Linux 3.0

[geoffrey mendelson]

On May 29, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
>
> I know you said this as a joke, but to rain on your parade, BSD is  
> not GNU-
> free. As far as I know *BSD distributions typically use quite a  
> number of GNU
> packages, such as gcc, groff, bc, and probably a bunch of others.  
> They also
> include, I believe, a bunch of other GPL (though not GNU) software.

Some do, some don't they are not needed. As for C compilers, there is  
more than GCC.

>
> Linus's intention is to change the kernel numbering scheme, and  
> nothing
> else - the move to 3.0 (or 2.8) will not (apparently) be used as an
> oportunity for massive depracation of old features, cleaup of defunct
> drivers, or major restructing of the code. These things have been  
> happening
> slowly in every version, and nobody is waiting for a specific  
> version number
> (like the big three-oh) to do them.
>

Good, there was among other things the major I/O driver change from  
2.4 to 2.6 leaving many devices with 2.4 drivers not working in 2.6,  
and 2.4 without drivers for many new devices until the fact that 2.6  
was not being universally accepted and 2.6 drivers were backported.

Then there was the alsa/oss disaster, when lots of things stopped  
working because there was no alsa support in the applications that  
used them, oss support for them in the kernel was dropped, and no oss  
emulation under alsa. This covered probably 90% of the TV capture  
cards and many sound cards in use.

I had to give up on MythTV because I could no longer get a packaged  
system that would work with my capture card.

I recently installed the latest Ubuntu (11.04) on a system with the  
card and it does not work. There was a work around using /dev/dsp? but  
it just disappeared in this release.
>> Will audio ever work right?
>
> Audio has been working "right" for me for at least 10 years (before  
> that,
> I had a lot of problems with proprietary and half-working  
> drivers)... What
> kind of problems are you having?
>


See above. Also the various sound daemons that have come and gone and  
never worked right, ESD, and something new I don't remember (it's in  
11.04) and so on.


>> Will Linus, etc ever "get it" that it's not a toy and people actually
>> expect it to work and stay working?
>
> Linux worked, and stayed working, for me for the last 18 years, ever  
> since
> I dumped AT&T's commercial System Vr4 which I had been using on my  
> 386sx,
> because Linux was, frankly, better than the commercial alternative.
> Over these 18 years, I slowly dumped also the rest of the commercial
> alternatives I had been using - DOS, Windows, OS/2, Solaris (nee  
> SunOS),
> Ultrix, OSF/1, Irix, HP-UX, DG/UX, and probably a few others, and  
> today work
> (almost) exclusively on Linux. My current PDA is still using Apple's
> prorietary OS, but the next one will most likely be using Linux (via
> Android). And I have several other devices at home running Linux  
> (streamer,
> router, and more).
>
> So I don't think it should be called a toy. I think it has been  
> working,
> and will continue to work for another decade, better than all the  
> "commercial"
> alternatives.


You're lucky. The system that has worked for me over time has been  
Windows. Linux has worked well for servers this century, but it never  
quite seems able to do the things I want when it comes to applications  
or hardware support. Once Windows 95 came out with TCP/IP built in,  
and SAMBA was available for UNIX, it has been a much better  
workstation with far less surprises and "gotchas" than Linux.

IMHO it's still Linus' toy, and he makes artbtirary decisions based  
upon what he wants to see people use, and not what they want.

Of course at this point it's the big choice for servers because the  
others are BSD (which is fragmented and not as well supported), MacOS  
(being dropped in server form), Windows Server (a different can of  
worms) and well that's it. Solaris is just about dead except in new  
large shops as Oracle intends to make a profit from it. No one I know  
can afford zOS or A/IX :-)

As for your using Linux for 18 years, that would put you starting in  
1993. That surprises me because I have been using Linux since mid 1995  
and in those days it was not much more than a curiosity, and not  
something that you would want to replace UNIX with.  In fact, in those  
days I was buying CD ROMS with several versions of Linux and BSD on  
them, and BSD was far richer and more reliable than Linux. I remember  
the disasterous Linux over DOS filesystem which if you were not  
careful deleted your boot blocks. I don't even want to remember how  
many times I had to rebuild them  on various computers.

When I made aliyah in 1996, I brought with me one of those disks, and  
left it on the ceiling of the HUJI CS department's system group. At  
that time they had a site license to to a BSD version and were using  
that for X86 UNIX, although the first year students had a farm of  
Windows/NT computers.

When I left in 1998 to go work at one of the early (and by that time  
well established Linux based startups in Israel), they were just  
experimenting with Linux. By that time Red Had been out for a while  
and it was stable enough to be used for a work environment.

Ironically while I was there I helped beta test what became Red Hat  
Linux release 6, with the brand new and seriously broken kernel based  
NFS server. By the time it was released it had been fixed. I recently  
went back to the user NFS server, dropping the kernel one because it  
causes data loss and kernel panics if you share a USB disk.

The user NFS server does not support all of the functions of the  
kernel one but I have not had an I/O error or kernel panic since I  
started to use it, while before I was getting it several times a day  
on different computers running different Linux kernels (and distros)  
and disk drives.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
Making your enemy reliant on software you support is the best revenge.