Linux Archive

"What makes GNU/Linux such a pleasure to use is the excellent documentation that is included with it for each and every tool bundled with it. Just try learning to use iptables without reading the documentation even once, and you will get the idea. The documentation in Linux is available in a variety of formats - as man pages, info, HTML pages, postscript and in some cases even pdf. But not many people are aware that you can have additional documentation and even whole books available locally for making your GNU/Linux experience that much richer. Here are a few of them that have come to my notice."

It seems like Linus Torvalds cannot make up his mind about whether or not to use the GPL3 for the Linux kernel. After clearly rejecting the idea of using the GPL3 ('and I don't see that changing'), he now opens the option up again. "It's 'quite possible,' said Torvalds that the GPL 3 could be used, 'but on the other hand, there's a purely practical problem with any change of license when you have tens of major copyright holders and hundreds of people who have written some part and thousands who have submitted one-liners and small fixes. There are, after all, benefits to putting the kernel under the GPL 3,' Torvalds said."

"New real-time Linux enhancements open a whole new world of possibilities for Linux, ranging across the latest 3G technologies and as near as the mobile handset in your pocket. The purpose of modifying the Linux kernel with real-time functionality: to dramatically reduce interrupt and task preemption latency, thus enabling the 2.6 kernel for use in high-performance multimedia applications and those requiring extremely fast, task level reliable control functions. Real-time Linux has come a long way - where is it now and where is it heading?"

The Free Standards Group, the non-profit group behind the Linux Standard Base, has announced that Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock will be its new chief technology officer and will chair the LSB workgroup. A spokesperson for the FSG said that as co-founder of Debian Linux and the commercial custom Linux distributor Progeny, Murdock brings unmatched experience building open-source communities, driving technical consensus and solving Linux distribution challenges. Murdock has also been one of the leaders of the DCC Alliance.

Alan Cox, a leading UK Linux developer, has expressed his support for the next version of the General Public License. His viewpoint is in direct contradiction to Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, who said last week that he won't convert Linux to GPL 3 as he objects to its proposed digital rights management provisions. Cox said that the DRM provisions "don't really matter" to the Linux kernel as DRM is generally used by applications.

The OpenVZ project has released a beta kernel based on 2.6.15 (their current stable kernel is based on 2.6.8). Kernel 2.6.15 brings in some new features like CFQv2 I/O schedulers, enhancements in memory management, ext3 online resizing, and so on. This kernel is already stable enough to be used for testing/evaluation. Some things such as 4GB split and Fair CPU scheduler are not yet ported, but they are working on it. For interested kernel developers, they have also released broken out patch sets for the 2.6.15-based kernels, available from here.

LinuxQuestions.org announced that voting for the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 20 categories, including Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on March 16th and winners will have the option of receiving their award at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Last year's winners include Firefox, OOo, and MySQL.

"A conceptual understanding of file systems, especially data structure and related terms, will help you become a successful system administrator. I have seen many new Linux system administrator without any clue about file systems. The conceptual knowledge can be applied to restore file systems in an emergency situation."

Linus posted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List today and said that the kernel will not be moving to GPLv3. "The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licenceable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing."

"Probably everyone who reads DesktopLinux.com encounters the same question over and over again: "What's the best Linux desktop distribution?" Now, while some people will swear up and down that Slackware or Fedora or even Puppy, for that matter, is the best Linux desktop, I think the answer is more complicated. In fact, I don't think there is a single answer."

"Coming home after a hard day at work after staring at the monitor continuously for hours on end, the last thing I want to do many days is sit in front of the computer again. At times though, I have this urge to grab a book and do some light reading but often the strain on my eyes dissuades me in pursuing this thought any further. This is where this very nice utility called Festival comes into the picture. Festival is a text-to-speech synthesiser developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. It is shipped with most Linux distributions and has been released under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike."

"With the traditional Microsoft news media turning their collective ear to the rest of the industry, you have to suspect a changing of the guard. But Linux companies don't seem to guage their efforts by what the industry says about Microsoft. Linux just keeps chugging along. So what does the Industry have to say about Microsoft? They say that though many people will swear by the invincibility of Microsoft's ship, it hasn't maneuvered all the icebergs. Collectively, the competition has started ringing up wins. With alternatives in Linux, FireFox, OpenOffice.org and Apple the Microsoft floating casino has begun to list and sway. Here's how and some of it might surprise you."

"The sockets API lets you develop client and server applications that can communicate across a local network or across the world via the Internet. Like any API, you can use the sockets API in ways that promote high performance - or inhibit it. This article explores four ways to use the sockets API to squeeze the greatest performance out your application and to tune the GNU/Linux environment to achieve the best results."

"Companies using Linux for embedded applications may be unwittingly violating the Linux license and even breaking federal securities laws, according to a research published by Wasabi Systems. According to the study, the problem lies with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that companies disclose ownership of intellectual property to their shareholders. The study indicates that dozens of companies are discovered each year to have violated the terms of GPL, and if they are public companies, they are violating Sarbanes-Oxley."