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PCMag's PCTech Reviews Linux Kernel 2.2 123

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Gryphon writes "PC Magazine has published a pretty level-headed 8-page review of the Linux 2.2 kernel. Mostly a features review, compared to Windows NT. I think this is pretty significant, considering a lot of Windows users (including me in years now past) read that magazine! "
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PCMag's PCTech Reviews Linux Kernel 2.2 More

PCMag's PCTech Reviews Linux Kernel 2.2

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  • Poor PCMCIA support? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This report seems OK, but some things are
    not exactly right.
    The author says PCMCIA support in Linux is
    poor. I say its SUPERB!!!. The package
    of David Hinds is one of the perls of Linux
    kernel developement.
    Ok you won't find PCMCIA drivers in the
    kernel on ftp.kernel.org but they is an
    extra seperate package. Which is I think a good
    thing anyway because linux-2.2.9.tar.gz is getting
    to big already.

    Anyways, another Linux succes story in a Microsoft
    oriented Magazine. Not bad, not bad at all!!


  • well, actually..... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have to admit that I use NT4 40% of the time, BeOS another 40% and Linux like %20, and there is a way to get USB under NT4. You need to have SP5, then you have to download the USB support from Win2000 (it's a hack....), and then USB will werk. BUT it only werks with like some video camera, mice, and keyboards, so it's semi-pointless.

  • No PnP support?? and other things.. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Please wake me up, I must be dreaming that my PnP sound and network cards configure themselves...

    [ On filesystems: The reason it was stressed, I suspect, is simply that Linux supports more. Lots more. Lots, lots more. NT supports, what, FAT16 and NTFS? I believe I found a Win95 program to read ext2 partitions but that hardly qualifies as 'support' -- in particular, I can't mount them as proper filesystems. A quick scan of my kernel config shows 13 possible foreign filesystems, if I compress all the offerings from Microsoft into one entry. And I'm not even counting the network filesystems. AFAIK NT only supports NCP and SMB natively. If you want to include 3rd party drivers you should also include all the 3rd party kernel drivers floating around, which include a number of versioning and journaling filesystems...I think at least one of them compiles ;-) ]

    AFAIK the Linux API does not change for 64-bit processors (correct me if I'm wrong); I consider it to be a sad comment that Microsoft even has to publish new interface specifications. (I guess hardcoding variable sizes into their type names caught up with them?) Most well-written code should just need a recompile. (now that I've said that, I'm sure that all my code will fail on a 64-bit arch :-P )
    I'm rather confused about the occasional assertions that NT is more stable than Linux. 'as stable' I can see. But the only time I had to reboot Linux lately was when the filesystem code freaked because of physical damage to a floppy. (I think this is inexcusable personally, just so you know :-) ) I've rebooted it other times, mainly to play with the Hurd, but unless I'm playing with things marked "do not install unless you really really want to risk your stability" it..just..never..dies.

    Daniel
  • Gee, that isn't a very wide range. How about "Palm pilots to clustered supercomputers"
    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
  • Seemed good, but at a quick pass, I noticed it said *NT4* had usb support..... if it did, my friend shawn wouldn't compilain so much. :) No time now to look for other errors in accuracy, but seemed like semi-informative article overall.

  • The author (Score:3)

    by drwiii ( 434 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @04:49AM (#1860459) Homepage
    Just a sidenote: Neil Randall isn't exactly new to Linux.. He published a very nice piece in the July 1997 issue of PC Magazine called "Leaning Toward Linux", in which he acquainted the reader with the Linux kernel in general (development model, history, etc.) and with each of the major distributions. He also provided a detailed walkthrough of installing slackware, and some tidbits on the X window system.

    An article like that might not seem like much today, 2 years later, but back then that was great press coverage. It's nice to see he's still on the Linux bandwagon.

  • Oh god... I read an issue recently in which Dvorak's editorial advocated nationalizing Microsoft-- it's time for Windows to become a national commodity, basically. This has to be the worst idea EVER. I can't take the magazine seriously anymore.
  • Not bad... I only caught a few technical inaccuracies.

    NTFS support is read only.

    2.2 includes an experimental read/write NTFS driver.

    DSL and cable modems are mostly unsupported.

    Every DSL or cable modem I've ever seen has been an Ethernet device, and Linux works fine with them. If they're talking about phone/cable company support for Linux, that may be another story, but that's a PHB issue, not a technical problem.

    They state that SMB is a networking protocol, like IPX, rather than a network filesystem, like NFS.

    They missed a couple of ports and a couple of filesystems, but, hell, I can never remember all of them, either...

    And they didn't include Slackware in the list of distributions.
  • I believe the term you're looking for is "geek".
  • Heehee... I run RC5 on all of my boxen, too... the 386-16 gets about 5000 keys/s. That's about 1 2^28 block a day...

    My Celeron, meanwhile, will rip through a 2^28 block in five minutes...

  • Re:linux on a 386 -- the big truth (Score:4)

    by John Campbell ( 559 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @05:13AM (#1860464) Homepage
    I personally have Linux running on four different 386es.

    There's eddi, a 386SX-25 with 4M of RAM and an 80M disk, which is my laptop. Not a blazing fast machine, but she was cheap ($20), she's portable, and she's sufficient for carrying work around with me. You don't need a lot of space or processing power for writing code, or even for compiling small projects. She's currently running 1.2.13, because she hasn't got enough disk space to compile a 2.0 kernel.

