Linux Archive

Last week RedHat entered into the PowerPC market, leaving Yellow Dog Linux, the distribution that is a port of RedHat to the PowerPC, in a precarious position. When SuSE and Mandrake also entered the PPC market, LinuxPPC was the first of the PPC-only Linux companies that put a break into their further development. As PPC-only Linux company, where is YDL will be standing in the near future? Read the editorial at TuxPPC.

A thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list started innocently enough about proper spacing in source code, then grew and grew into a somewhat philosophical debate about evolution and code design. The subject of the thread was "Coding style - a non-issue". However, before long a debate was sparked, leading to some interesting comments by Linus and some others, perhaps best summarized by Alan Cox's comment: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works." and Linus Torvalds: "And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has _nothing_ in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design there."

"It's been a tough year for Linux companies. Those that didn't go bust announced large layoffs as investors realized that businesses built around a free operating system weren't poised for aggressive growth. The Linux Hatchery at this month's Comdex convention was home to just two companies, down from about 150 last year." Read the rest of the story at NewsAlert.

Linux kernel version 2.4.15 has been released and it is available from Kernel.org and its mirrors. Patch here, Changelog here, while the development, unstable, 2.5 source tree opened by Linus Torvalds. Update: A serious bug has been discovered on both 2.4.15 & 2.5 kernels and it can corrupt your filesystem. Please use an older version of the kernel until 2.4.16 comes out. Update 2: Linux kernel 2.4.16 has been released. Patch here, source here.

The journaling file system ext3 made it to the test version of 2.4.15 Linux kernel and it seems that it will be as standard of the final version of the kernel. ext3 has pretty much the same design and capabilities of ext2, but it adds journaling. Our Take: Can't wait for the day that SGI's next generation, truly advanced file system, XFS, will make it to the main source tree. Update: In a related note, the NTFS driver for Linux was updated today with support for WindowsXP's NTFS 5 among other new features.

Based on Linux Kernel 2.4, Turbolinux 7 Server supports 64 GB of memory, a journal file system, a 128-bit SSL library, and 32 SMP support. It is scheduled to begin shipping on December 7. Turbolinux is focusing on enterprise business needs with this release, as it tried to design this version of the server with extreme flexibility and functionality in mind. "Turbolinux 7 Server offers businesses a highly secure, high-performance operating system," Pete Beckman, vice president of engineering for Turbolinux said in a prepared statement.

The title says it all, get it while it's hot! This release is mostly a stability version for the new Linux VM system and 2.4.15 will also be the same. After that release, Linus Torvalds is expected to open the 2.5 development source tree.

Open source instigator Linus Torvalds speaks with Charlie Rose in a very interesting interview about the past, present, and future of Linux and technology. Quote from Torvalds: "To get where Bill Gates is today, he needed to be the business guy who knew about technology. I was the technology guy who had no clue about business."

"Over the past year, the information technology elite have started to dismiss Linux as a flash in the pan that tried and failed to dominate in a world owned by Windows. Woebegone Linux and open-source companies are scattered across the landscape like so much shrapnel. The stock prices of IPO high fliers VA Linux and Red Hat currently trade near half of their pre-IPO offering prices. Meanwhile, Windows XP gets the press and the plaudits. But what's happening behind the scenes?" Does Linux found its place in... Hollywood, being the No 1 choice for a rendering farm? Read the rest of the feature article at Salon.com.

PC Magazine offers a six-way shootout between Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (Potato), Caldera, Mandrake, and Turbo Linux. Red Hat takes top honors in the final reckoning (which can be viewed by downloading a PDF on the last page of the report.) From the article: "Widespread industry acceptance and ease of use make Red Hat's distro a solid choice for general use, but don't rule out other distributions until you've studied them and know which excel at specific tasks."

The Gartner Group, the well known consulting and analyst firm, is analyzing Linux progress and future. Interesting read, as it offers explanations behind IBM's $1 billion investement on Linux among other information. Our Take: We don't know what the future holds, but there is a new Linux kernel just released (2.4.13) while SuSE is to start shipping its new, SuSE Linux 7.3 distribution in the United States and North America today.

"It certainly would not be a surprise for friction to occur when Windows and Linux developers are confined in close quarters. Now a recent post on a Borland community message board by Danny Thorpe, a well-known Borland engineer who has been involved with the Kylix project from the beginning, has stirred the pot. Thorpe, rightly or wrongly, criticized both Linux and open source in explaining why Kylix wasn't working exactly as intended at library load time." LinuxWorld features the full article. Our Take: The timing for Mr. Thorpe to publish such an article was probably a bit wrong from a marketing point of view: Kylix 2 was announced just today and such an open technical disagreement can have some negative impact at its sales in the Linux market.

Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Linux solutions for PowerPC microprocessors, announced the immediate availability of Yellow Dog Linux version 2.1. YDL 2.1 offers the following updates and improvements: YDL installer now supports individual package selection, KDE 2.2.1, XFree86 4.1.0, 2.4.10 (default) and 2.2.19, Mac-on-Linux 0.9.60 which automatically grabs the ROM image from your Mac OS partition--reducing setup to a minimum. - Webmin web-based system administration tool, Mozilla 0.9.4, Ext3 journaling file system, Sound support on iBook 1 and iBook 2 (2001), Sleep support on full range of Apple portables (include all iBooks), Improved support for Apple Network Servers and support for NVidia GeForce 2 & ATI Radeon video cards.

From Wired: "It started as a crusade for free source code. Linux zealots turned it into a full-frontal assault on Microsoft. Now the battle for the desktop could snatch defeat from the jaws of moral victory." This is the teaser of a four page interesting editorial from Russ Mitchell found on Wired. The author recognises that "Linux has a real shot in the enterprise business", but he believes that Linux is never going to get a respectful share of the desktop market, and he presents a number arguments for it. He also includes statements from many people like Rob Malda and Red Hat employees who, surprisingly, state that the real enemy for their business today is not Microsoft (where most of their joe-user customers are far reached from Linux's "nerd" market), but companies like Sun and the "traditional" Unices like Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and Tru64.