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3 – 2 – 1. Ignition. We have lift off…. maybe…

Today, CNET reported on the business launch of VISTA (“Microsoft takes wraps off Vista for business”).

Today, I installed a copy of the Japanese edition of Windows XP, upgraded to SP2. Right after a fresh install – using just under 2 GB of space – space didn’t seem to be a big problem. Then the updates and finally SP2 came. The 4GB partition wasn’t enough so I had to make another partition and move the paging file to it. Why only 4GB? Call it a BIOS limit. Then there’s the fact that, some of us are forced to deal with that one small piece of a proprietary software/hardware combination that we can’t live without.

Today, I also installed a copy of Debian’s testing version called Etch. A full desktop with extras and space to spare using less than 3 GB. Of course I have separate partitions for all my “data”.

So you might wonder, what one can do with only 3 GB. Well, there’s a full Debian install of KDE 3.5, Mplayer and others for other multimedia, OpenSSH, Apache, Samba for Windows networking, gnump3d for multimedia streaming, etc… All UP TO DATE. All relatively safe and stable.
HOW can anyone justify bloating a bare OS install with 2GB worth of updates? When you end up needing more than twice as much storage just to make an OS safer, what does that say about the OS?

With each Windows release, I’ve always heard about how much more STABLE it was. How much faster…. How much… Well, someone would have to hand it over to me for free before I let it near my system. Get a pirated copy off the torrents? I’d rather not even consider wasting my bandwidth on something like that.

Actually, the one Microsoft thing that would be of interest to me is this: Singularity. They call it a “research project”. But it obviously has the potential to be so much more than that.

Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.

In the meantime, I’ll live with my XP and various Linux distros.

- toshiya