Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1999-37,: Re: Accountability

# Re: Accountability

David Parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us)
Wed, 15 Sep 1999 21:55:27 -0700 (PDT)

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I wrote:

> > Is the NT kernel that much larger than Linux? Sure, it takes three
> > disks to bootstrap it, but a large part of that is drivers and the
> > stage-1 installer, which is, in my experience, the thing that bloats
> > up a Linux bootstrap to the point where you either have to use a
> > compressed root filesystem or (shudder) multiple floppies to
> > bootstrap.

Walter Reed wrote:
> Oh Plah. Tom's RootBoot. Full kernel with networking and most drivers
> and lots of nifty utilities to boot. After the three NT disks, you STILL
> don't have a usable system. Some of the *&%^ DLL's you would need probably
> won't even fit on a floppy...

Yeah, but that's two disks containing compressed content. The 3 NT
bootstrap disks are uncompressed, and the largest lkm is 380k (NTFS);
If you compress the three NT boot floppies (NT 4.0 Build 1381) with
bzip2, the resulting archive is 1408261 bytes long, which is enough
to fit on a single high-density floppy.

The NT kernel is large (880k), but I don't think it's compressed...
No, it isn't. When I gzip it, it goes down to 470k.

I suppose it's fortunate for the Unix side that MS was sloppy when
they built their installer; I'd suspect that if they used a
syslinux'ed installer they could do a Mastodon and have a single-
floppy image.

> Long-term stability, managability (remote and local), flexability, standards,
> security, virus resistance, and open source are all perfectly valid reasons
> to use Linux over NT. Lack of constant bluescreens is no excuse to stay with
> MS products.

Tell that to my corporate masters. If you can convince my boss and the
marketing and sales people to dump NT for Mastodon (or any of the
other Linux distributions), I might even pay you for it. But unless you
can bring a powerpoint replacement, a Filemaker pro replacement, and an
Office 9x replacement to the table, I suspect that you may not be overly
successful in your efforts.

> So to get back to the MAIN topic, we DON'T want Linux ever being developed like
> an MS product where with each service pack comes New and Improved bugs (and
> security holes).

You might as well give up on Linux now, because we already have
patches going out that introduce new and improved bugs. That's
life, and you're going to have to deal with it.

____
david parsons \bi/ Sorry.
\/

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