Category Archives: Linux

Articles about Linux.

UAE 0.7.6

Introduction

On the subject of emulators, there are two main factions. The first says that they are a good way of using all the software that you had for your previous computer when you upgrade. The second say that an emulator is a sure sign that a platform has no software. Why, they say, would you have an emulator if you could get as good or better software for your new machine? (They seem to forget that there are loads of emulators for DOS and Windows.)

I was first introduced to a useful emulator when I still had my old 386. A 386 has roughly enough power to run Sinclair Spectrum software at full speed. This was great: I could bring Bomb Jack, Manic Miner and Nebulous with me! And I could save levels and I could load complete games in a split second rather than ten minutes. The emulator was better than the real thing!

But my Amiga software just sat in the box. I had no way to bring that with me. Until now. PC’s are just about getting to the point that they are able to emulate and Amiga at full speed (and if they’re not then I can run them on my HP K box at work!).

Installation

The long and the short of it is that I’m lazy. If I can download an RPM archive of a program, I will. It’s not that Ican’t build programs — most work days I’m up to my arm-pits in C and Makfiles — it’s just that I want to use a program straight away. Okay, that makes me impatient too.

I’ve not been able to find an RPM of UAE, so I downloaded the latest stable version I tried to build it. Normally these GNU ‘configure’ scripts are straightforward: type configure; type make; and everything is ready. Configure usually goes away and finds the various bits and pieces without any trouble. The UAE configure script, however, couldn’t find my GTK library (I have the correct version according to the documentation) and it couldn’t see that I had the SVGA library, and the DGA support, which it did find and claimed to be using when I started UAE up, didn’t give full screen support.

So to summarize, I couldn’t get a nice user-interface and I couldn’t get full screen support in console or X. I wasn’t impressed.

Does it work?

It shows how long ago it is that I used a real Amiga. Like all the various kinds of memory that a PC can have (EMS, XMS, conventional, high), the Amiga has a number of different types too. I used to be able to remember all of them, what they are, what they do and why they’re there — on both the PC and Amiga — but I can’t now!

That’s to say, some of the programs that I couldn’t get working might, in fact, work fine if you can get the right combination of memory and video settings. This isn’t a criticism of UAE as such, more of the Amiga. It might be possible for the UAE team to add hints, though. (I never programmed my Amiga much, so I don’t know whether that would be possible.)

But I did have a number of successes. Workbench 1.3 seems to work fully (I’d forgotten how bad it looked), as does AmigaBasic and Deluxe Paint. With the windowed version of UAE, it is normal to have the Amiga mouse-pointer being completely independent of the X pointer. I find this annoying, but you can switch it off.

Perhaps more impressively I managed to get some games working. Arkanoid 2 works flawlessly; International Karate+ seems to work okay, albeit from the keyboard; Populous ran; as did Pacmania. However, all ran somewhat slowly. Arkanoid was fine unless the sounds was switched on. This slowed down the game, and the sound kept breaking up. Probably the worst was Pacmania, which was far too slow. The documentation does warn that some of the scrolling effects are the most processor intensive, and this is obviously the problem here.

As I mentioned before, there were a number of games that I couldn’t get working at all. Chase HQ gave me nothing more than a black screen. Rampage crashed. Paperboy didn’t work. Simulacra didn’t start. Maybe these will work if you twiddle with the memory settings?

In use

While it’s true that the performance and sounds problem can be overcome by throwing extra hardware at it, I think it’s fair to mention that most games are unplayable on a mid-range Pentium (120). Many application are probably okay, maybe even faster than the real thing, but I can’t see why anyone would want to run Amiga productivity software on a PC. Microsoft Word or LyX would be far better than anything on an Amiga.

UAE is supposed to come with a GTK-based front-end. I never managed to get this working, so all I was left with was the command line. This left no way to switch disks — they are emulated by files on your hard-disk — after the emulator had started, and no way to edit display or sound settings without resorting to obscure command-line directives.

Overall

I get the feeling that the UAE team may have bitten off more than they can chew. The Amiga was always considered a powerful machine, and trying to squeeze it into a ‘well behaved’ operating system like Unix was always going to be difficult. (One of the best Amiga emulators, Fellow, runs under DOS which is a far better option. There’s no chance of you being preempted by another process or user and you have full control over the screen.)

