On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 02:02 -0400, Neil Cherry wrote: > Joel Jaeggli wrote: > > On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, John Wendel wrote: > > > >> > >> Food for thought, > >> > >> http://news.com.com/Negroponte+Slimmer+Linux+needed+for+100+laptop/2100-7346_3-6057456.html?tag=nefd.lede > >> > >> > >> * BOSTON--The One Laptop Per Child organization will use Linux on its > >> inexpensive machines, but the operating system suffers the same code > >> bloat as Windows, the project's leader said Tuesday.* > > > > Oddly enough this is a something I've been doing a lot of thinking > > about. but of course oversimplicafication and blanket statements only go > > so fair. > > I've also given this a lot of thought. I started using FC 1, upgraded > parts to FC2 and live a quasi-mess between FC2 and FC3 (Libraries > messed me up). I tried to run Gentoo and it fit nicely on a 2G disk > with my various servers (but no X GUI) and dev sys. The problem was > that they were doing thing like BSD and I grew up with AT&T. So I > didn't always know how to do things. I'm just amazed as the bloat > going into the new systems. Do you know it take 1G+ of disk space to > rpmbuild and install a Fedora kernel? > > > Linux distro's tend to err on the side of completness. Striping all the > > non-esential bits for a given use case can get you quite a long way in > > the direction you want to be even before you start attacking shared > > libraries and questionable software development practices... I got > > redhat 8 down to about about 300MB on a flash card with about two days > > of work when I built a special purpose machine around a 486 based > > soekris board a couple years ago. > > I used to run RH 6.2 on a 120M drive with 32M swap. I'll never get > Fedora to run on that. DOS used to run from a floppy disk, and even with dos 6.22 it needed less than 2 mb of space to install. It also only needed 32k of ram. You can't get Windows to do that either. > > > My nokia 770 runs a 2.6 kernel, multiuser environment, xwindows, gtk+ > > and a web browser and a couple shells, in 1/2 as much ram (64MB) and 1/4 > > as much flash (128) as the $100 pc, all on a 200mhz arm to boot. > > My opinion is that the Linux kernel isn't at fault it's the > distributions and the Windows managers. Why is the power meter's > suddenly running on my desktop computer? How come when I uninstall > various apps I suddenly find the supporting libraries being yanked. > I'm finding all of this very annoying. I may start building my own > distribution just so I can trim down the fat. The number of applications that are chosen are a good bit of the bloat, that is for sure. > > > My laptop one the other hand has both gnome and kde, mono, java, vmware, > > a complete development evironment, and at least three office suites in > > it. It's not really the OS or the distro that's bloated it's my > > expectation of completeness that led me to have all the crap > > installed... It's having 40 or 50 webpages in tabs averaging 200KB of > > objects on each one open, it's driving a 1920x1200 display in 24 bit > > color on an intel shared memory video chipset. > > I've got 14G of disk space on my laptop and after I clean up I > only have ~1G free. That 1G tends to fill up quickly and I > have to go fishing for things to delete. I'm not happy. > You must have a lot of un-needed stuff. My install is only about 6 gb with everything I routinely choose. All the games and almost everything that pirut can install (except KDE).
