GNU HURD Retrospective
Linked by David Adams on Thu 1st Jul 2010 08:52 UTC
GNU, GPL, Open Source The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary -- a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users -- but it has yet to come down to earth.
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Laurence
Member since:
2007-03-26

One day Linux will indeed become mainstream (some might say that day has arrived) and people will use it just like they use Windows or Macs, without even knowing what FOSS is and how it changed the world. For someone who was there during the 90's, it's extremely ironic.


Linux has become mainstream, however real irony here is people rarely use the GNU userland tools despite often using Linux on a daily basis.

Linux is on our phone, in our routers and on our sat-navs - but each and every time users Linux is buried so deep behind layers of corporate developed -and usually propitiatory- userland tools that it's easy to forget just how widespread the OS is.

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google_ninja Member since:
2006-02-05

i probably use grep, find, ls, cp, rm (and curl, but not sure if thats gnu or not) on a daily basis... and thats it. i would be curious if IT guys use more of the tools, because as a dev, I would rather just write a quick script or one liner in a more general purpose scripting language (like ruby), then stuff like awk, groff, etc.

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Bill Shooter of Bul Member since:
2006-07-14

mkdir, top, tail, head, less, chmod, chown,awk, cut, w,xargs,tar, cat, ps, netstat, dc

amongst others.

One liners are cool too ( but, really only in perl. Ruby's not poetic enough for my tastes), but sometimes gnu tools with some bash glue is faster.

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Laurence Member since:
2007-03-26

So you (and Bill Shooter of Bul) never use GNOME either?

Oh, it's not part of the base system, but it's still GNU.

As is BASH and GRUB (and it's pretty hard to escape GRUB on any PC - be it laptop, desktop or server - without switching to the now not so common LILO

Edited 2010-07-02 09:07 UTC

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spiderman Member since:
2008-10-23

GNU userland is not just rm, grep and awk. It's also ld, glibc and gcc. The linux kernel does not compile without gcc. Linux depends on GNU and all the GNU system depends on glibc (sockets, i18n, pipes, I/O, users and groups, processes, etc). The kernel is a very small component.

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