Linux Archive

As Linux made its way further into the enterprise, a key feature that it was lacking at one point in time was a journaling file system. This was true in 1999, but today there are four journaling file systems that can solve enterprise server requirements. This article focuses on one of them: JFS.

Michael C. Barnes updates his in-depth review of Linux desktop operating systems. In this exclusive article at DesktopLinux.com, Barnes examines how far the Linux distributions have come over the past year, updating his popular first article and evaluating the current versions of leading Desktop Linux desktop options including Ark Linux, ELX Linux, Lycoris, MEPIS, Vector Linux, Xandros, as well as Live CDs including Puppy Linux and Flonix.

Linux kernel 2.6.4 has been released. Get it from a mirror or read the changelog.

"Thanks to its streamlined and relatively secure core, the Linux operating system has gradually been winning a place on servers in federal agencies. Now Linux is making inroads on desktop PCs as well, territory that has long been ruled by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows." Read the article at USAToday.

Increasingly, businesses, government entities and schools are starting to look beyond Windows, which IDC says securely dominates the desktop market with a 94% market share. Instead they're considering running Linux as their client operating environment. But the move is a slow one. In the meantime, Sun's JDS turns heads: Fonterra, Auckland University giving Linux serious consideration.

ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. You can configure your personal build of ROCK and easily build your own distribution. Features of ROCK Linux v2.0 are build dependency auto-detection, a new binary package format, "smart optimizations", the ability to be build on a cluster and many more. ROCK Linux comes along with over 1000 package descriptions ready for compilation. Currently supported platforms include x86, AMD64, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, SPARC as well as SPARC64.

This whitepaper provides an changes that you may need to make to a customized or specialized Linux installation in order to use it with the Linux 2.6 kernel, building upon the configuration file and administrative updates that were touched upon in the third article in this series.

The 2.6 Linux kernel employs a number of techniques to improve the use of large amounts of memory, making Linux more enterprise-ready than ever before.

These days you cannot talk about computers and networks without thinking of Linux and wireless networking. This article explains wireless networking with WLAN, Bluetooth, GPRS, GSM, and IrDA from a Linux perspective. It uses various wireless devices and the corresponding kernel layers and user space tools to demonstrate how they work with Linux. With this knowlege you can tinker with various wireless devices having different form factors, and develop Linux kernel code required to enable unsupported devices.

Continuing with the Linux on the AMD64 series of articles, this installment is to be a summary of two new distributions, and the changes that have been made to Gentoo since the last installment. Here I review the installation of TurboLinux 8 (both with and without the update CD), the installation of Fedora Core for x86_64, and more news on Gentoo for the AMD64.

This article describes how Linux boots. Who loads what, who starts which program, and what services do and act like.

The new maintainer of the Linux Kernel 2.2, Marc-Christian Petersen announced the release of 2.2.26. The release includes several security fixes, including a fix for the mremap() bug. Alan Cox released the previous 2.2 kernel, 2.2.25 almost a year ago, in March 2003. In August of the same year he began a one year sabbatical to study for an MBA, handing over the maintainership to Marc-Christian.

This white paper explains how to upgrade an existing desktop system to the 2.6 kernel. It covers software requirements imposed by the new kernel, and administrative changes that you must make when migrating an existing system to the 2.6 kernel. It supplements previous whitepapers in the same series about Customizing the 2.6 kernel and porting drivers to the 2.6 kernel.

"Linux Kernel 2.6 has been in stable release for months now, which is like dog's years in kernel time. Kernel releases are exciting times for Linux geeks, because it's just plain fun to be able to replace the kernel on a system, or have several different kernels installed, and choose among them as the whim strikes. Oh yes, you want to gain improved performance and functionality, too." Read the article at ITManagement.