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Reducing Boot Time On a General Linux Distro
Linzer writes "In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."
I can see optimizing this for the sake of the geeky goodness of it and all that but, really, how often does someone reboot a Linux box, that this even enters into it? Maybe I'm unusual but mine usually stay up until there's a new version of my distro of choice to upgrade to. Time to boot just doesn't impact me very much.
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password.
A female Linux user?!? You can compile and install Gentoo while waiting for that to happen. : p
This guy's the limit!
I see what they're getting at but not how to achieve similar gains. Anybody out there feel like putting together a slightly more practical guide?
...so now I need a sex change to run Linux. Sheesh!
I am sure both Mandriva users will be very happy.
Proper English is "his password" Apparently you've forgotten too. Their is plural.
For a grammar nazi, you're making quite an elementary mistake. "User" is a singular noun and needs a singular pronoun to go with it. "Their" is a plural pronoun. Using "his", "her", or "his/her" would be correct in this sentence.
Well, it helps if it's installed on a laptop or on old hardware.
Also it goes to quicker recovery time in case of outages. Coming from the Solaris world before they had journaling UFS filesystem it could take hours to FSCK a large partition before the OS would come up. On a production system that is a big deal.
Hm... prefetch, anyone?
Really? English is not my first language, so my intuition may be wrong, but since it basically replaces "the user's" (singular!), "his" or "her" make more sense to me than "their".
The use of "they" as a singular pronoun is by no means universally accepted.
On my systems, it's the BIOS that takes a very large chunk of the overall boot time. As far as it goes, I think the Core2 machine takes about the same amount of time to start loading the OS as the old 486 used to.
Having an x86_64 architecture is nice, but why oh why are we still lumbered with that legacy piece of you-know-what? I think I want a Mac Mini now, just because of that...!
-- Steve
Thanks for playing, but you're wrong:
Each student is singular -- the is instead of are proves it -- so the colloquial their (a plural) doesn't agree with the verb, and is frowned on by traditionalists. It's common enough in speech -- "A friend of mine called me." "What did they say?" -- but, although many writers have used it (see examples from Jane Austen), it often sets off alarm bells among the fussier readers of formal writing today.
The correct answer is "there is no answer". There's plenty of "right" ways that have either fallen out of favor (such as using "type one's password"), or that get repetitive and annoying ("type his' or her's password")
I suggest brushing up on your Grammar Youth Movement handbook at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/s.html#sexist
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My problem is not the linux distro coming up to a login prompt, but the server getting past all the cards prompts to get to the normal boot. What with scsi controller cards having their own bios, the system bios, and miscellaneous others, it can take longer to get past the post then to boot linux. The HP DL360 G5's we have can take almost 30 seconds just to starting booting the linux kernel.
One thing to remember when you are on /. (and the internet in general) is OVER HALF THE WORLD DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH AS A FIRST LANGUAGE. (yes, I am yelling at the few who can't seem to comprehend this)
Whose fault is it that English is not their first language?
Whose fault is it that the education system sucked?
Whose fault is it that they have a learning disability that makes them suck at grammar or spelling?
Is it bad that they are more interested in earning some cash to "feed the kids", or "spend quality time with the family" than go back to school to brush up on Grammar.
I am amazed at the high quality of the writing here considering peoples background, and the fact they are trying to whip off these messages and get back to the day job(or whatever).
My password is just the letter 'a'. Like in 'apple'. No luck for me then.
And from your link:
Generic they has indeterminate number:
* There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend â" Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3 (1594)
(Their can be understood equally well as referring to each man considered one at a time, or to all of them collectively.)[citation needed]
In this example, *his* would have been appropriate as gender is implied in the context of the writing, whereas 'user' is generic, and NOT gender specific. Using the pronoun 'her' instead of 'his' is as sexually discriminatory as using simply 'his' has been judged to be in the past. Therefore, I submit that 'their' is appropriate as user refers to one of any number of possible users, and not a single user of specific gender.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
For a grammar nazi, you're making quite an elementary mistake. "User" is a singular noun and needs a singular pronoun to go with it. "Their" is a plural pronoun. Using "his", "her", or "his/her" would be correct in this sentence.
And for a grammar-nazi nazi you're making an quite an elementary mistake.
From, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/their
"Long before the use of generic he was condemned as sexist, the pronouns they, their, and them were used in educated speech and in all but the most formal writing to refer to indefinite pronouns and to singular nouns of general personal reference, probably because such nouns are often not felt to be exclusively singular: If anyone calls, tell them I'll be back at six. Everyone began looking for their books at once. Such use is not a recent development, nor is it a mark of ignorance. Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Scott, and Dickens, as well as many other English and American writers, have used they and its forms to refer to singular antecedents."
No, you are wrong. It should read:
The masculine pronoun is the proper default for referencing people of unknown gender. And, that is regardless what the PC people say.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Why not simply use sleep or hibernation (bind i to the power button)? All modern hardware/OSes support it. No need to load all drivers and background apps every single time. Actually hibernation saves time and energy due to shorter boot times.
Just be sure not to use crappy software/hardware that doesn't support it.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Just be sure not to use crappy software/hardware that doesn't support [sleep].
And pay multiple times over for return shipping when I find that one or more components of my computer don't come out of sleep properly. Or do you know of a good whitelist of makes and models of commodity PC hardware that have the fewest defects in their ACPI implementation?
NICE try "Steve" or is it "Mr. Jobs"? Attempting to infiltrate our "Linux discussion" with your MAC hype!!
No, that would imply the user is male. his/her password is most proper.
Has no one here heard of hibernate or sleep?
It appears Acer's testers haven't. My cousin tells me his Acer Aspire One subnotebook running Windows XP Home comes out of sleep with some hardware not properly awake.
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type the password."
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type the correct password."
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type a password."
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type a correct password."
All of those achieve grammatical correctness while maintaining gender neutrality. I believe gender neutrality is the message the OGN (original grammar nazi) was trying to get across.
I have a linux laptop that I tote with me. I generally like to power-down when moving place-to-place to reduce HD damage if I jostle it too much.
Why not just get hibernate to work well and do that?
There is a lot of CPU chewed in the booting process and you can only do so much to speed it up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For a Grammar Nazi you got your grammar wrong.
When the gender is not known, and the subject is singular, the correct pronoun is "his." "Their" only works if the subject is plural.
Comment of the year
I would invoke the "Humpty Dumpty Principle" (from Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"). Quoting: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
"Their" is in common usage to indicate his/her. It has the advantage of being less awkward to say and looks less strange on the page. It also has the benefit of annoying grammarians, who seem to believe that they subscribe to the One True Way.
Their has been in common usage for a possessive of indeterminate gender since before grammarians decided to declare rules for the English language based on their (sexist) biases and preferences. Wikipedia provides a mind-numbingly detailed description of this history and grammatical rules surrounding it, but this usage dates to the 1300's.
Here are some fun quotes that Wikipedia gathered showing usage of they and their as singular by famous authors:
-- Arise; one knocks. / ... / Hark, how they knock! - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
-- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech. - Shakespeare, Hamlet
-- I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. - Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
-- That's always your way, Maimâ"always sailing in to help somebody before they're hurt. - Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
So this is not some modern invention of feminists or the ignorant, but simply usage that is not favored by self-appointed grammar police. (At least in France the grammar police are official and given the duty of writing the rules on behalf of that nation. It seems that there, too, people go on speaking without regard to the official rules.)
-Jon
Most proper, but saying "his password" is also acceptable.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Amazon EC2 images (et alia) would find this useful.
They will come online faster.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
After post, I have my Archlinux based laptop booting in 11-14sec consistently. I have added a daemon or two since this bootchart, but until then I was at 12 seconds every boot. Now it's still only 14sec. I don't see how these guys call their bootcharts fast. Their athlon xp 3400 system (closest to my 3200 x2) booting in 22 secs is supposed to be fast.
If they are preloading desktop environment files, while waiting for the user to type in a password, that can allow people to guess usernames!
Back in the days of yore, you could tell if you typed in a valid username by how long it took to validate the login attempt. A valid user with invalid password was reported immediately; an invalid user took longer. This was changed to always take a constant time, to prevent username guessing attacks.
With preloading desktop environment files, if a user is sitting at the machine, they could type in a username, and listen for disk activity. No activity? Try a different username!
