Linux is only free...
Jan. 27th, 2004 07:31 pmJamie Zawinski, whose best known in the Linux community for doing more work and getting less money developing the original Mozilla than Andreeson ever did, but who's popularity is mostly cemented on his continuing development of the best screensaver package ever, has a quote that never rang more true for me than today: "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."
This is a truism of any endeavor, of course: the point has to be that going from a hunk of metal and a box of bits, how long does it take to get to a functional operating platform on which one can perform "useful work?" Installing an OS is no longer an exercise in challenging my abilities; it's simply a necessary step towards getting things done, like word processing and so on. That's one of the reasons why I chose RedHat. Screw the "user nuisance" factor associated with dealing with the company; the box of bits they distribute (still, "for free" on-line, after all) is one of the better. It "just worked" after I installed it.
Oh, sure, I'm letting the box churn through some optimizations (upgraded Gthumb and openSSH, and am now upgrading X to 4.3.0 with a hot compiler) while I do other things. I upgraded the kernel to 2.4.24 and installed both the laptop-mode patch and the Con Kolivas patchset, so now I have ext3 with good disk behavior, O(1) scheduling, low latency, and a preemptible kernel. It makes a BIG difference, although if you're doing something CPU intensive at the same time as a download, the download can slow down significantly (the CPU activity pre-empts the I/O now). Unfortunately, Con's patches conflict with the 2.4 Software Suspend patch, and after trying to hack both in by hand, I decided I could live without Software Suspend because APM "just works" with this build, anyway. I don't have to be here while those work, though; building X takes a long time.
This is a truism of any endeavor, of course: the point has to be that going from a hunk of metal and a box of bits, how long does it take to get to a functional operating platform on which one can perform "useful work?" Installing an OS is no longer an exercise in challenging my abilities; it's simply a necessary step towards getting things done, like word processing and so on. That's one of the reasons why I chose RedHat. Screw the "user nuisance" factor associated with dealing with the company; the box of bits they distribute (still, "for free" on-line, after all) is one of the better. It "just worked" after I installed it.
Oh, sure, I'm letting the box churn through some optimizations (upgraded Gthumb and openSSH, and am now upgrading X to 4.3.0 with a hot compiler) while I do other things. I upgraded the kernel to 2.4.24 and installed both the laptop-mode patch and the Con Kolivas patchset, so now I have ext3 with good disk behavior, O(1) scheduling, low latency, and a preemptible kernel. It makes a BIG difference, although if you're doing something CPU intensive at the same time as a download, the download can slow down significantly (the CPU activity pre-empts the I/O now). Unfortunately, Con's patches conflict with the 2.4 Software Suspend patch, and after trying to hack both in by hand, I decided I could live without Software Suspend because APM "just works" with this build, anyway. I don't have to be here while those work, though; building X takes a long time.
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