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.'"
Standard distros, yes.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:4, Insightful)
install something now, you'll see 10203 dependancy packages hanging around, and 20406 items in the kernel choices that you have to say N to. and when some packages in your linux distro are broken, well tough luck mofo.
sure expanding stuff is fun, but it is becoming a burden, one that consumes too much of my time and too much of my network. perhaps it's time to just cut things off into an "internal and external" layer in the kernel ? meaning move optional modules and stuff into other distribution methods ? there's no reason for 99% of users to download and disable the code for amateur radios etc.
i played around with freebsd for half a year, and it's default install cleanness and the ease of kernel configuration just amazed me.
i vot for a cleaner linux core and cleaner gnu/linux core packages. do you ?
Negroponte needs to be educated... (Score:4, Insightful)
As big as it is made (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)
Where this might be useful though is parts of highly impoverished rural America like parts of say Alabama, West Virginia, inland Oregon, etc. These are areas where people are genuinely strapped for cash and a 100 dollar good to go laptop might be genuinely useful, most particularly for kids in school, being portable. Yes the geeks among the rural population might be able to build a better computer cheaper, but lets be realistic that's what maybe 10% of the population?
Don't think there aren't areas in the U.S. that don't look like the 3rd world with shacks, and trailer homes, there are, I've lived there and those people need help too.
His perspective has to be wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Patently untrue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I see someone complaining "Linux is slow" or "Distribution Foo is bloated" I remind them that their system is bloated because they CHOSE to install unnecessary services (You're running MySQL, PostgreSQL, PostFix, Apache, Subversion, DHCPD, BIND. and everything else available in the distro? You have Composite enabled with KDE with ALL eye candy turned on and every SuperKaramba theme you could get your hands on? You're running a non-SMP kernel on that shiny dual core processor?
Let me tell you something: I still run dual Celeries and dual Pentium II Xeons at my office - and they're going to be wiped soon and be reinstalled with bare KDE installations for use as CSR workstations, probably with build server and 3D rendering daemons to take advantage of spare CPU cycles should we need it (those will be off by default of course). Even with full installations those machines are all mighty responsive. I don't turn on eye candy, Postfix, MySQL, apache, etc. remain turned off unless absolutely needed for testing a web or other application locally, and superkaramba is not installed.
Now, I've tried complete installations (installing EVERYTHING on Mandriva, SuSE, and other distributions) one weekend out of morbid curiousity and yes, it gets piggish, and composite made it absolutely unbearable, but I wanted to see just how much those boxes could take before Linux became unstable -- plus I wanted to have easy access to all apps because there are many, MANY Linux apps I've never even tried. And wouldn't you know it, the systems did not become unstable, but just painfully slow. That's an extreme case, but obviously it wasn't the fault of Linux that I chose to do something that many newbies do because they think it might be convenient.
Linux isn't bloated in and of itself. It's used in many embedded devices where CPU cycles, memory, and storage are all scarce. When designing embedded systems the engineers select only the bare essentials to get the job done - check out Snapgear (now Cyberguard SG) routers, some of LinkSys' routers, and Zaurus PDAs. Check out any number of the latest-generation cellular telephones, most notably Nokia's and Motorola's. Check out Tivo.
Not a lot of CPU power in many of those, and yet they do their jobs very, VERY well.
My own desktop is a little slow due to the ATI video card (video is a big bottleneck on ATI with Xinerama - I keep sticking with the AiW card in the hope that X.org's integrated Gato drivers will eventually work) but the other desktop boxes in the office are NVidia and they absolutely fly (in terms of responsiveness), despite having more toys enabled than my box, and all having slower CPUs than my system. Heck, even the dual Pentium II Xeon with NVidia card is more responsive than my system. When I switch to a single-head configuration my system is plenty fast. Even with Xinerama, Linux is more responsive than Windows is on my box.
Linux isn't bloated. It all comes down to configuration, user error, and to a lesser extent, hardware choices (imho, ATI cards should be avoided if you run a dual-head system).
By your argument, Windows bloated if you base your judgement on an OEM who installed a ton of eye candy, or if you installed something like WinFX, Desktop Sidebar, SpyderBar, or other CPU-sucking toys. Windows by itself with unnecessary services disabled is not bloated, and on the same token neither is Linux.
Want a nice responsive system? Install what you need, and either disable or don't install what you don't need. Forget about eye candy. SuperKaramba isn't a necessity. Install the right kernel for your processor (in the case of dual core systems, the SMP kernel is the right choice - or for a single-core processor with hyperthreading, an SMT-aware SMP kernel is the right choice).
not the subject (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:3, Insightful)
course it's not difficult, after all, they run Linux on phones with everything stripped out except what's actually needed for the phones' hardware... actually I'm getting worried about this $100 laptop thing... I think something's happening behind the scenes and the bloody thing's gonna end up with WinCE on it with a super triffic no cost at all deal from Microsoft...
W.T.F? (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as you're not running Eclipse or OpenOffice, it's Good Enough (TM) to get work done.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:4, Insightful)
problem with Negroponte (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe what he means is that Gnome and KDE require more memory and CPU power than that; well, they do: the features users apparently demand (vector graphics, theming, animation, translucency, etc.) just require a lot of CPU power. That's not Linux getting "too fat", it's Linux following the desktop mainstream, which is what a lot of people apparently want.
It's a serious problem when the self-styled designer of a $100 laptop can't figure out how to even pick an existing Linux distribution that runs on a 500MHz ARM with 128M of memory. But Negroponte's skill has always been more talk than technology, I suppose.
Re:Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't run modern software on old hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
He's wrong.
Both software and hardware grow. Software grows in terms of functionality, hardware grows in terms of speed, memory size, etc. Software and hardware need to match. Don't run slackware 2.0 on your shiny new dual core athlon 64. Don't run KDE or gnome on that old 486 you found in the basement.
So Negroponte creates a low cost laptop. Good. Now he tries to fit contemporary software on it. He finds it doesn't work. Does that make the software bloated? No. The software just doesn't match the hardware.
People tend to forget how slow old hardware really was. Don't you remember visible slowness in scrolling on 8086 hardware in text mode? Don't you remember how long Wordperfect took to start up? Big&bloated Microsoft Word starts in under 2 seconds on modern hardware.
You probably don't remember. That's why modern software seems so incredibly slow on old hardware. That's just because the hardware is old.
Of course some software is bloated. Openoffice is extremely slow in comparison to Microsoft Office, while even lacking features (wether you want those features is open to another debate). KDE applicates take too long to start up (while their speed when stated up is good).
My point is: software is not bloated. Software is designed to run on contemporary software. Which in this day and age is >= 2 Ghz, >= 512 MB ram, >= 200 GB harddisk, fast GPU w/ >= 64 MB ram. That's a lot faster than the $100 laptop.
Re:Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
Argh no handcrank! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a project to relieve poverty in the poorest of the poor countries. It's a project to provide an educational laptop to children in developing countries.
There is a big difference, but Slashdot as a whole (if such a concept is valid) seems not grasp it yet.
Mozilla is the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
There are alternative windowing system to X. The problem is, last I looked, none of them have gained much traction, and I believe this is because Mozilla won't work on them. So, someone needs to port Mozilla to their favorite X alternative. This is something that someone with tons of money, publicity, and connections like Negro Ponte can do.
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:2, Insightful)
If the kernel devs would just stop being lazy and make a stable API so that modules outside the main kernel tree are not treated as second-class citizens, that would solve a lot of this.
Re:Self-correcting system (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely, and it explains perfectly why Vista is taking so long to get here.
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Self-correcting system (Score:2, Insightful)
KFG
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am ignorant about a car's fuel system. That's just a fact.
It's an excuse. (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that this is just the preliminary announcement and the real anouncement forthcoming is that Microsoft will be providing the operating system.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not convinced that that was what he was saying at all — he was just stating that Linux, in its current state, is not suitable for the project. We know this. He knows this. He's not blaming anyone (would a "slim" Linux be suitable for a newer system?), he's just saying that this isn't where the crux of development will be, and stating that changes will need to be made for the project.
