Unix vs. VAX/VMS and Windows vs. Unix/Linux/BSD -- seems like we'veseen this before

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Mon May 8 12:55:59 2000

On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 09:16:40AM -0400, allisonp_at_world.std.com wrote:
> I also don't care that the kernel fit on a 1.44mb disk (useful for LRP
> maybe) as the useful config has to have a lot more around it for a user
> workstation. When you reach that point it's big, like needing a 1gb disk
> big.

Boy things have changed. When I first got into Linux, I ran it on a 40 MB
MFM drive and had lots of space to spare. Of course that was no TCP/IP and
certainly no GUI crap, and it didn't even have vi. But it might be a fun
exercise to put together a similarly minimal config from the latest sources,
it would probably still fit in a couple of cylinders of a modern disk drive.
Certainly when Alpha Linux started out, a lot of people were running it from
Zip drives on their Nonames.

> Therein lies the probelm with linux:
>
> Slackware, mandrake, redhat, cladara and howmany more all different?

Those are just different distributions, they all generally use the standard
kernels, it's mainly the layered crap and startup scripts that are different
and most of the differences are cosmetic. It's not at all hard to build
executables that will work fine on any of them, just don't hard-code all
your path names, but the system calls will work fine.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Mon May 08 2000 - 12:55:59 BST