of computer users couldn't do and 99.9% wouldn't want to or couldn't be bothered.
Recompiling is NEVER a solution to any USER-level problem. Unforunately too much open source software relies on recompilation and/or patching to get the setup you need, whereas the Windows equivalent software can be reconfigured in 10 seconds using a GUI.
Erector set ...? Sounds like email spam to me!
He's right. Any Unix like OS is a behemoth. Allways has been. Linux never was an exception. It allways needed stronger hardware than Windows a few years ago. That's slowly changing, but parts of the Linux experience are serious slowpokes and demand top range hardware for up-to-date performance. Pure BeOS would probably be the prototype of a modern system that runs fast and lightweight.
Yet I still can't shake the notion of this project approaching the problem the wrong way.
Let me explain:
I've got a Sharp PC 1403 right here. It's the successor to my first computer I've ever had, a PC 1402. It runs on two buttoncells for something like 200-300 hrs. I've yet to see a comp that runs of the grid for such a long time. The 1403 has 32 KB which isn't very much at all. But this computer is 15 years old! The 1402 I bought back in 1985!
What if you take, let's say, a PC 500-S (the lates of the sharp series, still available), give it a good large (80x40) monocromatic passive LCD display, 4-8 MB of memory, two slowpoke non-x86 CPUs and a good solar display and some kind of rugged connectivity (some serial port or something). Put it all into one super stable box that is easy to open and repair and build them for 30$ a piece. It can't be that hard. Who in the 3rd world needs a Linux Box??? I don't even need one - and I make a living using Debian (I'm typing this on a Mac). Back in the day DOS 5 and Works 5 on a 4-greyscale LCD PC the size of a chocolate bar (1994 it was) was perfect for everything. And it still would be today. It's just that we what to see neat little pictures. The Fidonet was text-only and the quality of content was 10x better.
Nobody in the outskirts of Africa needs Linux and noone there has 100$.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
95% of users have no need to trim the kernel to save a few K of memory.
The $100 computer project is developing an entire new hardware platform, I'm sure compiling a custom kernel won't be too difficult for them.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, you are technically correct, but look at it this way - the vast majority of people would look at Linux being an "Operating System". They don't know what a kernel is, and couldn't give a damn what a kernel is, nor the fact that it's customisable on a GNU/Linux system. 4% (if you're lucky) of the worlds population use Linux. Ask the other 96% what a kernel is, and what an operating system is. Most will know what an operating system is, most won't know what a kernel is. Most will call Linux an operating system (at least those that have even heard of it, which is no more than 20% of the population I'd hazard a guess at).
./configure on a kernel tree fully? My recollection of Slackware from years and years ago was that it didn't let you adjust the kernel. Gentoo I've never used, but Gentoo was always overkill and a means to show yourself off as being an "uber g33k" as far as I was concerned.
Now - how far do those distributions that you've named allow you to modify the kernel? Do they just allow you to maybe choose low mem and hi mem, and cpu architecture type? Or do they let you basically run a
Dave
Slashdot can go and get fucked.
So tell her to lay off the twinkies, dog.
The article was about someone who wants to make a $100 "laptop" not being smart enough to realize that Linux, and it doesn't matter if you're talking about the kernel or the crap thrown around it, was able to be slimmed down enough to work on devices with much LOWER specs than is being thrown around. If they're willing to make their own very specialized hardware, I doubt they're "too scared" to make a distribution of linux that will run well on it. Your entire argument falls apart.
it's specialized hardware that's going to come with a specialized OS with a Linux kernel. If they can't get the Linux kernel and the userland apps to be small enough to fit on there, they should give up the project right now as they're obviously incompetent.
Linux is open source and the MIT folks are very smart people, so just do it! How hard can it be for MIT to take a FOSS project and tweak it to their exact needs? There are already versions of Linux + X Windows that run off 2 floppy disks. 1 month is all it should take to get a beta version out, or are they not half as smart as they would like us to think they are?
The $100 laptop they can use expert system administrators to build their kernels. Heck they could hire RedHat and thus get Alan Cox to do it personally. Eric Raymond (who wrote some of the early kernel config programs) supports the $100 laptop project.