I don't think he's assigning blame, I think he's telling people what the challenges of the software side of his project are.
look at his foundation (Score:3, Insightful)
So of course he's going to gripe about bloat. He's starting from one of the fattest Linux distributions around.
Re:Most needed in poor rural U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wait for world hunger to be solved before you do anything, you're never going to do anything. Your argument is a cop-out.
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
True, except lazy has nothing to do with it. They've quite repeatedly said they aren't going to make a stable API, because they a) want to be able to break it whenever they feel like and b) they want closed source modules, which is most modules outside the main kernel tree, to be a pain to maintain. Remember when one of the early 2.6 kernels (2.6.4 or thereabouts) broken nVidia's kernel module? Well, if closed source modules were the norm rather than the exception, you'd see that all the time. Unless the kernel devs had to keep old code around for backwards compatibility, which is roughly where Vista is at now. Not to mention they'd get a ton more problems they couldn't debug because it was some closed source module that went freakazoid. Not to mention that many old archs and new arch's like x64 would be crippled because the modules aren't available.
Yes, on the short-term it would be a gain. But seeing how far they've come with the current policy, I don't think there's any reason to stop now. As far as "system-level" things holding linux back, it's mostly that they can't ship patented stuff like mp3 decoding and DMCA-protected stuff like DVD playback out of the box. That is a much bigger issue to most people that the really odd piece of hardware that doesn't have a driver, I think.
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that what Negroponte was really trying to say is: "KDE an GNOME are too fat for a 500MHz computer with 128MB RAM and only 512MB of storage". And, lets face it, hes right.
Now, this raises a really good point. If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!
Not that I dont like KDE or GNOME, quite the contrary, I found them better than Windows in many ways... But they just have grown fat, I remember being able to run KDE2 on a Pentium 166 MMX with 46MB RAM! And even back then, KDE was pretty capable... much more than Windows95 for example.
Of course now we have much better computers, and the programmers are just using this extra computer power and memory that otherwise would be wasted... But it wouldn't be cool if we managed to build a full featured desktop environment without depending on so much power? Because if we manage to do so, there will be much more remaining cpu cycles to waste with eye candy
Just my $0,02
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:3, Insightful)
sometimes we don't do this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least.
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:3, Insightful)
biword (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, commercial Linux distributions are fat (although not in comparison to any other mainstream user OS)....if you go with default installs and the most bloated applications avaliable. However for his project it is entirely possible to trim down and remain highly functional. A lightweight, yet attractive and relatively easy to use WM like windowmaker, or icewm, are perfectly capable and work well for what he wants to do.There are lightweight yet capable word processing and other standalone office applications, like Abiword...which can take the place of Open Office in most cases. Email, basic photo viewing and manipulation, web browsing....all have light weight applications avaliable for them that'll do a fair job.
He's just bitching because his $100 laptop can't use the cool eyecandy filled environments with the exact same application base as most modern expensive computers....and still fit the hardware footprint and budget. He wants the magic GNU Fairy to come and sprinkle pixy dust and wave a magic wand and instantly make Firefox, OO, KDE, and GNOME run on his hardware requirements.
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Your response highlights the problem. The only distros that allow meaningful choice are the ones geared towards advanced users (Arch, Gentoo, Debain, etc.). The distros for regular users go ahead and install much more than is necessary (in the name of choice).
How about a distro that installs a set of sensible defaults. Example: either Gnome or KDE (but not both) for the desktop, OpenOffice (or AbiWord) for productivity, VLC for video and, of course, the standard gcc packages for development and compilation of 3rd party software. Note that I left out almost all dev-tools and libraries, and lots of other command line utilities. There's no reason that we should be installing this stuff unless its a dependency for something we *do* want. GCC, in this case, is the exception that proves the rule. Then, if I want something else, I can pull it off the CDs (or the internet where available).
Re:What??? never heard of DSL then? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps Slashdot is not for you, or possibly you should read quietly before jumping into a discussion when you don't know what people are talking about. If you do jump in, and are corrected, it doesn't make much sense to demand that everyone should dumb down the discussion and explain all the terms used. This is an article posted on linux.slashdot.org. It is expected that people reading know the subject at hand and follow it -- at least enough to use Google (as someone else in this thread did) to look up the term.
