On Friday 22 February 2002 15.49, gilson redrick wrote:

Hi, all:

The corner of my eye saw "Seven Brides to Five Brothers." What? No: "Seven Kernels on Five Systems."

" ... I have four different distros running seven different kernels just on the five systems I have at home. ... Mandrake 8.1, which has a lot of bells and whistles, didn't include wireless utilities or support for CardBus or my ORiNOCO card ... Caldera has a nasty habit of providing upgrades, such as those to the kernel, but not upgrading the kernel version itself ... leave the source as 2.4.2. Needless to say, some software refuses do build when 2.4.4 or better is required. ... I'm afraid I don't have [a solution]. But I do know that what I consider only niggling annoyances can become show- stoppers for newbies. And, NO AMOUNT OF SUPPORT WILL PUSH LINUX INTO THE MICROSOFT STRONGHOLDS IF THESE PROBLEMS AREN'T RESOLVED. " [the capitals are mine for emphasis] Newbies? What's that? "Seven Kernels on Five Systems" by David A. Bandel [david@pananix.com], page 58, March 2002, www.linuxjournal.com.

Seven kernels on five systems, that's quite a feat. Most systems I've seen can only run one kernel. And no software in userland compiles against the kernel, at least none that I'm aware of. Only kernel modules need be aware of the kernel version, and *any* amount of support will provide those modules pre-compiled. SuSE does that for *almost* everything, and a newbie will never know - or need to know. There are problems with the kernel, most notably the ever-changing ABI. If linux is ever to gain any real support from hardware makers it needs to keep a constant ABI. An OEM can release one driver for win98, but needs to keep releasing drivers for linux, because their module refuses to load in 2.4.16 when it was written for 2.4.2. And no, GPLed drivers are not a solution for most of these. It would work, certainly, but many will balk at such a development. But these are developer problems. The end user should never have a problem with it. The (relatively) few that compile their own modules will know how to handle the kernel sources, and for the rest, all vendors I'm aware of have one kernel version "current". At present SuSE's is 2.4.16. No newbie will - or at least they shouldn't - download other kernels either from kernel.org or mantel/next. If they do they shouldn't complain. They're in deep water, they got there on their own accord so they better learn to swim PDQ. //Anders