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Linux Archive

Spotlight on Moblin.org Linux

Linux Devices writes about Intel's Moblin effort. Moblin is a environment for netbooks. Originally based on Ubuntu, Moblin recently switched to Fedora citing RPM and a completely Free and open source base as among the benefits. As Linux based netbooks continue to grow rapidly, efforts like Moblin are interesting to watch.

Lazy Linux: 11 Secrets for Lazy Cluster Admins

Cluster means different things to different people. In the context of this article, cluster is best defined as scale-out -- scale-out clusters generally have a lot of the same type of components like Web farms, render farms, and high performance computing (HPC) systems. Administrators will tell you that with scale-out clusters any change, no matter how small, must be repeated up to hundreds of thousands of times; the laziest of admins have mastered techniques of scale-out management so that regardless of the number of nodes, the effort is the same. In this article, the authors peer into the minds of the laziest Linux® admins on Earth and divulge their secrets.

Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users?

Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users."Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that's not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation's Ts'o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole.Fedora's Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base.'We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,' Frields said."

How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works."I went and asked every single hardware manufacturer, the big guys that ship the boxes, Dell, IBM, HP--what do you ship that isn't supported by Linux? They came back with nothing. Everything is supported by Linux. If you have a device that isn't supported by Linux that's being shipped today, let me know.".If you would like to take up Greg KH on his claim, his email address is greg AT kroah.com

A Better File System for Linux?

InternetNews talks to developers and vendors about the rise of Btrfs as a successor to Ext4. Though Ext4 adds extents, Chris Mason, Btrfs developer noted that BTRFS adds a number of other features beyond that. Among those features are items like snapshotting, online file consistency checks and the ability to perform fast incremental backups. BTRFS (pronounced better FS) is currently under development in an effort led by Oracle engineer Chris Mason. With the support of Intel, Red Hat, HP, IBM, BTRFS could become the engine that brings next generation filesystem capabilities to Linux.

Would The Internet Exist Without Linux?

Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux? "Absolutely not", says Rich Menga. "Where Linux shines the most is in its server applications".In the 1990's "There were thousands of Mom n' Pop ISPs that operated out of a garage and the vast majority of them were all running Linux. Windows couldn't do it back then and neither could MacOS. What would you have used that you could afford? Netware? Lotus Domino? HP-UX (that requires those refrigerator-sized HP servers)? Linux was literally the only OS out there that had the right price (free), ran similar to a Unix and could use existing computers of the time to connect customers.The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There's an extremely high probability that the internet connection you're using right now is connected through a Linux server - and routed through many other Linux servers along the way."

Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems

Lifehacker reviews some of the popular Linux distributions that have provided tools to make Live USB keys, a easy task. These include Damn Small Linux, Fedora with it's cross platform liveusb-creator , Puppy Linux and Xubuntu. All systems were tested with UNetbootin except for Fedora which was run using it's own liveusb-creator. For every distribution, the minimum requirements, image size, boot time, features, things that need improvement and which users it is recommended for, is listed.

Support Grows for Intel’s Mobile Linux Despite Delay

El Reg reports: While Intel's Moblin 2.0 platform has been delayed from November 2008 to the first half of 2009, it looks like its arrival will provide quite the boost to the netbook scene. "Start-up Good OS has announced a relationship with MiTAC International to deliver its gOS Gadgets Linux operating system on a netbook based on Intel's Moblin 2.0. David Liu, founder and chief executive of gOS, told The Reg the machine planned with MiTAC would be among the first to be released on the as-yet unfinished Moblin 2.0. Ahead of completion, vendors have been working with Moblin 1.0 and so-called 'Moblin optimizations'. These are portions of the Moblin spec that have been picked up and incorporated into either hardware or software design. Xandros and Asus have, for example, added changes to their systems from Moblin that provide a 25 per cent improvement in battery life. Liu said Moblin was 'getting more and more ready for mainstream use' with features such as an extra-fast boot time of five seconds."

Linux’s Next Victim

ServerWatch writes about the slow but sure death of UNIX by the onslaught of Linux and customers moving from older proprietary UNIX systems to commercially supported open source enterprise Linux distributions."Linux does have one killer feature that is driving the switch: lower cost. Many companies are discovering Linux to be extremely attractive from a cost perspective. Take the experience of Sabre, a travel company that replaced Solaris with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on x86 machines, resulting in lowering costs 90 percent (with a three-fold speed gain to boot). These potential cost savings, which include hardware maintenance costs savings, are not to sniffed at."

Linux Ecosystem Worth $25 Billion

The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion. Despite the large number, Internetnews seems to think that the number is low compared to IDG's predicted estimate of $49 billion by year 2011. We just have to wait and see, for more details.

Ext4 Completes Development Phase

While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.

Linux: Reboot Like a Racecar with kexec

Kexec is a feature that allows to boot kernels from a working kernel. It was originally intended for use by kernel and system developers who had to reboot several times a day. Soon, system administrators for high-availability servers found use for it as well. As systems get more and more advanced, and boot times get longer, end users can now benefit from it.

Linux Summit Will Preview New Advanced File System

Linux Foundation is organizing a end user collaboration summit this week. A major topic will be a presentation on the new upcoming filesystems - Ext4 and Btrfs. Ted Tso, who is a Linux kernel filesystem developer on a sabbatical from IBM working for Linux Foundation for a year, has talked about the two-pronged approach for the Linux kernel, taking a incremental approach with Ext4 while simultaneously working on the next generation filesystem called btrfs. Read more for details.

KpackageKit: Future of Package Managers on Your Desktop

PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.