--
Evan "Fighting against dumbing down"
Re:Can't say i wouldn't agree (Score:1, Insightful)
Well. looks as if the jig is up guys. We're busted. Yes. It's true. Every distro ships with 376 window managers, 5912 terminal programs and, at last count, at least 50 versions of Kill Bill, including one in colour ASCI. And you're forced to install them all. It's hard-coded into the kernel, not Torvalds himself or IBM have it withintheir power (or will) to change that. You caught us. We fess up, Vista really is the right choice for a $100 notebook.
When did Slashdot become such forum for anti-OSS dunces?
Opposites attract (Score:3, Insightful)
I get a kick out of these stories. If this were Microsoft talking about a $100 laptop, everyone in Slashdot would be downing them because its vaporware at this point. But since its *not* Microsoft, its Way Cool and everyone acts like its the discovery of the fucking Holy Grail, the Second Coming of Christ, and secret documents about aliens stored at Roswell all rolled in to one.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree 100% with this.
Dependency hell is alive & well in Linux.
Linux advocates should acknowledge it & DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Currently it is glossed over, this is just as bad as wintel fanboys & trolls.
Re:not the subject (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's talk substance.
The Simputer also began as a well-hyped charitable project, an attempt to bring the computer to the third-world masses. It didn't quite work out that way.
I think it is fair to ask whether Negroponte's estimates are realistic.
The laptop has to take all the physical abuse a kid can deliver. It has to survive in environments that would stress military-grade components. But cost no more than a Bayless clockwork radio in the West.
It seems a little late in the day to be talking about the core OS.
That suggests there are problems elsewhere. With the GUI. With applications. With storage. With networking. With power consumption generally.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't run modern software on old hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
The specs the article mentions is 500 mhz and 128 megs of RAM. Obviously with 512M of CF, you won't want swap. But its enough to do many of the basic functions an office has need of, if done cleverly. You probably won't have the disk space to be decoding MP3s with it, but it's not outside the specs of the CPU. The trouble is going to be Office Applications. Abiword might fit the bill, but I had a bad experience years ago and haven't revisited it since. But gedit or some other simple text editor should be light weight enough to operate within constraints, and comes with the benefit that it can likely be stored on CF space.
But a much bigger challenge than disk or RAM space is power. Disk and RAM grow bigger and cheaper daily, and the OLPC project has a couple of very bright people capable of handling (or finding someone else who can) those problems. But power requirements aren't as well defined in the market, and that's gonna lead to some problems. Negroponte claims he'll power it with a foot crank or some bizairre no grid required system. This is going to be a real piece of engineering, because unlike the rest of the project, it's not about taking someone else's work and gluing it together. He keeps saying that it's gonna run on something ridiculus like 1W of power, but there's no way you can do that and transmit anything over wifi long distances.
Re:Don't run modern software on old hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
More to the point, Java isn't slow!
Not the point at all. His point is that we're not being taught how to write good Java programs.
the programmers take up every ounce of system resources they can now by being lazy
Not true. At least, only partly true.
Yes, there's often an attitude of developer time vs. hardware cost. Obviously, no one expects a CGI to be written in C and assembly -- the amount of time that would take simply isn't worth it when a Perl version would run almost as fast. Often, it goes further -- Ruby is being used, and I don't see how that language could be optimized much more.
I remember a time when PCs struggled to play MP3s and run a word processor at the same time. Now I have no trouble playing a DVD while streaming media accross the network and recording two channels of TV.
That is your hardware, but don't tell me there's no laziness involved. I use mplayer to play my mp3s, vorbis, flac, and so on, and I know for a fact that this worked great on very, very old hardware. I sincerely doubt a recent WinAMP would be as fast.
I've been doing things like using Firefox and Thunderbird instead of, say, Galleon and Pine, like I did a few years ago. But, if I really wanted to, I'm sure I could train myself to use Mutt at least as effectively as I do Thunderbird, and I know for a fact it'd use fewer resources.
