Linux Archive

Elive is a Live CD featuring Enlightenment as the only window manager (and desktop shell too). Its version 0.1 was mostly an alpha release, and while E16 ran fine, E17 was severely broken in many aspects. Elive 0.3 fixes most of those problems and presents E17 at a point where it's perfectly usable for the day-to-day desktop. Read the review here. Update: screenshots.

This may not be news for the experienced Linux users here, but for those who are new to Linux, someone sent me a link to this new online Linux magazine geared towards new Linux users. The magazine is published by the same company as publishes the Linux Journal, it is well laid out and is free to subscribe to.

IBM's Developerworks website has published an outstanding free tutorial (free reg. req.) introducing hackers to the Linux source. "This tutorial is written for Linux or UNIX programmers whose skills and experience are at a beginning to intermediate level. You should have a general familiarity with using a UNIX command-line shell and a working knowledge of the C language."

For as long as most technologists can remember, there has been Wintel, the $250 billion industry dominated by Microsoft's Windows operating systems and Intel's microprocessors. But Lintel, or the Linux operating system and Intel, is now encroaching on this empire, and behind it is the entire open-source software movement, which threatens to overthrow the Windows industry.

Linus has released 2.6.13 after a longer testing period and committed to improving the release cycle by merging in the major changes within the first two weeks for 2.6.14 and above as discussed before in kernel summit recently.

The next stable update of the Linux kernel will bring advances in file system event monitoring, the Xtensa architecture, and a set of system calls that allows users to load another kernel from the currently executing Linux kernel. While the 2.6.13 –rc are currently being tested, the stable version is expected to be released in the next few weeks.

Japan's Miracle Linux Corp., China's Red Flag Software Co. and Haansoft Inc. of South Korea are teaming up to release Asianux 2.0, a Linux distribution meant to compete with Microsoft Windows in their home regions.

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation. He explained that the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters are a requirement of maintaining a trademark. "Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even the Linux Mark Institute has so far historically always lost money on it."

Systemsim970 written in C, is a full-system simulation infrastructure and tools for the PowerPC 970 instruction set built upon the IBM Power architecture. It provides a Linux full-system simulation to develop, run, and evaluate PowerPC software stack solutions in the absence of PowerPC system hardware.

You can turn your blue Linksys router into a Linux box with OpenWrt, an embedded Linux distribution for Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers. This tiny distribution exceeds the default firmware functionality in many useful ways. Instead of having only a Web-controlled wireless access point, OpenWrt provides you with a fully interactive Linux system.

Security, cost-savings, performance and innovation are the primary reasons to move to Linux, says Novell Linux developer evangelist Darren R. Davis, stating what is to him the obvious. Rather than dillydallying with that question, he'd rather help IT shops and developers get moving to Linux. Davis explains how to port Unix and Windows applications to Linux and how to make those Linux apps support multiple distributions in this interview.

Knoppix, a Linux live CD, will boot a computer from the optical drive and give a slow but usable graphical user interface. The most recent version comes with Firefox and OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta, so if you're already using the Windows equivalent, Knoppix is that much easier to pick up. This still leaves the question, what can be done on a computer without a hard drive?

Trusted Computing is generally associated with Microsoft, and, as of a short time ago, now Apple as well. On the other hand, little time is spent on the idea of integrating Trusted Platform Module support deep into GNU/Linux and other Free Software desktops. Maybe it is time for that to change.