We've had the door open for a while now, and we've put up a number of articles about Operating systems but the discussion has been rather light.
Have we just gotten mellow about the options? Are you waiting for a review of Windows 8 to plaster the pages with your disgust?
Are we at a point where all of the options are no better than the others?
Where has all the passion gone?
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/01/1514223
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/28/1457224
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/06/18/0221230
Related Stories
Linux 3.14 has been released on Sun, 30 Mar 2014.
Prominent Features:
- Deadline scheduling class for better real-time scheduling
- zram: Memory compression mechanism considered stable
- Btrfs: inode properties
- Trigger support for tracing events
- Userspace probes access to all arguments
- Userspace locking validator
- Kernel address space randomization
- TCP automatic corking
- Antibufferbloat: "Proportional Integral controller Enhanced" packet scheduler.
Ars Technica brings us a rather lackluster review of Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 review: Missing the boat on big changes
Canonical pushed out Ubuntu 14.04 last week. This release is the first Ubuntu Long Term Support release in two years and will be supported for the next five years.
It feels like, for Canonical at least, this Long Term Support release couldn't have come at a worse time. The company is caught in a transitional phase as it moves from a desktop operating system to a platform that spans devices.
The problem for Canonical is that it's only about 90 percent of the way to a platform-spanning OS, but it just so happens that the company's schedule calls for a Long Term Support release now.
Long Term Support releases are typically more conservative and focus on stability and long-term maintenance rather than experimental or flashy new features. Things that are 90 percent done don't make it into LTS releases. And, unfortunately for Canonical, most of its foundation-shaking changes to Ubuntu are currently only about 90 percent done and thus not part of this release.
It's an unfortunate time for a release in the cycle; Do you think they should have held off and waited for xMir? Or will they finally pry Microsoft Bob away from your cold dead hands?
Debian 6 debuts its long term support period
June 16th, 2014
The Debian project is pleased to announce that the "Long Term Support (LTS)" infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name "squeeze") until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.
(Score: 4, Informative) by forsythe on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:06AM
I'm just not really interested in discussing holy wars, so I tend to shy away from discussions that seem primed for them. Other than that, to be honest I'm not really interested in the update cycles of distros I'm not interested in, and for the distros I am interested in, I'll probably get my news directly from them.
Just my two cents, since it was asked for.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:28AM
I'd be interested in OS Holy Wars, but... the comparison landscape is just barren.
OSX is a wallen garden not an OS, Win8 is nothing - therefore much less an OS - and smartphones are not computers so no proper OS-es are needed.
Maybe, just maybe, the BSD variants would worth something, but I don't think a war with all the 6 eccentrics using them would make a difference. Perhaps we'll see some action in the "near" future, when GnuHurd is released.
Indeed, the only OS remaining is Linux and... you know... sectarian wars are just not as funny as holy wars.
(but somehow I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop. No worries, probably it will come with the flying car I'm waiting as well)
---
(lobbed... ducks for cover now)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:22AM
You forgot the flying pigs.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:50AM
I looked for the FlyingPigs OS (seriously, I did!) but couldn't find any.
A link or something, please?
...
..
.
(you can spare yourself searching for HellFreezes OS, it has been found [wired.com]... well, sorta)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:15PM
From an old saying that my Grandmother used use when describing an improbable event, "When pigs fly". Regarding your comment about the year of the Linux desktop arriving when we get our flying cars...
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:26PM
(hint: read to the bottom of the comment you replied to)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Freeman on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:07PM
Don't worry, you can slap a flying pig background on a Puppy Linux Distro, customize it to your liking, and release it as your very own Piglet..., er.. Puplet. ;-)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:33PM
This brings to mind one of my favorite OS-related stories.
When interviewed 12 years later, Sterling Ball (CEO of Ernie Ball, Inc.) used just that phrase [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [etmag.com] when asked if he would ever again use M$ products.
For those who missed the original story of the aftermath of the BSA raid in the year 2000:
Ernie Ball: Rockin' on without Microsoft [googleusercontent.com]
Note that CNET, ever the faithful M$ lapdog, has taken down the original page. [archive.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Informative) by goody on Thursday June 19 2014, @11:17AM
Statements like "OSX is a walled garden and not an OS" is why many of us, myself included, are not interested in OS holy wars. Instead of discussing anything constructive, people have to waste their time debunking statements like this. 20 years ago when I had more piss and vinegar in me I would relish these debates, but now the OS is a tool, and I use several tools, including Windows, Linux, and OSX. I can basically do whatever I want to on any of the three. It's unfortunate OS discussions today, especially smartphone OS discussions, are more about people calling other peoples' kids ugly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @11:56AM
See... that's the answer to Where has all the passion gone?: who, with some notable exception [soylentnews.org], would be passionate about an axe [soylentnews.org]?
On a more exciting topic... how do you like bacon?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:03PM
who, with some notable exception, would be passionate about an axe?
Any guitar player. Fender or Gibson? Guitar players are all passionate about their choice of axe.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday June 21 2014, @06:19AM
B.C. Rich Rich Bich!
She's named Rose and she has been with me longer than my wife of 30 years.....
And the mutant Givelson! (made from a Gibson body, a Charvel neck, and Jackson electronics.)
Yeah, passionate covers it pretty well....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1) by goody on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:31PM
Can't eat bacon. Cholesterol was too high. I'm now a part time vegetarian.
Yea, it sucks getting old, but it beats the alternative. :-)
(Score: 1) by q.kontinuum on Thursday June 19 2014, @10:43PM
Yeah, me to. I rarely eat meat between the meals (so, part-time I'm a full blown vegetarian), and during my meals I'm a second-level vegetarian. (I only eat vegetarian animals, assuming pigs and cattle are mainly fed with soy, hey etc.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:00PM
"Not an OS" is too stupid to debunk, of course it's an OS. It's also a walled garden, which is a good thing for many. There was a woman I worked with twenty years ago (before we got a network at work) who kept infecting our PCs with the Michelangelo virus. She should have bough a Mac rather than a Windows computer.
