Badger Linux

Many decisions and opinions in the Linux world are justified by the idea that the decision will help attract new users to Linux, but why should anyone care at all if other people use Linux? KillaGeorge recently posed the question directly in response to a recent post, titled “A Simple Feature of Ubuntu 8.04 That Could Be So Important:”

“I always wondered why linux users are always trying to convert microsoft users. Whats the deal with that? Who cares what other people use. I use linux and i’m happy with it. If my friends don’t want to use it then no sweat of my back. Who cares?”

The main reason for wanting more users to switch to Linux is that the more people use an operating system, the better it will be supported by hardware and software companies and, in the case of open-source software, there will also be more people to develop the operating system. In fact, a good example of this showed up earlier today.

With AMD open-sourcing their graphics drivers, many people are looking to nVidia to see if they will follow suit. Earlier today, an open letter to nVidia was posted that has already received 547 signatures at this time, yet even if this number grows to 1,000 or more, nVidia may still never respond. With Linux’s current market share, nVidia can continue to ignore people for as long as they want. That does not mean they will, but even if nVidia listens, they are only one of many companies that do not have open-source drivers or do not have Linux drivers at all. If Linux had a larger market share, companies would finally have to pay attention to the Linux world and release drivers for Linux.

Unfortunately, the issue is not as simple as more users being better. If Linux ever achieved a large market share, it would become the target of viruses, much like Windows is now. The question is how to find the perfect balance, so that Linux is widely supported, but not the target of viruses and spyware. Right now, Windows is obviously far over that perfect market share and Linux is way under. The closest may be the Mac, since most companies do support OS X, but, so far, there are no viruses for OS X in the wild. If you think I am advocating everyone switch to OS X, however, you are wrong. Apple has no intention of stopping their growth. Any day now the viruses will start to come for the Mac and each day it just gets more and more likely.

Hopefully this will not happen to Linux, but it seems hard to escape. Once an operating system gains enough momentum to make it to a significant market share, it is unlikely to stop and no matter what you tell me about the security of Linux, someone will find a way around that security. Perhaps Linux will really find a way to avoid this .

http://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/02/29/why-attracting-more-users-to-linux-matters/

Badger Linux Net

wwww.badgerlinux.net

A little more than a decade ago, I came across a little project called FreeWin95, aiming to create a clone of Windows 95 in much the same way that Linux cloned UNIX. It seemed somewhat interesting, but in order to have a chance at being useful, it needed a working release and at the time it didn’t even have any code.

In 1998, the project was relaunched with the name ReactOS. This time, it aimed to produce a clone of Windows NT. Because Microsoft’s roadmap showed that it would be sticking with the NT kernel for a while (and Microsoft is still using it in Vista), this seemed more promising. As a user of Windows NT 4.0, I decided to keep an eye on it.

Over the years, ReactOS has periodically impinged on my consciousness. I haven’t used Windows seriously for a few years, but I am still rather fond of the NT kernel design. It made some very interesting design decisions, such as the ability to plug in different personalities and support different userspace kernel APIs easily. Unfortunately, it was buried under so much legacy-compatibility cruft that it never really had a chance to show off its strengths.

Over the years, the focus of ReactOS kept slowly shifting. Originally aiming to be a functional clone of Windows NT 4.0, it now incorporates some features from Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), XP (NT 5.1), and 2003 (NT 5.2).

Because ReactOS always aimed to be binary-compatible with Windows, a lot of device drivers can be used directly without modification. While they can’t use any of the Microsoft-supplied drivers for generic hardware, one of the strengths of Windows is that there is a plethora of third-party driver support. Things like nVidia’s display drivers can be used to provide 3D acceleration to applications, as shown off by running Unreal Tournament on ReactOS. It should be noted, however, that this can only be managed with a little patching of the nVidia driver binaries.

Not all drivers will work correctly. While most of the interfaces are identical, some parts are very different. The cache controller and memory manager are completely unlike their Windows NT counterparts, preventing some drivers from working.

Another group has overlapping, if somewhat different, goals to ReactOS. The WINE project aims to provide replacements for most of the userland libraries found on a Windows system. A significant amount of code sharing goes in between the two projects. Some components from WINE can be re-used directly in ReactOS. Some can be used with a few minor changes, and some are superfluous. GUI applications, for example, are run on the native display, and so GDI calls don’t need to be turned into X11 calls.

This code sharing is not all one-way. Code from ReactOS has found its way into various driver wrappers for Linux, such as NDISWrapper for WiFi drivers and Captive for NTFS support. The GNU toolchain for Windows has similarly benefited from contributions by ReactOS developers, as has QEMU. WINE, of course, also accepts some patches.

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