something to get back on track

[rotovegasBoy]

well after a number of technical posts heres something to start a bit of a chin wagging.

How is linux going to get back on track?

At the moment there are several versions of linux which all compile different binaries i.e. a program compiled for redhat won't work on slackware (or another distribution)
<aside>I'm not sure but will a binary compiled on an earilier version of one distriibution work on another?
and then there's the problem of different versions of the kernel.

Is this the reason why linux fails to capture more of the desktop market? I think the answer is yes. Linux delivers cheap stable performance and if preinstalled little worry for the user, although having a linux guru handy is always helpful, yet not a lot of people consider it a serious replacement for windows infact most of the people i know running linux have windows on another computer or on a dual boot machine. And the reason - i need to run office (or insert big expensive application here) when i point out that star office is available for free and will do everything you want it to including opening ms office documents they all complain that it's to hard to get applications installed. To a degree this is true you need to know what libraries are installed and what versions your kernel and distribution are. If you download the source code it can be a bit daunting for a new user to install the application sucessfully.

What linux needs is some sort of standard sort of like a java class file thus allowing binaries being distributed without worrying about the finer details.

well hoipefully that'll get people talking

Chris Packham
kriz@i4free.co.nz

A thousand mokeys at a thousand machines, it happened, it got called the internet.

 

[MikeLacey]

&quot;How is linux going to get back on track?&quot;

I don't think it is...

What's happening to Linux now bears a strong resemblance to what happened to Unix when it first appeared. (and no, I'm *not* (quite) old enough to have been in IT at the time)

The first version of Unix, what came to be known as the Berkely Standard Distribution -- BSD, was free, anyone could have it and install it; support was on an informal best efforts basis, pretty much like Linux is now. Loose but effective.

Then it started to fragment.

H/W vendors started to support it, different companies produced different versions of it, to add value, to differentiate *their* product from everyone else's. Sometimes these differences were subtle and sometimes not.

Sounds familiar eh?

There were a number of efforts to standardise across different flavours of Unix (XPG, POSIX) but, while they met with some degree of success, they never got to the point of being able to buy &quot;shrink wrapped&quot; s/w that would run on DEC, Sun, IBM and Sequent.

I think that this is what we'll see next, there will be a call to standardise and bring back together the different versions of Linux, there might be already for all I know.

Any such move is likely to fail. Red Hat (a fine company, don't get me wrong) have a vested interest in keeping their product different from the other versions of Linux. They need to give people a reason to buy Red Hat Linux. Ppl will not buy RH Linux out of kindness to stop those nice guys at RH from going under - so RH will have to make sure *their* Linux is visible different from the other versions.

Far from being off-track I think that Linux is following the well beaten path started by the guys at UCB. It can never go back from here.
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com

 

[rotovegasBoy]

Unfortunately Mike you are completely right. Which is a reason why unix never really made it to the desktop market in a huge way. Can you even walk into a computer store and by a version of unix?

Linux needs some way of porting software between distributions I think programs like VMWare and WINE may just be the answer. If these were developed further to allow the running of windows based programs on a linux machine safely and efficiently many would opt for the linux option and use the windows programs they need. This could further be developed to provide a virtual box that programs could be written for, I guess programs compiled for the native machine would run faster.

If RedHat or another distributor managed to develop this first they would have something to make them comercially successful. BUT then does this start to contradict the idea behind linux? Will everyone turn it into a comercial product that will be released full of bugs and rely on updates called &quot;service packs&quot;?

How can linux compete on the desktop market and still maintain it's advantages over windows? - sort of like how would Ralph Nader look at himself in the morning if he did become president.
B-)



Chris Packham
kriz@i4free.co.nz

A thousand mokeys at a thousand machines, it happened, it got called the internet.

 

[MikeLacey]

I might be right but, frankly, the thing I didn't consider was the number of installed systems.

This is a serious difference between The Linux Years and The Early Years.

In The Early Years Unix was installed on hundreds, then thousands. It's difficult to say exactly how many people are using Linux but most of the estimates have it in the high hundreds of thousands, certainly every other server you come across on the Internet is Linux. All of them, no doubt, installed by people who didn't want to be bothered rebooting an NT box every week.

Installed and then promptly forgotten I shouldn't wonder, happened to me. Our IT audit ppl were going around checking for non-standard systems a while ago; they came to me and said &quot;What's this Linux box then? You shouldn't have that you know...&quot;

&quot;What Linux box?&quot; I said.

I turned out, of course, that there was a PC in the corner of a computer room - chugging away happily - that I hadn't thought of in a year let alone looked at and yes -- Linux. Anyway, I moved whatever it was running onto AiX and away we went again. But, and here is my point finally, with so many installed systems there's going to be a fair amount of intertia. Shame I forgot about that box, I'd already changed the getty message on all of the other red-hat pc's so that they weren't so obviously non-standard...

The pace of change in the IT industry has accellerated somewhat though and this may yet be a factor. Unix has been recognisably Unix for about twenty years.

Linux in twenty years? Hmmmmm

NT in twenty years? I doubt it somehow.
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com

 

[rotovegasBoy]

I agree that Linux (or a descendant of it) will be around for years to come. NT doubtful, will Whistler (MS's new network/internet OS) even make much of a difference or will it be a spectacular failure like web tv.

Maybe its time hardware vendors started taking notice. Certainly most vendors that make networking equipment recognise that Linux is here to stay. So why aren't other hardware vendors recognising this. Don't they think that Linux users want 3D audio, hardware accelerated graphics, internal pci modems (yes I know its a kernel problem, but still). Maybe Linus (or Dogbert?) should be running around with a rolled up newspaper making sure that they think about these things before they cut off 20% (according to the last servey i read) of their customer base.

Was microsoft even responsible for their monopoly or was it narrow minded hardware developers? Well maybe i wouldn't go that far.

X-)

Chris Packham
kriz@i4free.co.nz

A thousand mokeys at a thousand machines, it happened, it got called the internet.