Linux can be a walled garden for less knowledgeable computer users (meaning non-nerds of course) since you get your software from repositories; normals aren't likely to apt-get anything. And to tell the truth I've found all the software I need in repos.
Windows 7 is an acceptable OS; I haven't put Linux on this old notebook yet, even if Windows does piss me off sometimes and is dog-slow compared to 'nixes.
Like you said, pick the right tool for the job and the user. Don't give the carpenter a shovel and expect him to build a house with it. Open Office is excellent for writing but its spreadsheet sucks, if you need a spreadsheet you really need Excel. If you need a database you need anything but MS Access, worst piece of shit DBMS I ever had the displeasure of using and I used dozens in my career, including NOMAD (a mainframe DBMS that ran under JCL).
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by goody on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:56PM
I even take issue with the "walled garden" claim, at least for OSX. (iOS, yea, that's a walled garden.) You can get into the guts of OSX. The first time someone came into the office with a Macbook and was having networking issues, I hopped on the machine, brought up a command prompt and ran ifconfig. I was a rather happy camper, having never touched OSX in my life. I'll admit you're not going to compile a kernel on OSX, but I guess I got that out of my system in the 90s with Linux and later with BSD. It was fun, and pretty much a requirement back in those days, but today it's just not really necessary with the distros we have. I've done some minor OS tweaking in the CLI with OSX. They do let you under the hood a bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @01:10PM
that will be next year together with the hoverboards. I'm more interested in the hoverboards actually.
The year of Linux on the desktop will happen when all the normal linuxdists comes with "runs any program" guarantee, so any package or binary you come dragging to it just runs and it doesn't have to be the right version of the right repository with the right animal name to work. and with wine built in ofcourse making Windows programs work just as good as the linux ones.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:27PM
So basically, magic. You're not a programmer, are you?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:05PM
Well I wouldn't have a good feeling about a programmer who calls binary compatibility and easy to use package management "magic".
It needs good binary compatibility; segregation of library versions so multiple can be installed at the same time; more useful package managers (current mainstream package managers are useful if the central package repository has the package and version you want, but if it doesn't, you're back to configure, dependency hell, configure, dependency hell, configure, make, fix, make, fix, make, bang head on wall, fix, make, make install).
Source-level compatibility is useless for most users. Compiling an old program and a dozen libraries from source because your distro's package repository hasn't got those versions of them is a waste of time and very inconvenient. Stuff breaks often. Compare to Windows, where you can download a 12 year old compiled application and the chances are it will probably run perfectly.
Until a user can just download an old executable, or the latest version of LibreOffice straight from the website the day it's released, and (like on Windows) it runs with no compiling, fixing or Googling for error messages, Linux is, I'm sad to say, not ready for the mainstream desktop.
Source: Enthusiastic Linux desktop user and programmer.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday June 19 2014, @01:29PM
OSX is a wallen garden not an OS
Really? How is it any more a walled garden than windows xp?
IOS, sure, that's a walled garden. One that works really well for an appliance, but OSX?
I don't use OSX that much, mainly to test software I write on my main (linux) laptop, sometimes as a second screen. The macbook air is a nice piece of hardware for portability and battery life. My T410s does the brunt of work though.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @03:22PM
One button, endless possibilities [theonion.com], huh?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:05PM
smartphones are not computers
Turn in your nerd card! In 1970 there wasn't a computer on Earth as powerful as your phone. Your phone has a CPU, RAM, storage, a screen, and input devices. It most certainly IS a computer by any definition of the word.
And smartphone OSes (Apple and Android, anyway) are far better suited to their form factors than desktop OSes. I shouldn't have to move the mouse pointer off of text when I'm typing, alt+n should should produce an ñ, etc.
That said, every OS (except maybe Windows 8) has its strengths and shortcomings. Linux is faster, more stable, and has more features than Windows, but often you have to wait quite some time for drivers if you have bleeding edge hardware. It took five years for all the extra buttons in my wireless keyboard to work, but it came with Windows drivers.
Doing art or music? Get a Mac. PC games or you need a decent spreadsheet? Windows. Programming, writing, or just about anything else, Linux or BSD.
Use the right tool for the job.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:33PM
Other than the obligatory whooosh, what else would you like me to say?
(seems like age does indeed impair either the perception of humour or the expression of it)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:46AM
The thing is you have too many that treat that shit like a religion so any and all discussion other than "product X is evil, product Y is the only way!" will just get shit flung and who the hell wants to deal with that shit? Right before the whole beta bullshit got me to bail from Slash i had blocked any and all articles to do with FOSS, Linux, or GNU anything because it was NOTHING but flame wars and circle jerks, that's it. Either you got "you are a filthy cocksucker" or you got "gee Biff isn't product X swell? Why it sure is Skip and product X is maintained by people so pure their farts cure cancer!".
So there really is no point in OS articles, there just isn't, as it never goes anywhere healthy. Sadly its become like politics where you can't have any talk of the issues thanks to the "us versus them" crap, in the old days we could have a good 100+ thread going arguing the merits of file systems or driver models or CPU arches and it was VERY informative and even if you didn't agree you'd leave with something to think about. Today you wouldn't even make it to post 10 before you had an ACtard spewing shit like a 14 year old Halo player and derailing the whole thing.
