Linux Archive

The Slackware-based VectorLinux receives a review from MadPenguin. Read it here.

"If we were to re-write Linux, taking clues from various operating systems, what would we make sure it did? Our next-generation operating system (NGOS) would be completely modular in design, aimed at 64-bit hardware, and with an interface that would change the way people compute. It would support a large number of applications and hardware devices, accepting device drivers written for other operating system, and run applications written for other operating system under an emulation mode." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

My first experience with Linux on a PPC machine was Pegasos PPC and Debian. Last weekend I upgraded my Cube G4 450 Mhz and with a blazingly fast 120 GB 7200 RPM WD drive (for just $58!) to replace the default (and extremely slow) 20 GB Maxtor IDE drive. In this vast drive space, there is enough room for more than one operating system, so I decided to install Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 (and then upgrade to 3.0.1 via APT) as an addition to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Read more for my impressions of YDL 3.0.1 and check some screenshots too.

"Utilities like urpmi, up2date, apt4rpm and OpenPKG may be a step in the right direction, especially if they become widely adopted. Until we have a universal tool for resolving application dependencies, we can't expect casual users to be able to install their own applications." Read the article at NewsForge.

Libranet to ArkLinux: 'An experiment in migrating from one distro to another' can be found at TuxReports.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released 2.6.0-test8. He listed the most noticeable changes as fixes for: the '/proc/PID/stat' oops, the Athlong prefetch bug causing occasional spurious page faults, serverworks PIO autotuning, cpufreguency calculations and NFS O_DIRECT. Read the changelog at KernelTrap.

How Linus Torvalds became benevolent dictator of Planet Linux, the biggest collaborative project in history. Read the 6-page article at Wired.

Roderick W. Smith discusses how to resize and defrag the Linux filesystems.

Zebra is open source TCP/IP routing software that is similar to Cisco's Internetworking Operating System (IOS). Flexible and powerful, it can handle routing protocols such as Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and all of their various flavors. This article shows you how to set up Zebra and used it to manage routes dynamically in conjunction with real Cisco hardware.

"For high-end and server applications, probably the most significant is in scalability," says Andrew Morton, who -- along with Linus Torvalds -- maintains the Linux kernel. "2.6 scales to more CPUs, more memory, more disks and larger disks," he told NewsFactor. Here is also a discussion about Linux kernel 2.7.

The purpose of this review is to provide some additional exposure to source-based Linux distributions in general, and Sorcerer in particular. We've been using Sorcerer where I work since January of this year and have been completely satisfied with the experience. Hopefully this review will give you a good idea of why we use Sorcerer, and it may move you to try it yourself. I'm no systems adminstrator, so if I can install and work with Sorcerer, most people with a little Linux experience will be able to also.

After two release candidates it is released the final version of Vector Linux-4.0. This release is based on Slackware 9.0 and the 2.4.22 kernel. It comes with auto hardware configuration and enough desktop software. The Deluxe version includes more software, KDE and Gnome.

Turbolinux has announced the release of Turbolinux 10 Desktop. Skipping version 9 and inventing a term "High Windowsability" in the process, some of the notable features in Turbolinux 10 include complete Japanese support, interoperability and file sharing with Windows, and Turbo Update. Turbolinux 10 is the first distribution shipping with the new 2.6 kernel series (2.6.0-test5) as the default kernel and it also comes with KDE 3.1.3 and GNOME 2.4 desktop environments, as well as a number of commercial applications. Read all about it at DistroWatch. Also at DistroWatch check for a link for the Tectonic site which takes a brief tour of the forthcoming Ark Linux version 1.0, with screenshots.

CRUX Linux (simply CRUX for now on) is a source-based Linux distribution created by Per Liden, targeting advanced and intermediate users. As reported on CRUX Website, the main philosophy behind the distribution is to "keep it simple". Update: Screenshots added.