    There's deliah, a 386SX-16 with 8M of RAM and no disk. She boots a 2.2.5 kernel off a floppy disk, then configures her ethernet and mounts her filesystem using BOOTP and NFS. I use her as a not-entirely-dumb-but-not-very-smart terminal for my faster machines.

    There's gabrielle, a 386DX-40 with 20M of RAM, a 120M disk, and a 1.0G disk. She runs X, and I use her as an X terminal. Mostly I run stuff on other machines with the display redirected, because she hasn't got enough horsepower to handle X and, say, Netscape at the same time. I also use her as my guinea-pig machine. Because she doesn't do anything mission critical, I use her as a test bed for new kernels, new libc installs, and such things. If I screw her up, no big deal... I could wipe the system and reinstall it without losing anything important (I haven't had to do so much as a floppy-rescue yet... which is fortunate; gabi's got no floppy drives). She's currently running 2.3.5, and if I get sufficently bored today, I may download 2.3.6pre1 and compile it. Sure, it takes four hours, but there's no reason I have to sit around and wait for it.

    The last one is leviathan, a 386SX-25 with 8M of RAM and a 120M disk that I'm planning on embedding in my dashboard as a CD player and radio as soon as I get the power supply for it built. It's currently up and running in a caseless heap on my card table.

    I'm not even going to get started on the 486es I'm running Linux on...
  • I'm not sure, but I think the crucial difference
    is whether it is true one-to-many IP multicasting
    or is it pseudo-multicasting: ie. a series of
    one-to-one connections transmitting the same data.

    This review suggests that NT kernel is currently not capable of doing true IP-multicasting.
  • I commend this review for at least getting
    these things right for once:

    1. Comparing Linux kernel features to NT kernel
    features instead of doing another "Linux/Apache
    vs. NT/IIS" snow job.

    2. Pointing out that the Linux installation
    process depends on the distribution you use,
    and yes, the two remaining daunting areas
    for newbies in each installer is disk partioning
    and the video card and monitor settings for X.

    3. Nice explanantions of why new features such
    as IP multicast and frame buffers console are
    important.

    4. Pointing out the areas where NT will be playing
    catch-up with Linux such as supporting Merced.

    Aside from a few accuracy flaws, it looks like
    ZD finally hired a reviewer who actually has a
    clue about "this crazy Linux thing all the kids
    are talking about."
  • I like to see this kind of good press on Linux. Errors seem to exist in there but overall pretty nice, positive article.

    Da -941
  • And compare the press coverage of the 1.0 kernel debut :) I was happy to read a level-headed, non-fudish not-too-technical appreciation of the 2.2 kernel. As pointed out above, there are some errors, but they don't seem intentional. Also, did anyone notice that he refered to the X Window system and not X Windows? That's pretty good.
  • Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It
    supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration
    and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed
    pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.

    This is true, but this being Linux, we don't put everything and the kitchen sink into the kernel. Userland tools exist to configure PnP fairly well. It's certainly not as 'user-friendly' as Windows (or it wasn't when I created my configuration last year; an auto-configuration option has appeared in the program since then which I haven't bothered trying) but it works exceedingly well.

    Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to
    apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people
    and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products.
    If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT
    (most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little
    different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com,
    EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just
    a matter of looking.

    Hmm, ok. I haven't needed to mount ext2 drives from any Windows flavour for a while now so my information could be out of date :-P

    I still maintain that Linux has much broader support for exotic filesystems than NT, if exotic filesystems are your cup of tea :-) The kernel itself ships with, as I said, ten to thirteen separate non-network filesystems, and at least a dozen more were listed on LinuxToday recently (admittedly, some of those were fairly specialized, like a driver that made audio CDs look like they contain .WAV files.. )

    Daniel
  • AFAIK, NT4 has a PnP service, although it doesn't seem to be any better than Linux's PnP capabilities. Also, NT's UI is rather user friendly for those tasks for which you would rather use Win9x. However, I agree that the same UI makes NT server administration a big ole PITA.
  • Yeah, you're right I forgot to mention PCMCIA, but that's because I didn't go that far into the article. I suppose that the author of the article didn't bother to install the pcmcia_cs package (included with just about any Linux distribution on this side of the galaxy). This makes me believe that the writer was only cut&pasting from other texts and documentation to write the article.

  • The non-technical nature of the article seems to be due to the author's unfamiliarity with the subject. There are many lines that are either pseudo-typos or flat-out misunderstandings. A few examples:

    • SGI 'Virtual' Workstation
    • "TV tuner cards and video capture cards are enhanced through a new driver (BTTV), which, among other things, lets the card write directly to memory, bypassing the CPU, to produce a higher-quality image."
    • "...but you can now change the kernel's configuration through Linux's virtual file system instead of rebuilding and recompiling."
    • It says Linux has two native filesystems, but 2.2.x doesn't have extfs anymore.

    I don't think I'll go beyond the third page...

  • I didnt know about this feature. Where do I find more info about it? Whats the connection to VFS?

  • Another mistake in the article was the continual reference to NT being able to see FAT32 filesystems. Unless they've finally fixed that, NT and FAT32 are completely incompatible.

    --Alex
  • It's amusing to see them talk about filesystems
    that arn't really filesystems....
  • Thats a really good point. I didnt even think about my friends, who are now linux users, who started out as Win Quake players.

    John Carmack is a remarkable individual who has done much for the linux community (and for cumputing as a whole) by forcing hardware manuf's to adhere to standards, and also by forcing superior standards (OpenGL, MesaGL, etc.) into the limelight.

