Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-for-Workgroups-Linux-3-11-s-feature-set-now-confirmed-1917712.html

by parfe • 13 years ago

256 113 13 years ago

16s• 13 years ago

I was part of a Windows system install in 1993 for a mid-sized corporation. At that time, Windows 3.11 was wonderful. People were amazed by it. There were no writable CDs back then (floppies ruled), but it was being researched and people were excited about the huge storage potential. Things have changed a lot since that time, but some things have stayed the same (red black trees are still red black trees). MicroSoft is still a heck of a systems programming shop, but back then, they were God.

The Linux name change is a fitting tribute to Windows system programmers everywhere.

spudlyo2• 13 years ago

Although Windows for Workgroups was largely considered a joke (Windows for Warehouses) I also remember it being pretty wonderful. It brought to Windows all the SMB stuff that I enjoyed from OS2 as well as an actual built-in TCP/IP stack. I was happy to ditch WinSock.

tnuc• 13 years ago

From the depths of my bad memory; To get TCP/IP in windows 3.11 you needed an extra disc to load up their winsock version.

And it was a shitload better than anything else available at the time.

josephscott• 13 years ago

I worked for a placed that used the Reflections TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.x. I recall it working fairly well for that era.

pbsdp3• 13 years ago

As a Mac user at the time, the love for Windows 3.11 left me scratching my head something fierce. By comparison to System 7.1+, Windows 3.11 was awwwwful.

Of course, around that time you could also run an Irix desktop, complete with Photoshop and SoftPC and even (later on) IE, but that was sadly beyond the reach of most consumers.

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

One word: Networking. Mac OS and Windows were awful at networking at that time (and Mac OS remained awful at network for some time beyond this point).

UNIX variants, OS/2, and the BSDs were the options at the time for decent networking...Mac OS wasn't in the running.

spamizbad• 13 years ago

My memory might be fuzzy, but I remember support in those days being very limited for 7.1. Win 3.11 would run on stuff made in the 80s (any 386 or 486 with enough RAM) - OS7 required a fairly new Mac.

LeeLorean• 13 years ago

Irix with SoftPC was about the slowest thing I ever had the misfortune of using.

Keyframe• 13 years ago

At the same time you could run AmigaOS/Workbench 3. People, sadly, often forget about that great affordable system.

yuhong3• 13 years ago

Personally, I don't think it was all that wonderful, particularly when WfW 3.11 required a 386 anyway. This is part of why I hate the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco quite a lot.

yread• 13 years ago

requred 386? I was running it on a 12MHz 286 (and it only had 12MHz with TURBO on! yeeeeaah!)

HNJohnC3• 13 years ago

Thank you for not making me feel like such an oldtimer here. As soon as I saw the name I thought "I bet I'm the only one who remembers it".

windows 3.11 aka "windows for warehouses" was actually pretty nifty and in a prior life I installed it at many small businesses who took full advantage of it's built in network mail client and many other very useful features.

It absolutely killed Lantastic which, at the time was pretty much pervasive in small businesses. Also at about the same time we replaced a lot of Arcnet and Token ring networks with UTP ethernet which I would have been amazed back then to hear would still be widely in use in 2013.

sokoloff• 13 years ago

You might equally amazed that we're STILL running TokenRing on part of our manufacturing floor. Today.

hristov2• 13 years ago

It is not a tribute. It is obviously a sarcastic joke cued by the coinciding version numbers. I am not sure how good Microsoft was at systems programming at the time, but I guarantee you Linus has very little regard for Microsoft's systems or any other type of programming acumen and is not about to start making tributes to Microsoft.

shadowfox• 13 years ago

Linus has very little regard for Microsoft's systems or any other type of programming acumen

Perhaps true. On the other hand: http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_Is_...

hnriot5• 13 years ago

Obviously the version number is the reason, but tribute vs sarcasm, that's tough. It lacks any actual sarcasm, so I think Linus might have inadvertently made it a tribute, by mistake.

While I like linux, and I am writing this on an Ubuntu 13.10 install, there's really nothing very innovating about Linux, for anyone that has a unix history, it's just another variant, like the myriad of other ones [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_variants

vacri• 13 years ago

An entrepreneur can recognise a competitor without it being an attack of some form. Why does it have to be sarcastic? It's just a humorous acknowledgment of coinciding numbers - "Hey, '3.11' is a number that has significant history elsewhere in the computing world"

Certainly 3.11 is more evocative a number in that context than 10.4 or 6.1 or 3.0.

e12e• 13 years ago

Wow. I think my first run-in with Windows 3.11 was in high-school -- and after having lived for years with an Amiga 2000 -- Windows was a complete joke of an OS.

I do remember having fun typing in single letters to files, and renaming them "somethin.com" -- I seem to recall eg: a "b" would predictably crash the computer instantly.

