iB::Topic::Moving Forward - What's Your Desire?

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Topic: Moving Forward - What's Your Desire?, Please Vote

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lucky13

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Posts: 1478
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Mar. 30 2007,22:28

I've written a more detailed explanation of the views I expressed earlier on this subject, with more about how I think the changes I advocate would benefit users and developers.

http://lucky13.blogsavy.com/dsls-future/

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"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."
-- meo (copyright(c)2008, all rights reserved)

torp

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Joined: July 2005

Posted: Mar. 30 2007,23:39

don't pull DSL out of it's niche.

torp

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lucky13

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Posted: Mar. 31 2007,00:08

humpty:

Quote

I would eventually opt to cut back on the apps and go for kernel 2.6. I've heard good things about 2.6

I've read this before. It was written about four years ago (per the 2003 date on bottom of the page), before a lot of the features he notes are native to 2.6 were backported to 2.4: SATA, NPTL (which he noted had been done by Red Hat in RH9), etc. ALSA modules are also available for 2.4 users.

I know there are things many users immediately would appreciate in 2.6 over 2.4, like handling of hot-plug events via udev (a need or a convenience?) and (maybe?) better X response. The trade-offs, though, for DSL users in particular are loss of use of older devices for which support is dropped from 2.6, significantly larger kernel size (all these internal improvements come with a steeper price), and I'm still not sold on speed issues (X, etc.) as it relates to older hardware -- which has been one of DSL's real strengths -- because there's an effect of balancing things out when you compare resource demands required by 2.6-only daemons like udev/hald against the improvements in more limited scenarios. I know that won't apply to people with fairly recent hardware and computers 256+ MB RAM for which 2.6 was intended. How significantly will affect users with older hardware? See some of the comments in this thread for examples of what I mean:
http://lwn.net/Articles/140975/

Since 2.4 is still in active development and features continue to be added/backported while not deprecating legacy support, I don't see a need for DSL to switch. I'm interested to see the responses of other users and their (specific) reasons for wanting to switch to a 2.6 kernel.

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"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."
-- meo (copyright(c)2008, all rights reserved)

mikshaw

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: Mar. 31 2007,01:39

As far as I see it, support for very old hardware should remain as long as there is a significant amount of that hardware still in use. This was, after all, one of the reasons DSL was born.
If much of that support is lost in a 2.6 kernel, I don't see any reason to go beyond a newer 2.4 kernel.

I'm sure most people use systems that are newer than 3 or 4 years, but most is not all. As has been said by others, it's a waste to leave the older machines behind if they can still be useful, and keeping DSL updated and improving while retaining support for these machines is something that practically no other distro can claim.

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Juanito

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Posts: 1601
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: Mar. 31 2007,05:27

I cannot see a difference in speed between DSL and DSL-N on my laptop, but I can see a big difference in power saving features (cpufreq, laptop-mode-tools, etc) and bluetooth/irda that make the laptop much more useable in DSL-N.

On the other hand, I did not even think about using DSL-N on my ancient desktop (1997), which works perfectly under DSL and doesn't need power saving or bluetooth/irda/etc.

I believe the focus should be more on getting applications to work better - it would be great to be able to use a bluetooth headset with Skype for example - and to make the base system more easily upgradeable.

At the moment, dpkg/apt-get doesn't recognise that Perl is present in DSL, the libc6 library needs upgrading to install almost anything, etc, etc - all this makes installing a new application that much more difficult.

Anyway, whichever way we decide to go, I'll be happy to continue using DSL and DSL-N - thanks for a great, and different, take on Linux.

95 replies since Mar. 30 2007,18:13

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