A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release is a bit special, as it includes support for Ubuntu 7.10. Moreover, starting with this version, the ATI Catalyst software suite does not support the Linux kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.3 software and workstation hardware.
Issues resolved in this release:
• Launching a new terminal un RHEL5 32bit version no longer results in inconsistent background colors appearing each time the window is minimized and maximized• The kernel module is now working on kernel version 2.6.23• An error message no longer appears during installation if dash is used as /bin/sh
Known issues of this release
• There is no support for video playback on the second head in dual head mode.• Desktop corruption may be noticed when dragging the overlay/video when using dual-display mode.• A black screen may be observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used.• An error message appears during installation if dash is used as /bin/sh.• Several distribution-specific packaging scripts are not up-to-date in this release. In particular, packaging for 64-bit Ubuntu versions is known to be broken.
In order to gain the best performance and ease of use, ATI/AMD recommends the following:• Kernel module build environment – should include the following: Kernel source code: either the Kernel Source or Kernel Headers packages• ISSE Support enabled in your Linux Kernel (applies to Intel Pentium III and later CPUs only; enabled by default on version 2.4 and later kernels)• The rpm utility should be installed and configured correctly on your system, if you intend to install it via RPM packages;
Requirements:
• XOrg 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3• Linux kernel 2.6 or higher• glibc version 2.2 or 2.3• POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applicationsPlease notice that starting with this version, ATI Catalyst doesn't support Linux kernel 2.4. If you have a machine running Linux kernel 2.4, you should install version 8.42.3 of the ATI Catalyst software suite.
Supported operating systems:
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 (tested with Snapshot 6)• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (tested with Snapshot 7)• Ubuntu 7.10• RedFlag 6.0 DT (tested with RC)•OpenSUSE 10.3 (tested with RC1)For installation instructions and more information about this release, please go here.
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
What I want for christmas (The cool new trend on preloaded Linux)
Dear fictional character that oppreses the workers of
the North Pole:
This christmas, I want an Asus eee PC, an Everex gPC,
and some bare white box with a nice Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS.
Why am I asking the red menace from the north for these items?
Well, they do have one thing in common: Linux. Another is that they are consumer boxes, not servers.
For many years, one of the huge advantages windows had was that it came preloaded with most PCs. This enabled people to turn a blind eye to windows installation and configuration since it was done by Someone Else (TM).
Since getting Linux has become much easier in the last 10 years this has been very frustrating. Imagine you had something you gave away for free, but people kept using something more expensive because they had to pay for it anyway!
That itches. If Linux was not chosen because it was inferior for the task at hand, that's one thing, but not even being able to be tested because the other product was bundled and paid for? Annoying.
Of course on servers this worked differently. The OS was not the expensive part, and was preloaded less often. Corporations have prearranged licensing terms, and adding things to the mix is simpler.
But for consumers, preloading has been a huge problem
So, if the jolly trespasser brings me what I ordered, I will find the following:
- Asus eee: A cheap subnotebook with Linux and KDE preloaded.
- Everex gPC: A cheap Desktop with Linux and Enlightenment(!?) preloaded.
- Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS: an embedded hypervisor and Linux OS.
The eee is probably the most appealing. It's ideal for many uses:
- Salesmen who are now using some ungodly Blackberry app (or worse)
- System and network admins. Really. I would love to have a cheap notebook I won't hesitate bringing to a roof, a bar, the beach, whatever. It would live in my bag. My current notebook? Besides weighting 8 pounds, it's expensive and large. All I need are webpages email and SSH sessions!
- Kids and students (it's cheap! You can buy a replacement if he drops coffe on it!)
- Basic users and old people. Really, an office-like thing and a web browser? And I can use it wherever there's wifi? Neat.
And it is going to get a lot cheaper, and it's going to get a lot better. I expect there will be a 32GB, 10" model by the end of next year for $350, and the current model available for $250 (after all, half the components are cheap as dirt already, only flash is expensive, and that's a fluke)
And so on and so forth. If Asus creates a decent dock and a nice rdiff-backup-based backup solution (it should be at least as nice as Apple's Time Machine), this box turns into my main computer whenever I am at home, and is a useful tool on the road. I really can live with those specs.
The gPC is a bit harder to grasp.
