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Linux Software

Linux Turns 10 275

Posted by michael from the still-getting-beat-up-between-classes dept.
An AC sent in: "The IBM PC may be 20 years old, but they're not the only ones with a birthday coming up. Check out www.linux10.org for an invitation to a birthday party on August 25 for the Linux kernel. The big bash is in Sunnyvale, just down the peninsula from the San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo, but there are also links to local parties around the globe (or if there are none near you, plan your own and add it to the list)."
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Linux Turns 10 More

Linux Turns 10

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  • Networked (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Snowbeam ( 96416 )
    Will any of these parties be put on the web via live stream?

    • Well, we're thinking about a coast-to-coast event-to-event communication via webcam, or at least irc, etc.. but I hadn't thought of webcam live-broadcast. We don't currently have the technology available/in place, but if you or anybody else is interested in helping to make this happen, with either hardware or otherwise, let me know.
      East-Coast Linux10 Celebration [linux10.org] will be happening on the same day (August 25) and, while we are starting a few hours earlier (due to timezones), we will be concurrently happening during the rest of the time. .
    • oh christ no... Another movie out this summer that tells jokes about Geek Parties and Sausage Fests (or are they one in the smae?) ;-)

  • Just for the Fun of It (Score:3, Informative)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @11:14PM (#2113105)
    Wow. Somewhat of an interesting story for me. I just got through with a long car trip with the audio book of Linus' "Just For the Fun of It" to keep my brain occupied during the mind-numbing journey.

    It talked a lot about Linus himself, how Linux started, his views on Open Source, politics and the meaning of life. (His take on the meaning of life was not insightful, but at least interesting.)

    Did you know that Linux started out as an overgrown terminal emulation program to read USENET newsgroups from the University's computer, and ran under Minix?

    Neat stuff. Linus was taken completely by surprise that Linux has gotten to where it is today. On one hand, had he known of all the work that was ahead of him, and that he'd be spending ten years of his life on it, he would have given up. But on the other hand, seeing all that it has done and the benefits that it has brought, he said he probably would have went forward with it.

    If this sounds schizophrenic, at least according to the book, that partially describes a number of Linus' views. Like on intellectual property.

    Anyhow, glad to read there will be a Linux anniversary celebration, and for an intersting commute, pick up the audio book. Five CD's full.
  • I wonder if anyone has managed to keep the kernel running for 10 years.... (California Power Crisis comes to mind)

  • Bad domain name... (Score:3, Funny)

    by KGraci ( 229893 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @07:13PM (#2114947)
    I think alot of people may actually close the browser window by habit with the domain name:

    www.linu x10 .org

    I know I almost did. Those damn cameras are going to ruin this world...

    Regards,
    KGraci

    • > www.linu
      x10 .org

      then how about renaming it to

      www.LinuxOSX.org

      Btw, I don't know much about Linux Torvalds but I am amazed that he developed an operating system before he even turned ten years old. Happy Birthday!

      - jfdouble

    • Agreed. BTW: Could you please stop picking your nose and wiping it under the desk? Viewers of the KGraci-Hidden-Cam have been complaining.

  • To bad I can't attend but it's my weddingday so the occation will be marked never the less.

    Another thing happening on the same day is the wedding of the norweigan crown prince. O.k. it's not realy an issue for amnericans but still it's a nice useless fact.

    I suggest we all have a great 25 of august.

    // yendor

  • Another 10 year old technology... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Karpe ( 1147 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @07:26PM (#2116818) Homepage
    ...also related to infrastructure, can be found here [microsoft.com]. It's so interesting to compare what both have done to the internet. ;)
    • I opened your link in Opera, and was presented with a page with "undefined" as the first word, and big squares before and after a few words, which I presume were meant to be "smart quotes" or some other thing that is not part of normal HTML outside Microsoft's world. I'll stick with the product with the better web page.

    • Serious?

      VB has had more of an impact.


      Don't forget that at its heart linux is just a copy of a 30 year old os design. The only impact it has had on the internet is that more people get their unix binaries for free now.

      meanwhile ...
      • Over the past 10 years, the Visual Basic community has grown to a majority share of the total worldwide developer population. During that time, an entire industry of component vendors grew up around this single product ... From this rather inauspicious beginning came an equally unfathomable outcome: an impact on the computing industry so profound that it forever changed the face of software development and created an explosion in the Windows applications market. Ten years later, it seems so obvious--but at the time, when only a small, select group of people were even capable of building Windows applications, Visual Basic 1.0 represented a monumental shift in application design and a great leap of faith for the development community.
      • ...From this rather inauspicious beginning came an equally unfathomable outcome...
        They're talking about Code Red, right?

