Linux Archive

Transitioning to the New GRUB 2 Boot Loader

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-21 Linux 30 Comments

The tools used to boot Linux are changing. Specifically, the Grand Unified Bootloader is now officially in maintenance mode only, and GRUB's developers have abandoned the original GRUB in favor of an entirely rewritten package, known as GRUB 2. Discover GRUB 2's new capabilities and how to use it.

Introducing PCLinuxOS 2010

Guest post by Jesse Smith 2010-04-19 Linux 26 Comments

The PCLinuxOS distribution is the popular brain child of a man best known as Texstar. PCLinuxOS's website, which carries a pleasant blue theme with ads bordering the pages, claims the distro is "radically simple" and easy to use. If we stopped there, it would probably give the impression PCLinuxOS is aimed at newcomers to the Linux community, but that does not appear to be the case.

Synaptics Releases Gesture Suite for Linux OEMs

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-19 Linux 51 Comments

We all know Synaptics, the company that seems to produce just about every touchpad you can get your ~~hands~~ fingers on. Their touchpads also do a lot of multitouch and gesture stuff, but up until now, their set of gestures, the Synaptics Gesture Suite, was only available on Windows. Luckily, they've ported it over to Linux, and made it available for OEMs building Linux laptops.

Anatomy of Linux Kernel Shared Memory

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-18 Linux No Comments

An interesting change in the 2.6.32 kernel is Kernel Shared Memory. KSM allows the hypervisor to increase the number of concurrent virtual machines by consolidating identical memory pages. Explore the ideas behind KSM (such as storage de-duplication), its implementation, and how you manage it.

Monitor Linux File System Events with inotify

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-16 Linux 5 Comments

Learn how to use inotify functions for a simple monitoring app. Download the sample code and Use inotify when you need efficient, fine-grained, asynchronous monitoring of Linux file system events. Use it for user-space monitoring for security, performance, or other purposes.

10 Things Linux Does Better Than Windows

Kroc 2010-04-09 Linux 186 Comments

"To be clear about this article's intent, it's not to bash Microsoft, or Windows. Because to be fair, despite using Linux 95% of the time while I'm on the PC, I can find more faults with it than Windows. So, this article's goal is to highlight some of the major pluses of Linux, and also showcase where Windows could improve in the future, should Microsoft take heed of the suggestions."

Guest post by douglasm 2010-03-28 Linux 41 Comments

At least two major GNU/Linux distributions have decided to drop PowerPC support; OpenSUSE has dropped support already, and Fedora is going to drop it in Fedora 13.

First Glance at SimplyMEPIS 8.5

Guest post by Jesse Smith 2010-03-15 Linux 12 Comments

All Linux users have their own vision of the ideal distribution. Some people crave stability, others want new and exciting features, some people are very security focused and others are concerned about licensing. Warren Woodford has his own vision and he's made it accessible to the world via MEPIS. This week he was willing to take a few minutes to talk about his creation.

Peering at Paldo 1.21

Guest post by Jesse Smith 2010-03-10 Linux 41 Comments

One of the things I love about software, particularly open source software, is innovation can come from anywhere. Sometimes it appears out of large tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM or Sun and other times it can come from one person writing code on a second hand computer in their college dorm. Software is really the expression of ideas and concepts, which can come from anyone. So I really enjoy seeing small open source projects try new things. Some will succeed and be adopted and some will fade away, but the amazing thing is to see people put their idea out there and present it to the world. Which is why I was thrilled when a few people directed me to Paldo and suggested it was worth a look.

North Korea Develops Its Own Linux Distribution

Thom Holwerda 2010-03-04 Linux 44 Comments

Choson Minjujuui Inmin Konghwaguk, here in the west more commonly known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or North Korea, is a country you usually read about in the foreign affairs section of the newspaper. As a logical consequence of its Juche ideology, North Korea has developed its own Linux distribution.

Submitted by cloud 2010-02-28 Linux 5 Comments

Evidence has just submitted to LKML a new version of the SCHED_DEADLINE real-time CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel. The project is basically a new scheduling policy (implemented inside its own scheduling class) aiming at introducing deadline scheduling for Linux tasks, and it is being developed by Evidence in the context of the EU-Funded project ACTORS. This version takes into account comments come from Linux kernel developers, and it also introduces a first drafted implementation of deadline inheritance.

Submitted by diegocg 2010-02-24 Linux 15 Comments

Linux 2.6.33 has been released. This version features Nouveau, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), TCP "cookie transactions", a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), support for cache compression and other improvements. See the full changelog here.

Guest post by theosib 2010-02-14 Linux 65 Comments

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we'll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.

Virtio: An I/O Virtualisation Framework for Linux

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-05 Linux 3 Comments

With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.

Android and the Linux Kernel Community

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-03 Linux 12 Comments

"As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter."

Submitted by twickline 2010-01-29 Linux 27 Comments

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today. "Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.36, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools. We have improved support for Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and preliminary support for Internet Explorer 7 in this release, there has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the back-end."

75% of Linux Code Written by Paid Developers

Submitted by Dale Smoker 2010-01-24 Linux 52 Comments

LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. 18% of contributions were made without a specific corporate affiliation, 7% weren't classified, and 75% were from people working for specific companies in roles where developing that code was a major requirement. "75% of the code comes from people paid to do it," Corbet said.

CRUX PPC 2.6 Released

Submitted by acrux 2010-01-19 Linux 4 Comments

"CRUX PPC 2.6 is now available. It works on Apple 32bit 'NewWorld' G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, IBM RS/6000 CHRP (604e), YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER, and IBM pSeries RS64/POWERn. CRUX PPC 2.6 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain."

An API for Easy Linux Virtualisation

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-09 Linux 3 Comments

The libvirt library is a Linux API over the virtualization capabilities of Linux that supports a variety of hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, as well as QEMU and some virtualization products for other operating systems. This article explores libvirt, its use, and its architecture.

Submitted by diegocg 2009-12-23 Linux 23 Comments

After two long years since the last release, Cygwin 1.7 (a Linux-like environment that runs on Windows systems) has been released. Among many other improvement, this release adds support for Windows 7 and Server 2008R2.