Linux Archive

In order to celebrate the release of Pardus 2011, here's a review of it by LinuxUser, which quickly shows the small touches and attention to details which make this Turkish distribution so special and explains what's new in this release.

"Martha Lane Fox is promising GBP 98 computers to tempt the last remaining digital refuseniks in UK to get online. The machines, refurbed by Remploy, will come complete with telephone support, monitor, mouse and Linux software."

"At the end of last year, to demonstrate my company's swiftBoot service, I put together a rather impressive demo. Using a Renesas MS7724 development board I was able to achieve a one second cold Linux boot to a Qt application. Here's the demo."

"At the end of 2010, the 'open-source' software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015."

"With the acquisition of Bordeaux, Wine-Reviews has transformed from a stand alone news portal service to a full service Wine information and Technology company." Information about the upcoming 3.0 release of Bordeaux follows.

Remember that guy who got Meego to run on his HTC HD2 ? Well, he's at it again, now booting Meego on a Nexus S. He also ran Ubuntu on it shortly thereafter.

"Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file. I know it sounds unbelievable, but apparently someone even ran some tests which prove that Lennart's solution works."

Linux 2.6.37 has been released. This release includes several SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, complete removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a network device based in the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules and listing of accesible local and global variables, image hibernation using LZO compression, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers. You can read the full changelog as well.

Here's the latest in our new series on OS tips from power users: a seemingly trivial task. You have a computer, most likely a laptop, that you wish to keep suspended while you're not working. For example, let's say overnight. At the same time, you wish to run a handful of maintenance tasks, like backups and cleanup, which you don't normally do during the day. So you need a mechanism that will send your machine to sleep, wake it up when necessary, run cron jobs, then send it back to sleep again.

Splashtop has released a new version of its instant-on OS that is based on the Chromium browser and could shorten PC boot times to just a few seconds. The latest version of the Splashtop OS, now in beta, is a lightweight version of Linux that allows users to surf the Web, access online applications or check e-mail almost instantly after switching on a PC.

"In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small - just over 200 lines of code - but it does wonders for the Linux desktop."

How do you audit your Linux environment? How do you track after changes to your files? What kind of processes are running on your system at any given moment? What uses the most resources? Valid questions, all. Special contributor Dedoimedo gives us the straight scoop on "audit.". Editor's note: Call for submissions: are you an OS expert? Can you provide some special insight, some tips and tricks, or just plain illuminate an obscure feature in your OS of choice? We'd like to publish it.

The third version of the SCHED_DEADLINE patchset has been released to LKML: SCHED_DEADLINE is a real-time scheduling class for Linux with bandwidth isolation (a.k.a. 'resource reservation') capabilities based on the EDF algorithm. This version adds support for global/clustered multiprocessor scheduling through dynamic task migrations. This means that tasks can migrate among (a subset of) CPUs when this is needed, by means of pushes & pulls. Moreover, (c)group based task admission logic and bandwidth management has been removed, in favour of a per root_domain tasks bandwidth accounting mechanism." The code is being jointly developed by ReTiS Lab and Evidence S.r.l in the context of the ACTORS EU-funded project. Development takes place right here.

Clang can build a kernel now. "The kernel can successfully boot to runlevel 5 (aka X + networking) on the Macbook, both on bare metal and in Qemu. The kernel can successfully boot to runlevel 3 on a secondary test machine, a microATX desktop box (Intel Atom). I haven't tried to start X on this box yet. The kernel can self-host; I am currently running a 'fourth generation' self-hosted Linux kernel built by a 'fourth generation' Clang."