[RULE] Hi everybody

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 11:20:15 at 11:20:15AM -0500, James Miller (jamtat at mailsnare.net) wrote:
> This would be a huge issue for me.  I have no such scripts, and it would
> take me several months to figure out how they work and how to put one
> together - assuming I could find several months' time to devote to it (I
> can't).  Not to mention that, were I to be using such a Linux on the sort
> of hardware RULE aims to run best on, I would not have adequate system
> resources - or time - to build it.  It's an interesting aside, but I don't
> see how it addresses RULE issues: can someone help me understand?
> 

Perfectly legitimate question.

Both Raul and James present correct concerns about sw bloat, and
equally valid solutions.

Raul's approach is the most valid and performing, no doubt. His
observation that today most of the bloat is in the programs seen by
end users (called userland or userspace in sw jargon) is also correct:
we probably all know Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution...

Of course, there is a huge lot of people with old hardware, and
without absolutely time and/or technical expertise to follow Raul's
approach. James is right to point this out. I fall in that category
too, and RULE was born for these cases: this is why relies on an
existing distribution.

If so, why then I am so happy that Raul joined us here, and invited
the kernel hackers to do the same?

1) because it is extremely important that the hackers actually doing
this and the *next* kernels remember that the people needing a low
resource Linux are many, many more than those with both money and
real *reasons* to buy a state of the art box every two years.

2) because we at RULE were already do something to make userland less
bloated, but have no expertise (at least I haven't make me happy
proving I'm wrong!) to look at the current Red Hat kernels and tell us
how to recompile and configure *that* code base to require as much
little RAM *and* disk space to install and run faster. *THIS* is where
I hope to have feedback first. Of course any other contribution is
welcome.

HTH,
	Marco Fioretti

PS: the distinction between "fully functional" and bloated is (using
mailers as example):

if it can handle POP3, IMAP, multiple accounts and digital signatures,
user macros and similar ... it is fully functional (eg mutt)

if it has a whole bunch of ways to change themes, fonts, margins,
colors, icons, sounds... it is bloated. Not bad, for heaven's sake,
but bloated (eg... well, you don't expect me to say one, do you?).

Note that the two things are not mutually exclusive, but only the
first is needed to make something useful with a PC.


-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

...the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the
Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. (Calvin)


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