    In retrospect, Quake seems like it could be the perfect teaser to get people interested in Linux.

  • It seems to me that the average Joe computeruser, even the ones who are really into gaming or whatever, either has not heard the word linux or has no idea what it is. Sure, articles like this one help, as it appeared in a widely-read Windowsesque magazine. But to most, linux is still freak show material.

    Some recent improvements have made things better. Though the actual distribution (IMHO) is about as stable as a drunk prom date, the Red Hat 6 installation process was fairly painless (I have always and still do run slack). Personally, I dont care about installation proceedures, but to sway sheep to the flock, it's got to be idiot proof.

    Idiot being the key word.

    Positive things are happening. I think that with time, the product will improve and 'sell' itself. We simply must be patient, and continue to hone linux into an even more robust and powerful OS.


  • www.pcmagazine.com tuns apache

    Check it! [netcraft.com]

  • Not to mention the fact that the Linux version of Q3 Test runs smoother, faster and looks much better on the same hardware than the Win version

  • IP masq in NT? (Score:3)

    by RelliK ( 4466 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @04:04AM (#1860480)
    Am I missing something or does NT4 really include IP masq? Didn't they say it will only be available in win2000?

    Also, did anyone else notice that they were comparing Linux to NT4, win98 and (yet unreleased) win2000 at the same time? Win98 supports pnp better and NT4 supports RAID better...
    They didn't make clear *which* OS they were talking about. Last I checked NT didn't support USB, couldn't read FAT32, and had no pnp or power management support whatsoever.
  • And ...

    • Important for intranets, Linux now supports IP tunneling, which lets you configure a machine to belong to a network different from the one to which it is physically attached.

    IPIP encapsulation has been supported for ages. Then he goes on to say Linux has support for IP masquerading, and discovering routes dynamically (I assume he's talking about gated). Certainly these are nothing new for Linux. It will give users the impression that Linux is just barely catching up.

    The article is fine for what its audience is, I think. It definitely still shines some good light on Linux. But an article can be technically accurate _and_ be newbie-friendly too.

    Jason.

  • Undoubtedly, they were talking *useful* or *mainstream* ports. I wouldn't call the "port" to the Dragonball CPU on the PalmPilots terribly useful for anything other than "gee-whiz" sort of thing.
  • NT can read FAT32 if you go out and buy a 3rd party (I forget who makes it) patch that installs a service on NT. Then and only then can it read FAT32, I would think that Microsoft would at least try to rip this company off and include a something similar in a service pack. But then again maybe they can't figure out how it works.
  • It seemed like a rather fair analysis, though not as in-depth as it could have been. I suppose that it was aimed at the mainstream user anyway so that's fine.

    I'm not sure where the reviewers found problems with pcmcia card services though. I know that while my laptop that Win95/98/NT all had problems with card services, I was able to get surprisngly good results when I installed linux there.

    I suppose hotswapping may be an issue, but when you run with the same cards in there all the time as I do, I don't hit that wall.

  • Well, I for one was not aware that NT supported FAT32 at all. I have just built (reluctantly) an NT machine with Service Pack 5 (the latest) and there's no mention of support for FAT32.

    It would have been nice if the article mentioned the recent open sourcing of XFS, which eats NTFS and Ext2fs for breakfast. Oh, and I've heard rumours of an upcoming Ext3fs. Any word on its capabilities?
  • Actually, isn't the PCMCI support shared with *BSD kernels as well? Istr that was one reason for it staying as a separate source tree.
  • See http://www.winternals.com - they sell the FAT32 driver - the read-only version is free of charge, the r/w version is chargeable but not too expensive. I used it when I was dual booting Linux and NT, now I just use VMware (http://www.vmware.com) to run NT on top of Linux.

    Windows 2000 supports FAT32 r/w.
  • Agreed - I found that Red Hat 5.2 just recognised my PCMCIA modem/network card (from Ositech) on a Thinkpad 755 and the installer even let me NFS-install over the network using this card!
  • Despite the inaccuracies and comparing Linux to 3 Windows OSs including the unreleased Win2K, I thought the review was OK overall, and generally fair.

    However, I don't see why NT can't be a server for multicast apps, in fact there is a Cisco IP/TV (video multicast) demo on my desk that runs on NT4 clients and servers. Multicast routing is not necessary for multicast server apps to run, IMO, though it would be necessary for a server with more than one NIC perhaps.
  • True about NT4 and FAT32, but Win2000 will support FAT32.
  • This looks a lot like the press release which was going to be sent out when Linux 2.2 finally came out. If only I could find a copy of that and compare... :^)
  • > Aside from a few accuracy flaws, it looks like
    > ZD finally hired a reviewer who actually has a
    > clue about "this crazy Linux thing all the kids
    > are talking about."

    I'm skeptical about this and any Ziff 'articles'. The reason has been shown in the current DOJ vs MS case. Just recently a Micros~1 exec was asking for favorable data on Netscape browser numbers "FOR PRESS PURPOSES". Does Microsoft release articles to the press about other companies products and the press publish them? Does Micros~1 have a army of phantom writters who write these 'stories' and submit them for publication? I just think that this shines some light on Micros~1 ability to control the press at any time and on any subject....
    I find it fishy that the reviewer was throwing all version of Windows in there and was talking about kernels (technical subject for Ziff pubs) while getting some items wrong.
    Scully! Mulder! Are you watching?
  • USB support is available for NT4. As an experimental addition, just like Linux. I would guess some service pack or another adds it.
  • Maybe you should lay off the junk. A good number of the optional features in the kernel can be compiled in but not activated until you echo some magic string into /proc. Granted it's not everything, and it's usually only the more experimental features, but it is correct.