Maybe I’d have been more impressed if I’d managed to get the user-interface and full-screen mode working. And maybe I’d have been more impressed if I could install Linux on my PII at work. But I wasn’t and I haven’t, so, for now, I’m going to leave UAE well alone.

WindowMaker 0.20.0

Introduction

I remember when I was at school I sometimes got bad grades when writing essays. This, the teachers claimed, was because I’d used an unconventional structure. Rather than start with an introduction, continue with the discussion and finish with my conclusion I’d often start with a rather long introduction, which included my view, and then argued my case in the rest of the text. I guess it weakened my argument a little to do it like that, but people did remember it!

I’ve still not learned my lesson. One of the first things I do with the review — not quite an essay but along the same lines — is say that I think that WindowMaker is the best window manager that I’ve used. In fact I like it so much I’m seriously considering changing from AfterStep, the window manager that I’ve used practically since I had a PC that could support X.

What’s so good?

Superficially WindowMaker is not that different to AfterStep. That could be part of the reason I liked it so much. (And after my disappointing experience with the new version of AfterStep last week I was most definitely open to suggestion.) Just like AfterStep and the NeXT, WindowMaker has a dock, or a wharf or whatever you want to call it, down the right hand side of the screen. This time there is also a paper-clip icon in the top left of the screen. This is WindowMaker’s method of moving between its virtual desktops. It’s a lot less fiddly than AfterStep’s mini-map but only slightly less intuitive.

Windows are handled in, more or less, the same way as AfterStep, they even look similar. The title bar is nicely gradiated, the top left has the minimise button, the top right has the close gadget. At the bottom of the window is the resize bar. A nice touch is the ‘technical drawing’ lines that are used to show where and how big the new window will be. It’s good to know that an xterm is eighty characters wide.

So far we’ve found that WindowMaker and AfterStep are pretty much the same. It’s when you try and configure things that the differences appear. To add an icon to the AfterStep dock you must open a text configuration file and try and interpret the syntax. Not hugely difficult, but someone used to Microsoft Windows isn’t going to be too happy. The WindowMaker method: open the application you want to dock; drag one of the icons, the one without the title at the top, to the dock. That’s it.

Unless you’re just skim-reading, you should have found something odd with the last paragraph, even if you ignore my English: “…drag one of the icons…” An explanation is in order here. WindowMaker does not just have an icon to indicate that an application has been minimised. If you launched a program any way other than from the dock then you get an extra icon, just as if you’d minimised the window but without a title at the top. Until I figured what it was for I was incredibly confused! The first one is the application — use it as you would in any other window manager. The other can be dragged to a dock. It’s a waste of screen real-estate and I can’t help but think that there must be a better way of doing it.

Other configuration parameters are also handled graphically in WindowMaker. Try to change some of the colours, or the backdrop or any other parameter in AfterStep and it’s back to the configuration file. WindowMaker has a very nice WindowMaker Preferences Utility to allow you to change them all graphically. I’ve not had the need to dig into the GNUstep directory yet it’s so complete.

The Verdict

If you don’t know that I’m impressed then you just haven’t been paying attention(!). While there are faster and smaller window managers, WindowMaker is small and fast enough. It is also very simple to use — it’s one of the first free window managers that doesn’t insist that you edit large and complex configuration files — looks superb and is fully functional.

And finally, despite dire warnings that it’s still beta software, it seems to be more stable than many commercial applications. (I only had one glitch: I loaded Netscape once and WindowMaker vanished and twm took its place. I have no idea what happened there!)

WINE 980614

Introduction

This is the second time in as many reviews that I’ve started like this: I don’t want this to be the start of a trend. I did say in my ‘policy’ document that I didn’t want to look at very early releases of software and I stand by that.

However, sometimes you see something and, even though it doesn’t work fully, it show such great promise that you need to shout about it. WINE is such a piece of software.

What is it?

Wine allows you to run Windows applications on x86 Unix machines, Linux in this case. It should work on almost any PC based UNIX like NetBSD, UnixWare, etc. and it’s supposed to run 16- and 32-bit Windows applications, although the former are much better represented at the moment. There are some that will never work properly (the FAQ says something about VxD’s which I don’t understand).

At least, that’s what it will do. At the moment it is a developers release, not even stable enough to be called beta software. However, I’m not here to bash Wine because it’s in its early stages of development. I’m here to express how shocked I am that it’s so good!

