Linux Archive

Debian and KDE developers have announced an ambitious initiative to provide an enterprise Linux desktop operating system based on the KDE interface. Perens, an important open-source community leader, though, sees this move as pulling effort away from his similar GNOME-based plan, UserLinux.

This is the second installment of the "Linux on the Opteron, are we ready?" article. Basically, it is a "where are we now?" article, noting that what once did work now does not, and others that did not work now do. The first article was published on OSNews almost three months ago. Since that time not too much has happened publicly in regards to the amd64 Linux situation, but a lot of people mailed to tell me that I should have checked out SuSE or the new Mandrake which was "about to be released" at that time. Also since that time I have upgraded the RAM and acquired a larger hard disk for the machine. I will give a brief rundown of the system as it stands now, what I tried to install on it, and what works.

KernelTrap posted an interview with William Lee Irwin III, aka 'wli', and a step-by-step guide to installing his performance improving -wli patchset.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. He covers everything from logging to networking, and from the command-line to help systems etc.

A debate has started in the Linux kernel mailing list about the ide-scsi module. The cdrecord guys want it up while Linus points out that the module is "bad" and it imposes a number of problems to users. Our take: I've been hit by most of Linus' points: from the 'silly CD numbering' confusion, to the need to have two LILO entries to load ide-scsi or not in order to either burn a CD or be able to watch DVD.

Linux news is getting more and more exciting, and somehow, managing to get less and less interesting. Why? Because the speed of development is getting so rapid that it's hard to get excited for each upcoming release, keep your system completely up to date, and even remember what the current version of your favorite distributions are. This breakneck pace of development means good and bad things, but I have a few ideas about how I expect it to turn out.

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti announced that XFS has been merged into the 2.4 kernel.

After spending a few months as a download available only to YDL.net members, Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 ISOs are now freely available. The distro now includes HFS+ support and the 2.4.22-based kernel.

OSDL has been running performance tests with hackbench to measure the improvement of the scheduler, compared to Linux 2.4.18. A write-up of these results with graphical plots is posted here.

"I consider myself part of the open-source community. The (Linux) community has to recognize that it can't have it both ways. Linux cannot be a hobbyist's toy and be the leading operating platform in the industry at the same time. Those two things are incongruent. For Linux to become a credible part of the enterprise, it has to go through the standard evolution and maturing process" and "Linux on the desktop is definitely an area where hype is ahead of reality by orders of magnitude. There's a sexiness around the idea of taking on Microsoft", vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's Linux strategy, Martin Fink says to News.com in a very interesting and seemingly honest interview.

OReilly's OnLamp site has two articles, Part I and Part II titled "Real Desktop Linux". Elsewhere, Bruce Perens posted a white paper of his UserLinux initiative titled "UserLinux: Repairing the Economic Paradigm of Enterprise Linux".

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti recently announced his future plans for the 2.4 kernel. Acknowledging the pending release of the new stable 2.6 kernel, Marcelo explains that we will see only one final round of major fixes in 2.4, after which this kernel will go into maintenance mode. Following the future release of the 2.4.24 kernel, only critical patches and security fixes will be merged.

Marcelo Tosatti has released the final 2.4.23 stable Linux kernel, three months after 2.4.22. This latest kernel includes a number of changes, including the removal of the OOM (out of memory) killer among other significant VM updates. Laptop users will appreciate Jens Axboe's "laptop mode" which can extend battery life, also merged in 2.4.23. Find this latest stable kernel at a kernel.org mirror.

Linus Torvalds has released his final 2.6.0-test kernel, calling it the "Beaver In Detox". Following this release Linus says that 2.6 development will be lead by Andrew Morton. The kernel's name refers in jest to the previous release, which Linus had named "Stoned Beaver". It contains a fix for the aic7xxx driver, proper error handling in do_fork(), some firewire fixes, and correction of a few skbuff leakage points. Download it from a kernel.org mirror.