Negroponte says Linux too 'Fat' 839
Cadef writes "According to a story on CNet News.com, Nicholas Negroponte says that Linux has gotten too fat, and will have to be slimmed down before it will be practical for the $100 laptop project. From the article: 'Suddenly it's like a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.'"
What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:5, Informative)
DSL? (Score:5, Informative)
There is hope... (Score:2, Informative)
Currently, Professor Tanenbaum and his group are working on a new version of Minix (version 3), which is a micokernel with just under 4000 LoC! He do hope that it will be used for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) a la $100 PC.
I agree with Nicholas here. (Score:3, Informative)
Too many applications are hemmorraging memory. e.g. Firefox, skype,
Too many applications are just plain huge; e.g. Open Office.
Too many applications do plain stupid things, like leak pixmaps in the X Window server.
Too many applications link against libraries they don't even use, causing
gratuitous references to them, and slower startup times.
People have become downright sloppy. Our systems, even with
If you ever wondered why our intereactive response is unpredictable, just consider what happens if you have to start waiting on disk drives to page things out and in.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem
that needs to be fixed.
Jim Gettys
OLPC
Re:What CPU are they using? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pr
Re:Don't run modern software on old hardware (Score:5, Informative)
I remember screwing around with MP3s not too long after they came out. I had done some upgrades at that point and was tinkering with Windows 95 and it turned out that it ate too much power for me to play MP3s. Mono was ok, but stereo skipped. I had to drop to DOS and use Cubic Player to get full stereo 128k MP3s. It was just all my system could handle. Now I play them in the background when I want, and they use maybe 10 seconds of CPU time per hour on one of my cores, it's just not even significant.
I could go on and on, but in essence it's changed from me sitting and waiting on my computer to it always waiting on me. There are very, very few tasks I do that take enough time I need to sit and wait, and even then it still multi-tasks fine and I can surf the web while that happens.
The problem is that Negroponte seems to have billed this thing as a legit replacement to a normal laptop. On the page it says:
"What can a $1000 laptop do that the $100 version can't?
Not much. The plan is for the $100 Laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data."
Ok well that's pretty clearly BS. Store large amounts of data is ONE OF the things the $100 laptop won't do, but there's plenty of others. Run a fancy GUI like KDE would be another one, have 10 apps open multitasking would be another. Now it's perfectly legit to say these things aren't necessary in a cheap laptop, but they ARE things that people expect out of computers these days.
I figured it was just over-marketing (I mean who doesn't do that) but it's possible that he really thought he could get a full featured Linux distro on his little laptop and is now finding out that's not the case. His statement of "Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third" just isn't the case. He may be finding that out, to his disappointment.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:2, Informative)
As a side note: Slashdot duped this story, could well have mentioned the very likely antefacts.
- Negroponte tests first prototypes of $100 laptops
- Laptop performing not too well, too much strain on system resources
- Negroponte discovers that latest kernel not actually meant for a $100 laptop
- Negroponte blames coders. (we are here)
As much as I want the concept to take off I do not like people who blames others for faults that were there from the beginning. Kernel developers have also no responsibility towards him, as the no warranty clause in GPL goes.
A WTF?/STFU! tag, anyone?
Re:Mozilla is the problem (Score:3, Informative)
The oft trotted out complaint that X is behind all the problems. I hate to break it to you but X is actually quite small if required, and highly adaptable. X is actually used for embedded systems, precisely because it is small (or can be made small). Here's a nice article on X and GTK+ in an embedded device [bluemug.com]. They managed to crunch an X and GTK+ based GUI down into only 2.9 MB, smaller than the QPE solution they were considering. It is quite possible to have X and a functioning GUI toolkit squeezed into a tiny space. The "things that come with it" that take up so much memory are things like Firefox and OpenOffice and a whole host high detail icons and whatnot. Try reading xrestop [freedesktop.org] instead of top when you want to see how your memory is getting used - the figures that top reports are massively distorted.
Jedidiah.
Is Negroponte a total moron? (Score:4, Informative)
I am rather asking, why is Negroponte saying such nonsense that Linux is fat? $100 project has 128MB RAM/512MB flash. I believe I could seriously run xen with 20 linuxes on it.
Instead of slimming down something fat... (Score:3, Informative)
I've regularly gotten OpenBSD to fit very nicely into a 500MB drive with room to spare. I'm sure it could be squeezed down to about 200M or so if you left out the compilers.
Re:Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:1, Informative)
"By 1997, Nike was shamed into telling its Indonesian contractors to stop asking for exemptions to the minimum wage and to stop paying apprentice wages. But the company still does not require its contractors to pay workers a living wage. In April 1999 when the Indonesian government announced that it was increasing the minimum wage to 231,000 rupiah/month ($26US), Nike for the first time announced that it would raise wages for its Indonesian factory workers higher than the legally required minimum,. Their new wage was a minimum cash wage of 265,000 ($30US) and a bonus package that adds up to 332,000 ($37.50US).