Installation

I’ve tried a number of times in the past to make Wine, and they’ve all ended in tears. I rake around my hard disk trying to find enough space — around 50 Mb — spend ages while it compiles and then when I run it I find that there’s been a segmentation fault in 32-bit code. I don’t know what that means, only that it’s not mentioned in the FAQ and that I can’t run anything, not even Notepad.

Then the other day I decided to make one last attempt and, rather than get the source code, I got a precompiled RPM. It didn’t work at first. I had to customize it, changing the configuration file to match where my Windows 95 partition is, but nothing too arduous (or unexpected).

So, I fired it up trying to run calc.exe. I wasn’t hopeful, and the fact that it was taking 100% of CPU and seeming to get nowhere fast didn’t help. I left it chugging away and made some coffee and toast.

Success!

When I returned from the kitchen, the Windows Calculator was sat proud in the middle of my Trinitron. My jaw dropped, and the dog nearly got my toast.

Okay, the display wasn’t completely right. The text in the title bar is far too small, the buttons are in the extreme top left and right rather than in the middle of the bar, and the font on the menu bar is proportionally spaced meaning that it looks rather odd, but I suspect that this is all configurable — you can certainly tell Wine to use your window manager rather than X directly.

But it worked. I could do sums; I could change between normal and scientific mode; I could get the About box. I was stunned.

Moving onto Notepad, I found that the same was true: it worked. I trundled though a few other applets that Windows 95 comes with, many of which, at least partially, worked.

Getting arrogant

Having got the tiny programs working, I started hunting around my hard disk for new challenges. Why start small and build up, I though. ‘wine "`pwd`/winword.exe"‘ I typed. That’ll show it.

I started on my toast, figuring that it’d take a while before it gave up.

But it didn’t give up. After a worrying amount of disk activity, the Word 95 splash screen appeared. As did screens and screens full of errors in the console window. Despite the errors, Wine and Word battled on, eventually displaying the normal Word screen, tool bars, menus and all. Again, the fonts weren’t quite right and the toolbar was far too dark, but there it was. Linux running Microsoft Word 95.

Tentatively I entered some text. This worked fine — even the font rendering was spot on — until I mistyped something. Word underlined the suspect characters with a wavy red line and then crashed.

Next time I managed to get the About box (fairly simple, but with a big bitmap and a sound clip) to display, followed by the Options dialog (big with lots of tabs). A few others also worked without problem. The open dialog, however, causes Wine to exit. I guess this is because Microsoft didn’t use their own standard libraries for the task! (Let’s blame Microsoft.)

Excel works roughly as well as Word. It starts without any problems, you can enter data in the cells and auto-sum works. Many of the dialogs appear, full and correct, but save crashes the system. PowerPoint vanished shortly after completing loading and Access didn’t even get as far as the splash screen.

I was very surprised at the success that I’d had up to this point. Okay, nothing useful actually worked, but I was looking from more of a technical point of view. I did, however, find a program that worked incredibly well, something much larger than clac.exe or Notepad. The program? Maxis SimCity for Windows 1.1. (Saying that it’s useful is stretching the point, but I digress.) I play tested SimCity quite thoroughly and found that, although small parts of the screen occasionally became corrupted, everything worked. Since games are usually associated with some of the worst coding and low-level hacking around this was good. (I’m not sure whether the credit should go to the Wine team or Maxis!)

Overall

I’ll not mess around: Wine is not ready for the prime time yet and is still some way off. This is not news, the developers say this too.

What is news is that it is an incredible piece of software. A non technical user might not see this (unless they want to play SimCity), but anyone who has written a non-trivial program can see what an incredible achievement Wine is.

Corel WordPerfect 8

Introduction

Linux is capable of many things. It is an incredibly fast and stable platform, able to sustain months, if not years, of uptime and has many world-class applications such as Oracle8 and Apache. What it doesn’t have much of are decent word processors. I find that, these days, the one of the few reasons that I boot up Windows is for Microsoft Word (the other reason is Worms 2).

So the day when WordPerfect, one of the few word-processors that can compete with Word feature for feature, arrives on Linux is a momentous one. However, just being there isn’t enough. Is it really on par with Word? And does it do justice to Linux?

First things first

Corel WordPerfect comes in three versions: Personal Edition, Standard Edition and Server Edition. I’m reviewing the Personal Edition, the one you can download from the Internet for free. The Standard Edition adds more fonts and clip-art and the Server Edition adds a character mode version and more administration tools.

