[Gllug] Interesting article on the MS monopoly

[John Hearns]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 13:41, Bruce Richardson wrote:

> 
> There is no "Linux" in reality: it's a kit for building a working system
> and since my needs and wants are obviously significantly different to
> yours, there'll always be people building their kits in radically
> different ways because it suits them, because they can.  

Hear hear.

Hey, look! We have the Gentoo crowd, doing something radically
different - you download the source code and optimise your
own system.
You can, if you want, roll your own distribution from scratch.
You have ideas like Knoppix.
Can anyone imagine these ideas from the proprietary Unices?
(Solaris, HPUX etc.) You simply wouldn't be able to do it.
I remember as a fledgling sysadmin that a simple kernel tweak
and recompile for Solaris (using the kernel-only C compiler)
was a Big Thing.

Look at the embedded space - stripped down Linux distros for
PDAs, using BusyBox etc.
Look at bootable USB and CD distros, like Stresslinux for
systems testing and media player distros like Movix.
Hey - not all distros will use X. The media player ones will
use the framebuffer directly, with an interface usable by
IR remote controls.

In the high performance space, we already have ideas like
the Scyld distro and the heavily stripped down Clustermatic.
(The idea being to present a single system image on a cluster).
I expect to see more distros optimised for HPC as time goes on.

We'll also see more progress on Linux-HA type systems,
and failover clusters made easier (though I admit these will
be grounded on RH/SuSE/United Linux).


Doesn't this excite everyone?
Yes - desktop Linux is an exciting part of this too.





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