Linux Archive

The Finnish company behind the open-source file system NTFS-3G, Tuxera, has announced it has signed a confidential intellectual-property agreement with Microsoft about creating a Linux exFAT driver which they will sell to Linux OEMs. They are in talks with Microsoft about an open source exFAT driver.

A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks? My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?

A fellow at CNET did a review of a beta version of another Linux distribution built specifically for netbooks. "One of those , called Jolicloud, is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services. I've been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it's trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative."

We already discussed David Finch, Dell's senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, last week. We missed, however, some more interesting statements by Finch; Dell is looking into the ARM-based netbook smartbook market, and close to a third of all of Dell's netbooks ship with Linux.

Hot off the compilation press, Arch Linux comes to its full 2009.08 grandeur with a myriad of new and updated features, including exciting new additions to be utilized in the AIF (Arch Linux Installation Framework) and more, detailed within.

Valerie Aurora has published a great article in LWN about btrfs: "You probably have heard of the cool new kid on the file system block - after all, Linus Torvalds is using it as his root file system on one of his laptops. But you might not know much about it beyond a few high-level keywords - copy-on-write, checksums, writable snapshots - and a few sensational rumors and stories - the Phoronix benchmarks, btrfs is a ZFS ripoff, btrfs is a secret plan for Oracle domination of Linux, etc. When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander. In this article, we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of btrfs on many levels."

KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. By switching from VMware build guests to Linux KVM guests, build times for each guest are reduced by as much as 50 percent. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

One of the problem with operating system updates is that you often need to reboot the system. While this is nothing but a minor nuisance for us desktop users, it's a bigger problem when it comes to servers. Ksplice is a technology that allows Linux kernel patches to be applied without actually restarting the kernel.

"The Linux 2.6.31 kernel is still under active development until it is released later this quarter, but the merge window is closed and most of the work going on is to address bugs and other regressions within this massive code-base. Some of the key additions to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel include many graphics-related advancements (merging of the TTM memory manager, Radeon kernel mode-setting, Intel DisplayPort, etc), an ALSA driver for the Creative X-Fi, initial USB 3.0 support, file-system improvements, and much more. To see how the general system performance has been impacted by the new Linux kernel that is in development, we have a few benchmarks today."

Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" was released a little while ago, so before it became too old of news, I thought I'd take a whack at experimenting with it for the sake of netbookers everywhere (and for myself, naturally). As I type this on gedit after about two weeks' use, let's just say that the system on my EeePC 1000 HE is, for the most part, rather glorious-- pun intended. As a bonus, I also got Google's Chromium browser to run on it, so keep on reading to find the section on that.

A couple of days ago kvm-87 was released featuring bug fixes, performance improvements, a preview of irqfd, new support for http protocol using curl version 6., and additional support for port redirection. The most notable of these from the end user perspective is the new http support. A good use case for this new feature is booting a livecd over http with a command like "qemu-kvm -cdrom http://www.sample.com/linux.iso". Awesome!

"Intel has created a new network management and configuration system for Linux called ConnMan - but not everyone is pleased to see it challenge NetworkManager. Ars looks at the pros and "conns" of the decision to create the new software."

"Let's take a look at SquashFS. SquashFS is a read-only compressed file system that has a variable block size. The primary intent of the file system is for constrained block device/memory systems. The classic example targets SquashFS for embedded systems but there are other uses for it that fall outside of the embedded world, and could surprise you."

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel. "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time, we do need the coverage of a eral release, and on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x." The list of changes is interesting.