http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:15:26 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/22453/Moblin_2_1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22453/Moblin_2_1_Released/ "The Moblin project steering committee today announces the project release of Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops. This project release includes the broadest feature additions, customer requested improvements, and overall polish to date. With this community release you will see significant feature additions and improvements including enhanced browser functionality and plug-in support, UI enhancements, support for 3G data connections, Bluetooth device management, input method support for localized languages, integrated application installer for the Moblin Garage, performance and stability improvements, and additional overall help and documentation." Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:45:01 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 9 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News poundsmack http://www.osnews.com/story/22446/Ryan_Gordon_Halts_FatELF_Project/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22446/Ryan_Gordon_Halts_FatELF_Project/ As we all know, Mac OS X has support for what is called 'fat binaries'. These are binaries that can carry code for for instance multiple architectures - in the case of the Mac, PowerPC and x86. Ryan Gordon was working on an implementation of fat binaries for Linux - but due to the conduct of the Linux maintainers, Gordon has halted the effort. Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:05:32 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 115 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22433/Next-Generation_Linux_File_Systems/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22433/Next-Generation_Linux_File_Systems/ Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring. Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:48:01 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 25 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22428/Tune_Your_Linux-Based_Server_for_Power_Efficiency/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22428/Tune_Your_Linux-Based_Server_for_Power_Efficiency/ Part 1 introduces the components and concepts you'll need to tune your system for power efficiency. Part 2 compares the five in-kernel governors: performance, powersave, userspace, ondemand, and conservative. Part 3 show you what results you can achieve by power tuning your system. Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:28:33 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22421/Sheepdog_Distributed_Storage_Management_for_qemu_kvm/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22421/Sheepdog_Distributed_Storage_Management_for_qemu_kvm/ "Sheepdog is a new third party open source project around kvm providing distributed storage management features. Sheepdog provides high availability to kvm guests by providing block level storage volumes to virtual machines similar to Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). In fact one of the items on the sheepdog project todo list is to support the Amazon EBS API. Sheepdog is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes. You can think of this technique as striping your virtual disk data across multiple nodes similar to what raid does. The project is still very early in its development cycle but already provides basic functionality." Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:56:30 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 2 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News diegocg http://www.osnews.com/story/22413/A_Good_HTPC_Linux_Distribution/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22413/A_Good_HTPC_Linux_Distribution/ I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I have an Atom 330-based tiny computer which I use as my HTPC. It performed its job fine running Windows 7 and Boxee, and over the past few months, it ran Mac OS X Leopard with Plex. Now, however, I want to try Linux as an HTPC operating system, but I kind of ran into a roadblock there with Ubuntu 9.10 - so the question is: what is a good HTPC Linux distribution? Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:07:31 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 76 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 Feature http://www.osnews.com/story/22373/Deadline_Scheduling_in_the_Linux_Kernel/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22373/Deadline_Scheduling_in_the_Linux_Kernel/ At the last Real-Time Linux Workshop held on September in Dresden, there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of enhancing real-time capabilities of Linux by adding a new scheduling class to the Linux kernel. According to most kernel developers, this new scheduling class should be based on the Earliest Deadline First real-time algorithm. The first draft of the scheduling class has been called "SCHED_EDF" and it has been proposed and discussed on the Linux Kernel Mailing List just before the workshop. Recently, a second version of the scheduling class (called "SCHED_DEADLINE", to meet the request of some kernel developers) has been proposed. Moreover, the code has been moved to a public git repository on Gitorius. More details are available here. Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:03:28 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 5 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News cloud http://www.osnews.com/story/22338/Linux_Foundation_Offers_Members_Hardware_Discounts/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22338/Linux_Foundation_Offers_Members_Hardware_Discounts/ "Back in June, the Linux Foundation started their individual membership program and they're now expanding it with new hardware discounts. Starting this week, those who pay the $99 for an individual Linux Foundation membership will also get up to 40 percent off of Lenovo devices and employee purchase pricing from Dell and HP... When the Linux Foundation started the $99 yearly fee provided users with their very own Linux.com email address. Now users can lock-in their email address for $150, for what the foundation calls a 'permanent' address." Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:19:11 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) Linux 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22309/Interview_PulseAudio_Creator_Lennart_Poettering/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22309/Interview_PulseAudio_Creator_Lennart_Poettering/ Lennart Poettering, creator of open source sound server PulseAudio, was recently interviewed at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. In this Q&A he details the latest PulseAudio developments and addresses some of PA's critics. Thanks to PulseAudio, the Linux audio experience is becoming more context-aware. For example, if a video is running in one application the system should now automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished. Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:09:51 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 49 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News MadMAtt http://www.osnews.com/story/22305/Linux_Distros_that_Don_t_Suck/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22305/Linux_Distros_that_Don_t_Suck/ Mind your manners, now. We're not saying that they do in general. There's just a good chap who has come up with a list in two parts of varied Linux distributions that he deems use-worthy. He also gives a short description about them and a link to their project websites. Some are the obvious Ubuntu, Gentoo, and other major players, but others you may or may not have heard of and may find useful. Enjoy reading part one from May of this year and part two that was published just recently in October. What are some of the perhaps more obscure Linux distributions that you've found useful and noteworthy? Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:44:09 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) Linux 31 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22246/Linux_2_6_32-Rc1_Kernel_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22246/Linux_2_6_32-Rc1_Kernel_Released/ Release candidate Linux 2.6.32-rc1 is out. Linus Torvalds has posted the announcement for the first release candidate of Linux kernel 2.6.32 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "The Linux 2.6.32 kernel brings many driver updates, some new drivers, many file-system updates, and much more. Exciting us in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel is the ATI R600/700 kernel mode-setting and 3D support along with the VGA Arbitration code and the KMS page-flipping ioctl." Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:04:02 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Linux 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News lemur2 http://www.osnews.com/story/22238/Moblin_2_0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22238/Moblin_2_0_Released/ Yesterday the Moblin Steering Committee announced three developments: Release of Moblin v2.0 for Atom-based netbooks, a preview of the Moblin Garage and Moblin Application Installer, and a community preview release of Moblin v2.1 for Atom-based netbooks and nettops for early development. Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:56:23 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Linux 2 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News Kishe http://www.osnews.com/story/22221/Cool_Things_with_SELinux_Introducing_Sandbox_-X/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22221/Cool_Things_with_SELinux_Introducing_Sandbox_-X/ "One of the downsides of working in security is that we seldom get to do cool things. The desktop engineers, VM engineers, even kernel engineers get to show off cool stuff. But security guys usually only ever get to show how we broke something, if that. Sometimes all we can do is say 'trust us, it's working'. But I think I have something cool to show off which I'm calling sandbox -X." Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:09:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News akaas http://www.osnews.com/story/22220/Systemtap_1_0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22220/Systemtap_1_0_Released/ Systemtap 1.0 has been released. There are a few features for this release, like experimental support for unprivileged users, cross-compiling for foreign architectures, matching C++ class and namespace scopes, reduced runtime memory consumption, but more importantly, this release means that Systemtap is finally considered stable and ready for user adoption. Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:06:58 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News diegocg http://www.osnews.com/story/22217/New_Moblin_Netbooks_in_the_Pipe/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22217/New_Moblin_Netbooks_in_the_Pipe/ At the recent Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, there were hints of new Moblin-powered hardware being announced at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum. Normally, this would be moderately interesting news, but some of the ambitious comments made by Linux luminaries at Linuxcon merit further examination. People from the Linux Foundation, Intel, and IBM spoke at the conference, and it's evident that they see the netbook market as the epicenter of the movement to raise Linux's profile in the consumer space, and whittle away marketshare from Windows. Update: Intel has also announced Moblin 2.1 for phones. Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:38:38 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Linux 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News stonyandcher