First, it's even cheaper. $200 is cheap. The CPU is slowish, but there are a whole range of tasks that are not CPU bound. I really want one of those as a home server. This is the first time I can see one of these ITX boxes as actually cheap not just small (in fact this one is not small at all).
- I have a TV capture card, I could make a PVR out of it using LinuxMCE? It does have enough CPU for that (since I am doing it with a slower box already)
- A file server? More than good enough for that.
- A houseguest computer?
- A MPD server?
- All of the above?
And do all this while being quiet and power-efficient? Neat!
And the Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS simply would be cool because I can virtualize without jumping through any hoops. This one is still fuzzy for me, but I only found out about it today. I need time for things to grow.
Why do I think these boxes mark a trend? Because they are definitely low-end products. These are meant to be made by thousands and hundreds of thousands, and make small money on each.
The makers are being smart about providing as little functionality as they can and making them simple, niche, consumer products instead of monstruosly powerful Linux monsters (sorry for how ugly that sounds).
Another factor is the huge growth of web apps that work well on non-IE browsers. This is making the OS irrelevant just like Netscape hoped in 1996. If the OS is invisible, Linux won.
So, Santa, for this christmas I ask for all these toys,
and if it has to be only one, please make it the Asus eee.
Roberto Alsina
PS: and if you don't do your part, the raindeer's a goner!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Linux vs. Windows: Why Linux will win?
One of the oft-mentioned weaknesses of Linux, fragmentation, just happens to be one of its greatest strengths. A broad range of choices in an immature market is a good thing. Of course, choice does come at a cost. For example, there may be no standard way to do a particular task. Further, development resources will sometimes be split among two or more projects. However, these are weaknesses in the short term only.One could similarly argue that evolution of species suffers from the same ‘weakness’ of fragmentation. However, in the long term, the survival and consolidation of the best traits results in an improved breed. Eventually, one of the many approaches to some desktop task will rise to dominance and show the market the right way to do it, and, at the same time, reduce the fragmentation problem.Based on my observations, business continuity considerations are starting to place more emphasis on portable data formats and protocols. Relational databases, contrasted with the counter examples provided by Microsoft formats, are helping to raise awareness of the value of portable data.
For a private business to blithely entrust their data to proprietary formats and protocols is irresponsible at best. For a public company to do so can be looked upon as a breach of the shareholder’s trust; an unnecessary liability. It’s quietly overlooked now partly because of the ubiquity of the practice and partly because no Microsoft-dependent organization wants to point out a liability from which they also suffer. This situation will change with growing awareness of the problem and as the Linux-plus-free-applications option makes vendor lock-in increasingly harder to justify. The time is coming when the stock market will recognize and reward data independence among public companies.
Linux is entrenched in the server world. That provides a huge opportunity to expand into more and larger server niches. It also provides a small contributing stream of desktop users in influential places.
Major market shifts, when limited by ingrained attitudes, are generational. It takes the replacement of one generation by the next for a market to complete such a transition. Even after Linux comes to dominate in new installations, there will naturally be Windows holdouts for many years, in both homes and organizations. This diehard tenacity is not an unexpected sign of strength, but it will be interpreted as such by a certain class of industry analysts for many years.
The IT industry has an inertia that is almost unimaginable to someone who hasn’t spent significant time immersed in it. Application systems built on one operating system or architecture are extremely expensive to port to an unrelated OS or architecture. While this effect does slow the uptake of Linux in business, it also prevents a sudden loss of the Linux market share. But, mostly, it masks the rise of Linux so that it is possible for much of the IT industry to simply ignore its growth. I think that this effect of the slow and gradual adoption of Linux is the main support for the ‘Windows has won the desktop’ analysts’ arguments.
Linux is free as in ‘free beer’. Yes, you can buy it — and many do — but when you pay money for Linux you are really buying something else: support, non-free components, and convenience, to name a few. The reality, however, is that Linux is as free as you need it to be.
Linux is also open. It can be extended, embedded, and used as needed without restrictive licenses and without fear of vendor lock-in. This characteristic of Linux can only improve Linux’s profile with each business continuity study and proprietary counter example. The significant restrictions of Linux’s license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), establish rules of redistribution, not limitations of use.