Installation barely warrants a mention. It’s not a ‘standard’ Linux package such as RPM or DEB, but is very straight-forward nevertheless. It’s very Windows-like: click here, enter this information there. Easy. It’s not as confusing as StarOffice either – you install it as ‘root’!

Running it for the first time

X doesn’t make it easy to make a decent application. It imposes no standards on an applications look and feel, but does impose a relatively high memory overhead. I guess this makes it difficult for a company used to writing Windows applications.

Corel, like StarDivision, have chosen to make WordPerfect look and feel like their Windows version. This is going to annoy some Linux users, claiming that it’s not ‘UNIX’ enough, but I think it’s a good thing. It makes anyone used to a Windows word processor (i.e., almost everyone) instantly at home. No one is going to have a problem with the Office 97-like tool bar, nor the simple and logical menu structure.

Perhaps more of an issue for people coming from Windows or a Macintosh is what the application is capable of. Word processors on those machines can, just about, do everything from letters to fairly advanced desktop publishing. Most free Linux equivalents just can’t compete with that. LyX is great for long, structured documents (with certain caveats that I noted when I reviewed it last year), and many of the others look good, allowing import of multimedia clips, but are disappointing when you want to do any real work.

WordPerfect is more like a Windows word-processor in this respect.

Doing some real work

I thought a good test would be to write this review with WordPerfect. I suspect that documents of around a thousand words are not atypical and it would allow me to test out some of the nice new features, such as its Internet interoperability.

Unfortunately, half way though the review I found that there was very little to write about. This is not a criticism, in fact it should probably be taken as a compliment. In writing simple text, WordPerfect has all the tools you need exactly where you would expect them, doing exactly what you want. It has the basics, such as font and style selections, plus more recent innovations such as on-the-fly spelling- and grammar-checking. The latter is annoying and I usually switch it off, which is a useful feature that Microsoft Word doesn’t have!

So far, there is nothing that WordPerfect has that the Windows competition doesn’t already have. I guess it has two things. Firstly it has the ‘shadow cursor,’ something so obvious that I’m surprised that it’s not been done before. (People said that about the drag-and-drop cut-and-paste in Word for Windows 2.) If you switch it on, you can click anywhere on the screen and start typing. WP adds the necessary returns, tabs and spaces for you.

Secondly, it has what I can only describe as an on-the-fly thesaurus. It’s a drop-down list on the tool bar that gives a continuous list of alternatives to the word that you just typed. I’m not sure that it’s a great improvement over pressing Shift-F7 in Microsoft Word, but it’s there anyway.

Advanced stuff

Once I found that I could test more than a small amount of functionality while writing the review, I started playing round in other documents.

The first I opened was my CV, a Word 95 document complete with some of the dodgy advanced formatting that you can do there. The import was less than perfect, but was still quite impressive. It brought across all the text and most of the formatting, including most of the style information. Unsurprisingly it failed on the floating frames, but it did place the text at a suitable place in the document. Full marks for falling over gracefully. I was surprised that it didn’t manage to import the header and footer information, though.

I then tried to reapply the formatting that the import had managed to remove. Again, it gets boring to write about as it was so easy.

The second document I tried was rather longer, nearly seven thousand words. Again, conversion was impressive although imperfect. This time the main problem was the heading numbering, a fault that Word 97’s converter also has.

Having lost the table of contents, I tried to recreate it. I didn’t find this entirely straight-forward and never did get exactly what I was looking for. It looks like you have to define each paragraph that you need entering into the table of contents, rather like the way LyX insists. I much prefer the Word approach where it uses the list of styles to work out the document structure.

Not all good

It has to be said, there isn’t a lot wrong with WordPerfect 8.

The font handling – unique to WordPerfect – isn’t quite as good as that in Windows, but is probably better than that in most X applications, StarOffice included. Also, the version that’s free to download doesn’t have the on-line help. I can’t help but think that this is a very important thing to miss out.

The two worst things that I can think of are that the Microsoft Word filter doesn’t work with fast-saved documents (I’m not sure what MS has done with fast-saved documents, but no software other than Word itself seems to be able to deal with it!) – annoying as most of my Word documents are fast-saved!

And the finally, a question mark hangs over its stability. I had a couple of (unreproducable) crashes while wring this. However, it should be noted that WordPerfect managed to reinstate a recent backup each time meaning that I only lost a sentence or two.

