If you roll your own, it is possible to get a working Linux system as small as you want, depending on the functionality. 5MB for a webserver--before compression!
Sources themselves are huge compared to the bins they create especially considering source trees for projects like the kernel and X, which have support for many architectures. Much of the source code doesn't even get into the binary in the end.
This is great that these things are comming as standard in the kernel, but so many things are "standard" now its getting pretty large for joe-schmo average user who will get a full kitchen sink kernel with their distro.
This is also great for creating products like VPN gateways et al, but is it time to consider a different structure for kernel builds, with modules being seperately managed with a smarter installation procedure.
Due to kernel modules and the fact that you can "roll your own," the kernel can be as bloated as you want, the only downside is the size of the download. The current installation procedure works well enough for this, though the only feature it really lacks imho is querying dependencies satisfied by an entry.
Really though, kernels can and will always fit on teeny floppies, providing they're trimmed down enough. Regarding your comment about the end user getting the kitchen sink, have you ever looked at how distros handle this?
Most make a generic trimmed down kernel cross-compiled for the architecture and build all the modules. It may be the case that the distro copies hoards of modules, but that still isn't going to be as big a package as, say, glibc. If "joe-shmoe" doesn't have Bluetooth or scsi hardware, the corresponding modules won't get loaded, and as a result the bloatedness of the/lib/modules// directory won't bleed into the performance of the actual running kernel.
Stolen from the article. Most of it recaps what the average/. developer would already know, so here's the numbers to look at:
| Script | Without Patch | With Patch | | Find script | 78.51 ms | 0.48 ms | | Launch script | 0.61 ms | 0.41 ms | | File move script | 0.62 ms | 0.31 ms |
As you can see and would expect, there's a sizeable improvement.
The article is about Uranus. I think we all know the joke, and we can all laugh about it by ourselves in the privacy of our own desks, without posting lame jokes here. This dead horse is beat. Most of us (except for the moderators;) are over 15 and can be expected to behave in at least a semi-adult fashion.
You know, on second thought, screw that crap. This joke never gets old. The more I think about "21 moons on Uranus" the more I crack up. Pun intended. Just allow yourself to laugh at this, and maybe even let it lighten up the rest of your day. It has mine.
I also can't wait until a story comes along about how scientists "find" a small chance that there could be frozen water, which could indicate the slim chance of life. In turn, there'll be all the boring threads about the seti@home project and distributed computing to look forward to--certainly more pertinent than this post of course, but what the hell...
"Here's another piece on the how the movie studios are trying to co-opt the movie delivery mechanisms of the 'counter-culture' set, but instill major restrictions such as IP-address range verification to ensure country of origin, and maximum 24-hour-play lifetime for each downloaded movie."
I am preoccupied with my digital rights like most/.ers. Hence, I don't participate in this garbage. However, since the fall of Napster, many have sought legal and legit ways to get media on the Internet--the Internet is more than suitable. Hence, they accept license agreements that resemble the physical limitations on renting movies at Blockbuster, for example.
As much as I hate the DMCA, etc., this doesn't bother me too much. I don't lose any rights by not using the service which I frankly don't really have a burning desire to use, as others do.
So others may face crappy lame restrictions. If they don't like it--stick with Blockbuster. However, a number of people here on Slashdot have been asking for similar services for a while, and now that it's coming, I see no reason for anyone to whine (what did you expect?).
After the feature freeze, if as many people as possible test out the new features and provide bug reports to work on, maybe the impending issues can be fleshed out sooner.
Unless, of course, Linus decides that there must be a set time between when the features are frozen and when the firse betas hit the servers.
I'm getting fairly excited about this, even though I don't plan on using any of these new features. Does that mean I read/. too much?;)
Good points, except for the cheap bytes thing. They'd have to rip out crossover and all of xandros' non free stuff (probably means the installer, xandros' file manager, etc).
SCSI is not an interface limited to the server by any physical means--merely marketing means. SCSI drives are built almost identically to IDE hard drives. They are usually faster, but you could make a SCSI hard drive of any speed/noise level you damn well pleased. SCSI is a superior interface to SATA. Period.
SCSI could scale down to fit desktop needs, but it wouldn't since IDE has such a high market share, it would start out more expensive. SCSI is expandable and scaleable (in both directions).
Yeah, even if your statement were true. Price is a huge shortcoming in technology today, especialy when most people can't use the preformance hardware that they own.
