What Linux needs 13539

Daveman750

Inertia. Microsoft has been selling Windows preinstalled on every OEM machine since about 1990, over 1 billion Windows licenses have been shipped worldwide since the release of Windows 95, about 10 years ago.

Linux is making huge strides though. This year PC makers only shipped about 80 million new machines. During that same period, over 40 million Linux licenses have been shipped, downloaded, or registered.

In that same year, 100 million copies of FireFox were downloaded. In that same year, 30 million copies of OpenOffice were downloaded. Anyone know how many copies of cygwin have been downloaded?

Users are discovering open source and they like it. They haven't scuttled Microsoft, but they now see that Open Source is a huge enhancement to their computer.

There are many machines which fully support Linux, even though they are sold with Windows preinstalled. It's very easy to test. Take a live-cd version of Ubuntu, Knoppix, or SuSE LiveCD to your retail store, turn off the power to the computer, insert the live-cd, and boot it up. In most cases, you can tell in about 90 seconds exactly what will and will not be supported by Linux. Test a few boxes to see which has the best support. The best supported machines cost about 30% more because they have OpenGL based graphics cards, Linux compatible WiFi, and Linux compatible devices everywhere else.

When you choose the printer, check to see if it is supported by Linux. HP has promised that all of their printers will support Linux, but you can check. Lexmark also has a number of well-supported printers.

Most of the PC magazine benchmarks will tell you which devices support Linux and which ones only support Windows.

You wouldn't take a Porsche 911 on a Jeep trail would you?

Linux has this. It's called modprobe, and any vendor who wants to offer a binary-only driver only has to release the source code to the "probe". Again, if there is no probe for that hardware, don't buy that hardware.

There is absolutely no excuse for purchasing a "Windows Only", which machines are supported at:

Here's some hints: If the computer uses a FireGL video chipset - it's probably If the computer vendor offers the same model without Windows - buy it with Windows and it will easily run Linux.

it's probably on sale dirt cheap because they are on clearance sales, but avoid them like the plague. They won't run Linux and you will just get frustrated.

In most cases, binary driver modules can be downloaded from the web. The modules are so small that it really doesn't take much. Most modules are only a few kbytes, not even enough to fill a floppy, let alone justify an entire CD. Worst case, you can download some drivers, burn the packages to a CD, and have your own "custom collection".

And by the way, even many "unsupported" cards have drivers available at drivers.com and other for example nvidia:

Again, MUCH better to pick hardware that you know IS supported by Linux than try to pick hardware that ISN'T supported by Linux then whine because it's not supported. About 2-3 of all the different PC models now made by Sony, HP, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and Lenovo - are Linux friendly. You just want to avoid that 1-3 that are "hostile".

Yes. There are many old MS-DOS uses who remember NDIS and think of it as arcane, but there are many devices that are either too old or too primitive to use anything else. Again, far better to choose hardware that is known to support Linux then try to force it to run Linux.

Most people do NOT put drivers in the kernel. Compiling a custom kernel only makes sense when you know the configuration won't change, and even then you are buttuming that the hard drive containing the Linux image will never be moved to another machine.

In fact, most specialized Linux kernels are simply built with probes removed, to reduce the amount of time spent probing hardware you know you'll never need.

There is almost no advantage to built-in drivers instead of driver modules. At worst, a modprobe script can force the installation of specific hardware.

One of the problems with Windows and 3rd party software is that each application has their own vbrun libarary, or their own jvm and jre, or their own tools libarary. The result is that when several of these applications are loaded into the same machine at the same time, you get some serious conflicts and-or some serious memory consumption issues. Which would you rather have sucking up 1 gig of RAM on your PC, dozens of nearly identical libraries containing thousands of modules you will never use? Or hard drive buffers that will allow you to run your applications faster.

The biggest problem is when you have new libraries and older 3rd party software. In most cases, the new library will work, but the 3rd party software doesn't know that. In some cases you just have to "Force" the installation. In other cases, you can create a "bridge" install that simply tells the RPM manager that the newer library is equivalent to the older library. When libraries are updated, the developers should provide the backward compatibility bridge references.

The real issue is "DLL Hell". it's very easy to get strange interactions when one application tries to run from another application's "customized" DLL. The same is true with Linux shared libraries. Very often, when you do end up with these conflicts, you end up having to create a new "virtual machine". When you have 4-5 virtual machines on an 80 gig drive and 2 gig of RAM, things can get very very crowded.

The library issue is important, and it is being addressed by things like LSBv3.

The biggest problem is "name mangling", where fully qualified descriptive path names are reduced to 1-2 letters and the names of the arguments can't be easily identified. There is a similar problem with Java.

Yes. The problem is that if you have an application that loads VBrun4.dll and another application wants VBrun6.dll then you have 2 choices - try to run using VBrun, which will blow up because it's not v6, or specify Vbrun6.dll and have two 16 megabyte libraries trying to thrash through your L1-L2 cache.

With Linux, some standard libraries are provided, and every effort is made to maintain backward compatibility. If new interfaces are needed, they are packaged in separate "wrapper" libraries, or as uniquely identified new modules in the new library.

There are legal issues here. The shared library might come with Linux, but shipping it as part of a product can trigger additional licensing requirements.

In most cases, if the library once existed, I can usually download the correct version via the web. More often, if an older application can't find a new libarary, there is probably a fixpack which supports the newer library. Often, one can force the install, install the fixpack, and everything is back to normal.

So basically, what you are saying is that if one purchases a computer which was made for Linux, and one purchases a Linux distribution which provides a good robust suite of applications, and one uses 3rd party applications that provide updates to their products when libraries are updated, that Linux should be taking over desktops all over the place.

I've often advocated a "black-list" on this group. We should publish the names of any hardware that isn't supported by Linux, so that people know not to purchase that hardware, or computers which use that hardware. If Nvidia doesn't want to support Linux on their 9000dx cards but does support 9000gx cards (I made the model number up), then we should make sure that the 9000dx card tombstone is posted here, and this will allow Linux sites to add these cards to their "Hall of Shame".

Do you really think HP, Dell, Compaq, Lenovo, Sony, or Panasonic would really WANT to have several lines of their brand, showing their brand names - in the "Hall of Shame"?

If you can go to CompUSA and get a "Nascar Laptop" running AMD-64, and you see a Pentium 4, DirectX, Linux hostile 802-11b-g card for $68 plus 19, and you KNOW you want to run Linux, which one are you going to buy?

If you said the $68 plus 19 one because it's on clearance and you couldn't resist the price, all I can say is "a fool and his money are soon parted".

Rex Ballard