Linux Archive

Android is Linux

Linux 133 Comments
Steve Cheney:

There's more to the platform wars than mobile - Android is starting to take off in non-mobile markets in a massive way - Internet of Things, Television (Chromecast), etc. To date Linux has been the dominant OS but Android is now taking some embedded designs which would have run Linux. The effective decoupling of Android from carriers for non-mobile markets + the richness of tools and the existing developer ecosystem will likely cement Android as the definitive open source OS of the next decade. This will have pluses for Google but also unintended consequences.

A common misconception among people who don't really understand what Linux is - one that I'm seeing pop up more and more now that people are trying to paint Android in a negative light - i.e., as competition to not just iOS, but also the noble and open source Linux.

Repeat after me: Android is just as much 'Linux' as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, or anything else that uses the Linux kernel. Technically, a better term would be 'Linux distribution', since Linux in and of itself is just a kernel. Wikipedia defines 'Linux distribution' quite well:

A Linux distribution (often called distro for short) is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications. These operating systems consist of the Linux kernel and, usually, a set of libraries and utilities from the GNU Project, with graphics support from the X Window System. Distributions optimized for size may not contain X and tend to use more compact alternatives to the GNU utilities, such as BusyBox, uClibc, or dietlibc.

Android is a Linux distribution, and is an addition to the Linux ecosystem - not a challenger. Painting it as such is just a sign of ignorance.

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Elementary OS Luna released

Linux 25 Comments
The Elementary OS team has released their latest offering, Luna, which has been in development for a while now. Based on Ubuntu, this Linux distribution aims to develop its own minimalist applications, but it goes beyond that - it has its own desktop environment, window manager, human interface guidelines, APIs, and more. There's an article on their blog detailing the road to Luna.

They've managed to build quite some hype, so let's see if it lives up to it. Does anyone here use it?

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OS X applications on Linux courtesy of Darling project

  Submitted by dylansmrjones Linux 28 Comments
From ZDnet:

Fancy running iWork on Linux? It may one day be possible courtesy of a project to get Apple OS X programs running on Linux-based operating systems.

Similar to how Wine allows Windows applications to run in Linux OS, the Darling project is trying to build a software compatibility layer to run OS X apps.

I obviously doubt the attainability of the project's goals, but this will be a fantastic coding experience for the programmers involved.

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The future of Linux: evolving everywhere

Linux 18 Comments
Serdar Yegalulp offers a long view of the current evolution of Linux, one that sees the open source OS firmly entrenched as a cornerstone of IT, evolving in almost every direction at once - including most demonstrably toward the mobile and embedded markets. "If Linux acceptance and development are peaking, where does Linux go from up? Because Linux is such a mutable phenomenon and appears in so many incarnations, there may not be any single answer to that question. More important, perhaps, is how Linux - the perennial upstart - will embrace the challenges of being a mature and, in many areas, market-leading project. Here's a look at the future of Linux: as raw material, as the product of community and corporate contributions, and as the target of any number of challenges to its ethos, technical prowess, and growth."
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Linux 3.11 renamed to ‘Linux for Workgroups’

Linux 16 Comments
"Substantially improved support for the power management features of modern Radeon graphics cores is among the major new additions of the now available first release candidate of Linux 3.11. For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from 'Unicycling Gorilla' to 'Linux for Workgroups' and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993." Just awesome. Nothing else.
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Linux 3.10 released

Linux 42 Comments
"This release adds support for bcache, which allows to use SSD devices to cache data from other block devices; a Btrfs format improvement that makes the tree dedicated to store extent information 30-35% smaller; support for XFS metadata checksums and self-describing metadata, timer free multitasking for applications running alone in a CPU, SysV IPC and rwlock scalability improvements, the TCP Tail loss probe algorithm that reduces tail latency of short transactions, KVM virtualization support in the MIPS architecture, many new drivers and small improvements."
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Linux filesystem hierarchy

Linux 37 Comments
"This document outlines the set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under the Linux operating system according to those of the FSSTND v2.3 final (January 29, 2004) and also its actual implementation on an arbitrary system. It is meant to be accessible to all members of the Linux community, be distribution independent and is intended to discuss the impact of the FSSTND and how it has managed to increase the efficiency of support interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems."
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One Man’s Exploration of Linux Distros