Here's why your point is moot: First, IDE drives are only cheaper because it's more widely used. Secondly, SCSI can scale to low end needs--you're not locked into having to be fast. What has happened is that SCSI has found its nitch in the server market. SCSI could downscale very well
I don't believe the demand is the reason for the premium price for SCSI, but the hardware... It's just more expencive to make.
That's only true because SCSI hard drive makers have to make fast server-oriented drives. If they had a desktop nitch, they could sell slower drives for similar prices--as it stands they couldn't compete.
SCSI can serve both low-end and high-end needs, if folks would give it a chance. The article's mentioning of SCSI being too loud is ridiculous--internally they all work the same. 15k rpm hard drives by nature make a lot of noise.
Soon the hard drives and configuration methods that have existed since the origins of the personal computer will change forever.
All of IDE's shortcomings are fixed by SCSI (except for a small degree of added complexity). SCSI hardware is more expensive, and rarely does it come built-in to motherboards.
If more people used it, it would be a cheaper solution, and would fix all of IDE's problems without re-inventing the wheel--it's a solution that, right now, works.
15k rpm scsi drives get seek times in the low three range--that's three times faster than your average 5400 rpm ide hdd.
In the early 80's M$ was giving away copies actively trying to get people to try MS-DOS. Apple did the same with getting IIe's in K-12 schools. They both got people to try their OS before building their client base.
And that's just one counterexample. So, what were you saying?
Your counterexample is moot, and therefore what I was saying holds unless you do some more convincing that companies can make profit from selling an OS to people that haven't tried it or heard much about it--to which there are plentiful competitors running the same kernel/core platform.
The fact that you know that both KDE and SuSE are good is because they've been tried and tested by others. Both can be installed via ftp, and both have established themselves as viable solutions.
Crossover is also already established. A trial without Crossover could work.
At any rate, Xandros has given up a once-in-a-corporate-lifetime opportinity to quickly get a user base. Now it will be significantly harder to convince potential customers of their merit--word-of-mouth is arguably the most important advertising method in a new product's life.
Re:Big mistake
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes, but it's not aimed for hobbyist *nix users.
For a corporation to even consider it, they want to know what others' reactions are. Period. No IT manager will even come close to thinking about a product unless people start talking about it. How will that come about? By developing a client base.
It's aimed at companies who can buy a cheapo $99 copy to eval it, decide it works with their NT domain, buy a HUNDRED cheapo $99 copies, test is in a small site somewhere, decide it's good, then buy 10,000 cheapo $99 copies - paying for the development and cutting their licensing costs from £385,955.50 PER YEAR JUST FOR THE OS to £990,000 in a one off cost every time they want to do a full upgrade - complete with tools and support and such!!!
Again, companies know there are ways to cut corners, especially in their OS licensing budget. What stops them from dabbling in the multitudes of different alternatives? Only a few gain any acceptance. Xandros must gain acceptance with a small client base, and therefore generate hype--people need to be talking about Xandros for it to even be considered. A huge cut in costs plus a giant headache and, in the long run, more expenses is not what they want. Risk must be minimized even to get a boss to shell out 100$ and a free computer to try it out on. Considering alternatives itself in a costly process; they're going to weed out the 90% of options that simply will not work before they even install them. If no one knows what Xandros is or whether or not it is a viable solution, it will get tossed.
Get a clue.
Sure.
Big mistake
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No free download so you'll have to shell out US$99 for it but you do get an enhanced (?) version of KDE 2.2 and built-in Cross-Over Plugin and Office! Finally a decent challenger to Lycoris and also what Lindows should have been...
Big, big mistake. In fact, if they don't provide some kind of live-cd, ala SuSE, they'll completely flop. It's that simple. No one will pay for an OS that they haven't used at a friends house or can freely try it out on their own, especially when the packages are so out-of-date (all these "Windows-killers" seem to use that same outdated version of KDE). Check out the Xandros page at distrowatch and see for yourself.
LindowsOS saved itself by coming pre-installed on WalMart PC's--Xandros will have to try and pull some similar maneuvre. As I see it, there's no way in hell other *NIX users will pay for something they already have, and Windows users are skeptical of change as is ("You mean to tell me they're making this for free?" usually sets them off).
If Xandros were the best desktop distro ever, it wouldn't matter if they couldn't get people to try it, and then buy it. I hope they do in the future, because I'm actually interested in this.