    About what I can expect from someone who can't put his name behind his comments.

  • The minimum requirement for NT 4.0 is something like a 486/33 with 12 MB RAM (for an Intel-based machine) and 120 MB of hard drive space.

    For a RISC-based machine, you'll probably need 16 MB of RAM.

    On the other hand, I just worked on a P90 with 24 MB of RAM today, running NT, and it was unusable.

    Some minimum requirements are more reasonable than others.

    --
    QDMerge -- generate documents automatically.
  • 24 MB of RAM is at least 8 too few for NT, and there are a few corporate things used here that slow the system even further... so you're right, it's not the best benchmark.

    It's still a pig compared to Linux on the same hardware.

    --
    QDMerge -- generate documents automatically.
  • I remember when PCMCIA support was known for being bad, years ago. I remember buying a Xircom CreditCard Ethernet adapter and being heartbroken when I discovered it wouldn't work with Linux.

    To show how far things have gone, I needed to get a modem and replace my old 3COM Ethernet adapter, whose cable was starting to get a bit flaky. So I bought a Xircom combo 100mbps Ethernet and 56k modem. I plugged it in, started up my ThinkPad (a Linux only machine), and it worked flawlessly without even asking me any questions or requesting a driver disk.

    Linux PCMCIA support absolutely whips Windows'. No question. Incidentally, my understanding is that NT 4 has virtually no PCMCIA support, contrary to their chart (which features Windows 2000).

    Incidentally, did they ever get accelerated X to work with the SGI Visual [Virtual? Ha!] Workstation? I'm not sure if I'd say Linux is relaly supported on that machine until that's in place.

    D

    ----

  • This article's ok.... (Score:3)

    by cswiii ( 11061 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @03:40AM (#1860498)
    Level-headed, for sure, but it's nothing new for most of us.

    Decent article: my only complaint is that they don't talk about the emerging (!) GUI interfaces for Linux very much at all, solely relying on the "users have more control over their system" argument -- an apples to apples comparision would have been a little more handy.

    Good article, though, for trying to convince familiy to switch over ;)

  • I would have liked it better if the author didn't have to throw in that snipe about having to go through a repartitioning. Users are only forced to go through that process since MS had pretty much forced OEMs to preallocate the entire disk to Win9x before the computer leaves their manufacturing facility.

    Give the customers (remember them? They're the only ones who are always right!) the option to either:

    • Select Win9x for pre-installation.

    • Select Win9X for shipment but not pre-installed.

    • Select DOS (or DR-DOS).

    • Select no operating system.

    It would be nice to have a fifth and sixth option:

    • Select Linux for pre-installation.

    • Select Linux for shipment but not pre-installed.

    but which Linux distribution would the OEM select? [Debian|Slackware|SuSe|Caldera|etc.] bigots would surely take to task any OEM that decided to ship Red Hat.

    [DR-]DOS?! Are you mad?! Not really; just practical. I still find DOS useful for running diagnostics and/or setup utilities that manufacturers ship with their cards. Until the world standardizes on each machine having a bootable CD-ROM drive and all cards come with their utilities on a bootable CD, I think we're stuck with needing something that can launch our diagnostic/setup software. Since a lot of these utilities would be difficult or impossible to run while Linux was running, it doesn't bother me too much to keep a bootable DOS floppy or a 5MB DOS partition on the first hard drive. (I'm confident that the need for these will go away someday soon!)

  • He's talking about the /proc filesystem. It allows you to activate features that have been compiled into the kernel but which are not started automatically. As examples, I currently have these lines in rc.local:

    # Start SCSI logging
    echo "scsi log error 1" >/proc/scsi/scsi
    echo "scsi log scan 1" >/proc/scsi/scsi

    # Set up MTRR for X
    echo "Activating MTRR for video card..."
    echo "base=0xf6000000 size=0x800000 type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr

    # Set up IP forwarding
    echo "Starting packet forwarding..."
    echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

    # Start SYN cookies
    echo "Activating SYN cookies..."
    echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies

  • That's because WebBench is a useless benchmark. Anyone can dump static pages from memory to an ethernet controller. WebBench is little more than an ad for IIS. Does it matter how fast a web server is if my clients are at the other end of a 128kbps pipe or worse?

    Apache isn't designed to be fast in these circumstances. It's designed to be stable and flexible. There are other web server choices out there that would be faster in WebBench, including probably 10 lines of Perl code.

  • I was happy to see "Open Source Code" at the TOP of the comparison chart. While not the most technically literate article I've seen, it shows signs that they're starting to "get it".

  • Linux is a POSIX compliant Unix? (Score:3)

    by wolfen ( 12255 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @05:41AM (#1860503) Homepage
    Ok, quick question...
    WHEN did Linux become a POSIX compliant Unix?
    (As opposed to a unix-like system)

    "That revolution is Linux, the POSIX-compliant
    Unix operating system, now out in Version 2.2
    --a significant new update."
    First paragraph...
  • From what I gathered from the article they are more complaining about the web servers on linux then about linux itself
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 2.4 been released by now, either. Nor has Win2k. What you say is likely true, but my point was that the article compared a released product with an unreleased product. The least they could have done was compared vaporware with vaporware and talked about 2.4's journaled file system and enhanced scheduling. (no, I don't know those things for certain, those are just two current hot topics).