While this is certainly a step forward, the wages are still a far cry from a living wage. An Indonesian wage study released by Global Exchange shows that 332,000 rupiah/month ($37.50US) is needed to cover the basic needs of one person. A living wage, which is a wage that helps cover the needs of a family, not just one worker, would be twice this figure, or 664,000 rupiah/month ($75US).
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum.
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum."
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshop
Yes living expenses are less in third world countries but not THAT much less. Cheap labor conservatives love "foreign investment" when the the prevailing wage in the country being invested in is a slave level of wage. If we are actually concerned with helping people and not exploiting them, we should aim for them becoming self sufficient through education, and micro businesses, not being exploited by first world multinationals. And yes laptops might be PART of that picture, FIRST people need to be healthy through building basic infrastructure like clean water, good agricultural practices, etc. THEN in the long term they can build up educational opportunities so they no longer need to be dependent on foreign aid. But first things first don't put the cart before the horse, and don't look at people as a source of cheap labor to be exploited.
He hasn't seen OE, has he? (Score:3, Informative)
If I was interested in a lightweight, maintainable Linux distro for this project, I'd make sure that the OE devs got hooked up with a development system (or
That depends... (Score:3, Informative)
If on the other hand he already knows a thing or two, (or isn't afraid of learning) then he will find that minimalistic systems are actually one of Linux's primary strengths, at least in my observation. He could probably use this [damnsmalllinux.org] as a base, and then for X use apt-get to install ROX [sourceforge.net] Filer, metacity [gnome.org], (as a background for ROX) and fbpanel [sourceforge.net] as his start menu. Or, if he wants most of that done for him, he could install FVWM [fvwm.org] instead of metacity and fbpanel, and still use ROX as an explorer clone. Mind you, this is only one possible option, and most people reading this would probably think I'm insane and ask why I don't simply advocate fluxbox/xfce etc. This is a problem with myriad possible solutions.
He'd probably also need to install gtk for Abiword etc, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. There are also any number of lightweight image viewers around as well...he should check freshmeat [freshmeat.net]. For web browsing, there's also dillo [dillo.org].
Hence, what he wants is more than possible. He might have to do a bit of surfing, but then again, with the magic of apt-get, he probably doesn't even need to do that.
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd certainly agree that rolling one's one distro for small hardware is a great idea; however, this case, one needn't even go to that extreme. Their specs - 512 MHz clock, 128 MB ram, 512 MB drive - aren't all that shabby. You could easily run the latest 2.6 kernel on that hardware with negligible overhead.
Obviously it would be in their best interest to skip all the unnecessary stuff in the kernel and not carry around any modules they don't absolutely need - but since the hardware is all well defined, that isn't hard to do.
The real issue may be that the most newbie-friendly applications also tend to be the biggest resource hogs.
Putting together a fully usable linux system that will run nicely on that hardware is trivial. Hell, I've got my own $35 laptop with far more timid specs running a very recent 2.4 kernel and loaded with applications to cover just about any common computer task one could name.
Putting together a linux system that you can hand to a child with no computer experience and expect them to do something productive with it is a much more difficult task. (As much as I'd like the children of the world to grow up loving command line tools, console applications, and text config files, it's going to be a hard sell, judging by the way even my computer-savvy, geek colleagues tend to react when I suggest software to them.)
On the other hand, if you're willing to hire someone full time for a year or two to work on the project, and you don't have to accommodate user hardware, it may not be impossible. There are an awful lot of lightweight gui-based applications out there just waiting to be stitched together into a coherent framework and accompanied by newbie-friendly documentation.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:3, Informative)
Running X with a (novice) user friendly gui (read kde or gnome)will require more than 128mb ram to run smoothly. Actually you will able to hear the hard drive grinding everytime you so much as open the system menu.
The area where your average linux distro needs to improve is disk space. There is no excuse for the default desktop installation to take over 500mb. A great deal of this is caused by programmer never reinventing wheels in OSS. This means that every program has dependancies for a half dozen third party programs and libraries instead of incorporating just the functionality they need for their app. Those half dozen programs and libraries have followed the same bloat yielding philosophy and have their own dependancies; those in turn have their own dependancies and so on.
Hopefully this trend for easy and fast development will subside and increased hardware performance will begin to mean that your apps run faster instead of allowing developers to take the easy road over the efficient road. To all my fellow developers, the next time you are about to use a 3rd party lib instead of writing a couple optimized and custom tailored routines to the program you are working on; ask yourself why you you are against vb and microsoft bloated development environments and ask yourself if you aren't manually enforcing the same bloat and inefficiency in the name of ease and rapid development that those programs automatically enforce.
WTF is DSL? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not the subject (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:4, Informative)
Use XFCE. XFCE is a very fast desktop environment; I use it on my old system which has the following specs:
Thats around the same specs as the $100 laptop isn't it? The storage is very low but XFCE is barely 40-50 MB so that's ok too.
