Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

"Putting together a Linux distribution gets a lot more complicated when stacks of requirements start arriving from hardware vendors and other partners. Throughout this article, the focus is on how the release was put together. This article primarily discusses the development of the kernel used in Enterprise Linux v. 3. The kernel is only a fraction of an overall distribution, the portion that controls the underlying hardware and system resources." Read the rest at LinuxJournal.

SGI Unveils Systems Running on Single Linux Kernel Up To 256 CPUs

In an industry first, Silicon Graphics today announced the worldwide availability of SGI Altix systems running up to 256 Intel Itanium 2 processors within a single instance of the Linux operating system. The record-breaking accomplishment is the end result of an international Altix beta program originally targeted to achieve just half the scalability of today's 256-processor milestone.

Design cross-platform Java UIs with native performance

Can you write Java code that compiles across several platforms but still performs as fast as native code? This is a problem that has vexed Java developers, particularly when it comes to applications with complex UIs. This article proposes an interesting solution to this problem. You'll learn how to use JNI to access SLIK, a cross-platform C API that offers native performance on both Windows and UNIX. The JNI APIs demonstrated in this article will help you write skinned GUIs that run under both Linux and Windows with no code changes.

Sun Ultra 5 Primer

Here are a few tips I've gathered for working with Sun's Ultra 5, and indeed other Sun hardware in general. While many are familiar with the intimate details of the x86 BIOS system, and how to go about configuring a BIOS, dealing with a Sun system is very different.

XFree86 Gets Underwhelmed by Linux Distro Support

David Dawes seems a little suspicious of the underwhelming support for XFree86 by Linux distributors: "I have heard privately that some vendors were planning to move to an X.Org release even before this licence issue came up. That probably makes business sense for the vendors given that X.Org is a vendor-oriented organization sponsored by hardware and software companies, while XFree86 is an independent group of volunteer developers. I suspect that the licence issue may have affected the timing, but not the end result", he concluded.