  • Perhaps the NSA will have the anti-terrorism(anti-hacker) Alliance their to sqaush the rebel rebellion?

  • For those east coasters, there will be a party held in Philadelphia. Check here [linux10.org] for details. This link is correct as the one on the main page of linux10.org is broken.
  • Happy birthday to you..
    Happy birthday to you..
    Happy birthday dear Linux!
    Happy birthday to you.

    Omega9
    $chown us base
  • Better keep the party in a bombshelter, just in case Microsoft decides to bomb the place !!
  • This actually coincides coincidetnally well with the opening of my fFriendly neighborhood linux specialist, annexa [annexa.com] :) (damn i'm a lucky bastard, to have that kinda resource, not 5 minutes away! :) (based in Rochester, New York, which is near buffalo. check em out if yer in the area *extremely* fFriendly and helpful gang!)

    Happy b-day, linux :)

  • Who was it that said it takes 10 years to make really good software?

  • On celebrating backwards compatibility (Score:3, Funny)

    by Carrion ( 2315 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @07:35PM (#2132481)
    Is it really worth celebrating that two things that were originally intended as quick backwards compatibility HACKS has stayed around this long, spending huge amounts of energy on maintaining backwards compatibility?

    The IBM PC never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X. Still, both technologies keep their life force because they've already become standards.

    The IBM PC was designed to make porting easy for already existing x86 CP/M software. Check the documented CP/M backwards compatibility interrupts if you don't believe me. It used commodity parts because time-to-market was the most important issue. CP/M itself wasn't used because of a legal fight between IBM and Digital. (I believe this was mentioned in a documentary film labeled "Triumph of the Nerds".)
    The reason that Linus got so much help with creating Linux, was because they wanted it to run already existing UN*X software, quickly.

    As any low level coder can attest, the IBM PC as it is today is a kluge on a kludge on a hack. Just the process of making it boot is a tedious job with pitfalls around every corner. It's got an entire 16-bit computer inside that's only used during the first couple of seconds after you turn it on. The CPU is full of instructions that are never ever used by the programs that 99.9% of PC users use.
    I'm almost amazed it still works.

    Linux on the other hand has been totally redesigned since its hack days. There are still a major limitations with the way it's designed, though. It's a monolithic kernel, an ancient design principle, where everything is running in the same place, intermixed like crazy. The increased modularity of the recent kernels help with some things, letting you add drivers during runtime, but doesn't help much with larger upgrades, or making it easy to develop for. A more modern kernel design such as the Hurd can let a regular user develop and try out larger kernel parts during runtime, whereas with linux a reboot is still required for upgrading most nonessential parts of the kernel. And since it's just one big heap of code, a mistake in one place can make the whole thing crap out. It's a stroke of fortune that Linus has the inhuman ability to maintain such a beast.
    And that's just Linux. For UNIX, the main word is Inconsistency. The inconsistencies of the API are quite hair raising, and many of the calls are practically hacks that remained, and never got implemented proper. The security model is laughable, a philosophy that you either are God (root), or you are not. The commandset is just as intuitive as you'd expect, where practically every program has a different way of recieving command line arguments. The X Window System is an add on that is also full of kludges. It eats more and more memory and can never release it. It is optimized for a situation that is hardly ever the case, namely that the applications are running on a remote computer, making every tiny little bit that's going to appear on your screen pass through a bunch of network abstraction layers. That's one of the reasons X on a monster workstation often feels slower than the actually hundreds of times slower machines we were using in the 80's...
    Excuse me for hardly even touching the surface on that one, but I started feeling nauseous.

    All the while we were focusing our efforts on what was already there, smart new designs came and went, because they weren't backwards compatible.
    Great new designs have been researched, which would help the totally different demands of computing today. But still people cling to what they know, and prefer to hang on to what they have no matter how much extra work it'll take in the long run.
    Why is this? So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?
    The reason not for switching to something new is not to rewrite the software, but that's happening continuously anyhow, so why would that be a problem?

    What's holding us back then? To put it in Slashdot terms I think it's FUD. Not the technique, but the feelings themself. Human nature.
    We pretty much like it better the older it gets, no matter how many wrinkles and scars it accumulates.

    Happy Birthday, PC and Linux.
    We love you more each year.

    • So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?