Or just put in Blackbox as the window manager for a completely stripped down Gnome or KDE subsystem. The whole point of the $100 laptop is to provide basic computing power for those who cannot afford it. So in that sense if the hardware is tuned down, even the software needs to obviously be tuned down.
Re:Damn Small has no Damn GUI (Score:1, Informative)
Just take a look at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-2.3.jpg [damnsmalllinux.org]
I hope you're a troll, rather than an ignorant nay-sayer....
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:5, Informative)
The heck it won't. Back in the day I happily ran Enlightenment--the notoriously graphics intensive Window Manager, versions 0.14, 0.15, with 2 virtual desktops, across two heads of monitors each running 1280x1024... And all of this was done on a Pentium I running at a blazing 133 Mhz, with a whopping 96MB RAM (and 6MB VRAM). It was perfectly suitable for coding, compiling, for checking and writing mail, for browsing the net, and even for experimenting with The Gimp.
As a matter of fact, that computer was still serving up files at my home, being a web server, mail host, fax server, and small database server for perl apps for a neighborhood association, and companion for my SGI O2 of the same vintage (1996), and it ran up until about two years ago when I retired it; and that was only because when I moved, Qwest started jacking around with my DSL service and myself, and I just decided that it would be easier to put that site on a shared hosting service, dump the commercial DSL service and move to cable internet.
Maybe it wasn't the fastest computer around, but it worked, and damit, it worked well. It never broke, and it never complained, unlike some modern computers. I learned very much plugging around with that old beast-and well after it was obsoleted by much, much newer technology. Maybe I kept it going out of romance because I had so much fun learning back when I was hacking around with Enlightenment, Linux, Gnome, etc. i.e. Back when I really just could not afford a better computer.
My P133 also dual booted to Win95 when I first installed RedHat4, and I learned the basics of 3D modeling, raytracing, and if I'm not mistaken, I also ran the very first betas of Rhinoceros 3D on it, too. I had one scene in truespace2 that took several days just to render, and did I have a problem with that? No.
So, lower spec computers might not play HD porno, run Windows Vista in Glass mode, play Counterstrike: Source, or other things... So what?! Like those things are going to be of great utility to third world children! I would have gladly accepted a 500Mhz notebook with 128MB, way back when. I think such a computer could be a great thing to third world children, because instead of learning how some slick GUI with gobs of eyecandy works, like our current generation, they might actually stand a chance to learn how a computer works.
Re:Why $100? They can't afford them anyways. (Score:3, Informative)
The architecture (AMD Geode 2) was chosen because of its *extremely* low power consumption--The whole thing takes up around ten watts to operate if memory serves (About six for the mainboard, RAM, and CPU and four for the rest). You simply cannot buy a good embedded system from Dell, and you certainly can't buy one that is as rugged and portable as the OLPC systems. And remember--A lot of the places these laptops are going will probably not have a stable enough power grid to plug in and charge a 'normal' laptop regularly.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:5, Informative)
cat /proc/meminfo
I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that's a bad way to measure memory usage. Modern Linux kernels just continue to keep stuff in memory until something else needs the RAM. The question is not how much RAM the kernel is using right now but how well it can juggle resources when they're limited. You can't figure that out without doing actual experiments on limited hardware.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:2, Informative)
Why apologize to Samuel L. Jackson? You were not paraphrasing him, but John Travolta.
Re:Oh, here we go again with senseless analogies. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Versatile != FAT [Who are these damn moderators (Score:4, Informative)
find me a Linux distribution that lets you customer a Linux kernel at install time.
*Raises hand* Me me! that one is easy!
Gentoo [gentoo.org], slackware [slackware.com]
Or what about NeoMagiclux [linuxfromscratch.org]
Neat uh?
Look, the problem with the article and almost all the articles is that they try to add labels and properties to "Linux" as an operating system. Linux is not an operating system it is a kernel, Mandriva, Gentoo or whatever you want is an operating system, some of them are Fat, some of them are bloated, some or them are insecure and whatever.
But you can not say that "Linux is a fat operating system" because linux is not an operating system.
Compile your own kernel (Score:3, Informative)
So default kernels are bloated.
However the moment you compile your own OR can fine tune a distro to one specific set of hardware you can cut a lot of crap out.
Take the simplest of things. Module support. Only needed if you load modules and modules are only really needed by developers OR if you want to include all the modules for say all the soundcards and load the right one at boot.
If you know wich modules you need you can just compile them in and skip all the module support.
Same with a lot of things.
A fine tuned kernel is a lot smaller.
The proof? Linux runs on tiny computers like switches and watches and phones and pda's.
Linux the source code is big and feature rich.
Linux the kernel is as fat or as slim as you want it to be.
/proc ????? (Score:3, Informative)
> You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc.
> A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them.
> But a Linux user can.
No you can't. You have to recompile the kernel to do that, which 95% of computer users couldn't do and 99.9% wouldn't want to or couldn't be bothered.
YES you can. Ever heard of
And for fairness, windows actually has some similar capabilities in the Registry... But many of these settings by default are not in the registry(!) (e.g. windows uses default values).