Linux is also scalable — but just what does that mean? Scalability runs in several directions. To say an OS is scalable doesn’t simply mean that it scales to very large systems. Rather, scale refers to the entire range from the very small to the very large. It refers not just to the vertical dimension but also to the horizontal, across arrays of clustered systems. On this measure, Linux truly excels. Linux powers an amazing range of systems, from tiny devices to supercomputers. Of the several operating systems that scale to very large systems, Linux seems to be the one destined to own the small end of the size spectrum.
Security may be even more important than scalability to the IT industry. Security concerns are also gaining mind share among home users as identity theft becomes more widespread. SELinux is beginning to be integrated into major Linux distributions — which will expand the number of security-conscious IT shops that can deploy it. At the same time, Windows has spawned a healthy industry dedicated to screening out viruses and worms.
I believe that Microsoft’s practice of neglecting security is one of the biggest reasons for Firefox’s phenomenal success, just as it is steadily contributing to Linux’s growth.
Meanwhile, there are a few features that many Linux distributions are still missing out of the box. As each of those areas is addressed, end-user Linux adoption will increase. As this process adds to the size of the Linux installed base, the newly enlarged base will increase the value of solving other such problems, continuing to fuel the positive feedback loop. As Linux reaches ‘critical mass’, almost all of the other arguments against Linux will fall, one by one. For example, when major vendors start offering preconfigured Linux systems to home desktop users, one of the most persistent complaints against Linux, that ‘it is hard to install’, will become irrelevant. As many readers surely realize, Windows is difficult to install as well. The difference is that users generally don’t have to install Windows. It comes preinstalled, and with a preconfigured ‘restore’ CD. The implication of this is that as Linux approaches critical mass, its period of fastest growth may still lie ahead!
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s desktop network effect advantage is weakening due to cross platform software packages such as Firefox, OpenOffice, and, for programmers, gcc.
Even some game makers could conceivably abandon Windows by releasing custom Linux LiveCD versions of their games. Granted, there might need to be some embedded graphics support, but this need not be an insurmountable problem since many games only support a limited number of graphics adapters anyway.
Linux has a certain ‘coolness factor’ that appeals disproportionately to young people. Further, Linux is strongest among the technological elite, i.e., those who help and advise others, run websites, write code, and generally set technology trends. This slice of the market is more important to the future than their numbers suggest
Microsoft has, as they say in politics, ‘high negatives’. That is, a substantial percentage of people very much dislike Microsoft. These people will go to considerable efforts to avoid buying or using Microsoft products as alternative products become more visible.
Capitalism, like open source, is relentless and efficiency based. A central planner can never fully predict a market’s evolution — yet capitalism moves in lockstep with it. In much the same way, various Linux distributions will be born and die as desktop evolution relentlessly marches on. Even the current ‘Linus’ branch of the kernel can and will be replaced (forked) if it doesn’t follow the main market closely enough. The ‘planned economy’ of Microsoft is at a disadvantage when facing the evolutionary dynamics of the laissez faire open source bazaar.
Compounding the problem for Microsoft, Linux is poised and ready to pounce upon any new, Windows-incompatible, hardware platform; perhaps IBM’s upcoming cell processor will be the next Linux success story. Linux runs on almost everything and gets quickly ported to new hardware. Linux is agile, Microsoft is not.
Microsoft’s biggest remaining asset is probably the vendor lock-in ‘feature’ of Microsoft Office. Of course, that lock-in is also one of the biggest reasons not to use Microsoft Office. As free office suites achieve acceptable levels of command, feature, and file compatibility with MS Office, more and more user’s desktops will become available to Linux. Microsoft will, as always, try to leverage their current lock-in into future lock-in. But with the pace of office software development slowing as the market nears saturation, that is easier said than done. Changing Office to render a competitor incompatible will also hinder older versions of Office, creating more ill will. Also, if a competitor ever does achieve close compatibility with the current version of Office, customers will have the option of jumping to the competitor if Microsoft changes the file formats. With bad timing or a bit of bad luck, such a lock-in maneuver by Microsoft runs the risk of hastening the abandonment of Office.
Microsoft has always shrewdly leveraged their network effect and mind share advantage to maintain themselves and grow. They will continue to use this strength — but they face many hazards. They must correctly identify the real threats early enough to fight and nullify them. Microsoft can win many battles and still lose the war. They simply can’t win all the battles and yet their relentless adversary, Linux, can lose battles indefinitely and still come back to win the war. Unfortunately for Microsoft, ‘Linux’ doesn’t need to make a profit and can’t be put out of business by an upside down balance sheet.
