I don't have the expertise to tell which, but I would be happier seeing some benchmarks from an independent source rather than BSD.
This is entirely subjective, but:
FreeBSD 6 was quick on our dual two-core Opteron server, but upgrading to FreeBSD 7 gave a real kick in the pants. Honestly, the thing just screams along now. Our servers have never had Linux on them so I can't directly compare it on the same hardware, but can confidently say that 7 is a huge improvement over 6.
Whatever happened to Windows? Or does programs != packages?
Funny you should mention that. If you rule out junk software like sparkly mouse cursors, Windows seems to have less software than any other major OS (given that most Unix software is already ported to OS X, or at least can be). I feel constricted every time I have to use a Windows box because none of the programs I want to use are installed, or even readily available. No, I'm not joking.
Do you really think my parents give a rolling fig about GPL vs. non-GPL code, who's exporting who's symbols or any of that?
First, your parents bore me. I'm not a kernel dev but even I'm sick of hearing about how uninvolved third parties may or may not feel about legal issues they don't understand. Second, should they come to depend on Linux, they'll care a whole awful lot if parts of their system have to be disabled for those same legal issues. You seem to be asserting that short-term convenience is better than long-term practicality, which makes me care even less about your opinion.
Trying to claim that Linux somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads programs that aren't is stupid and pointless. If it loads non-GPL programs, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols.
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
I certainly don't understand the reason for using a runtime VM to run executables when a standard binary would suffice
In Python, it is trivially easy to add new methods to a class or module at runtime. The only way to compile such code statically would be to link against a Python compiler that can create the new opcodes from newly-generated source on the fly. At that point, what's the advantage over just using a VM in the first place?
found them to be quite fast to check in, even if marked for secondary screening.
I think he was referring to DFW's famous attribute: evenly distributing the gates throughout local zip codes. Arrived on A23 and departing on MM1478? Greyhound departs in 15 minutes.
On behalf of "normal" Slashdotters over the age of 22 and not living in our parents' basements, I apologize for the big deal made over you being a woman.
On my 4G model, stock except for being upgraded to 1GB RAM, that's actually 24 seconds from pressing the power button to being fully logged in. Of that, several seconds are for POST and grub, then a few seconds pausing, then another few seconds while X initializes, and then a short pause as the launcher loads. Honestly, I don't know how they could get from grub to loading X any faster. It "feels" very streamlined.
you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux.
For me it was the exact opposite. The Eee PC is a nice laptop that runs Linux, so I don't have to give up all the programs/features that simply don't work that well or at all in XP or Vista.
Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier that the built-in wireless is almost unbelievably good. With my wife's 4-month-old Compaq laptop, in our room I can see a 75% signal from the WAP at this end of the house. With the Eee, I see a 100% signal from that WAP, 80% from the WAP at the other end of our house (ok, it's a big house), 3 of my neighbors' access points, and one of the local ISP's. Seriously, you'd think they'd skimp on components to get the price down, but it seems to be exactly the opposite.
They chose to throw their engineering might behind Plasma TVs because, while they cost more, they produce a better picture (too bad the market preferred cheaper LCDs).
You mean, too bad the market disliked multi-thousand dollar screens that looked pretty until they burned in.
I want one for this exact reason as well. Been too busy/lazy to really research it (and/or get my employer to buy me one).. how well does it function as a "portable thin client"?
Wonderfully. It comes with Firefox preconfigured with Flash and other plugins, Thunderbird, Kontact, OpenOffice, and lots of other useful apps.
Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?
Well, ctrl-alt-T gets you an xterm in the default install. You can reinstall if you want (and some people have been putting XP on them), but you might not want to.
In fact, at the risk of having my geek card revoked: I don't even go into advanced mode anymore. It boots more slowly than easy mode, and easy mode is good enough for me 99% of the time. I'm a huge KDE fan so I expected to hate the basic launcher and "need" the full KDE desktop, but all that extra flexibility kind of misses the point of the Eee PC.
Why buy a Eee PC when I can get a Dell cheapie of the moment with 12X the power at the same or LESS price.
I can only speak for why I got one (or more accurately, talked my boss into getting me one). I love it because it's tiny, cheap, doesn't have any moving parts (except a fan that kicks in a small part of the time), and ships with Linux preinstalled. That last one is pretty nice - it means that all the hardware buttons are supported perfectly and everything works with zero tweaking. It also means that all the software I need to do my job is either already installed or an easy apt-get away. Note: yeah, I had to add some repositories to its configuration, but if you're the kind of person who needs nmap and PostgreSQL then you should be able to handle that.
