Linux Archive

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.

It was another small step forward for Oracle Enterprise Linux this week as a handful of ISVs pledged support, but it's still a long road ahead for the Red Hat clone. Says searchenterpriselinux, "The news came a day after Oracle announced that a handful of other hardware ISVs had also pledged to support its brand of Linux. For Tony Iams, a senior analyst with Rye Brooke, N.Y.-based Ideas International Ltd., the news was indicative of an upward trend for the company's Linux distribution, which was launched in October."

According to kerneltrap: "The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, awaiting his May 7th trial. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton stated, 'the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it.'"

"More than half of the 1.2 million lines of code for the real-time kernel technology have been moved into the mainline Linux kernel over the past year, Tim Burke, the director of emerging technologies at Red Hat, said at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference on April 23."

Recently a change in the Linux virtualization landscape has appeared with the introduction of the Kernel virtual Machine. KVM supports the virtualization of Linux guest operating systems - even Windows - with hardware that is virtualization-aware. Learn about the architecture of the Linux KVM as well as why its tight integration with the kernel may change the way you use Linux. Update: An interview with the KVM lead developer.

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal."

TriedIT reviews CRUX 2.3, and concludes: "CRUX 2.3 is simple, but not from a user standpoint. It does require a lot of manual installation and configuration. It also doesn’t come with a bunch of pre-installed software either. But the distribution is meant for experienced users, after all. It is definitely simple from a system standpoint, however. There's no complex hardware auto-detection, or heavy weight desktop environments, 3D desktops or proprietary video card drivers. The package system is also pretty simple, but includes source-based package installation. There are no fancy GUI configuration utilities (or even console-based ones)."

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

"NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix, a purely functional package management system. NixOS is an experiment to see if we can build an operating system in which software packages, configuration files, boot scripts and the like are all managed in a purely functional way, that is, they are all built by deterministic functions and they never change after they have been built."