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"Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves" "Windows is closed as

"Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves" "Windows is closed as ever" Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers.

beagle3 12y ago
There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly. The majority of users are actually running XBMC on the Pi, and they don't care if it's linux or windows. But the early adopters do care, and they are all Linux people.
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  "There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly." Of course there are, but I was taking issue with Windows being unsuitable for a classroom - is it realistic to claim that teachers are getting children to modify and compile the Linux kernel in the classroom? No, that's silly.
danieldk 12y ago
Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turbo Pascal was expensive for a 12 year-old). At the beginning I just typed some small C snippets that I could find in books in the library. Then I started reading shell scripts and found out that a lot of the system is controlled through shell scripts and started writing my own. Then I started reading through the source code of libraries to find out how things were implemented. At some point I got a Minix book (I was probably 16) at a discount at a book store. I started comparing the theory I read there and tried to find out how e.g. the Linux VMM differed from Minix. Don't underestimate how important it is for a kid to have access to such information. Only a small subset dive deeply into the system, but they will be the hackers of the future. But you have to awaken the interest by making easy to dive in. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I think you underestimate how important access to the OS (in the widest sense) has been to the success of everyone from Google, Dropbox, and Facebook to the newest of startups.
- bohol 12y ago
  I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
    - bohol 12y ago
      No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows. It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing. And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualified user software exist on other platforms. Industrial, scientific, medical, music, film etc.
      - throwawayaway 12y ago
        No? Tiny? I'd love to know which games industry you think came before the games industry on Windows. Did a legion of Windows programmers appear overnight? Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making. Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.
quonn 12y ago
Plus, it's just another _option_. How can this possibly be a bad thing? You can of course still run Linux.
- anilgulecha 12y ago
  I think this was answered. It's bad because teachers would push for a platform they presumably know more about -- Windows.
  - watty 12y ago
    And there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will be more productive on Windows and more likely be able to take those skills with them. How many kids need to know linux in the future? Here's what the Linux trend looks like: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
    - aruggirello 12y ago
      'linux' is a single keyword, while GNU/Linux OS might show up as a wide set of different keywords, like ubuntu, debian, mint, arch, centos, rhel, fedora, gentoo, opensuse. Note that this is not the case with Windows, iOS, OSX. So, it would be interesting to see the combined interest of all those added to that of 'linux' for a more correct perspective - not considering Android of course, since it's not a GNU/Linux system. BTW it seems interest in Windows is also halving every ~10 years (though not as fast as 'linux'): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows
      - aruggirello 12y ago
        Edit: I was partly wrong; the matter is much more complex than that: interest in iOS and OSX might show up as interest in iPhone/iPad, and Mac/Mac OS; interest in Windows, besides any interest in 'surface', might also show up as a generic interest in 'PC' or similar terms: you can make such assumption, since anyway those interested in 'linux' or 'OSX' would probably avoid using terms generally associated with Windows.
marcosdumay 12y ago
> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Why not? Do you hod the opinion that kernel code is something impossible to mess with? If so, why?
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  When introducing kids to programming in a classroom environment, hacking the Linux kernel is a completely OTT scenario. And Linux will still be available and probably the most popular OS to be installed on RPis, for those kids who are the next Linus Torvalds.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    naturally everyone wants to avoid a situation where people are afraid to try out different operating systems. instilling open mindedness and eagerness to learn new things, to kids, the idea that the OS isn't important it's what you can make it do... will stand them in better stead than leaving them with the idea that Windows or Apple or whatever, is the only way it's done.
nkuttler 12y ago
> Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers. Maybe, but Linux just seems more convenient. I mean, can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command? And all the other tools you might want to use, like editors, databases? And you will never know if they want to do kernel-level coding if they don't have access to the kernel.
- watty 12y ago
  I completely disagree. I used Ubuntu for a year and I spent more time fixing things or trying to do things in the OS than I have in all other operating systems combined. My nephew tried to install Ubuntu on his new build and hit brick wall after brick wall trying to install the OS and Minecraft. It simply hasn't gotten easy enough and I'm afraid it's too late now. I don't see a comeback for linux. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    I do: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android
  - nkuttler 12y ago
    It's unfortunate that you apparently had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but this thread is about development tools, not installing third party games from external sources. Yes, if you want to game, windows seems like a more convenient choice, nobody disputes that.
    - watty 12y ago
      Well I have a B+ and installed Raspbian for a little home energy project that reads from my smart meter over serial and pushes the data to the cloud. The programming was easy, I spent 5x as much time trying to get things installed. Finally got Cloud9 working, never was able to get InfluxDB installed, kind of got OrientDB installed (it crashes). I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.
bananaoomarang 12y ago
I am in computing now because someone put Linux on my laptop when I was 11, I don't think I would have ever really thought about it otherwise. It's not necessarily that I could look at the source of the kernel (I didn't), it's far more the philosophy of the OS as a whole meaning that I could tinker with whatever I wanted, pull apart components and see how it broke, dive as deep as I wanted into any area of the system. A Linux system is far more openly composed even when you're not at the source level, Windows is comparatively a black box. A value of Linux is teaching people how computer systems are put together and function, it is unequivocally better at this than Windows. I don't hate Windows either, but I do think that Linux aligns itself far better with the RPi's mission statement.
- guardian5x 12y ago
  It's not like Linux is going away. I think more possibilities in regard of OS is a good thing, and also in align with the RPi's mission statement.
Zardoz84 12y ago
I would prefer giving to a children an ZX Spectrum and explain how use it to make programs on BASIC, that putting in front of a Windows. At least, they would understand what is doing the computer, instead of seeing the computer doing "magic"
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I misread you then and read ZX81 instead of Spectrum and my mind went back to typing in pages of code and being unable to save due to only have the 8k version. That nearly put me off writing code! Thanks to the BBC B and floppy disks!
chernevik 12y ago
Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle. We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there. Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface. Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.
  - zanny 12y ago
    I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were: 1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed. 2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open. 3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%). The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era). I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high. On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in. On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum. My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.
eloisant 12y ago
Linux being open is not just about the kernel source code. It's the fact that it's modular, that you can decide what brick you need, add or remove them, and end up with the perfect right configuration. It's especially interesting when you're building an embedded system (typically with a RPi). Start with the minimal Arch Linux install, think about what you need and add just that. There is a lot to learn about how operating system work when you configure Linux without having to recompile your kernel (something that nobody do any longer anyway).
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  Or you can go even further, use something like buildroot (http://buildroot.net/ http://buildroot.net/) to build your kernel and rootfs, and even tweak the kernel configuration if you like. I recently did an RPi project where the kernel and rootfs together were about 5 MB compressed.
Niten 12y ago
> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. Not most of them and not to begin with, but "educating themselves" means having a platform where their curiosity can run amok, and some kids with RPis absolutely will find the Eudyptula Challenge or some other source of inspiration and make it to tinkering with the kernel. RPi is absolutely the perfect platform for this. Break your OS? Just throw in another SD card. Somehow damage the hardware? Whatever, it's only $35. I'm not the only person on here who taught himself Z80 assembly language in school because it let me dig deeper into our TI calculators; if we'd been using RPis for programming assignments I would have been all over that. I think it's a little surprising that it even needs to be said on a site called "Hacker News", but let's not underestimate what curious kids with a bunch of free time will accomplish.
- gknoy 12y ago
  Thank you for mentioning the Eudyptula Challenge [1]. It's not my cup of tea right now, but it sounds Really Cool for anyone interested in kernel programming. 1: http://eudyptula-challenge.org/ http://eudyptula-challenge.org/

