Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.''
You aren't kidding. I remember back in the 486 days, I had a slower 486 that was RAM starved for a long time and damn with Windows programs. I'd start Works to write a paper and wander off to the kitchen to grab a snack while it loaded. A 2 minute process at least. Now at work I expect it to be up instantly. Even on a cold boot when it's not cached it's like 3 seconds until it's loaded. Printing was even worse, it took forever for the system to get all the data ready for the printer and it was all you could do, you couldn't multitask. I'd start a paper printing and go elsewhere. Now, hell I submit a 40 page job to the copier and it's in the tray before I have time to walk over there.
I remember screwing around with MP3s not too long after they came out. I had done some upgrades at that point and was tinkering with Windows 95 and it turned out that it ate too much power for me to play MP3s. Mono was ok, but stereo skipped. I had to drop to DOS and use Cubic Player to get full stereo 128k MP3s. It was just all my system could handle. Now I play them in the background when I want, and they use maybe 10 seconds of CPU time per hour on one of my cores, it's just not even significant.
I could go on and on, but in essence it's changed from me sitting and waiting on my computer to it always waiting on me. There are very, very few tasks I do that take enough time I need to sit and wait, and even then it still multi-tasks fine and I can surf the web while that happens.
The problem is that Negroponte seems to have billed this thing as a legit replacement to a normal laptop. On the page it says:
"What can a $1000 laptop do that the $100 version can't?
Not much. The plan is for the $100 Laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data."
Ok well that's pretty clearly BS. Store large amounts of data is ONE OF the things the $100 laptop won't do, but there's plenty of others. Run a fancy GUI like KDE would be another one, have 10 apps open multitasking would be another. Now it's perfectly legit to say these things aren't necessary in a cheap laptop, but they ARE things that people expect out of computers these days.
I figured it was just over-marketing (I mean who doesn't do that) but it's possible that he really thought he could get a full featured Linux distro on his little laptop and is now finding out that's not the case. His statement of "Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third" just isn't the case. He may be finding that out, to his disappointment.
I'm the author of the CNET News.com story in question. If you read beyond the opening lines about Linux being too bloated--which by the way also was how Negroponte opened his speech and an interesting tidbit, in my opinion--you find information on some of the 95% of the speech you say was missing. You will see other information about mesh networking, $100 servers, pedal power, a launch delay, the initial $135 price, the dual-mode monitor, and other items. Stephen Shankland stephen.shankland at cnet dot com
Yes but a full blown feature rich gui will not run on those kind of resources
The heck it won't. Back in the day I happily ran Enlightenment--the notoriously graphics intensive Window Manager, versions 0.14, 0.15, with 2 virtual desktops, across two heads of monitors each running 1280x1024... And all of this was done on a Pentium I running at a blazing 133 Mhz, with a whopping 96MB RAM (and 6MB VRAM). It was perfectly suitable for coding, compiling, for checking and writing mail, for browsing the net, and even for experimenting with The Gimp.
As a matter of fact, that computer was still serving up files at my home, being a web server, mail host, fax server, and small database server for perl apps for a neighborhood association, and companion for my SGI O2 of the same vintage (1996), and it ran up until about two years ago when I retired it; and that was only because when I moved, Qwest started jacking around with my DSL service and myself, and I just decided that it would be easier to put that site on a shared hosting service, dump the commercial DSL service and move to cable internet.
Maybe it wasn't the fastest computer around, but it worked, and damit, it worked well. It never broke, and it never complained, unlike some modern computers. I learned very much plugging around with that old beast-and well after it was obsoleted by much, much newer technology. Maybe I kept it going out of romance because I had so much fun learning back when I was hacking around with Enlightenment, Linux, Gnome, etc. i.e. Back when I really just could not afford a better computer.
My P133 also dual booted to Win95 when I first installed RedHat4, and I learned the basics of 3D modeling, raytracing, and if I'm not mistaken, I also ran the very first betas of Rhinoceros 3D on it, too. I had one scene in truespace2 that took several days just to render, and did I have a problem with that? No.
So, lower spec computers might not play HD porno, run Windows Vista in Glass mode, play Counterstrike: Source, or other things... So what?! Like those things are going to be of great utility to third world children! I would have gladly accepted a 500Mhz notebook with 128MB, way back when. I think such a computer could be a great thing to third world children, because instead of learning how some slick GUI with gobs of eyecandy works, like our current generation, they might actually stand a chance to learn how a computer works.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
cat /proc/meminfo
I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that's a bad way to measure memory usage. Modern Linux kernels just continue to keep stuff in memory until something else needs the RAM. The question is not how much RAM the kernel is using right now but how well it can juggle resources when they're limited. You can't figure that out without doing actual experiments on limited hardware.