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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.'"
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.
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.
on Linux. You can strip it down pretty damn small. Just build a complete custom distro just for the laptop.
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)
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.
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 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.
course it's not difficult, after all, they run Linux on phones with everything stripped out except what's actually needed for the phones' hardware... actually I'm getting worried about this $100 laptop thing... I think something's happening behind the scenes and the bloody thing's gonna end up with WinCE on it with a super triffic no cost at all deal from Microsoft...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
But seriously, it's not fat, it's nerves and muscle, except that the appendages and sensory organs aren't always there to be supported by them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, because fat people become experts at not moving.
:)
Precisely, and it explains perfectly why Vista is taking so long to get here.
fortuantely even DSL needs at least 128MB of RAM to be effective. While these laptops might have that, there are many computers like 486's that might otherwise be able to surf the web, but Firefox is a RAM hog and makes any system with less than 128MB suffer.
Oh You POS
Ah, well, Vista is a special case. It's not merely fat, it's also got an extra chromosone or five.
KFG
Ignorant doesn't imply an insult.
I am ignorant about a car's fuel system. That's just a fact.
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.
I'm not convinced that that was what he was saying at all — he was just stating that Linux, in its current state, is not suitable for the project. We know this. He knows this. He's not blaming anyone (would a "slim" Linux be suitable for a newer system?), he's just saying that this isn't where the crux of development will be, and stating that changes will need to be made for the project.
I don't think he's assigning blame, I think he's telling people what the challenges of the software side of his project are.
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.
While DSL is fine for the regular hacker, I dont know if a 10 year old will be confortable with it...
:-)
I guess that what Negroponte was really trying to say is: "KDE an GNOME are too fat for a 500MHz computer with 128MB RAM and only 512MB of storage". And, lets face it, hes right.
Now, this raises a really good point. If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!
Not that I dont like KDE or GNOME, quite the contrary, I found them better than Windows in many ways... But they just have grown fat, I remember being able to run KDE2 on a Pentium 166 MMX with 46MB RAM! And even back then, KDE was pretty capable... much more than Windows95 for example.
Of course now we have much better computers, and the programmers are just using this extra computer power and memory that otherwise would be wasted... But it wouldn't be cool if we managed to build a full featured desktop environment without depending on so much power? Because if we manage to do so, there will be much more remaining cpu cycles to waste with eye candy
Just my $0,02
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
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.
I do use FF 1.07 on a 233MMX Compaq with 48MB of RAM and it's very slow to load compared to IE. Page rendering works, but IE is still faster on the system. I don't remember how fast FF is in DSL on that machine, but my point stands that FF is a RAM hog and it's hard to have more than a tab open on it without at least 128MB RAM.
Oh You POS
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.
Perhaps Slashdot is not for you, or possibly you should read quietly before jumping into a discussion when you don't know what people are talking about. If you do jump in, and are corrected, it doesn't make much sense to demand that everyone should dumb down the discussion and explain all the terms used. This is an article posted on linux.slashdot.org. It is expected that people reading know the subject at hand and follow it -- at least enough to use Google (as someone else in this thread did) to look up the term.
--
Evan "Fighting against dumbing down"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
"...A great deal of this is caused by programmer never reinventing wheels in OSS. This means that every program has dependancies for a half dozen third party programs and libraries instead of incorporating just the functionality they need for their app. Those half dozen programs and libraries have followed the same bloat yielding philosophy and have their own dependancies; those in turn have their own dependancies and so on."
I agree 100% with this.
Dependency hell is alive & well in Linux.
Linux advocates should acknowledge it & DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Currently it is glossed over, this is just as bad as wintel fanboys & trolls.
Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.
8) No matter how well you optimize it, you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM (graphics take memory - even monochrome graphics). He should seriously reconsider the amount of RAM; even just 64 more megs would make it fly by comparison.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Hmm. Computers have evolved, the kernel has evolved, things aren't the same as ten years ago. I'm shocked to hear that. :)
I can still install a functional Linux system with a 2.6 kernel on that Pentium 100 with 64mb of RAM and make it a useful system. Maybe not Fedora's distribution, but it's a trivial undertaking. I'd like to see Windows XP make that box useful.
...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.
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/
"The area where your average linux distro needs to improve is disk space. There is no excuse for the default desktop installation to take over 500mb. A great deal of this is caused by programmer never reinventing wheels in OSS. This means that every program has dependancies for a half dozen third party programs and libraries instead of incorporating just the functionality they need for their app. Those half dozen programs and libraries have followed the same bloat yielding philosophy and have their own dependancies; those in turn have their own dependancies and so on."
