RE: tlug: Why use Linux? - The explanation!

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

> Ok, let's put away emotions for a moment and think about
> that rationally (hehe, I know that's impossible :-) 
> 
> So, now imagine, you buy next years Nokia mobile and it runs
> on Linux (this is no joke, they are looking into this).
> Given that you probably won't reformat the flash memory
> (does it even have flash) and install your own binaries on
> it, is it an "inappropriate" use of Linux?  Should it
> preferably run on WindowsCE, crash during every other call,
> and be twice as heavy, because it needs much more memory?

no, this is acceptable.  embedded systems are an exception.

> 
> Ok, now imagine you buy the Nokia mobile in two years (still
> runs on Linux, of course), it comes with more RAM and they
> figured that it wouldn't hurt if they would let the user
> enter small perl scripts (using Palm-like graffiti) to write 

see above.

> Time warp - 5 years later - mobile phones come routinely with
> 512MB of main memory, voice recognition, 2GB of flash, and
> some digits and the thing rings your mom.  As a Linux
> hacker, are you morally required to reinstall everything
> from scratch on your phone and ring your mom buy typing
> `ifup mom' on the command line, or do you even have to

yeah, at this point it's no longer an embedded system.  Give me egcs on
the phone, please.  Instead of 'ifup mom', though, I'd have to have a
directory into which I could cd and then 'make mom' or 'make CFLAGS=-O2
mom' at my leisure.

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Systems (UNIX) and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company 

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