Linux Archive

After a bit over 20 months, work on ROCK 3 has been completed. ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. This means it is a tool to create and maintain GNU/Linux distributions. With a few keystrokes and some patience, you can have a generic distribution up in a short time. With some more work, you can adjust its package selection. With the help of freshmeat and the power of autotools you can add new packages in a heartbeat. The ChangeLog is available and the Roadmap for ROCK 4 is already there, too.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has put the slides and a transcript to his keynote at OLS online. The title speaks volumes: "Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel". He starts off: "I'm going to discuss the a number of different lies that people always say about the kernel and try to debunk them; go over a few truths that aren't commonly known, and discuss some myths that I hear repeated a lot."

MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 6.0. This is the first public release of SimplyMEPIS to incorporate an Ubuntu foundation. Based on the Dapper LTS package pool, 6.0 is designed for stable long term use and support. Screenshots here.

The 8th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium kicked off Wednesday in Ottawa, Canada at the Ottawa Congress Centre. Jonathan Corbet, co-founder of Linux Weekly News, opened the symposium with The Kernel Report, an update on the state of the kernel since last year.

The Linux file systems community met in June 2006 to discuss the next 5 years of file system development in Linux. Organized by Val Henson, Zach Brown, and Arjan van de Ven, and sponsored by Intel, Google, Oracle, the Linux File Systems Workshop brought together thirteen Linux file systems developers and experts to share data and brainstorm for three days. Read here, here and here.

The Linux world's very own version of Paul Thurrot, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, lists 5 things Linux can learn from... Microsoft. "Linux does a lot of things right - open-source, security, reliability - but it's far from perfect. In fact, Linux and its vendors could stand to learn a few things from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. Like what? Here's my list of the top five things that Linux could learn from Microsoft." Next thing you'll know we'll have Apple switching to Intel and... Oh, wait.

"Hopefully you never had to restore your own system from a compromise and you will not have to do this in the future. Working on several projects to restore a compromised Linux system for various clients, I have developed a set of rules that others might find useful in similar situations. The type of hacks encountered can be very variate and you might see very different ones than the one I will present, or I have seen live, but even so, this rules might be used as a starting point to develop your own recovery plan."

Here's a quick guide on how to install applications using various types of package formats in Linux. It is aimed at people new to Linux. "Installing software in GNU/Linux looks quite different to the way you’re probably used to from Microsoft Windows. This is due to philosophical reasons. GNU/Linux is a free (as in freedom) operating system. Most of the software is free as well. Thus, the programs can better cooperate with each other and often depend on each other for getting a job done."

"The Smart Package Manager hopes to beat the native package management applications for distributions like Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian at their own game. Still in beta, it has support for most major GNU/Linux package and repository formats, with a modular codebase that hints at further compatibility. Smart introduces many innovative and useful ideas, but its killer feature, with which it purports to excel beyond its counterparts, is the algorithms it uses to select packages and versions that best resolve dependencies and ensure cooperation between the hundreds of applications and libraries on a user's system."

As has been reported on LWN recently , Andrew Morton (one of the core Linux kernel developers) has been heard to worry that bugs are being added to the kernel more quickly than they are being fixed. But it is hard to know for sure. In an attempt to obtain a little more data on the problem, Andrew has asked LWN to run a survey of its subscribers. The results will, hopefully, shed some light on how a wider part of the community sees the kernel quality issue; they will be discussed at the upcoming kernel summit.

"The first time I have seen the knockd project I liked it instantly. The idea is so simple, and though so effective. Knockd is a port-knocking application that silently runs on a server passively listening to network traffic. Once it will see a port sequence it has an action configured for it, it will run that action. We can see this as a remote control to our server: once we hit the right button it will take the appropriate action!"

"The Linux kernel continues to evolve, incorporating new technologies and gaining in reliability, scalability, and performance. One of the most important features of the 2.6 kernel is a scheduler implemented by Ingo Molnar. This scheduler is dynamic, supports load-balancing, and operates in constant time -- O(1). This article explores these attributes of the Linux 2.6 scheduler, and more."

"They said it at LinuxWorld in Toronto a few months ago. They've buzzed it at analysts, and now the press is saying it to the public. Novell says this is the year of the Linux desktop, and I'm familiar with evidence showing gains in popularity for Linux. Yet, I disagree that this is the year. Nothing is happening this year to make it, specifically, the year of the Linux desktop and I'm going to hypothesize what could change that."

It's been over a year since the last time I reviewed (1, 2) the Linux distribution that I use most of the time, Arch Linux. Since then, while the distro-specific innovations have slowed a bit down, maturity and stability has emerged.