Linux Archive

Dan Gillmor says: "It looks like I'm going to have to reconsider something I'd been taking for granted -- that Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, was a non-starter in the operating systems race. While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up." Read the rest at SiliconValley.com.

The interview was conducted by e-mail. Questions by Tim Mullins, answers from Zackary Deems and Bernhard Rosenkraenzer who are two of the head developers of Ark Linux.

LinuxDevCenter takes a look at the Sony PlayStation 2 and add-ons that make it into a Linux computer. Elsewhere, the effort to port Linux to the GameCube -- a longtime goal for many hackers -- finally came to fruition in December 2003 at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany. Read about it at the LinuxDevCenter.

Dan Gilmor writes for the Mercury News: "It looks like I'm going to have to reconsider something I'd been taking for granted -- that Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, was a non-starter in the operating systems race. While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up. One reason I'm rethinking this long-held conviction is in my lap. I'm writing this column on a nearly 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad, a computer that was a marvel of technology in its time but is now fairly old stuff. Linux has rejuvenated this machine."

The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much that those running distributions now going on a year in age are really missing anything terribly substantial. OfB.biz did find a few interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1. Read the whole look back at the last distribution release cycle at OfB.biz.

Today I stumbled upon a little live distro called PCLinuxOS . I've seen it before mentioned online, but I never really looked at it in depth. When I found it under "alternatives" for Mandrake, I decided to take a look. I was surprized to what I found.

Linux is rapidly gaining market share in embedded operating systems. "I wouldn't be surprised if it were 20% right now," says Nadamuni. That's a far cry from the middle single digits, where Nadamuni put Linux two years ago, says LinuxInsider.

Tudy Parghel sent us a link to the first part of Tom's Hardware's migration guide. It starts you down the path of migrating from Windows to Linux.

2CPU.com has an article posted comparing the performance of Linux kernels 2.6.4 and 2.4.25 under a variety of server-oriented benchmarks. Their Apache and MySQL results were especially interesting. It's a good read for those of us debating whether or not to update our production machines from 2.4 to 2.6.

Cooperative Linux, a system for running a linux kernel completely natively within an NT environment has now been released at version 0.60.

If you are a Linux kernel and device driver developer with a moderate level of experience, the benefit of using the DSF template is twofold: You can develop test cases faster and more consistently since the DSF template can be used for many different tests. Also, you can target specific areas of the kernel for execution, which eliminates the typical userspace test case hit-or-miss approach to executing kernel code. This article will get you started simulating devices of your choice.

During the 2.5 development cycle, ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture was merged into the Linux kernel. At that time, support for OSS, the Open Sound System was marked as deprecated. A recent thread on the lkml discussed the future of OSS, questioning if it is worth fixing issues with now deprecated OSS drivers. Read the full discussion at KernelTrap.

Linuxlookup newest staff member Rich Hughes takes a look at Arch Linux version 0.6 (Widget). "I am a recovering distribution junkie. I would obsessively spend my time at Distrowatch, looking for something new. There were plenty of exciting releases. After a while, the excitement would wear off, and the sexy distribution I installed would have some annoyance, so I would dump it and look for something new."

A recent bug report on the lkml complained of significant performance degradation from enabling CONFIG_PREEMPT, kernel preemption. 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton pointed out that such degradation from enabling kernel preemption is not normal, instead likely from it triggering a bug. Also, it was recently asked on the lkml what value there is in upgrading the microcode on an Intel processor. Tigran Aivazian, author of the IA32 microcode driver and Microcode Update Utility for Linux explained.