[dba-Tech] The latest Debian

Salakhetdinov Shamil mcp2004 at mail.ru
Tue May 14 01:04:47 CDT 2013


 Hi Hans --

I should have written that I have supposed that Linus Torvalds work on Linix was heavily influenced by works of Andrew Tanenbaum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum ), his MINIX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX ) "educational UNIX like" OS as well as by  POSIX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX ) standard - all the rest was "just the art of system software development" driven by passionate Linus Torvalds and thousands of Linux development contributors...

Anyway, I must note I'm completely in agreement with you on what caused MS Windows do dominate in 90-ies and (first part of) 00-ies, what operating system architecture principles makes Linux more stable than MS Windows etc. -  I can't only sign under your "MS Windows must die" "petitions" :) - and not because I'm working mainly with MS Windows but because AFAIS MS Windows, all its end-user software (Office (365) etc.) and development tools, MS Windows Azure "cloud" services are getting better with years - would that help MS Windows and all its infrastructure to survive in the coming years - we will see...

Thank you.

-- Shamil

Понедельник, 13 мая 2013, 16:08 -07:00 от Hans-Christian Andersen <hans.andersen at phulse.com>:
>Hi Shamil,
>
>The Linux kernel isn't based on Minix sources or any other source. Linus
>Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch and, as it developed into an operating
>system, he continued with it simply because there were no freely available
>kernels that supported the 32bit architecture - which is what he wanted.
>
>"*He *[Linus]* has stated that if either the GNU or 386BSD kernels were
>available at the time, he likely would not have written his own*" (
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux ).
>
>In fact, Linux was originally conceived by Linus to be a terminal emulator
>and not an operating system.
>
>"*In 1991, in Helsinki, Linus Torvalds began a project that later became
>the Linux kernel. It was initially a terminal emulator, which Torvalds used
>to access the large UNIX servers of the university. He wrote the program
>specifically for the hardware he was using and independent of an operating
>system because he wanted to use the functions of his new PC with an 80386
>processor*" (same source as above)
>
>In any event, Linux happens to be a lot more stable because it builds on
>top of the original philosophies of Unix. Unix was simply just a better
>conceived operating system than Windows was. The fact that Windows
>succeeded and we have been living in an Windows dominated world until
>recently has little to do with whether Windows is more stable or a better
>platform, but has more to do with that Windows was designed to be
>consumer-friendly compared to Unix (which wasn't at all consumer friendly
>at the time), while also being cheaper than an Apple computer. It also
>didn't help that all the different Unix vendors at the time were at war and
>completely at odds about anything and everything - X Windows (the GUI)
>included - and therefore were not focusing on the computer revolution,
>because they didn't anticipate the moment when PCs would suddenly become
>cheap enough that everyone would eventually have one in their homes.
>
>That's not to say that Linux is perfect. In fact, I would argue that its
>monolithic kernel is purely pragmatic but not ideal and can suffer from the
>same flaws that Windows has of badly written drivers being able to crash
>your machine. The approach of a microkernel architecture avoids this, but
>it was not considered feasible at the time. But this effect is minimized by
>the open source and transparent nature of the Linux project.
>
>But, nevertheless, Linux and Unix machines in general are just more stable.
>Take this as an example (Solaris Unix):
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAUvfqLEWuA That server had an uptime of
>3737 days before it was switched off... 10+ years. :)
>
>- Hans
>
>
>On 13 May 2013 13:43, Salakhetdinov Shamil < mcp2004 at mail.ru > wrote:
>
>> Hi Hans •-
>>
>> Thank you for your reference on Linux history.
>>
>> <<So what are we really arguing about here?>>
>> I personally not arguing but expressing opinion on Jim's (rhetoric)
>> question how it happened that Linux is a more stable OS than MS Windows.
>> And the fact that Linux kernel was based on Minix sources and not on (GNU)
>> Unix ones doesn't matter that much.
>>
>> Thank you.
>> --Shamil
>> << skipped >>
>


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