Linux users fret about desktop fate

CNet News ^ | Nov 4, 2003 | Robert Lemos

[D-fendr]

Can anyone explain to me why Apple can turn BSD into OSX but nobody seems to be able to do something similar with Linux on intel?

IMHO:

Linux is a committee effort, Apple is proprietary, it can move and decide faster.

Now someone like Novel could "do something similar with Linux on intel" but then it would be a proprietary system as well.

"Free" Linux is going to be slow in arriving with a "standardized" desktop that's suitable for consumer/home non-tech users.

Remember also that Linux is not Unix, so there's still some ground to catch up for it.

I also remember in the 90s when the holy grail was to bring Unix to the desktop with a decent GUI. It broke down in the various standards battles with each vendor trying to get its product to become the standard. (It also didn't help that Microsoft joined competing groups and gummied up the works.)

So, what Apple has done is quite remarkable and gives it a lot of room to grow bringing more and more features of FreeBSD to its product through new interfaces.

It's a remarkable product, IMO, and should logically be the alternative to Windows on the desktop for non-tech users at least until Linux is able to provide the same ease, simplicity, security and functionality to the consumer market.

FWIW.

[D-fendr]

Panther, the latest version of OS X does not include "Classic" on its install disk. However, you can load OS 9.2 and run in Classic mode concurrently.

The last Mac I bought was two years ago, OS X 1.1 and it came with OS 9 also.

I've since installed both 9.1 from an older system onto the newer Macs, and installed Panther on a much older iMac.

If you don't have install discs for older systems, I'm pretty sure you can download them free somewhere, perhaps from Mac, the upgrades are there from a long time back, so if you ever had a Mac or know someone who does...

However, OS X has been out long enough to finish the migration from v9 for most folks. I keep an OS 9 box to run those apps I haven't been able to justify upgrading to OS X. No, I don't believe you can buy a new Apple with OS 9 installed.

As for the price, you can get OS X on an iBook for about a grand, same price for eMacs and for a few hundred more you can get into a very good basic tower that is very price comparable to PCs, when you consider all you get with it - particularly if you consider all the security costs and hassles that Wintel adds to your life.

But, in the main, you're right, Apple is a hardware/software business model. There are efforts to port the OS to Intel, it's not that big a deal, but thus far Apple has been gunshy, likely for the reasons you indicate.

[goldstategop]

I have Lindows. It may be the only survivor of the Linux desktop wars. No telling if Novell's SUSE or Xandros' Version 2 will give it a run for the money.

[Myrddin]

I'm running RH 8.0 on one of my computers. It was a Windows 2000 machine before a win32 PE virus burrowed into the firmware on one of the cards in the machine. Once that happened, the virus would re-appear even after low level format of the hard disk, zero of the CMOS memory and re-flash of the motherboard BIOS. Very irritating. I put RH 8.0 on the machine so it wouldn't be a total loss.

The RH 8.0 is less likely to get nailed by a Windows virus floating around. It also gives me a UNIX like OS to host stuff like CVS. My python code runs portably between Windows 2000 and Linux, so it is fine either way. The loss of support for RH 8.0 will probably cause me to migrate the box to be a dedicated QNX 6.2.1 development system. I won't miss the goofy Ximian e-mail reader. It is damn irritating when I'm trying to clear the daily spew of SPAM.

[Cacique]

This might interest you ping.

[taxcontrol]

Sounds like you have some experience with QNX. I tried it and found that it ran slower - even slower than Windows.

Comments?

[Myrddin]

Sounds like you have some experience with QNX. I tried it and found that it ran slower - even slower than Windows.

I use QNX for real time data acquisition tasks. It runs beautifully on my 100 MHz 486 PC104 CPU. I wrote a device driver that allows sampling of 2 accelerometer channels at 50 KHz each and 16-bits of resolution. You can't even tell it is running. Concurrently with that sampling, I have a PPP process managing an internet link over a Kyocera 200 module (1XRTT), a Garmin GPS monitoring time and position, a TCP server feeding data to the locomotive over an 802.11b wireless LAN, DSP processes crunching the accelerometer data, a serial process talking rs485 to pull data off 7 bearing transmitter units, a PIC processor monitoring wheel speed and other processes. All that going on on a 100 MHz 486 in 32 megabytes of RAM and a solid state 128 MB disk module. Try that with Windows.

The only slow performance that I've witnessed on QNX 6 has been the Arcom VGA board during shutdown. The Arcom driver isn't particularly good at graphics on the PC104 stack. My development box is a PII 350 MHz Pentium with 384 MB RAM and 30 GB of disk. That machine has an ATI graphics board. It is MUCH snappier than my Windows 2000 machine running a similar ATI card on a 1.1 GHz Athlon CPU with 512 MB RAM and a 60 GB ATA100 disk.

