Slashdot Mirror
Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03
eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"
Of course, in this case it applies even more so.
Never use a 0.01 Release, especially not in a production environment.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
and the Hurd is still just around the corner. :(
Too bad his middle name isn't Connie.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I'm glad simply for the sake of history and preservation they're making these articles. I read the LKML frequently even if I don't fully understand the mechanics for the how and why the kernel operate, but I like to pretend that I do. I find this stuff rather fascinating. It is also interesting to wonder how Linux became what it is today considering its roots.
Linux today is a child of countless contributers, but it is still tied in name and perception very much to one man. I wonder if people think this is a good thing. I've often maintained that Linus is terse, but I've enjoyed that about him. If he rips into someone, I chuckle. But after this latest fiasco with Con and the schedulers, I'm wondering if this is a bad thing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I used to have many things stored across 34 floppies. I could never complete the install, though, because disk 33 was always corrupt.
At least, it looks as if the Change Log is still being updated. (Click the link titled "ChangeLog in the main directory".)
I got my first install from a shareware/freeware CD. I remember downloading patches and re-compiling to add ELF support. Good times.
This article should not have the Linux Tux logo. Tux only came much later. I suggest an egg or something.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
than other times. And dammit, when I say "files don't matter", I'm really
really Right(tm). Which is actually more funny than arrogant, so long as you know Linus' style.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm looking forward to any comments you might have
Streak of natural leadership, much? Sure beats ducking flying chairs.
Thankyou Linus!
you had me at #!
I can see he's gotten a little bit better at letting people adjust to the new Kernel point updates.
The game.
I am rather afraid to look, for fear that I might find more than a few moronic postings, often drunk on smitticks and trying desperately to make SLS installs of 0.99 versions of Linux work in what was otherwise a SunOS shop. After 1994 we never bought another piece of Sun hardware, so the experiment was successful to say the least. But it was kicking-and-screaming successful.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I really enjoyed seeing the quote by Linus (this is a program for hackers by a hacker). He clearly never, ever, expected his little hobby project to catch on the way it did. Hope this gives hope and inspiration to all the OSS developers out there, scratching their own itches. Just looking back on the history of the software industry, it seems like so many tremendous ideas and businesses got started around a small hobby project by one or two smart guys: Google, Perl, Python, Linux, GNU, and so on. Remember that one man change history.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
"...they never bothered to code it right the first time around."
And imho its coded very well indeed.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Thanks, I was going to say something similar. The Hurd doesn't have developers coming out of its ears like Linux does, but if you want to run it on your x86 machine, Debian have a distribution of it that works today.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
I'm curious about what's going on w.r.t. Hurd dev, but not curious enough to actually delve through the changelogs. Anybody involved care to summarize what's up?
More importantly, is there still a point to its development? I'm no kernel hacker, but I'm sure there are things that the current kernel can't do well.
Thanks.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
So where is the link to the source for these?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I don't want to start the everlasting monolithic/microkernel flame war up again, but I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.
There's a lot to be said for the microkernel architecture, and if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on, and only a very small body of users can be expected to ever compile their own. (True, you can always recompile a specialized version of a monolithic kernel, ripping out all the stuff you don't need, but this is a PITA and it only becomes harder as the thing gets bigger.)
Along with probably most other Linux users, I've always wondered how things would be if Tanenbaum had released MINIX under a free license earlier in the game (Torvalds has said at several points that had MINIX been more free, he probably would have simply modified it, keeping its architecture, but since Tanenbaum had no interest in "turn[ing] MINIX in BSD UNIX" [1]...the rest, of course, is history.)
Or perhaps more interestingly, what would have happened if a free version of BSD had been produced for low-end hardware just a little earlier than it actually was. (In reality, 386BSD came out in a working form in July 1992 [so sayeth Wikipedia], nine months after the first Linux release, and 4.4BSDLite didn't come out until '94 [2].) It seems to me that had "real UNIX" been available for low-end systems in the early 90s, much of the impetus to create a from-scratch clone would have disappeared. (Although, maybe not; perhaps the philosophical differences that drive Linux and the BSDs in different directions would have eventually caused a from-scratch rewrite.)