Linux does, however, have one looming vulnerability. Microsoft could possibly kill Linux with some unwitting help from the Linux kernel team or the open source applications development community. Governments, through trademark, copyright, and patent law, wield such power over common business practices that runaway software patents — like those now being issued in the US — could kill off commercial Linux use and support in affected countries. For example, heavy participation in a scenario such as this one could lead to a near-death experience for Linux. This scenario, though, is best classified as a government action. Linux has already penetrated so many niches that the chances of Microsoft rooting it out via market mechanisms seem pretty slim.
And, no, Linux isn’t yet ready for every desktop that Windows occupies. However, it wasn’t long ago that Linux wasn’t ready for many server roles either. The server situation has changed drastically just as the desktop situation is now changing. The desktop will change more slowly since it is not transparent to the user, but similar forces are pushing it inexorably forward. Each year new niches are added to the Linux desktop installed base and other, more established, niches grow. With each such increment of desktop growth, another marginal niche becomes viable. A few more years of this growth and the big market niches will gradually go from inaccessible to marginal to viable to dominated. No, Linux can’t yet replace Windows, but time is on Linux’s side.
Meanwhile, if you’re impatient, you can help to speed things up. Help a friend install Firefox or OpenOffice.org. Give a Windows user a Knoppix CD to play with or install a Desktop Linux distribution on their ‘old’ machine and show them a software repository full of nice, friendly, and free binary applications. If you’re a programmer, find an open source project that interests you and lend a hand.]
source:libernix.com
For a private business to blithely entrust their data to proprietary formats and protocols is irresponsible at best. For a public company to do so can be looked upon as a breach of the shareholder’s trust; an unnecessary liability. It’s quietly overlooked now partly because of the ubiquity of the practice and partly because no Microsoft-dependent organization wants to point out a liability from which they also suffer. This situation will change with growing awareness of the problem and as the Linux-plus-free-applications option makes vendor lock-in increasingly harder to justify. The time is coming when the stock market will recognize and reward data independence among public companies.
Linux is entrenched in the server world. That provides a huge opportunity to expand into more and larger server niches. It also provides a small contributing stream of desktop users in influential places.
Major market shifts, when limited by ingrained attitudes, are generational. It takes the replacement of one generation by the next for a market to complete such a transition. Even after Linux comes to dominate in new installations, there will naturally be Windows holdouts for many years, in both homes and organizations. This diehard tenacity is not an unexpected sign of strength, but it will be interpreted as such by a certain class of industry analysts for many years.
The IT industry has an inertia that is almost unimaginable to someone who hasn’t spent significant time immersed in it. Application systems built on one operating system or architecture are extremely expensive to port to an unrelated OS or architecture. While this effect does slow the uptake of Linux in business, it also prevents a sudden loss of the Linux market share. But, mostly, it masks the rise of Linux so that it is possible for much of the IT industry to simply ignore its growth. I think that this effect of the slow and gradual adoption of Linux is the main support for the ‘Windows has won the desktop’ analysts’ arguments.
Linux is free as in ‘free beer’. Yes, you can buy it — and many do — but when you pay money for Linux you are really buying something else: support, non-free components, and convenience, to name a few. The reality, however, is that Linux is as free as you need it to be.
Linux is also open. It can be extended, embedded, and used as needed without restrictive licenses and without fear of vendor lock-in. This characteristic of Linux can only improve Linux’s profile with each business continuity study and proprietary counter example. The significant restrictions of Linux’s license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), establish rules of redistribution, not limitations of use.
Linux is also scalable — but just what does that mean? Scalability runs in several directions. To say an OS is scalable doesn’t simply mean that it scales to very large systems. Rather, scale refers to the entire range from the very small to the very large. It refers not just to the vertical dimension but also to the horizontal, across arrays of clustered systems. On this measure, Linux truly excels. Linux powers an amazing range of systems, from tiny devices to supercomputers. Of the several operating systems that scale to very large systems, Linux seems to be the one destined to own the small end of the size spectrum.