Which reminds me...hey admins? Hi, could we pretty please have a "NO AC" button, please please please? there is ZERO point in having them in a thread where discussion is taking place as the very nature of AC is to shit on a page, never to see it again, so no response or dialog can be built, and surfing at +2 really doesn't work as there are registered users that post something that goes against groupthink that gets downmodded...for an example look at how Ethanol fueled is often modded down by the politically correct even when he isn't saying anything deserving of being modded down. So I really don't think its too much to ask to just have a "NO AC" button, maybe a little icon by the user's UID if they turn it on so ACs know not to bother. it saves them wasting their time as those that don't like ACs won't respond (if you can't take 2 minutes out of your day to make an account I'm not taking 10 out of mine to respond to you) while at the same time it allows those UID posts that may not be popular to still be seen. How bout it guys?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by fleg on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:09AM
if the ...
>"NO AC" button
just puts...
>a little icon by the user's UID
so...
>ACs know not to bother.
i somehow dont think thats going to stop them.
but anyway, maybe i'm just not seeing the posts you are but i find the AC's
here to be a lot better than at the other place. check out Arthur "gewg" Scargill
for instance.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:30PM
i somehow dont think thats going to stop them.
It might. Some Slashdot users have signature lines saying that they have ACs blocked so they simply won't see any AC replies. This of course doesn't prevent an AC from replying, but if the OP isn't going to see it, what's the point? If you're an AC and just want to make a post to the world at large, in reply to the OP's post, you'll post anyway. But if your intention is to either troll the OP, or try to engage the OP in some sort of debate (or argument, though this could be seen as a troll), then you're just wasting your time if the OP isn't even going to see your reply.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @09:07PM
check out Arthur "gewg" Scargill for instance.
He has. I'm #1 on his list. [soylentnews.org]
His broad generalizations can't stand up to distinct examples of his wrongness and he can't handle someone who shows up loaded for bear.
He especially can't stand it when it is pointed out that the trolling he is doing has been debunked to him before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill [wikipedia.org]
I wasn't familiar with that name, but I like the cut of his jib.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by fleg on Friday June 20 2014, @03:07AM
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill
>I wasn't familiar with that name, but I like the cut of his jib.
i thought you might ;)
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday June 20 2014, @01:31AM
Nooo, maybe I didn't explain this well, here let me try again. the "NO AC" would 1.- Remove ALL AC POSTS from the page so the one that used the NO AC button wouldn't even know they existed. They could always turn the button off if they wanted to see the AC posts but I bet many are like myself and consider ACs as nothing but a "hey lets troll!" option so would keep it on. This would greatly differ from the current system of having to surf at +2 just to keep ACs off the page as this still allows those who are sockpuppeting to mod up their AC trollposts and it blocks legit UID users who have a controversial post from being seen.
The second thing it would do is 2.- Let the AC trolls know that while those that have allow AC on will see their post there is NO POINT in trying to troll this person as they will NEVER see it. As it is now even though I have it clearly marked I won't respond AC trolls still try to post their shit at me because they hope i might be surfing at -2 that day. this way they will clearly see that "nope he won't even see this or know I tried to troll him" which frankly should cut down on the amount of AC garbage troll posts, especially if those with UIDs that have high rated posts have NO AC on, as I have noticed the AC trolls will often try to attatch to the high rated posts to get more views to their trolling.
so as you can see it would help BOTH those that have UIDs that don't want to deal with the cesspit that is AC posts (seriously if you are too fucking lazy to spend 2 minutes making an account why should I waste 10 minutes responding to you when you will never see it anyway?) while hopefully making the threads more readable for everybody by taking a huge incentive to troll (to be confrontational and stir shit) out of the equation.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 20 2014, @02:13PM
Couldn't you achieve the same thing by setting the 'Anonymous modifier' on http://soylentnews.org/users.pl?op=editcomm [soylentnews.org] to -6?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:29PM
Not to deflate your argument or anything, but I've had better conversations with some ACs than I've had with you.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:11PM
Yes, agreed. I find his anti-Linux rants and Microsoft love hilarious. I wouldn't have rated his comment "troll" though, I'm guessing one of his customers reinfected their computers and bitched him out for "not fixing it". What ever, he's obviously in a bad mood today.
Most of the ACs here actually make good posts, unlike the green site.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:51PM
The Linux driver model is garbage, I have an easy and simply reproduce-able test that shows the Linux driver model is garbage, if you don't like it? Tell Linus Torvalds to join the 21st (hell the 20th, the man is nearly 50 fricking years behind now) century and use a driver model THAT WORKS. What is funny is that you and the other FOSSies try to defend his broken driver model when it doesn't have anything to do with FOSS it has to do with bad design because....get ready for bricks to be shat....BSD PASSES THE HAIRYFEET CHALLENGE WITH FLYING COLORS! Its just a shame it doesn't have support for enough devices to be used as a mainstream OS but thanks to BSD having a sane driver model if the driver works with foo? It works with foo+1 as it should.
But you can try to use fallacies like attacking the messenger all you want, I have the proof that the Linux driver model doesn't work and not a single distro has passed the challenge yet. I mean for the love of God I can take Win2K, a fricking 14 year old OS and update it from RTM to EOL and THE DRIVERS WORK, I can take XP, a 13 year old OS and do the same, and I will take the Pepsi challenge using Windows Vista against any Linux mainstream distro released in the same quarter and go from RTM to current and MY drivers WILL WORK, the Linux distro? WON'T. If you don't like it go bitch at Torvalds not me, its not my fault he is old and refuses to grow up.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @10:18PM
It has been pointed out to him numerous times that people who want ~10 years of service from a Linux install on the same hardware[1] without having to reinstall, can get that with RHEL
or with (gratis RedHat derivatives) CentOS or Scientific Linux.
-1 Troll (yet again)
[1] How many times have you actually seen that requirement?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 20 2014, @03:12PM
Okay, fine. Let's see it. Post it somewhere. We totally aren't going to find a reason to reject it out of hand like all the counterarguments people have offered you over the however many years you've been yelling about this.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 20 2014, @05:06PM
I saw his challenge, it's bullshit. I'm running the latest kubuntu distro on a ten year old computer and it runs everything just fine.
