FS-WebDesiGn Blog 2.0 (in spanish) has links to some very nicely done Linux and Ubuntu ID cards. [Via comuNIdad]
Saw that a flaw in Debian with a fix: New openssl packages fix predictable random number generator. Update quickly, keep yourself safe.
How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion managed to help me get my vmware tools running on my laptop. Finally found the right combination of magic to get it all working!
Nice post at content consumer entitled The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment. Simple premise... using the new Ubuntu, assign a set of tasks to your girlfriend (computer related you perverts!) and see how she does. Click the link for the results.
A Few Questions to Enlightenment's Rasterman
Enlightenment 0.17, the big, long awaited new release of the Enlightenment project, has been in the making for a long time now - since December 2000, to be precise. E17, as it became known, is a complete rewrite of Enlightenment, complete with a set of base libraries (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) turning it into a full-fledged desktop environment, complete with its own set of base libraries for building applications.
Ars reports that Epiphany (the gnome web browser), using the GTK WebKit port passed the Acid3 on Linux.
Finally Ubuntu 8.04 has been released. This is the LTS (Long Term Support) release which means that Ubuntu will continue to support the package for... uhm.... a long term. Check out the What's new in 8.04 for a full list along with lots of pretty screenshots.
Via OSNews: Linux 2.6.25 Released. Sadly not a huge amount of "exciting" features, but I suppose with a mature system that's to be expected.
Gentoo users out there, the new baselayout package is coming soon, converting from a lot of bash scripts into baselayout-2 which uses OpenRC. These changes are fairly major, so you'll want to check out the Baselayout and OpenRC Migration Guide to make sure your system isn't rendered unbootable!
If you're not interested in baselayout-2, check out these bootchart values and get a bit more excited. Note that these stats don't mean all that much if you hardly ever reboot your machine :)
The cute and linux-based Chumby (still would love one to play with) is designed to be open and hackable. There's a wired article about how Programmers and DIY Types are Embracing the Soft, Hackable Chumby.
I'm just waiting for someone to put a self-controlled chumby into that unmanned car land race thing.
Found a nice review of Linux image browsers. Not sure I agree with the gqview assessment, but that's just cause I have been using that image viewer forever so I'm used to it.
Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1 has been let loose.... Looks like the main media player for the suse platform has gotten some nice tweaks... looking forward to playing with this when I get home.
Ars has a look at the KDE 4.0 release... ready, but rough they say. Looking forward to checking it out.
The Fox And The Penguin is a good post from a summer intern working on the Linux visuals part of Firefox 3... just cause I love visual integration on Linux :)
Craigslist post on: Help me keep the shell people alive.
I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." We are an old-fashioned bunch, preferring the warm glow of a green screen full of text over the cold blockiness of a graphical interface. We use ssh, scp, and even occassionally ftp. Back in the days before high-speed connections ("broadband"), we would dial up during off-hours to avoid being slammed with huge phone bills. The whole "Microsoft Windows" fad will fade away sooner or later, but in the interim, our kind is facing extinction.
This is mostly for my own reference. Found a good page of IPtables Examples and programs including a very handy (for me right now) script that will convert the save format from iptables-save into a nice shell script.
KDE-ers, just a note that K KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 1 is ready for the world, please download, test, rinse and repeat.
Download a Free Issue of Linux Journal. Thanks Tony. Only caveat is that you have to give them your email address (not that that's a huge deal IMHO).
Ars has a nice first look at the Firefox 3 visual refresh for Linux. Very nice and clean and looks like it should integrate nicely into the look of the Linux desktop.
Anatomy of the Linux file system has some good in-depth nerdery of some filesystem internals.
Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Linux Client Released. That about says it. Hopefully the performance under Linux will be as good as windows, but right now sadly my Linux box is a bit old for gaming :)
LinuxGames has the news on the Linux demo version of ETQW for my non-Microsoft shackled friends.
I've been wanting to make a list like Ten things Linux distros get right (that MS doesn’t) for a while. I use Windows at work on a daily basis, and linux at home on a daily basis, and both do things well, and both do things suckily. Here's one guys opinion of the Windows suckage.
[...] All-in-one application sources. Man, I love my apt. Finding and downloading applications for Windows is a crap-shoot in almost every way. I find this especially handy when building new systems: it takes far longer to build, update, and add needed applications on a Windows system than on most Linux systems.
Noticed a thread on the EVMS-devel list on the status of EVMS. EVMS as you may know is the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, a nice system which brings partitioning, RAID, LVM, LVM2 and various other technologies under one management system, and something I use both at home and on the UFies.org system. The response to the thread was:
IBM has pulled all resources from EVMS. Some of the people previously assigned to EVMS are doing some work in their spare time, but apart from that, it's pretty much unmaintained.
That's a bit worrisome... I haven't seen any issues with EVMS, but I'd hate to upgrade the kernel and find suddenly things start breaking :( Is this the honeymoon fading for IBM's relationship with Linux, or just a project that never took off enough to keep putting resources into it?
Any replacements / alternative technologies for this stuff out there? Ubuntu seems to run plain LVM for their setup, and Ubunutu isn't (I hope) going anywhere anytime soon, so one presumes LVM will stick around. Maybe ZFS can be ported from Solaris? KTNXBAI. :)
Aaron Bockover has some openSUSE 10.3 details as far as what's going to be included when it's released.
OSNews pointed to a nice Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 Review, showing what you'll get with the next version(s) of Compiz and the distros using it by default (Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse).
Via OSNews I found a nice little X.Org 7.3 Preview with some of the new nifty stuff that'll be coming up in the new Linux/Unix graphical system.
Compiz Fusion has made it's first first release. 0.5.2. Compiz Fusion is the new(ish) un-branch of Compiz and Beryl with some sexy new effects and stuff to play with. Unfortunately it still lags unbearably when using nVidia Twinview (at least the last git version I tried out) :( Hopefully something that can be worked on in the next release.
For Linux geeks only.... Anatomy of the Linux networking stack over at IBM's developerworks site.
Found a nice overview of AppArmor vs SELinux via a story about how AppArmor is now included by default in the new Ubuntu 7.10 release.
Check the KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Release Announcement for some info and sexy screenshots!
Very cool video of some of the new stuff people are doing playing with the newly merged Compiz/Beryl project, Compiz Fusion. The video is here. Great soundtrack too :)
OMG. SGI is setting up a system for NASA, the Largest Shared-Memory System in the World. 1024 dual core CPUs (that's 2048 cores). 4TB of RAM. 13 TFLOPS. Running linux.
Yowza.
Go Linux!
Really interesting interview with kernel developer Con Kolivas.
Con Kolivas is a prominent developer on the Linux kernel and strong proponent of Linux on the desktop. But recently, he left it all behind. Why?
He also talks about the linux desktop, Microsoft, and why he's no longer a kernel developer.
In other news, it looks like Xen Merged into the 2.6.23 kernel today. Iiiiinteresting things going on!
Very cool stuff... lguest was merged according to kerneltrap. Remember KVM, a kernel module with build in paravirtualization built directly into the linux kernel? 'lguest' is similar, but unlike KVM, doesn't require the VT enabled CPU.
Performance is still not up to Xen or VMWare, but it is something that'll be built in the kernel, is lightweight, and gives people hackability.
I'm not sure if more virtualization is better. I'd rather see efforts go into one of the existing technologies to make it faster / better or more compatible. Course, maybe lguest is is the project that'll get this needed attention.
The Completely Fair Scheduler has been merged into the kernel 2.6.23 tree. This new scheduler (which decided which task to give the CPUs attention next) "tries to run the task with the 'gravest need' for more CPU time. So CFS always tries to split up CPU time between runnable tasks as close to 'ideal multitasking hardware' as possible."
Linux kernel 2.6.22 is oot and aboot, and the link has a summary of changes and new stuff in a (fairly) digestible format.
The article 10 minutes to run every Windows app on your Ubuntu desktop is standard is some ways (using vmware) and unusual in others (desktopless settings and RDP). Check it out anyway, if you have need for windows on linux....
Eric Kustarz's Weblog talks about using ZFS on a laptop. Very neat to see what Sun's filesystem can do in a non-complicated manner. Of course, if you want to try this out you may come across the issues that Ian Murdock did to find where to download OpenSolaris.
I suppose it had to happen sometime, Mythbuntu 7.04 Public Alpha 1 has been released. MythTV has long been used on Ubuntu as the main installation platform, it makes sense to create a full release based on it!
This alpha can be used for running a live frontend from CD, and provides a good representation of where the GUI is headed for the installer.
The CD contains a backend/frontend full installation on disk with all plugins. Depending upon the choices made during an "Advanced Installation",
multiple packages will be removed from the installation.
Question is, do I nuke my current working setup which is a couple of mythtv releases behind to try this out or not :)
Well, title says it all... Fedora 7 released. Here are some details from the article.
Fedora 7 features the latest versions of many popular open-source software programs, including GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6, Xorg 7.2, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel, with integrated KVM virtualization support. The version of Xorg 7.2 included in Fedora 7 features extensive support for display hot-plugging, a much-anticipated feature that will hopefully eliminate the need for frustrating Xorg configuration tweaking typically required for multiple monitor configurations and projector support.
Very cool.... Miguel has announced that Paint.NET 3.0 for Mono is Now Public. Paint.NET is (for those who don't know) a fairly feature complete and complex, free .Net based paint program. Think a supercharged version of MS Paint that doesn't suck. Not quite photoshop, but pretty much all you need for most "normal" use. Homepage is here.
For you odd folks who like that KDE thing, you'll be happy to know that KDE 4.0-alpha1 Released: "Knut" has been released. Highlights are a new visual look, all sorts of cool stuff in the background, new default apps (dolphin for a file manager for example), composite enabled for eyecandy goodness, and much more. Probably still horribly unstable, and it sounds like it's still far from finished, however, I'm happy to see it being released and plan to check this out ASAP! :)
For those of you running Kubuntu, here are the upgrade instructions.
Thanks to Wim pointing me to a couple of blog posts from Simon Crosby from XenSource. First is VMware tests Xen Performance: Embarrassing, where benchmarks are referenced but can't be revealed due to the licensing agreements, second is The Performance News You've Been Waiting For, in which the benchmarks are revealed!
Who says innovation is dead, WikipediaFS, allows you to view and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files. This uses FUSE, the userspace filesystem under Linux. Found via wired.
So a sub-sub-sub-sub release Enlightenment update was released today (0.16.8.7). Sadly Enlightenment E17 is still not released, though you can run it if you do a bit of hacking around.
Personally I think that while E17 was the shiznit back in the day (transparent eterms! OMG!), however now it's really not all that relevant. Projects like Beryl and Compiz have far eclipsed the functionality that enlightenment gave us, and as cool as the new E17 stuff sounds (resolution independance, hardware acceleration, running on any device (like a cellphone)), if it's never released and available as a finished product (or as finished as any open source gets), how good is that? Duke-Nukem' ForE17 anyone?
That said, there are still people hacking away, which is great to hear.
Kerneltrap reports on the Linux 2.6.21 Kernel Release. Ticklessness (wtf?) is the flavor of the day.
Nice article on IBMs DeveloperWorks on the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine.
Ubuntu 7.04 is out in the wild now, after lots of testing. The Ubuntu Linux home page has gone on a diet for the release, with only links to the upgrade and release notes as well as of course, all the mirrors.
Highlights for this release are the latest everything (gnome, kernel, OO.o, etc etc), sexy hardware accelerated graphics with Beryl/Compiz, new codec download manager, new 'restricted driver' (read: non-free) manager, windows migration tool and other stuff. More an incremental release than anything, still nice to see.
Now to see if the bug with installing root on a raid partition is fixed :)
Update: Yup, looks like it is. Now I'm safe to play with it at home to see if it should replace my Gentoo Linux desktop :)
Cool image of the timeline of progression of Linux distributions. Cool to see where everything came from (and for some, when they ended.... bye bye united linux, we hardly knew ya'.
A great and interesting article by David Wheeler is Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FOSS, or FLOSS)? Look at the Numbers!
Basically he enumerates a lot of studies and addresses a lot of issues such as the various Microsoft funded TCO studies with a barrage of articles and writings regarding why a company or person should choose Free / Open Source software.
Bit-Tech.net has a nice review of some of the stuff in linux gaming that you may or may not know about. From FPSs to Flight Sims (wow, Flight Gear has come a long way since the last time I saw it).
Couple of big things this weekend..... first of all, Gaim has been renamed to "Pidgin" due to a legal war with AOL over the "AIM" part of the name. Stupid stupid stupid IMHO. Sadly I'm not a big fan of the new name, "pidgin" is harder to pronounce and spell than "gaim" in my opinion, but what do I know. At least now it's over they can start releasing new versions of the software. Wh00t.
Speaking of "wh00t", Debian 4.0 has been released. 4.0, or "Etch" was twenty-odd months in the making and is released for 11 different platforms. Highlights include:
"This release includes a number of updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.5a (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.14, the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, the GNUstep desktop 5.2, X.Org 7.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a, GIMP 2.2.13, Iceweasel (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3), Icedove (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5), Iceape (an unbranded version of Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.8), PostgreSQL 8.1.8, MySQL 5.0.32, GNU Compiler Collection 4.1.1, Linux kernel version 2.6.18, Apache 2.2.3, Samba 3.0.24, Python 2.4.4 and 2.5, Perl 5.8.8, PHP 4.4.4 and 5.2.0, Asterisk 1.2.13, and more than 18,000 other ready to use software packages."