beagle3 12y ago

There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly. The majority of users are actually running XBMC on the Pi, and they don't care if it's linux or windows. But the early adopters do care, and they are all Linux people.

nmeofthestate 12y ago
"There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly." Of course there are, but I was taking issue with Windows being unsuitable for a classroom - is it realistic to claim that teachers are getting children to modify and compile the Linux kernel in the classroom? No, that's silly.

danieldk 12y ago

Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turbo Pascal was expensive for a 12 year-old). At the beginning I just typed some small C snippets that I could find in books in the library. Then I started reading shell scripts and found out that a lot of the system is controlled through shell scripts and started writing my own. Then I started reading through the source code of libraries to find out how things were implemented. At some point I got a Minix book (I was probably 16) at a discount at a book store. I started comparing the theory I read there and tried to find out how e.g. the Linux VMM differed from Minix. Don't underestimate how important it is for a kid to have access to such information. Only a small subset dive deeply into the system, but they will be the hackers of the future. But you have to awaken the interest by making easy to dive in. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I think you underestimate how important access to the OS (in the widest sense) has been to the success of everyone from Google, Dropbox, and Facebook to the newest of startups.

bohol 12y ago
I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
  - bohol 12y ago
    No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows. It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing. And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualified user software exist on other platforms. Industrial, scientific, medical, music, film etc.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      No? Tiny? I'd love to know which games industry you think came before the games industry on Windows. Did a legion of Windows programmers appear overnight? Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making. Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.

quonn 12y ago

Plus, it's just another _option_. How can this possibly be a bad thing? You can of course still run Linux.

anilgulecha 12y ago
I think this was answered. It's bad because teachers would push for a platform they presumably know more about -- Windows.
- watty 12y ago
  And there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will be more productive on Windows and more likely be able to take those skills with them. How many kids need to know linux in the future? Here's what the Linux trend looks like: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
  - aruggirello 12y ago
    'linux' is a single keyword, while GNU/Linux OS might show up as a wide set of different keywords, like ubuntu, debian, mint, arch, centos, rhel, fedora, gentoo, opensuse. Note that this is not the case with Windows, iOS, OSX. So, it would be interesting to see the combined interest of all those added to that of 'linux' for a more correct perspective - not considering Android of course, since it's not a GNU/Linux system. BTW it seems interest in Windows is also halving every ~10 years (though not as fast as 'linux'): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows
    - aruggirello 12y ago
      Edit: I was partly wrong; the matter is much more complex than that: interest in iOS and OSX might show up as interest in iPhone/iPad, and Mac/Mac OS; interest in Windows, besides any interest in 'surface', might also show up as a generic interest in 'PC' or similar terms: you can make such assumption, since anyway those interested in 'linux' or 'OSX' would probably avoid using terms generally associated with Windows.