OTOH when my work upgraded from W98 to XP, FoxPro 6 no longer worked, and when my then teenaged daughter ruined my W98 install in 2002 by installing Sony's trojan on it from a CD she bought at the store she worked in, I'd lost the CDs with video and audio drivers and they were nowhere to be found on the internet. I bought a copy of XP, and it had no drivers for the audio chip on the motherboard. I wound up installing Mandrake on it, everything worked and the computer was a hell of a lot faster.
I don't think harryfeet is a troll, I think he's wantonly ignorant, much like far right and far left political nuts.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 4, Funny) by davester666 on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:12AM
Windows X.Y sucks, Windows A.B is/was/will be so much better.
MacOSX isn't absolutely terrible, but Apple hardware is overpriced, because they don't sell a $100 netbook.
Linux is fabulous, except the UI keeps changing. And everything needs to be configured so you can use it. Next year, everybody will be running linux at home on their desktop computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @09:42PM
Next year, everybody will be running linux at home on their desktop computer
The delivery date of the Valve-specified Steam Machine (with a Linux-based OS) has been pushed back to next year. [google.com]
At that point, we'll see how prevalent Linux boxes become in the general population.
(Cheaper without the M$ Tax.)
How reconfigurable those will be as general-purpose boxes will be interesting.
...and, since many a guy views his handheld thingie as his "desktop", let's mention the SteamBoy, also due shortly.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by quadrox on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:09AM
I appreciate getting the OS stories, just to keep up to date. I do read them, but I will only comment if there is something noteworthy to comment on.
The Linux 3.14 one I missed completely somehow. Ubuntu I won't comment on further until their next big fuck-the-user implementation. Debian LTS was interesting to know, but not much worth discussing in my view.
But even if there is little discussion on these stories, I don't come here ONLY for the discussion, I also come for the stories. So please keep posting!
(Score: 1) by clone141166 on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:29AM
I bought a new USB3 4-bay external HDD enclosure the other day. It wouldn't show all 4 HDDs in Linux, only the first one; all kinds of USB errors in dmesg output. Upgraded from 3.2.X to 3.14.X kernel and now it works wonderfully.
<3 kernel 3.14
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:09AM
The first link had four comments, the second had 31, I didn't even check the third. Those comment counts are about average for this site, 31 is actually pretty good. What was your point?
PS - Has anyone installed Debian GNU/Hurd? Would it be safe to call it 'Debian GNU' rather than 'Debian GNU/Hurd'? I mean, the whole OS is GNU, so there's no need to assuage the ego of that foul-mouthed Finn.
(Score: 5, Informative) by forsythe on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:58AM
I have done some work with GNU/Hurd in the past (Which, as per recommendations, should be referred to with the GNU prefix the first time it is brought up, and then may be referred to as "Hurd" or perhaps "HURD" because everyone knows what you're talking about at that point). I could give a very extensive writeup, but the problems with Hurd (from my viewpoint) are:
1) Mach. Hurd was designed with the intent of the kernel being a drop-in replacable part, but Mach was really the only usable microkernel when it was developed, so Mach got grafted in pretty heavily. Nowadays, a dev team could choose between myriads of L4-based kernels (including my favorite, SeL4), Mach, some of the L3 splinters, etc.
2) Drivers. Somewhat the same as above, but HURD really needs drivers. It doesn't have a USB stack or sound support. When I used it, one of my main goals was using Zheng Da's work with DDE to bring the Ethernet drivers out of kernelspace into userspace, where they should be for a proper microkernel system. But there were really only two drivers that Hurd had been designed to use: e1000 (a very generic one) and ne2k (for which it is pretty damn hard to build a computer, because the damn thing takes an ISA slot). ne2k was more heavily used, because it was supported by Qemu. This leads to a vicious cycle, in which drivers aren't developed unless they can be tested with Qemu, and it's hard to get Hurd off Qemu and onto metal because it probably doesn't have drivers to support what you're running. Thinkpads seem to work pretty well, surprisingly.
Theoretically, with DDE you can just magically port over a Linux 2.6-style (this includes 3.x) driver, compile it, and run it as a translator. In practice, this isn't quite so easy, and in order to compile things you have to start juggling different branches of Hurd, Glibc, Pthreads, DDE itself, etc. If anybody out there is a masochist, try building Glibc with full Pthread support natively on Hurd. I saw it done once time with Glibc 2.14, but never again.
3) Debian is the only real distro of Hurd. Debian is a fantastic group of people, but they patch the hell out of their software. This is good (because they make patches, and submit them upstream) and bad (everybody developing Hurd runs Debian Hurd, so they all have the Debian patches, so there are weird discrepancies between the source tree and what everybody is actually USING).
Aside from that, I very much like the concept of Hurd, and when I was running it there were some really cool things that I saw with it. For example, I once observed the translator* that handled forking fail. This meant that no new processes could be started if they required a fork() (or something, it was a while ago and I'm fuzzy on the details). However, by luck the `settrans` program that was required to fix this didn't trip this up. So, from userspace, I restarted a core part of the system, and magically everything worked again. It's one thing to know ``Almost everything is in userspace'', but it's another thing to actually see it hands on. There are other, questionably cool things I've seen, like the TTY translator putting itself to sleep because there's been no keyboard input for a while, then being impossible to wake up because you need a way to give keyboard input. That's been fixed now, but it's pretty cool that the system is set up in such a way to even allow that sort of bug. Hurd is incredibly modular, albeit there's only one module for everything.
Another translator that's very cool to see working is the ftp translator. You can mount an ftp server as a filesystem, use it as a working directory, perform fancy redirection with pipes and such on the contents, and all you notice is some heavy network activity. That's nothing any other OS can't do these days (especially with Linux's module system, Fuse and some hacking), but it's cool to see it ingrained into the system on such a low level.
