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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.
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.''
Linus has gotten a little chunkier over the years too, so it makes sense.
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.
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 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!
No, because fat people become experts at not moving.
KFG
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
AMD Geode GXo ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863,00.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pr
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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.
Poverty isn't a boolean variable, and you can't generalise the rest of the world into rural Ethiopia.
Nor can you just 'take' effort from one project and 'put' it into another. Tech experts can provide cheap hardware for educational purposes. They can't, at the whim of a Slashdot poster, become experts in manipulating the political forces of the world into providing basic infrastructure in other countries.
And besides, those things are the responsibility of governments. Governments, by the way, cannot design and build a $100 laptop for distribution to children. It takes tech experts to do this, and international support to fund it.
A programmer would understand this concept of different people sticking to what they are good at - it's called object orientation.
No, because fat people become experts at not moving.
:)
Precisely, and it explains perfectly why Vista is taking so long to get here.
Linux responded to Negroponte by saying "I may be fat, but you're ugly and I can lose weight!"
Ah, well, Vista is a special case. It's not merely fat, it's also got an extra chromosone or five.
KFG
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.
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.
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.
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
Multitasking OpenOffice and Firefox with a dozen tabs open, on the other hand, will be problematic.
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)
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.
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
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."
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.^
...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.
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.
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.
They are to be given out by government agencies. The motivation for making it as cheap as possible is to help connect as many people as possible, even if it means making compromises on system capabilities (So long as it's adequate to get people connected).
The architecture (AMD Geode 2) was chosen because of its *extremely* low power consumption--The whole thing takes up around ten watts to operate if memory serves (About six for the mainboard, RAM, and CPU and four for the rest). You simply cannot buy a good embedded system from Dell, and you certainly can't buy one that is as rugged and portable as the OLPC systems. And remember--A lot of the places these laptops are going will probably not have a stable enough power grid to plug in and charge a 'normal' laptop regularly.
Stop thinking in terms of x86 though... an ARM or PPC processor costs a fraction of a modern X86 and for the applications these will run is just as competitive [if not more because they often take less power].
Similarly for memory, there is no reason this has to be CL2 PC3200 memory. I'll bet there is quite a bit of spoilage memory that gets marked down [or written off] because it's not up to speed. Call it CL2.5 PC2100 and be use that, etc, etc.
There are a lot of things around already that could lend themselves to a cheap PC.
Take a look at something like the GP32 or NDS. They have more than enough juice to run Linux and they run off small batteries for a dozen hours. Granted the screens are not quite the right size [or number of] and there is no keyboard but for the most part those "toys" show that a relatively cheap computing platform is possible.
If you could spec out a 250Mhz ARM9 with 128MB of PC-100 memory, a 20G 4300RPM drive, 640x480 VGA display, 802.11b wifi and QWERTY/Dvorak keyboard you'd pretty much have a laptop. Moving to the ARM and PC-100 from x86 and DDR alone probably saves enough money. In the grand scheme of things the 20G drive could be replaced with a 4GiB flash and still be useful as a relatively full desktop Gentoo install takes only 2GiB of disk leaving a full 2GiB for user documents and what not. That would very likely cut costs in secondary fashions as the battery would not have to be as big to accomodate the motors. The form factor could be smaller, etc.
As another poster said though I doubt these would cost 100$ today but in the future it's possible but more so they could be written off, e.g. if they cost 300$ some generous entity could pay 200$ and the recipient could pay the last 100$ and voila, 100$ laptop that is small, low power [usage] and functional for it's environment.
The trick is really to apply better use of our current technology.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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/
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.
...] and yet lacks a proper shell, media player, development tools, office suite, TeX suite, etc.
... you're stupid. IceWM for instance would run just fine and take a fraction of the resources.
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 +
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
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
You're mistaking the bzipped kernel's on-disk image size with the kernel's operational memory footprint; it's like comparing the size of the Firefox binary (a few MB) with the amount of memory it uses (hundreds of MB).
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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'
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.
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.
> 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).