Pinderkent

Thanks to an article on DesktopLinux.com, I was reading about the Asus Eee PC 701 system. One interesting thing about this system is that it will reportedly run a variant of Xandros Desktop Linux.

The article goes on to note that this device will apparently have 512 MB of RAM. It's the paragraph following that portion of the article that I find most interesting: While this may not sound like enough RAM to run Xandros, this Linux operating system is well-known for its ability to run with a bare minimum of RAM. In a DesktopLinux.com review in 2006, we were able to run the latest version, Xandros Desktop 4.0, on a far less powerful system: a 6-year-old Compaq Deskpro EN Desktop with a 500MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive.

I find it laughable that 128 MB of RAM is considered "a bare minimum" today. It's actually a very large amount of RAM. Back in the 1980s and even into the late 1990s, those of us in the corporate world would have been amazed to have that much RAM at our disposal. At one job, we used a Sun SPARCstation 1 with 1 MB of RAM. This was around 1991 or 1992. On this system, we ran not only a fairly busy email server, but also a couple of databases and several other backend applications. Looking back, I don't know how we got by with such a system. Perhaps software was written with more care in those days. Regardless, we had some of the older system administrators telling us how lucky we were to have 1 MB. They recalled the days when 64 KB of RAM was considered a lot.

When it comes to desktop systems, there's absolutely no legitimate reason why a capable desktop system needs more than 128 MB of RAM. In the early 1990s we had NeXTstation systems that worked comfortably with 12 MB of RAM. Keep in mind that these systems came with a very capable suite of desktop software, still comparable in many ways to Mac OS X today. And even then, we were dealing with relatively heavy-weight technologies like Objective-C, Display PostScript, Mach, and so forth. Yet those systems still performed very well, with 100 times less RAM than the typical low-end consumer PC today!

Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they're actually trying to accomplish.

Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the "Philosophy" section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend's house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

Why do I need to imagine that sort of an operating system? I've had that for years now. It's really quite simple: I have a system at my house running Solaris, connected to a broadband Internet connection. Using SSH, I can connect to it from virtually any other network-enabled computer. And over that secure connection I can run X-based applications quite well. All I need to bring with me is a USB key with an X server installed. Since most UNIX or UNIX-like systems, like Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X often already have an X server present, it's really only a matter of using Xming on Windows.

Best of all, I get to use real desktop applications. I don't have to bother with lousy JavaScript-based web apps, and I have full access to all of my data. Also very important, I have much more control over how my data is stored, copied and backed up. Yes, it's a little bit more effort on my part, but I think it's well worth it to know how my private files are being stored and used.

So I find it difficult to understand what exactly the GNOME developers here are trying to accomplish. Using my setup, it's already possible to use the existing GNOME applications from other computers quite comfortably. We get the benefits of web apps, without what is often the poor quality they exhibit, and without having to worry about who else has access to our information.

Now is major turning point for the GNOME project. KDE 4.0 is coming soon. GNOME isn't prepared. We may very well see a mass exodus of users from GNOME to KDE, just because KDE 4.0 will be so far ahead of GNOME. It's doubtful that this GNOME Online Desktop idea will bring any benefit.

There is currently an article at Yahoo! News that takes a look back on how the market has so far reacted to Microsoft's Windows Vista. It covers a lot of the problems that many people have experienced when using Vista. And after reading the article, I find myself asking a pretty important question: Why would one subject himself or herself to the problems of Windows Vista?

One reason is likely ignorance, especially when it comes to the general populace. They bought a new PC, it came with Vista pre-installed, and so they use it. But I find that somewhat difficult to believe these days. Many would-be computer purchasers are aware of Apple's offerings, specifically Mac OS X. In many computer retail outlets, systems from Apple are displayed right next to typical PC systems running Windows Vista. So if you're looking at the PC running Vista, you will no doubt also notice the Apple systems running OS X.