  • Why don't they just compare vs. 2.4? (Score:4)

    by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @04:25AM (#1860507) Journal

    It's disappointing to see the current proven functionality of Linux 2.2 compared against Windows 2000 in this article. I'm sure many admins are deciding whether to upgrade to Win2K or to Linux, and they would like to see this sort of comparison. But if we're going to compare a product which has been released and thoroughly used for months with a product which may not be available for months (unless you're a beta site) then we might as well compare against a future Linux release as well.

    PCmag would have done better to compare the current Linux 2.2 kernel with the current NT4 release and Service Packs available in stores for the bulk of the article. Then at the end they could state that Win2K promises these additional features, and Linux 2.4 will have this other list of additional features over 2.2. That would be a little more honest of a comparison.

  • USB (Score:1)

    by Old Ben ( 14626 )
    I think NT has USB support through one of the service packs; there was an SGI NT machine at school with a USB keyboard.

    However, Windows 98 cannot use USB devices, even keyboards until it loads the USB drivers. that was a nasty surprise when installing Win 98 one day; especially since the BIOS could find the keyboard.

    Chalk it up to USB being still fairly new, I suppose.
  • Remember the "unbiased" comparison table somebody put out several months ago, to 'help managers make an informed decision?' It was a joke. After going a quarter of the way through it, it was obvious to a reader with an IQ 60 that the author was slamming NT every chance he got. Nobody would ever take it seriously as an unbiased comparison.

    This one is refreshing. It has yesses and nos on both sides, and gives both systems credit where credit is due. I think this comparison will be taken seriously by a great many people. Good work PC mag!
  • I would agree about PCMCIA support not being so bad under Linux. I have a MegaHertz dual function (33.6 modem, 10mbit Ethernet) PCMCIA card that I use in a ThinkPad 355Cs. SuSE found it for both modem and Ethernet during install with no problems, and this was with a 2.0.x kernel. I've also had occasion to plug in a few other PCMCIA cards (such as a 10/100 LinkSys Ethernet card) and they were automatically found and the proper modules loaded...

  • Another mistake in the article was the continual reference to NT being able to see FAT32 filesystems. Unless they've finally fixed that, NT and FAT32 are completely incompatible.

    Microsoft hasn't fixed that as far as I know, however I read in Infoworld a few weeks ago that a 3rd party company has announced an extra cost add-on for NT which does add FAT32/FAT32X compatibility. Of course, this means adding 3rd party code to the kernel level of a closed source product and adding expense to an already expensive product. This seems like a bad thing from the standpoint of stability, bloat, etc.

  • Fortunately the third party product you are talking about works really well and appears to be one of the more stable bits of my NT system.

    I'm sorry, but that makes me more, rather than less suspicious about NT in general.

    ISTR it wasn't that expensive either.

    After checking the article again, it appears that it is nearly the cost of the street price of the average Linux distribution. While that is not terribly expensive, when you add it to the street price of NT (even the gray market NTW prices), the whole package seems less than attractively priced, especially since that isn't the only 3rd party add-on that I'd consider necessary (and most of the others are not so cheap).

  • Ahh, don't you see? He was constantly refering to kernel 2.x, not 2.2.x! So by his (perhaps accidental) view, these features *are* new. Of course, we all know that when he said 2.x, he really meant 2.2.x and thus a number of "new" features he mentioned really aren't.

  • From Microsoft's web site, the requirements for Intel NT:

    - Pentium or faster processor 16 MB of memory (RAM); 32 MB recommended
    - 110 MB of available hard disk space
    - CD-ROM drive or access to a CD-ROM over a computer network
    - VGA or higher-resolution display adapter
    - Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device

  • What is the minimum requirement stated by Microsoft for NT? Ever tried to actually run it? I bet linux on it's minimum requirement of a 386 would beat NT on whatever it's minimum requirement is.

    As a matter of fact, there's an old 386/40 sitting in our communications closet that's collecting dust. One of our users had it until he needed to run Xcursions and got upgraded to a more modern machine. I've been thinking of installing linux on it to use as a print server, file server, WINS, etc.

    I recently had a 486/40 (SX-20 upgraded with DX2-50 chip) running NT and it was a pig (no offense intended to pig lovers). The same machine used to scream with linux.
  • Seems like everything he writes or "predicts" is hogwash. No matter how inevitable something is, if John Dvorak writes about it, it will fail. ;-)

  • I echo that sentiment, getting PCMCIA working in linux on my DELL i32k was a much more pleasant experience than trying to get it to work in NT.

    Interestingly enough, NT never did manage to see my PCMCIA modem and my PCMCIA network card at the same time, i literally had to change a BIOS setting to get it to see one or the other. Under linux, i grabbed the PCMCIA packages, compiled, and voila...network card and modem ;).

    so, NT went the way of the dodo, at least on my machine...no big loss.
  • I think he just means that you can tweak the kernel by changing some values in the /proc filesystem, instead of hard-coding them in the source and needing to recompile.

    I agree that he wasn't very clear here, but at least it was written in a pro Linux manner. I hate it when 'tech' reporters make mistakes and in turn make Linux look bad (that goes for any other OS or software as well). If you're going to say something negative, you better make sure that you are right... Unless your spreading FUD of coarse :)
  • Well, seeing as the article was mainly about the Linux kernel, the GNOME/KDE debate doesn't really fit in.

