Linux Archive

Arjan van de Ven, an Intel employee and a known kernel hacker, has announced a new OSS project, the Linux-ready firmware developer kit, a "tool to test how well Linux works together with the firmware (BIOS) of your machine." In other words, a sort of 'Linux-compatible machine' test. There are screenshots as well.

You must remember the period where various electronic devices, from phones to radios, were available in transparent cases. You may have found them utterly cool. Yet the simple fact that you can't find these things on the shelves anymore (except for do-it-yourself PC cases) means the crowd doesn't find them nearly that cool. While you may not see the link yet, this is exactly why the Linux desktop will never be popular.

"To be frank you do not need a full source tree in order to just compile or build module against the running kernel; i.e. an exploded source tree is not required to build kernel drivers or modules. Developers and power users will benefit immensely from the instructions outlined below."

"Is Michael Robertson afraid of anything? The entrepreneur has a made a career - and a fortune - playing rough with giants. Now, though, he's turning up the volume: predicting an end to Apple's hold on digital music, shaking up the Linux community by looking to marry open source smarts with proprietary know-how, and talking trash about Microsoft's new Zune. Pay attention, because this is a guy who finds a way to win every time he mixes it up."

"It is with great delight that I announce the first bulk shipment of free Linux disks from the Free Linux Disk project. This shipment will put Linux into the hands of people from around the world. This would not have been made possible without support from the contributors, the sponsors, and your donations. A huge thank you to everyone that continues to help and make the project a success. I would like to give special thank you to the project contributors. They have shipped over 1000 requests at their expense. They are a tremendous help to the project and their efforts are very much appreciated."

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running. This article gives a brief overview of the field.

Not only is Linux having trouble breaking market share for desktops, server shipments actually grew at a smaller rate than Windows server shipments. "Somewhat surprisingly, Linux seems to be running out of steam a little. After nearly four years of double-digit revenue growth, the Linux server sub-market accounted for only USD1.5 billion in sales in the second quarter of 2006, an increase of only 6.1 percent. IDC didn't say this, but it could be that the mainframe market has saturated itself with Linux and is no longer consuming Linux MIPS like it has for the past several years. Linux server shipments grew 9.7 percent in the quarter, and most of the revenue and shipments were on X86 and X64 servers. Windows-based server shipments increased by 11 percent."

"2X today announced the release of 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server for Linux, which enables users to run a Linux desktop and Linux / Windows applications over any type of connection. "If Linux is going to happen on the desktop, it will require a terminal server approach such as that of 2X Terminal Server for Linux. Only with the more advanced thin client approach, will Linux be able to outdo Windows fat clients in a company's network. 2X is proud to contribute to this by opening the source code of its terminal server software for Linux."