And yes, I know, if the machine is not in a secure location, it isn't secure. But the preload behaviour for valid usernames may open up other attack vectors. For example, if the user environment files are on NFS, a flurry of network activity may signal a correctly guessed username.
You know, some of us try to lower our CO2 footprint by not using power needlessly.
"Over half the world" - Technically accurate, I suppose.
Are you American? A slightly knowledgeable American but definitely an American.
About 5% of the world's population speak English as a 1st language.
Well *I* submit that you're a pedantic douchebag who brings nothing to the top-level topic of this board.
Fuck you.
I shut my laptop down when I'm not going to use it for a while, instead of putting it into suspend. On battery less boot time means more time to actually use the machine, so I'm interested.
On the other hand, my battery should probably be replaced as I can only get about an hour out of it on a single charge.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
What's a "her" ?
On Linux usb ports can be powered down to save power. However it turns out that many USB devices are broken and can't cope with being powered down. Now the question comes up what version of Linux are you using? If it's something older than 6 months then there's a good chance this has been fixed (the list of things allowed to be powered down has gone from a blacklist to a whitelist of large categories). See this commit talking about the kernel no longer powering anything down bar USB hubs for some more details.
A very short term band aid might be to disable usb autosuspend on that device via /sys/.
I don't suspend to disk because it usually sucks... NetworkManager fails, wireless complains... And somehow some videos causes X to crash beyond what restart of X fixes... Probably a really bad graphics driver... Or maybe I haven't configured it to reload the graphics driver correctly. I did that using config files in earlier versions to enable compiz after wakeup..
When I used SuSE 10.0 (Which I dumbed when their package manager broke ever more) suspend to disk worked just fine... Now I run Ubuntu and I know I ought to run something less buggy..
But suspend to ram and disk isn't the most stable feature... Sometimes it just really sucks... Nevertheless it's actually one of the most important features.
The masculine pronoun is the proper default
Wrong! "Their" as a singular pronoun is not improper (and there are scholars who are fans of, e.g. Jane Austen who will slap you silly for suggesting that it is). These days, it is, at best, informal, and many consider it colloquial and ugly, but no one who actually studies the language would suggest that it's improper. Awkward, distasteful and best avoided, maybe, but not improper. (Note: middle-school English teachers are not generally considered to be among the set of people who actually study the language.)
Its use is controversial (to put it mildly), and I don't think anyone would suggest that it should be used in formal writing, but only the ignorant claim that it's wrong. (See also: split infinitive.)
Wikipedia is a load of rubbish.
If you want to let the BIOS "know" you can use the platform option in /sys/power/disk. If this is broken you can use shutdown instead. I believe the former effectively uses S4 and may have beneficial results (e.g. faster startup when powering back on, power light pulsing while hibernating/restarting) if it isn't broken.
It suffices for informal situations, such as this one. If you expect me to look very hard for a citation for common rules of grammar (that you yourself acknowledge), you have lofty expectations indeed.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
You can see a video of Arjan's EeePC 901 5 second boot on youtube. It's not the 3 seconds you're asking for but it's still somewhat fast right?
No, you stupid fucking idiot. "Their" is a plural pronoun, not a singular pronoun.
"Their" only started being used as a singular pronoun when feminists got their panties in a twist because the the masculine form was also the gender neutral form and felt it was a slight to women.
Now, shut the fuck up and dig your head out of your ass, moron.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
While servers still seem to take hours to get past their BIOSes, modern laptops often have options for skipping the POST and generally taking shortcuts enumerating devices. The EeePC has a "BootBooster" option where it caches BIOSes results to solid state disk so the BIOS finishes in less than a second (rather than 4 or 5). It is so fast it can be a pain when you actually DO want to change a BIOS option!
...and wants to do something malicious then I'd worry about something other than not having to guess a correct username. Unless you're using full disk and virtual memory encryption why wouldn't they just boot off a CD/USB key (or possibly take your disk out and put it in another machine)?
Using the pronoun 'her' instead of 'his' is as sexually discriminatory as using simply 'his' has been judged to be in the past.
My grammar is terrible, but I do know that 'his' was used as the neutral/unspecified gender pronoun as well as the masculine pronoun (but we tend to use their now, it's what I would use) and that it has nothing to do with negative sexual discrimination.