TL;DR: Hurd is awesome, but there are problems with the design and problems with the implementation. But it's awesome.
* If you don't know what a translator is, think of it as a driver that runs in userspace, but far, far more than hardware. If you do know, please forgive my generalities.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:36AM
See, this sort of post is why it's good to have the OS discussion, flame wars or not. That was an interesting read about Hurd that wouldn't exist if not for the OS summaries.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 19 2014, @11:29AM
Are you sure there weren't PCI versions made? Linux has a PCI driver for that card called ne2k-pci.
(Score: 2) by monster on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:52PM
If I recall correctly, not only there was at least one ne2000 derivative PCI card, but also there used to be many cheap cards which would support the same driver with some kind of emulation in the card itself.
Admittedly, it was many years ago (think kernel 2.2.x) and even then performance was better in native mode.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:08PM
I may very well be wrong on that. Perhaps the Hurd driver only encompassed the ISA version?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @12:20PM
Thanks very much for the very informative post. I'm glad to hear that Thinkpads do well with Debian GNU/Hurd, I have an old x-series that I will be trying Hurd on at some point in the future.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:34PM
Sounds very interesting, but what about performance? Is having almost everything in userspace a significant hindrance to performance?
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:20PM
A bit of a mixed bag. Most of my work was in Qemu, which naturally had extremely bad performance (Qemu allows you to give the CPU to a guest OS natively, which sped things up immensely, but not quite to bare metal speed, and it introduced some instabilities that I was never able to track down). I did manage to install Hurd on an old PIII machine, and it seemed to perform fairly well there. I could run X11, have a few xterms open, compile some software, etc.
From a theoretical side, however, Mach has terrible IPC. Much of the work that was done after Mach was figuring out how to make IPC fast, since in a microkernel system that is arguably the kernel's main job. It's not so bad as to be noticeable from a user perspective most of the time, but there are some things that you can do to trigger it. Again, I'm talking from muddled memories here, but I think if you invoke gcc with the -pipe option on anything of significance, you might get lower/less stable performance than if you let gcc use temp files. I imagine that if I tried to run a web server on Hurd, I would see slower performance compared to monolithic kernels that might be explainable by IPC (as opposed to general development starvation).
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:42PM
How does "Debian GNU/Hurd" in any way "assuage the ego of that foul-mouthed Finn?" I assume you're aware Hurd != Linux.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:20AM
...between you and the work you're trying to get done. Personally I'd like a Debian flavor on all my devices but work seems to think I do better on windows 7, my wife prefers OSX Leopard, and my phone runs Android. At this point I'm nearly OS agnostic but Windows and OSX tend to piss me off the most, I feel powerless without my apt tools, and Android feels so artificially limited. While tradition dictates a car analogy, comparing them to politicians fits much better. They promise you the world, take all your resources, are incompatible with others, work slower the longer they are installed, they need your approval for the most trivial things but do the most devious things in secret, panic when you need them the most, and give up when it's too hard.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:24AM
And BSD is a mystery to me. I hear it exists, but I've never seen a living specimen.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Thursday June 19 2014, @10:46AM
You usually don't see BSD, it's just there, quietly doing its job in a non-dramatic way. Netflix uses FreeBSD, for example. I run a couple of sites on a FreeBSD server and I don't think I'd use any other OS on a server - it's that good. You have finegrained control over every single process running on your system; it's engineered for stability and security, not convenience. I don't think it's a great desktop (PC-BSD is as good as it gets; pretty good actually, but still) but on a server, it's awesome and there you don't need a sound system or huge compatability with USB devices, etc.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by shadowknot on Thursday June 19 2014, @09:24PM
Not that they're really an option for everyday use given the hardware requirements but the same invisible but used argument can be made for the z-family of Operating Systems (z/VSE, z/OS, z/VM and z/TPF). If you've ever used a Visa, AMEX or other card then you've used one of these OSes. Most banks and credit unions use z-family hardware and OSes as their systems of record with AIX supplementing in many cases so that's another one to count as used but invisible. Of course, if you're a masochist with money to burn you could use Hercules or the IBM PDT and run z/WHATEVER as your primary OS. If you can find an old tape image of OfficeVision you could even have a pretty nifty productivity suite!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 20 2014, @02:26PM
Since we're on the subject of both Debian and FreeBSD -- have you used Debian/kFreeBSD on anything? I've been playing with it a bit and have been considering throwing it into a few VMs on a server I'm building. Seems like a good way to get the security and stability of BSD with the ease of Debian package management and such. I think it's still somewhat experimental, so probably not great for anything in "production", but it's worked quite well in the little bit I've played with it so far!
(Score: 1) by Freeman on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:37PM
That is possibly the best analogy I have heard regarding Operating Systems.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:27AM
I like news about different OSes, both mainstream and obscure, so I say keep them coming.
I just don't have much reason to get into a flame-war over it. They have different merits and uses; while I might vehemently complain about the ways that one pisses me off (Windows, generally), it doesn't mean that OS is worthless, and I'm not going to tell people they're wrong for liking something I don't.
There's nothing wrong with having civil discourse and leaving the "ur thing sux mine roolz" bullshit elsewhere, in my opinion.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by c0lo on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:37AM
The current version of Windows is not an OS. You know? An Operating System needs to... you know... facilitate or carry some operations.
Ok now, I admit: a computer with Win8 actually does something... I just don't know what it does (other than warming the climate, I mean) but I'm sure like death and taxes whatever it does can't honestly be called "operating".
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:20PM
Why do you keep it up with the X is not an OS?
Whether it's a great OS or the world's worse piece of shit, saying "Windows 8 is not an OS" is like saying "Yugos aren't automobiles".
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 20 2014, @02:08AM
(because I'm getting bored and subtle-or-not trolling may bring a bit a variety? Because I do have enough karma to burn?)
