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Linux Kernel v2.6.23 Released
diegocgteleline.es writes "After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, and variable process argument length. SLUB is now the default slab allocator, there's SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support. Also the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog for details."
overlord. welcome. yay.
On a more serious note, are these improvements dramatic, or is story featured just because it's the newest Lolnus kernel?
I'm so excited, I wish I could have stayed up until midnight in a huge line for it! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SLEEP NOW?!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
yeah, but does it run... Oh. Nevermind.
I think I'll take the opportunity to upgrade to 2.2.26; I don't waste my time with unproven technology.
After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support
Yes, what they don't mention is that the XEN "guest support" is in the form of a crowbar.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I RTFA and it didn't mention whether or not it was released under GPL v2 or v3. Does anyone know?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Now that that's out of my system...
I have to say this is a pretty big batch of changes. I'm actually really interested to see how the new scheduler performs. Oh well, time to go update my Linux box...
*prays to god that random hacked up drivers keep working*
Linux will never be GPL3. Got that? NEVER!
So has anyone done any "real" benchmarks yet? Hmm? Hmm? What would the robot do!
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
thinkpad-acpi: enable more hotkeys, add input device support to hotkey subdriver
Woot!
Money is the root of all evil?
...the extra flavor that makes this release a little bit more headline-worthy than usual is probably the whole controversy involving the Completely Fair Scheduler. Between Con Kolivas leaving kernel development, the Really Fair Scheduler flamewar and almost ten release candidates, the whole 2.6.23 development was some kind of geek soap opera.
My distro (Arch Linux) should have packages up within a couple days. And since the ftp iso installs from the repos, its *already up to date*. The isos don't even need to be touched.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
But does it run OS X?
So this "Arch Linux"... How does it stack up to other distributions? Does it rely on a package management system? Does it have an easy to use installer? Is it aimed at servers/end users/developers? Is it actively maintained? How much does it cost?
Yes, this is a good thing. However, they seem to have missed some: sockets and pipes. Sockets are not close-on-exec by default, so you may pass a sensitive socket to a child.
Windows NT has the same problem: sockets are inheritable by default until you call SetHandleInformation to disable inheritance. Other handles' inheritability is selected at open/create time.
Luckily, there is a workaround for it, if not pretty: use a reader/writer lock with opening handles as writers and forks as readers.
By the way, the linked changelog on kernelnewbies.org has a bad link for the "recommended LWN article".
For the SELinux thing against null pointer attacks, won't that break DOSemu?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I have been using Arch for a couple of years now and would recommend trying it if you have a bit of experience maintaining a Linux system. Take a look at the web page - http://www.archlinux.org/ . Uses the pacman management system, reasonably easy to use ascii-graphical (ncurses) installer, actively maintained, free. Its nice features are i686/x86_64 optimization and rolling release.
:(){
fallocate() is a new system call which will allow applications to preallocate space to any file(s) in a file system. Applications can get a guarantee of space for particular file(s) - even if later the system becomes full
I was about to go and make fun of Linux for creating a feature that's been around in Windows for quite a while - take your pick of SetFilePointer or sparse files. Yes, yes, I understand that reserving space for a file is not the same as growing it and not using that space. Twas meant to be a troll....But, it turns out that a bit of googling reveals that sparse files under Windows are not all that they are cracked up to be:
http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/sparse-files.phtml
This is my sig.
Does Linux really want to become the OS for MicroIdiots? Are "words" really too complicated for you to understand?
...
Click - drool - blank stare - drool - click - use "start" to "shut down" - drool - click - drool - drool
I'll bite.
Your point that usability is important is true. However, your implication that progress in the kernel prevents progress elsewhere is questionable. There are plenty of people working on usability and creating new desktop interfaces. I'd argue that a current installation of Ubuntu, installed on cooperative hardware, is quite easy to use. But there's no need to sacrifice the underlying elegance or power of Linux to get there -- the shell shouldn't be "hard to find", just unnecessary for most people.
To drag out some car analogies: 1. There's no reason the engineers can't still work on the engine while the designers are still working on making the "driver experience" simpler and more comfortable. 2. It's a good idea to reduce the regular maintenance that a driver needs to perform, but there's no need to weld the hood shut or lock it just to prove to yourself that they don't need to fiddle with it.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Right, because the kernel developers should drop what they're doing and start hacking on userspace applications and doing things to make Linux more "user friendly."
The article is about a new release of the kernel, it's not about the desktop experience, or ease of use, or anything along those lines. They're totally separate topics.
#include ".signature"
I thought XEN was the guest host when Leno goes on vaction
personally, i think, that the height of computing was 'cron'. you needed a report every morning, put it in cron. you needed to analyze data every week, put it in cron.
;) i mean, heavily under the influence.
computing was supposed to automate. supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
am i there to help the computer do it's job? or is the computer there to help me do mine?
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
but that's a more philosophical discussion to be had - under the influence
ThinkinginBinary, You make a valid point. I agree you are correct, however I wasn't disagreeing with you that the underlying support should be halted. I just wanted to state the fact that there is also plenty of work that needs to be performed to deliver a product that is both easy to use as well as powerful. Linux has so much potential and I'd like to see it spend a little more time in the limelight. I've even tried to switch to Linux many times. However I can't sever the ties with certain Windows software which I would prefer not to use in a VM environment. The OSS community is an amazing phenomenon and I love what they stand for. I just think in order to get Linux adopted by the populous, it's going to take more than kernel enhancements to see that through. Dylan
Slashdot is a technical community so my comment may not be well received.
No, your comment won't be well received because it has nothing at all to do with the article or the Linux kernel.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
While I won't disagree that an "easy to use gui" (an oxymoron for a cli guru) is a good idea, I've get to find a way to use sed without bringing up a virtual terminal. ...Click this, click that, click this again ... what, you mean this clicky thing doesn't support regular expressions? No loops or recursion of any kind? Jeez, that's just asking for RSI.
So ... wake me up when you can use, erm, a terminal, without a terminal? Until then, don't hide it from me please.
Usability has been a big area of growth in the Linux distribution department for a while now. Just to let you know, this article is about the linux kernel, which is "Linux", but not what you are talking about. (I'm sure my analogy falls flat somewhere) Consider the kernel like the engine of your car. What the engine looks like and how it works have little to do with how you actually drive the car, although the performance of the engine directly effects the performance of the entire vehicle, it does not (really) effect whether you can "drive" this car well or not.
