gentoo - wow!! - progress

[dep]

begin  Collins's  quote:

| We agree to disagree.  My WIN98 system runs great on K6/II 300MZ
| 128Meg.  A little slow for Photoshop stuff, but AOK for M$Office
| stuff; same system ran Linux AOK.  My laptop at work is a Compaq
| 800Mz 256MZ model, and it really needs 512M to run WIN2K properly,
| wheras linux would run just fine on that box.  The concept that
| linux requires more resources to run that M$ products is just
| wrong.

interesting. i have a little p-166 64-meg machine here, and when i pop 
in the otherwise identical w2k drive performance just blows the doors 
off an equivalent linux installation. by "equivalent" i mean with a 
full-desktop, not some stripped-down thing. any msoffice application 
opens in well under 30 seconds, while openoffice takes more than 
three minutes. disk access under linux is very nearly constant; not 
so with the w2k install. this makes me exceptionally unhappy.

| Windows was a miserable experience on 133MZ machines; basic linux
| stuff is a little better.  Granted, neither linux nor M$ is doing
| much for the third world class of user.  FreeBSD, on the other
| hand, has a lower memory profile and runs most executables slightly
| faster, so it might be a candidate for the third world, except that
| it's even squirrelier to install than the average linux distro.

we have 98 running on two machines, both p-133s with 64 megs. we would 
put linux on them, but performance is painfully slow. the argument 
could be made that the solution, then, is to install a 1998 version 
of linux, to even the field. okay, so i'll install caldera open linux 
1.1, complete with looking glass, on one. it will run nicely. i won't 
have anything approaching an equivalent system, but it will run. the 
sad fact is that in the race to gobble up system resources, linux is 
beating microsoft, by a lot if experience here is any indication. 
this makes me exceptionally unhappy.

| Claims are almost always bogus.

but with linux they oughtn't be. if the linux community finds lying 
for sport to be as attractive as lying for money is, we have some 
serious, systemic problems.

| Current results would counter this argument.  Linux as a complete
| solution and in the univeristy community appears to be growing most
| rapidly in the higher tier third world countries and in the non-US
| first tier countries.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt that much can
| be done with respect to computers in dirt poor, starvation
| economies (I doubt that they even have reliable electric power),
| and I certainly don't believe that linux should sacrifice current
| generation capabilities in order to run on ancient hardware.

i normally ignore paragraphs that use "solution" as you have, because 
it is first-order marketspeak, not reasoning. but there is something 
you've said that does require some consideration: presuming that 
higher tier third world countries is a definable thing, what goes on 
in their universities is scarcely of much importance. what goes on in 
their businesses, and in their homes, is of far more importance than 
what goes on in their universities. american universities were all 
once populated by unix. which is why you find practically nothing in 
use on any american computer anywhere today but unix. or so your 
reasoning would have it. and gaining hearts and minds elsewhere does 
not come about by offering up an operating system that requires you 
to blow a year's wages on new hardware just to run it.

| There are efforts to provide linux for less capable machines
| (Peanut Linux comes to mind).

yes, there are. but in that there is no reason why *any* linux needs 
high-powered hardware (look what OS/2 was doing on a 386-16 with 8 
megs a decade ago, for chrissakes!), there is no real justification 
for the direction linux has gone, unless the idea is not to have a 
quick and efficient and reliable operating system but instead to sell 
hardware.
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the 
envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.