So no I'd say its as far this goes its the opposite end of the spectrum.
Unforunately too much open source software relies on recompilation and/or patching to get the setup you need, whereas the Windows equivalent software can be reconfigured in 10 seconds using a GUI.
That is just plain nonsense. Unix apps tend to be far more configurable since they utilize human readable config files and scripts. Windows programs conversely are difficult for the developers themselves to recompile with different settings due to the fragility of the Visual Studio environment.
My personal take on this (coming from someone who's used Linux for nearly 10 years now) is that it's not "Linux" (as in kernel) that's become so fat, it's the window environments.
Anytime I set up a computer with Linux, if said computer is older, I will set the desktop up with either blackbox or afterstep. Doing so makes those machines quite spritely. On the same machines, you use KDE or GNOME and you're going to slow the machine down quite a bit.
So if someone is looking to create an environment for a sub-100 dollar laptop they better be looking at one of the "other white meats" of the Linux desktop environment.
To be honest, I'm saddened by the serious lack of interest it seems the Linux community has developed for the other DEs. I personally run blackbox on my desktop and love it. I would love to see a renewed interest in these far-less-bloated DEs.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
If Prof. Negroponte wants a small light weight operating system that is very stable, he should consider switching to PicoBSD. It fits on a 1.44 Megabyte floppy. http://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/picobsd.html
Excellent idea, living in non sustainable environments sucks. Now where are we putting these people EXACTLY? Are you volunteering your backyard? I hope you have a big backyard...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
So you you are justifying exploiting the fuck out of people because they live in very desperate circumstances? ASSHOLE!!!!!! And you wonder why Latin American countries are electing leftist leaders and saying FUCK YOU to use multinationals exploiting their populations?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Much of UNIX early development was on PDP-11s which averaged 1/8th megabyte of core. MicroSoft used to sell a version of PC-UNIX called Xenix on 64 KB PCs. It was underpowered compared to PDP UNIX. LAter MicroSoft sold Xenix to SCO.
Note that the article says "Linux". It does NOT say the Linux kernel. It says Linux. Read it again.
Linux IS the kernel. The GUI is not linux. The user space utilities are not linux. The shells and compilers and servers are not linux.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I only get erection in one piece, so Linux can't be fat.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Has no one demonstrated Damn Small Linux (DSL) to these people?
Linux is only as Fat as you make it.
Light, Love, Happiness,
Blame the Window Manager. Window Maker or Enlightenment would do a better job than a full Mandrake KDE session. You can use Konqueror, Kicker, Kontact and other KDE applications without problem. A 233 MHz can run that and play music at you with Noatun without skipping with just a little more RAM. GIMP is also usable. OO is where you might want to draw the line. It's very slow to open and the average 70MB Power Point won't open.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So default kernels are bloated.
However the moment you compile your own OR can fine tune a distro to one specific set of hardware you can cut a lot of crap out.
Take the simplest of things. Module support. Only needed if you load modules and modules are only really needed by developers OR if you want to include all the modules for say all the soundcards and load the right one at boot.
If you know wich modules you need you can just compile them in and skip all the module support.
Same with a lot of things.
A fine tuned kernel is a lot smaller.
The proof? Linux runs on tiny computers like switches and watches and phones and pda's.
Linux the source code is big and feature rich.
Linux the kernel is as fat or as slim as you want it to be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm currently running Ubuntu 5.04 on an HP4150 with 256MB (500MHz PII) and have zero, I mean ZERO complaints. What's the expectation here? I like his concept immensely, and given that I can strip out whatever I like at install or at anytime later I don't see his point. All comes down to what your application might be.
Let's say all that you want is a wireless web browser. Hmm....easy.
Media machine, maybe a bit more intensive.
Gaming? Well, I don't really play games, so I don't know. Seems to me that 3rd world countries may not have gaming as a priority.
Office productivity? Pretty effective. OpenOffice and other alternatives work just dandy on such an underpowered (by today's cutting edge standards anyway) machine.
Printing? Are you kidding me?
Gimp(or the like)? Well, now you're getting into some rough waters, but it will still do the job.
USB support? There.
Wireless? There.