If you have some concerns about the usability of Linux distros, the two main areas you should voice them to are the KDE people and the GNOME people. These projects are the ones that develop the "Desktop Environments" that are the equivilent to the steering wheel, seats and the whole look and feel of the car/operating system. Both projects have methods for you to voice your concerns and ideas. If you are looking for usability over features, I believe GNOME is the better option, though I haven't used it much. I personally prefer KDE for myself, but you sound like you may already have a preference, having tried Linux a bit yourself.
But graphic UI's are the future of computing and I think it's high time for a distribution to make it HARD to find the shell in an OS.
In the ideal OS, finding the shell would be *easy*, not hard. I think what you mean to say is, "...day-to-day 'regular user' tasks would not involve using the shell." Hiding any end-user application is stupid.
You're using POP for email it would seem. There is an option to leave messages on server...
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Lol.. Unless you are using bleeding edge hardware or some obscure specialty piece, or digging into the dirty server areas, you don't need a shell.
Most people use the shell because it is fast and easy. It is as if they finally get it. Those that don't want to use the shell, don't have to. They just won't be able to do everything as easily. But as for being a user, it is quite simple to configure everything from the desktop, do your work from the desktop, and not even see a shell. Mandrake (mandriva) has had this ability for several years now. Ubuntu seems to be on the same track.
I'm guessing that your experience is a little dated or you were attempting to do stuff that normal users wouldn't need to do. Most package managers like those in mandriva or ubuntu will install everything your need from a GUI. The software repositories offer a little more if you hit a shell usually, but you shouldn't need to in order to do most things. And the newer versions of webmin could pretty much replace most of everything you would think you need a shell for. I recently used webmin to partition, format and mount a drive 15 miles away and I pointed and clicked everything but my login and password.
I think what you asked for has already been accomplished at least to a reasonable degree. Try out the new mandriva release and make sure webmin is installed. Outside of it _not_being_windows, it should quite capable. And I underscored not being windows because linux will never be windows. The sooner people realize that, the less disappointed they become.
the linux kernel has nothing to do with "user experience". it interfaces with the hardware... or in this case, the virtual hardware. :)
Pick out any of the top 5-10 distros at distrowatch and chances are unless you have some exotic hardware/extremely brand new and bleeding edge, or special needs, you won't have to touch the command line to use it. This level of functionality has existed for at least a couple of years now with the major distros, and with applications at your fingertips, it is light years beyond what redmond offers. There is really no comparison what you get out of the box with any major linux distro once you see how much variety and functionality you get and any windows OS, even the "professional" vista stuff. There's just not. Some peripherals, etc obviously function better on windows from driver issues, but just a modicum of homework and you can build a hardware system with some distro that will "just work" for the most part to the level of which you are looking for (most likely, have to guess for your needs here), and never have to touch the command line at all. And with live CDs you can try before full installation, it is ridiculously easy to test them and see what might work on your system you have right now. And the price is right, download and burn for free, or send in a few bucks to one of the clone shippers. I'm not a dev or programmer, and I use linux exclusively, from the GUI all the time now, because I have found there's no real reason to use the CLI, the gui tools are plenty good enough now. I'm just a computer user, I like other geeky stuff,but not into programming at all. I know just enough BASH to know I like running the mouse better, I can navigate any random gui menu tree a lot faster than I can memorize some arcane commands where one single missed or wrong keystroke can bork your reality. If linux wasn't good enough or easy enough, I wouldn't use it. Some years ago it wasn't, but now it mostly is.
basically archlinux = slackware's simplicty with debian's package manager with gentoo's compiling power
i'm not joking...
ala slackware:
- it's BSD startup scripts
- all packages are pretty much untouched and rely on upstream releases...there is no backporting
ala debian:
- awesome package manager
- and for me, i find it easier to use and especially better when the package manager breaks (i've never been able to recover from a crapped out dist-upgrade without reinstalling...)
ala gentoo:
- obviously not everything is compiled...but if you do, it's 3 commands:
- abs (sync with PKGBUILDs which is the equivalent of ebuilds)
- makepkg (compile)
- pacman -A package-1.0.0.tar.gz (install)
No, I am using IMAP over ssl, and configured correctly, it was a Kmain bug. And no thanks -- I won't want to reproduce it! Thankfully I had a backup. Most likely Kmail choked at the huge amount of email (many folders with over 20,000 messages). It may have improved by now, but no, I am not trying that experiment again.
...Netcraft confirms it.
it looks like linux is going on without a single decent desktop (non-terminal) email app.
Kmail? Evolution? Claws mail? Those are just off the top of my head. And it's not like losing developers is going to make the current release of Thunderbird worse. Just keep using it. POP3 and IMAP aren't going to change any time soon.
Kmail, the one time I tried it, promptly erased all my email folders, and in any case is not very flexible.
As I have never had that problem nor have I ever known anybody who had that problem, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you just didn't know what you were doing, erased your folders by accident, and blamed it on Kmail. How would you know whether it's flexible or not, anyway, since you've only used it once, and apparently you weren't even using it right?
I just think in order to get Linux adopted by the populous, it's going to take more than kernel enhancements to see that through.
But see, the problem is that nobody's arguing that kernel enhancements alone *are* going to result in the rise of desktop-Linux-for-the-masses. What you're doing is akin to walking into a university campus that's just expanded a bit and proclaiming how they're not doing enough to save the baby whales. Yes, some of the facilities and information dispersed therein may be getting used by people looking to save the baby whales, and some of the staff may even be interested in saving the baby whales themselves, but the university is not in fact there to save the baby whales, but instead serve as general resource that can be utilized in a number of different and often drastically divergent ways.
Have you ever heard of Evolution? I've not used Linux on a desktop/laptop for about a year, but I found Ev to be the best email client by far. Honestly, I'd much rather use Evolution than Mail.app or Entourage.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
"But graphic UI's are the future of computing and I think it's high time for a distribution to make it HARD to find the shell in an OS."
You can have my shell when you pry it from my cold dead hands - same as my keyboard!
Most distros come with multiple GUIs, and those GUIs are superior to anything Redmond can put out. Add that to the ability to run Windows in a window (where it belongs, if it belongs at all on your box), and mp3 and dvd installers a click away in the newest distros, 21 gigs of software free for the downloading, faster release/bugfix/update cycles ... if you want a GUI, you can have your pick.
But do NOT take away my terminals. There are a lot of things that are quicker to do in a term than with a clicky interface. Have you not heard of "the right tool for the job"?
Hmm... how do you moderate "Informative Offtopic" ?
In other news... Arch barfed on me when trying to install on some super new hardware. Specifically speaking: Intel DQ35JO motherboard with SATA optical and hard drive. Only Ubuntu and Slackware managed to install out of 4 distros tried.
