Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds decided to change the code name for Linux 3.11 and even submitted an alternate Tux Logo. Heise reports: 'For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from "Unicycling Gorilla" to "Linux for Workgroups" and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993.'"

Comments

Re:But will Microsoft sue?

[Trepidity]

It's pretty clearly a parody, not a trademark misuse that could cause confusion in the marketplace.

Re:what?

[pipatron]

It's actually Eric Raymond's own distro: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux

Two different flags

[tepples]

Windows 7 uses the Windows XP flag, not the different flag used for Windows 3.1 through Windows 2000. The XP flag has two curves in it and no dots; the Windows 3.1 flag has one curve in the flag and one curve in the dots.

Godwin's law anyone?

Re:Can't possibly be true

[verbatim]

Considering it's open source, it's not terribly difficult to verify the veracity of the article.

https://www.kernel.org/diff/diffview.cgi?file=%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fkernel%2Fv3.x%2Ftesting%2Fpatch-3.11-rc1.xz;z=367

Re:ooh! so it now has SOCKETS!

[NJRoadfan]

TCP/IP didn't ship with Windows for Workgroups. It was a separate installation.

Re:what?

[Silvrmane]

Sorta. It "boots" to running a startup script that executes a series of CLI commands (to mount various directories as aliases and to move some critical libraries to a RAM disk) before (usually) ending in a call to LoadWB, which prompts the system to load up the graphical workbench. When I had an Amiga I almost always left that step off my startup script because I did my work from, more often than not, the CLI, not the clumsy Workbench.

Re:what?

[dbIII]

On Atari the operating system, known as TOS, was separate from the GUI, which was GEM. That meant that games could run without GEM even starting and that alternative GUIs known as "gemini" could run.

Re:Yo Linus!

[Greyfox]

Oh lord don't get me started on that. That was the single most crippling flaw in the operating system! And they COULD have fixed it! Someone posted a problem related to that on my queue one time, and I went out of my way to locate a quad processor machine running a multi-processor version of OS/2. The multi-processor version still had the problem mind you, but it had an input queue per processor. I was able to demonstrate that the system would continue working even with one (or up to three) input queues not being processed. All they really had to do was instantiate multiple input queues and one misbehaving app couldn't bring the entire system down! *sigh* Fuckers...

This made OS/2 ironically better at multitasking windows and DOS applications than it was at OS/2 applications. Windows apps couldn't lock the input queue and could be run in separate instances of Windows so that if one crashed, you wouldn't bring the others down. If you opened a command prompt you could do multi-taskey things like format a disk and print something at the same time. The trick was you had to use the command line format and not the pretty GUI one.

Ah IBM. Always reaching for awesome and always falling just a little bit short. The problem with them was they viewed the PC line as toys. You didn't use a PC to multitask. You used it as a dumb terminal to a mainframe. If you wanted to multitask, you dropped 5 digits on an AIX machine. Shitty CDE gui and all. I discovered Linux shortly before they announced they were killing OS/2, and Linux was really what I wanted anyway -- UNIX on my PC without having to pay SCO several thousand dollars for the OS (Which was something like $1200) TCP/IP (Which IIRC they wanted another grand for) and a goddamn C compiler.

Ahh the good ol days...