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Microsoft Looking to Run Windows on OLPC
pete314 writes "Microsoft has been provided with a number of test models of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child computers and is trying to get Windows installed on them. The current design runs a custom version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux. Running Windows will take quite a bit of additional memory: the OLPC has 512Mb of Flash, where XP requires a minimum of 1.5Gb storage."
Both instances of the letter 'b' in the article summary should be uppercase 'B'.
B = bytes, b = bits.
One Loan Per Child!
FLR
average Linux distro
EXACTLY!
Now why would a typical "user" need most of that shit. Honestly, does a typical user need the kernal source, an IDE, a debugger or any other dev stuff, how about an HTTP server or an FTP server. The problem is that for some odd reason Linux thinks I want to install a bunch of worthless shit unless I tell it not to, then if I decide to add some worthles shit i need to do more then just put the CD or DVD in the drive.
WTF?
Heh. Exactly in which way is "for the same price" relevant in a discussion about supposed Windows bloat? No, seriously. Please do enlighten me, because I find it such a fascinating concept. Do DLLs automagically double in size if you raise the price? Or?
But ok, if you need an extra strawman there to make the mandatory anti-MS point, by all means, let us discuss the extra price of all those: exactly 0$ total. OOo costs just as much for Windows as for Linux. Ditto for Apache. Ditto for GIMP. P2P programs also tend to be available for free. IRC client? You can find lots of free, if a bit limited ones, and occasionally you even find one bundled with what you'd expect least. E.g., Unreal Tournament had a built-in IRC client. Development tools? You can download MS's compilers for free. Or GCC if that's what floats your boat. Or download Eclipse and Java for free too. Etc.
So while I might tolerate a smart straw-man, this one seems to me like it's not even particularly useful: again, we're talking exactly 0$ difference between Windows with those and Windows without those.
Oh, but wait, you probably meant the usual "but MS Office and MSVC.NET and Photoshop cost sooo much more" thrust. Right? Well, see, that would be relevant at all if you actually had to buy those. But since OOo and Gimp and the gang run just as well under Windows, you don't.
What MS Office and the rest are is an extra _option_, in case you think you need/want it. If you think MS Office or Photoshop have some feature you need, you can buy them. If not, not. (And believe me, just about every normal person I've shown the Gimp to, quickly decided they'd rather pay for Paintshop or Photoshop.) Options are good. _Lacking_ an option in Linux isn't actually an advantage over Windows. Sometimes it may be no great loss, sure, but an advantage it ain't.
Or for that matter, how's "includes all of these on the base install" relevant to a discussion about size? Do the installed packages take less space if you just bundle the installer on the same CD as the OS? Will my OOo install under, say, Linux take more space if I download it from Sun than if it's included on the SuSE DVD? Or? Enlighten me please.
But we've lost enough time on that silliness, so let's get back to size and the OLPC. Since that was the whole topic.
May I point out that you don't have room for all those on an OLPC either? That's the whole point.
In fact, you don't even have space for a reasonable base system that can from there on run any Linux program I might download. The dependencies of Linux programs are spread between so many libraries and frameworks, that, seriously, if you want Joe Sixpack Jr with an OLPC to be able to just run any program like in Windows, he'll actually need all those libraries or space for them. At the very least, he'll need both KDE and Gnome, plus of course the system and X libraries, plus a whole bunch of others.
Have you looked in your KDE directory lately? The libraries alone are well over 200 megabytes. Gnome? Not exactly small either. Just between the _libraries_ of those two alone, you're using more space than a minimal Windows install. And that doesn't even give you a usable desktop yet. It's just the stupid libraries to run programs based on those. Talk about bloat. By the time you crammed everything else onto an OLPC, you don't actually _have_ those extra programs, or space for them.
So the whole "muahahaha, Windows need to trim out the fat to fit on an OLPC" is moot
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