Monthly Archive:: October 2001

"SuSE is billed as a complete easy-to use Linux package providing users with a large set of programs. SuSE 7.3 is available in two editions: a Personal Edition and a Professional Edition. The Personal edition is primarily for Linux beginners and has a 'relatively' small set of applications included in the package. This review will focus solely on the Professional Edition." Read the rest of the review over at the FirstLinux web site. Update: Another review of SuSE 7.3 can be found at LinuxPlanet. This particular author found the SuSE upgrade problematic.

The FreeBSD Handbook is the primary source of documentation produced by the FreeBSD Documentation Project. This new edition contains over 650 pages of material about FreeBSD and has been completely updated to reflect FreeBSD 4.X and 5.0-CURRENT. More information at BSDToday. In related news, "FreeBSD Unleashed" by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann was also released recently. The book is published by SAMS Publishing and you can buy it at the Daemonnews Mall. Update: The "FreeBSD Unleashed" book includes the latest version of FreeBSD 4.4 in its cover CD-ROM as well as a snapshot of the FreeBSD-CURRENT 5.0 unstable branch.

Caldera announced the availability of OpenLinux-64 R3.1, a Linux system-based server and workstation product designed for 64-bit Intel Itanium processors. Utilizing 64-bit technology, OpenLinux-64 brings a new level of stability, scalability and robustness to the Linux platform the company says. OpenLinux-64 is licensed on a per system basis. No restriction exists on the number of users who use or attach to the system. Licenses for regular OpenLinux 64 kits are available for $599; not-for-resale versions are $49.

"Nothing determines the peculiar behavior, the feel - even the ultimate success or failure of an operating system - like its virtual memory design." A must-read article for all the Linux coders regarding the problems of the Linux VM so far and the solutions presented recently. Another good reading regarding VMs is an article about the FreeBSD VM, which is known to be one of the best VMs available.

Back when I used to live in Greece, there was a popular saying: "Greece is not just Athens". Similarly, Linux is much more than (the highly marketed) Red Hat or Mandrake. Assuming you got the skills required, a Linux distribution can be created, distributed or sold by virtually anyone. This is what Free Software is all about anyway. Two Sweedish Linux coders are offering their own Linux distros for some months now (with newer versions on the way). Per Lidén has put together CRUX from scratch, while John Eriksson has evolved a lightweight Slackware version to his own ROOTLinux. OSNews interviews both the developers regarding their (part-time, hobby) projects and their future prospects.

"If these OS's were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA. Damn." This is a... pretty funny article regarding the experience of a TheRegister journalist, trying to compare both RedHat and WindowsXP. Our take: AFAIK, all he had to do was to decrease the PIO mode value of his CD-ROM in his computer's BIOS. After doing that, the Linux installation should have worked just fine.

The German Linux web site Tuximus is interviewing the KDE 3 co-ordinator, Dirk Mueller. Dirk talks about how KDE compares to the Windows desktop and Gnome, about KDE 3 and more.

The well known to 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' fans, Wil Wheaton (the 'Wesley Crusher' actor) is being interviewed by Slashdot. Wil talks about TNG, his relationship with computers and the Free Software, his work at NewTek (makers of the 'Lightwave' 3D application) and the legendary "Shut up Wesley!". Great to see an actor turned to a computer geek rather a geek (or singer/model/housewife/fisherman) turned into an actor!

One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to the new BSD-style source tree. The team hopes to eventually mirror the Apple's Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format. In other news, they also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users."

Plural OS is a multitasking, microkernel operating system being developed based on the XOpen Single Unix Specifications. The project only started a month ago. Another hobby OS, Clicker, a multitasking open-source operating system project, is based on a modular microkernel and a brand-new architecture. With its new release today, Clicker made a leap, the OS was able to run its first binary application.

Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.

The calling card for the Linux-Mandrake distribution has always been ease of installation and use, and 8.1 delivers the goods in this department. First time users will find many of the pains of installation are handled automatically by the installation program. Experienced Linux users will appreciate a multitude of installation modes and options. Read the rest of the review at Linux.com.

A new release of the development versions of GTK+ and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, Atk) is available at GTK's FTP site. In this unstable version of 1.3.10 (which it will become GTK+ 2.0) you can find GtkTextView fixes, drag-n-drop fixes to generic code and widgets and many Win32 fixes and improvements. More details at Linux Programming web site.

Kerneltrap interview's Keith Owens this week, an experienced kernel hacker who has long contributed to the Linux kernel. His contributions include updating ksymoops and modutils, both of which he maintains. He also works on kbuild 2.5. Earlier, he built the original Integrated Kernel Debugging patch. He's also working on kdb and XFS.