Security may be even more important than scalability to the IT industry. Security concerns are also gaining mind share among home users as identity theft becomes more widespread. SELinux is beginning to be integrated into major Linux distributions — which will expand the number of security-conscious IT shops that can deploy it. At the same time, Windows has spawned a healthy industry dedicated to screening out viruses and worms.
I believe that Microsoft’s practice of neglecting security is one of the biggest reasons for Firefox’s phenomenal success, just as it is steadily contributing to Linux’s growth.
Meanwhile, there are a few features that many Linux distributions are still missing out of the box. As each of those areas is addressed, end-user Linux adoption will increase. As this process adds to the size of the Linux installed base, the newly enlarged base will increase the value of solving other such problems, continuing to fuel the positive feedback loop. As Linux reaches ‘critical mass’, almost all of the other arguments against Linux will fall, one by one. For example, when major vendors start offering preconfigured Linux systems to home desktop users, one of the most persistent complaints against Linux, that ‘it is hard to install’, will become irrelevant. As many readers surely realize, Windows is difficult to install as well. The difference is that users generally don’t have to install Windows. It comes preinstalled, and with a preconfigured ‘restore’ CD. The implication of this is that as Linux approaches critical mass, its period of fastest growth may still lie ahead!
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s desktop network effect advantage is weakening due to cross platform software packages such as Firefox, OpenOffice, and, for programmers, gcc.
Even some game makers could conceivably abandon Windows by releasing custom Linux LiveCD versions of their games. Granted, there might need to be some embedded graphics support, but this need not be an insurmountable problem since many games only support a limited number of graphics adapters anyway.
Linux has a certain ‘coolness factor’ that appeals disproportionately to young people. Further, Linux is strongest among the technological elite, i.e., those who help and advise others, run websites, write code, and generally set technology trends. This slice of the market is more important to the future than their numbers suggest
Microsoft has, as they say in politics, ‘high negatives’. That is, a substantial percentage of people very much dislike Microsoft. These people will go to considerable efforts to avoid buying or using Microsoft products as alternative products become more visible.
Capitalism, like open source, is relentless and efficiency based. A central planner can never fully predict a market’s evolution — yet capitalism moves in lockstep with it. In much the same way, various Linux distributions will be born and die as desktop evolution relentlessly marches on. Even the current ‘Linus’ branch of the kernel can and will be replaced (forked) if it doesn’t follow the main market closely enough. The ‘planned economy’ of Microsoft is at a disadvantage when facing the evolutionary dynamics of the laissez faire open source bazaar.
Compounding the problem for Microsoft, Linux is poised and ready to pounce upon any new, Windows-incompatible, hardware platform; perhaps IBM’s upcoming cell processor will be the next Linux success story. Linux runs on almost everything and gets quickly ported to new hardware. Linux is agile, Microsoft is not.
Microsoft’s biggest remaining asset is probably the vendor lock-in ‘feature’ of Microsoft Office. Of course, that lock-in is also one of the biggest reasons not to use Microsoft Office. As free office suites achieve acceptable levels of command, feature, and file compatibility with MS Office, more and more user’s desktops will become available to Linux. Microsoft will, as always, try to leverage their current lock-in into future lock-in. But with the pace of office software development slowing as the market nears saturation, that is easier said than done. Changing Office to render a competitor incompatible will also hinder older versions of Office, creating more ill will. Also, if a competitor ever does achieve close compatibility with the current version of Office, customers will have the option of jumping to the competitor if Microsoft changes the file formats. With bad timing or a bit of bad luck, such a lock-in maneuver by Microsoft runs the risk of hastening the abandonment of Office.
Microsoft has always shrewdly leveraged their network effect and mind share advantage to maintain themselves and grow. They will continue to use this strength — but they face many hazards. They must correctly identify the real threats early enough to fight and nullify them. Microsoft can win many battles and still lose the war. They simply can’t win all the battles and yet their relentless adversary, Linux, can lose battles indefinitely and still come back to win the war. Unfortunately for Microsoft, ‘Linux’ doesn’t need to make a profit and can’t be put out of business by an upside down balance sheet.