Even serving up FTP or SAMBA work just as quick as you like.
Try experiencing any of this functionality with W2K or XP and you are hosed. This machine used to run NT just fine and dandy as well, it was only when I tried using the 'upgrades' to it that I started getting frustrated and went with Linux. First RH7, then RH9, then FC2. Now I've settled on Ubuntu/Debian and couldn't be more pleased with the efficiency and doggone frugality that Linux offered in the first place.
What does the Media Lab consider as a distro, and what of that is 'fat'?
Maybe Negroponte needs to check out how Linux can get into shape and/or diet....
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
"Gentoo I've never used, but Gentoo was always overkill and a means to show yourself off as being an "uber g33k" as far as I was concerned."
So... you want to be able to customize the kernel... but distributions that allow you to cuztomize the kernel are 'overkill'... make up your mind.
Maybe he should look into what Nokia is doing. He's building an embedded device, so use a embedded Linux. Nokia managemed to slim theirs down to 64M installed with 32M of memory on the internet 770 tablet PC, so they should be able to do the same.
The GP is showing a lot of knowledge about Linux and distributions. You clearly do not understand much about Linux. There are numerous distributions that allow you to customize a kernel at install time. That however, is completely irrelevant. Since all of Negreponte's laptops are going to be running the exact same hardware, they can all use the same kernel. My Zaurus has a linux kernel and a graphic interface and it runs on a 200 MHz ARM. If this can run on a Linux kernel, then so can Negreponte's laptop. Instead of calling the GP a zealot, perhaps you can defend you position with an argument that is relevant to the topic.
If they just sign up for a 36-month MSN subscription. Why cripple the kids' computers when they can have awesome 2GHz laptops for free? And they'll get unsurpassed internet connectivity with some of the finest customer support in the world to boot.
Or wait, I've got it: TiVo hands out free computers too! There's a linux computer in those boxes somewhere. Plus the finest entertainment the world has to offer, for only $12.95 a month!
When those leftist leaders give the finger to the "capitalist exploiters" and the money that used to come into their countries dries up, where will that leave their people?
-- Old Man Kensey
> You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc.
> A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them.
> But a Linux user can.
No you can't. You have to recompile the kernel to do that, which 95% of computer users couldn't do and 99.9% wouldn't want to or couldn't be bothered.
YES you can. Ever heard of
And for fairness, windows actually has some similar capabilities in the Registry... But many of these settings by default are not in the registry(!) (e.g. windows uses default values).
Linux can be FAT, although old versions of Windows are decidely FATter than most Linux installations. My Linux installations tend to run on the leaner side. Like Reiser. Yeah, Paul Reiser... right...
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
I think one of the main problems with a statement like "LINUX is fat" is that MANY people do not differentiate between the LINUX kernel and the distribution that uses LINUX as it's kernel. Technically "LINUX" is only the kernel only but many people refer to running "LINUX" when the are really running RedHat, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, ect.
You could easily make the argument that many LINUX distributions are "FAT" but the kernel? It's possible to compile a LINUX kernel with only the modules you need (either included or as external loadable modules). I find it hard to believe that it's FAT in that sense since you can still run LINUX stripped down on a 386. There are a whole host of embedded devices that are small relative to the negraponte's system and run the LINUX kernel just fine.
That is just plain nonsense. Unix apps tend to be far more configurable since they utilize human readable config files and scripts.
----------
You are probably correct but I thing the previous poster meant from a users point of view NOT a developer.
As someone who has just made the switch from windows to Linux I can say that WINDOWS was so much better for non-computer type people.
When I install windows EVERYTHING works. With Linux I tried 4 different distros before I found one that even detected my graphics card. As a beginner I have always wanted to try Linux but never had the nerve.
Imagine my horror when the first distro booted straight into a console WTF. Where was my pretty login screen the installer had promised. Now three days later I understand runlevels, Xserver, etc. But I still don't have all my hardware working.
Most Linux distros DO have a long way to go. Thanks to Microsoft users EXPECT things to work. The average computer user would not be able to install a distro from scratch if something went wrong.
Oh and for the other posters, it is possible that the kernel can be cut down, but THERE IS NO WAY I WOULD ATTEMPT THAT!
I like the distro I have running now and will probably continue using it instead of Windows. But getting things to work is a pain.
Al
Linux too fat? Have you googled a pic of Negroponte lately?
He really needs to quit working himself up over nothing.
In 6 months,when Moores law kicks in,linux won't be too "fat" for "lardass" Negroponte.
If he quits feeding his face on donuts,ice cream and eclaires he still will be fat in 6 months.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Oh.
I thought we were talking about an operating system to install in a $100 laptop.
Sorry, should have been paying attention. I lost you when you were explaining how you like Windows XP.
Are we talking about Linux being too fat to install on a $100 Laptop, or are we talking about the average user installing on 120Gig HD?
"I'm a snake if we disagree"-Jethro Tull, Bungle in the Jungle
Don't forget the hardware you are talking about was built for windows and shipped with windows. If you bought an AMD Sun you wouldn't be shocked if you had driver problems under Windows. Pretty much there is a 6 mo delay between the time hardware comes out and the time distributions support it. That's pretty good if you think about. No one else is even close to Linux in supporting foreign hardware.
Having to pick a distro based on quick adoption of hardware is likely to make you unhappy in a whole lot of other areas. You may just want to wait.
This person is apparantly unfamiliar with the concept of an entire Linux system on a single CD. Or USB key. I just grabbed SimplyMEPIS this weekend, and it is the epitome of lean. Click the "install me" icon, and away you go. If you *want* fatter, you can apt-get anything else you want, but everything the typical user needs is there already. Can't say that with Windows.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Hello
:)
Actually every piece of hardware I have is supposed to work under Linux. What I was trying to get across is the difference in the end user experience.
Under windows; download driver and double click.
Under Linux; i will let you know when I figure it out.
I did check before I started that everything should work with Linux, however as someone who has only used a computer for a few years(all of that under windows) i can say Linux is harder than Windows. That doesn't mean I am going to give up though!
I like Linux and the distro I am using has everything I need, plus I am learning something new every time I turn the thing on, unlike under Windows.
Al
Once again, we have a case of someone confusing Linux (the kernel) with a fullblown distro. I'm not surprised Negroponte thinks Linux is too fat if the project partner is RedHat; yes, RedHat is one of the few institutions able to pull this off, but their distro is not meant for this kind of hardware. Especially not their modern distros.
Seriously...all these machines are the exact same spec, right? Have a single production server at the project's home base install Gentoo in a chroot environment, with GCC set to -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -march=k6 (or whatever it is Geode CPUs use), and build a minimal system. Modular X.org so it only has the stuff for the relevant video card, Nautilus and Gnome-Panel but NOT Gnome itself, and Fluxbox as the WM with the Panel running on top of it. AbiWord and GNUmeric over Openoffice.org, iDesk for icons, Aterm instead of Gnome-terminal, etc. Then strip out Portage, GCC, and any other dev tools that aren't going to be used. I'd be surprised if that whole thing took 700 MB. Load it onto all the machines, and theyre good to go.
As far as the kernel goes, since (I believe) 2.6.15 certain patchsets have an option to pass GCC -Os instead of -O2 for building the kernel. It'll still probably take more memory than a comparable 2.4.x kernel but that's a start. It's all a matter of making intelligent choices, and the more I read about this project the less I tink Negroponte understands the technical aspects of this...
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
And what I'm telling you is that your not doing an apples to apples comparison. Try running a poorly supported piece of hardware under Windows (one where you can't just double click on some driver). You've never tried to use a non windows piece of hardware on a windows computer so you don't really have anything to compare your experience with Linux too. You might be able to get it sort of kind of work under limited conditions but not very smoothly.
You can far more easily get something to 1/2 work under Linux. 6 months from now it will be a different story because the drivers will be integrated and everything will just self install. If 3 Linux distributions don't support your video card than most likely your video card was added to a recent version of X, for example.
I'm running DSL on 2 IBM365 Thinkpads, one with 24MB of ram and the other with 32. It runs frighteningly well, much better than 95, which is what was on them before. Now I just need to find 2 linux suppored 802.11b or 802.3 cards and I've got two useful machines.
I don't get it.
DSL is impressive technically, but it'd make anybody with a shred of aesthetic sense want to gouge his own eyes out.
Seems like you could solve that with 5MB of theming. Not appropriate for DSL, but a PDSL patchset would be useful for alot of people.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Chavez is so communistic that he has beaten their economy into the sludge of south america. they now have to resort to stealing billions of $$$ from the rest of the world to survive.
i disable sigs
"Your logic is like saying I only beat my slaves two days a week, the other guy beats them four days a week, therefore I'm good. It leaves out the fact that beating slaves or exploiting the most vulnerable people in the world is sick and wrong"
You have yet to offer any evidence of "exploitation". There is no explotation in the free exchange of goods, money, work, and services. The "slaves" reference is way off-topic. These are not slaves, they are not owned. They willingly show up to do a service and be paid fairly for it, after which they go home.
"Yeah "foreign investment" sure helped those people in Vietnam and Indonesia working at Nike factories for less than 40 dollars a month"
Yes, it sure has. Typically, these jobs offer much more than the jobs that were there before
"But the company (Nike} still does not require its contractors to pay workers a living wage."
The "living wage" idea is a very imaginary concept, and entirely arbitrary. Just about any wage, after all, is a living wage, if you make the right lifestyle choices. Using the logic to defend the "living wage", why not take it to its logical end? Demand Nike pay $600 an hour to its workers in Vietnam and China? I have written letters to Nike asking that they pay a fair wage, not the "living wage" which is unsustainable.
"A living wage, which is a wage that helps cover the needs of a family, not just one worker, would be twice this figure, or 664,000 rupiah/month ($75US)."
This shows how imaginary and arbitrary this is. Why should someone earn a wage based on their lifestyle and not their work? Why should a single person be paid a lavish unearned "living wage" the same as someone supporting a whole family? Why should someone working a low-value job who has a family be paid extra just because they have a family (instead of earning more by being a better worker?) You are taking all value away from the idea of work. Would you actually put in place something where wages were connected to family size and not the work done?
You prove my case for me when you say that the "living wage" is "not (for) just one worker": what if it really is just one worker, not a family? If you set it based on a family, then what size? 3 children? 8? I wonder if you can dust off any of Stalin's aparatchiks to help you out with assigning values to things you know nothing about. Who cares if people starve to death as a result, right?
"Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages."
None of them do. Poverty is a matter of lifestyle and choices, not wages. Anyone can live on just about any way, no matter how low, if they make the right choices. The "living wage" really trashes economics with disastrous results. This always happens when the price of something is disconnected from its real value and is instead set in some ludicrous arbitrary fashion by fiat.
"Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum."
You forget that this "meagre sum" that you demand that Nike overpay its workers adds up quickly into a huge amount. Yeah, they can afford it, just like they can afford to go bankrupt. There is no reason not to pay them for the work they do. No more. "Yes living expenses are less in third world countries but not THAT much less. The truth is that Nike can best afford to pay its workers the REAL VALUE of the work, which is what they are paying them already.
"Cheap labor conservatives love "foreign investment" when the the prevailing wage in the country being invested in is a slave level of wage."
First, I don't advocate "cheap" labour. I advocate the real value of the labour. If it is cheap, so what. If someone in India or Mexico is better at a job than an American, I do not begrudge them the jobs they earn. Second, slavery and earning wages are two topics. There is no such thing as a slave level of wage.
"If we are actually concerned with helping people and not exploiting them, we should aim for them becoming self sufficient through education, and micro businesses, not being exploited by first world multinationals."
Well, since first-world multinationalists are not exploiting anyone, there is no problem at all.
"lets strip you of your western possesions "
Is that it? It all boils down to you wanting to steal my stuff? Such greed and jealousy, and a foam-at-the-mouth obsession with money and material objects you have.
"dump you in a third world country where you don't speak the language"
How in any way does this compare to the Vietnamese and Chinese you have been arguing about who work in these factories and also happen to speak the local language? Why tweak the analogy into further irrelevance (off-topic) by installing a language barrier?