Your hardware is fast enough that programmers can afford to be lazy, and you'll still be running ten times as fast as a computer ten years ago. But remember: according to Moore's Law, your hardware is 32x as fast.
This isn't always a bad thing. It's really nice to be able to brute-force some things, and to use an elegant, future-proof design instead of a somewhat faster, but absolutely unmaintainable one.
Mac OS was a dog on the computers of 1991, as was Windows.
Mac OS and Windows in 1991 were horrible programs, and they have gotten better. Still, just about everything's gotten bloated. You try installing OS X or Windows XP on a 1991 computer. I'll go aheand and install a custom Linux. Then we can compare all three to the OSes that were around at the time. I think my Linux will win. And I think that you'll discover that bloat does exist.
Fire up Word 7.0 on a 33MHz 486 with 16MB of memory and Windows 95, then tell me that applications aren't faster today.
They aren't, and your comparison isn't fair. Fire up Word 2003 on a 33MHz 486 with 16MB of memory and Windows XP... what's that? You can't?
Or, if you can get Word 7.0 and Windows 95 to run on my 2.4 ghz amd64, compare those to XP and Word 2003.
Or, probably the fairest example: just compare the application. I'd imagine that XP runs faster than 95 on my box, but uses more of the completely unnecessary 2 gigs of RAM that I have -- thus, try Word 7.0 on a new box with a new OS, compared to a new Word.
Microsoft Word starts in 3 seconds on my system.
No, it doesn't. Try disabling the (rather large) chunk of Office that starts when your system boots. Or better, compare your boot time with Word installed to my boot time without a hint of Word anywhere on the computer.
Look, guys...
It's not either-or. You're both right. There is software bloat, and computers are faster today. Software uses more memory today because it does more, and because programmers have gotten lazier. No one would think of working with a 1 gig OS in 1996, certainly not one that used over 50 megs of RAM just to run, before you start trying to edit 50 meg photos.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:3, Insightful)
I can still install a functional Linux system with a 2.6 kernel on that Pentium 100 with 64mb of RAM and make it a useful system. Maybe not Fedora's distribution, but it's a trivial undertaking. I'd like to see Windows XP make that box useful.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
call me a liar, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to a UNICEF study an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the US banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," - "all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production" according to the UNICEF study.
Reference: http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/ [unicef.org]
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're seriously saying that in order to improve disk space we need create many copies of the same functionality?
This is very unintuitive....And I'm not sure how this could possibly be so, except if the libraries were huge and only selected to offer 1 or 2 functions..
But it seems to me, that if there are many dependencies (as you claim), it would suggest functionality was broken up into small pieces, and the designers merely selected the pieces they required. This is in contrast to large frameworks like
So which is it? Is the functionality not divided finely enough (note that dividing it further increases start-up time due to linking more libraries) or is it divided too finely (note that this will increase disk usage due to waste).
Just because a 1kB program requires 12-15 100kB libraries (and maybe the requisite 3-5MB gtk/or whatever toolkit) doesn't mean it wastes space.
Assuming the functionality is sufficiently finely divided and library overhead is negligible, nothing is lost this way in the worst case. In the best case it results in (primarily) more efficient RAM usage and also more efficient harddrive usage.
Re:If it's too big, try something else (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:4, Insightful)
As to being "negative", I admit that yes, I've given up on GNU/Linux [at least for now], and now use Microsoft Windows XP again as my main workstation operating system - it suits my current needs and uses much better than Linux did in all honesty.
Linux required too many compromises, and too much time wasted due to fiddling to keep it all together and running. Linux has a long way to go before it's suitable for the masses, it has a variety of issues that are not being addressed, and until they are addressed, it'll get nowhere imho. That's just my personal opinion based on near 4 years of having Linux as my sole choice of operating system. I've been there, I've done it, so it's not like I'm just spouting an opinion that's unfounded or unbased.
Cheers,
Dave
Re:biword (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is his hardware will all be IDENTICAL
Now think about that, Linux puts every single driver you could need INTO it's DISTROs.
That has to go, the graphics will always be (vga? Whatever low colour) 800x600 so no scaling or fancy fonts etc.