      I'm a bit confused. Which Linux software from the 1980s can still run on Linux? And btw, most MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 programs run on Windows XP. Have you heard of WOW (Windows on Windows)?
      • Yes, you are a bit confused. He didn't say *Linux* software from the 80s, he said software.

        The point of fact is that Linux was specifically developed to run existing software. . .of the 80s.

        You'll find most of it at gnu.org.

        KFG

    • ... never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X.

      Are we talking about the same OS? There is a reason that UNIX has remained essentially unchanged for the last thirty years, and that intelligent folks like Torvalds or the BSD or GNU people chose to clone UNIX instead of some other system. The reason is that UNIX is a Good Idea.

      Take the API, for instance. Compared to most other systems in history it's a miracle of elegance and simplicity. In many OSes (especially those in the 60's), you have different system calls to write to a disk, systems calls to write to the printer, the display, other processes, etc. In UNIX, on the other hand, everything is a file (or more properly a file handle): regular files, directories, disks, tapes, pipes, sockets... The entire UNIX API boils down to open()/read()/write()/close(). Sure, implementations have acquired a lot of cruft of the years, but that's a property of any living system.

      Take the file system. Other systems give you crap like drive letters, device names, and UNC paths. Not so in UNIX, where all your files and other stuff exist in a single unified namespace. You can use tar to write to a file, a tape, or a CD writer; it's all the same. One interface for everything.

      Take the user interface. Instead of providing a lot of commands with lots of options for accomplishing some specific task, UNIX gives you a few commands that each do a particular thing well, along with the infrastructure (e.g., pipes) to combine them. Then the user can build arbitrarily complex stuff from a few simple commands.

      In summary, UNIX is succesful (and becoming more so every day) because it is a work of art. Really. May it last another 30 years.

  • Sunnyvale? Isn't that sitting directly on top of a fat hunking Hellmouth...?
    • Suitcase contents:
      Stake
      Holy Water
      Crossbow
      Sig-Sauer with carbon fibre bullets (Ultraviolet has much better weapons!!)
      Ancient volumes on Vampires, Demons and other creatures of the night..

      Oh, damn thats Sunnydale not SunnyVale.

      Anyway, why did a vampire who gets sunburn very easily, decide to live in California ? Maine or Seattle whould be much better for his complexion.Ah, that explains Microsoft!! :-)
    • I've lived in california, the whole thing is a fat hunking hellmouth.

  • Wonder why they didn't wait to release 2.4.8 on that date.

  • Wrong Date? (Score:4, Informative)

    by LtFiend ( 232003 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @06:30PM (#2137889)
    In Just for Fun Linus marks the first release date as September 17, 1991. The version was 0.01
    • I could be wrong, but I think that the first line of 0.01 was written on August 25, 1991 and released September 17th.

      • Re:Wrong Date? (Score:2, Informative)

        by mce ( 509 )
        I'm sorry to report you wrong. August 25 was the date that Linus first publicly announced that fact that he was working on something. The actual work had started some time before. Somewhere in April IIRC.

        See also this history of linux [hypermart.net].

        • To be born in September, work must have begun the previous December, whether it was announced then or not. For the humor-impaired, that's 9 months from conception (December) to birth (September). So I get stranges thoughts when I'm tired and should be in bed.
    • Oooh boy..is this gonna be anything like when MIR was brought down? Why doesn't /. hold a contest.."give us your guess on the exact date AND TIME that Linux was created and you'll get a free t-shirt!" :P
  • The Baylands Park also requests that we inform guests of other park rules:
    * ... * No [...] model rockets. They realy dont trust nerds..
  • Anyone planning on a party in the Baltimore/Washington/Arlington area?
  • too bad i'm leaving in a week. i'd like to attend.
  • No media, no raging drunkards, just Bring your own entertainment, plug in your laptop, and make nice with the neighbors. The question remains as to whether or not Linux has just plain outgrown the grassroots ambience that is planned.
  • Though I live not too far away, I'll pass on the party!

    I can imagine thousands of dot-com 3733T 4AK3RZ trying to network to find jobs!

  • Inviting geeks to a party? Are you INSANE? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @12:33AM (#2141357) Homepage Journal
    Geeks go fucking crazy when surrounded by even a dozen people. How the hell do you think they'll react when surrounded by a DOZEN THOUSAND at a LINUX RAVE? Good god, at least let them hang out in the cool-down room. There aren't *too* many people in those.

  • Linux developers should be proud... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ulwarth ( 458420 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @07:19PM (#2142139) Homepage
    ...and everyone that is a part of the open source community, including "mere" users. In ten years we have come further than any comparable OS in that same amount of time. Remember, this isn't ten years since Linux 1.0 - this is ten years since the project was announced _at all_.