"Oh, you are reluctant to take that deal that you would offer to those whopse skin is brown"
Thanks for coming out of the closet as a racist. I think the "whopse" is an attempt to desparage Italians along with those brown foreigners you hate. You are a perfect example of the "ugly American" who wants to force companies to fire large numbers of people by imposing artificially-high wage standards that might look good on paper, but aren't sustainable in any way. Economic disaster is always the result when you ignore the real value of something and set the price via government fiat.. Tell Pedro his income went from $4 a day to $0 a day because you thought his $4 "was not enough". Stalin (who appears to be the inspiration for your economic ideas) did the sort of thing you like in the Ukraine in order to "Be fair to the poor". He set the value of everything, and he stopped those nasty private businesses from exploiting one single soul. 7 million Ukrainians dead by starvation as a result? An acceptible loss, no?
You also forget that if I offer a bad deal to your detested "brown whops", they are free to ignore it until they deem it is fair to them.
It is so easy to run other people's lives and make choices for them when you live so far away from them, isn't it? Especially brown whops!
Also, if I did not like what I was earning, I'd endevour to earn more, instead of whining about it. A radical concept: the idea of earning more through better work and improved skills instead of by whining "gimme!!!".
"Yeah looks Venezuela is doing really badly under Chavez, try harder next time reactionary prick."
The fascist dictator of Venezuela presents cooked data through one of his mouthpieces, and you buy it. I see your concern for the poor vanishes when it comes to "spinning" information in order to make Latin America's latest experiment in left-wing fascism look good: you ignore the poverty that has been on the rise under the Chavez dictatorship.. Of course, the dictatorship in Venezuela says it is going down (just as the USSR always said that there was no poverty or unemployment or oppression there).
According to the UN, "More than 23% of the population of Venezuela live on less than $1 per day". Nice to see that the Great Father of the Peoples, Hugo Chavez, is well provided for with palaces and lots of fatty beef. He deserves it, it is hard work fighting the good fight against democracy, freedom, the Jews, and everything else that imperils Chavez bringing about a glorious revolution.
(Maybe we should have Nike build factories there so the earnings of the poor would go up 400% from $1 to $4. But wait, I forget: you are against evil Jewish-controlled "multinationals" giving people good jobs)
The grandparent, with his opposition to fascism in Venezeula, is anything but "reactionary".
Can't you do better than to support your side with opinions from a far-left blog like tpmcafe?
Or how about Voltairenet.org, self-proclaimed mouthpiece of the "non-aligned movement", which was controlled by the USSR during the cold war and, according to Wikipedia, supports antisemitism in its platform and has most of the world's dictatorships as members? I found in Voltairenet this curious attempt to justify genocide. They said a certain situation was not genocide, but was instead "a civil war in which the population is the victim". I would not put it past them to claim that Auschwitz was not genocide, but was instead a biomass energy burning experiment.
How about a factual source instead of wandering pointlessly through the fevered editorials of ideological kook blogs or the web organs of "Global Tinhorns United" ?
For an "anarchist", you sure bend over the barrel to support fascism any time when given a chance. I know from other messages that you really hate Jews. Perhaps Chavez' numerous statements about those evil bloodsucking "Christ killers" has made him your hero. You also don't mind that his "fair" election included huge numbers of illegal votes, thugs threatening people at the voting places and media censorship. As long as the vote counting is good it is fair, right?
I'd ask you to lie harder next time, but it is hard to imagine you going to worse extremes of falsehood to support fascism, bash Jews, bash brown wops, etc.
There are many others who empathize with you. I started using Slackware back in 95 when the "wankers" still hadn't shown their faces. It was fun and exciting and the community was great. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case and I gave up on Linux several years ago. Most of the people advocating the system these days are simply religious zealots seething with hatred and anger. It's no longer primarily about doing the right thing technically or proving good ideas and new theories. It's about replicating what others have already done, making excuses for sub-par implementations, inelegant code, application bloat, and lambasting anyone who calls a spade a spade. A community that cannot accept criticism and deal with it in a mature fashion is no place for me.