Those that think women are denigrated by the use of "his" (eg "If a soldier lays down his arms ...") should really wonder why they think so little of women that they might need the rules of grammar to be changed to promote them.
OK, er, you fail. Epically.
These are completely different types of work. What Arjan is doing is tailoring boot to a specific set of software running on a specific set of hardware, using an entirely legacy-free init system.
This is nothing at all like what Fred is doing, which is optimizing a legacy boot system for completely generic hardware and software - it has to run on any system, with any set of software available from the Mandriva repositories installed.
The two types of work are utterly and entirely different.
For the record, another of our engineers - Claudio Matsuoka - has been working on the *other* type of boot system for several months now. It began as a re-implementation of the 'fastinit' system found in the Xandros distribution on the Eee. This system is called 'finit', and you can find it at http://helllabs.org/finit/ . It is used in Mandriva Mini, our custom edition for netbook OEMs. It pre-dates Arjan's work substantially, or at least the public announcement of it.
If you read the summary, one culprit is modprobe - for each kernel module loaded at boot time, it scans several hundred Kb of config files.
I have patches to fix this behaviour of modprobe, which can shave several seconds off boot-time. I submitted them months ago but I think so far the sole maintainer has been too busy.
Anyone interested, poke me and maybe I'll have another go... .
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password.
I once heard someone say that only girls use Fedora, but until now I always figured it was just some kind of snide remark.
If you acknowledge the common rules of grammar, you would recognise that 'their' can be used as an impersonal pronoun in cases where the gender is unknown. Less common but also correct is the use of 'one/s' as an impersonal pronoun. As neither suffice all the time we regularly see a case for a new word to cover all impersonal pronoun usage.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I do recognize those.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
From your comment I am forced to conclude you are a 'middle'* school English teacher. You are incorrect. 'Their's use as an impersonal pronoun precedes the feminists by a significant amount of time. It was just consider vulgar, unsophisticated.
* we don't have middle school so I presume it would be equivalent to primary education.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
/dev/sda1 has not been checked in 60 days. Check forced ... ... /dev/sda1 clean
That's right, in 2008 the EXT3 filesystem still needs to be offline for a read-only consistency check.
Unfortunately even with journals one still needs regular fs checks so we can't just tune2fs -i our volumes to make the problem go away.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Combine these efforts with IBM's recommended use of Make for startup dependencies, and Fedora's One Second X project and we should have some marked improvements in boot time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Mod parent informative!
It doesn't have to be universally accepted. If it is universally understood that is good enough, which it pretty much is despite the protests of some who don't like it.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No, you stupid fucking idiot. "He" is a singular masculine pronoun, not a gender neutral pronoun.
See, other people can holler and swear to. It doesn't make them right.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
* we don't have middle school
Really? Where is that? The term is moderately common in the US and nearly universal in the UK. I thought it was widespread in Oz as well, but I can't claim to be fluent in Aussie (or Kiwi). The term "high school" is much more common in the US, but "middle school" is a widely used alternative, and doesn't confuse the Brits, which is why I used the term and why I tend to use it in places where I may have an international audience.
BTW, thanks for the backup. I probably would have ignored the post as obvious flamebait, but your calm, intelligent reply seems to have done well enough. I should point out, however, that singular-they wasn't really considered vulgar or unsophisticated until sometime in the Nineteenth Century. Before that, it was, at least according to most scholars, considered perfectly appropriate for formal speech, as evidenced by (among many others) that impeccable writer and personal favorite, Jane Austen.
Here's a poweropint presentation about this work. If you're an LWN subscriber you can you read an article and comments about the 5 second boot presentation at the Linux Plumbers Conference (it will become viewable by all on from the 2nd October 2008). Finally you might be able to test drive some of this work if you are willing to sacrifice a USB key and destroy your existing EeePC install by because Moblin may include this work.
I've always wondered, why does it take so ridiculously long to reboot a computer? The basic problem seems to be that you want to send every program on the computer a signal to quit (sighup or sigterm or something like that), and those processes then each begin doing things like writing data to disk, closing file descriptors, running destructors to 'properly free' allocated memory, etc.