    What's most amazing is that we've done it all on our own sweat, blood and tears. We've created something for ourselves (and others) that is powerful, useful, and has shaped the world of technology (and thus the world in general) in many important ways. All of it was for just one goal: to create something cool.

    Congratulations, everyone!
  • Sept. 9. at 01:46:40 GMT, the unix system clock is 1 billion seconds old.

    SkåneSjællandLinuxUserGroup has a page that counts down to it (it's in danish, but most people should understand the numbers) at http://www.sslug.dk/~chlor/1000000000

  • Why we picked August 25 (Score:4, Informative)

    by ikluft ( 1284 ) <ik-slash@thundCO ... g minus caffeine> on Monday August 13, 2001 @03:28AM (#2143198) Homepage
    I was the one who suggested we should hold this on August 25. The choice of the date really was never an issue. In the discussion on the SVLUG list, others who read through the Linux history to verify it, either agreed or didn't object. We had already posted the reason for the choice on the history page [linux10.org] at Linux10.org.

    We're celebrating the anniversary of the announcement which got the community involved in Linux. The first beta testers and offers for help came in after this announcement. August 25, 1991 was when Linux changed from being just Linus' hobby to involving others. Yes, it does pre-date the first kernel posting by a few weeks.

    You can choose different criteria and arrive at a different day. Linux10.org will respect your choice and still link to your local celebration's web site if you pick a different day based on Linux history. The first involvement of the community was what we thought made this date stand out among other candidates. But as a counterexample, SSLUG in Copenhagen chose Sept 17 based on the actual posting of Linux 0.01. As long as you have a reason grounded in Linux history, it's an equally good choice. (Though I think Aug 25 and Sept 17 are the only two you're going to find.)

    For those who tried to argue one date over the other, don't bother. You will never settle it because there are different criteria by which these dates can be picked. However, I urge you to respect the choices of the volunteers who go to the time and effort to organize a Linux 10th anniversary event in your area.

    (BTW, sorry that I didn't post this earlier. I was at the Moffett Air Show all day.)

    Ian Kluft

    Linux10 organizer

  • I get dibs... (Score:2, Funny)

    by mattkime ( 8466 )
    I get dips on spanking the kernel!
  • Are there any parties planned for the Denver metro area (including Boulder)? If so, drop me a line and give me some details.

  • what a predicament ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mc2Kleen ( 190152 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @06:27PM (#2144971)
    What do you get for the kernel that already has everything?

    • Re:what a predicament ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jchristopher ( 198929 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @06:34PM (#2119770)
      A usable interface? :)
      • When was the LAST time you actually interfaced with any kernel (OS not included) directly? I know for me, it was about 2 weeks ago when I get 2.4.6 compiled on here. Butttt come on, people rarely have to interface with the kernel on a daily basis, unless you happen to be a programmer, then yea. But I don't even think you can even look at the kernel in a Windows box, so don't complain. BTW Happy Birthday Tux!
        • What you don't do is *Address* the kernel directly on a daily basis. You DO interface with it constantly. That's what an *interface* is. It sits *between* you and kernel.

          Inter-face. Look up the word and then look up "inter."

          bash is an interface. KDE is a GUInterface.

          THEY face the kernel. YOU face them.

          Inter. Get it?

          Perhaps you are getting confused by your advanced knowledge that Linux is just the kernel. You are correct.

          bash and KDE are not Linux. They are among the many kernel *interfaces* available to address the kernel and for the user to address.

          I wish to God that Sun had taken half the money they spent on testing Gnome and KDE. I would have written them a long letter telling them everything they learned with a lot less wasted time on everybodies part. They suck, for everybody, newbie and expert alike. They don't need to.

          bash, on the other hand, is an excelent interface. . . for those that already know everything.

          The joke is funny, as many jokes are, because of how painfully true it is.

          KFG
          • I wish to God that Sun had taken half the money they spent on testing Gnome and KDE. I would have written them a long letter telling them everything they learned with a lot less wasted time on everybodies part.

            These 'problems' were well known for a long time. What the study did was quantify them and test them to determine if they were the random gripe of someone with sour grapes or something that really did confuse the average user.

            One thing here, however, is that most users are now used to Windows, so anything different from Wintendos is likely to confuse people who first face a new system.

            I would, however, be the first to complain about the gdm login window, and I've been using Unix since 1983.

