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Alan Cox says 2.4 Kernel in November
BoNeS writes "Alan Cox, revealed at the first ever UK Linux Expo that the 2.4
kernel of Linux could be available for developers everywhere as soon as November. Cox also revealed that in a couple of weeks he will be working "directly" for the most successful commercial Linux distributors by contracting programmers for their European operations."
The full guess I gave ZD is - code freeze November, 2.4pre December, 2.4 march or so. I know Linus wants to get things moving rapidly on that. But only Linus (and I doubt even Linus) has a totally clear timetable 8)
As to the other stuff thats mostly pretty accurate. Currently I run building #3 which is mostly contracting for Red Hat. With Red Hat europe in place this no longer makes sense. Lest anyone is worried about that I can assure them that part of the paperwork we are putting in place is something both Red Hat as well as I wanted to be sure we had there - which guarantees appropriate degress of autonomy.
Hello to everyone I met both at the show.
Alan
Hmm, England would be a fairly poor country to do encryption work in. The most recent law they are thinking of passing is a good example of the kind of attitude they have towards it. They're almost as bad as the US.
From what I understand Canada would be a much better place to develop that sort of thing. I do believe that is one of the major reasons OpenBSD is developed there.
I wonder if this also means a new http://rio.dhs.org/penguin.html
http://lwn.net/1999/1007/a/wwo_2.4.html
I have seen other versions of this; this is allegedly the "final" version.
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Infuriate left and right
Here ya go:
The Wonderful World of Linux 2.4
I wish we could get a rundown of all the expected features of kernel 2.4. I'd really like a little bit of FUD to hit Redmond. Can you imagine the fear, uncertainty, and doubt the Win2k developers feel knowing the Linux kernel will be released by November with as many features as the Win2k kernel, but with a much smaller memory footprint? They gotta be shakin' in their loafers over there! I'm going to wait to upgrade my distro until 2.4 comes out because I can't wait to kick its tires and see how it works. I just hope Creative releases a driver for their SBLive!
"Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Release a patch for Linux, and use it to Take Over The World!"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This might just be the ultimate argument against the by now well known MS FUD: MS has no roadmap to guide it's development. Yes, MS has such a roadmap although it seems they've fallen off the cliff a few times. The proliferation of all the different Win9X flavors combined with the (8 ?) different version of Win2000 sure don't sound like much of a roadmap to me.
...
So what if we have no roadmap! Again Linux is showing that decentralized development is able to advance an OS (or any other piece of code for that matter) faster than any company could. Add to this the increasing technology 'donations' by companies like SGI and Siemens, and you have a turbocharged development process that makes MSs progress from WinNT4 to NT5 seem pretty glacial.
On a related note: does anybody know if Ultra-DMA 66 will be supported by the new kernels? Right now I have to use my UDMA66 disk as a UDMA33 disk as Linux 2.2 will not recognize UDMA 66 disks
UDMA66 is supported in Andre Hedrick's IDE patches (most of the basics of which are in 2.3.x). Backports to 2.2.x of these patches can be found at your local kernel.org mirror (ftp.xx.kernel.org) under /pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/
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Jeremy Katz
No, I'm not talking about the 2.4 or Alan Cox news. That's all great. Great for Linux, great for Alan. Hopefully great for the UK Linux scene.
Ahem . . .
[rant]
Did anyone else play "Count the Typos" in that article? WTF is up with that? Did ZDNet UK give the editors a holiday or something? Here's one particularly offensive bit of text:
Cox was swamped by adoring follows of the Linux hoping perhaps that a little of his coding expertise might rub of on them.
That barely makes sense! It reads like a Babelfish translation! And there were plenty more where that came from.
It's not just this article, either. More and more, the quality of grammar/spelling/editing on web-based news sites are going to crap. A lot of these places also do print versions, which I never really see. Do the typos make it in there, too?
This is offtopic, to be sure, but I just had to vent my spleen. Are my perceptions skewed, or is this journalistic atrocity becoming more common?