marcosdumay 12y ago

> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Why not? Do you hod the opinion that kernel code is something impossible to mess with? If so, why?

nmeofthestate 12y ago
When introducing kids to programming in a classroom environment, hacking the Linux kernel is a completely OTT scenario. And Linux will still be available and probably the most popular OS to be installed on RPis, for those kids who are the next Linus Torvalds.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  naturally everyone wants to avoid a situation where people are afraid to try out different operating systems. instilling open mindedness and eagerness to learn new things, to kids, the idea that the OS isn't important it's what you can make it do... will stand them in better stead than leaving them with the idea that Windows or Apple or whatever, is the only way it's done.

nkuttler 12y ago

> Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers. Maybe, but Linux just seems more convenient. I mean, can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command? And all the other tools you might want to use, like editors, databases? And you will never know if they want to do kernel-level coding if they don't have access to the kernel.

watty 12y ago
I completely disagree. I used Ubuntu for a year and I spent more time fixing things or trying to do things in the OS than I have in all other operating systems combined. My nephew tried to install Ubuntu on his new build and hit brick wall after brick wall trying to install the OS and Minecraft. It simply hasn't gotten easy enough and I'm afraid it's too late now. I don't see a comeback for linux. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  I do: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android
- nkuttler 12y ago
  It's unfortunate that you apparently had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but this thread is about development tools, not installing third party games from external sources. Yes, if you want to game, windows seems like a more convenient choice, nobody disputes that.
  - watty 12y ago
    Well I have a B+ and installed Raspbian for a little home energy project that reads from my smart meter over serial and pushes the data to the cloud. The programming was easy, I spent 5x as much time trying to get things installed. Finally got Cloud9 working, never was able to get InfluxDB installed, kind of got OrientDB installed (it crashes). I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.

bananaoomarang 12y ago

I am in computing now because someone put Linux on my laptop when I was 11, I don't think I would have ever really thought about it otherwise. It's not necessarily that I could look at the source of the kernel (I didn't), it's far more the philosophy of the OS as a whole meaning that I could tinker with whatever I wanted, pull apart components and see how it broke, dive as deep as I wanted into any area of the system. A Linux system is far more openly composed even when you're not at the source level, Windows is comparatively a black box. A value of Linux is teaching people how computer systems are put together and function, it is unequivocally better at this than Windows. I don't hate Windows either, but I do think that Linux aligns itself far better with the RPi's mission statement.

guardian5x 12y ago
It's not like Linux is going away. I think more possibilities in regard of OS is a good thing, and also in align with the RPi's mission statement.

Zardoz84 12y ago

I would prefer giving to a children an ZX Spectrum and explain how use it to make programs on BASIC, that putting in front of a Windows. At least, they would understand what is doing the computer, instead of seeing the computer doing "magic"

72deluxe 12y ago
I misread you then and read ZX81 instead of Spectrum and my mind went back to typing in pages of code and being unable to save due to only have the 8k version. That nearly put me off writing code! Thanks to the BBC B and floppy disks!

chernevik 12y ago

Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle. We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there. Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface. Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?

nmeofthestate 12y ago
To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.
- zanny 12y ago
  I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were: 1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed. 2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open. 3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%). The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era). I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high. On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in. On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum. My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.

eloisant 12y ago

Linux being open is not just about the kernel source code. It's the fact that it's modular, that you can decide what brick you need, add or remove them, and end up with the perfect right configuration. It's especially interesting when you're building an embedded system (typically with a RPi). Start with the minimal Arch Linux install, think about what you need and add just that. There is a lot to learn about how operating system work when you configure Linux without having to recompile your kernel (something that nobody do any longer anyway).

mwcampbell 12y ago
Or you can go even further, use something like buildroot (http://buildroot.net/ http://buildroot.net/) to build your kernel and rootfs, and even tweak the kernel configuration if you like. I recently did an RPi project where the kernel and rootfs together were about 5 MB compressed.

Niten 12y ago

> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. Not most of them and not to begin with, but "educating themselves" means having a platform where their curiosity can run amok, and some kids with RPis absolutely will find the Eudyptula Challenge or some other source of inspiration and make it to tinkering with the kernel. RPi is absolutely the perfect platform for this. Break your OS? Just throw in another SD card. Somehow damage the hardware? Whatever, it's only $35. I'm not the only person on here who taught himself Z80 assembly language in school because it let me dig deeper into our TI calculators; if we'd been using RPis for programming assignments I would have been all over that. I think it's a little surprising that it even needs to be said on a site called "Hacker News", but let's not underestimate what curious kids with a bunch of free time will accomplish.

gknoy 12y ago
Thank you for mentioning the Eudyptula Challenge [1]. It's not my cup of tea right now, but it sounds Really Cool for anyone interested in kernel programming. 1: http://eudyptula-challenge.org/ http://eudyptula-challenge.org/