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Friday, 13th o February 2004





Linux is Dead, Long Live Linux   
 
My ode to Dave Barry
I have to say that this most recent Linux kernel 2.6x that just came out is WAY better than the first few releases of the last 2.4x series, which were a disaster.  The last series got out the door with some serious virtual memory issues. 
For instance, under heavy load, the kernel would go into crisis management mode, like a middle manager at an end of the year performance review.  Yeah, I know, not pretty.  And as the boat was sinking, the kernel had its handy dandy thimble and was dutifully bailing.  This was the infamous disk thrashing kernelTM (up until 2.4.12, I think). 
So you'd - get this - click on one program too many and the performance of your system would deteriorate until - and I'm not making this up - it became unresponsive and you'd have to hard reset it.  That's all fine and dandy for that OTHER OS, but this was the first time that had happened to me with Linux, and it was damn embarrassing.    Yes, even more embarrassing than all the crap I have stuffed in my garage, and no, Viagra wasn't going to fix it.
I checked around for a bit, and by a bit, I mean Slashdot, but the Linux press was decidedly quiet, too quiet.   I smelled cover-up.  Then one fine day the waters burst forth as Linus announced that he had ripped the guts out of the VM (virtual memory) module, given it a severe thrashing, and put in something more agreeable.  I quickly upgraded, and things seemed to be better, but I never quite got over my trust issues.  It still seemed dangerously, recklessly stupid under high load, and by high load, I mean listening to mp3s and surfing the web.
Well, I'd have to say that 2.6 is as beautiful and wonderful as 2.4 was ugly and miserable.  Wow, what an improvement and not just in desktop responsiveness (which is very nice but not why we uber geeks use it in the first place), but overall stability.  I have confidence that it won't decide to push up daisies at an inappropriate time.  In fact, my primary desktop machine here, is my development database server, webserver, nfs server, instant messaging server, remote update master, print server, desktop publishing platform, multimedia player, video machine, office suite, web development platform, and multimedia authoring system.   
<voice accent="Austin Powers">YEAH BABY</voice>