Not too long after that, as the pc hardware caught up with, and surpassed the Amiga, I got started with Slackware GNU/Linux. I find it hard to accept that anyone would seriously consider Windows 3.11 a good example of systems programming...

peterkelly• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I would describe a team that releases an OS without memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, or a 32-bit API several years after the introduction of the 386 a "heck of a systems programming shop".

The NT kernel, developed around that period, was good for its time though. Windows 3.x ... not so much.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

I hate retrospective analysis of computing history which try to criticise things without understanding the context/reasoning, and instead look at it in a modern lens (e.g. people that call Windows 95 "bad").

You just contrasted Windows NT (1993) with Windows 3.0 (1990). Apart from the fact that NT is a MUCH newer OS released later (with 3.1/3.11 being upgrades onto an earlier OS), the system requirements of the two are quite starkly different.

For one example, Windows 3.0 runs on 384K of RAM. Windows NT 3.1 runs on 12 megabytes. Windows 3.0 also runs on 8 and 16 bit CPUs, while NT is 32 bit only.

If they had released Windows 3.0 as a 32 bit OS Microsoft literally might not exist as they do today, since Windows 3.0 was targeting cheaper IBM clones which were very behind the curve technologically. 32 bit would also have meant perhaps doubling the minimum memory requirement of the system.

In general I think very little of your post.

caf• 13 years ago

WIN32S implemented a subset of the 32-bit Windows NT API on Windows 3.11.

andyjohnson02• 13 years ago

Unfair. Windows 3.x had to be able to run on an 8086 (real mode), because that was what most people had. It could also make use of a 286 (standard mode) or 386 (enhanced mode) if available.

Given the hardware constraints I think it was an impressive piece of work for the time.

Patrick_Devine• 13 years ago

My first experience with Windows for Workgroups was in 1994 when we were forced to use it at work. By that time I'd already been using Linux for a few years (since before 1.0).

In my opinion, WFW didn't really hold a candle to X11 and Linux, and the networking options were frankly laughable. Even with Linux's crummy NFS implementation at the time, it was far superior to using Netbeui/IPX and connecting to a Novell Netware server.

Wow. I sound like a crotchety old man.

xradionut2• 13 years ago

"At that time, Windows 3.11 was wonderful. People were amazed by it."

These must have been people with little computer experience.

In '93 I also ran 3.11, at home. At work I had access to Big Iron, VMS, DG UX, and a hand full of other OSes. There wasn't a really decent Microsoft OS until Windows 2000. Microsoft was only god on the desktop because it allow the average user tools like Office. The engineers and professionals used Sun workstations and Macs, production used VMS, which was decades ahead of any of the PC OSes at the time.

Angostura• 13 years ago

Precisely; Microsoft succeeded because it freed up the average user from the priests in charge of the big iron.

sampo2• 13 years ago

Here's the Makefile: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Makefile

Here's the changeset: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ad81f0545ef01ea6518...

petepete2• 13 years ago

And this makes me question whether Github comments (at least on high-profile projects) should be open to anyone.

artificialidiot• 13 years ago

https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132

I think he's trying to tell us something. :)

alatkins• 13 years ago

For those interested in adding to their Finnish vocabulary:

http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|perkeleen%20vittup%C3%A...

claudius• 13 years ago

Reading Finnish out loud (with a somewhat German-y pronunciation) always manages to cheer me up.

jeltz• 13 years ago

That is not a literal translation though, just the closest English equivalent.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Bucket list:

- get Linus to swear at me in Finnish

theboywho• 13 years ago

Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was relased on August 11, 1993.

yuhong3• 13 years ago

December 1993 I think.

aidenn03• 13 years ago

IIRC 3.11 Was August, 3.11 for workgroups was later that year

ivanbrussik2• 13 years ago

I came here to say, "wow, isn't that reminiscent of Windows for Workgroups." Touche linus, touche.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

I came here to say ...

I believe your packets may have made a wrong turn while en route to reddit.com.

ivanbrussik2• 13 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/YrFvRzp.gif

cheese1756• 13 years ago

Welcome to Hacker News! I don't mean for this to come off the wrong way, but please try to put more effort into your comments than Imgur links. This is a place for discussion, not one-liners and images. It may be that way on Reddit, but Hacker News has a focus on higher effort content.

petepete2• 13 years ago

Badmouthing Reddit at every opportunity doesn't reflect all that well on HN either.

jebblue3• 13 years ago

I'm still on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which has kernel 3.2.0-49, I thought 'old' was 2.6 or really old 2.4. What the heck is going on now, the kernel is already up to 3.11? Did I miss anything good in between? By my perceptions I would have imagined that newest kernel would be around 3.6 or so but I was wrong: https://www.kernel.org/finger_banner

proland• 13 years ago

It usually takes distro developers a while to vet kernels and ensure stability with their userspace stuff. 3.7 and 3.8 had a few regressions, and were skipped by a few distros. 3.9 only made it into Debian Stable last month (as a backport from testing).

On Ubuntu, you can always get some newer kernel versions through apt-get, but the default will always be what they consider to be stable (especially for an LTS)

laumars3• 13 years ago

The kernel numbering system changed when Linus moved over to v3. Basically the switch from 2.4.x to 2.6.x was the last major change to the Linux kernel. Since then, all the 2.6.x releases have been pretty standard incremental updates. So a few months ago Linus decided it was time to switch to v3 - just to round the numbers off (it wasn't a big nor noteworthy release - it was just an excuse to round the numbering off). So now the the second digit is what used to be the 3rd digit in the 2.6.x releases.

jebblue3• 13 years ago

Thanks laumars and proland, I don't follow it closely, your explanations makes sense.

asdfs• 13 years ago

I believe that 3.0 actually coincided with some Linux-related anniversary.

lambda2• 13 years ago

2.4 is really old, originally released in 2001. 2.6 has also been around for a long time, and the release cycle changed during the 2.6 timeframe, so the old release number system no longer makes sense.

Rather than having a major stable release like 2.4, and then a long period of development in 2.5, followed by a stable 2.6 kernel later on, it switched to much shorter merge windows and release candidate cycles that last about 2-3 months. So you had 2.6.x kernels which were new stable branches, and would get patches such as 2.6.x.y.

After a while, this got a little silly. When numbers were getting up to things like 2.6.32.60, it gets hard to keep track of the numbers. Since the first two numbers were just sitting there unused, at some point Linus decided it was silly, and they would cycle to 3, and the second number would be for each stable release.

So yeah, 2.2-2.4 was about 2 years between new stable versions. 2.4-2.6 was about 3 years between new stable versions. But then there have been new stable versions about once every 2-3 months, and new long term supported versions picked from those about once a year (for distributions which prefer to do long-term support on a single kernel version, rather than updating to the latest stable).

coldpie• 13 years ago

After a while, this got a little silly. When numbers were getting up to things like 2.6.32.60, it gets hard to keep track of the numbers. Since the first two numbers were just sitting there unused, at some point Linus decided it was silly, and they would cycle to 3, and the second number would be for each stable release.

And now we have only one number sitting there unused! Maybe they'll finish the job next time.

bebop• 13 years ago

If you want to move to the newer 3.5 kernel line, you can do so. This is what the 12.04.2 LTS is distributed with. Here is the apt-get for that: sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-quantal

You will also want to update your x.org install: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-lts-quantal

Note that some older video cards (nvidia I think) have had their support dropped, so this operation may or may not be safe.

jebblue3• 13 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I found a top level Quantal package and that pulled in the headers too in case anything needs to compile something.

Also, I looked at the X stuff too but it wanted to remove ubuntu-desktop and that seemed pretty drastic so I'm just using the newer 3.5 kernel for now. On this new PC I picked up support for my hot new 1 Gig ethernet, everything else worked fine but now I have an excuse to upgrade to a 1 Gig home router. :) Well once the cable can go fast enough that is. Assuming Google Fiber gets here, they promised Austin but Round Rock might not get it.

archmacbookuser• 13 years ago

Does this mean my MacBookPro8,2 will stop acting as a hot water bottle?

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

I really hope that Linus officially releases 3.11 on August 11th.

caycep• 13 years ago

What's wrong with "Unicycling Gorilla"?

mcv3• 13 years ago

Sounds prone to crashes.

mikevm• 13 years ago

Zswap looks very interesting. It seems that a similar feature is included (and enabled by default) on the new OS X Mavericks (http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/advanced-technologies.html -- called "Compressed Memory").

As a Windows user, I'm always surprised to see how conservatively Linux uses its swap area. On Windows, even with enough free memory, it still pages to disk and gives me a sluggish experience. Does anyone have any idea why Windows is so aggressive about paging disks out compared to Linux?

jstanley• 13 years ago

I can't explain the sluggish experience, but a plausible explanation is that Windows sees a bunch of unused pages, and also a bunch of uncached disk blocks that are used often, and decides that it would be preferable to put those disk blocks in memory in exchange for putting the "unused" memory in swap.

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

zram in its various incarnations is awesome and has been available in Linux for a few years at least now. It's interesting that Apple is copying it.

Linux gives lots of tuners to adjust swappiness. As far as I know, Microsoft assumes that one (conservative) setting fits all, in typical Microsoft fashion.

josteink• 13 years ago

Charming gestures like this is part of the reason I like the open-source community.

You don't see nonsense like this very often in commercial products (except maybe the Goats transported system-counter in Android, whose open-source status is constantly under debate).

jjindev• 13 years ago

Re. old times, if you were an early QNX user you kind of wondered what took everyone else so long ...

uzyn• 13 years ago

Nice homage.

Just an interesting observation that both of these "3.11" are actually referring to different relative versions.

Windows was not using the now-common semantic versioning. Windows 3.11 is actually a patch to 3.1, which in semantic versioning would actually be 3.1.1.

Linux 3.11 however, is a minor upgrade to Linux 3.10.

Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"

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