But again, "Informative Offtopic". Back on topic, having just compiled the previous 2.6.23rc with Slack 12 it still barfed when booting. So, I for one welcome 2.6.23.1!!
Just take OpenBSD and re-release it under the GPLv3!
Linux is a kernel. A kernel's definition of usability involves well documented programming API's.
Usability is a problem for the desktop maintainers ( the KDE or GNOME guys ), not the kernel hackers.
Added bonus, the desktop maintainers can be OS agnostic if they like, so the usability gains that linux sees can easily transfer to BSD or OpenSolaris, should they turn out to be better kernels overall
You would have problem with getting a fix for your issue with any software company. First, you don't know what happened. Second, you cannot give steps to reproduce the problem. So, the developers are left with,
"whaa whaaa whaa.!!!! Software broke! Erased stuff! Fix it!!! Fix it or I switch!"
Good luck with the switch. Be this commercial or free software, you are likely to get the same type of support if you are unwilling to help with the debugging of your problem.
funny, my thunderbird still fetches, reads and moves mail, and will continue to do so for a couple more years or more, and likely development will continue on it too. but you just threw up your hands and ran out and bought macs on the assumption that thunderbird would immediately explode. wow, if the manufacturer of your car laid off its chief engineer, would you immediately have it crushed and buy some competitor's car that only could take 98 octane gas sold at two stations within 100 miles?
Thunderbird is not dead, and David and Scott are leaving Mozilla, but retaining their roles as module owners of Thunderbird.
http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2007/10/08/thunderbird-in-crisis-no
http://standblog.org/blog/post/2007/10/08/The-future-of-Thunderbird
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
i like shell for a reason.. supposedly single SDL program frozen on my computer(that is full screen and is not killed yet..) so i switched to different TTY and kill it manually. Love it.
]
Posts like this make me feel like I'm not a nerd. Just like going to a political rally in Berkeley makes me feel like a centrist.
"It takes a specific type of person to get Linux running and to a point where it can be productive even for nontechnical users (which is the majority of users that use computers)"
WTF???
Linux installation for dummies, PHBs and Windows sysadmins (but I repeat myself)
If you can't follow that, print it out and pay some PFY* in grade 9 $20.00 to help you.
(if you don't recognize the reference, you're obviously new here and deserve to be beaten with a clue-by-four, both ways, in the snow, etc...)
i was looking for some masturbation material, and now i have found it!
To create a sparse file in Linux, you open a file, and seek to some arbitrary size.
fallocate, is something else.
What exactly does this have to do with Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 is no longer sold. The latest version of Windows 2000 is ReactOS.
More likely scenario is this - copied mails to kmail's folders, then tried to open them. Doesn't work that way, at least if you don;t give it time to re-index - kmail will craxh. Your email is still there, but its not indexed, so you won't see it.
That being said, anyone know a better/cleaner way to import email into a newer version of kmail?
An exploit with feature-complete proof of concept was released for x86_64 linux kernel ia32syscall emulation by cliph at isec in Poland. Exploit code was wildly popular on milw0rm, indicating that this local exploit has lots of potential.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
you missed the point. the problem is that computing became an end to itself, instead of being used to liberate people from little value-added work.
It's not yet released, but Fedora 8 Test 3 has been running the 2.6.23 kernel code. I suspect that within days (hours?) the RC labels will be pulled from the RPMs.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor
Linux on linux, that's so hot!
Is anyone else noticing the almost exponential rise in the rate at which new features are being added to the kernel? Linux major release anouncements would dwarf similar anouncements by 'competing' operating systems.
I don't think it can be entirely attributed to the linux kernel merely catching-up with other operating systems.
*Nods* I never tried kmail with an IMAP account. Sorry about your troubles, and I can understand not wanting a repeat.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
oh well, is this the year of desktop linux yet?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Telling readers that links are meant to be clicked is so 1995!
It's not source based... Coming from an Archlinux user..
Disclaimer: Disregard the above post.
How exactly do you run stuff without a shell?
If a system without a shell crashes in the server room does it make a sound?
I had a computer without a shell once. It had 3 switches on the front that you programmed in octal to make the red light blink.
So how many Microsoft patents does the new version infringe upon? It wouldn't be worth doing a release if it doesn't infringe upon at least an extra patent or two.
You are correct - that is a really bad analogy. A lot of people just drop the new kernel into whatever distro they have if their problem bit of hardware has a better driver or there's a speed improvement somewhere. Remember even a 1% speed improvement cuts over an hour off the runtime of a weeklong numerical processing job.
No. Your wrong there sir. Its binary based, however non-repo packages (Arch User Repository) are compiled via build scripts. You can also compile packages from source with pacman (pacman -Sb instead of pacman -S).
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
As with any other tool this means that it has to be somewhere you can get at it(on your desk) and that you need to know how to use it(ask anyone who has never used a hammer before to pound in a nail and see how many times they stuff it up).
Now you might argue that a computer is a lot harder to use than a hammer, but that's mostly because it's metaphorically a bit more like a toolbox. It has tools within it to perform specific tasks as opposed to doing only one task(historically this has had to do with cost, but as we see comodotized hardware prices this may change). When you have a toolbox full of tools, you not only need to know how to use the individual tools, you also need to know how to find them in the toolbox, how to properly and safely remove them from and return them to the toolbox, as well as how to perform any required maintainence to your toolbox.
In the same way in order to use your finance application(the tool), you need to know how to find it and run it as well as how to actually use it. Someone(not necessarily you) also needs to know how to put the tool where you can get it in the first place(install the software), clean the gunk out of the toolbox(maintain the PC) and to transfer all your tools from an old toolbox to a new toolbox when your old one falls apart, or you need one which can hold more tools.
Yea, you caught arch at a bad time (in the middle of a major repo change last weekend). The kernel is still .22 because of this. I imagine it will be updated later on tonight. Oh, and with arch you can choose stable or testing and easily switch between them (or install some testing stuff, etc).
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Not to nitpick, but the milw0rm main page says '2007-09-27' beside that exploit. I'd hardly call that today's Linux news.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Using caps at the beginning of sentences helps reading text a lot.
supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
Yes. You service the computer, so that the computer can service the rest of us. Until such time as a computer is created that requires no maintenance at all, such will be the way of things. Thank you by the way - my job would be harder without people like you doing yours.
Even adding machines needed oiling and parts replacing sometimes.
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
Well I can't speak for you, but personally I'm a programmer. A large part of my job requires me to be sat at a keyboard, writing and modifying code. I guess it doesn't really matter where the PC itself is, as long as I have monitor, keyboard and mouse on my desk; I hardly ever use the CD drive. But I know that wasn't quite what you meant...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
N/T
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
[This is the part where I say something enough on-topic to justify the stupid joke in the subject line. Use your imagination. Thanks.]
