> ------Jim Gettys (jg@pa.dec.com) wrote Fri, 15 Jan 1999 12:42:24 -0800
>
>
> >Ergo, it is premature to claim that Linux has one, in my book. Hopefully
> >in 6 months, it won't be. And there isn't anyone on the planet, with
> >the possible exception of Bob Scheifler, that will be happier than I
> >am when the bulk of Linux/UNIX shipments finally have a competant GUI
> >shipping.
> >- Jim Gettys
>
> IMHO it is not only important to have a competent GUI desktop for linux
> to make it more popular for home PC users. What I think is missing for the
> not-so-experienced PC user is an easy to configure installation tool for
> the kernel configuration. The make menuconfig is not sufficient
> as it still requires a lot of knowledge about hardware chips and card
> definitions, IRQs and such which isn't common knowledge to a new PC user.
<snip>
Why should home users have to reconfigure/recompile the kernel at all?
All device drivers should be modular, including the boot device driver.
(That would require smarter boot loaders that can find and load it off
a file-system using BIOS/firmware calls, plus a way to add a module to
the kernel before booting.) Any necessary reconfiguration should be
possible at run-time, through tools that maintain /etc/conf.modules and
the loader configuration file.
Here's a couple of other kernel problems I see for `normal' computer
users, and indeed for myself:
* Poor support of removable media (common to most Unix systems).
Under AmigaOS, I can eject and insert disks as I want; the volumes
are mounted and umounted automatically; the OS understands that
devices and disks are *not* the same thing. I think it's the same
under MacOS. In Linux, no can do. I understand that one can do
tricks with eject, amd, etc., but those don't come close to the
ease-of-use of the Amiga system.
* Poor ISA PnP support. It's difficult to support well at all, but
the fact that it's currently done by a user-land tool that is
independent of kernel resource allocations is a serious problem.
I suppose everyone's hoping this will go away soon...
-- Ben Hutchings, software engineer | web site to be reconstructed at some time womble@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk | Team *AMIGA* | Jay Miner Society - www.jms.org Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
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