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.'"

Comments

If it's too big, try something else

[dtfinch]

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)

The Problem

[Bob9113]

Here's the problem:

http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#T he_software

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.

Re:Oh, here we go again with senseless analogies.

[tomstdenis]

Your post fails to take note that alot of people seemingly do the same with much less. OpenOffice is the same size as Word2003 on its own.

A full WinXP install is roughly 3/4th the size of a full Gentoo desktop workstation [with build/edit/programming tools + WM + xmms + mplayer + openoffice + tetex + ...] and yet lacks a proper shell, media player, development tools, office suite, TeX suite, etc.

MSFT "bloat" is on a whole other level of bloat that most OSS doesn't even approach. The only exception that rings a bell is KDE where they are acting very much like MSFT in terms of doing everything in house, etc, etc, etc. [Gnome fan]

Fact of the matter is getting sub 2MB kernels is not too hard. Getting larger than 3MB kernels is hard. So Linux on it's own is fairly tight. Now if you put KDE [or even to a certain extent Gnome] on a laptop meant to run a slow processor with little ram ... you're stupid. IceWM for instance would run just fine and take a fraction of the resources.

Tom