Or maybe because, with the rare occasion of something truly experimental, discussing about OSes is nowadays like "gardeners talking about their hoes" (which is the stupidest topic some gardeners could discuss about)? Therefore the where's the passion? question has greater chances to receive mundane answers than it has to elicit passionate discussions?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:39AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:33AM
Seriously. What about *BSD? or other nixes? or free non-*nixes
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:46AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:03AM
Everything is either Unix crap or Windows crap.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:48AM
Those articles won't show up unless people keeping up with relevant news submit them. Someone primarily spending time on sites that focus on more mainstream OSes is unlikely to see news about a little-known one, and is even less likely to be able to tell whether the news is important or old-hat.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by migz on Thursday June 19 2014, @05:57AM
Having used slack, openBSD, debian, OSX, solaris, (+dos 2.11 thru XP) in my day job, I can say the war is over. The code is cross platform, if it's not you're doing it wrong. Osx is worth every penny as a user (tell the PHB's its proper Unix). OpenBSD is really more secure, but anything out of the ordinary will have you in a compile and patch fest from hell, and when you stuff up it will be your own fault.
Debian is the shiz. We narely went Ubuntu, and they started throwing out command line switches and replacing them with binary crud, and other craziness. Served as a good desktop for about 2 years, but even if they fix that, I'm never trusting a server to those loons.
Last year was the year of android on the phone. Micro$oft is a dead man walking, the don't have the depth of IBM, sell your shares.
Need a replacement for my macbook pro in about 2/3 years, thinking HP Slate with keyboard dock, battery, usb-ports thingie.
Am super interested in wiggly bits though, like kernel big-lock improvements, user space drivers, Haiku etc.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Subsentient on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:38AM
Windows 8 is a fractal trainwreck, OS X is evil, Linux is Linux, BSD is BSD (and getting better, actually), and Haiku still needs to release a beta.
AROS is an interesting and wonderful OS. If I were experienced with GUIs I might help them.
Smartphones are even more evil than they were when I called them evil the first time, tablets are fading as people regain their sanity and use a fucking keyboard again, Android is evil because Google is evil, and iOS is a locked down turd sandwich with congealed armpit sweat sauce on the side.
So, in short, there's not really any credible threat to Linux as the other two OSes have gone further down hill to the point I sometimes pity Microsoft, so I use my SubLinux with Epoch init and the days roll by faster than before.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Insightful) by panachocala on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:12AM
The only credible threat is Linux itself copying the others with inane UI features. I started off with Ubuntu but it became unusable with gnome3, then I tried a bunch in quick succession - mainly shiny turds, then Mint/MATE but after putting XFCE on top I find it so much snappier I'm converted. It's still annoying, don't get me wrong ;)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:37PM
Exactly. The main threat to Linux is shooting itself in the foot. Luckily, forking in Linux/FOSS isn't very hard, so when one group of people drink too much Kool-Aid, another group of people is able to fork their earlier work and continue on. But there is a lot of foot-shooting going on, between Ubuntu with Unity and the Amazon lens, and Gnome.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:30PM
Meh, I've used KDE since Mandrake and have been happy with it. Tried Gnome once, hated it. Didn't like Ubuntu but I'm happy with kubuntu.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:38PM
I'm a longtime KDE user, but the (sad) fact is that Gnome has long had a much larger userbase and a lot more visibility for some reason.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 20 2014, @05:09PM
True, but irrelevant to me. As long as KDE is around Gnome doesn't bother me a bit.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 20 2014, @02:40PM
Perhaps that's why Arch keeps slowly, slowly gaining year after year. There's a video on YouTube from some Linux conference or something, 'Why Linux Sucks' (and also 'Why Linux Doesn't Suck -- this guy Lunduke does the same two talks every year I think) where he shows a graph of "market share" (from Distrowatch) and makes a joke that, while other distros rise and fall, Arch just keeps gaining 1% year after year. Seems like it's picking up a lot faster lately though, as there's numerous new distros based on Arch (Antergos; Manjaro)...anyway, I think the reason is they can't really shoot themselves in the foot because they don't do anything! Pretty hard to pull a Unity when the system doesn't even pre-install a DM...or X...or even the OS itself ;)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:33PM
He's showing weakness! Quick, beat the pity out of him!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:28PM
tablets are fading as people regain their sanity and use a fucking keyboard again
In what universe? [guim.co.uk] Don't you have a Google? [pcpro.co.uk]
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:51AM
Probably the articles are absent since we are more of a community (in pre-web2.0 sense of the word) here than at the other site, we seem to aim more for a good time discussing the articles then to have heated arguments with emotions running high.
Or it could be that today all the major OSes (*BSD, Linux, Win) are all "good enough" and only the UI and package-manager really differ.
Other than in specialized cases I have a hard time to get excited over OSes these days actually (then again - I really would love to read an article about a hard realtime OS, about PLCs and their OSes, and for that matter the current state of microkernels, or where AROS, ReactOS and Haiku currently are, and why Raspian still is at the 3.10 kernel [3.12 solves a lot of issues] - all of which would make for good weekend features).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:54AM
Nothing more to say.
Windows 8 is a farce. Mainframes haven't died (die JCL die!). Linux still winning server side. Others still edging in.
So. Just, waiting.
Next big step: portable user os where everyone carries their "desktop" around. Portable PAN server ala The things tgat make me....
My current phone can handle it hardware wise.
So, sit down and suck a red lolly while we wait for something new.
Ah, what the heck.
Today I started putting together a replacement for our existing stats engine. Inspired by Soylent Piwik is our test subject. Unfortunately it has to go on a windows server (do. NOT. ask.).
OMFG this blows compared to linux. Sigh.
On the bright side, piwik looks more usable than urchin
(Score: 1) by Freeman on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:40PM
Portable user os where everyone carries their "desktop" around... hmm..., for some reason that makes me think of Puppy Linux, or any Live OS on a USB drive.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 20 2014, @02:55PM
I think part of it is improvements in Linux in general too. A lot of the "holy wars" fighting was even between different distros a few years back, but these days it just doesn't matter all that much.
I remember maybe five years ago, if someone new to Linux asked me for a distro recommendation, my first questions were 'What are you installing it on? Desktop or laptop? How old is it? Do you know what brand the network card is? Graphics card?" And then you'd look at that and say something like 'OK, standard well supported hardware, they can probably use anything' or 'Hmm, that's kinda weird, better look for a distro with better out of the box hardware support' or even 'Yeah I've had problems with Broadcom chips on Ubuntu, those tend to be easier to set up with Mandriva.'
But today it just doesn't matter much. Now the first question I ask now is 'Why Linux? What do you want from it?' Because unless the hardware is REALLY out there, you can pretty much go with Ubuntu or Arch or Fedora or whatever, and it all just works. And the package repositories are much better too, to the point where I can pretty much find any package I need in any distro's repositories. Only difference is if you're typing 'apt-get install' or 'yaourt' or 'urpmi'
And with everything going web it doesn't matter what distro, doesn't matter what OS, as long as you've got a web browser 90% of use cases are satisfied. Hell the only software I really run at home anymore is a web browser, a text editor, and a terminal. I barely even use a word processor...
(Score: 3, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Thursday June 19 2014, @09:05AM
... when you can wait for mod-points to make your point from a sniper perspective? If I participate I can't downmod the evil fanboys of %YOUR_PERSONAL_OS_NEMESIS% anymore :-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Thursday June 19 2014, @03:58PM
If you're going to use Windows variable syntax, even in jest, you should post AC. :-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by q.kontinuum on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:35PM
Not, when I specifically refer to YOUR_PERSONAL_OS_NEMESIS, and not, when TFA more or less explicitly asks for more trolling ;-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @10:39AM
The passion died in a walled garden. With each corporation creating its own walled garden to deliver DRM content from the copyright industry, and a padded cell of corporate-supplied development tools that work only for that walled garden, and a reinvented wheel of UI, ORM, etc frameworks, what is there to get excited about except the latest flattened, scrambled-up user interface?
UNIX in some form underlies everything but Windows, and Windows is synonymous with doing boring work in spreadsheets, so there's not much left to get passionate about. Innovation in OSes has largely stopped.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:40PM
Where has all the passion gone?
young girls picked them everyone
when will they ever learn...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:40PM
There's still some very interesting work going on in the Linux kernel (and some other kernels; go read some guy's post about HURD above), but that's rather esoteric and if you're not interested in really low-level stuff like that, you won't be interested.
But for everything else, you're right, there just isn't much going on, except people trying to copy the latest ugly, flattened, touch-oriented UIs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by joekiser on Thursday June 19 2014, @10:54AM
I am not running Linux. The OpenBSD article I sent here a few months ago gathered about as many comments as any OpenBSD article on the old site would.
My smartphone is running QNX. Yesterday, the major "tech news" sites announced that my phone would start running Android apps from the Amazon App store. That's cool story brah, except just about everybody who has one of these QNX-powered smartphones has already been running Amazon App store with no issues for the past six months. So why comment?
I posted on OSNews about Linux 3.15, and got downmodded to hell for suggesting that some people actually like using proprietary drivers, and for pointing out the hypocrisy of people who call out others for not using OSS *everywhere*. I still stand by my comments, and I didn't see the need to rehash the conversation here.
I'm not sure if it is a lack of interest in operating systems, as much it's an overall trend that SoylentNews is not getting the pageviews it had 3 months ago. None of the articles break triple-digits on the comments section anymore, and many struggle to break into double-digits.
Debt is the currency of slaves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:02PM
and got downmodded to hell for suggesting that some people actually like using proprietary drivers
Not surprising.
For me I do not mind using one or the other just so long as they work. Having the source is 'nice' but not necessary for most of what I work on. For the parts that I do work on, yeah I want the code. But usually more to see what they are expecting not what they documented.
The thing is open source has really succeeded and really failed at the same time. Take for example openssl. *EVERYONE* was using it. Yet no one really owned it. There are hundreds of libraries/projects out just like that. We use them every day and they need mucho TLC but have not had any fixes for 10+ years. Even just to bring them up to somewhat modern coding standards and practices or even get a bug fixed and mainlined. It shows in the support of many projects which varies wildly from spot on help to 'reformat your computer and sacrifice a chicken'.
You could argue they are 'done'. Then you look at the bug lists. They are usually far from done. Usually just abandoned in place. At least there is a chance (however remote) someone may pick it up. But that usually rarely happens.
Take for example one of the latest compression programs 7-zip. That guy has done awesome work. At least he has not abandoned it, yet. Yet he has not checked into the repo in 5 years. No one on the boards is saying 'hey check in, let me help'. There are plenty of people standing around to glue libraries together. But very few to make and maintain the libraries.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:37PM
I suspect part of the reason for the OSS drivers shouting is that the more people say they are satisfied with closed-source drivers, the more the quality of the OSS ones decrease/stagnate because the companies have less motivation to work on them.
Or at least, that's the reason I would use. Maybe it's more simple and just knee-jerk.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Funny) by damnbunni on Thursday June 19 2014, @12:55PM
Hey, I'm using AmigaOS 4.1.6 here. I'm just waiting for some Atari losers for a proper flamewar.
Or maybe a RiscOS schmuck. (Planted any Acorns lately?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:09PM
what is the last version that runs on a 68k? a real amiga I mean...
ofcourse newer is not always better, what is really best of DOS and ProDOS for apple2?
(Score: 1) by damnbunni on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:11PM
Well, you can get AmigaOS 4.1 for the Amiga 1200/3000/4000, but it requires a PPC card.
