Linux Archive

The Ottawa Linux Symposium wrapped up its busy 4 days with a 6-hour long bar party at the Black Thorn Café across the street from the American Embassy in Ottawa. And for some, it was that social aspect that they came for. For most attendees, though, stable Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton's keynote address was the highlight of the day.

Gartner will officially announce figures that show Linux has shipped on 5% of all PCs worldwide in 2004. It expects that figure to grow to 7.5% by 2008, but is quick to point out that this is not necessarily a representative figure of the number of Linux PCs being used. The company estimates that perhaps 2% of all PCs shipped worldwide this year will actually be used with Linux, with that figure growing to 3.5% by 2008. Not every PC that ships with a version of Linux continues to run with that, noted Gartner.

Preston Gralla, a well-known technology expert and windows user for a long time, tries Linux after his son suggests it to him. I found his testimony brief but very honest.

Jono Bacon has written an article on my O'Reilly Blog called The path to unified interaction which looks at the challenges of making our software work natively in the different desktop environments on Linux. Do you think this is something we should strive for, and if so, do you think it is technically possible?

Say you want to use Linux in a dual-boot arrangement, but you don't have any free space on your computer's hard drive. One solution would be to use a "live" Linux distribution such as Knoppix, which can be run directly from CD. This is certainly viable for occasional use, but it has a number of serious drawbacks.

Loosely based on Red Hat Linux 9, ELX BizDesk 4.0 is designed primarily for corporate users who are looking for a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Windows and Office. DesktopOS.com has just published a comprehensive review that examines this Indian-designed distribution.

This articles teaches you how a Linux system starts, or boots -- that is, how the kernel gets into memory and how the regular system processes get started.

Yoper Linux V2 has been released. It includes "leading edge technology enhancements using Linux Kernel 2.6.7, bolstered with performance patches, innovative prelinking, Win4Lin support, VMware support, VMware module integration, NVIDIA 3D support, ReiserFS 4, Secure SHell File System, CDROM Supermount and NdisWrapper for Windows binary driver integration."

The crackers currently have the whip hand over Windows, and Microsoft's assertion that Internet Explorer is now part of the operating system shows its flawed reasoning. Worried sick about the latest rash of Internet Explorer security problems? I have the perfect solution for you, one that's even better than switching to Mozilla, Firefox or Opera. Switch operating systems: Go to Linux, says eWEEK.

This article is a quick overview of scheduling in operating systems and presents Bossa, a research project on operating system schedulers and domain-specific languages.

Linux is not after Microsoft. Linux is chasing Unix out of the enterprise server scene. Why not Microsoft? Well, its because Microsoft apparently has not completely succeeded in the data center league.

The choice of software to run our computers can get awfully depressing. On one hand, there's Windows XP expensive and woefully insecure, but it works on almost every machine out there. On the other, there's Mac OS X -- far more secure, but also expensive and restricted to Apple's own computers.

Security and the way windowing is handled remain two of the diminishing differences between Linux and Windows, according to one of the main speakers at Microsoft's developer conference.

There is a remotely exploitable bug in all Linux kernel 2.6 series due to using incorrect variable type. Vulnerability is connected to netfilter subsystem and may cause DoS. It's disclosed only when using iptables with rules matching TCP options (i.e. --tcp-option). There is no difference what action is taking up by matching rule.