Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups' The first release candidate of version 3.11 of the Linux kernel has arrived, and to commemorate the occasion, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has given the kernel a new codename and a new, Microsoft-inspired boot logo to match. As of Sunday, Linux kernel 3.11 is officially named "Linux for Workgroups," borrowing the moniker …
This post has been deleted by its author
Not to need tonnes of driver disks. I will have to have a clear out soon of all my old driver disks for various devices I dont have. I still have some floppies with windows drivers for the network port. The funny thing is they worked for the OEM of windows XP as it didnt auto configure the common port.
The start menu was a quantum leap in usability on the Windows desktop. That was 1995, what was the Mac OS like back then? or Linux even? I don't think Linux was really becoming usable until a couple of years after that. That was still the days of the LILO bootloader with all its quirks.
"The start menu was a quantum leap in usability on the Windows desktop. That was 1995, what was the Mac OS like back then? or Linux even? I don't think Linux was really becoming usable until a couple of years after that. That was still the days of the LILO bootloader with all its quirks."
It was fine in '95 - the 2.x series kernels came out the following year but even the 0.96/8 ones were alright up to a point.. driver support for cheap consumer tat was still more miss than hit, but X windows had been ported a couple of years prior and the (GNU) compiler chain was useful and (more importantly for me at the time) rather cheaper than the Microsoft C compiler (which they'd bought from someone, forget who, pretty good it was too).
I mainly used it for interfacing with the University network, some dev work and as a front end onto the SGI Onyx in another room that had research data and analysis tools.
Linux wasn't as consumer friendly as OS/2, Windows etc back then, but for technical work - especially on machines with a more-workstation-than-whitebox bent - it was alright and a very compelling software development platform. Crashes - yes, lock-ups - yes, mostly Duplo-level window/desktop managers - yes.... but fine for all that, and they were all criticisms I could level at my Windows box. Windows '95 looked OK (IMO) when it came out, but everything before looked and ran like cheap crap compared with the mainline OSes we used, e.g. Solaris, Irix, HP-UX and most of them couldn't even connect to a network after a standard install.
One thing I didn't miss was playing the diskette shuffling game to keep the AAA set to hand whilst trying to load the rest of the OS onto the other ones - anyone who installed Linux around then without and infinite number of floppies will probably remember something similar.....
"Windows '95 looked OK (IMO) when it came out, but everything before looked and ran like cheap crap compared with the mainline OSes we used, e.g. Solaris, Irix, HP-UX and most of them couldn't even connect to a network after a standard install."
That sounds weird on re-read - what I meant by that was that most of the versions of Windows couldn't connect - not the other OSes.
"That sounds weird on re-read - what I meant by that was that most of the versions of Windows couldn't connect - not the other OSes."
I worked once for a MS partner out On The Bleeding Edge and although I found the user experience of Windows 95 innovative you are bang on about the lower level issues for the poor buggers in the set-up and install trenches.
According to our installation and support guys we had problems mainly because firms would buy from "you spec it, we deliver it" PC-by-mail operations (once upon a time these were a lot more common than they are now) and a delivery of "identical" PCs would have so many variations in NICs, video cards and gosh knows what else that the driver configuration was a nightmare suck-it-and-see process.
And let's not talk about the IRQ conflict hell. Swap out a sound card and end up working all day to get everything else back on line (maybe by buying a different sound card than the one you were trying to install).
Ah, them were the days. The days I'm glad we're well shot of now.
Yes, it did bring it into second place.
Ironically, Windows 95 was far more similar to RISC OS, than the Windows 3.x machines that replaced it in the early 90s. (Meaning many school leavers faced with windows 95 had a much steeper learning curve, than they would have had)
Shame they never fixed the input focus system though.
My recollection is that most Linux software was still command-line stuff. Yes, there was X-windows, with the free window manager (I forget its name) from MIT. Its main role seemed to be to run lots of terminal apps simultaneously. As actual X-apps one had:
- basic clock
- the Dali clock, with graphically changing characters and colours. Very popular, I miss it.
- xv, an impressive image editor for its time.
- and
- er
- that's about it.
Star Office was not widely known until Sun bought them and promoted it; and it was not free as in priceless. There was Latex (terminal based coded markup), still hard to beat for mathematical documents. There were terminal editors: Vi, more or less usable, and Emacs (you loved it or hated it).
Yes, things are much better now, despite the near-death experiences of KDE4, Gnome3, and Ubuntu.
Dali clock still lives, along with xscreensaver (which I still run), both from the same guy, who used to code for netscape (remember the days ) .
xv wasnt really an editor, and other than viewnior, not many image programs come close to it's ease of use when it come to putting an image on the screen as fast as possible, with as little unnecesary junk as possible.
The start menu was a quantum leap in usability on the Windows desktop.
This always bugs me, a "quantum leap" is an electron moving from one shell to the next shell and is the smallest amount of change possible in a system. So rather than meaning a massive change it really means a itsy bitty tiny change at or beyond the limit of measurement.
But there again that might be exactly what the poster meant.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Something tells me they won't give a shit."
Quite the reverse, they will take it as a compliment, "Oh look, Linus admits they've just caught up with WFW 3.11".
Redmond doesn't do irony. For evidence, see every communication coming out of Microsoft, ever. They have more self belief than Richard Dawkins, or a whole nightclub full of rappers.
