Linux Archive

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here this week has drawn fewer people who came to learn what Linux is all about and more who are ready to buy Linux products that can deliver cost saving, performance and reliability. That was the view expressed by several LinuxWorld attendees who took time out to talk about what they saw and liked at the show.

Scyld Software today announced an agreement with Cluster Resources, an innovator in advanced workload and resource management software. The two companies have joined forces to extend the virtualization and system management capabilities of Scyld Beowulf Linux clustering software to include a powerful workload management toolset.

The Mac mini offers a viable platform for embedded multimedia development. In this article, Lewin Edwards shows how to make efficient, direct use of the framebuffer to display JPEG files and discusses the issues involved in deciding between direct framebuffer access and using the X server as a graphics driver. Part I of this series can be found here.

When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.

ARSTechnica took a new 64 bit laptop out for a test run using Gentoo Linux. How did it fair? Just that: fair, as it turns out. Lightening fast, but with more cons than pros.

In this first in a series of five tutorials, Ian introduces you to configuring your system hardware with Linux. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how Linux configures the hardware found on a modern PC and where to look if you have problems (free reg. req.).

So, you are not sure what makes a Linux distribution a good desktop Linux but you know it when you see it, right? Perhaps but perhaps not. So, what does it take to be a good desktop Linux distribution?

The CEO of cluster software vendor Scali takes issue with Microsoft's clustering options. Scali is demonstrating a new, major upgrade to its Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect suites at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

Between December 2004 and July 2005, the "defect density" in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent.

"I am proud to announce the official release of Symphony OS Alpha 4. Alpha 4 includes the KNOPPIX version of the 2.6.11 Linux Kernel and an updated base based on Knoppix 3.9, numerous improvements to the Mezzo Desktop environment, includes synaptic for package management, beagle for local searching, supports freedesktop.org .desktop files in the Programs target, and much more."

A lawyer acting for Linus Torvalds has contacted Linux vendors in Australia and asked them to sign a legal document relinquishing any legal claim to the word "Linux" and demanding they purchase a licence for its use from the Torvalds-created Linux Mark Institute, which administers the Linux trademark. The effort is part of an 18-month struggle to get 'Linux' registered as an Australian trademark.

There seems to be a new important security patch out for Linux every month, lots of "do not use this program" warnings, too many articles and books with too little useful information, high-priced consultants, and plenty of talk about compromised systems. It is almost enough to send someone back to Windows. Can the average Linux user or system administrator keep his or her system secure and still have time to do other things? Bob Toxen is happy to say yes and here is how to do it.

Every year most Linux hackers attend a conference where they talk about all those topics only kernel hackers talk about. Papers of all the talks are now available, with a wide range of topics: NTPL, XEN, page cache performance, I/O scheduling, future ext3 development, VM, and more. Also, as every year, LWN's excellent kernel summit coverage is now freely available.

After three months of testing via two beta releases and two release candidates Vector Linux has released version 5.1 of its Slackware-derived operating system. This release is an important milestone as there is now a working dependency package management system inside a Slack-based distro.