Linux Archive

"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.

"BORPH is an operating system designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a 'hardware process', which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for 'Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware'."

We're infatuated with Siri on our iPhones, and wish something similar existed for Linux. Turns out, it does exist. Almost. An interesting article by a guy who seems to know a lot about the Xvoice project, and an invitation to get involved. The best open source adventures start like this.

With Enlightment 0.17 released, it's no surprise the Linux distribution that uses E17 for its desktop is rushing to release a new version that uses it. Look for Bodhi 2.2.0 in January, featuring the stable E17 desktop. If you've never experienced it, Bodhi is a Ubuntu derivative, and it offers more configurabality than you can imagine. Have you been complaining about Unity and Gnome3 taking away your options? Bodhi and E17 bring them back - and many more, too.

"This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years. Unfortunately there's a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won't be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff. I'm not sentimental. Good riddance." Almost 21 years of support for a professor. Not bad.

Linux kernel 3.7 has been released. This release includes support for the new ARM 64 bit architecture, ARM multiplatform support - the ability to boot into different ARM systems using the same kernel; support for cryptographically signed kernel modules; Btrfs support for disabling copy-on-write on a per-file basis using chattr; faster Btrfs fsync(); a new experimental "perf trace" tool modeled after strace; support for the TCP Fast Open feature in the server side; experimental SMBv2 protocol support used by modern Windows systems; stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS; the vxlan tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 ethernet packets over UDP; and support for the Intel "supervisor mode access prevention" security feature. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here's the full list of changes.

Since its 4.4.10 release way back in 2008, Damn Small Linux languished as an inactive project. But a month ago John Andrews announced 4.11 release candidate 2. It includes updated apps and bug fixes. Download from here (only 50m). More on what's in the release candidate here. DSL is popular for making older computers useful and also works well as a tiny live distro.

"The result of almost a year of development by NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, the new GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience - and showcase the enormous potential of the world's biggest open-source operating system." Like I said: something is happening here. No, not all problems will be solved overnight - but something is happening here, and you have to start somewhere. The fact that several gaming companies and NVIDIA are working together on this is a very clear sign that commitments have been made.

Here's a topic guaranteed to start controversy. Which Linux distribution is best? It all depends on your criteria for judging. Even then the topic is highly subjective. Here are a few nominees for "best distro" in specific categories.

"F2FS is a new file system carefully designed for the NAND flash memory-based storage devices. We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage. Also we remedy some known issues of the very old log structured file system, such as snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead."

"I was in a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon and happened to spot Linus Torvalds sitting alone at a window table. I asked the creator of the Linux operating system and the Git source code control system if I could join him. Over the next fifteen minutes we talked about programming and programmers." Editor's Note: We've realized it's unclear whether this is a satirical interview or not. We don't know, so YMMV.

"You are logged into your remote server via SSH and happily plucking along at your keyboard and then it happens. Suddenly, the characters stop moving and then you get the dreaded 'Connection Closed' message. You have just lost your session. You were halfway through some task and now you have to start over. Ugh. Well you can prevent this from happening by using screen. The Linux screen tool can not only save you from disconnection disasters, but it also can increase your productivity by using multiple windows within one SSH session. I use this tool all of the time in our server management work." An older tutorial, and even though I have little to no knowledge about screen, I know one thing: lots of people swear by it.

"For years now, Linux has been a black sheep standing in the shadow of Apple and Microsoft. Despite having a fervent and enthusiastic following, the operating system hasn't been able to grab a sizable share of the computing market and has instead been content to subsist on the customers that come away dissatisfied with the mainstream competition. But that may be about to change. With the release of Microsoft Windows 8 on the horizon, some are saying Linux may have a great opportunity to steal a significant share of the market away from Microsoft, allowing it to finally take the helm as a major operating system service provider." This has to stop, and the only reason I'm linking to this nonsense is to make this very clear: Linux will not magically conquer the desktop or even make any significant gains because of Windows 8. People who don't like Windows 8 (Vista) will continue to use Windows 7 (Windows XP). This is getting so tiring. And does it even matter? Linux is winning big time in the mobile space, server space, and countless other spaces. The desktop is and always has been irrelevant to Linux.

Linux kernel 3.5 has been released. New features include support for metadata checksums in Ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with systemtap/perf, a simple sandboxing mechanism that can filter syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Here's the full list of changes.