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"bsd and linux are supposed to be versions of unix or clones of... and both care a lot of code that is in unix... hmm..."

Linux was originally written as a clone of Minix, BSD386 was written as a port of BSD to i386. There was never any any actual UNIX code in Linux, and following the BSDI lawsuit all the BSD code was rewritten to form FreeBSD. Since then both have grown to provide much greater hardware support and much more powerful interfaces than their proprietary ancestors.

"oh wait.. i guess linus torvalds IS god of all OS's"

Linus is a nice guy and a fine programmer. His contribution to software engineering--which would have guaranteed him more than a passing mention in the history of computing even if the Linux kernel was not as successful as it has been--is an empirical proof what has been known as Linus' Law:

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

And an empirical counterexample to Brooks' Law:

The programming work performed increases with direct proportion to the number of programmers (N), but the complexity of a project increases by the square of the number of programmers (N2).

Linus showed that distributed development is not only possible, but remarkably effective, as long as the structure of the project is maintained as a hierarchical tree of subsystems. Perhaps more importantly, he showed that distributed debugging is perhaps the greatest advance in software engineering since portable programming languages.

So even if Linux is not the end-all of *nix kernels (and it definitely is not), It still stands as a profound contribution to the field of software engineering. Not only did Linus Torvalds revive the hacker culture when it was near death in the early 90's, but he has shown us that individuals, academia, and competiting corporations can collaborate on a single software project.

Is Linus God? No. Does he belong in the top echelon of the world's greatest programmers? No. Is he the greatest hacker of all time? Quite possibly.

"or a buncha kids who thought that linux was the only way to beat microsoft successfully started the bandwagon affect.."

A bunch of kids who wanted to hack but had nothing to hack on were suddenly given something promising to work with. It wasn't about beating Microsoft. It was about showing that proprietary software was not the sole destiny of the personal computer. That as long as we can think, imagine, and create, there will always be a public domain.

Why don't we wake up and realize that we can write our own music, produce our own movies, paint our own paintings, write our own literature, and program our own software? We don't need to depend on content providers to stimulate our interests.

Especially now that we have the Internet. History has taught us that great advancements in communication and education have been followed by periods of intellectual rebirth, creativity, empowerment of the individual, as well and political and social reform. It happened in the Rennaissance, and it happened in the histories of our great world empires. Perhaps history only recounts the larger trends and not the minor fluctuations. Because it seems like the political and societal response to the Internet has included a strong component striving to control and effectively stifle this progress.

In conclusion, it's not about religion, it's not about beating microsoft, and it's not about youthful idealism, it's not even really about software. It's about our freedom to absorb, influence, and communicate culture. If culture can propagate across a global network as remarkable speeds, then our ability to affect culture should be equally remarkable. Freedom of speech is is a categorical imperative. Free trade is an economic theory. If free trade stops working in a digital age of free speech, then it is the economy that needs to be regulated, not speech.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

fact was unix was controlled by novell, sco or bell and their licensing policies were bullshit and no one would share their crap and nothing was interoptable and it was all platform specific. once open group came a long it was too late.

THAT is why unix did not win. I rest my case.

I was a little disappointed by that powernotebooks page. I was hoping it was selling something like no-name PPC notebooks. That would have been neat, even though they would probably only have about 5 customers.

http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/index.html
http://www.dell.com/
http://www.gamepc.com/index.asp

While this is true to some extent, software still needs to be recompiled/repackaged for all the individual distros.

No it doesn't. You can distribute your package statically-linked and it will install on any distro. Loki did this for their games, Codeweavers does this for Crossover Office.

Just install it in /opt and add that to the global path and you're in business...

A workaround, but not a definitive solution. Some folks are already complaining of the high memory consumption of the big DEs... Static linking might not help "the cause".

An unified package deployment system with a set of pristine, uncustomised libraries would be ideal, but that is probably utopic. That said, we never know.

I agree it's not ideal, however for commercial applications it's a pragmatic approach.

I do think that waiting for a unified package manager is utopian...

"In year 2000 [blaaaat] beat MS Vista"
"In 1980 [blaaaat] to OS X.4"

In 1980, everyone was copying from everyone.
In 1985, everyone was copying from everyone.
In 1990, everyone was copying from everyone.
In 1995, everyone was copying from everyone.
In 2000, everyone was copying from everyone.
In 2005, everyone is copying from everyone.
In 2010, everyone will be copying from everyone.
In 2015, everyone will be copying from everyone.

There, the software/operating systems world in a nutshell.

VS2005 is for wankers.

So you're using it right?

If they're mature, they're not zealots.

You must be trolling. KDE4 will be about the same level as Win98? You realize that Win98 has no hardware rendering, or the other hundreds of extra usability and eyecandy features? Have you used KDE, or any other Linux DE or WM?

I think alot of people here dont know **** anyway

So this pot and this kettle met on a dark night...