Linux does, however, have one looming vulnerability. Microsoft could possibly kill Linux with some unwitting help from the Linux kernel team or the open source applications development community. Governments, through trademark, copyright, and patent law, wield such power over common business practices that runaway software patents — like those now being issued in the US — could kill off commercial Linux use and support in affected countries. For example, heavy participation in a scenario such as this one could lead to a near-death experience for Linux. This scenario, though, is best classified as a government action. Linux has already penetrated so many niches that the chances of Microsoft rooting it out via market mechanisms seem pretty slim.
And, no, Linux isn’t yet ready for every desktop that Windows occupies. However, it wasn’t long ago that Linux wasn’t ready for many server roles either. The server situation has changed drastically just as the desktop situation is now changing. The desktop will change more slowly since it is not transparent to the user, but similar forces are pushing it inexorably forward. Each year new niches are added to the Linux desktop installed base and other, more established, niches grow. With each such increment of desktop growth, another marginal niche becomes viable. A few more years of this growth and the big market niches will gradually go from inaccessible to marginal to viable to dominated. No, Linux can’t yet replace Windows, but time is on Linux’s side.
Meanwhile, if you’re impatient, you can help to speed things up. Help a friend install Firefox or OpenOffice.org. Give a Windows user a Knoppix CD to play with or install a Desktop Linux distribution on their ‘old’ machine and show them a software repository full of nice, friendly, and free binary applications. If you’re a programmer, find an open source project that interests you and lend a hand.]
source:libernix.com
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Hardy Heron open for uploads
The doors are now open for uploads to Hardy Heron, the next in the Ubuntu line of releases, due for release in the first half of 2008. The LINUX COMMUNITY is ready and waiting for your contributions to what is certain to be our best release yet!
In particular, help is needed to merge the many new versions of Debian packages waiting at
Naturally this means that Hardy will be a bit bumpy for a while as the many new changes take time to settle. In the event of a cabin depressurization, please remember to secure your own mask first before assisting other passengers. Otherwise, enjoy the ride towards Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and thanks for flying with the Hardy Heron!
[1] http://merges.ubuntu.com/main-trend.png
In particular, help is needed to merge the many new versions of Debian packages waiting at
Naturally this means that Hardy will be a bit bumpy for a while as the many new changes take time to settle. In the event of a cabin depressurization, please remember to secure your own mask first before assisting other passengers. Otherwise, enjoy the ride towards Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and thanks for flying with the Hardy Heron!
[1] http://merges.ubuntu.com/main-trend.png
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Why linux is successful and not microsoft?
The success of Linux over the past 16 years boils down to a few key factors, according to a panel of Linux luminaries.
Larry Augustin, chairman of VA Software, Eric Raymond, founder of the Open Source Institute, Jon maddog Hall of Linux International, Chris DiBona of Google, and Dirk Hohndel of Intel regaled the capacity crowd with tales of their first experiences with Linux and Linus.
They also made some strong statements as to why Linux has succeeded where BSD failed, as well as noted the conditions required for Linux to succeed in the years to come.
Dirk Hohndel noted that timing was key and that Linux started off as a purely European phenomenon.
For Hohndel three key factors that fostered the rise of Linux: 386 chips, which provided enough power; rise of the Internet, which permitted the collaboration necessary to build Linux; and the GNU toolchain, without which none of Linux would have happened.
Hohndel also noted that Linus Torvalds is also obviously of critical importance.
"Linus is able to take people who vehemently disagree on architecture and get them to agree," Hohndel said.
It is that ability to agree that made Linux different from the BSD community.
Larry Augustin noted that in the early days, BSD was clearly more functional than Linux, but by many measures has not exceeded it.
Eric Raymond said the cause for BSD's failure could be summed up in one word: "overcontrol."
Hohndel responded by throwing out one word of his own: "fragmentation."
"Overcontrol leads to fragmentation," Raymond retorted. "Linux's strength is that it is more loosely coupled."
Maddog Hall said he thinks the success of Linux had a lot to do with the marketing of Linus Torvalds
"Here's this nice young man wearing sandals and with a funny accent, as opposed to other people that weren't quite as nice."
Over the last 15 years there have been a number of "tipping points" for Linux.
Hohndel recounted that one such tipping point occurred in July 1998 when Oracle said it was going to port to Linux.
"It was on the day of the naming of Linus' daughter, our god-child," Hohndel said looking at Maddog.
Hohndel also cited the IPO of Red Hat as a critical tipping point.
The fact that a company could credibly tell people they could make money from Linux was a big deal.