*muttermuttermutter....*
[/rant]
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Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Here's info straight from the Debian web site:
Major Changes For "potato":
The major changes we know will be part of potato are the following:
Linux kernel 2.2 based (for architectures with Linux kernels at all).
GNU libc 2.1 based (upwardly binary compatible with GNU libc 2.0)
The egcs version of gcc, also known as egcc, will be the default C compiler.
There is also a good chance that the potato release will include the powerpc and arm architectures.
cpeterso
Maybe a new version tag is needed, additionally to the the odd numbers, and the "pre" and "ac" tags. Like "ea" for "early adopter". Whatever. Anything above "beta".
;)
:)
The distributions would offer two kernels then: "ea" and "stable as hell".
And "stable as hell" is what "release" should mean.
I'm all for K.I.S.S.
If there was such a thing as a special EA release, why put it in a Linux distribution at all? It's the Kernel, not the OS, so a distro doesn't have to provide packages for all releases! Newbies should stick with what their favorite distro provides pre-packaged, then get into source packages once they want to learn more, and finally try the unstable kernel versions when they feel ready to tackle some serious stuff. To be ready to use the "beta" kernerls, one should have read the appropriate FAQ's and HOWTO's, which means you know about the version numbering scheme and risks. Why change the simple rules and make them more complicated for those who shouldn't mess with the Kernel anyway? If one gets confused by the Kernel version numbers and release phases, do NOT go any further, stick to what your distribution provides! Leave the Kernel development to the developers and get tested packages from your distro's site. You're free to play with the unstable releases, but make sure you know the rules first, it never was intended to be for everyone. Everybody can get involved, but they must learn, or rely on their vendor.
It's that easy.
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Gone are the times when only unix hackers used new Linux releases.
This means: A kernel officially released as "Release" should be VERY stable. Stable enough for anyone to put it on his most important servers, without a second thought.
Remember the problems the 2.2 series went through. Even 2.2.12 is not yet completely there. 2.2.13 or 14 might effectively be.
Maybe a new version tag is needed, additionally to the the odd numbers, and the "pre" and "ac" tags.
Like "ea" for "early adopter". Whatever. Anything above "beta".
The distributions would offer two kernels then: "ea" and "stable as hell".
And "stable as hell" is what "release" should mean.
PS: Potential deficiencies in the NT release versions are not really of interest here. Linux can do better. The people in control of the kernel dont need to care about public company quarter results.
This doc should answer your questions and more:
Wonderful World of Linux 2.4
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Well, based on the track record of the 2.1.x to 2.2.0 release, this doesn't look too promising. Linus promised October 1998 then, and the kernel came out in January 1999. Alan says November 1999 now, so I'm looking for late December 99 or sometime in January 2000.
Also, I hope the stability is a hell of a lot better. Something labeled the "stable kernel" should be just that - stable. 2.2.12 isn't even really stable yet, though 2.2.13 is promised to be good (and Alan Cox's pre-13 stuff seems to solve most of the major problems). IMHO 2.2.12 should've been 2.2.0, and the previous kernels should've been part of the development cycle - they were not stable kernels by any stretch of the imagination, so should not have been falsely called that.
If we continue to release things before they're ready, people will be scared off, and everybody will still be using 2.0.38 forever (many many people still do) - do we really want that?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Dammit, a roadmap is a document put out for marketing purposes only. The product delivered some time in the future usually has little or nothing to do with the roadmap. Remember how Cairo was going to be this big open object soup? .
Don't fall into the trap of playing on their turf. Linux needs goals for technical reasons, like Merced support, better SMP, Journaling. But it also is Open Source which means that you CAN'T roadmap it. People are morphing it all the time into amazing applications like TiVo. Each time this happens it adds to Linux 'stone soup' in a new and unpredictable way. YOU CANNOT PROGRAM OR PREDICT CREATIVITY. It just can't be done.
Microsoft FUD is FUD, and that's it. Not worth the photons needed to carry the image to your eyeballs.