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Linux Archive

Avoid Virtualization Overhead with Linux Containers

Linux Containers provide lightweight virtualization that lets you isolate processes and resources without the need to provide instruction interpretation mechanisms and other complexities of full virtualization. In this step-by-step tour of Linux container tools (LXC), the author introduces you to the Linux container tools and shows how to get up and running on them. This article will show you how Linux containers significantly lower the overhead of using true virtualization, while still providing isolation.

Torvalds on Filesystems, Netbooks, KDE 4.0

Ever year, Linus Torvalds goes on vacation to Australia, during which he usually also visits linux.conf.au. During his stay this year he gave an interview to ComputerWorld, in which he talked about the success of point releases and the important topic of file systems in Linux, which is quite an active field today with ext4 and Btrfs. He also gave some insights into why he switched away from KDE, moving to GNOME instead, and he shares his thoughts on Windows 7.

Building a Mini-ITX Web Content Filter with Ubuntu

Using an Mini-ITX motherboard and some spare parts lying around my study, I was able to put together an extremely powerful internet filtering appliance that is not only powerful but fast, reliable, and darn near impossible to circumvent by computer savvy teens. Most parents do not want to bother becoming the internet police of the household but today's internet is a very hostile place with many different opportunities for trouble.

Btrfs 0.17 Released

Versin 0.17 of the Linux filesystem btrfs has been released. The main news on this release is that it has been included in the Linus' tree. The changes include support of transparent compression, seed devices, improved block sharing while moving extents, improved block allocation and many bug fixes and performance improvements. Also, the disk format is not expected to change unless a critical bug is found.

Keryx: Updating GNU/Linux Without Broadband

Keryx provides a way to download software and updates for Ubuntu systems that have little or no connectivity to the internet. Simply put Keryx on your pen drive, use it to create a new project file which retains a copy of your software sources and other system details, then take the pen drive to a computer with a better connection. Via its Synaptic-like interface, users can then select all updates for download, plus select any other software they may want to install, complete with dependency resolution.

Linux Foundation Launches ‘I’m Linux’ Campaign

Sick of Apple and Microsoft flaunting themselves about constantly with their "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" advertisements? Had a vision for the first Linux commercial you've been wanting to put into place? The Linux Foundation is calling you. Not literally, of course. Beginning January 26th, 2009, the Foundation will be accepting 60-second video offerings from budding directors worldwide to begin their own "I'm Linux" advertising campaign. The winner takes all with "a flight to Narita in Japan from the airport closest to your home plus three nights at a hotel in order for the winner to attend the Linux Foundation Japan's symposium in October next year." Start those rusty creative gears turning-- it's certain that plenty will enter, and only one will win.

Higher and Further: The Innovations of Linux 2.6.28

Heise Open Source provides an extensive breakdown of the innovations present in the latest release of the Linux kernel, announced by Linus Torvalds. This version adds the first version of Ext4 as a stable filesystem, the much-anticipated GPU memory manager which will be the foundation of a renewed graphic stack, support for Ultra Wide Band (Wireless USB, UWB-IP), memory management scalability and performance improvements, a boot tracer, disk shock protection, the phonet network protocol, support of SSD discard requests, transparent proxy support, high-resolution poll()/select()... full Changelog here

Nix Fixes Dependency Hell on All Linux Distributions

A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers. Unlike existing package managers, Nix allows different versions of software to live side by side, and permits sane rollbacks of software upgrades.

First Steps Towards USB 3.0 on Linux

USB 3.0 isn't even available to us mere mortals yet, but thanks to Sarah Sharp's hard work, the Linux kernel is already underway towards having basic support for the new specification. "Now that the bus specification is public, I can finally talk about the code I've been developing at work. I've been writing a Linux driver for xHCI (the new USB 3.0 host controller), and changing the Linux kernel stack to support USB 3.0 devices." Sharp got to demo her work at the USB 3.0 Superspeed Conference.

Distributed Computing with Linux and Hadoop

Every day people rely on search engines to find specific content in the many terabytes of data that exist on the Internet, but have you ever wondered how this search is actually performed? One approach is Apache's Hadoop, which is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of vast amounts of data. This article introduces the Hadoop framework and shows you why it's one of the most important Linux-based distributed computing frameworks.

Smolt gets adopted by openSUSE

Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."

Linux Ported to iPhone/Touch, Runs Busybox For Now

Even though there are a lot of happy people using Apple's iPhone very happily, there's also a group of people who are not so happy, most likely because of Apple's rather strict policies regarding applications and developers. While most of these people would just jailbreak the thing, some take it a step further - by installing another operating system. Yes, Linux now runs on the iPhone (1st gen/2nd gen, and the 1st gen iPod Touch).

Hardening the Linux Desktop

Although GNU/Linux has the reputation of being a more secure operating system than Microsoft Windows, you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This tutorial takes you through the steps of installing and configuring antivirus software, creating a backup-restore plan, and making practical use of a firewall. When you finish, you'll have the tools you need to harden your Linux desktop against most attacks and prevent illegal access to your computer.

Kerneloops.org Records its 100,000th Oops

Arjan van de Ven from Intel Open source centre has posted the news that http://kerneloops.org has recorded its 100,000 oops. An oops in the Linux kernel is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel which produces a certain error log. kerneloops is a client side software that helps record oops more automatically on the website with the same name and is available as part of many distribution repositories and even included by default in Fedora. This is part of the QA efforts in the Linux kernel and when posting the news, Arjan has noted that Linux kernel developers have been fixes most of the top oopses quickly