Raymond noted that a big turning point for him was the open sourcing of Mozilla by AOL, an event that ultimately led to the creation of the open source label and the OSI, which he founded.
DiBona cited the availability of decent installers for Linux, as well as the rise of the Internet as tipping points.
He also noted the deficiencies of other competitive platforms to Linux.
"If Mac and Windows didn't suck, people would've used them," DiBona said.
The panel also tackled the issue of where Linux will be in the next five years and what needs to be done to get there.
Hohndel predicted that the embedded market will be 80 percent Linux in the next five years.
For the desktop, market share in mature markets will be single digits in five years; in emerging markets it will be in the 15 percent to 20 percent range.
"Adoption of the Linux desktop is more likely in emerging markets where there is no legacy," Hohndel said.
Raymond got riled up as he proclaimed what he thought was necessary to be done for desktop Linux to be successful.
"We need to do whatever compromise is necessary to get full multimedia capability on Linux so non-technical users don't dismiss us out of hand," Raymond shouted.
A somewhat more relaxed DiBona advised the audience to tell people to use Mozilla Firefox on their desktops.
"Develop for the Web," DiBona said. "People can switch to Web applications from their desktop more easily."
Larry Augustin, chairman of VA Software, Eric Raymond, founder of the Open Source Institute, Jon maddog Hall of Linux International, Chris DiBona of Google, and Dirk Hohndel of Intel regaled the capacity crowd with tales of their first experiences with Linux and Linus.
They also made some strong statements as to why Linux has succeeded where BSD failed, as well as noted the conditions required for Linux to succeed in the years to come.
Dirk Hohndel noted that timing was key and that Linux started off as a purely European phenomenon.
For Hohndel three key factors that fostered the rise of Linux: 386 chips, which provided enough power; rise of the Internet, which permitted the collaboration necessary to build Linux; and the GNU toolchain, without which none of Linux would have happened.
Hohndel also noted that Linus Torvalds is also obviously of critical importance.
"Linus is able to take people who vehemently disagree on architecture and get them to agree," Hohndel said.
It is that ability to agree that made Linux different from the BSD community.
Larry Augustin noted that in the early days, BSD was clearly more functional than Linux, but by many measures has not exceeded it.
Eric Raymond said the cause for BSD's failure could be summed up in one word: "overcontrol."
Hohndel responded by throwing out one word of his own: "fragmentation."
"Overcontrol leads to fragmentation," Raymond retorted. "Linux's strength is that it is more loosely coupled."
Maddog Hall said he thinks the success of Linux had a lot to do with the marketing of Linus Torvalds
"Here's this nice young man wearing sandals and with a funny accent, as opposed to other people that weren't quite as nice."
Over the last 15 years there have been a number of "tipping points" for Linux.
Hohndel recounted that one such tipping point occurred in July 1998 when Oracle said it was going to port to Linux.
"It was on the day of the naming of Linus' daughter, our god-child," Hohndel said looking at Maddog.
Hohndel also cited the IPO of Red Hat as a critical tipping point.
The fact that a company could credibly tell people they could make money from Linux was a big deal.
Raymond noted that a big turning point for him was the open sourcing of Mozilla by AOL, an event that ultimately led to the creation of the open source label and the OSI, which he founded.
DiBona cited the availability of decent installers for Linux, as well as the rise of the Internet as tipping points.
He also noted the deficiencies of other competitive platforms to Linux.
"If Mac and Windows didn't suck, people would've used them," DiBona said.
The panel also tackled the issue of where Linux will be in the next five years and what needs to be done to get there.
Hohndel predicted that the embedded market will be 80 percent Linux in the next five years.
For the desktop, market share in mature markets will be single digits in five years; in emerging markets it will be in the 15 percent to 20 percent range.
"Adoption of the Linux desktop is more likely in emerging markets where there is no legacy," Hohndel said.
Raymond got riled up as he proclaimed what he thought was necessary to be done for desktop Linux to be successful.
"We need to do whatever compromise is necessary to get full multimedia capability on Linux so non-technical users don't dismiss us out of hand," Raymond shouted.
A somewhat more relaxed DiBona advised the audience to tell people to use Mozilla Firefox on their desktops.
"Develop for the Web," DiBona said. "People can switch to Web applications from their desktop more easily."
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