Linux Archive

Melbourne Bennett has written an editorial on his opinions regarding Linux & Online communities, detailing how and why you should be giving back to them. Read the full opinion piece here.

In a multi-user, multi-process operating system, files are continually being created, modified, and deleted, often by apparently unrelated processes. This means that any software that needs to keep aware of what is happening in a filesystem needs to employ a file monitoring technique. Monitoring, in this sense, means keeping a watch over a set of files, waiting for any of them to change. Read the article at DevChannel.

WineHQ has an interview with Mike Hearn, the Wine and Autopackage developer (and also frequent OSNews reader). You can read 12 more interviews with Wine developers in their archives.

Andrew Morton, 2.6 kernel maintainer, can be forgiven if he's a little blasÉ about this week's maintenance 2.6.6 release. Morton, who said he's handling a fraction of the kernel changes these days, is mucking his way through a heavy load of more than 140 a week. "This is a large volume of changes, a much higher rate of changes than earlier kernels," Morton told SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Wednesday afternoon. "We've just got our processes sorted out better now." Read his interview here.

I've been trying Linux on and off for a couple of years. My first experience with Linux was with a version of Slackware (can't remember) way back in 1996. At the time the installation was so daunting that I gave up all together. For a little background I consider myself a proficient computer user.

"When you quit picking on Windows and start picking on Unix vendors for not being "Linuxy" enough, you've become a true zealot. However, if you consider administration, education, software development, and the labor market (at least in the U.S.), the notion of Linux being the de facto standard Unix starts to look a little less goofy." Read the rest of the article at Linux.com.

Distributors must solve setup and licensing issues for Linux to be a success on the desktop. For Linux to become a real competitor to Windows on the desktop, Linux distributors must refine their software installation and management systems. There are some loose ends that need to be tied up and some tricky legal knots to unravel, says eWeek.

MandrakeSoft S.A. and Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux division, recently shipped new versions of their respective mainstream Linux distributions, both based on the new Linux 2.6 kernel. eWEEK Labs tested Mandrakelinux 10 PowerPack+ and SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional—which each began shipping last month—and we were impressed with their ease of use and with the broadness of their capabilities.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.6 stable kernel. A number of notable additions found their way into the mainline 2.6 kernel during this development cycle, including Jens Axboe's laptop mode and the completely fair queueing (CFQ) I/O scheduler, support for a non-executable stack on a number of architectures, several patches laying the groundwork for object-based reverse mapping, and 4KB kernel stacks for the i386 architecture reducing the kernel's per process overhead, KernelTrap reports.

Linux has only recently begun to regain credibility in the financial markets since its speculative debut. However, its licensing model, hefty competition, and lack of maturity still worry investors. Companies such as Red Hat, long past its 1999 speculative highs, are slowly gaining ground while other Linux companies, such as Linspire, are planning initial public offerings. Is Linux finally becoming a viable alternative to proprietary operating systems, or is this rise simply a byproduct of a mini-tech bubble?

Resellers are enthusiastic about recent moves by Novell and Red Hat to move Linux onto the desktop but warn that fear of the unknown and missing applications are holding progress back. Asked if he thought Linux was ready to grace the desktops of the average business Philip Burgess, sales manager at Sire Technology, said: "Blimey, I've just put the phone down after talking to SUSE Linux - I'm going to see them next week."

This interview with MontaVista CEO and embedded pioneer Jim Ready explains why Ready is preparing his small, privately held company for the "battle of the century."

LinuxDevCenter takes a peek at the coLinux runtime engine, running under Windows.

Knoppix, the most popular LiveCD linux distribution (a complete linux distribution that boots off a CD-Rom) version 3.4 is out. New features include Kernel 2.6 (default is still 2.4), KDE 3.2.2, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 and Gimp 2.0. Complete changelog, torrent.