$35 LAN Party...

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| Sure, but this purpose deviates heavily from what Intel would have in mind
| in terms of the "4 inch square board" notion.  A MythTV recording box isn't
| much like that

There has always been a tension between flexability and efficiency.  
Plug-in cards, and even just card slots, are more expensive than 
integrated devices.

We (Unix and Linux folks) have been really lucky that Win 3 pushed 
commodity hardware such that it was capable of running our systems fairly 
well.

Quibbles: they didn't understand headless or remote management or
reliability (think ECC) or a myriad other things as well as we'd like.
But they were "good enough".  Part of this was forward thinking by
Intel: eg. putting in an MMU before the DOS / Windows folks needed it.

We're moving into an era where that cannot be assumed.  Examples:
"sealed" boxes that prevent anything but the manufacturer-provided
OS (Apple iOS devices, Microsoft WinRT devices, cell phones in
general).  If not sealed, many have undocumented hardware that is hard
for FLOSS to support.

Laptops have always been worse for Linux than desktops; desktops are
fading.  New systems are integrated in the way laptops are -- possibly
even more so.

Linux is doing OK for drivers.  Other third party OSes have whithered 
because they cannot support the deluge of devices.  For them, you have to 
hand-pick your system's peripherals, possibly from a scrap yard.  For 
example, my impression is most Plan 9 users run it on a virtual machine 
for this reason (luckilly, it runs on the bare Raspberry Pi).  I think 
that this is a major factor in the dominance of Linux compared with *BSD.  
And Windows above all.

Android is the new Windows (except on Intel).  The fact that it is
based on Linux gives us a significant help.  But the Android video
drivers don't support our userland.

PS: what would it take to write an X or Wayland server that uses the
Android video drivers?

For all we've debased our desktops to be tablet-like (Unity, Gnome 3), 
there doesn't seem to be a familiar distro that actually works on a tablet 
in a useful way.  I have a Nexus 10 waiting to be upgraded.  What a 
screen!
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists