Linux Archive

Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster. Terra Soft will use the test cluster 'E.coli' to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster 'Amoeba' will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research. The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems.

"For a long time, Linux has been blamed to boot slowly, compared to other modern operating systems. In this article, we are going to focus on a new init system we developed for our Pardus Linux distribution, Mudur, together with other initiatives that are worth mentioning. Mudur is written from scratch in Python with simplicity, speed and maintainability in mind. It isn't a replacement for the /sbin/init command like some other alternatives, nor just a parallel script executor. Mudur greatly simplified our boot process, making it faster and more flexible. Authors look forward for future boot process research for further improvement and optimizations."

ENP has an article on Linux's udev. "udev handles the task of detecting hardware and creating nodes for it in /dev, and also managing device permissions. It works in concert with the Linux Hardware Abstraction Layer and the hotplug subsystem. In effect, all devices, even internal drives and expansion cards, are treated as removable hotplug devices."

"George Weiss, Gartner's open-source analyst, recently said that Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of Linux over the next five years. He's right. Microsoft will fall flat on its face all by itself, and Linux will pick up afterwards. It's very simple."

Gael Duval has emailed us to let us know of an error in our previous coverage of his new project, Ulteo. "There is small confusion in the Linux Format article which leads to confusion. In fact, what is shown in the LXF article is the 'Ulteo Connected Desktop', which is actually to way to use Ulteo within a web-browser, with all basic applications, for free. Anyway, this feature is just a part of the Ulteo concept, and of course the full Ulteo OS can be installed on a PC." Stay tuned for a short interview with Duval which will give some answers concerning Ulteo.

"FreeDOS is a project which aims to recreate the magic of DOS and bring a truly free GPLed DOS encompassing all the characteristics of MS-DOS with lots of improvements thrown in. A couple of weeks back, FreeDOS developers released ver 1.0 of their OS. I downloaded the full CD ISO of FreeDOS from their website which was around 153 MB in size. Since I have been using Linux as my operating system, I decided to install and use FreeDOS inside Linux by means of an emulator. In the past, I have used Qemu to run Damn Small Linux on my Ubuntu machine. And I was pleased with its performance. So I decided to use Qemu to run FreeDOS as well."

According to a Gartner report in June this year, the overall thin-client computing market will continue to grow at a steady pace during the next several years. The analyst noted that this growth will be fueled by falling thin-client terminal prices. While the thin-client approach makes Linux PCs easier to manage, there are still kinks to iron out with desktop Linux operating system, according to Gartner.

Andrew Morton posted his patch queue with numerous comments about merge plans into the mainline kernel. Among his comments he noted that he would not yet be merging the Reiser4fs, "reiser4. I was planning on merging this, but the batch_write/writev problemight wreck things, and I don't think the patches arising from my recent partial review have come through yet. So it's looking more like 2.6.20."