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Linux Archive

Thirty Days with Linux

Complaining about Windows Vista is a national past time on Internet forums these days. Windows Vista 'costs too much', 'has onerous product activation', 'requires too much hardware', etc. These complaints are often followed up by a very simple boast: 'I'm just going to switch to Linux'. But in today's landscape, how viable is that statment? Is the threat to switch to Linux an empty one, or is it entirely possible?"

Conary: an Innovative Second-Generation Package Manager

"rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around - nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution."

Choice or Chaos: the High Cost of Linux Fragmentation

"Freedom of choice is one of the great benefits of Open Source Software in general and Linux in particular. This freedom gives consumers the ability to select, without fear of litigation, what software they will use and how they will use or modify it. As a principal, this freedom is extremely valuable. However, a couple of announcements this week seem to indicate that market value of freedom of choice has dipped considerably. The biggest hurdle Linux adoption faced this week wasn't Microsoft, it was an enemy from within: Linux fragmentation."

New Linux WLAN Subsystem Integrated Into ‘mm’ Kernel Tree

"Almost a year ago the Linux WLAN developers announced the switch to a new WLAN subsystem. Today the new system finally found its way into the mm kernel tree of Andrew Morton. In May and April 2006 it became clear that the devicescape WLAN stack will be the future base for the Linux WLAN drivers. The aim was to overcome the current situation of having several different subsystems for different drivers and to create a common, well documented subsystem. The new stack will feature a reworked driver for Broadcom bcm43xx drivers as well as a Ralink rt2x00 driver. And, as already mentioned, Intel's ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon."

Review: KateOS Live 3.2 Beta

A review of KateOS Live 3.2 Beta. "KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) distribution which is completely community-driven. The effects of the community work are pretty impressive. Kate is original and has its own feeling. Each new release of the system brings a few decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux lightweight multimedia desktop. In my opinion it will soon be able to compete with other popular lightweight Linux-based systems like Xubuntu or Zenwalk."

The Future of Packaging Software in Linux

There are currently at least five popular ways of installing software in GNU/Linux. None of them are widely accepted throughout the popular distributions. This situation is not a problem for experienced users - they can make decisions for themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, installing new software is always pretty confusing. The article tries to sum up some of the recent efforts to fix this problem and examine the possible future of packaging software in GNU/Linux.

Zero Install: an Executable Critique of Native Package Systems

"Zero Install is one of the more promising alternatives to native package systems for Linux distributions, such as RPM and Debian's dpkg. Originally developed by Thomas Leonard, who works in the Department of Electronics and Computing at the University of Southampton, it begins with a criticism of existing package systems the difficulties of using them, and is built to provide an answer to the problems raised by the critique. However, like other alternative package systems, it faces the problems of winning acceptance from the major distributions and fine-tuning its features."

GoboLinux: Recipes for Delicious Package Management

"GoboLinux is a unique distribution in many ways. It's built from scratch following the Linux From Scratch procedure and uses custom boot scripts, personalized directory structure, and a simple yet comprehensive source-based dependency-resolving package management system. GoboLinux is perhaps best known for its alternate filesystem hierarchy. Unlike Linux's traditional Filesystem hierarchy, where a program has bits and pieces scattered in several places like /etc, /usr/bin, and /usr/share, each program gets its own directory tree under GoboLinux."

Yellow Dog Linux v.5.0 To Be Released for Mac Late February

Originally Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 was slated for late December release, but after a few delays, they have announced the impending release of YDL 5.0 for Power Macs. YDL v5.0 has been available for the Sony PlayStation 3 since November, but here is the Mac delivery schedule: install and source ISOs available for download via YDL.net Enhanced accounts at the end of February 2007. Two weeks later, DVDs will ship from the Terra Soft Store. Two weeks after that, you can download install and source ISOs via the public mirrors.

Zumastor Linux Storage Project

"Zumastor is a community project started by Google members to bring enterprise storage features to Linux. Currently, we offer a ready-to-use network storage server with enterprise features such as online volume backup, multiple volume snapshots, remote volume replication, integration with Kerberized CITI NFS and Samba, all wrapped up with a nice, easy management interface. As a subproject we offer the ddsnap virtual snapshot Linux kernel extension, which adds multiple snapshot and remote replication capability to Linux filesystems in general."

Other Distributions To Follow Linspire?

Yesterday, Linspire and Canonical issued a joint announcement that Linspire would begin to base its distributions on Ubuntu rather than Debian, and that Ubuntu users would be able to use CNR to install proprietary applications and drivers, starting with the Fiesty Fawn release. Linspire is just the latest distro to switch from Debian to Ubuntu, though it may be the highest-profile distribution to do so. Are other distros in talks with Canonical? Steve George, Canonical's director of support and services, says that Canonical is in talks with other vendors, and says, "I think you'll see some announcements next week about other people using us as a platform."

Foresight Is a Linux Distro to Watch

"It seems as if a new Linux-based operating system is born every day, with each facing the challenge of justifying its existence in a field that's already rather crowded with mature Linux distributions boasting active user bases and organized bodies to back them. But one relatively young Linux distribution worth keeping an eye on is Foresight Linux, a desktop-oriented distribution that hit its 1.0 release milestone at the end of January. What sets Foresight apart from the rest of the fledgling distro pack is the software management framework on which its built."

Linux Kernel 2.6.20 Released

After two months of development, Linux 2.6.20 has been released. This release includes two different virtualization implementations: KVM: full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Aditionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, and many other things. Read the list of changes for details.

First look at Foresight Linux 1.0

Distrowatch did the first review of Foresight Linux 1.0. They conclude: "Overall, despite a few early glitches while installing Foresight Linux 1.0, this distribution has turned out to be very usable system with an excellent package management utility and a unique, web based system configuration manager. It is clearly designed for users who enjoy GNOME and Mono software on their desktops or those who want to try the latest versions of these applications."