The last 68k-native version was 3.9. 4.1 has a pretty good 68k emulator though; most 'system legal' 3.x programs run just fine.
Basically, if it would work on a 'real Amiga' with aftermarket sound card and video card, it'll work in 4.x. And there's a 'Run In UAE' function for stuff that demands original-chipset hardware.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:11PM
Are you sure you're not just waiting for it to finish displaying the contents of your floppy in the filer window?
Seriously, I did have an Atari briefly, but I'm sure as hell not going to take the side of TOS and GEM in a flamewar!
I did try to revisit the old times by booting up RISC-OS on my Raspberry Pi... but at the end of the day it just felt like a rather clunky 25-year-old operating system - nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I just wish Xara would produce an OS X version of Xara Designer (great-grandson of Artworks) so I didn't have to keep Windows around...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by damnbunni on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:19PM
| Are you sure you're not just waiting for it to finish displaying the contents of your floppy in the filer window?
Alas, this thing doesn't have a floppy drive. Reading old Amiga floppies takes a special PCI controller that, obnoxiously, lacks decent AmigaOS 4 drivers.
I actually stuck a small SSD in here - because it's silent, fast, and you don't need a *large* drive for the thing.
AmigaOS 4 is pretty weird, technically. It's 32 bit, which limits it to 4 gigs of RAM. They don't want to screw up compatibilty too much by going 64 bit, so they're implementing - get this - bank switching.
Bizarre.
On the other hand, it's loads of fun to screw around with, which is why I have it. (I have other computers too. But I use this one a lot.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dwilson on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:24PM
Where has the passion gone? What place does passion have in my choice of operating system. I use what I use (Linux Mint, at the moment) because it more or less does what I need it to. If it does something that annoys me, or something is clearly broken, then I wade in to the internals of it and, being that it's open source, I have a fighting chance of fixing the problem or changing it's behavior.
And if it becomes more of a pain in my ass then I'm willing to put up with (As did Ubuntu, and Gentoo before it), then I look for an alternative and make the switch.
If you want to arouse my interest in an OS story, make it about some technical issue or detail, not a watered-down marketing fluff piece about the latest release of Brand X.
- D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19 2014, @06:06PM
yeah more of technical details would be nice, say for example a discussion of automatic file versioning would be interesting.
But sure, news about a linux dist that promises to *not* change the userinterface and stuff and let me *not* upgrade for ten years at least, while still getting bugs removed (and let me getting new versions of applications if I want but not forcing it) would be wonderful... I guess I can just dream :)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:31PM
Many people have found their favorite OS and won't take rational arguments or is just stuck in some dependency hell from PHB policy or weird binary that must have environment X to run. And version cycles are predictable and won't change anything about real life in a big way.
The only interesting was to read about GNU Hurd. Though I did know what what was written before reading anyway. But that OS has some neat paradigms. We just need it to go BSD and work with hardware that you can actually buy now..
(Score: 2) by skullz on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:31PM
From my perspective the only real change to an OS has been Windows 8 and it's interface, which is quite good for a touch screen. That's about it on the workstation / tablet front.
The real interesting stuff I have seen is with the meta-OSs such as VMWare, Xen, LVM, and now the http://www.docker.com/ [docker.com] workup. More and more I see the actual OS just being a tool to support the larger structure (OpenStack) and abstract the hardware interfaces. Still some very interesting problems on the server OS side but it is more of a slow iteration than something really new.
So, from a workstation perspective Win 8 is the only new thing. Windows just works. Linux just works. Android has terrible security options but it just works. Why would you even think about an OS if it is doing its job, namely running your applications and staying out of the way?
(Score: 1) by turgid on Thursday June 19 2014, @08:08PM
Operating System features have converged on the unix feature set, so to speak, traditional unix has gone, Linux prevails with BSD and OSX close behind. Windows clings on as a remnant of a bygone era and the walking corpse of VMS.
For a while there were interesting things about like Plan 9, Inferno, Amoeba and others. They've never made it into the mainstream. The advantages must not be worth the extra effort (yet).
Nowadays, people (in general) are only interested in the features and behaviours of GUIs. The underlying technology is irrelevant to 99.99% of people.
Over the years I kept trying to get into kernel work but always got diverted onto other things at the last minute. I've been on courses and hacked a couple of drivers and board support files in Linux (and a tiny bit of Solaris). The learning curves these days are huge since these systems are vast and mature.
Starting a hobby OS from scratch would be cool, but it's daunting. These days hardware is so complicated.
I suppose writing something to run on an emulator of some simple hardware would be a start (like Contiki OS [wikipedia.org]), but a very small one. The really interesting hardware these days is all multi-core, NUMA etc.
If I had more time, I think I'd try to write a little multi-tasking kernel for ZX Spectrum hardware in Z80 assembler or a home-made language...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by mister_playboy on Friday June 20 2014, @12:07AM
I've spent a lot of time hacking on Linux in past, but I've done relatively little of it since installing Arch Linux in January 2012. It was plenty of work to set up and was my first time building a system from the ground up, but since then it has just worked.
Even with all the structural changes to the filesystem, switching from grub to grub2 and from init to systemd, I've never been stuck with any problems. The worst that has happened is that occasionally pacman will require a bit of manual intervention before committing an upgrade, but in every case I have been able to find the answer to such issues on the Arch forum in less than 5 minutes. In those cases where I don't feel like messing with it, I just come back to the issue later, since my system is working perfectly fine in the meantime.
I thought I was moving to a bleeding edge distro, but no variant of Ubuntu I previously ran ever came anywhere close to this level of reliability. I don't even worry about my system, I just use it. The ultimate complement, I think.
Since then I have also started using Windows 7 for gameing. It has ups and downs compared to Linux, but it generally "just works", as well.