Linux Archive

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.

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."

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.

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 Foundation has announced Linux Standard Base 4.0 beta. LSB attempts to provide a consistent Linux platform for ISV's. These are a number of changes. Following Red Hat's efforts to consolidate on NSS, LSB has endorsed it as the cryptography solution as well as providing new distribution tests and tools for certification of third party applications.

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.

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.

Linus Torvalds who has recently started blogging, writes about the new 2.6.27 release. The developer's viewpoint on releases tend to be different from end users. Some interesting bits...

The Linux Kernel version 2.6.25 introduces a new Linux process sleeping state, TASK_KILLABLE: If a process is sleeping killably in this new state, it works like TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE with the bonus that it can respond to fatal signals. This feature is generally an improvement over the existing options -- after all, it is another way to keep from getting stuck with dead processes.

Lennart Poettering, main programmer of the PulseAudio project, has written a 'Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle': "At the Audio MC at the Linux Plumbers Conference one thing became very clear: it is very difficult for programmers to figure out which audio API to use for which purpose and which API not to use when doing audio programming on Linux. So here's my try to guide you through this jungle."

I'm generally not very fond of reporting on security breaches or bugs, but OSNews reader and Mandriva employee Adam Williamson warned us of a pretty serious bug in pre-releases of the Linux kernel. "A major bug has been found in the e1000e module (which supports some Intel onboard ethernet adapters) in Linux kernel 2.6.27 pre-releases (up to and including 2.6.27rc7). It can cause the EEPROM of the adapter to become corrupted, rendering it non-functional. This may affect current pre-releases of distributions. Mandriva has posted a detailed notification about the issue, as has SUSE." So, watch out.

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code. Update by TH: Rebuttals are appearing all over the web, like this one by Canonical's Matt Zimmerman ("He's refuting a claim which has, quite simply, never been made. When this sort of thing happens on mailing lists, it's called trolling."), or this one by another Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland.

Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group recently hosted another of its Kernel Walkthrough tutorials given by Bart Trojanowski. The screencast starts with a one-hour presentation on the components involved, and then dives into the code which bootstraps the kernel on the 32bit x86 platform. The first Kernel Walkthrough by the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group covered Linux development background, file layout and data types.

"Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done." The solution came in the form of udev, and udev uses rules to determine how it should handle devices. This allows distributors to tweak how they want devices to be handled. "Or maybe not. Udev maintainer Kay Sievers has recently let it be known that he would like all distributors to be using the set of udev rules shipped with the program itself." ComputerWorld dives into the situation.