Linux Archive

"Last year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York was a time for major vendors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. to debut new hardware offerings running various flavors of the Linux open-source operating system. This year, with Linux-based server sales holding their own, the focus is on keeping those customers happy by giving them the kind of service and support that until now has mainly gone to customers running Unix and Windows. The Linux community is also looking for ways to broaden use of the operating system in business computing. About 150 vendors are expected at the show, which is down from about 200 at last year's LinuxWorld, said Rob Schescherareg, a vice president of sales, marketing and product development at Boston-based IDG, which runs the event. Some of the decrease is due to the economy, because some of pure-play Linux companies no longer exist, he said. IDG expects up to 19,000 visitors to the show, down from about 25,000 last year." Read the rest of the report at CNN.

"What is real time? This article, first of a three-part series, introduces the benchmarks we'll run on real-time Linux version in the next two issues. Linux is well tuned for throughput-limited applications, but it is not well designed for deterministic response, though enhancements to the kernel are available to help or guarantee determinism. So-called real-time applications require, among other things, deterministic response. In this article I examine the nature of real-time applications and Linux's strengths and weaknesses in supporting such applications." Read the rest of the story at LinuxDevices.

"For desktops, the 2.4 version of the kernel is just fine. If you have heavy-duty processing needs, 2.4 has been a series of disappointments. Sysadmins of big iron have two choices -- go back in time or play upgrade hopscotch. Both have problems. Let's start from the beginning. In July 2001, I was responsible for upgrading a customer's server from Red Hat 6.2 to Mandrake 8.0. The machine was built from scratch, and Mandrake was installed onto a freshly formatted RAID 5 array. We then migrated the Red Hat 6.2 applications to the new machine." Read the rest of the story at InfoWorld.

wxWindows is a cross-platform applications framework available under a free license. Early this year marks wxWindows 10th birthday, and to mark this event codingstyle.com has an exclusive interview with several key developers of the project.

"If KDE and GNOME are the Hatfield and McCoy of Open Source graphical desktop environments, then theKompany.com and Ximian are not exactly kissing cousins. But the philosophical beliefs of the two businesses are converging, and the community is settling down to a broader acceptance of commercial software. Assuming computer users choose their desktops before they choose their desktop applications, ostensibly theKompany's and Ximian's target markets are non-intersecting sets. But their business practices and philosophies on Open Source have been scrutinized, discussed and compared at length in public." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

Kerneltrap interviewed Dave Jones who currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability.