[nmglug] Other/Gnu operating system

[Sam Noble]

On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 19:36 -0600, Mars DeLapp wrote:
> I found an interesting article that breaks down the Debian distribution into informative pie charts.
> 
> Considering the contents of the pie charts, it looks I should quite calling my computer a Gnu/Linux system and start 
> calling it an Other/Gnu system.

Well that's possible but any given system is not particularly likely to
have the whole of the Debian repository installed on it (no comments
about installs with a LAC lineage!). I think their intention was to
evaluate the whole of the Free Software universe. So, surprise surprise,
the results are:
Free Software mostly comes from the Free Software community.

The part that's surprising to me on first glance is that Linux is so
large. But yesterday I managed to fill up my /usr partition compiling a
kernel after trying out 'make allmodconfig' ie, it was building every
possible driver as a LKM. Which reminded me that majority of Linux is
drivers for hardware that's not likely to all be in the same system at
once. So it's the exact same scenario as counting lines of source in
every single debian package and then implying that it represents the
percentages of 'my computer' 
I was just looking at disk usage of the kernels on my machine right now:
sam at isaac:~$ du -h /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-sam
2.0M    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-sam
sam at isaac:~$ du -hs /lib/modules/2.6.20-sam/
9.6M    /lib/modules/2.6.20-sam/
sam at isaac:~$ du -h /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686
1.3M    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686
sam at isaac:~$ du -hs /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/
46M     /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/

And the allmodconfig that ran out of space yesterday:
sam at isaac:~$ du -hs src/linux-2.6.20/
2.5G    src/linux-2.6.20/

Of course that one's source+binaries, (And of course I've been ignoring
the relative size of the two.)
But it's still telling to me that yes I can blow the kernel out to more
than 2 and a half gigs, but when I've got it config'd it's less than
twelve MBs. And even the stock Debian kernel which presumably has
drivers for most hardware available, is only ~50MB

Whatever, back to work with me.


> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/nodes/2168/cost-deb-pie-sarge.jpg
> 
> And a link to the whole article:
> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/gnu_linux_neither
> 
> Mars
>