There is one other area of slow performance that I need to fix in my current hardware suite under QNX 6.2.1. The boot process is managed by the "diskboot" executable. It appears to be probing for SCSI controllers, but I have only the Apacer solid state disk module (EIDE). The Apacer is ready to go in 1 second, but the SCSI probes for 7 targets with mandatory timeouts of 2 seconds per target causes a big delay in boot up. The "sloginfo" analysis program exposes the source of the delay, but doesn't explain what diskboot is touching. QNX 4.25 booted to fully ready in 20 seconds.

[wattsmag2]

Try getting 99% of PC users to understand a word you have said.

[mpreston]

SuSE 9.0 for the desktop. Installed the Pro version last night. Very easy, no problems, very few clicks. Installed it along side Win2K. Now have a dual boot system. Plus 9.0 resizes and reads NTFS partitions. Makes migration easy.

As for long term implications I think the Novell/SuSE is positive. Novell brings channel, SuSE and complete Linux product. This is a IBM / Novell+Ximian+SuSE partnership.

From Yahoo http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=2&u=/cmp/20031105/tc_cmp/16000245

"One mid-Atlantic Microsoft certified partner, who asked not to be named, said he was stunned by the news. "I'm desperately worried about Novell's acquisition. This gives them a Linux server story in a spot where Microsoft has been struggling to compete. If Novell can bridge its still-large installed base of NetWare and this new Linux stuff, and integrate with Active Directory--which they can via Samba--they have a story," he noted. "The fact that you can now connect Linux and Windows environments without the CAL [client access license] implications is, or should be, frightening to Redmond. This is Microsoft's worst nightmare: a dedicated competitor that hates their guts and has the resources to fight."

[RogueIsland]

While Red Hat Linux won't be available at retail, the company is supporting a community project, Fedora, to create distributions based on cutting-edge Linux technology.

Everyone seems to be overlooking this. From what I've been reading, Fedora is pretty darn good, and the support for it is community based.

[Billthedrill]

Now as far as Novell and SUSE, this is a big deal.

Decidedly. Novell is positioning themselves for a serious run on corporate accounts with SUSE as the desktop and applications server environments, Netware (still incredibly stable and efficient) for file and print services, and they gave in to the Webserver standard some time ago (either v5.1 or 6.0, I forget) by incorporating Apache instead of something proprietary - they were playing with WebSphere for awhile in there too. Starting at Netware v5.1 it even looked like Linux when it booted up (greenie-weenies inside brackets, that sort of look).

The longterm goal is to offer corporations an integrated computing environment that does not need a license from Redmond. They now have the makings, but the integration part still has years to go, IMHO. In the meantime the marketing problem is still there. It'll be quite a challenge.

[MrConfettiMan]

LOL

[taxcontrol]

I am thinking about using QNX for my CNC router. Do you know of any QNX / software URLs?

[Poser]

"Linux works well for me on the desktop. But, go ahead and keep paying out the nose for Windows if you prefer."

Windows came with my computer. Since there is no discount without an operating system, it was free. I had to pay to get Linux. It's way to big to download.

[Poser]

"Drop back to version 8, if you aren't already flustered."

Am I going to be able to get a Windows network printer to work with version 8? If so, I'll reformat the drive and start over (again).

And how big a download should I expect. I have a T1 line, but 8 hour downloads are not acceptable.

[vollmond]

I never could get everything to work that I wanted to on a Linux platform. I would spend all my free time on weekends trying different versions of Linux and desktops, but there was always something lacking.

One day I took a step back and realized that most of the open source applications I wanted to use (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firebird, MySQL, etc.) had Windows ports. So I bought a retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional and installed all the open source applications I wanted to play with.

Now I spend my free time playing with the applications, rather than the operating system. I would agree that Linux is not yet ready for home prime-time.

[Myrddin]

Try http://www.qnx.com as a start. You can download a free, non-commercial version of QNX 6.2.1 that comes with compiler, browsers, support for a variety of video cards, networking (IPV4/IPV6). All you need is a CDROM burner and some patience to download the CDROM image.

The folks at QNX decided to change their distribution model when the moved from QNX4.25 to QNX 6. I paid over $10,000 for my initial QNX4 commercial development licenses and deployment licenses were nearly $1,000 per node. The QNX 6 release offers free non-commercial code to encourage developers to use it and become proficient. Commercial developers can buy the Momentics Standard Edition or Profession edition packages to deploy custom kernel images for commercial use. The deployment price is $80 per node. Much more reasonable. If you plan to deploy hundreds of thousands of nodes, they make a very good deal, so it scales commercially.

[Myrddin]

Try getting 99% of PC users to understand a word you have said.

The home PC user is NOT the target audience for QNX. QNX has been king in the world of real time process control on the factory floor. They share a portion of the embedded systems world with VxWorks. pSOS, Windows CE, Symbian and a few other players.

Frankly, I hope QNX never achieves broad acceptance for home users. That would just invite the litigious idiots in government to attack the company.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

There are still plenty to choose from.