Now, here's the thing - yes, programs need 'cleanup' for a reboot, but I think simply writing data to disk and closing files would be much faster than completely shutting down programs, and doing all the *unnecessary* memory cleanup that implies. Yes, filesystems need to be flushed/unmounted, but I think that probably 80 percent of the stuff that happens during a typical computer shutdown or reboot is just unnecessary, particularly doing things like running destructors on complex data structures (like the 800 megs of model, texture, animation, particle effect, sound, and state [e.g. character inventory, stats, etc] data that a game might have loaded in memory, for example). Seems like all you need to do for a shutdown or reboot is send a signal to programs to write data and close files, then when that is finished, umount filesystems, then send the appropriate instructions or interrupts to the CPU to trigger the shutdown/reboot. Who cares if programs don't free() their memory or properly terminate if you are rebooting or shutting down?
Fair comment, but on the other hand if someone who does speak English as a first language doesn't point out mistakes then how will those people who don't usually speak it ever know?
Chicken and egg: as long as it's so slow, people are going to go to great lengths to avoid doing it. (Like, say, leaving it up until a new version arrives. Do you leave your lamps on all night long, but covered, in case you want to use them quickly?)
The biggest reason to keep your computer running 24/7 is to allow it to be instantly usable. Most people aren't actually making use of those CPU cycles when they're asleep. Computers use power, and make noise.
This is one of those cases where a big enough quantitative change brings about a qualitative change. Bringing boot time from 240 seconds to 230 seconds is geeky goodness. Bringing boot time down to under 5 seconds brings about a change in how people use their computers.
yes, I was going to post the same. Of course, the password is need not be his or her password. It may just be 'a' password. Hell the user may be logging in as someone else. Using his/her (own?) password would be silly.
The article is about Mandriva linux, don't you guys feel the difference?.. Gentoo users should read http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speed_up_your_boot_time and http://jolexa.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/gentoo-improve-boot-time/
[..] I do know that 'his' was used as the neutral/unspecified gender pronoun as well as the masculine pronoun
So was "they". The Wikipedia link the OP posted states that "[r]ecognized writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each since the 1300s."
Those that think women are denigrated by the use of "his" (eg "If a soldier lays down his arms ...") should really wonder why they think so little of women that they might need the rules of grammar to be changed to promote them.
It's even worse in German (and probably in related languages as well), where the word "man" is used as an indefinite pronoun. It does not have any gender connotations at all, even though it obviously originated in the word "Mann" (man). Nevertheless, in the past ten years some writers have decided that using the pronoun "man" was not gender neutral enough, so they invented replacements with varying degrees of absurdity:
Needless to say, this makes their texts hard to read, and is not widely accepted. In fact, it rather accomplished the opposite of what they aimed for, by creating a strong aversion against gender-neutral speech generally, even in people like me who were open to the idea of a reasonable degree of gender-neutrality (where possible).
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Yawl come right back now ya hear! Meanwhile some of us will be using English instead of whatever has been taught in US schools since Reagan cut the cash and standards.
No. It is simply misleading and a barrier to communication.
I've been known to butcher the init scripts, there is a TON of stuff in there that doesn't need to be there. (I'm from the slackware days when tampering with init was a fairly normal way to configure a system)
Also once did linux from scratch, and wrote my own init subsystem from scratch. It's amazing how fast linux can be made to boot when you rip out stiff that doesn't strictly need to be there.
The whole initialization subsystem is one of the things I really dislike about almost every linux (and freebsd) distribution I've ever seen. WAY too much junk in there.
You should be able to trace from init down to login: withing about 3 minutes, by just reading the scripts.
...you stupid fucking idiot...moron
You called?
Yeah! You go girl... Don't let them beat you down just because they're right.
What?
heh, I've obviously only taken note of those that felt it was uncouth before the feminists bandied it around. To answer your question, I'm from North Queensland, Australia. primary school is Prep(atory) - year 7, and high school is years 8 - 12. I presume middle school is a composite of ~ 6 - 8?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
The use of "they" as a singular pronoun is by no means universally accepted.
If somebody doesn't accept it, they should just STFU.
In the USA it generally takes one of two forms with the public school systems(note:the number of variations and combinations of Middle School and/or Junior High School for grades 5 through 9 is astounding):
grades 1 through 5=Elementary School, or in some areas Primary School
grades 6 and 7=Middle School
grades 8 and 9=Junior High School (commonly referred to as "Junior High")
grades 10, 11, and 12=High School
or...(as when and where I went to school: southern Maryland-graduated High School in 1976)
grades 1 through 5=Elementary School
grades 6, 7, and 8=Middle School
grades 9 through 12= High School
BTW, I agree with your reply, and fully endorse it.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Another time-eater at boot that might be eliminated is the routine fsck e.g. with ext3 filesystems at mount. It's unfortunate when, once in a while, it can take 5 minutes (!) or more to boot for a routine check. Granted, you can esc-abort it (a new feature in newer Ubuntus), change the intervals or switch it off altogether, but (a) Joe user doesn't know how to do that, and (b) the checks shouldn't be abandoned, since they actually make sense. Maybe it would be a good idea to find a way to delay the (routine) checks and somehow perform them in the background when the filesystems are already mounted?
fixed for you all: Think Adam's family ... it!
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type its password."
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
When the gender is not known, and the subject is singular, the correct pronoun is "his." "Their" only works if the subject is plural.
In case you haven't seen the other comments on this, you should know that you are wrong. To summarize the above and add my own comments:
1/ Historically 'their' 'they' 'them' have been used in the singular sense over hundreds of years by various well known writers including Shakespere. A few 'grammer authorities' decided relatively recently that this use was wrong, but since their 'authority' is bogus (see 2/) this carries little weight.
Some of these same 'authorities' would also have told you to never under any circumstances split an infinitive no matter how awkward the result.
2/ English is defined ultimately by usage; this is a common usage and since it is natural, simple and useful it should be recommended.
3/ Just because some teacher at your school told you this was wrong doesn't necessarily make it so.
4/ It's not a question of "PC"; more that using male pronouns exclusively in (say) a work context just sounds really archaic.
Thanks for your perspective on this /auf Deutsch/.
I have that problem with my laptop. It was fixed by adding "irqpoll" to the Linux kernel's boot options.
Why not pay someone to do that for you and just buy a system?
I bought an Acer Aspire One laptop running Windows XP Home, and my employer bought a Dell desktop. I hibernated both, and both came back without video after filling the progress bar at the bottom of the screen.
And "nigger" used just to mean "black", with nothing to do with negative racial discrimination. Sadly, language changes, and what was harmless a few hundred years ago can very easily carry a very genuine negative connotation today.
The simple fact is that "his", today, implies masculine. "Every doctor should know his patients" does, whether you like it or not, imply to most people that the speaker believes that being a doctor is strongly correlated with being male. And most people find that sentences like "every nurse should know his patients" sound, well, subtly wrong. That's because nobody believes that there's a strong correlation between being a nurse and being male.
Who said anything about promoting women, or changing grammar? The meanings of some words have changed over time, and inclusive language means making sure that you use those words with their modern meanings to describe the modern world, where "he" is no longer a suitable pronoun to describe a soldier or doctor of unspecified gender.
Eh.. No.
What we (Arjan and Auke)are doing is not "legacy free init system", we're using SysVinit like everyone else....
For the people wanting to speed up their boot time, look at your bootloader. How many seconds is the delay?
lilo, set timeout to 0, boots without a delay, but hold control when it goes to boot and you can still get to the lilo prompt.
grub, set timeout to 0 and it boots without a delay and no chance to get to the grub prompt.
I sent in one patch (subject: [PATCH] hold shift or control to disable timeout even timeout=0), to disable the timeout when control or shift are held, seems the 10 assembly instructions I added to the core was frowned upon as that routine wasn't called in the core, so they had half a point. If I get time I'll rework it again.
The bit I positively hate about Windows is that it pretends to be usable while in reality it is still miles away from it. It boots, you log in and then you get a desktop. If have the nerve to touch anything in the first 3 minutes you extend the time to get a moderately responsive desktop by minutes.
In the end you have to watch the disk light to get some sort of idea at which point it is, and that's just a relatively normal XP based laptop with all the crud removed.
And just when you think you can use the box, Windows update pops up telling you that it has found new reasons to reboot and go through it all again..
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