    I liked the article as well. It talked about many of the technical advantages of Linux (without any technical details mind you). I think that too much emphasis is being placed on advertizing the new GUIs for Linux, and your average non-Linux user doesn't realize the many other great features that Linux has (RAID, SMP, SMB, IPmasq, etc...) There needs to be some balance in the advocacy wars...
  • And then there's my 386/40 that's been running the RC5/DES client without a hiccup for the last 423 days and counting. 20,000 keys/sec is nothing to snicker at! :-) You can read about this machine, called Nodens [verinet.com], and some of my other machines, here [verinet.com].
  • make xconfig anyone? yeah, make isn't a button, but still....
  • I just wonder, exactly how easy is it to install
    Windows while still keeping another already installed OS?
    All this "Linux requires partitioning which confuses the hell out of people" makes me wonder how newbies would feel about installing windows on a Linux box without destroying the existing Linux, since that is the way most people install Linux the first few times.

    --
  • While that may have been nice, this was primarily an article about the kernel, right? Might as well say that it didn't mention the fact that you don't have to run a GUI at all on servers...

    Nathan
  • >All windows machines can have IP masq through WinGate.

    You mean Sygate? Wingate is a proxy server (if that's what you're talking about.) Sygate lets you configure your client machines to a default 'gateway' without individual apps being 'proxy-aware'.

    And if so, a 3rd-party add-on package, even at $80 shareware, is hardly support (as you point out). I think its fair to compare features that are in the Linux *kernel* with things that are in the Win32 *kernel*.

    If you are talking about something else, I apologize. I wasn't aware of anything available in Windows to do masquerading. Been using Linux to do that for a while since I gave up on Windows cause it sucked and would'nt do what I wanted (run a decent firewall on my 486 to gateway the Linux and Win PC's in my house to my cable modem.) Oh, and port-forwarding to my quake server, can Windows do that too? Sygate couldn't handle any kind of inbound services at all.



  • >even the ones who are really into gaming or whatever

    My observation is that this is changing quite a bit, especially in the First Person Shooter (FPS) gaming community (Quake).

    As a matter of fact, it was my 3D gaming that first got me interested in Linux. On these gaming news sites, there are constant mentions of this-game-ported-to-linux or this-linux-device-now-supported. id Software had gone a long way in supporting Linux and I think a lot of people are now more aware of it because of this.

    I happen to run a game server in my house through my cable modem. When Q3Test came out, I started running a server on my linux box (linux version came out before win32). I was pleasantly surprised how many players came to my server everyday (at this point only the Mac and Linux clients were available, Win32 was a couple weeks off yet.) The majority of these guys were running Linux. Of course, once the horde of players got their hands on the Win32 client, all the 14-year-old pissants started showing up too. (sorry to generalize, but it often seems to be true).

    Now I have a group of 'regulars' that play on my server all the time and quite a few are Linux users. I've even chatted with Windows users that are interested in Linux now _because_ of Quake and I've even exchanged e-mail with a couple who were looking for some info on how to get started.

    Take a look at www.bluesnews.com or www.q3arena.com and see that Linux gets mentioned almost every day.

  • Boy, that sure is right. My brother has a brand-spanking-new TNT2 that he runs under windows and he was complaining about how Q3Test didn't look/play quite as good as my Voodoo 2.

    I dual-booted back to windows and installed the Win32 Q3 client and it does in fact look better and play smoother under Linux.

    Now, when the GLX/Mesa stuff is finished for TNT2, I'll go grab one of those babies and _really_ ruin his day. 1024x768 at 32 bpp -- man I can't wait. (no, don't give me a lecture about Matrox, still not able to forgive them for the Millenium2) :-p

    Still can't quite convince the twerp to give Linux a shot though. I've offered to come over and install it for him and everything. Guess he's just too right-brained (graphics artist) to want to give it a shot. He doesn't see the point since all his graphics tools are win-based and he is happy to re-boot his PC 3 times a day. *sigh*

  • Who else has noticed that slashdot is listed at the end of the article as a `recommended resource`? People are going to come here to learn more after reading that article. We ought to give them a good impression.
  • Maybe they are considering NT 5.0.

    *slaps wrist* You mean Windows 2000. All will comply with the mighty Bill's naming scheme.

    --

  • Calm down (Score:5)

    by garver ( 30881 ) on Tuesday June 08, 1999 @04:57AM (#1860529)

    To everyone in here that is ripping the minor points of this article, calm down!

    In comparison to past articles, this one shines as being quite fair. Remember that PC Mag might as well as been MS Mag a year ago. I don't think a Linux magazine would have been so friendly to Windows 2000. Further, PC Mag was NEVER as friendly to OS/2 as this article is to Linux.

    I think it is OK to compare Linux 2.2 to Windows 2000. NT4 has been around for a while and most people looking to put a server into place over the next few months will be looking at Windows 2000 and Linux 2.2. 2.4 is very far away and should be not be considered.

    It didn't bother me that the auther switched around between Windows versions. The article is not about which is a better server, etc. but just a general feature comparison. If you are in the Windows world, you get this, in the Linux world you get this. Most admins are not concerned about getting PnP on servers, but are very concerned about getting it on workstations.

    The author did refer to features that are not available yet, but will be in Windows2000, but he did the same for Linux. For example, he said that IP tunneling on Linux only does IP, but also said that other protocols will not be far behind.

