h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyway I thought Linux was founded on C and C++ with gcc and so forth.

hmm

-- DoctorMO --

C and C++ are fine if you don't mind worrying about low level details...

Personally I'd rather leave all that stuff to a compiler, it's considerably less likely to make mistakes than I am

C++ done properly doesn't actually involve much low-level stuff anyway... sure it's not as high-level as Haskell, but you don't need to go right down low if you don't actually want to - there are many, many things which don't require such things.

C is a bit of a different story, because there's no STL.

DoctorMO, Linux is pretty much C all the way - all the kernel, system libraries and so forth are C, as is XFree86. The only really, really major things in C++ at the moment are KDE, Mozilla and parts of OpenOffice. This is probably because there are two impressions among UNIX programmers:

1) C++ is inefficient (this is partially true, it's possible to write tighter code in C, but not by much with modern compilers)
2) C++ compilers are slow (this is true if you're talking about g++, which is *the* compiler for C++ on open source systems)

Personally, I use OpenBSD.

( you can quote me on this, I use it everywhere ) It's hard as hell to install, but it's stable as concrete.

I still can't get X to work, possibly because I've got a discontinued ( read: unsupported ) video card.
But the BSDs are good.

www.freebsd.org <- prime focus: usability
www.openbsd.org <- prime focus: security
www.netbsd.org <- prime focus: portability

Hmmm, can't say I've tried it...

Maybe something for a rainy day ... presumably they can be installed on random partitions like a Linux distro?

They are fairly well installable anywhere (unlike microsoft).

one of my test machines has many operating systems on it including dos6.22/win3.11, win95, freebsd 4.6.2, gnu hurd j1, debian linux and mandrake linux.

and this is only using 2 drives, one of which is only 1.2Gb.

most non microsoft operating systems are fairly stable, and most non-microsoft os's have the video (and other hardware) driver problem. This driver problem will go away to a large extent as linux gets even more popular, as people are already refusing to buy hardware that has no linux support, and are starting to preferentially buy hardware with open source driver support (using either staff programmers or just providing the data to the community).

once the driver data is out in an open source format, it can be converted for multiple operating systems.

Mmm, GNU/Hurd... I'm planning to try that at some point.

Impressive... my biggest achievement so far is a machine running Windows 98/XP and RedHat 7.2/8.0...

How is HURD, anyway? It's been in development for uh... quite some time...

Linus wrote his kernel because he got sick of waiting for HURD to be finished if I recall correctly...

Actually, he wrote Linux as a small project, it had nothing to do with him wanting a kernel for the GNU OS. That is, however, why it got so big.

it seems stable enough, but I can't give it a detailed report, because that machine is in for repairs at the moment (motherboard replacement ).

this is doubly annoying, as it has both my dvd drive and my cdrw on it.

but they do all seem very stable (except for the microsoft os's).

I think one of the major problems with HURD is that they haven't implemented most of the servers that will be needed for it to be used in a modern computing environment - some more filesystems would be highly useful, for example, and the hardware support is dreadful (unsurprising that, always the problem with a new OS and very, very hard to overcome).

Also, they want to change microkernels again...

there are a few problems with Linux, but compared to the tortus mess you put up with windows, it's nothing.

The Linux Army marches ever on...

-- DoctorMO --

There are always problems with any OS... it's incredibly difficult to write such a large piece of software and not have any - I think the human brain is just incapable of properly planning things that large, especially given that the perfect OS would have infinite potential for future expansion - and do that correctly you'd need to know what that future expansion would involve. Which is kind of tricky.

Still Linux is doing very well, and holds up remarkably under the occasional stress of the development tree having half its guts pulled out and re-worked, as has happened and is still happening in the current 2.5.x series.

What are they reworking it for speed or for features?

I know the WinXP (shudder) on my 1.3Ghz box loads about 8 times faster than Mandrake, but then again Mandrakes loading a pile of servers and loads of things...

-- DoctorMO --

One of the major speed enhancements that are being added in the development tree is the pre-emptible kernel (sp?)... Essential this means (as I understand it) that userspace programs will be given more flexibility to take processor/kernel time almost as and when required...
This will mainly affect sound/video, but does have knock-on effects for many other desktop uses (especially involving multiple windows)...

As for hardware support - I know they are including support for many of the OSS and ALSA modules in the kernel, also video framebuffers are being implemented...

There's loads of other stuff that I just can't get my head round at the moment.

As far as all these servers, etc that Mandrakes helpfully loading for you - unless your're actually using them it might be an idea to stop them... Not only will you notice an increase in speed, but there is always a greater security risk if there are more programs running... If you don't know what's running it's fairly unlikely that they've got all the latest security patches....

The major reworkings in the kernel are for all sorts of reasons - the IDE drivers weren't all that good, so they've been pretty much completely rewritten (and are still being stabilised). The dev_t struct, which holds information about devices attached to the system within the kernel, has been made bigger to allow for more devices to be connected. They've also been working on things like integrating preemptible kernel threads (as mentioned above), trying to get a better virtual memory system integrated, ports to more architectures and substantial improvements to existing ports and various things which will, among other things, allow software suspend to be supported much more easily.

They've also integrated ALSA into the kernel tree, and I think the aim is to take OSS out of the kernel at some future stage (3.0 would seem a sensible time for that, provided that doesn't come around too quickly for ALSA to fix up where they don't support things that OSS does and which people want support for).

There's a lot more than that too - the O(1) scheduler being one of the nice ones - because it's O(1) (constant time, in case you're not familiar with big-O notation), it takes the same amount of time to decide which process gets to run next no matter how many processes there are, which is obviously of great benefit to large servers.

Sounds like the Linux Development rolls on...

wounder if they will have suport for the suspected AMD 64bit chip...

-- DoctorMO --

It's already there. AMD have been providing some quite useful stuff to make sure at least one OS runs natively on x86-64... of course, Linux has also been ported to IA-64, but naturally any new port isn't going to be as stable as a long-established one like x86-32, which is the most complete and most used Linux port.

x86-64, hmmm lovly, wounder if you can have multipull prossesors with them...

-- DoctorMO --