But really, why would I want a much larger, more powerful Dell over this solid little laptop? So it can idle faster while I'm in an SSH session? So the animation of loading Firefox looks cooler? Sony's right: they're in a lot of trouble. Now that I've been able to use this Eee PC for a month or so, I have no desire for anything more expensive or theoretically "better". This does everything I want it to and does it well.
By a car analogy, if I'm in the market for a Miata, I don't want an Escalade. Maybe it can do some things better, but if I wanted to do those things, I wouldn't have bought a Miata. Well, I think a lot of people are seeing the Eee PC and realizing that a Miata will get them to work just as well as an Escalade and will look neater doing it.
I'm sorry, but there is a perfectly good reason Vista would be 'slower' than XP. It is trying to do more with the same hardware.
Every other OS seems to get faster with age, leaving two basic choices to explain Vista: either Microsoft is wholly incompetent to release a OS, or those extra "features" should have been left out.
No offence, but I found your answer somehow single sided. My experience is quite different (so is, probably, the way I'm using bsd)
None taken! Yes, our usage is probably different. I use it almost exclusively our our multipurpose servers (like a machine loaded out with a bunch of jails, each running services that use different resources so that we can max out the hardware). These tend to stay up until I reboot them for upgrades, so I don't really deal with fscks too much. That said, I'm running 7-PRERELEASE on my ancient, flaky home server that hardware-crashes at least once or twice a month. With the background fsck, I'm never offline for more than a couple of minutes. Is it worse for you?
It has tons of side effects I had to fight against, not mentioning the enormous amount of disk it takes which prevent journaled filesystems under ~4Gb (I'm working with embeded small sized systems).
I'm not a BSD dev, just a very happy user, so I might not have the breadth of experience to really appreciate this. What is it about background fscks that would be a problem on filesystems under 4GB? I'd think they would finish in record time.
As for its usefulness, I'm not totally certain that journaled FAT is something I should care about, but it's just me.
That was meant more as an example of silly things you can do, not anything you'd actually want to do.:-)
No, you read that right. The reason is mainly that FreeBSD users have been enjoying something called "softupdates" for the last decade or so, which is sort of like an in-memory journaling. Rather than writing metadata directly to disk, it's queued in memory, grouped into an efficient order, then transactionally committed to the underlying drive. The disk is never in an inconsistent state, even without a journal to fall back on. If the system crashes, a special fsck that can run while a filesystem is mounted read-write comes along and deallocates any space that's no longer used but hasn't yet been marked as empty.
Because of that, there hasn't been much need or real drive to get journaling into FreeBSD. The solution they're going with is actually nicely abstracted, in that you configure a journal for a whole device through GEOM (which is kind of like a Lego set for building drive setups). Although you'd probably never want this, you could theoretically have two "drives" that reside on remote machines (via ggate) bound together with RAID1 (via gmirror), encrypted (via geli), and with a local journal (via gjournal).
When FreeBSD says it's experimental, that means you can probably use it in production but you might want to keep an eye on it.
Does that hold true for such things as tmpfs? I've been using that on a devel server without incident, but would like to roll it out elsewhere if it was widely thought to be stable.
Softupdates don't solve the important unclean shutdown fsck problem very well. Background fsck is a nightmare for any production system with non-trivial amount of spinning rust.
How's that? I mean, I'd rather not have to fsck my terabyte RAIDs, but if I have to, at least the system can be running live and undegraded while the loose ends get cleaned up.
Wrong. Half the writes as compared to the naive gjournal journalling. Real modern journalling filesystems usually have the option to journal just metadata. What's more, journalling is far more flexible than softupdates. You can journal to a small battery backed RAM device for example.
If you're just journaling metadata, then you're not getting the full benefit of journaling (and definitely not anything more than softupdates offers, as it's basically an in-memory ordered journal of metadata transactions to be committed). As far as the battery-backed RAM: that's like saying cats are better than dogs because you can give them medicine if they get ringworm. BTW, with FreeBSD's GEOM system, you could journal to an encrypted RAID on a remote host if you wanted to. You might have already known that; others might not.
Wrong. There has to be some filesystem support work done.
Wrong. gjournal is a generic journaling provider. You can use it to wrap any other GEOM component. From it's own man page:
When gjournal is configured on top of gmirror or graid3 providers, it also keeps them in a consistent state, thus automatic synchronization on power failure or system crash may be disabled on those providers.
Pretty neat, huh? You can wrap it around your RAID to make it crashproof. If you think background fscks are bad, then you've probably never watched a few terabytes of mirror resync itself. Anyway, what you misunderstood is that filesystems have to be altered to interact meaningfully with the underlying journal. UFS has been so modified. That doesn't mean that other filesystems won't work on top of it (which would be silly because a gjournal looks just like any other block device), but that they're not optimized for it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is entirely subjective, but:
FreeBSD 6 was quick on our dual two-core Opteron server, but upgrading to FreeBSD 7 gave a real kick in the pants. Honestly, the thing just screams along now. Our servers have never had Linux on them so I can't directly compare it on the same hardware, but can confidently say that 7 is a huge improvement over 6.
Funny you should mention that. If you rule out junk software like sparkly mouse cursors, Windows seems to have less software than any other major OS (given that most Unix software is already ported to OS X, or at least can be). I feel constricted every time I have to use a Windows box because none of the programs I want to use are installed, or even readily available. No, I'm not joking.
First, your parents bore me. I'm not a kernel dev but even I'm sick of hearing about how uninvolved third parties may or may not feel about legal issues they don't understand. Second, should they come to depend on Linux, they'll care a whole awful lot if parts of their system have to be disabled for those same legal issues. You seem to be asserting that short-term convenience is better than long-term practicality, which makes me care even less about your opinion.
Userspace programs don't link against the kernel. Additionally, from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING:
Yep. But are there arguments for or against other than "Lisp did it"?
In Python, it is trivially easy to add new methods to a class or module at runtime. The only way to compile such code statically would be to link against a Python compiler that can create the new opcodes from newly-generated source on the fly. At that point, what's the advantage over just using a VM in the first place?
No kidding! It sounds like IE8 will support both OSes: XP and Vista.
Wonder if my IE7 for Ubuntu will upgrade itself?
I think he was referring to DFW's famous attribute: evenly distributing the gates throughout local zip codes. Arrived on A23 and departing on MM1478? Greyhound departs in 15 minutes.
On behalf of "normal" Slashdotters over the age of 22 and not living in our parents' basements, I apologize for the big deal made over you being a woman.
On my 4G model, stock except for being upgraded to 1GB RAM, that's actually 24 seconds from pressing the power button to being fully logged in. Of that, several seconds are for POST and grub, then a few seconds pausing, then another few seconds while X initializes, and then a short pause as the launcher loads. Honestly, I don't know how they could get from grub to loading X any faster. It "feels" very streamlined.
For me it was the exact opposite. The Eee PC is a nice laptop that runs Linux, so I don't have to give up all the programs/features that simply don't work that well or at all in XP or Vista.
Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier that the built-in wireless is almost unbelievably good. With my wife's 4-month-old Compaq laptop, in our room I can see a 75% signal from the WAP at this end of the house. With the Eee, I see a 100% signal from that WAP, 80% from the WAP at the other end of our house (ok, it's a big house), 3 of my neighbors' access points, and one of the local ISP's. Seriously, you'd think they'd skimp on components to get the price down, but it seems to be exactly the opposite.
You mean, too bad the market disliked multi-thousand dollar screens that looked pretty until they burned in.
Wonderfully. It comes with Firefox preconfigured with Flash and other plugins, Thunderbird, Kontact, OpenOffice, and lots of other useful apps.
Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?Well, ctrl-alt-T gets you an xterm in the default install. You can reinstall if you want (and some people have been putting XP on them), but you might not want to.
In fact, at the risk of having my geek card revoked: I don't even go into advanced mode anymore. It boots more slowly than easy mode, and easy mode is good enough for me 99% of the time. I'm a huge KDE fan so I expected to hate the basic launcher and "need" the full KDE desktop, but all that extra flexibility kind of misses the point of the Eee PC.
I can only speak for why I got one (or more accurately, talked my boss into getting me one). I love it because it's tiny, cheap, doesn't have any moving parts (except a fan that kicks in a small part of the time), and ships with Linux preinstalled. That last one is pretty nice - it means that all the hardware buttons are supported perfectly and everything works with zero tweaking. It also means that all the software I need to do my job is either already installed or an easy apt-get away. Note: yeah, I had to add some repositories to its configuration, but if you're the kind of person who needs nmap and PostgreSQL then you should be able to handle that.
But really, why would I want a much larger, more powerful Dell over this solid little laptop? So it can idle faster while I'm in an SSH session? So the animation of loading Firefox looks cooler? Sony's right: they're in a lot of trouble. Now that I've been able to use this Eee PC for a month or so, I have no desire for anything more expensive or theoretically "better". This does everything I want it to and does it well.
