Comments on: Yellow Dog Linux http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/20 Welcome to the throes of my thoughts Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:29:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Rob Stevenson http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/20#comment-11 Rob Stevenson Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://maize.dhs.org/wp/?p=20#comment-11 Woot! Glad to see that YDL worked out for you! Strange about that bootup time though. Hmmm. Personally, I'd dump Mozilla and pickup Firebird. I've looked at Thunderbird as well and it seems a tad rough right now, but definitely looks like it has potential. Linux just lacks that "Spit and Polish" that it needs to break into the more "Average Joe" user base. Can a graphical startup screen be THAT difficult? Just give a keystroke as an option to view the text bootup sequence (can be set as default) and you'll appease(?) the geek masses. I'll be interested to see what you think of MacOnLinux (MOL)!! Woot! Glad to see that YDL worked out for you! Strange about that bootup time though. Hmmm.

Personally, I’d dump Mozilla and pickup Firebird. I’ve looked at Thunderbird as well and it seems a tad rough right now, but definitely looks like it has potential.

Linux just lacks that “Spit and Polish” that it needs to break into the more “Average Joe” user base. Can a graphical startup screen be THAT difficult? Just give a keystroke as an option to view the text bootup sequence (can be set as default) and you’ll appease(?) the geek masses.

I’ll be interested to see what you think of MacOnLinux (MOL)!!

]]> By: Eric http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/20#comment-12 Eric Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://maize.dhs.org/wp/?p=20#comment-12 The slow boot time is a problem for Linux in general. With hardware running so fast now, maybe people overlook the problem, similar to how memory footprint of the desktop is overlooked. I think the kernel actually initializes pretty quickly, but all the init scripts that run take time. Why can't some of these scripts run in parallel? There could still be dependencies, like run network first, but then kick off xinetd, cups, apache, etc in parallel. Maybe even give the user their login prompt while a few scripts are still running, like enabling swap space. I understand the debugging value of having each task run separately on screen along with its output. But we are going to have a graphical boot soon, so log all that boot stuff, and queue events to notify the user of problems after they login ("The system was unable to initialize swap space because ..." -- then pop up the help browser). I like shell scripts for simplicity and maintenance, but I wonder how much faster binary code would run? What if there were a compiler that turned the shell scripts into binaries? I think the scripts are a bit inefficient too. I noticed a lot of "sleep" commands being used in them on my RedHat system. To be fair, my Windows 2000 desktop at work takes 2 minutes to boot also, but Linux should be better than that. The slow boot time is a problem for Linux in general. With hardware running so fast now, maybe people overlook the problem, similar to how memory footprint of the desktop is overlooked. I think the kernel actually initializes pretty quickly, but all the init scripts that run take time. Why can’t some of these scripts run in parallel? There could still be dependencies, like run network first, but then kick off xinetd, cups, apache, etc in parallel.

Maybe even give the user their login prompt while a few scripts are still running, like enabling swap space. I understand the debugging value of having each task run separately on screen along with its output. But we are going to have a graphical boot soon, so log all that boot stuff, and queue events to notify the user of problems after they login (”The system was unable to initialize swap space because …” — then pop up the help browser).

I like shell scripts for simplicity and maintenance, but I wonder how much faster binary code would run? What if there were a compiler that turned the shell scripts into binaries? I think the scripts are a bit inefficient too. I noticed a lot of “sleep” commands being used in them on my RedHat system.

To be fair, my Windows 2000 desktop at work takes 2 minutes to boot also, but Linux should be better than that.

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