32MB is not too much to ask. On 56k, that amounts to like a few hours of download. Let's assume 5K/s (I used to get 2 in Windows, but 7 is Linux for some reason). That's 300K/min. That's 1 MB every 3.5 minutes. That's 32MB in ~120 minutes, or 2 hours.
If you haven't gotten cable, and you're using Linux, the distros themselves are at a magnitude greater in size; I doubt that kernel sources are the real problem.
OpenBSD is the only OS I know of which randomizes the IPID sequence therefore making it invulnerable to the idlescan, but we have neither the time nor urge to migrate to OpenBSD. How can one secure their Linux or NT TCP/IP stack from malicious idlescanning?
My advice--take the bull by it's horns and migrate if this vulnerability is so important to you. Sketchy patchwork can't always reliably fix this sort of thing, and can lead to a messier situation in the long run, and you'll likely find yourself having less drive and urge to migrate. Otherwise, keep existing setups as simple and locked-down as possible--hence, if a quick-n-easy fix does come up, go for it.
Re:Let me be the first to come out with the bad jo
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 2
Here is the stupid thread you're looking for. Good day, sir.
Let me be the first to come out with the bad joke
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Again, some of the things on this list won't make it into 3.0. It's just candidates. But everything that is NOT on this list in about 7 days is probably going to become 3.1 material by default.
Speak now, or till 3.1 hold your peace...
Ok, lets all acknowledge the obvious cracks at 3.11 (like what happened with Windows). Let's sort of communally agree that we're not going to find 'em funny, before a really dumb thread enters the picture, okay?
Slashdot Mirror
Sources themselves are huge compared to the bins they create especially considering source trees for projects like the kernel and X, which have support for many architectures. Much of the source code doesn't even get into the binary in the end.
Due to kernel modules and the fact that you can "roll your own," the kernel can be as bloated as you want, the only downside is the size of the download. The current installation procedure works well enough for this, though the only feature it really lacks imho is querying dependencies satisfied by an entry.
Really though, kernels can and will always fit on teeny floppies, providing they're trimmed down enough. Regarding your comment about the end user getting the kitchen sink, have you ever looked at how distros handle this?
Most make a generic trimmed down kernel cross-compiled for the architecture and build all the modules. It may be the case that the distro copies hoards of modules, but that still isn't going to be as big a package as, say, glibc. If "joe-shmoe" doesn't have Bluetooth or scsi hardware, the corresponding modules won't get loaded, and as a result the bloatedness of the /lib/modules// directory won't bleed into the performance of the actual running kernel.
Stolen from the article. Most of it recaps what the average /. developer would already know, so here's the numbers to look at:
| Script | Without Patch | With Patch |
| Find script | 78.51 ms | 0.48 ms |
| Launch script | 0.61 ms | 0.41 ms |
| File move script | 0.62 ms | 0.31 ms |
As you can see and would expect, there's a sizeable improvement.
You know, on second thought, screw that crap. This joke never gets old. The more I think about "21 moons on Uranus" the more I crack up. Pun intended. Just allow yourself to laugh at this, and maybe even let it lighten up the rest of your day. It has mine.
I also can't wait until a story comes along about how scientists "find" a small chance that there could be frozen water, which could indicate the slim chance of life. In turn, there'll be all the boring threads about the seti@home project and distributed computing to look forward to--certainly more pertinent than this post of course, but what the hell...
All our movies are belong to us!
I know you're a troll, but I'd like to nevertheless point out that it's 'Baliwood,' and they make more movies over in India than we do here.
I am preoccupied with my digital rights like most /.ers. Hence, I don't participate in this garbage. However, since the fall of Napster, many have sought legal and legit ways to get media on the Internet--the Internet is more than suitable. Hence, they accept license agreements that resemble the physical limitations on renting movies at Blockbuster, for example.
As much as I hate the DMCA, etc., this doesn't bother me too much. I don't lose any rights by not using the service which I frankly don't really have a burning desire to use, as others do.
So others may face crappy lame restrictions. If they don't like it--stick with Blockbuster. However, a number of people here on Slashdot have been asking for similar services for a while, and now that it's coming, I see no reason for anyone to whine (what did you expect?).
The 2.1 series got as high as 2.1.132.
Unless, of course, Linus decides that there must be a set time between when the features are frozen and when the firse betas hit the servers.
I'm getting fairly excited about this, even though I don't plan on using any of these new features. Does that mean I read /. too much? ;)
I think you would have done better with a goatse link.
It's cool dude.