Would it surprise you to find out that most of the community agrees with that statement? .. With one caveat, however: You're confusing Linux, the opreating system kernel, with the rest of a complete system. If we were discussing one of the *BSDs, I'd not balk, but there is a huge difference between Linux and what you're talking about. Linux runs behind the scenes and has nothing whatsoever to do with usability or even UIs.
The last thing you want to do is hide functionality - especially necessary functionality - from users. All Apple did was wrap a Mach kernel under a NeXT-ish facade and hide the majority of the more "advanced" features. IMO, there's no reason to make the shell go away, but rather to set it aside in a non-intrusive and logical place - exactly how most current distributions set it up. You can still get to a terminal emulator in OS X - it's harder, sure, but it's still trivial to make it readily accessible - and it uses BASH, a powerful and quite useful shell. By contrast, on Windows, it's not obvious where the shell is right away, and once you know where it is, you quickly find it's limiting and hard to use - if you're an advanced user, it's useless.
It's quite unified. There's surprisingly little fragmentation in the community (save for Vim/Emacs and KDE/Gnome zealots), and a lot is accomplished daily. We have, right now, not one but ten (more?) advanced, powerful, and very usable desktop environments (including Gnome and KDE); a constantly improving graphical server that now supports advanced 3D effects, render acceleration, compositing, and multiple pointers (new! for multi-touch displays and the like a la iPhone); powerful multimedia features that audiophiles and videophiles are turning to in droves; multiple complete suites of office-targetted applications (KOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and others); and many, many other programs that most users will always find that meet their immediate needs. And that's just in the stable repositories.
My question for you is this: What do you think is missing? We'll get somebody on it.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
No. It's not something they teach you about in school.
This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler,
I know what I'm doing!
a simpler read-ahead mechanism,
And I knew it before you did!
the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor,
LeVar Burton would not approve of that kind of self-abuse!
XEN guest support,
Crabs are NOT invited to my head!
KVM smp guest support,
The sump reverses the M^V>K process?
and variable process argument length.
Oh great, now you'll never get them to stop bickering.
SLUB is now the default slab allocator,
Your build has now lost the battle of the bulge.
there's SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap,
If you're going in those kind of holes, you better be wearing something slinky!
XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support.
No no, you put the TP over the PP 2 L8!
Also the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm,
Mike Rowe? Have I got a job for you...
a userspace driver framework,
Better make it a rollcage.
the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag,
I thought only birds have those.
splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall,
Your Linux will do anything for love but they WON'T do THAT!
lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog for details.
Whew. Time for my cigarette.
You have probably defined things a bit too narrowly. As an extreme example, you can have a well-documented single-tasking kernel, and it would be a royal pain to turn into a usable modern operating system using just user-level "desktop code." Less extreme examples include the ability to service real time tasks like playing music without skipping and burning CDs (coasters were a real problem when CPU capacity was just a bit more than the CD burners needed), and various other tasks that make a desktop environment usable. Some of these usability traits require direct support from the OS kernel.
Certainly a valid point. A very similar issue was raised by Mark Weiser in his article "The World is not a Desktop":
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ACMInteractions2.html
Aahhh... I love the smell of car analogy in the morning.
Meep.
You have just argued in favour of Richard M Stallman, who insists on using the term 'GNU/Linux' (or 'GNU+Linux') where referring to the operating system.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
New kernel releases are only for people with big smelly dual-cores these days. Us PIII users have to set aside entire days if we want to compile a new kernel.
Need to learn about cross-compilation, I guess.
Those new quad core AMDs are hot off the presses. Has anyone done any testing with this in the kernel to see if it works at all?
And dare I ask if anyone's tried the per-core voltage/speed throttling?
How about CPU errata bugfixes?
Even if you're not building linux from scratch, you are allowed to compile your own kernel you know. It most likely won't kill you or make your machine burn in flames, just avoid to do it on for instance a production server.
/proc/config.gz. In that case you can just copy the file over into /usr/src/linux, unpack it, rename it .config. You can then tweak the settings using make menuconfig or make xconfig.
But do keep a backup of your current kernel that you can easily access by editing the path when booting in grub (or even create a grub menu entry for it), so if your new kernel fails for some reason or another you can still boot and fix it without using a live cd.
As for the kernel configuration, if you're lucky your distro has enabled
Going over the list, there is little there I wanted and nothing I needed. I think the Linux kernel is getting more and more bloated.
Also added in this release is the new b43 driver. I've been waiting for a long time for this, since my BCM4318 doesn't work with the bcm43xx driver. Unfortunately, unless the driver can be backported to .22, I'm stuck with ndiswrapper (I'm on CentOS, and the Fedora 2.6.23 package wants a bunch of updated core packages like nash).
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Well here is one who strongly disagrees. All OS's that have a GUI allow the user to select an application without him/her having to read a manual, however once they are in their application they should have a good idea on how to use it and if that requires reading a manual or on-line help then so be it. What I have just said actually applied to Unix and other OS's running a GUI back in the late 1970's and it is no different today with any GUI be it Linux, MAC, MS Windows or Unix.
The bottom line is that Linux or Unix for that matter does not require you to read through mountains of manuals, it never has, however to be fair it really depends on what you are doing. A senior Systems Administrator is always aware that a huge amount of documentation exists and knows how to search and get the most out of it. A normal user only needs to know how to login and select their required applications and with a GUI this is trivial. Linux is surprisingly easy to install and has been for some time. The only problems you can have is with hardware that does not have supporting Linux drivers, although this is actually getting better. Most people can't install a Microsoft OS from scratch either but are shielded from this with a factory install. It is unfortunate that it is rare to get a factory installed and configured Linux. I won't disagree but I find Linux works well for me and my family (in fact my wife prefers it over MS Windows) as my primary OS for home use. It is unfortunate that my work requires me to use MS Win XP Pro since some of the applications I am required to use are MS Windows specific although I can and do dual boot to Linux when consulting or out in the field.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
two out of three aint bad...
I agree, leave my shell alone. I love having the power that a shell gives you and most users are going to see that option and not touch it. To them shell = scary nerd thing and will avoid it at all costs, now that doesn't mean that tools shouldn't be in place so that an average person should able to do most things they need to do w/o touching the shell. The corollary to that is the shell is very powerful when wielded by the right hands and frankly I find linux problems much easier to fix for my family than windows problems because of the shell. All I have to do usually is ssh in, fix it and hop back out usually while they're still using the computer.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Unless you have any poorly supported hardware, in which case prepare for hours (if not days) of running google searches, reading mailing lists and forums, downloading tarballs, compiling code, and just general fighting before you get everything to work. SOMETIMES (perhaps even frequently) the install goes very smoothly. But when it doesn't the average user is in way over his or her head. Whether you like it or not, linux still has plenty of serious hardware support issues.
