Linux Archive

Linus Torvalds, leader of the cult of Linux, took a swipe at Apple's OS X and Microsoft Vista in the same breath at a conference in Australia last week. Speaking at the linux.conf.au conference in Melbourne, Australia, a few weeks ago, Torvalds called Leopard 'utter crap' and bashed the proprietary OS makers for being greedy, according to Australian reporter Nick Miller in the The Age. "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." He also scoffed at his rivals' practice of revenue-through-renewal by launching upgrades that require new purchases. "An operating system should be completely invisible," Torvalds said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment - to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than 'a marketing thing', according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. "They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don't think they've - not that I've gone through any huge amount of law cases - but I don't think they've generally used patents as a weapon," Torvalds said. "But they're perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, 'Hey, isn't this convenient? We can use this as a PR force'."

He doesn't own a mobile phone and he is proud of it. And he thinks virtualization is over-hyped. Find out what else we prize from Linux guru Linus Torvalds. "Linux has done what I wanted it to do for the last fifteen years, literally. So since very early on my motivation actually came from the outside: my motivation came from problems that other people see. I don't see the problems, my usage model is actually fairly simple and it's still the same development model that I tend to concentrate on. So I am actually motivated by other people's issues, and sometimes they make me go 'those people are just crazy, that's just insane', but sometimes the crazy people have some of the most interesting problems too."

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.24. "The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let's hope it's a good one. Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the tree. But most of it really is one-liners, and mostly not very exciting ones at that."

"The Intel Open Source Technology Center is pleased to announce the release of version 0.1 of LatencyTOP, a tool for developers to visualize system latencies. Slow servers, skipping audio, jerky video - everyone knows the symptoms of latency. But to know what's really going on in the system, what's causing the latency, and how to fix it... Those are difficult questions without good answers right now. LatencyTOP is a Linux tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where system latency occurs, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen. By identifying this, developers can then change the code to avoid the worst latency hiccups."

"The Linux 2.6.23 kernel comes with a modular scheduler core and a Completely Fair Scheduler, which is implemented as a scheduling module. In this article, get acquainted with the major features of the CFS, see how it works, and look ahead to some of the expected changes for the 2.6.24 release."