            • And why * shouldn't* it confuse people if it looks just like Windows. . . except when you want to do something? I've been using KDE for three months now and I still can't perform many simple GUI specific tasks just because I can't find where they are done, even if I've done them before.

              More importantly related tasks seem to be placed at random places . . . away from each other.

              I'm no computing novice, I remember when there was no UNIX. I didn't use Windows until it had been out for years, and then only because it came preinstalled.

              I think MS Windows sucks for many reasons, but I can use it fairly easily.

              KDE sucks not only to the extent that seeks to emulate Windows but *also* to the extent that it fails to do so.

              At least it's getting better, I've stopped using GNOME because it seems to be getting worse.

              Damn good thing I boot to level 3.

              KFG
        • I'd say the last time I interfaced with the kernel was when I ran top. Or maybe it was the last time I looked at the /proc filesystem. Or maybe it was when I mounted a filesystem. It was pretty recent, nonetheless.
          Those systems COULD use a better interface. You're right, but you're wrong.
        • Well, kernel.exe had a few things to say after I wrote some code trying to access a std::basic_string < char > after trying to load it full of NULL characters.

          The moral of this story is, try some test data early, so you can realize that your hairbrained scheme of stashing binary data in a string is exactly that.

          My behavior was sufficiently bad that kernel.exe didn't feel like playing anymore. So, that's one on me against a few thousand for Bill.

      • Re:what a predicament ... (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        what's wrong with read, write, and ioctl?

        er, OK forget ioctl, what's wrong with read/write?
    • In other news, Microsoft announced the 18th, 19th, and 20th attempts to produce a full fledged, viable, and stable operating system ...

      [note - XP =18, etc. depending on how you count it.]

    • A standardized set of video codecs in a single stable player.

      • A standardized set of video codecs in a single stable player.

        I've been emailing quicktime@apple.com [mailto] asking them to release a Sorenson decoder (not a full codec, just a decoder) so that QuickTime video can be viewed under Linux. Especially as they claim that "QuickTime is a truly cross-platform technology".

        It seems to me that without a generally available decoder technology what they are providing is QuickTime encryption.

        So far they have failed to even acknowledge my messages. *sigh*.

    • Re:what a predicament ... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mce ( 509 )
      I'm not the kernel, but if I were, the top of my wishlist would be a VM that actually works.

      No, this is not flamebait. It's an honest (and somewhat sadened) remark by a very long time Linux fan (cfr. my signature) who just finally managed to get the sysadmins at his office (very much against the desires of their NT-minded (blinded?) boss) to seriously consider Linux SMP servers with Gigabytes of RAM for some heavy E-CAD work as a replacement for our aging HP-UX boxes. In fact, one such Linux sweety will likely be ordered quite soon for evaluation purposes. And what happens? Precisely now the 2.4 kernels are taking over the various distributions while having major trouble with their VM in exactly the kind of conditions we want to use them for.

      Just to short cut one kind of replies: Of course we can use an older distribution or build our own combination of things (heck, I don't even use a distribution at home and compile everything from scratch). But at work, I'm not a sysadmin, and we have to make do with a few UNIX and NT experts and lots of people who how how to fix NT problems, but whom one might suspect of fearing that a Linux box will explode if they push the wrong key. And no, the latter is not a reproach, its an simple observation. It's quite normal given their backgounds, but it's also a major problem for us Linux zealots.

      I absolulety hate to say it, but Linux still has a few more years to go before really making it, even in certain non-desktop roles. It needs a several more improvements in the technical department. It definitely needs to loose its tendency to have stable versions that aren't stable at all until several months after initial release. But most of all, it needs a whole class of people who know a considerable amount about using computers (read as: Windows machines), but don't really understand them, to get used to something which, to them at least, is completely new and exotic.

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by DreamSynthesis ( 415854 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @06:27PM (#2144972) Homepage

    Lotsa birthdays coming up! Be sure you don't miss these high-tech celebrations:
    • My PC mouse is turning 4!
    • My PC headphones are turning 6!
    • My Right Guard is turning left!
    • Damn, you got there first!!

      I was just about to do an "In other news" post, but the page wouldn't load. Then when I finally get here, somebody's already done one. Oh well, I guess i'll have to add onto it.

      In a related story, Slashdot turns sour. Somebody forgot to put it back in the refridgerator again.

      "Turn the Page" -- Bob Seger
      "Turn Turn Turn" -- Backup Singers for the Byrds (immediately following "To Everything" and "There is a Season". :)

      Oh well, that's all the turns I can think of right now. :P

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