    The author also didn't say Linux was lacking a feature simply because there wasn't a button to activate the feature. Never have I seen the flexibility of the sysctl stuff in /proc discussed in an article. This guy did even though there wasn't a point and click interface.

    He even pointed out that even though Windows may be more user friendly, Linux users love the control they have with Linux!

    In future, please calm down and treat an article that is decent as it should be treated. Just because it is in PC Mag doesn't mean it should be ripped to shreds. Otherwise, the media sees the Linux community as a bunch of religious zealots and not the serious group of users that just want a good OS that we are.

    May the flaming begin... sorry Rob.

  • It lists PCMCIA support as "poor" - I don't know where the writer got this tidbit, but I've never had any problems with PCMCIA under Linux (with a variety of different notebooks)

    Something that astounded everyone here in our tech department was the fact that Linux recognized and installed an IBM Home&Away modem/NIC with no problems at all... this after they had given up trying to get these cards to work at all in Win98/NT.. (they could sometimes get the NIC part to work under 95, if they screwed around enough, using exactly the right combination of DLLs & drivers..)

    Just my 2 bits..
  • The comparison is NT4 vs Linux 2.0.3something...that means, it's just as worthless as all the previous ones :)

    I'll belive those numbers when it's NT4 with latest SP vs. Linux' latest stable kernel...till then, those tests are just Microsoft ads :)

    Vox

  • How 'bout a beowolf cluster OF palm pilots?
  • And a good point to make to those 'serious' linux users who say that porting games is a waste of time.
  • The ability to run a great OS like Linux on really
    old hardware (which 386's are, in computer time)
    means that poor countries in Africa and Latin
    America can get a 'net infrastructure up and
    running with less effort than by using NT.

    The fact is, MS and hardware vendors want you to
    buy new hardware -- it's no surprise NT needs big
    machines to run on. Everybody "wins" -- even Linux
    users, as old-but-perfectly-good machines flood
    the market, keeping computers affordable for more
    people.

    /g.
  • I looked at the article and, as much as I love linux, I thought the article over-hyped linux and mostly compared NT and linux on points those of us in the linux community like to brag about. There was some negatives said about linux, but if doing a fully comprehensive review, it would need to address more issues that would concern average windows users. Maybe I missed something in the article, but I did not see much of a discussion of user-interface friendliness. NT is a bit more user-friendly and has more unified appearance. X offers moore flexibility with less user-friendliness (though even brain dead people should be able to figure out how to work a window manager, even if they don't look EXACTLY the same.
    Just my two cents..
  • With the rash of 'pro-NT' articles and benchmarks out lately and the uproar on Slashdot about the bias shown, it is disappointing to see that even an article like this which is fairly 'pro-Linux' is still criticised when it paints the 2.2 kernel in a better light than it really should be, and includes some blatant FUD about the state of the NT kernel.

    Looking at more specific parts of the article:
    "You also need far less hardware to run Linux than Win NT; a good old Pentium/166 is just fine, and you can even press that 386 doorstop into service." I will agree that a 386 won't run NT (it requires the CMPXCHG instruction on the CPU), but the inference that NT doesn't run on a P/166 is just ludicrous. I happily run NT Server on my 486/33 at home to serve 98, NT and Macs just fine. There really isn't an issue with performance at all when using EISA SCSI controllers.

    NT is cast in a bad light for running Apache slowly, but no mention is made of IIS which actually won the 'Editors Choice' award for the best web platform in the very same issue. Again, showing considerable bias to Linux.

    Now for the Kernel FUD:

    "It's unlikely that Windows NT will offer 64-bit support until significantly after Merced's introduction." Windows 2000 already has a 64 bit version (Win2000 Datacentre) in development which runs happily on the Alphas. I agree that Linux is already 64 bit on the Alphas, just the inaccuracy of the article's comment is unbelieveable. The Win64 API has been published for at least 12 months now and the SDK is widely available for making apps that behave on 32 and 64 bit platforms.

    Mention is made of the improved SMP support in the 2.2 kernel, but it is cast as 'better' than the support that has always been in the NT kernel. The fact is that the 1993 NT kernel offered better SMP support than the current Linux kernel by offering fully reentrant APIs. The 2.2 kernel still has a long way to go before it will scale as well as NT, just as NT still has a way to go before it scales as well as Solaris. The inference that the 2.2 kernel scales better than NT is just FUD!!

    The lack of PnP support is quickly glossed over. Again, hiding the weaknesses of Linux and the strengths of Win2000. Even NT4 had limited PnP support!

    2.2 is praised for not having to recompile to recofigure the kernel. Isn't that exactly what NT has always done? While recompilation is an added bonus for Linux, surely the praise for not having to recompile must also be thrown back to NT. More bias!!

    3rd party file system support is highlighted for Linux (NTFS etc.), but ignored for NT (FAT32, ext2, HFS etc). How is this comparison even close to fair?

    NT could always boot from a FAT partition, so UMSDOS is hardly 'non NT'. SMB and NCPFS are not 'beyond NT'. NFS is readily available for NT, and I'm not sure about the availability of then others. Still bias and FUD here.

    Linux is consistently written up as soon to support something that NT already supports (eg IPX over VPN), but NT lacking support such as IPv6 is hardly written in the same light. NT does not support IPv6, but is this an issue in the short term? NAT seems to be alleviating most of the problems with IPv4 for now and the NT stack will be available in plenty of time.

    Linux IP configuration and route configuration is praised, but no mention is made of any of NT's advancements from NT4 to Win2k over Linux. More FUD and bias.

