Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"
h-online.com
h-online.com
The Linux name change is a fitting tribute to Windows system programmers everywhere.
And it was a shitload better than anything else available at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workgr...
Also, for your historical needs http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/downloads.html
3.11 laid the foundations for modular Windows networking, but included TCP/IP support was two years away in Windows 95, and even then it still wasn't installed by default(!). Microsoft took a while to catch on.
Of course, around that time you could also run an Irix desktop, complete with Photoshop and SoftPC and even (later on) IE, but that was sadly beyond the reach of most consumers.
UNIX variants, OS/2, and the BSDs were the options at the time for decent networking...Mac OS wasn't in the running.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
IIRC, almost everything Windows 3.11 had out of the box was already present on Macs for ages. Shared printers, p2p file servers, instant messaging (that was an add-on) and more. And better - it all just worked.
I remember that, at the time, the e-mail client/server that came with 3.11 was nice and I don't remember anything like that on Macs, but, with that exception, System 7 was orders of magnitude better than 3.11.
* "Standard mode" was dropped, so 3.11 required a 386 or above * Significant networking improvements (hence the "for workgroups" in the name) including IIRC built-in TCP/IP support (prior to that most people used Trumpet Windsock) * I/O subsystem improvements too
I've heard it said that WfW3.11 was essentially a huge gamma-test for the network and I/O subsystems intended for what became Windows 95.
Also, WfW did not initially ship with built in winsock implementation, WfW did ship all the networking apparatuses other than that, just needing a drop-in winsock.
I never had cause to use SoftPC.
windows 3.11 aka "windows for warehouses" was actually pretty nifty and in a prior life I installed it at many small businesses who took full advantage of it's built in network mail client and many other very useful features.
It absolutely killed Lantastic which, at the time was pretty much pervasive in small businesses. Also at about the same time we replaced a lot of Arcnet and Token ring networks with UTP ethernet which I would have been amazed back then to hear would still be widely in use in 2013.
Perhaps true. On the other hand: http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_Is_...
While I like linux, and I am writing this on an Ubuntu 13.10 install, there's really nothing very innovating about Linux, for anyone that has a unix history, it's just another variant, like the myriad of other ones [1].
Regarding your first paragraph, you cannot make a tribute inadvertently. The definition of the word tribute requires a certain intention. In layman's terms, if Linus did not intend something to be a tribute, then it is not a tribute.
So, it seems like you're agreeing with me, that Linus was making a tribute to windows? It's unclear what you're trying to say really.
There's plenty of innovation in every modern "unixlike" OS. IllumOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, to take some common examples, have each taken different paths in different functional areas, and rarely is one objectively worse than any other unless you have the constraint of a particular set of hardware to run the kernel on and/or software to run under the kernel.
Filesystems, for instance. ZFS and Btrfs (to a lesser extent, mainly because it's years from being feature complete) are innovative compared to earlier mainstream filesystems. Yet, a typical desktop user would not notice any innovation. Typical users are not concerned with snapshots, sending snapshot diffs between devices, or scrubbing a raid array for errors. ZFS has been criticized for being a resource hog, and both have been criticized for being slow. There are always trade offs. Getting a modern filesystem with COW and block checksums or hashes has performance costs, particularly on rotating disks. The only thing a desktop user will notice about a 5 year old computer running linux or BSD with a ZFS or btrfs filesystem is that it's slow. Slowness isn't innovative, right?
Of course there's kernel innovation, my point was that this is true for all variants - not just Linux which gets all the attention.
>Of course there's kernel innovation
:\
Perhaps ease up a bit on the hyperbole, you just took 2 polar opposite positions in the space of as many comments.
>ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that
harshreality wasn't saying that Linus had anything to do with ZFS, he was noting it as an example of 'innovation [in something] that "looks like unix"' in order to counter your odd implication that that all unix variants are pretty much the same and devoid of innovation. To break down your argument, you say that: 1 - "Linux isn't innovative" 2 - "It's just another variant" 3 - "Like the myriad of other ones"
So Linux isn't innovative, and since all of the other ones (Solaris, BSDs, etc.) are alike, that they are neither innovative. You basically denied that there has been any innovation in Unix since it left Bell Labs. The ZFS example was a counter to that implicit claim.
Windows had a window manager too, and you could swap it out. There weren't nearly as many options.
Anyway, I for one am excited about Mir, because it means that my tf-101 or the replacement some years in the future may rejoin the convergence zone. They are making steps to live in the Android ecosystem, at least according to the article summaries I've come across that give any inkling of information about Mir.
If you google ASUS Transformer Ubuntu and follow some of the howtos you find, it's an absolute joke trying to get a windowed environment that resembles any netbook, laptop, or desktop you could buy last year or the year before that. "Now use Android VNC client to connect..." WTF?
Nobody else seems to be heading back to the convergence zone. Maybe wayland will get there at the same time. That's my rant.
Could have been either that, or "competition is bad, we already have the best way." You're right I think, it is probably characteristic of a manager to try to tell people what way to spend their time.
I really wish I could use control-F on paper books.
I don't remember what book it was in, I think maybe the Art of Unix Programming or Just for Fun, but somebody remarked that the real innovation of Linux was the modern open source model of software development. And I think that's mostly true.
There was minix, which was a lot more innovative (microkernel), but Tanenbaum wanted to keep it strictly for educational purposes, simple and easy, and didn't want to turn it into a big system with all the bells and whistles that linux got.
Had FreeBSD been released earlier, that might have had the position that linux has now.
All that came tacked on later and thus had inherent security issues because of backward compatibility.
So, calling Linux (which was always build around both, multi user and networking) "For Workgroups" in this 3.11 iteration is 100% sarcastic. Seeing as they (Linux) wouldn't even have to add that "For Workgroups" as it goes without saying that Linux is capable of it.
Certainly 3.11 is more evocative a number in that context than 10.4 or 6.1 or 3.0.
I do remember having fun typing in single letters to files, and renaming them "somethin.com" -- I seem to recall eg: a "b" would predictably crash the computer instantly.
Not too long after that, as the pc hardware caught up with, and surpassed the Amiga, I got started with Slackware GNU/Linux. I find it hard to accept that anyone would seriously consider Windows 3.11 a good example of systems programming...
The NT kernel, developed around that period, was good for its time though. Windows 3.x ... not so much.
You just contrasted Windows NT (1993) with Windows 3.0 (1990). Apart from the fact that NT is a MUCH newer OS released later (with 3.1/3.11 being upgrades onto an earlier OS), the system requirements of the two are quite starkly different.
For one example, Windows 3.0 runs on 384K of RAM. Windows NT 3.1 runs on 12 megabytes. Windows 3.0 also runs on 8 and 16 bit CPUs, while NT is 32 bit only.
If they had released Windows 3.0 as a 32 bit OS Microsoft literally might not exist as they do today, since Windows 3.0 was targeting cheaper IBM clones which were very behind the curve technologically. 32 bit would also have meant perhaps doubling the minimum memory requirement of the system.
In general I think very little of your post.
For PC users, Win 3.11 and Win 95 were both BIG advances at the time, no matter how they look to us in retrospect.
It was bad for the era. It did well because the competing solutions only ran on expensive single-source hardware and/or were not seen as serious enough (even the big-box Amiga's were, aside from cost, negatively affected by being connected to the "game machines" on the low end).
Windows 3.0 also runs on 8 and 16 bit CPUs, while NT is 32 bit only.
Given the hardware constraints I think it was an impressive piece of work for the time.
In my opinion, WFW didn't really hold a candle to X11 and Linux, and the networking options were frankly laughable. Even with Linux's crummy NFS implementation at the time, it was far superior to using Netbeui/IPX and connecting to a Novell Netware server.
Wow. I sound like a crotchety old man.
These must have been people with little computer experience.
In '93 I also ran 3.11, at home. At work I had access to Big Iron, VMS, DG UX, and a hand full of other OSes. There wasn't a really decent Microsoft OS until Windows 2000. Microsoft was only god on the desktop because it allow the average user tools like Office. The engineers and professionals used Sun workstations and Macs, production used VMS, which was decades ahead of any of the PC OSes at the time.
I think he's trying to tell us something. :)
http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|perkeleen%20vittup%C3%A...
...Although "perkele" is a native god, and it can be debated whether it should be translated to "devil"; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkele
Disclaimer: my knowledge of the Finnish language is mostly limited to profanity.
- get Linus to swear at me in Finnish
Here's the changeset: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ad81f0545ef01ea6518...
You don't see nonsense like this very often in commercial products (except maybe the Goats transported system-counter in Android, whose open-source status is constantly under debate).
As a Windows user, I'm always surprised to see how conservatively Linux uses its swap area. On Windows, even with enough free memory, it still pages to disk and gives me a sluggish experience. Does anyone have any idea why Windows is so aggressive about paging disks out compared to Linux?
Linux gives lots of tuners to adjust swappiness. As far as I know, Microsoft assumes that one (conservative) setting fits all, in typical Microsoft fashion.
On Ubuntu, you can always get some newer kernel versions through apt-get, but the default will always be what they consider to be stable (especially for an LTS)
Rather than having a major stable release like 2.4, and then a long period of development in 2.5, followed by a stable 2.6 kernel later on, it switched to much shorter merge windows and release candidate cycles that last about 2-3 months. So you had 2.6.x kernels which were new stable branches, and would get patches such as 2.6.x.y.
After a while, this got a little silly. When numbers were getting up to things like 2.6.32.60, it gets hard to keep track of the numbers. Since the first two numbers were just sitting there unused, at some point Linus decided it was silly, and they would cycle to 3, and the second number would be for each stable release.
So yeah, 2.2-2.4 was about 2 years between new stable versions. 2.4-2.6 was about 3 years between new stable versions. But then there have been new stable versions about once every 2-3 months, and new long term supported versions picked from those about once a year (for distributions which prefer to do long-term support on a single kernel version, rather than updating to the latest stable).
And now we have only one number sitting there unused! Maybe they'll finish the job next time.
Actually, I think it would make the most sense to go with a year.month numbering scheme, but that probably won't happen.
You will also want to update your x.org install: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-lts-quantal
Note that some older video cards (nvidia I think) have had their support dropped, so this operation may or may not be safe.
Also, I looked at the X stuff too but it wanted to remove ubuntu-desktop and that seemed pretty drastic so I'm just using the newer 3.5 kernel for now. On this new PC I picked up support for my hot new 1 Gig ethernet, everything else worked fine but now I have an excuse to upgrade to a 1 Gig home router. :) Well once the cable can go fast enough that is. Assuming Google Fiber gets here, they promised Austin but Round Rock might not get it.
Just an interesting observation that both of these "3.11" are actually referring to different relative versions.
Windows was not using the now-common semantic versioning. Windows 3.11 is actually a patch to 3.1, which in semantic versioning would actually be 3.1.1.
Linux 3.11 however, is a minor upgrade to Linux 3.10.
I believe your packets may have made a wrong turn while en route to reddit.com.