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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Will Linux on Itanium be saved? Absolutely not (www.theregister.com)

submitted 11 months ago by thehatfox to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They were interesting, but only good for a very narrow purpose - not really a good thing when the trend back then was going away from special purpose machines toward general purpose.

intel didn't plan it to be just a special purpose CPU - but it just ended up that way. That they gave their first customers free Alpha workstations for crosscompiling code as that was faster than native compilation should tell you everything you need to know about suitability of itanic as general purpose system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I never used Itanium, but I'm guessing that the Alpha workstations also ran x86 code faster than the Itaniums. fx!32 was one of DEC's marvels that they completely forgot to market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah, but x86 was relatively cheap. Alpha and Itanium were in a similar price range.

At that time Alpha belonged to Compaq - and they stopped Alpha development (and canned quite a few good designs which were pretty much ready to go), expecting they'll be able to replace it with Itanium.