    On page 5 we get a whole three paragraphs (after 4 pages of FUD) stating the shortcomings of Linux. Wow. What a break!! Come on - the match isn't that close yet.

    To recap on the FUD in the table on page 6:
    64 bit *is* supported to a small extent on NT4EE and is supported on Win2k Datacenter.
    The File Systems are complete FUD as it does not include 3rd party support in NT. UMSDOS is a red herring as NT supports FAT booting natively.
    SMP support is much better in NT with reentrant syscalls for I/O.
    NT's RAID support is much better.

    I haven't mentioned that I've found NT more stable than Linux in my home environment (less reboots), but that's a personal thing that mainly stems from the fact I know more about configuring NT than Linux. We have NT boxes at my work that go years without reboots, but empirical evidence seems to be contrary to my experiences.

    Basically this article is almost pure pro-Linux FUD. Some concessions are thrown to NT to make it *seem* fair, but it simply isn't.

    Perhaps if the Slashdot community values their integrity, they will also write to PC Mag and demand fairer reviews from both sides of the fence? Somehow I doubt it though. Most Linux advocates lose their integrity when forced to admit NT is sometimes better than Linux.

    John Wiltshire
  • Interesting. I have a 486/33 running NT at home (36M of RAM - amazing how many 30 pin SIMMs I can find) and it is very usable.

    Guess YMMV?
  • Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.

    Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products. If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT (most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com, EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just a matter of looking.

    NT supports NCP, SMB, Macintosh file and print, and NFS natively (from Microsoft) as network file systems and a few others from 3rd parties. Most filesystems have been developed as file system device drivers. I believe 3rd party solutions for Linux should be included simply because that makes the most sense when comparing two products.

    Most of the problems with 64 bit NT is the user interface stuff where handles, pointers, ints and so on all get munged together. The back end things still seem pretty much untouched by the change to 64 bit pointers. Personally I use 'int' where I don't care and '__int32' where I do care.

    'As stable' I can go for. I was just relating my personal experience that I've had more kernel panics on Linux than BSODs on NT. YMMV.

    John Wiltshire
  • If you say so. I find it runs really well if you set bash as your shell instead of explorer and stop all the services you aren't using. Has about the same memory footprint as my equivalent Linux install. :)
  • PnP - I think our definitions of 'the kernel' are somewhat different (as always, what is kernel and what isn't is ambiguous). Still, I agree Linux has 'Plug and Configure and Play', but to the best of my knowledge, won't boot, recognise all PnP devices, ask for the driver disks if the correct drivers are not found and so on. In this way Windows is a long way ahead for the average user.

    Filesystems - By sheer numbers I guess you win in that Linux definitely has more filesystems than NT (probably due to the $1000 cost of the SDK for NT). As for usable file systems, the support of NTFS is a little dodgy in Linux (stripe sets and so on don't work yet AFAIK), and the ext2 support in NT is a little dodgy and both support FAT/VFAT/FAT32. Little more else you need on x86.

    John Wiltshire
  • There's a review of web server platforms [zdnet.com] in the same issue that disagrees about how wonderful Linux is.

  • No, they did dynamic page tests too. See http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755, 402311-2,00.html

  • Seems like they 'forgot' a couple of ports (maybe to make NT look less bad?) like the Corel netwinder (ARM), palmpilot (like someone else said), SGI's MIPS systems.
    And -plug- support for more is on the way .. see http://www.linuxce.org/ linux as a windows CE replacement on MIPS/SH3/(ARM maybe?) devices. -/plug-
    Their "table" said that NT4 supports IP masquerade, yah right.. win2K and the latest win98-osr2 ? support it (but who knows how good it's going to be).

    They also claim that linux 2.2.x adds Raid support .. wasn't it an improved version of 2.0.x ?
  • Abit motherboard's BIOS comes with an option to drive a USB keyboard through the BIOS or through the OS. So I would guess other BIOS' support this too.

    Dodger_
  • Dork.
  • Regarding installation difficulty, at best they are both roughly the same -- but NT does a much better job of working with unusual or new hardware. Linux, particularly RH Linux, beats the tar out of NT when it comes to disk management though. Unfortunately both suck rocks at PnP support, can't give either one the advantage here.

    Regarding "user-friendliness", I find the opinion that X is more friendly to be hard to support (and I've been using X since before Windows 3.x even hit the streets). Let me explain.

    The variety of window managers and desktops makes X a lot harder to deal with for the beginner; most of the time you don't just get a working desktop when you log in and start it up, you have to tweak the hell out of it. Red Hat and Caldera have made great strides here, but the fact that there's no standard sure makes things tough.

    That assumes that the server even starts up. One huge, huge problem with the design of today's X servers (at least the ones I've used) is that they tend to be monolithic (server tuned for a particular video card or class of cards). They should be redesigned with a loadable driver system instead, and a hell of a lot more work needs to go into getting them to properly identify display systems.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly fond of NT, but in terms of end-user usability it creams any UNIX variant I've ever used (even NeXT, although that had a few high points).

    Don't even get me going on support for peripherals such as printers. They scale well, but they can be a freakin' nightmare to configure even for an experienced UNIX hand.

    If you're not focused on UI issues, though, Linux generally whips NT's ass. Gateway services, email, web services, file sharing ... not much of a contest, particularly given the price differential.
  • It's a comparison of the linux kernel and windows/NT/2000 'kernels' not of the gui etc for the most part

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