Good points, except for the cheap bytes thing. They'd have to rip out crossover and all of xandros' non free stuff (probably means the installer, xandros' file manager, etc).
SCSI is not an interface limited to the server by any physical means--merely marketing means. SCSI drives are built almost identically to IDE hard drives. They are usually faster, but you could make a SCSI hard drive of any speed/noise level you damn well pleased. SCSI is a superior interface to SATA. Period.
SCSI could scale down to fit desktop needs, but it wouldn't since IDE has such a high market share, it would start out more expensive. SCSI is expandable and scaleable (in both directions).
Here's why your point is moot: First, IDE drives are only cheaper because it's more widely used. Secondly, SCSI can scale to low end needs--you're not locked into having to be fast. What has happened is that SCSI has found its nitch in the server market. SCSI could downscale very well
That's only true because SCSI hard drive makers have to make fast server-oriented drives. If they had a desktop nitch, they could sell slower drives for similar prices--as it stands they couldn't compete.
SCSI can serve both low-end and high-end needs, if folks would give it a chance. The article's mentioning of SCSI being too loud is ridiculous--internally they all work the same. 15k rpm hard drives by nature make a lot of noise.
All of IDE's shortcomings are fixed by SCSI (except for a small degree of added complexity). SCSI hardware is more expensive, and rarely does it come built-in to motherboards.
If more people used it, it would be a cheaper solution, and would fix all of IDE's problems without re-inventing the wheel--it's a solution that, right now, works.
15k rpm scsi drives get seek times in the low three range--that's three times faster than your average 5400 rpm ide hdd.
Your counterexample is moot, and therefore what I was saying holds unless you do some more convincing that companies can make profit from selling an OS to people that haven't tried it or heard much about it--to which there are plentiful competitors running the same kernel/core platform.
Crossover is also already established. A trial without Crossover could work.
At any rate, Xandros has given up a once-in-a-corporate-lifetime opportinity to quickly get a user base. Now it will be significantly harder to convince potential customers of their merit--word-of-mouth is arguably the most important advertising method in a new product's life.
For a corporation to even consider it, they want to know what others' reactions are. Period. No IT manager will even come close to thinking about a product unless people start talking about it. How will that come about? By developing a client base.
Again, companies know there are ways to cut corners, especially in their OS licensing budget. What stops them from dabbling in the multitudes of different alternatives? Only a few gain any acceptance. Xandros must gain acceptance with a small client base, and therefore generate hype--people need to be talking about Xandros for it to even be considered. A huge cut in costs plus a giant headache and, in the long run, more expenses is not what they want. Risk must be minimized even to get a boss to shell out 100$ and a free computer to try it out on. Considering alternatives itself in a costly process; they're going to weed out the 90% of options that simply will not work before they even install them. If no one knows what Xandros is or whether or not it is a viable solution, it will get tossed.
Sure.
Big, big mistake. In fact, if they don't provide some kind of live-cd, ala SuSE, they'll completely flop. It's that simple. No one will pay for an OS that they haven't used at a friends house or can freely try it out on their own, especially when the packages are so out-of-date (all these "Windows-killers" seem to use that same outdated version of KDE). Check out the Xandros page at distrowatch and see for yourself.
LindowsOS saved itself by coming pre-installed on WalMart PC's--Xandros will have to try and pull some similar maneuvre. As I see it, there's no way in hell other *NIX users will pay for something they already have, and Windows users are skeptical of change as is ("You mean to tell me they're making this for free?" usually sets them off).
If Xandros were the best desktop distro ever, it wouldn't matter if they couldn't get people to try it, and then buy it. I hope they do in the future, because I'm actually interested in this.
I had dial-up a long time too. However, I didn't find files under 50mb to ever be a problem. That's my point.
If you haven't gotten cable, and you're using Linux, the distros themselves are at a magnitude greater in size; I doubt that kernel sources are the real problem.
My advice--take the bull by it's horns and migrate if this vulnerability is so important to you. Sketchy patchwork can't always reliably fix this sort of thing, and can lead to a messier situation in the long run, and you'll likely find yourself having less drive and urge to migrate. Otherwise, keep existing setups as simple and locked-down as possible--hence, if a quick-n-easy fix does come up, go for it.
Here is the stupid thread you're looking for. Good day, sir.
Ok, lets all acknowledge the obvious cracks at 3.11 (like what happened with Windows). Let's sort of communally agree that we're not going to find 'em funny, before a really dumb thread enters the picture, okay?