Check out the new USENIX Web site. next up previous
Next: Project History and Background Up: Managing Distributions from the Previous: Managing Distributions from the

Introduction

For Linux to achieve mass acceptance, and hence world domination, one of the prerequisites is having a sufficient application base (how often have you heard the lament ``I would switch to Linux but for this one XYZ application that I need which only runs on NT, Solaris...''). One successful approach to this is emulation used by applications like wine[2] and dosemu[3]. However, emulators, particularly those of Microsoft operating systems, tend to be unable to emulate the entire operating system (mainly due to secret APIs and undocumented system calls). Furthermore incompatibility problems and inefficiencies with any emulation layer make this a solution which is feasible, but not optimal. True world domination will only be achieved when application vendors can be persuaded to write native applications for Linux.



Subsections

James Bottomley 2001-09-13