Conclusion

This is exactly what we need. WordPerfect is a superb application, just as good as its Windows counterpart, but running under Linux. Due to its less-than-one-hundred-percent compatibility with Microsoft Word, I can’t guarantee to use it always (my work uses Word) but it is going to stay on my hard-disk.

WWWThreads 2.7

Introduction

While Linux cannot currently compete with Windows NT on the desktop (for a number of reasons that I’m not going to get into here), it has already made inroads into the server market. Many large companies use it as the OS for their web server (like this machine), and many more use it on their intranet for sharing files and hosting web pages.

WWWThreads capitalizes on this framework, adding CGI programs to generate threaded discussion groups, just like Usenet but with a more appealing web front-end.

Installation

Installation should be fairly simple. All that’s involved is copying the files into a CGI directory on your server, alter a few parameters in one of the files and type ‘./wwwthread_startup.cgi'.

Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. The blame has to lie with the documentation which could best be described as minimal — a single 85 line README. The description of some of the variables that need changing is rather poor. I managed to change them to the wrong thing and only found out when I brought WWWThreads up in Netscape.

Of course, that’s when I finally managed to get it working at all! Apache‘s first reaction was to complain about a ‘premature end of script.’ I’ve done a small amount of CGI programming, and realized that this meant that the web server wasn’t receiving a header describing the format of the data.

But why? Isn’t this supposed to be a finished program? I shouldn’t be getting run-time errors and the like? Then I remembered, my email address has an ‘@’ in it. ‘@’ is Perl‘s way of saying ‘here’s an array’ and needs to be quoted to mean ‘at.’ This edited, the start screen appeared.

You could argue that it is a server side program, designed for knowledgeable people, and that I did manage to get it working in the end. However, all that’s needed is a little extra effort on the documentation and, maybe, a Makefile. Something like an Installation FAQ would be invaluable.

From a user…

Looking at the system from a web browser, things look much better.

WWWThreads has a very neat front screen. The colours have been well chosen; they look smart and well designed, but are very readable. In the top left is a logo, the top right has a menu. Below this is a list of the discussion groups that the administrator has set up. Clicking the title of the group brings up a list of the threads in that group. Clicking a thread bring up a list of posts. Clicking a post brings up that post. All very simple, standard stuff.

If you want to create a new post or reply to one that is already there, you will need to create a user for yourself. Here you’re invited to enter a user name, password, name, email, home page, occupation and hobbies. The first four are mandatory, the others optional. Clicking ‘Submit’ results in a screen (hopefully) saying that your details were added successfully. There are no other links or details on this screen, and you are forced to wait before your browser loads a new page. Annoying.

Replying to, or adding, a new post is similar. Fill in a few details, click submit and wait. There should at least be a link on this page to act as a short-cut for the impatient.

However, generally it is all well laid out, attractive and intuitive — there’s not much to write about.

From an administrator…

The administrative tools are good, and are web based just like the rest of the system. It allows the admin to change their password, add new discussion groups (‘Boards’), edit or delete posts, change details about the groups, archive a board, delete a board and edit users.

Most of these options are obvious, the one that might not be is the ‘archive’ option. This allows you to, in the words of the author, ‘…move all of the current posts on a board to an archive.’ This is a really good idea, and is implemented well, but does not go as far as I’d like. Some way of selecting posts by date or author, or individual posts would be useful. As would a method a more intuitive method of deleting archives (it appears as another board at the moment).

All the tools are password protected, which allows remote administration — a useful feature.

But the main thing missing is overall configuration options. What it I don’t like the look of the pages that WWWThreads produces? What if you want to fit it into your ‘house’ style? What if you don’t want to ask for hobbies or an occupation when a user registers?

The software is distributed with the GPL licence, so of course you can edit the HTML generated. But there is not documentation and much of the look-and-feel is hidden away in the Perl scripts. Perhaps some kind of template HTML file could be used?

Conclusion

WWWThreads is an odd program.

In some ways it is excellent. The design of the pages are good; the way that it remembers which posts you’ve read and those which you haven’t is useful; the archiving option is excellent, in fact most of the web based admin screens are very well done.

But then again, the installation is needlessly difficult, you can’t easily change the way that it looks, it seems not to perform particularly well (I am running the client and server on the same machine, so this might not be a fair comment) and the documentation is poor.