That of course doesn't mean the poster you were responding to was right himself, he wasn't, but then neither is the picture of a linux install always being about as hard as putting in a disk and letting it run.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
...it IS missing quite a few things:
1. Games. Other than Urban Terror, pretty much any game I have tried in Linux is crap, or runs kind of crappily under wine. There are some emulators, so you can have decent games, but most of them don't work very well out of box, and are ludicrously difficult to set up. Plus: Until Nintendo figures out a smart/easy way for users to license content, emulation is inevitably going to be a piracy only option. Also, joystick support under wine is pretty awful (though getting better), and I have yet to figure out how to do
2. 3d audio. I'm assuming there's a way to do it. Good luck figuring it out, oh, and this isn't Linux's fault, but many Creative cards don't work at all because Creative are douches about making
3. drivers. There are plenty of missing drivers out there, and again this is not the fault of Linux, but it is an unfortunate part of the reality of where we are today. M$ has bullied many manufacturers into NOT supporting Linux, and the market has not brow beat them into sense about it (yet).
4. Ease of Use. I'm not saying Ubuntu hasn't made strides, it has, the new version even more so, but there are still plenty of common tasks that are very difficult and shouldn't be.
5. Videoconferencing. I've read that it's possible in ekiga, or by running VLC in some kind of special mode, but I have yet to be able to do it AT ALL, and I have thrown several hours away on it.
6. Recording Video. You know, like off of a TV card. Again, I've heard it was possible, and even read about MythTV and Mythbuntu, and others. If you can get it to work, kudos, you must be a fucking genius. I've tried like 8 approaches with zero success.
7. Microsoft Office. Linux does have the superior Open Office, but a LOT of students and professionals require M$ office, because they currently enjoy
8. a hegemony. Linux is going to have to be better, faster, easier, and backwards compatible before "The Year of Desktop Linux" happens. But this is a problem that feeds on itself since MS has a hegemony.
Linux is KICKING ASS right now, but it is still losing the war, and I'm nervous that it may not be ABLE to win, given some of the problems I've run into using Ubuntu in particular, and dealing with the Ubuntu community specifically. There is no bar for entry into the FOSS community, and it would not surprise me if M$ and the like were inserting enemy combatants left and right. I have to assume they are, given the ludicrously easy things that Linux as an OS (and yes I know the parent article is about the KERNEL, and this is all OT) fails to do.
I really hope the problems can be addressed, but I'm skeptical if Linux will ever break out of the server farms based on most of my recent experience, especially in the game department!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Installing a Linux distro on compatible hardware is fairly easy.
Keeping it running gets interesting.
I am not a Linux guru, but I've been writing how-to articles on Linux for the last 3 years.
I have a fairly standard sort of setup, a Biostar GeForce 6100 AM2 integrated motherboard with Nvidia chipset and Athlon 64x2/4200 and 2G DDR2.
The normal procedure for installing a new nvidia video driver is:
# aptitude remove nvidia
# aptitude install nvidia[version compatible with kernel version]
Easy enough.
I had to do extensive research to find workarounds that would permit me to install the nvidia driver on the last three kernel upgrades
Last time around, I found out that the new kernel upgrade was compiled on a different gcc version than the version of gcc which had been pushed out via automatic update about a month before.
Before that, I found out based on a web search on the error message that the kernel developers decided to make a kernel call relating to paravirtualization unavailable to non-GPL proprietary drivers, some digging found me a patched kernel with the fix.
Would you like to talk a MCSE or your grandmother through what I just described?
I don't take the assertion that "Linux is ready for the masses" seriously yet and neither should anyone else. This delusion is bad for the Linux community as a whole, as it reduces the pressure on developers to fix the remaining problems.
Getting there? Certainly. I'd be far more surprised than not if Linux is to the point where a member of the general public can use it without having a Linux guru available to provide hands-on help by this time next year. But that time is not now. Do you want 20 or 30 million people running into trouble they can't handle, reformatting their boxes for XP, and telling their friends that Linux is shit? I certainly don't.
Tech Public Policy stuff
And I just finished compiling 2.6.22.9 :( Fuck!
Tried compiling this on a HP DL360 G5 - Debian Etch today, seems to be an issue with the make modules not actually making the modules. Have found a web reference for the same issue with v2.6.22. Ended up backtracking kernel versions to something a little more stable.
Upgrade to 2.6.23 right now? Are you out of your mind? Everyone knows you're supposed to wait for the SP1 release before upgrading to a new operating system!
As a non-drinker, that sounds great to me.
You can compile your kernel from source in almost any distro.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The new kernel also includes ALSA support for the Dreamcast sound device (for the first time - an out of mainline OSS driver did/does exist for 2.4).
More dreamcast support is on the way - expect some more stuff in 2.6.24 and 2.6.25 and I (the author of the code) would love to hear from willing testers, etc
I was going to make the same joke :)
Shell is neccessary part of the whole thing that some might call Operating System. Maybe Sumdumass meant console instead of shell. Or like friend of mine puts it: black thing with gray text on it.
You don't know what you don't know.
If meant that you want a precompiled kernel, you should wait until your distro offers a package.
On the other hand, if you want to try the new kernel now, you have to build it yourself.
Many users complain that the "make-based" compiling is too difficult, hence distros usually offer some kernel building facility. Check your documentation - or google.
Here's how I'm building the new kernel right now on a Debian system: cd
ketchup -r 2.6
make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=`date +%d%m%y` kernel_image
What if my work is compiling my software... :(
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Coming from an environment with Unix and Unix, I must say that I found Unix hell of a lot eaiser to learn than for example Windows. After having used Unix for a few months, I had already learned enough that I was able to hack the kernel on my own. After having used Windows for a few months, I still couldn't get the GUI to behave how I wanted it to, and just wanted to scream.
Pirate: My witty statements always become memes
Guybrush Threepwood: Oh really? To me that just sound like clichés.
Alternative reply: Too bad no one's ever heard of YOU at all.
Bad reply: I am rubber, you are glue.
In other words, there is now a key component of Xen in mainline, but still nothing even remotely close to a usably complete Xen system.
I don't get this at all. Xen was the very first virtualization system for Linux, it's been around for years, and has always been open source. So why isn't it fully merged into the kernel yet?