Most notably, AMD has contributed more than 150 patches that improve support for Radeon graphics cards, including support for new hardware and for dynamic power management in the open source driver.
Can't wait for this! Nice to see AMD continuing to improve their Linux support after the release of Steam on the platform. The cards are still woefully underpowered when running under Linux, compared to Windows.
"That's more a result of the unstructured architecture of Linux compared to Microsoft's optimised model. I wouldn't expect to see that fixed any time soon."
And how do you explain L4D2 running faster through DirectX wrapper to OpenGL on proprietary nVidia drivers than on Windows?
Just stop this nonsense.
Radeon drivers are slow because they are Alpha quality software, as in not feature complete and far from fully optimised.
"And how do you explain L4D2 running faster through DirectX wrapper to OpenGL on proprietary nVidia drivers than on Windows?"
It was specifically being optimised for Linux.
If you look at real world graphics benchmarks that are the same on both platforms, Windows 8 is substantially faster than the latest Ubuntu, etc.
"The cards are still woefully underpowered when running under Linux, compared to Windows."
That's more a result of the unstructured architecture of Linux compared to Microsoft's optimised model. I wouldn't expect to see that fixed any time soon.
I'm not sure what you mean about the architecture... certainly the point at which the images are rendered on the screen has more routes to it on Linux, what with different compositors etc, than Windows which is a single target - but that's not to mean that you can't try and optimize the performance on Linux for each, just that's it's potentially a bigger, more costly, job. That touches on one of the main reason for differences - economics.
Where there is a large shared code base, such as openGL, the binary drivers from AMD and nVidia tend to run about the same speed on Linux - and certainly for GL work that speed is on a par with the performance on Windows (some GL benchmarks Windows is faster, some Linux + binary driver is faster). For a lot of businesses, GL performance is what matters - not directX etc, the situation is different, by default, for consumer PC OSes which are still dominated by Windows. In the latter case, the performance on Windows is still generally much higher than on Linux - and the chance to optimize the performance of a Microsoft protocol on a Microsoft platform is enough to probably keep it ahead, or at least on par, for the foreseeable future.
That said, it is not always the case - one of the more notable exceptions recently(ish) is with Steam and Left 4 Dead 2. The following quote from one of their dev teams seems to contradict the idea that a confusion of architectures on Linux is the reason for some performances differences
".. - the company squeezed 270.6 FPS (Frames Per Second) from the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit and a whopping 315 FPS on Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit. This translates into a 16.7% increase in performance, or a 14.3% decrease in the time taken to render frames.
According to Valve, when the company started the experiment they struggled to get 6 FPS on Linux.
That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive," writes the Valve Linux team, "given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL".
"In real world tests of the same Open GL benchmarks on each platform, Windows is almost always faster"
No it's not - the particular case of the Intel driver was that the Linux performance was much better than the Windows one for a while, then the Window driver got some serious tweaking by Intel and is now much better in turn. Have a look at the GL benchmarks for the AMD and nVidia drivers, not just the Intel one, on Phoronix for more.
That's more a result of the unstructured architecture of Linux compared to Microsoft's optimised model. I wouldn't expect to see that fixed any time soon.
Utter, utter nonsense. Valve's initial port of L4D2 ran faster on Linux by quite a way. Some of the original Eyefinity multi-monitor demos were running on Linux, apparently. When the software running on it is properly optimised (which is what AMD are doing), Linux is by no means slower than Windows.
Please go and read up on Linux graphics capabilities so you have the slightest notion what you're talking about.
"Can't wait for this! Nice to see AMD continuing to improve their Linux support after the release of Steam on the platform. The cards are still woefully underpowered when running under Linux, compared to Windows."
About time AMD and Nvidia put some leg work into getting their cards working. I used to hate steam for putting some annoying popup malware on my system to play games, but after seeing the effort they are making to port games and how they are pushing the graphics card manufacturers to improve I have gained a lot of respect for them.
I particularly like that they managed to get faster graphics on linux than on windows as it forced windows to improve their directX. Hopefully this will continue and benefit all of us who use the technologies.
About time AMD and Nvidia put some leg work into getting their cards working.
What precise features are you missing from nvidia drivers, apart from the ability to read their source code?
More to the point, what features have you missed from nvidia drivers for the past 5 years, during which time every single nvidia graphics card going back to the geforce 2 has been fully supported on linux, BSD and solaris.
"What precise features are you missing from nvidia drivers, apart from the ability to read their source code?
More to the point, what features have you missed from nvidia drivers for the past 5 years, during which time every single nvidia graphics card going back to the geforce 2 has been fully supported on linux, BSD and solaris."
Unfortunately stability. I dont blame linux as it runs fine on most of my machines but the nvidia drivers have their rather large issues. I do hope it clears up soon because I like my linux installs and it does seem more stable on mint15 but still it occasionally freezes my screen and I have to ctrl alt backspace. I have played TF2 on linux and I was plenty impressed but on the desktop I still have odd issues depending on which driver I choose (noveu, Nvidia stable, Nvidia experimental I believe they are).
I do need the Nvidia ones to run TF2 and the stable one has the best stability on my system but I still get some issues when using the system normally. I will point out that windows went through an odd phase of crashing and restoring the Nvidia driver some time ago but it seemed to clear up after some updates from Nvidia.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