.Net or whatever where you have to have the entire framework.
So you're seriously saying that in order to improve disk space we need create many copies of the same functionality?
This is very unintuitive....And I'm not sure how this could possibly be so, except if the libraries were huge and only selected to offer 1 or 2 functions..
But it seems to me, that if there are many dependencies (as you claim), it would suggest functionality was broken up into small pieces, and the designers merely selected the pieces they required. This is in contrast to large frameworks like
So which is it? Is the functionality not divided finely enough (note that dividing it further increases start-up time due to linking more libraries) or is it divided too finely (note that this will increase disk usage due to waste).
Just because a 1kB program requires 12-15 100kB libraries (and maybe the requisite 3-5MB gtk/or whatever toolkit) doesn't mean it wastes space.
Assuming the functionality is sufficiently finely divided and library overhead is negligible, nothing is lost this way in the worst case. In the best case it results in (primarily) more efficient RAM usage and also more efficient harddrive usage.
Minix3 would probably be much more suitable for this. Tanenbaum does have a lot of valid points. He also is willing and able to get the project going.
Re-read my previous comments. The memory footprint for running a Linux distribution (and that means kernel, since it's the core part) has grown over time. A larger memory footprint for the kernel is generally related to bloat. There's been several arguments along this line over at kerneltrap.org, I suggest you go read there if you're really interested, otherwise, if you're all interested in doing is creating an argument for an arguments sake, I won't participate further.
As to being "negative", I admit that yes, I've given up on GNU/Linux [at least for now], and now use Microsoft Windows XP again as my main workstation operating system - it suits my current needs and uses much better than Linux did in all honesty.
Linux required too many compromises, and too much time wasted due to fiddling to keep it all together and running. Linux has a long way to go before it's suitable for the masses, it has a variety of issues that are not being addressed, and until they are addressed, it'll get nowhere imho. That's just my personal opinion based on near 4 years of having Linux as my sole choice of operating system. I've been there, I've done it, so it's not like I'm just spouting an opinion that's unfounded or unbased.
Cheers,
Dave
Slashdot can go and get fucked.
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.
Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.
Exactly. Have those people compiled a kernel lately? Did they notice the modular design and the way you can strip out a lot of things you don't want?
I run Linux on a 206 MHz handheld with 32 megs of RAM, off a 512 MB flash-card. I use Familiar as a distro and Opie for a desktop environment. I have IR, Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, I have Opera as a browser and a whole lot of software I can't even begin to name (ipkgfind counts 35,000+ packages).
So what's with this complete bullshit about Linux not being fit for a 500 MHz/ 128 MB RAM machine? Negroponte didn't even support his statement in any way, that phrase you see in the Slashdot summary is all he said in the article too (serves me right for RTFA).
Don't get tricked into thinking about the regular desktop distro and how to slim it down for the 100$ laptop. There are established handheld distro's out there for which the specs of the 100$ laptop would be an upgrade, that's what they should go with. Think bottom up, not the other way around.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Yes, it's a crude experiment, based on usability[...]
No, it's not based on usability. If it were, you would be asking questions like, "Does it feel slow?" and "Can you do useful work with it." Your experiment is based on examining the contents of /proc/meminfo.
Actually, I have no idea what your experiment is supposed to prove, since you never say anything about how you interpreted the contents of /proc/meminfo. That pseudo-file gives you a lot of information about
the system's memory use and you never said which parts were
relevant and how.
What I am saying is that a modern Linux distribution has some very heavy system requirements, and they have jumped up an awful lot from previous distributions as little as six years ago.
I'm not disputing that. Although now that you bring it up, I'd like to point out that this is irrelevant. If you're going to build a $100 laptop, you're going to want to put together your own Linux distribution as well, so the real question is, "How small can you make this distribution and have it still be useful?" Since Redhat doesn't even try to keep Fedora small, its size isn't useful in this discussion.
Maybe if you looked at the sizes of floppy- and flash-based distributions, you'd have a point, but the sizes of mainstream distributions are irrelevant.
Get over it, get a life. There's more to the world than Linux - it's a tool, nothing more, and nothing less. If you can't take criticism of Linux, then maybe you should wear ear muffins :-)
Linux criticism I'm fine with. It's fuzzy thinking that grates on me. Also, I tried getting one of those "life" things but I find it interferes too much with my Slashdot posting.
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.
This doesn't really have as many features or drivers as one would expect from a CD that's supposed to demonstrate an OS's capability. It's more of a recovery environment... You couldn't run half the software that you could if XP were installed. Linux LiveCDs don't have this limitation... What are the limitations to the Pre-boot Environment?