Linux Archive

June saw new releases of two of the world's most significant Linux distributions—Red Hat Inc.'s Fedora Core and Software in the Public Interest Inc.'s Debian—both of which are popular, freely available and capable of serving well in roles from the server room to the desktop.

"Sometimes System Administrators need to determine where applications spend most of their time, in order to tune their systems better. The traditional method, when the source code for the application and gcc are available, is just to recompile the application with the – pg flag and to use gprof to profile it. Other than the inconvenience of the recompilation process, the solution is pretty straightforward. But what happens when you don’t have the source code for the application? And what if you’d like to profile the system as a whole? That’s when oprofile comes in handy."

In a follow-up to last week's Linux distro roundup, TipMonkies has published an article introducing users to partitioning and filesystems, and explains how to set up a dual-boot environment.

Andrew Morton, maintainer of "mm" patchset of the Linux Kernel which acts as a development tree has posted a long list of features for potential inclusion in the 2.6.13 version of the Linux kernel.

Proc: Manipulating all manners of runtime state information by using file-level system calls and commands. Read more at LinuxJournal.

TipMonkies has an article highlighting some of the major distros and their derivatives. The article discusses some history and the advantages and disadvantages of each distro. If you have not been keeping up with Linux developments, or have yet to try a distro, it may be a good place to start.

Imagine using your iPod and a regular old microphone to record studio-quality audio. Or sitting on a commuter train and playing Othello, Pong, Tetris, or Asteroids. All this and more is possible when you install Linux on your third-generation or earlier iPod. Best of all, one soft reset, and you’re back in Apple’s iPod operating system, listening to your tunes.

Performance analysis and bottleneck determination in Linux is not rocket science. It requires some basic knowledge of the hardware and kernel architecture and the use of some standard tools. Using a hands-on approach they’ll walk readers through the different subsystems and the key indicators, to understand which component constitutes the current bottleneck of a system.

According to McKusick, one of the FreeBSD creators, Linus has said: "I wouldn't have to create Linux if there wasn't any lawsuit against BSD in the early 90`s. It wouldn't be necesary".

After my editorial yesterday about the hurdles the Linux desktop will have to endure after Apple moves to x86, two high-profile editors seconded the notion: read John C. Dvorak's editorial and eWEEK's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's analysis.

Linux use in computer servers running business applications was reported in 53 percent of the 500 North American companies surveyed by SG Cowen & Co. for its Core Technology Survey, released this week. In addition, 7 percent of the respondents planned to adopt Linux, which was the "most modest" level the New York investment banker had seen in its survey.

The tools to analyze the performance of applications are varied and have existed in one form or another since the early days of UNIX. It is critical to understand how an application is interacting with the operating system, CPU, and memory system to understand its performance. This chapter will help you understand where the bottleneck in your system is occuring, and how to fix it.

One of the biggest difficulties in migrating from Windows to Linux is the lack of knowledge about comparable software. Newbies usually search for Linux analogs of Windows software, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they may not know much about available Windows software. This list of Linux equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software is based on our own experience and on the information obtained from the visitors of this page on English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, French & German.

A HOWTO on GIT patch management software that replaces Bitkeeper has been published on the Linux Kernel mailing list.