Linux Archive

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday. In the latest kernel release, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago, the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said.

"One of the greatest features of the Linux operating system is its networking stack. It was initially a derivative of the BSD stack and is well organized with a clean set of interfaces. Its interfaces range from the protocol agnostics, such as the common sockets layer interface or the device layer, to the specific interfaces of the individual networking protocols. This article explores the structure of the Linux networking stack from the perspective of its layers and also examines some of its major structures."

"Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563."

The Linux community is splitting - right down the middle, at this point - over Microsoft's controversial claims that the open-source operating system infringes on patents it holds. Last Tuesday, Mandriva became the third Linux vendor within five days to say it isn't interested in signing a licensing deal with Microsoft to avoid possible infringement claims. A blog posting to that effect by Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon followed similar declarations by officials at Red Hat and Canonical.

I have so much to thank Bill Gates for: introducing me to the baffling joys of consumer computing with Windows 95; teaching me the meaning of fear and dread with Windows 98; leading me to the sunlit uplands of Windows XP; getting me out of Microsoft altogether with the arrival of Vista. I hardly know where to start. And if I hadn't flown into a high-minded anti-Microsoft, down-with-Bill-Gates fury at the start of this year, would I ever have stumbled upon ZenWalk? I doubt it.

Alan Cox talks about cooperation with hardware vendors, patent law, microkernels, and GPLv3: "I think is a bad idea and that Novell are going to get stung by the GPLv3, and rightfully so. The license is designed to keep the software free, if it fails to do this then it needs fixing, so GPLv3 hopefully will fix this flaw."

"The Symphony OS Project is pleased to announce the release of Symphony OS 2007.06. This is our first release based fully on Ubuntu and even though many improvements have not yet made it into this release, we hope to speed up the release schedule over the next couple months to help us settle into our new Ubuntu base system."

The T2 SDE release 7.0-rc named 'Water Falls' features two newly supported CPU architectures AVR32 and Blackfin as well as the brand new GCC 4.2 and GlibC 2.6. Additionally the T2 7.0 series comes with over 400 new packages while most of the existing packages received an update, including KDE 3.5.7, GNOME 2.18.2, X.org 7.3, XFCE 4.4.1, and Enlightenment 17. Many new features were implemented, including architecture and target package overlays.

DistroWatch has a review of PCLinuxOS 2007. "While they are not quite there yet, PCLinuxOS are certainly on the right track to achieving their goal of being 'radically simple'. Currently the system feels like a bit of a mixed bag, but if they can start to make their own path a little more independent there will be no stopping them."

"The one 'hole' in my workflow has been OCR. For years, people have been able to scan a document and have it converted into real text. One of my old printers even came with OCR software included - for Windows of course. But when I've really needed OCR, I've just assumed that there were no high quality packages available for Linux. Recently I decided to find out for myself (a complete OCR virgin) what is available, how to use it, and what the results are like. I installed every free OCR package I could find, and systematically tested them. They all work very differently, so I tried to design a simple test for my specific needs."

Why is it that the average computer user still chooses to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows or Mac when there are countless Linux alternatives that they could download, install and make use of completely free of charge? Some answers here.

"Good operating system performance depends in part on the operating system's ability to efficiently manage resources. In the old days, heap memory managers were the norm, but performance suffered due to fragmentation and the need for memory reclamation. Today, the Linux kernel uses a method that originated in Solaris but has been used in embedded systems for quite some time, allocating memory as objects based on their size. This article explores the ideas behind the slab allocator and examines its interfaces and their use."

"It has been a hard year around here but steady progress on Symphony has continued. Symphony OS 2007 will be released either late this month or early next month with several major changes: Ubuntu 7.04 base system, Ubiquity installer, Google Gadgets as desklets, and continued performance improvements."

"Arch Linux, or Arch for short, is one of the uprising new distributions. Well, at least compared to old folks like Debian or Slackware it’s still fresh and shining. Arch is gaining new users and good reviews every day. Let’s find out why this is happening." More here.