OT: OS bloat, CPU's, etc. (was Re: Record locking)

[Fairlight]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:32:14PM -0800, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Bill Campbell cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> You had to do some serious trimming to get SuSE 9.0 Professional crammed
> into a 2.1GB hard drive.  When we were runnin Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with
> the 2.0.36 kernels, everything fit nicely in a 1GB partition leaving room
> for applictions.  Now we're doing 5.0GB for the OS, and it will probably
> get larger (I don't spend a lot of time trying to trim things, preferring
> to have everything I normally use available).

I did indeed trim.  :)  A lot of cruft in there that I just don't use
though.  I'm not going to be doing DVD, video processing, office work, or
half a million other things that they include software for.  I'm thinking
of eating about 260MB of my remaining 480MB just to try OpenOffice and see
if it's any good.  There was a dependancy issue, but I grabbed the JRE from
8.0 and installed that manually, so libjawt.so is taken care of.  I'm free
to do it, I just haven't yet.  I can always take it back out again.  :)

But yeah, I left a lot off.  But then, I always do.  I've -never- just left
a default install go, on linux -or- 'doze.  I always customise everything
I install, right down to when I install Winamp or whatever.  If my desired
installation happen to equate to the default, then fine.  But I always at
least look at what my options are and make sure I want everything.  I
really, really dislike it when people just say, "Install everything!"  Not
you, just...people.  :)  I've always -had- to be resource-conscious, so I
can be a bit stingy about what I install.  I mean...do -I- really need
breadboard software, for instance?  :)

The one thing I left off that I really am rethinking is emacs.  I use it so
rarely nowadays, but it's always nice to know it's -there-.  Then again,
vim is something I've grown accustomed to.  And I finally picked a syntax
highlighting colour scheme that doesn't bloody blind me while I work.  :)

> I do find it interesting that Apple's OS X has been getting faster with
> each new release while adding new features such as expose.  Panther is
> considerably faster than the first version of OS X I used about two years
> ago on the same machine, a 450MhZ G4.

You wouldn't expect that.  NeXTStep wasn't known for being particularly
light on its feet, for instance, and a lot of the front end for Apple's
current offerings springs from that lineage.  Then again, the BSD
underpinnings are probably nice and light.  (Which BSD was it based off of
again?  I want to say just BSD 4.2 with Mach underneath, but people keep
referencing FreeBSD, and I've heard NetBSD at least once.  I know the real
NeXTStep was BSD 4.2 on top of Mach, so maybe that's where I'm mentally
associating that.  I know they're still using Mach underneath though--or
were the last time I heard.  That much is the same.)

Hmmm...G4.  I was looking at specs on that, and it appears that's a
Motorola chip, which doesn't surprise me, as Apple has traditionally used
Motorola.  However, I -thought- that the PowerPC was a joint venture...and
I've seen references that point to one 485MHz derivative of the PowerPC,
which I can say is -really- powerful.  Thing is, the whitepaper PDF on
that derivative has IBM stamped all over it.  Is the PowerPC processor a
co-venture, or am I confusing things?

If it -is- a PowerPC, even at that speed rating, that can be blazingly
powerful.  And I see they've much faster ones as well, not to mention the
G5.

mark->
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