Slashdot Mirror
Watch Out Linux, GNU Hurd Coming
sfcrazy writes "Debian now has concrete plans to bring GNU Hurd to the larger community. GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download."
Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download.
It speaks volumes that the highlight is the inclusion of a graphical installer. Likely no mouse support though....
Who cares? I mean really... we have all the bases covered by Linux and BSD...
If you need a GPLv3 licensed OS for some reason, this will be one. Linux will probably never contain the patent guards Hurd will. That might be important for some folks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"A" decade?
Here's what Linus Torvalds had to say about the GNU OS in 1992
"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now."
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?
Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.
It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.
There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.