WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Liam Proven]

On 25 September 2010 01:25, ms <devicerandom at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/09/10 16:26, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 24 September 2010 16:02, ms<devicerandom at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't understand how could you insist that they maintain something
>>> that they have no hardware to test on.
>>>
>>> It's sad, I understand, but it's also normal. Technologies come and go.
>>> Floppy is a dead technology since years and years.
>>
>> Floppies are not extinct, are still in common use,
>
> We have different definitions of "common". Anyway they could be as
> common as you want: if developers can't test them, they can't support them.

It's not an everyday thing, not even an every month thing, but they're
not gone just yet.

> If you want floppy support, you can perhaps donate a machine with a
> floppy drive to an Ubuntu developer willing to work on that.

I'd be very happy to. Any Ubuntu devs in London on this list who want
one, please speak up!

>> and for quite a
>> number of relatively modern machines that cannot boot from USB are
>> still the most commonly-available easiest and cheapest boot media. To
>> burn a CD for one use, such as re-Flashing a BIOS, and then throw it
>> away is appalling environmental irresponsibility.
>
> For one CD?! Please.

Yes. Exactly. For one CD. A single use of a write-once medium such as
that is *precisely* the sort of egregious resource wastage that has
given the C21 world a 5000 mile long raft of plastic poisoning the
Pacific ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

>> I expect testing on desktop machines and I expect support for fairly
>> recent legacy hardware. PS/2 ports, parallel&  serial ports, analogue
>> VGA ports&  monitors, CDs as opposed to DVDs, the ISA bus, the
>> parallel PCI buses, these are all "legacy" technology but still in
>> use. I have a live P4 server with Cirrus graphics on an electronic PCI
>> interface (physically, it's on the motherboard); I still expect such
>> things to work.
>>
>> Also, it pays to be aware of the position of Linux and Ubuntu in the
>> real world. It is a tiny minority OS in a world dominated by Windows
>> and one commercial UNIX. One of the main uses for Linux for many
>> people is to bring old PC hardware back to life, for which no licence
>> is available for a commercial OS, or where it would be too expensive
>> or modern commercial OSs too heavyweight. This is an important niche
>> and should not be neglected.
>
> I think you are not getting the point of the Linux *ecosystem*. There's
> plenty of Linux distributions that support all of this stuff and more.

There were. They are dying like flies, mostly because of the rampant
success of Ubuntu. That is not necessarily a bad thing - I think there
were arguably too many, and some thinning of the herd is good. Now we
just have time-wasting idiots creating wastes of space such as remixes
of Ubuntu aimed at specific religious groups. It's just consolidation.
The IT world is growing up. Patchily, in places, but it's happening.

> But Ubuntu is not geared towards revitalizing old hardware. Ubuntu, as
> far as I understand it, is designed to be a modern OS running on
> relatively modern machines. I have personally run Linux (and FreeBSD) on
> 64MB Pentium 1s, not more than three years ago. It wasn't Ubuntu,
> however. It wouldn't have been the right thing for the job, simply.

I'd suggest one easy definition of "relatively modern" as "shipped
with or can comfortably run Windows XP", which includes up to
8-year-old kit and anything well-specced from this century so far.

> There is a world of Linux distros out there, even if Ubuntu pretty much
> shadowed a lot of them.

Many of the "lightweight" efforts today *are* respins of Ubuntu, such
as U-Lite, Lubuntu and the latest versions of Puppy. The base distro
dropping support for hardware that was still being sold new in the
last couple of years is going to be a big problem for them.

>> No, but I *do* expect it to work on kit that meets the minimum
>> requirements and kit that is (say) ten to 12 years old if it was of
>> good specification at the time.
>>
>> A 64MB Pentium 1 from 1995, no. A 1GB P3 from 1998 or 1999, yes.
>
> And... why is 10 to 12 years old your expectation?

Covered above. If it came with or could run XP, it's still a modern,
usable machine. Look, for instance, at the level of specification the
ComputerAid charity requests for donations:
http://www.computeraid.org/equipment-accepted.asp

> 10 years are *aeons* in computing. It isn't unreasonable at all, sad as
> it may be (because I love old hw myself) that some hardware of that age
> is no more actively supported by a standard modern desktop distribution.

I could not disagree more. One of the core strengths of Linux is its
support for older kit.

Sadly, I think it's not really viable for modern Linux to support
386-class kit, even though that's what it was developed for. It's not
modular enough - the curse of its monolithic kernel, famously regarded
as obsolete in 1991 - to keep the old drivers it needs.

But supporting a machine that is modern enough to run the dominant
commercial OS of the whole planet? A machine capable of pretty much
full unrestricted access to the WWW and modern apps?

Yes, absolutely definitely totally and unhesitatingly *yes*. If the
kit is modern enough to run XP, it should work with Ubuntu.

Only supporting new or nearly-new machines will restrict the potential
audience of Ubuntu users to the sort of machine where people could
just as well run Windows 7, which is, like it or not, a pretty decent
OS and one with vastly more infrastructure around it than Linux has -
or if we are realistic, will *ever* have. If Ubuntu only tries to
compete with the latest and greatest commercial OS on its home turf,
it is dooming itself.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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