Linux Archive

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.

Phoenix Technologies has signed a deal with ASUS to include their HyperSpace "instant on" OS on new ASUS laptops, including Eee PC netbooks. Hyperspace is a stripped down Linux OS that provides you access to just a few frequently used applications like Firefox, or a media player, without waiting for a full fledged OS like Windows, or Linux to boot.

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.

This article describes an implementation of high availability for a composite application using Linux-HA. Delivering high availability to composite applications can be challenging. Because composite applications consist of several distinct applications, each with different availability requirements, configuration is complex.

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.

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.

The creation and management of user-space processes in Linux have many principles in common with UNIX but also include several unique optimizations specific to Linux. Here, review the life cycle of Linux processes and explore the kernel internals for user process creation, memory management, scheduling, and death.

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.

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 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."

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.

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

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.

Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux and the PowerStation PowerPC workstation (among other things) has been acquired by Fixstars Corporation from Japan, a company solely focused on the Cell/B.E. broadband engine. The entire product line and staff of Terra Soft Solutions will be maintained in Loveland, Colorado.