Hey Micro$hit Winblow$ fucktard, would you like some cheese with your whine? The only reason why you don't like the system is because you are being modded down for your comments. But thanks for making this comment, now you will be mod-bombed into oblivion if it hasn't happened already, as you are nothing more than a god damned fucking troll doing nothing more than flaming slashdot.
As for Linux, the only reason why you hate it is you're too fucking stupid to even exist let alone use a computer. Go take yourself out of the gene pool by kill yourself as well as all of your fucktarded children 'if you have any'.
We switched to Mac OSX for 12 months & really liked the system but noticed some hassles with drivers & applications.
Like what?
"Like what?"
Like with the fact that the Mac runs hardly any software at all compared to a standard PC, it also runs hardly any of the hardware out there. 3 of my 4 digital cameras just don't have Mac drivers. The company seems to have a "to hell with you users" attitude. This is reflected by huge mistakes such as requiring the early iMac users to buy dongle floppy drives due to a design flaw, and Apple shipping machines without standard printer ports at a time when most printers only had standard ports. This is why the PC world runs circles around the Mac: PC makers only drop features like floppies and standard ports AFTER nobody needs them any more. Apple drops them when they are still used and needed.
The problem of being a computer that hardly anyone uses, designs for, or programs for does have its advantages, though: the virus writers don't even consider the tiny Mac base worth harassing.
"...the virus writers don't even consider the tiny Mac base worth harassing."
Not any morrrrre maaaaaaaaannn.
Thanks to Mr. Jobs idiotic decision to convert the hardware to Intel CPU's AND enabling easy booting of Windows on Mac's using the new Bootcamp saoftware.
Stupidist decision Apple ever made. It will destroy the company.
"Thanks to Mr. Jobs idiotic decision to convert the hardware to Intel CPU's AND enabling easy booting of Windows on Mac's using the new Bootcamp saoftware."
s p
Jobs is facing up to the reality that his company has for many years been a failure when it comes to building microcomputers. Apple has painted itself into a corner with overpriced crippled computers. Cool-looking reliable machines that can hardly run anything: imagine if Lexus made the best cars in the world, but made them so they could only run on train-tracks and not roads. It is not sustainable, and it has been a long time since the last Microsoft bailout. They are finally doing what they should have done 20 years ago: change their strategy.
By making Mac's boot Windows, they have greatly increased the salability of Macs and have opened the market. No longer do Mac users have to put up with a meager software base.
What's different now? They've become a huge music company. That's where their bread and butter is; their future.
They no longer live or die by a barely-there microcomputer division. They no longer need bailouts from Microsoft just to keep limping along. They no longer have to cover up for useless machines with slick cool-looking cases.
In the mean time, the PC world lacks a strong premium PC brand. (Alienwere barely counts). There's a big hole for Apple to fill, and by morphing into a PC company, they have a good chance of filling it.
"Stupidist decision Apple ever made. It will destroy the company"
The Apple microcomputer division has been a dead end for years. It doesn't really matter what they do in this area: stick a fork in it it's done. However, by changing over to PC's, they might change that.
Read this column from two months ago:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1927885,00.a
I was skeptical, until the boot camp news recently, which proved that this is happening.
I really really can't understand why so many people seem to have hardware support issues. I have done hundreds of Linux installs with all types of distros (RedHat/Slack/Debian) on all types of hardware (Dell servers/Whiteboxes/HP/Gateway) and NEVER had hardware support issues. X worked fine. Sound worked. Now granted some systems are a bit hard to get working but the majority of users don't have them.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
Wow. I think the only person that can't handle criticism here is you. You have been proven wrong time and time again and you dig yourself deeper.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
"Even in the United States, the long-lapsed Fairness Doctrine would quickly be brought back, if our media ever got to one-tenth the level of partisan political activity exhibited by Venezuela's major broadcast and print media"
There is still this little thing called the Constitution (in the United States). There is no clause that gets rid of freedom of the press and freedom of the speech if someone has the subjective opinion that something is "biased".
Would you be one of those calling for suspension of freedom of the press and re-institution of tight government censorship of opinion (fairness doctrine)?
Back to Venezuela, the press is seeing the dictator turn it into a blood-soaked hellhole like Cuba. It is not surprising that they sound the alarm.