It might be faster to run a rendered jpg as the desktop
I think they'll probably end up with something like enlightenment, good performance and pretty (once you get it working).
Just think of all the stuff they won't need, filesystem support, printer drivers, touchpad support, 3D driver support, DVD support the list just goes on and on.
I imagine he's probably more concerned the linux people will either bloatware it ( Poverty Stricken countries really need IRC I mean heck, and Mplayer!) or they'll just strip it down at the last minute without customizing it.
Versatile != FAT [Who are these damn moderators?] (Score:5, Insightful)
The linux kernel is "versatile", not "fat".
What is the difference? You can compile the linux kernel without the stuff you on't want. 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.
Are you absolutely sure you are making a fair comparison? (The apparent simplicity is not enough justification). Perhaps more recent redhat kernels either compile more things in (instead of modules) or they cause more modules to be autoloaded by default... And what about changes in default memory management policies (e.g. memory mapping, disk cache, etc)??? And you even go as far to compare different Distributions??? Were they using udev, devfs, or a manually configured
Also note a lot of "Free Memory" is not very desirable... Memory not being used by applications can used for disk-cache. I've noticed that recent kernels only keep a little memory free, probably to have some "on hand" without incurring the delay of flushing disk cache pages.... This makes a lot of sense. Thus, you cannot simply look at "MemFree:" and draw conclusions. The same applies to the results in "top".
And I would suspect even Windows does something similar (but Taskmgr.exe is probably rigged to only show memory used by apps).
Note to moderators: The parent post is truly nothing more than flamebait at best. Shame on you for modding otherwise.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Have those people compiled a kernel lately? Did they notice the modular design and the way you can strip out a lot of things you don't want?
I run Linux on a 206 MHz handheld with 32 megs of RAM, off a 512 MB flash-card. I use Familiar as a distro and Opie for a desktop environment. I have IR, Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, I have Opera as a browser and a whole lot of software I can't even begin to name (ipkgfind [handhelds.org] counts 35,000+ packages).
So what's with this complete bullshit about Linux not being fit for a 500 MHz/ 128 MB RAM machine? Negroponte didn't even support his statement in any way, that phrase you see in the Slashdot summary is all he said in the article too (serves me right for RTFA).
Don't get tricked into thinking about the regular desktop distro and how to slim it down for the 100$ laptop. There are established handheld distro's out there for which the specs of the 100$ laptop would be an upgrade, that's what they should go with. Think bottom up, not the other way around.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's a crude experiment, based on usability[...]
No, it's not based on usability. If it were, you would be asking questions like, "Does it feel slow?" and "Can you do useful work with it." Your experiment is based on examining the contents of /proc/meminfo.
Actually, I have no idea what your experiment is supposed to prove, since you never say anything about how you interpreted the contents of /proc/meminfo. That pseudo-file gives you a lot of information about
the system's memory use and you never said which parts were
relevant and how.
What I am saying is that a modern Linux distribution has some very heavy system requirements, and they have jumped up an awful lot from previous distributions as little as six years ago.
I'm not disputing that. Although now that you bring it up, I'd like to point out that this is irrelevant. If you're going to build a $100 laptop, you're going to want to put together your own Linux distribution as well, so the real question is, "How small can you make this distribution and have it still be useful?" Since Redhat doesn't even try to keep Fedora small, its size isn't useful in this discussion.
Maybe if you looked at the sizes of floppy- and flash-based distributions, you'd have a point, but the sizes of mainstream distributions are irrelevant.
Get over it, get a life. There's more to the world than Linux - it's a tool, nothing more, and nothing less. If you can't take criticism of Linux, then maybe you should wear ear muffins :-)
Linux criticism I'm fine with. It's fuzzy thinking that grates on me. Also, I tried getting one of those "life" things but I find it interferes too much with my Slashdot posting.
Re:Versatile != FAT [Who are these damn moderators (Score:3, Insightful)
it's specialized hardware that's going to come with a specialized OS with a Linux kernel. If they can't get the Linux kernel and the userland apps to be small enough to fit on there, they should give up the project right now as they're obviously incompetent.
Re:Linux is NOT Fat (Score:1, Insightful)