WWWThreads would be an ideal program to place on an Intranet server to allow people in the office to communicate more effectively. However, it’s lack of configuration options would probably make it unsuitable for an external site.

Linux 2.1.131

Introduction

It’s a long time since I used a development kernel. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever just downloaded the source and built it myself. The last time I was on the cutting edge, it came as part of an installation of Slackware. I think it was 1.1.59, and seemed to be no less stable than the real thing. So maybe it’s a little surprising that since I moved up to a Pentium I’ve always stuck with the stable 2.0.x series?

Not really. I’m a coward, firmly fitting into the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fit it’ mould. Not only was I on a faster machine, but 2.0 was faster than 1.2. Why would I risk breaking things for a few extra percent?

In a sense, I think I was right. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s get the thing installed…

Quick Aside

I expect that most people reading this will already know about Linux’s version numbering conventions. If you fall into this category, you may as well jump to the next section.

If you’re still with me you may be wondering what all the fuss about Linux 2.2 is and why there aren’t any Linux 2.2 betas.

The reason is simple: way back when Linux 1.0 was released, Linus Torvalds decided that all stable, ‘release’ versions would have even version numbers. In the case of release 1.0.9, ‘1’ is the major version number, ‘0’ is the version and ‘9’ is the patch number. Since ‘0’ is even it is considered a stable, usable by ‘normal’ people version.

The version I tested was 2.1.131. ‘1’ is odd so this is a development kernel, usable by people that are prepared to accept the occasional glitch. Note, however, that the kernel is now in a ‘feature freeze’ which means that only bug-fixes are being added. Put another way, even this development version should be, and is, fairly stable.

Upgrade

Linux sits very much at the heart of your system, and any upgrade to it shouldn’t be taken lightly. That’s why, for pretty much the first time in history, I took a look at the documentation.

make config ; make dep ; make clean ; make zdisk ; make modules ; make modules_install

What could be easier?

Well, after being cushioned by using RedHat for a number of years it was a little confusing to be expected know which options I needed to set. Nothing I couldn’t deal with — and nothing unexpected — but I just want to make it even clearer that this isn’t something that someone who has difficulty installing a Windows 95 application would want to do.

I must confess, however, that it wasn’t as difficult as I’d expected. It only made me happier when I rebooted my machine and it started, apparently, without problem.

In Use

In use it doesn’t feel at all different to 2.0. Running some unscientific benchmarks I find that it is, indeed, slightly faster and it does use slightly less memory, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that it now runs on even more machines, from i386’s to Acorn Archimedes, in even more configurations, from SMP to X.25. The point is that it now optimizes for many of the Intel compatible CPUs and handles many of their bugs.

However, it’s not all rosy. The PPP daemon from RedHat 5.0 doesn’t work out of the box. You need to download and compile a new version. I found this more difficult than building the kernel! (The problem was that it expected to be built at /usr/src and failed anywhere else with screens of not very obvious errors.)

And I’ve not managed to get my 64AWE Gold working yet, either. This is more laziness than anything else, the instructions look fairly straight-forward.

More seriously, one of the main new features seems not to work on my machine: the graphical console drivers. Normally this wouldn’t matter too much. I spend almost all the time in X anyway, so some memory uselessly set aside just for the sake of being cutting-edge is not really worth it. However, one main benefit of the graphical console is the Tux logo when Linux is booting…

Actually, it is useful. It means that there’s a standard interface across all Linux platforms, from i386 to SPARC. But not, apparently, if your video card doesn’t support the VESA 2.0 standard. I would have thought that this is relatively rare. My machine is less than three years old but only supports VESA 1.2.

Other bits and pieces

Looking at Joseph Pranevich’s excellent “The Wonderful World of Linux 2.2” in this months Linux Journal (December 1998), it would seem that my ‘aging’ hardware is unable to take advantage of most of the fancy new stuff.

For example, if you have a multi-processor box, 2.2 will work much better. There’s improved support for non-x86 architecture machines and there are optimizations for non-Intel x86 machines, too.

Overall

The new development kernel is smaller and faster than the current stable version and still appears to be rock solid. I’m not sure how the development team keep managing it when the millions of dollars that Microsoft invest seems only to increase bloat.

However, the features that have been added seem to be there to please ever more niche markets.

In summary: the best has managed to get even better.