Linux Archive

Loki is the newest version of elementary OS, a design-oriented and open source Linux-based operating system for desktops and laptops. It succeeds Freya which was released in April of 2015.

ts and implemented over 20 blueprints. Altogether, these represent stability and security improvements, better internationalization, new features and options, and much more.

You probably don't think of car companies as Linux and open-source supporters. You'd be wrong. Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer, just joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history.

OIN was formed by IBM, Sony, Phillips, Red Hat, and Novell in 1995 to defend Linux against intellectual property attacks. OIN's plan, then and now, is to acquire Linux-related patents. It then shares them royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux or its applications.

It's worked.

OIN now has more than 2,000 members. In the last 18 months, with the rise of open source and Linux in all technology businesses, OIN has doubled in size.

Namespaces and cgroups are two of the main kernel technologies most of the new trend on software containerization (think Docker) rides on. To put it simple, cgroups are a metering and limiting mechanism, they control how much of a system resource (CPU, memory) you can use. On the other hand, namespaces limit what you can see. Thanks to namespaces processes have their own view of the system's resources.

The Linux kernel provides 6 types of namespaces: pid, net, mnt, uts, ipc and user. For instance, a process inside a pid namespace only sees processes in the same namespace. Thanks to the mnt namespace, it's possible to attach a process to its own filesystem (like chroot). In this article I focus only in network namespaces.

If you have grasped the concept of namespaces you may have at this point an intuitive idea of what a network namespace might offer. Network namespaces provide a brand-new network stack for all the processes within the namespace. That includes network interfaces, routing tables and iptables rules.

NayuOS is an ongoing project at Nexedi: We are mainly using Chromebooks for our daily development work and wanted to have more customizable, secure and privacy-compliant devices - not running any proprietary software, because we love Free Software. A few experiments later NayuOS - our free alternative to Chrome OS - was born. NayuOS is currently on a good enough way to meeting most of our needs, so we decided to spread the word and share what we have done so far.

One of the biggest freedoms associated with free software is the ability to replace a program with an updated or modified version. Even so, of the many millions of people using Linux-powered phones, few are able to run a mainline kernel on those phones, even if they have the technical skills to do the replacement. The sad fact is that no mainstream phone available runs mainline kernels. A session at the 2015 Kernel Summit, led by Rob Herring, explored this problem and what might be done to address it.

Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system in China, but the government is trying to encourage homegrown replacements. The most popular one is called NeoKylin. We gave it a whirl to see how the hottest China-made OS looks and feels.

For those who haven't kept up with bcache, the bcache codebase has been evolving/metastasizing into a full blown, general purpose posix filesystem - a modern COW filesystem with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching, and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features.

Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn't have all that much special. Much have been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically, that not only wasn't the reason for the version number change, we've had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a "solid code progress" release.

Our objective is to build the kernel network stack as a shared library that can be linked to by userspace programs to provide network stack personalization and testing facilities, and allow researchers to more easily simulate complex network topologies of linux routers/hosts.

Although the architecture itself can virtualize various things, the current design only focuses on the network stack. You can benefit network stack feature such as TCP, UDP, SCTP, DCCP (IPv4 and IPv6), Mobie IPv6, Multipath TCP (IPv4/IPv6, out-of-tree at the present moment), and netlink with various userspace applications (quagga, iproute2, iperf, wget, and thttpd).

With Linux 4.0, you may never need to reboot your operating system again.

One reason to love Linux on your servers or in your data-center is that you so seldom needed to reboot it. True, critical patches require a reboot, but you could go months without rebooting. Now, with the latest changes to the Linux kernel you may be able to go years between reboots.

Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.