Using what we have (was Re: [svlug] Linux for Macintosh (Alas MacII))

[Dan Bethe]

On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Patrick McGovern wrote:

> C) I always thought one needed 8+ megs to use X.  Never tried it to be
> honest.  I just assumed this to be true from reading books and RH boxes.
> My first install with Slackware was about three years ago was on a P60 with

	heh, well I've never heard a single realistically accurate
estimate of Linux's resource requirements, except from those who seek to
utterly minimize them.  Someone made a Linux setup that occupied 5 megs of
disk, and ran in 896K of RAM which included userspace.  and others rewrote
certain utilities such as getty, in assembly. 

	Peoples' perceptions of resource requirements is constantly
exhorbitant.  This reflects our primitive susceptibility to the illusion
that is competition, and to *never* have a grasp on what we have today,
and always want what we don't.
	The next generations of computer science development (see
http://www.tunes.org and http://dolphin.openprojects.net) are going to
take us back to the days of the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple // in
terms of minimal resource requirements. 
	You have the freaks who do things like that, and the freaks who
try to shoot it down and instead go with whatever crap is backwards
compatible with yesterday's crap.  What's the difference?  The former is a
goal to be attained, and the latter rides on their shoulders until the
former disposes of yesterday. 
	Somewhere in the middle are the freaks like Linus who stay
"advancedly" compatible, but honestly admit that their crap is at least
significantly better than the old crap.  I'll take my open standard GNU
system today rather than the proprietary GNU-like stuff.  Freedom is its
strength.  Tomorrow, we'll use Linux as a device driver for our AI
reflective systems, in a another revolution of truer computing freedom  :)

-- signed, dtm, seeker of the quantum leap


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