Of course, there are also a number of viable alternatives to Windows Vista and Mac OS X. Some of the most notable are Linux, FreeBSD and Sun's Solaris. When it comes to Linux, the Ubuntu distribution is often recommended, and is indeed a very mature and reliable system for most home users.

The main reason may still be what it was a decade ago: gaming. Although the availability of games for systems like Linux and Mac OS X has improved over the past ten years, Windows is still the leader in this area. But we need to ask, is it really worth the hassle of using Vista for the sake of a few games? I would think not!

Regardless, it will be interesting to watch the adoption of Windows Vista over the next six months, especially considering the relatively strong competition it is facing from rivals such as Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Home desktop users are living in a time diversity, and it is my hope that they will use this opportunity to broaden their horizons, and use alternative operating systems that may reduce or eliminate the hassles they have experienced in the past. Best of all, they may even find their productivity greatly boosted!

Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don't know whether that is true or not. I'm more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don't get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that's contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!

I wasn't sure exactly what the specs were on these laptops, so I went to the OLPC wiki and checked their hardware specifications page. I have to say, I was quite surprised. These are rather powerful systems. The CPU is apparently a 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700, and the laptops contain 256 MB of RAM.

Now, I realize that such a 433 MHz CPU would appear quite inferior to the latest x86-64 chips from AMD and Intel. Likewise, with many consumer-grade desktops including 1 GB of RAM or more, 256 MB doesn't seem like a lot. But we also shouldn't forget that these OLPC systems are comparable to the high-end PC systems of not even a decade ago.

I recall being amazed at how powerful PC hardware was getting by the late 1990s. At one particular job, I remember replacing several old SGI servers with a single new PC server running Linux, offering approximately the same hardware specs as these laptops. The performance boost that we experienced was significant. It was more than we had been anticipating. I was last at that company about six months ago, and that very server was still being used for its original purpose. The only changes were some software security fixes.

Hardware of the caliber found in the OLPC laptop is still very capable. So I find it absurd to suggest that the possible inability to use Windows or Mac OS X on such systems has anything to do with the hardware; it doesn't. The only real reason a system like Windows or Mac OS X would not work on such hardware is due to software bloat.

When it comes to Mac OS X in particular, we should remember that it is directly derived from NeXTSTEP. Years back I used a NeXTstation, and I was very surprised at how performant it was. These were systems with, at the high end, a 33 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU, and usually 8 or 12 MB of RAM. That's a mere fraction of what is available in these laptops. Yet NeXT still managed to put out a well-performing and very functional system using essentially the exact same software development technology still being used today on Mac OS X. If Objective-C, C and C++-based software ran enjoyably on those NeXT systems, which had 32 times less RAM and CPUs running at 1/13th the frequency of that of the OLPC laptops, the problems the author mentions involving Mac OS X should not exist.

Earlier this month I wrote about how the Ubuntu release names can get rather confusing. An interesting reply of sorts was made to that posting.

The author brings up the point that other operating systems besides Ubuntu use release names, either instead of or in addition to release numbers. Systems like Mac OS X, and recent releases of Windows are given as examples. Yes, the same problems with the Ubuntu release names do apply equally well to Mac OS X and recent releases of Windows. It perhaps isn't as much of a problem with those systems yet, as the duration between releases has been relatively long. Thus there are a smaller number of names to remember, and each name is used for a loner amount of time. But with a new Ubuntu release every six months, the names begin to add up.

As for Sun's use of the name "Nevada" for Solaris 11, I think it's pretty irrelevant. Every colleague I work with refers to it as Solaris 11. It just causes less confusion that way. Then again, Sun hasn't been the best when it comes to the Solaris version numbers, either. Some long-time Solaris users I work with refer to Solaris 10 as Solaris 2.10. One guy I know calls it SunOS 5.10! But he's been using Sun systems since the 1980s, so I suppose he can be forgiven.

One thing the Ubuntu team should have done was to choose their release names alphabetically. At least then we'd have a clear ordering between releases, even if such a system didn't offer the clarity of year/month-based version numbers.