By a car analogy, if I'm in the market for a Miata, I don't want an Escalade. Maybe it can do some things better, but if I wanted to do those things, I wouldn't have bought a Miata. Well, I think a lot of people are seeing the Eee PC and realizing that a Miata will get them to work just as well as an Escalade and will look neater doing it.
(I do too but that would have ruined the joke.)
Yeah, that sucked. I was trying to answer you directly; I'm not sure why others felt the need to silence you. Sorry about how that turned out.
The fantastic part isn't the "smart woman", but the "Slashdotter with wife". And now you expect me to believe it twice in one day?
Every other OS seems to get faster with age, leaving two basic choices to explain Vista: either Microsoft is wholly incompetent to release a OS, or those extra "features" should have been left out.
You had me until then. Well played, sir!
None taken! Yes, our usage is probably different. I use it almost exclusively our our multipurpose servers (like a machine loaded out with a bunch of jails, each running services that use different resources so that we can max out the hardware). These tend to stay up until I reboot them for upgrades, so I don't really deal with fscks too much. That said, I'm running 7-PRERELEASE on my ancient, flaky home server that hardware-crashes at least once or twice a month. With the background fsck, I'm never offline for more than a couple of minutes. Is it worse for you?
It has tons of side effects I had to fight against, not mentioning the enormous amount of disk it takes which prevent journaled filesystems under ~4Gb (I'm working with embeded small sized systems).I'm not a BSD dev, just a very happy user, so I might not have the breadth of experience to really appreciate this. What is it about background fscks that would be a problem on filesystems under 4GB? I'd think they would finish in record time.
As for its usefulness, I'm not totally certain that journaled FAT is something I should care about, but it's just me.That was meant more as an example of silly things you can do, not anything you'd actually want to do. :-)
No, you read that right. The reason is mainly that FreeBSD users have been enjoying something called "softupdates" for the last decade or so, which is sort of like an in-memory journaling. Rather than writing metadata directly to disk, it's queued in memory, grouped into an efficient order, then transactionally committed to the underlying drive. The disk is never in an inconsistent state, even without a journal to fall back on. If the system crashes, a special fsck that can run while a filesystem is mounted read-write comes along and deallocates any space that's no longer used but hasn't yet been marked as empty.
Because of that, there hasn't been much need or real drive to get journaling into FreeBSD. The solution they're going with is actually nicely abstracted, in that you configure a journal for a whole device through GEOM (which is kind of like a Lego set for building drive setups). Although you'd probably never want this, you could theoretically have two "drives" that reside on remote machines (via ggate) bound together with RAID1 (via gmirror), encrypted (via geli), and with a local journal (via gjournal).
Does that hold true for such things as tmpfs? I've been using that on a devel server without incident, but would like to roll it out elsewhere if it was widely thought to be stable.
Well, 7 or 8 people plus the few million people who have bought generic Dell boxes (or anything nicer) in the last year or so.
You underestimate my capacity for wrongness.
Softupdates don't solve the important unclean shutdown fsck problem very well. Background fsck is a nightmare for any production system with non-trivial amount of spinning rust.How's that? I mean, I'd rather not have to fsck my terabyte RAIDs, but if I have to, at least the system can be running live and undegraded while the loose ends get cleaned up.
Wrong. Half the writes as compared to the naive gjournal journalling. Real modern journalling filesystems usually have the option to journal just metadata. What's more, journalling is far more flexible than softupdates. You can journal to a small battery backed RAM device for example.If you're just journaling metadata, then you're not getting the full benefit of journaling (and definitely not anything more than softupdates offers, as it's basically an in-memory ordered journal of metadata transactions to be committed). As far as the battery-backed RAM: that's like saying cats are better than dogs because you can give them medicine if they get ringworm. BTW, with FreeBSD's GEOM system, you could journal to an encrypted RAID on a remote host if you wanted to. You might have already known that; others might not.
Wrong. There has to be some filesystem support work done.Wrong. gjournal is a generic journaling provider. You can use it to wrap any other GEOM component. From it's own man page:
Pretty neat, huh? You can wrap it around your RAID to make it crashproof. If you think background fscks are bad, then you've probably never watched a few terabytes of mirror resync itself. Anyway, what you misunderstood is that filesystems have to be altered to interact meaningfully with the underlying journal. UFS has been so modified. That doesn't mean that other filesystems won't work on top of it (which would be silly because a gjournal looks just like any other block device), but that they're not optimized for it.