Linux Archive

"Almost a year ago the Linux WLAN developers announced the switch to a new WLAN subsystem. Today the new system finally found its way into the mm kernel tree of Andrew Morton. In May and April 2006 it became clear that the devicescape WLAN stack will be the future base for the Linux WLAN drivers. The aim was to overcome the current situation of having several different subsystems for different drivers and to create a common, well documented subsystem. The new stack will feature a reworked driver for Broadcom bcm43xx drivers as well as a Ralink rt2x00 driver. And, as already mentioned, Intel's ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon."

A review of KateOS Live 3.2 Beta. "KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) distribution which is completely community-driven. The effects of the community work are pretty impressive. Kate is original and has its own feeling. Each new release of the system brings a few decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux lightweight multimedia desktop. In my opinion it will soon be able to compete with other popular lightweight Linux-based systems like Xubuntu or Zenwalk."

Linux distributor TerraSoft is accepting pre-orders for Sony Playstation 3 gaming devices pre-installed with Linux. Linux is installed alongside the Playstation 3's native gaming OS.

Wind River, one of the world's top embedded software providers, has acquired a real-time Linux distribution and patented hard-real-time technology from FSMLabs Inc. The acquisition will help Wind River penetrate new and emerging markets requiring extremely tight timing constraints, including the vast, emerging market for low-cost, single-core feature phones, according to the company.

"GoboLinux is a unique distribution in many ways. It's built from scratch following the Linux From Scratch procedure and uses custom boot scripts, personalized directory structure, and a simple yet comprehensive source-based dependency-resolving package management system. GoboLinux is perhaps best known for its alternate filesystem hierarchy. Unlike Linux's traditional Filesystem hierarchy, where a program has bits and pieces scattered in several places like /etc, /usr/bin, and /usr/share, each program gets its own directory tree under GoboLinux."

Originally Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 was slated for late December release, but after a few delays, they have announced the impending release of YDL 5.0 for Power Macs. YDL v5.0 has been available for the Sony PlayStation 3 since November, but here is the Mac delivery schedule: install and source ISOs available for download via YDL.net Enhanced accounts at the end of February 2007. Two weeks later, DVDs will ship from the Terra Soft Store. Two weeks after that, you can download install and source ISOs via the public mirrors.

"Portland is a new open source project that promises to simplify the deployment and commercialization of Linux applications by helping them run on multiple desktop environments, including Gnome and KDE. Although still young, Portland is available today, and it looks to be improving rapidly. Get started using the XdgUtils toolset in Portland 1.0."

The Southern California Linux Exposition's fifth year has been its best yet, with record attendance, vendor participation, and excellent presentations and talks. There were few new things to announce or showcase at the event, but if you wanted to measure the pulse of the open source software community, this was undeniably the place to be this past weekend. More on SCALE 2007 at Linux.com.

Yesterday, Linspire and Canonical issued a joint announcement that Linspire would begin to base its distributions on Ubuntu rather than Debian, and that Ubuntu users would be able to use CNR to install proprietary applications and drivers, starting with the Fiesty Fawn release. Linspire is just the latest distro to switch from Debian to Ubuntu, though it may be the highest-profile distribution to do so. Are other distros in talks with Canonical? Steve George, Canonical's director of support and services, says that Canonical is in talks with other vendors, and says, "I think you'll see some announcements next week about other people using us as a platform."

When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

After two months of development, Linux 2.6.20 has been released. This release includes two different virtualization implementations: KVM: full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Aditionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, and many other things. Read the list of changes for details.

Distrowatch did the first review of Foresight Linux 1.0. They conclude: "Overall, despite a few early glitches while installing Foresight Linux 1.0, this distribution has turned out to be very usable system with an excellent package management utility and a unique, web based system configuration manager. It is clearly designed for users who enjoy GNOME and Mono software on their desktops or those who want to try the latest versions of these applications."

"Elive is a live CD Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment window manager. Elive aims to provide an aesthetically pleasing environment with a full suite of desktop applications that runs efficiently on older systems. Its developers aren't finished yet, but they've come a long way with Elive since the release of 0.3 more than a year ago. This CD shows how beautiful distributions can become without being bloated."

"Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do. All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done."