Linux Archive

Future of Reiser4?

Adam Scheinberg 2007-04-26 Linux 38 Comments

According to kerneltrap: "The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, awaiting his May 7th trial. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton stated, 'the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it.'"

Submitted by RJop 2007-04-26 Linux 40 Comments

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 has been announced. Linus writes: "So the big change during 2.6.21 is all the timer changes to support a tickless system (and even with ticks, more varied time sources). Thanks (when it no longer broke for lots of people ;) go to Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar and a cadre of testers and coders." More info here and here.

Submitted by Rahul 2007-04-25 Linux 13 Comments

"More than half of the 1.2 million lines of code for the real-time kernel technology have been moved into the mainline Linux kernel over the past year, Tim Burke, the director of emerging technologies at Red Hat, said at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference on April 23."

Discover the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine

Submitted by IdaAshley 2007-04-24 Linux 14 Comments

Recently a change in the Linux virtualization landscape has appeared with the introduction of the Kernel virtual Machine. KVM supports the virtualization of Linux guest operating systems - even Windows - with hardware that is virtualization-aware. Learn about the architecture of the Linux KVM as well as why its tight integration with the kernel may change the way you use Linux. Update: An interview with the KVM lead developer.

Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-22 Linux 32 Comments

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the 'Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler'. He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads."

Submitted by Rahul 2007-04-20 Linux 85 Comments

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal."

Submitted by surrounder 2007-04-10 Linux 6 Comments

TriedIT reviews CRUX 2.3, and concludes: "CRUX 2.3 is simple, but not from a user standpoint. It does require a lot of manual installation and configuration. It also doesn’t come with a bunch of pre-installed software either. But the distribution is meant for experienced users, after all. It is definitely simple from a system standpoint, however. There's no complex hardware auto-detection, or heavy weight desktop environments, 3D desktops or proprietary video card drivers. The package system is also pretty simple, but includes source-based package installation. There are no fancy GUI configuration utilities (or even console-based ones)."

The Top 5 Things I Hate About Linux

Submitted by Matt H. 2007-04-05 Linux 71 Comments

"Even though I enjoy using my Linux boxes a great deal for the most part, there are still those little annoyances that are enough to drive a guy batty. After all, even something as elegant and as effective as the top Linux distributions can still do certain things to drive you nuts from time to time." More here.

MontaVista Touts Faster, Smaller Embedded Linux

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-05 Linux 3 Comments

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

Submitted by John Nilsson 2007-04-01 Linux 27 Comments

"NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix, a purely functional package management system. NixOS is an experiment to see if we can build an operating system in which software packages, configuration files, boot scripts and the like are all managed in a purely functional way, that is, they are all built by deterministic functions and they never change after they have been built."

Arch Linux Voodoo 0.8 Released

Submitted by Kuat 2007-03-31 Linux 34 Comments

Arch Linux team has just released their Voodoo (version 0.8) ISOs. Many changes and brand new software application versions included, while at the same time the Arch team released Pacman, v3.0, currently available in the -Testing tree.

Submitted by theosib 2007-03-30 Linux 169 Comments

The founder of the Open Graphics Project writes: "Good design and usability are very important. I haven't paid enough attention to the discussions between Linus and GNOME developers, so I can't address it directly. But what I can say is that a learning curve is not a bad thing. While it's good to think about the total novice, it's even more important to have consistent and logical mechanisms. This way, if someone has to learn something new to use the computer, they have to learn it only once. This is why I think it's good that Apple and Microsoft have UI development guides that encourage developers to make their apps act consistently with other apps in areas where their functionalities conceptually overlap. And this is where I start to get disappointed with GNU/X11/Linux systems."

Linux-Based OpenGL Development System Without X

Submitted by zelko 2007-03-29 Linux 39 Comments

An .iso image of myOS has been released. "Minimalistic GNU/Linux system, stripped down of everything, but core necessary files to compile and run OpenGL/C code. It has simplified directory structure and cleaned up internal cross referencing. It can fit single floppy disc without development components. With Scithech SNAP/MGL drivers (based on Mesa) it was possible to run OpenGL without X. Stripped down and modified GNU gcc compiler, mixed with diet libc includes and selected shared files seem to be able to compile all relevant libraries and produce stable and relatively small code. Apart from Necromancer's file manager and OpenGL developing tools, this is pretty much your average Linux thanks to BusyBox."

‘RIP: Community Linux (1991-2007)’

Submitted by anonymous 2007-03-28 Linux 68 Comments

"The idea that Linux is primarily a community-based project based on the work of thousands of independent, idealist hackers died a quiet death at home on March 27th. The proximate cause of death was the Linux Foundation's naming of its new board of directors. This leading non-profit Linux organization's board included many Fortune 500 executives from around the world - but not one representative from a purely community-based Linux organization."

Add Your Own Linux System Calls

Submitted by IdaAshley 2007-03-23 Linux 7 Comments

"Linux system calls - we use them every day. But do you know how a system call is performed from user-space to the kernel? Explore the Linux system call interface, learn how to add new system calls (and alternatives for doing so), and discover utilities related to the SCI."

Submitted by diegocg 2007-03-21 Linux 78 Comments

LWN writes about a InformationWeek interview to Linus Torvalds: "Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn't have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral. Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not 'evil' or 'immoral', it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade - it's just a superior way of working together and generating code."

Linux and Symmetric Multiprocessing

Submitted by IdaAshley 2007-03-17 Linux 41 Comments

"As evidenced by major central processing unit vendors, multi-core processors are poised to dominate the desktop and embedded space. With multiprocessing comes greater performance but also new problems. This article explores the ideas behind multiprocessing and developing applications for Linux that exploit SMP."

Parallelise Application for Faster Linux Booting

Submitted by IdaAshley 2007-03-13 Linux 21 Comments

"One of the biggest complaints about Linux, particularly from developers, is the speed with which Linux boots. By default, Linux is a general-purpose operating system that can serve as a client desktop or server right out of the box. Because of this flexibility, Linux serves a wide base but is suboptimal for any particular configuration. This article shows you options to increase the speed with which Linux boots, including two options for parallelizing the initialization process. It also shows you how to visualize graphically the performance of the boot process."

Review: PCLinuxOS 2007 Beta 2

Thom Holwerda 2007-03-09 Linux 49 Comments

OpenAddict 'reviews PCLinuxOS 2007 Beta 2, and concludes: "In all honesty, any review of PCLOS will be lacking as the qualities that make PCLOS what it is are in the details. There is no one' shining point regarding this distro. The whole PCLinuxOS distribution is the shining point."

Linux Mint Freshens Ubuntu’s Palate

Thom Holwerda 2007-03-08 Linux 70 Comments

"Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards."

Linux Archive

Future of Reiser4?

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released

Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology