At half-time, it's Idealists 0 Realists 1

Posted May 14, 2008 17:47 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207)
In reply to: At half-time, it's Idealists 0 Realists 1 by NigelK
Parent article: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Don't believe me when I say the Free Software guys try to attach themselves to high-profile projects in order to attempt to influence them?

I believe you have that backwards. Take the GNU away from Linux and you have just a kernel. Good luck doing much with it, unless you're an embedded developer.

It's possible to run the Linux kernel with non-GNU system components and a non-GNU userland, but I've never seen anyone do it. Quibble about the name "GNU/Linux" all you like, but most Linux kernels rely on the presence of GNU software.

At half-time, it's Idealists 0 Realists 1

Posted May 15, 2008 5:22 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

I am just trying to think how much GNU this Linux-based system is running as system-critical
components.  The only ones which immediately comes to mind are GNU grub (which the GNU project
hasn't done very much to, at least not to the version I am using) and glibc, which is a
newcomer but obviously absolutely critical.  I am sure that a few GNU tools are used during
boot for convenience, but probably for things that could be done equally well (or better)
using python or perl.  And this system uses dash, not bash during boot.  And KDE, not Gnome.

I have bash running in a Konsole for a few programming tasks, and it is a very useful tool but
not really system-critical to me.  I use a whole range of GNU tools for development.  This
whole system could probably not be built without the GNU development suite (everything except
the kernel perhaps yes, but without the kernel it is not Linux either).

I know I have said this before, but the GNU part of GNU/Linux really mainly revolves around
GCC and friends.

GLibC is not newcomer

Posted May 15, 2008 15:25 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Small correction: Linux used GLibC from the very beginning. Sure it was not "GLibC from FSF" (SFS had little interest in linux at the time) but it was still version GLibC.

And yes, GLibC is the most critical component of the system. May be even more critical then kernel - you can use GLibC with FreeeBSD and most Linux programs are quite happy with this setup.