Linux 14 Comments
The Linuxed - Exploring Linux Distros website has over 170 reviews of distros and common Linux programs by Arindam Sen. What makes it special is that Mr. Sen puts his experiences together in useful charts, such as this one that compares RAM usage for twenty different GUI versions, or this one that compares CPU and RAM usage for 20 KDE distros (page down to see the chart). While the site says it's merely "A non-techie's view of the Linux world," many techies will find it useful as well.
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Wayland Live CD that starts directly to Wayland

Linux 59 Comments
"Today I pushed out a new ISO of my Wayland Live CD project, which is named for my favorite celebrity. For this new Wayland CD, I wrote a new login manager with Bash and Zenity and Expect (and Script) that fully runs on a Wayland server (weston). Now X is no longer involved in the boot process, and X does not start, (unless you use an X application with xwayland), because I replaced LightDM with the new loginmanager."
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NixOS

Linux 7 Comments
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
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Linux 3.9 Released

Linux 30 Comments
After ten weeks of development Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.9. The latest version of the kernel now has a device mapper target which allows a user to setup an SSD as a cache for hard disks to boost disk performance under load. There's also kernel support for multiple processes waiting for requests on the same port, a feature which will allow it to distribute server work better across multiple CPU cores. KVM virtualisation is now available on ARM processors and RAID 5 and 6 support has been added to Btrfs's existing RAID 0 and 1 handling. Linux 3.9 also has a number of new and improved drivers which means the kernel now supports the graphics cores in AMD's next generation of APUs and also works with the high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips which will likely appear in Intel's next mobile platform. Read more about new features in What's new in Linux 3.9.
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The pleasures and perils of less popular distributions

Linux 29 Comments
Like many OSNews readers, I use Ubuntu. I also use several less popular distros. What is it like to use these lesser-known distros compared to the dominant systems? How does running, say, VectorLinux or Puppy or PC-BSD, differ from using Ubuntu or Fedora? This article offers a few ideas. Obviously, it broadly generalizes about distros for the purpose of discussion.
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Embedded developers prefer Linux, love Android

  Submitted by Anonymous Linux 10 Comments
In a recent EE Times 2013 Embedded Market study, Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey's participants, second only to 'in-house/custom' (at 28 percent). But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate the various shades of Linux to see how they compare? "Parsing the EE Times data this way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market."
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Linux 3.8 released

Linux 12 Comments
Linux kernel 3.8 has been released. This release includes support in Ext4 for embedding very small files in the inode, which greatly improves the performance for these files and saves some disk space. There is also a new Btrfs feature that allows to replace quickly a disk, a new filesystem F2FS optimized for SSDs, support of filesystem mount, UTS, IPC, PID, and network namespaces for unprivileged users, accounting of kernel memory in the memory resource controller, journal checksums in XFS, an improved NUMA policy redesign and, of course, the removal of support for 386 processors. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here's the full list of changes.
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AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel

  Submitted by ac Linux 18 Comments
"Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today. Our goal (and I use 'goal' in a very rough term, I have 8 pages of scribbled notes describing what we want to try to implement here), is to provide a reliable multicast and point-to-point messaging system for the kernel, that will work quickly and securely. On top of this kernel feature, we will try to provide a 'libdbus' interface that allows existing D-Bus users to work without ever knowing the D-Bus daemon was replaced on their system."
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ArchLinux running on the FreeBSD kernel

Linux 80 Comments
After about a year of work, the ArchLinux distribution now offers a variant running on the FreeBSD kernel. Says the developer, "Why would I do this? If like me, you enjoy FreeBSD and love it, but also like the philosophy behind Arch Linux, which is a fast, lightweight, optimized distro, I figured why not combine the both. Even though you could just do it on FreeBSD using the ports, not everyone wants to compile." This now puts Arch in the same category as Debian with Debian GNU/KFreeBSD, which offers a Debian userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
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Linux now has ‘double’ the market share of Windows

  Submitted by lemur2 Linux 168 Comments
"If you consider NetApplications' data set, then Linux owns only about 1 percent of the desktop OS market and Windows has almost 92 percent. But if you consider all computing platforms, including mobile, than Windows has only 20 percent and Linux has 42 percent - and that would be in the form of Google's Android alone." No more or less legitimate than claiming Windows owns 92% of the market. It's all a matter of perspective.
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