[ Thanks to Patrick
Mullen for this link. ]
“With Linux growing in popularity, it’s an understatement to say
that a lot of people were waiting for Linux 2.4. Scheduled and
re-scheduled time and time again, Linux 2.4 was finally born on
January 4th, 2001 at 4:01 PM, Pacific Standard Time….”
“While this certainly was a long haul and people were skeptical
on whether it would ever really be released, it arrived, and let me
tell you — it was worth it for many users. Over are the days when
your ATA-100 motherboard refuses to work because your kernel
doesn’t support the IDE controller. Long past are the days when
your USB and Firewire peripherals sat dormant on your Windows
machine (unless you happened to run a distro that hacked in USB
support for you). The days are also over when an external package
needed to be installed for PCMCIA — it’s supported internally via
the kernel, now. The future is here — and it’s Linux.”
“This is the first release of Linux that is said to truly stack
up against Windows as far as speed and compatibility go. It wasn’t
too long ago that Linux didn’t have much support, but in the last
year we’ve seen many vendors hop on the bandwagon. NVidia, ATI,
Abit, Lexmark, 3dfx, and SMC are just a few of the vendors that
showed their support in Linux over the last year. Still, many
companies need to come around, as many third-party hackers were
needed to even spur developments of drivers for Linux. Let’s hope
we have that kind of continued support in the future.”
“Everyone who is ready to jump on the bandwagon should pause for
a second and ask — how well does it perform? Will my hardware be
compatible? Will 2.4 break features I enjoyed so much in 2.2? Read
on to find out the answers to these questions and much more.”