Linux Archive

What do people do these days when they are bored? One of the latest additions to the list of answers seems to be Build a Linux Distribution. Have you checked on Distrowatch lately? They have upwards of 100 distributions listed there. I used to be happy that I had a lot of choices but now I am beginning to get intimidated by the sheer volume of choices. You could play charades with only Linux Distro Names.

Open Source Development Labs, which promotes adoption of Linux, said Monday it is putting in place a new system to better track and document changes to the operating system's kernel.

News.com is carrying an article that seems to have gone by unnoticed. Macromedia is looking into releasing Linux versions of their development tools. This will immediately make Flash development accessible. Future products will enable Linux users to program using next generation Macromedia technologies such as MXML.

Version 2 of CRUX, the lightweight keeping-it-simple Linux distribution, has been released ISO image. It's based on the 2.6 kernel, Glibc 2.33 with NPTL, GCC 3.3.3 and X.org's X11 6.7.0. Changelog.

Andrea Arcangeli is well known for having completely rewritten and stabilized the virtual memory subsystem in the 2.4 Linux kernel. Many were surprised when Linus Torvalds merged Andrea's VM into 2.4.10, but the new memory subsystem has long since proved itself. Andrea is a 27 year old Linux kernel hacker living in Italy and working for SUSE.

Businesses, not hobbyists, are the main contributors to embedded Linux, yet open source participation is growing as companies discover the benefits of shared development. This is one of several key findings from a survey of embedded Linux developers conducted jointly by MIT and the University of Munich.

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.