Given that you must be trolling, there's surely no point in responding to the rest of your balmy post.

you sir, are a fucking retard.


how can Linux copt a microsoft desktop, when Linux desktops have transparancy, shaders, copositing NOW when WIndows will not have it until Vista gets released in the FUTURE ???

how ?

come on dickhead, explain it.

or was this what happened in that dream you had ? you know the one, the one where you woke up touching yourself after you dreamt of sucking bill gates off

Microsoft ALWAYS are behind and ALWAYS copy the competition

In 2005, Microsoft released a 64-bit OS, without any competent apps. Linux was 64-bit in 1993, and has THOUSANDS of 64-bit Apps! Microsoft MIGHT catch up in ten to fifteen years, to where Linux was in 2000!

In 2005, Microsoft acknowledged its 305th loss in civil court, for theft of Intellectual porperty, just like the many CRIMINAL FELONY convictions. More the reason NOT to deal with a person, or corporation, with no ethics...

In 2004, and again, in 2005, Microsoft released a Server OS, that upon release, cannot serve their own office suite, and other, products!

Look at what it tells your customers and clients, when they see some intern on your floor, entering their private financial/medical data into an unsecured terminal database, wide open to the world!

Sheesh! The smart 40% of FOSS users run Debian Linux.

Linux is YOUR Operating System; and it works very well for a donation.

What is Linux OS's aim??? Can anyone define it in single sentence with less than 60 characters!

How about: "As you wish."?

Looking at your list, though, I don't think you quite get it. Linux isn't attempting to be a clone of Windows. ReactOS is.

Linux has been superior to Windows for over 1/2 of the last 14 years...but not superior to Windows for every configuration or use.

If you want to know the aims of Linux, look at the people who distribute it. You will find many different motivations and many different goals.

Like an active biosphere, the poorly adapted distributions and applications die out while the well adapted tend to get picked up. Not 100% of the time, but very frequently.

"Microsoft's aim is to put OS on every desktop.
Mac's aim is to put the most beautiful GUI on every desktop.
No offence but...........
What is Linux OS's aim???"

No, Mac's aim is not to put anything on every desktop. It is to put its desktop on hardware it, and it alone supplies, which implies putting it on around 5% of desktops.

Linux and MS have the same objective: to put as many copies as people will buy/download on the hardware of the user's choice.

No competition, really.

Linux aim is to offer complete freedom to do what you want with the OS, and choice. Which is good, and it works great for a lot of people.

The thing is, most users dont care about that. They want a nicely packaged and pretty OS that just works for them out of the box, no tinkering.

Some Linux distros are trying to offer this, but aren't quite there yet I think.

Microsoft's aim is to put OS on every desktop.
Mac's aim is to put the most beautiful GUI on every desktop.
No offence but...........
What is Linux OS's aim???

* Microsoft's aim is to dominate and profit by ANY means. (It doesn't matter if its OS, application, console, etc).

* Apple's aim is to provide hardware and software solutions. Whether its PCs or other devices like iPod.

* Linux's aim is to provide a kernel that is flexible and free for anyone. (as in the right to view the code, etc)

* Open-source's aim?
Technically, its split into to 2 main sub-groups...
One is OSI which accepts that open-source people need to make money, etc), while the Freedom Software Foundation believes that ALL software should be free.

In both cases, they promote the idea of any user having the choice to do whatever they want with the code.

Wake up linux fellow users, this is fast moving internet age....you can't just try to catch up with something already existing.......

rakamaka, you have no clue on Linux or open-source.
Just run back to your Windows haven and STFU. Bill and Steve need to be fed, you money will do quite nicely.

Yeah, this is the point.
If you are going to run mission critical databases with hundreds of gigabytes in size, then forget about the wintel stuff. Sun and IBM does a very good job in this area.
IBM have one of the best server hardwares, and Sun has (one of) the most advanced server operating system.
All the hype around x86 architecture is about 64 bit computing, and 3-4GHz CPUs. RISC and Sparc is not about gigahertz. Its about architecture, that can handle serveral dozens of processors, with almost a linear scalability.
And who the hell cares about 64bit on x86, if you can only put 8-12Gigs of RAM in to an Intel based server, and it is likely that you wont use more than 2-3 Terabytes of storage? 64bit is about capacity, and has nothing to do with performance.

Its true, that most of the companies don't need this technology, but there are also a lot, who does.

Yes, I'm a unix tech person working for one of the companies mentioned above. I hate server operating systems equipped with fancy looking graphical desktop, without the option to uninstall the the desktop. Graphic is just a waste of resources for a server, if I really want to click on icons, then I use an X terminal.
Oh, I have nothing against Windows in general. I use it as a desktop OS. It is really good in that. Also very good games they have for Windows.
But if I want to do serious computing, I use serious hardware and Unix.

And by that I safely assume that you've looked at Monad? Up til this point Windows have required either a mish mash of either JScript/String-of-command.cmd or (better yet) cygwin to do more advanced stuff on the command line but Monad is at least as good as *sh from where I look.

That coming from someone who loves cron/*sh

What ? You mean monad is portable ?
No ? So what are you talking about. You may love cron/*sh, but sure enough you have not the slightest idea why it is so powerful, which implies you don't even know how to use it (so I wonder how come you love it). Monad does the same mistakes as csh (notice we don't hear a lot about this shell lately, guess why), and given the track record of MS regarding security, I don't hold my breath for Monad. But sure enough, it has nothing near the power of *sh, at least as long as it's not portable.

Ookaze