On April 1, 2005 08:33 am, quoth Ted Ozolins: > Dave Nebinger wrote: > >> http://gentooexperimental.org/nt/ > >> > >>Nah! > > > >It's got to be an april fool's joke... > > Has to be. Why else would it use "NT" and "comercial-grade" in the same > paragraph?<G>
I'm not sure it is a joke. Windows as a whole is awful, but the NT kernel was designed by Dave Cutler (creator of RSX-11M and VMS) and it has earned a lot of respect from people who know about these things. It is perhaps the only genuine innovation MS has ever produced. I'm not saying it's better or worse than Linux or the BSDs. It may indeed by worse, but it is still a respectable attempt at a kernel. When I was running XP I installed Interix. I didn't end up doing much with it, but it was very useful to be able to kill -9 runaway win 32 processes - it meant I had to reboot less often. At the time I wondered whether it might be possible to shut down the win32 subsystem when i didn't need it for multimedia stuff and work the *nix way, which I found much less uncomfortable. It wouldn't surprise me too much to hear that someone has actually succeeded in doing so. And isn't there a project somewhere to run a linux kernel as an NT subsystem in order to get access to those windoze drivers? Surely this GeNToo, if it is for real, would be a more elegant way of going about this. The problems I have found with Windows are 1. the insecurity, instability and bloat of the win32 subsystem 2. the crappiness and unreliability of NTFS 3. the lack of tools to tinker with the bootloader to correct problems arising from the crappiness of NTFS and other causes. Interix does nothing to address #1, but a project like the one described would. I assume it would also come with #3. That would just leave the crappiness of NTFS to deal with. So what if the ReactOS people were to develop a reiser4 driver? Then you could have a dual boot system - Linux and the other one - sharing a /home partition and using a reliable and efficient (IMO) file system running the same applications - kmail etc - just in one of those systems you could launch the win32/wine subsystem (or an improved and less bloated wine-based susbstitute) when you wanted it to run cubase or some fancy Adobe sofware, and then shut it down again when you finish. No dealing with windoze update either. What if you could, say, have windows-native audio apps exchanging audio and midi data using jack, possibly over a network? That's something I wouldn't turn my nose up at. If wine becomes much easier to work with on Linux then this kind of idea won't interest me so much, but for now I am interested because there are so many windows apps I miss, even though I don't miss windows itself one bit. Robert -- Robert Persson "No matter how much ye shake yer peg The last wee drap rins doon yer leg." -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