New virtualization systems are appearing at a rate of knots. KVM and Iguest didn't seem to get held up in being merged, so what's up with Xen?
Did the source code for Thunderbird evaporate when those two developers left or something?
vendors of video display cards? Yes, that would be nvidia and ATI. So it's reasonable to expect support. Yes, I know the legal / technical / political issues involved, it's hardly possible to write for money about Linux without being aware of them. Would "the masses" know to research whether or not a video chipset is supported? More to the point, I verified that there was Linux support for nvidia before buying the motherboard.
Debian packagers do supply packages for nvidia and rebuilt as debs... as you might have noticed from my post that said the usual method for upgrading nvidia is # aptitude install nvidia.
The problem here is that the nvidia packages weren't fully maintained up to current version and there were problems with them besides that. All a Debian end user is responsible for is to check to see if Debian maintains driver packages compatible with the product one is considering buying. An end user isn't supposed to have to cope with situations where the compiler that's current with a distro (gcc 4.2) that one uses to build a nvidia binary (as I said, the Debian nvidia wasn't ready) is not the same as the one the kernel was built in (gcc 4.1). One of the points behind automated upgrades is to prevent that situation from happening.
If the driver packages exist in Debian repositories, that's "supported" as far as a Debian user is concerned. It's the developer/packager problem to make sure that they work on the chipsets they are claimed to work with.
Part of the Debian learning curve is finding out that non-free and contrib sections of the repositories have to be added to sources.list so one can get access to proprietary drivers. I think they deal with this better in Ubuntu.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'll second that!
A couple of days ago, we assembled a new desktop for a friend (Quad-core, NVidia 8800, 4G ram and all SATA disks/dvdrw). He wanted to install both Vista and Ubuntu just to check it out. We opted to go with Vista install first. We popped the x64 disk in the SATA reader and rebooted, the installer finished copying the files, rebooted a couple of times without asking a single thing and then ooooooooooppppsss! BSODed and never booted again. Being fairly ignorant we figured it was the SATA configuration that Vista puked over, so we installed an IDE reader and tried again... Same drill, a couple of reboots and hours later, oooooooooooooooopppssss! BSODed again and never came up...
Being persistent sods, we tried the x86 version from the IDE reader... this was ever better, the BSOD appeared while loading the installer... that saved us a hell of a lot of time...
My friend then suggested to install XP and try the installation of Vista from within XP. 3-4 hours later and countless reboots, we got Vista installed (no apps, just the bare bones)... sure my friend was impressed with the graphics but could immediately notice the performance hit...
TOTAL time: ~7 hours!!!
Then we started the Ubuntu install... we strolled down the brave path with this one (exhausted from the above) and booted off the SATA drive (this was a Feisty cd). Worked like a charm, within minutes we had the Live CD booted and working, the network was up and my friend was impressed. Then we started the installer, and after 10 minutes time we booted from the fresh intalled disk. just half an hour or so later we had the system fully patched and Compiz fully working.
TOTAL time: ~1hr !!!!
I call THAT impressive...
All the software is precompiled. If you want to go bleeding bleeding edge, then they have a very simple method to download the sources that you need. In fact, it's better than that: they give you their build tree, you make a couple of changes to the script, and it spits out a package that you can install and remove using the package manager. All sources are downloaded on the fly.
Karma whore who misstates a week old (and already fixed) flaw as beeing new. Step up against such karma whoring and mod -1 troll. Thank you.
"paravirtualization hypervisor" is going to be my new tech-babble phrase for a while :p
Don't "copy to KMails folders". Use KMails "Accounts" settings box to add your mbox or Maildirs. If you want everything live in KMail' directories then create folders in KMail and copy the messages from those "accounts" to them. Once that is done, remove the accounts.
I think the Linux kernel is getting more and more bloated.
I'm starting to think so too. One of the things that made linux popular was that it ran like the wind on rescued hardware, and dumpster salvage. While the response of FC7 on a 500MHz machine with 128M of RAM is quite snappy in a geological sense, on a human scale it runs like a drunk pig. There's so much stuff running in the background, it's hard to know what's needed and what's not, or even what the hardware supports. Can a PentiumIII even handle paravirtualization hypervising?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Windows doesn't always install so well either. On this box, XP refused to install (it doesn't like 3 video cards). Win2k will, but only in 4-bit "colour", and refuses to do any better, even with the right drivers. And yet here I am, typing on a linux desktop that installed with just a few clicks.
Another impressive thing (and something we're so used to we've come to expect it, but you can't even try with Windows) is that you can test which distros work with your hardware before you install, thanks to live CDs. Not sure if a particular linux will work on a laptop? Try it before installing.
Thanks. Next time I migrate my data, I'll try that.
And if you're really horribly unlucky then you'll have to endure the HORROR of copying
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So I'm in the shell more than I need to - but last time I really shouldn't was when I connected a 1440z900 (16:10) LCD monitor. Nope, wouldn't show properly until I added a custom modeline to my X11 config and I'll be damned if you can do that via the GUI. That's hardly something very obscure reserved for Linux gurus (but from what I've understood, the very latest x.org releases finally gets autodetection right.
The other issue is that even though you don't need to, about 98% of the time when I search for a solution I find one that's using the command line. Probably because it lends itself much better to being written in a forum post rather than taking screenshots, mixing them up with text "click this" to make it a nice guide, but it's definately very very hard IMO to find good guides on doing things without the command line.
In the end though, I think most of this can be solved once supported hardware is common, because most of my issues requiring shell access has involved making stuff work. If you all hardware plays nice, it's usually abstracted enough you can use the GUI.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yea, I mean console. Although I'm not sure that saying shell was all that inappropriate. I remeber numerous times being told to drop to a shell to enter commends in various howtos and so on. This is the point I was making, you won't/shouldn't need to do this.
yes, with default policy the only thing allowed to override this at the moment is X which means other users of vm page 0 will have trouble. Custom SELinux policy would have to be built for DOSemu (or disable the protection in /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr)
I'm sure you'd find plenty of people on the selinux mailing lists willing to help if you run into trouble!
I'm used to the /proc/config.gz thing because this way I know I can avoid keeping my old kernel sources around without worrying about backing up the config.
/proc/config.gz? I wasn't aware this was such a controversial issue.
Wait, why am I even responding to a guy who's getting his panties in a bunch over
Where can I find more information on the differences between the old and new process scheduler?
In a sense, you're quite right. It seems as though you're thinking of other things we use in our lives that help us do what we want - phones, pliers, cars, washing machines, lighting fixtures, drills, blenders, stoves, refrigerators - the list could go on and on. If I'm getting where you're coming from, these may be the kinds of things you have in mind as a sort of a reference.
