Linux Archive

"I am faced with a challenge: I need to find a Linux distribution that is both small enough, efficient enough and easy enough to maintain for my laptop. Realizing that all Linux distributions are not created equal, I did my research and was able to narrow my list to a handful of distributions that may be suitable for my needs and my laptop. Throughout the course of this article, I am going to test each of these distributions on my laptop and discuss my experiences. I will attempt to install and evaluate each distribution for a period of a couple of days. Based on my findings, I will select the distribution that best suits my needs."

"The success of Mozilla's Firefox and Openoffice.org's productivity suite has breathed life into people's aspirations about Desktop Linux. As a result, the vast majority of articles published today focus there and ignore the strides made on the Linux server. Unlike the Linux server of the past, today's version supports rocket science and its gains far exceed those of the Desktop."

"I've been a Linux diehard since my early days with Debian 1.3. I visited various RPM distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE, flirted with Gentoo, and jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but I could never find a single place to settle - until I tried Arch Linux."

"Can the ordinary computer user ditch Windows for Linux? The question came up when I decided that my six-year-old version of Microsoft's Windows operating system had to be replaced. My Sony Vaio computer was still too young for the trash heap. And I was hesitant to spend $200 on the Windows XP operating system, especially with Microsoft planning to launch XP's replacement, Vista, in January. So, I decided to give the operating systems that run on Linux technology a try."

"SELinux, the US National Security Agency's implementation of mandatory access control, is the most prominent new security subsystem in Linux. It comes installed by default in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is available in easy-to-install packages in other distributions. This article shows you how to convert a non-SELinux system by hand in order to expose details about how SELinux is integrated into a system."

Six months ago, architects from two dozen desktop-oriented Linux projects gathered in Portland to work together on creating the best possible Linux desktop. Thus was born the Portland Project. Now, in Mainz, Germany, the expanded group is meeting again on May 8 and 9 to see how far it's come and to look at what's ahead.

News reports out of LinuxTag late last week have Andrew Morton, the second highest ranking Linux kernel developer, calling for a bug-fixing cycle to cut down on the growing number of bugs found in the latest kernel release. NewsForge contacted the number one man on the Linux project, Linus Torvalds, who acknowledged it might be the right time for a "bug cycle".

"When you are using SMP you might want to override the kernel’s process scheduling and bind a certain process to a specific CPU(s). CPU affinity is nothing but a scheduler property that “bonds” a process to a given set of CPUs on the SMP system. With the help of Linux scheduler utilities you can set up processor affinity for a certain task or process." On a related note, here's a short guide on kernel compilation.

MadPengiun has a review of the PepperPad, a Linux-powered competitor to Microsoft's Origami concept, and concludes: "Overall, the Pepper Pad is a sleek ultra mobile PC in a nice form factor with a great touchscreen for navigating, launching applications, watching video and surfing the web. With the advent of AJAX web-based applications for calendaring, editing video, word processing, creating spreadsheets, and more, you can have some good fun with the Pepper Pad and get a wee bit of work done as well. The Pepper Pad won't replace a Sony PSP-type game platform, or a PDA, or a notebook, but it will do some things that those devices won't do."

"Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails to run. In such situations after I have tried every trick in the book like searching on the net and posting questions to Linux forums, and still failed to resolve the problem, I turn to the last resort which is trace the output of the misbehaving program. Tracing the output of a program throws up a lot of data which is not usually available when the program is run normally. And in many instances, sifting through this volume of data has proved fruitful in pin pointing the cause of error."

"In our last article, we discussed the registering process for the file system and then mounting it accordingly. In this article, however, we'll discuss the two widely used structures (structures as in C) in implementation of a file system. And then we will delve on the operations on super block structure."

"This is the first part of a series of articles regarding Linux Kernel Modules. In this series we will see some examples of module programming and some techniques and general rules that we must keep in mind when we work in kernel mode. This is not an in-depth series of articles, but and introduction for those people who want to know more about kernel internals. A background in C programming will be helpful."

"With a bit of C and microprocessors knowledge, this article shows it's possible to write your own device drivers in Linux. It might not be the easiest thing to do, but it's great to see that writing device drivers doesn't require black magic - it's just a matter of talking to the Linux kernel!" And a matter of praying that Linux's driver interface doesn't change while writing your driver, of course.

"The Free Standards Group will unveil Linux Standard Base 3.1, the first LSB version to include explicit Linux desktop application support, April 25 at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego. The standard has already been endorsed by Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell, along with other major Linux players such as AMD, Asianux, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Mandriva, RealNetworks, Red Flag, and Turbolinux, according to the FSG."