Linux Archive

IT decision-makers should avoid 'platform religion' and rule out Linux on the desktop until at least 2005, says analyst Giga Information Group. Research fellow Rob Enderle told delegates to the GigaWorld IT Forum at Disneyland Paris this week that experimenting with alternatives to Windows could prove a costly mistake.

In an era when mature Linux distributions abound, do you need a special one just for college? Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland, thinks so. The school's CollegeLinux 2.3 , a single-CD Linux distribution, is a power tool for educational organizations. Read the review at NewsForge and our recent interview with professor David Costa here.

KernelTrap has an interview with Nick Piggin, a college student living in Canberra Australia who has been working on an anticipatory I/O scheduler for the Linux kernel.

It's been almost a year since our first Linux distro poll, so here is your... annual Linux poll. Click more and vote for your favorite distribution!

This is one of the original boot logs for Linux on a POWER5 IBM microprocessor. Linux was ported to POWER5 at an IBM Lab in Austin Texas. The port was done with pre-production hardware.

Performance Inspector puts your finger on the pulse of your C/C++ and Java code, helping you nail down performance bottlenecks and problems with Linux kernel interaction. The suite of tools includes sample-based profiling, monitoring at the thread level, and more

I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to tweak Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I'd need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim.

"Microsoft's connection to the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group is becoming clear", Bruce Perens writes in his editorial at C|Net.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux Beta is now available for evaluation and testing. Read more for the full press release and more links:

Open-source enthusiasts and businesses are coexisting, says Adam Jollans, Linux strategy manager for IBM Software. Many companies simply want to figure out the best way to get the job done -- they will gladly mix and match applications. Read the article at NewsFactor.

Rocklyte Systems announced the first public release of its commercial operating system technology after five years of development. "Athenyx 2003" is an operating system distribution combining the Rocklyte technology (not based on XFree86), SciTech's SNAP graphics technology and the Linux kernel, into a desktop platform. Designed for multimedia use and general productivity, Athenyx 2003 includes these features. Coming soon: Internet dial-up support from the desktop interface, fully functional web browser, an X11 server for backwards compatibility with X11 programs. The OS costs $40 USD.

"Lately, there has been lots of discussion on the current state of Linux as a desktop system, and articles pop up here and there, occasionally with very good ideas. However, none have surprised me more than this one. It was all very hyphothetical, but had pretty radical ideas on how the author thought the Linux directory tree should be reorganized." Read more about GoboLinux, a Linux distro that uses a new style directory tree at Kuro5hin.org.

Robert McMillan has written a feature article regarding Linux storming into the financial computing industry. Robert expects that 2003 will be Linux' make or break year regarding financial applications.

Ingo Molnar has announced a new kernel-based security feature for Linux/x86 called "Exec Shield". He describes the patch, which is against the 2.4.20-rc1 kernel, as, "The exec-shield feature provides protection against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows, and against other types of exploits that rely on overwriting data structures and/or putting code into those structures. The patch also makes it harder to pass in and execute the so-called 'shell-code' of exploits. The patch works transparently, ie. no application recompilation is necessary."