The computer differs from all of those things in one particularly significant way - its highly multipurpose much more so than the aforementioned things. This makes it complex on a scale that nearly all other things we use by more than a longshot.
And, for that matter, while cron seems simple (and it is), those jobs it automates for you have to be put together as well which may not be simple. Also, what if the report cron cranks out needs to be different one day? You're back to the task of servicing the computer so it can service you.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
lol, what I meant was that you don't need to drop to a shell and input commands yourself. You don't need to open a console or directly touch a shell. You can do all your configuration from either the distro's desktop tools or from web apps like Webmin.
Sure. Luckily, there are a lot of developers working on other parts of the OS, like the KDE and GNOME teams, the folks working on upstart and other low-level but above-the-kernel components, the people writing device drivers, the application developers, etc., etc., etc.
What is your point? Do you think the kernel developers should start working on the GUIs? That would be a bad thing. Really bad.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
YOU MEAN LIKE THIS?
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
You can basically do the same to some extent in Mandrake/Mandriva. Just open the management console and select the monitor, change the resolution to something your monitor will work with, Change the monitor type to a genaric monitor if it doesn't list your brand, then plug the monitor in and it should work. Of course that is mandrake specific and using Mandrake's tools, I don't know what or how to do it in other distros. The CentOS boxes I run don't have a GUI at all outside a terminal and those are the two distros I mess with.( I actually went to CentOS because Mandrake was pissing me off)
I think one of the reasons you read about going to the command line so much is because most of the fixes are portable between distros. RedHat might use gui based tools that are different from SuSE which might be different then Mandrake's which might be different from Ubuntu's and so on. With a command line fix, the fix should be the same across most of those distributions. But it doesn't mean there isn't an easier way to do something with a point and click. A lot of times you have to look at the distro's website that you are having problems with. I though that might be the case. Although the little amount of time spent on problems getting hardware to work would be even shorter and less complicated once more OEMs start selling linux pre-installed. You also have to look at the distros being used. Some of them have strict OSS policies while some have no problem including proprietary drivers. It seems to me that the later has more hardware compatibility to some degree. Some distros are set up to be more server centric as well as for the more advanced user. Things like auto detection of hardware might not be included, and they just might not be expecting users who don't want to go into the command line so they just don't worry about not going there. I like mandrake because of the tools it includes, the urpmi package manager and a few other things. I hear that synoptics or whatever it is called is just as good. I'm just used to mandrake and their stuff. And I think finding a distro you like, not one that others claim is cool, and using it to the point you are comfortable with it, solves half of the issues I see people complaining about.
Those 90% of the general population want to run Windows software and won't accept Wine or a virtual machine. They want to double-click on the .exe, click-drool-click, and do their thing. Making it user-friendly is not enough, they have to be able to run their pirated copies of Photoshop and 3D Studio, not to mention all their pirated DirectX 10 games.
Without some massive reeducation program, I doubt that Linux will get a significant market share in the next several decades. People have Microsoft in their heads, and love what they get from Steve the monkey boy, regardless of how well it works. It's just like the instability of the Windows 9X line, as well as preceding products. People thought that occasional crashes were just facts of life if you wanted to use a computer.
Yep, yet another new version. It's really a shame how they couldn't be bothered to code it right the first time around.
And this is different from windows?
I don't think having cron browse the web for me (Slashdot, anyone?) would be a very enjoyable experience.
As little as I like the "there-is-no-stable" mentality of the current kernel development methodology, it's quite clear that it has enabled the kernel devs to incorporate new features into the mainline, and get them tested by a very large user base, in an exceedingly short period of time. Of course, the result is a decline in stability, and as a result, many still pine for the days of the old stable/unstable split. But, it seems the tradeoff is considered worth it by most.
I'm also willing to bet the move to a more distributed source control system has had a large effect. While I'm not convinced of it's utility for corporate development, a distributed source control system, and it's effect on development, seems to have been a very positive change for the kernel developers, and has greatly reduced the burden on Linus, as it makes it very natural for individual subsystem maintainers to groom, test, and incorporate downstream patches before sending the final mods upstream to Linus for inclusion into the kernel proper.
Unless you have any poorly supported hardware, in which case prepare for hours (if not days) of running google searches, reading mailing lists and forums, downloading tarballs, compiling code, and just general fighting before you get everything to work.
Funny, the same is true of Vista.
Maybe you should be laying blame where it's due: the hardware manufacturers.
Wow thats such a cool argument (yawn). People should try that when selling cars, TVs, Houses, Groceries, and every other thing !
:D ). I know its not relevant to oh-so-free-omgz desktop GNU/Linux, but my point isn't about Linux anyway, its about this dumb argument about how its easy for *me*. Take the *me* out and start thinking of *everyone*.
"Oh no sir, its not that the TV is hard to use, after all *I* can use it after just picking up the remote."
Replace accordingly.
"Ahh yes, I know you're used to riding a Toyota, but let me tell you it sucks!!! So, please drive a Honda. You'll have trouble with it early on, but then you'll get right into it!!!"
Let me tell you something Bubby, the person(s) who pays, gets to decide if its "user friendly", not you. If 10 million people willing to pay a Dev shop to write software tell the CEO it the software sucks, then it sucks (Note: 10 million blue-screens don't count.. unfortunately
There, fixed that for you.
What about RSS feeds? Isn't that sort of the same thing?
We have, right now, not one but ten (more?) advanced, powerful, and very usable desktop environments (including Gnome and KDE);...
multiple complete suites of office-targetted applications (KOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and others)
"unified"?
You keep on using that word...
--
You should note that the vast majority of computers (except the one at your desk) do work without intervention already. Your cell phone is a computer. Your CD player, DVD player, game console, and HDTV are all computers. There are many computers in your car. Every room door at a hotel has a computer. And so on... All of these computers have made "everyones lives easier by helping the person".
(The other argument is that desktop computers are still relatively new in the world. Like animals with big brains and a lot of potential, they need a lot of instruction, rearing, love, and attention. Eventually they will mature, require less attention, and maybe even take care of us.)
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Yes. You service the computer, so that the computer can service the rest of us.
In Soviet Russia, computer services you!
On January 23, 1978, two days after killing Teresa Wallin, Chase purchased two puppies from a neighbor, which he then killed and drank the blood of, leaving the bodies on the neighbor's front lawn.
Medical examiners reported an inordinate amount of semen in the corpse's rectum, indicating an "unusual amount" of ejaculations.
His most heinous act, however, was to stuff animal feces into her mouth.
The instructions say to use the terminal because its much *easier* to cut and paste "sudo kedit
If your X11 crashed on startup, well, that's a problem with xorg, not Linux. And you will find that all distros within the year will have a "failsafe" like ubuntu that allows you to use your "gui" to fix the problems.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
That's the step where it goes wrong. Person B is still bound by the terms of the BSD license.
Let's simplify it a bit, and assume just one file. Person A obtains a file consisting solely of one person's work, licensed under the BSD terms. Person A makes significant changes to it, and releases a derived work to Person B, under the GPL license. Person B now needs two licenses to modify and distribute what Person A gave them:
The key point is that Person A can only enforce copyright on his GPL'ed work to the extent that the alleged infringing material is not based on the original, BSD-licensed file. For example, if B takes a function from A's GPLed file and puts it into a non-GPL program, A can only complain if that function didn't appear in the original BSD-licensed work.
Are you adequate?
Whether kernel developers take requirements directly from users, or via application software programmers, the end result is the same: kernel developers need to and do take end user requirements into consideration. APIs are indeed important, documentation is indeed important, but "usability is a problem for the desktop maintainers ( the KDE or GNOME guys ), not the kernel hackers" is plain false.
A good Jedi never has enough time to rewrite a memory deallocation process.
An excelent Jedi, leaves it for the hackers.
?
I'm not saying "x OS is easy to use". I'm saying there's not such thing as "ease of use". It's not an argument about how easy it is for *me* to use Linux, it's an argument about how easy or hard is to get used to something new, especially if you're a non-techie.
To put an example, my grandfather was used to Windows 3.11. He had AutoCAD for his tailoring business, and it was wonderful. It did everything he needed, and his productivity was excellent. He was used to it. My father came in one day and replaced his old 486 with a new PC and put Windows XP on it. My grandfather went crazy, he didn't understand a thing. He was so used to 3.11 that XP's "user-friendliness" meant nothing to him. It took a couple of months till he could finally get used to XP.
Another example, and a much more radical one: My translation teacher was telling us the other day about the days when she worked with a manual typewriter. She was really good at it. But then there came the PC and the graphical word processors--she also went crazy. She wasn't used to typing straight without manually breaking the lines! This also took a certain amount of learning time.
How many people are there that actually used something other than 9x based Windows OS? I was raised with DOS, my first GUI experience was with the old Mac OS, then I passed through Windows XP and ended up today in Linux. I'm used to figuring how things might work in different systems. Most people aren't. Most people were introduced to computers in the 9x or NT era, and don't know anything else. How can you expect them to find something completely different to what they're used to "easy to use"?
I'm not saying people should move to Linux. I'm just countering the "ease of use" argument. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
the kernel I got was compiled with gcc 4.1 and the gcc version that's current and pushed out via automated upgrade is 4.2? Remember, the team responsible for distributing updated Debian-packaged kernels is also the one who decide what compiler goes into the current distro upgrade. I think this problem is going to be common to any driver that has to be compiled into the kernel, I'm merely glad that for me, nvidia is the only problem.
.deb Debian repackage is also supposed to be up to date with the current kernel for the same reasons.
More to the point, the nvidia
Tech Public Policy stuff
the problem is that the kernel will only tolerate the insertion of a module compiled on the same compiler version as the kernel.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I think the mod might have had a *WHOOSH* moment.
I'm not laying blame anywhere. I'm just pointing out that since that a linux install is frequently much harder than its XP counterpart. That's what the OP was talking about, that's what I'm talking about. The average user doesn't care WHY it's harder, they just care that it is.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
You obviously missed the point. The point is, that there is a lot of operating systems available, which all work in a very similar way. And then there is one big vendor, who decides to make a system as incompatible with everything else as they can get away with, and make it so different, that it is difficult to switch to and from. There can be only reason for a vendor to behave this way, they must believe, that if it was easier to switch, there would be more people switching away from their system than to their system.
Jeez. Most of the usability improvements that people wants are things that doesn't require any kernel changes at all. Why should kernel developers be bothered with requests like, I want this button to be moved to the right and do something else. If a user wants KDE to behave differently, it would be much better for the KDE developers to look on the request and decide how it can be done. And if it requires a kernel change, that developer can explain what he needs from the kernel. Very few end users will ever understand how that kernel feature relates to the user interface change.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
You don't change the license terms of the code you're based upon, you release a new work under a new license. The original code remains under its original license, you can't take that away.
How could I change terms? A license, roughly speaking, is a conditional promise not to sue. I can't take away the original promise, because it was not me who has made it. Nor can I sue you, because the copyright is not mine. But if I create a derivative work based on some BSD-licensed code, I can add my own promise not to sue you over use of the derivative, with different conditions. The original code that is a part of the derivative continues to be licensed under its original BSD license. (There's nothing wrong with a whole and a part having different copyright holders and a different licenses.)
Actually, it really really isn't. Compared with 2000 and XP - and Linux - Vista installers are very informative and provide quite a bit of information about what will and will not work, especially during upgrades. For clean installs, it is a bit less clear, but so long as you can get a network connection of some sort with your hardware, the setup update process will usually sort it all out on PIII or newer hardware.
Vista installers are very informative and provide quite a bit of information about what will and will not work
Tell that to my T61, which mysteriously BSOD'd twice while installing. And I'm hardly the only one to encounter issues like this.
For clean installs, it is a bit less clear, but so long as you can get a network connection of some sort with your hardware, the setup update process will usually sort it all out on PIII or newer hardware.
I'm not really sure how the "setup update process" can "sort it all out" if there's no Vista drivers for a particular piece of hardware, which is the case for many people with newer (or even older) video cards, printers, and or other types of gear, and is the entire point of this discussion.
The Vista compatability checker, which runs first, has always warned me about hardware for which no drivers exist. I don't have a T61, but my org has a large mix of desktop and laptop hardware and we haven't had any Vista install issues.
That said, I have never gotten any network connectivity out of the box installing Linux on my semi-vintage Dell 700m. I've tried Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6. The install completes, but no network is there, and no obvious errors or any help is given for resolving the issues. Yeah, I went online and an hour of searching on another machine, readining conflicting postings scattered over dozens of sites, and some arcane edits to config files, I was able to make the wired 100mbit adapter work. But still no wireless connectivity, even though the adapter is listed as up.
True, if no drivers exist, you're screwed. The same is true on the Linux side, which supports even less hardware. My point was that the Vista setup updater will find missing and newer drivers online automatically if you can get some form of network connection with the base installer. Basic network connectivity is is possible on most hardware I've tested with Vista. If Vista doesn't support your network hardware, you can be damned sure probably won't, either.