Ultimately I don't think either alternative would really have brought us out at much of a different place than we are right now, at least from an end-user's perspective; the majority of users don't really care about kernels as such anyway. But it's always fun to play 'what-if,' as long as one keeps in mind that although it's easy to fixate on how things could be better, it could always be far, far worse.
[1] Great archive of Torvalds / Tanenbaum Usenet discussions here. There's so much ego going on there, from both sides, ASCII text can barely contain it...
[2] I'm partial to fellow Slashdotter connorbd's BSD History, which is a good primer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah...because where I'm from I constantly nurse our Linux servers. I mean, heck, I even decided to do a kernel update once and it actually made me reboot the machine. How dare it make me nurse it along like that!?!11! If only patches came out on the second Tuesday of every month for every server and workstation at the same time and have them auto apply and hope nothing breaks instead of nursing it along by pressing the 'accept' button.
(And now for the real story: We don't have a ton of Linux servers, but for the 5 we do... we turned them on, set them up, and they've run ever since...)
I can see mine was Caldera's Open Linux Base ver. 1.1. It came with a lilo boot floppy, an install cd-rom, and a very well laid out user manual that made installs and the configuration pretty straight forward.
(disclaimer: purchased at flea market in 1996 for $0.50 USD...installed on several 386 and 486 pc's just because...)
Why, oh why, did I go to XP?
Happy to be on Kubuntu for the past year-year and a half??!!?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Oh yea. 1.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista...real coherent scheme there. Goes from small decimal numbers to large two digit numbers to four digit numbers to two letters to words.
As for Linux being unstable...dude, have you ever even seriously used Linux? Hell, if you don't fuck with it, it'll run for YEARS. Funny story - Freenet, with default configuration, crashes Windows XP on my computer in under half an hour. Not even kidding. Just murders the bitch. Now take the exact same program (It's Java), put it on Linux, runs fine. Runs for weeks without a problem. Remove the bandwidth caps, change max allowed connections from 200 to 750, increase the data store size by 40 gigs, and remove the limits on allowed known routing nodes...and it still runs fine. for weeks. Windoze would die in under 10 minutes from the load my Linux box idles on.
And I can tell you ARE experienced thanks to your incorrect usage of "its" and "your".
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Thanks, IMHO that's a +10 for funny.
Insert
might tell you something too. All it tells me is that he hasn't checked his email in 4 and a half years
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Simple reason, it's easy that way to understand what the original author was thinking, how he was developing it and where certain parts of the code come from. When you get dumped on a large project (and the Linux Kernel undoubtedly is one), it usually takes a LONG time to get into it, see past the various layers of changes and realize just why certain parts are the way they are.
The reason for this is that when a few megabytes of code hit you without warning or roadmap, most people have no chance to see the "whole picture" without getting lost in code, forgetting half of what they already read which made no sense because they didn't know what's coming after. If you have the chance to read code in the same "step by step" way it was written, you can easily grow into it as the code matures.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
..there would have been no such thing as Linux. Too bad that Tanenbaum doesn't get much of the credit for Linux.
Sounds more like a problem with Freenet, which most people seem to have a problem with getting to work properly.
Likewise, I wouldn't use Java performance as a good indicator of anything, because I mean.... let's be honest here... it's java. There are one or two good java applications out there, but for the most part, it just plain sucks.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
As i read all these articles on the net and from slashdot that compare Linux to Windows in such a way that Linux's aim is to steal market share from Windows. I also read in forums all the time, "Linux needs the marketshare so that software publishes will release Games/Photoshop etc on Linux then it will destroy microsoft" and i always say, "The aim of Linux WAS NEVER destroy Microsoft Windows market share." I used to always quote GNU from their site that said something like, "to create a completely open source operation system" Note the words open source which is not commerical programs
But now heres proof, right and it should be really noted. Linux was created by the developer for the developer. Its not developed to take out microsoft windows. Linux does not want commerical programs and Linux does not care for market share. There are no shareholders for Linux, no one is crushed if you dont use Linux or if you dont like it. So stop writing reviews that say "Linux will defeat microsoft if it had X and Y" because as a developer or Linux i dont care what you think, as long as it stays good enough to be my desktop OS.
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 95 (9x.1), 98 (9x.2), ME (9x.3), discontinued
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, NT 5.0 (2000), NT 5.1 (XP), NT 5.2 (Server 2003/XP x64), NT 6
I was a Unix user in the early 90's and following the 386BSD saga closely. It was much more well known among the Unix community, but no one was getting it to work. The home unix of choice is one that almost never gets mentioned Coherent, and business Unix was Xenix and later SCO. The Linux community had a focus on working with existing hardware and a focus on being usable by non Unix people since the days of the Corsair project.
The idea that the 9 months made the difference is simple BS. Much as the FreeBSD people like to claim otherwise it was strategic choices made by the BSD camp all throughout the 90s (like focusing on reliability over functionality) that drove Linux's popularity.
Bondage and Discipline programming occurs when the smart people on the central committee decide that ordinary developers are not smart enough to decide how to code on their own. They create a "system" that won't let the ordinary developers make certain kinds of errors. Pascal is the canonical Bondage and Discipline language.
There are 3 flaws in B&D programming.
Linus Torvalds' criticism of ukernels ( Thread starts here. ) accuses them of the first 2 flaws, but he politely does not mention the third.
The tunes people also have a harsh criticism of ukernels . They accuse it of abstraction inversion There is less criticism of ukernels in academia where it might be a career limiting move (CLM). Bondate and discipline programming seems to be commonly advocated there.
I made a presentation to Austin Linux Group on Tanenbaum-Torvalds microkernel vs monolithic kernel Debate.
Is it just me, or do most excellent pieces of software begin their lives as "yeah, I know there are all these other alternatives that do exactly the same thing, but I swear I'm not totally reinventing the wheel here...?"
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The versioning is always x.y.
95 = 4.0
98 = 4.1
ME = 4.2 or 4.5 (can't remember)
2000 = 5.0
XP = 5.1
2003 Server = 5.2
Vista = 6.0
You = Moron.
Will that increase my geek cred?
Dammit Jim, he's a programmer, not an English professor!
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Can anyone tell me why there is a "[sic]" in that above quote? There don't seem to be any spelling/grammatical mistakes in the sentence.
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
btw 95 is 4.0 and i think 98 and ME are 4.1 and 4.2
but the real version numbers are not exposed much to users, the only thing that is in any obvious place with modern windows versions is the year or name (and worse ms uses names for thier desktop editions and years for thier server versions)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
in my experience during the 80's and early to mid nineties (in britain at least) everyone used the verb "program". The verb to "code" was a kind of web-era americanism that has since taken over, at least from my perspective. A lot of nerds my age that I encounter still say program.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
eh, yea, I know Java sucks. a lot. but point is, exact same code runs fine on Linux, but the load kills Windoze nearly instantly.
If it wasn't for Linus, i would have continued on my path of a minix-like OS for my AtariST. ( no, not MiNT, but it was rather similar )
But noooo. because of him i jumped ship to the i386 and lost interest in the 68xxxx.
Could have been MY name up in lights.. thanks a bunch!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Windows ME I'm running right now says "4.90.3000" in the System Properties. Don't blame me; my parents actually like it (and I'm too addicted to Slashdot to wait until I get back to my own system).
Could someone please tell me why there is a "[sic]" immediately after "enjoyed" in the quote? There is nothing wrong with the word "enjoyed" as far as I know. Does the editor think that it is "enjoied" or "enjoyd" instead*interrobang*.
...walking around the office distracting anyone who will listen with war stories of how they once installed Linux on a damned flashlight. Get the story right! It wasn't just a flashlight, it was a flippin' Mag Light! The 4 'D' battery kind! The kind that doubles as a blackjack if you're stuck in the city after dark. And I'd like to see you install Linux on a Mag Light while the server room was being flooded by battery acid... Well, not flooded - but the floor was quite sticky with it. And I didn't just have to install Linux on that Mag Light; I had to compile it from punch cards, in the dark, while up to my knees in battery acid. And all the while, I was writing the documentation for my kernel branch! See this scar? While I was writing the docs, I didn't have a pen handy - I was writing in my own blood! You can take that little story back to your MSCE classes, youngin'!If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
But it's not a great quote.
It's kind of a lame quote quote in fact. it neither expresses elegantly nor with any special insight. It's not a quotable quote it's a news quote, a really old one. the entirety of the announcement has all the earmarks of someone who has gotten way too close to the subject and has lost their perspective on what is actually good.