Sadly a lot of the desktop apps are still lagging behind the current stable releases (GNOME 2.14 vs 2.18 is 2 stable releases, openoffice 2.0 vs 2.2), though a lot seem to be right on the money. I suppose those who use debian for the desktop are either using Ubuntu or are using unstable. I'm still lovin' debian as far as the server side though, and they have a great reputation for super-stable releases. Good on ya' Debian!
The second Mac vs PC vs Linux is up at the bottom of the original post. I like this one much better, feels far less forced to me.
Saw a note (via digg) about an article on Linux MCE. Uhmm.... Why hasn't someone told me about this? Where did it come from? Auto-dims your lights (if you have a home automation system of course), can send a control application to bluetooth mobile phones, turns on your TV and receiver and sets the right inputs? Scans all networked computers for shared media? Cover-flow like browsing? Where the hell did this come from?
And is it free? Huh? Really? From Linuxmce.com:
LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10' UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.
The video is a bit smarmy in it's comparison of LinuxMCE to Windows MCE though, something that the Linux Community has to work on. However, if the features they advertise work as... uhm.... advertised. I've had discussions with a buddy of mine on MythTV vs Windows MCE and MCE definately came out on top. I use MythTV and prefer it, but it's setup vs WinMCE make it far more usable to normal people (and even geeks). However, if LinuxMCE (which integrates MythTV) this works like they say, I'll be replacing my MythTV Box with this ASAP.
Anyone else know about this of have any experience in it?
Oh, and LinuxMCE also integrates Asterisk (the free phone system), provides network boot to easily put up other LinuxMCE systems in the home, and it seems like the list goes on and on...
Sorry for the rambling, but this is really exciting!
Update: OK, a bit more digging through the website has enlightened me a bit more. LinuxMCE is a project where the software is given away for free, but the commercial side of it is selling you consulting and a $1,000-$7,000 setup with varying levels complete home automation. So basically you can put it together yourself, get the right hardware, get the right bluetooth module yourself, etc etc, or pay someone to give you an out of the box plug and play solution. Looks like the software given away is 100% complete though, so if you can set it up and get the right hardware, you can make it work as advertised. I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like you might need two computers, a "core" and a "orbiter", where the latter is a non-hard drive, network boot device only that is what is connected to your AV equipment and is controlled by the core. Maybe, I'm not sure exactly if the "hybrid" setup is everything on one computer or everything on two...
The project is a fork of pluto home apparently.
Nice HOWTO from the Ubuntu community on running seamless windows XP under Linux. Not your standard "associate .exes with wine" though, this is about how to use QEmu. Check it out at Windows X PUnder Qemu HowTo.
Reverend Ted has a nice look at Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit, looking at the position and the "mac vs pc" campaign from Apple. They also present their first spoof ad (here) presenting the Linux vs Mac vs PC concept to turn things a bit on their head. Not bad, but a bit.... "forced" somehow. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Regardless, it's nice to see Novell putting the word out there.
I think a project like Linux Personas quite well defines the term "passive aggressive". Basically they group Linux users into broad categories (experimenter, follower, application, geek, transitioner) to help "better understand the marketing opportunities". Then they provide stats like sales cycle length, potential revenue, etc.
There's even a funky screening tool (with well worded questions akin to "do you like linux, or do you care about your IT infrastructure" to let you determine if you should attempt a sale to them.
I so wish I could say that ironically the server that runs the site is Linux, but no, sadly it's W2k3.... I guess they won't make that mistake twice :)
Ars has a nice look at the latest version of Beryl, the latest in Linux desktop eye candy.
Nice (and quick) wrap up of the Top 10 best Linux DVD ripping and encoding software.
Saw on digg that Beryl 0.2.0 was Released. Check out this comment for some of the new plugins and additions. Nice to see that some of them are not just plain old eyecandy, but actual productivity / workflow improvements.
Fedora v. Ubuntu: A Performance Look is a benchmark of games and various operations comparing fedora core 6 and 7 and ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04 (stable and unstable version of each main distro). Interesting, however the benchmarks are really close. I think the widest gap is 5 seconds difference in LAME compilation time and maybe 5 FPS running Enemy Territory. Wonder what that says.... Interesting also to see things like boot time differences.
The article also references a 64 vs 32 bit benchmarks article which is an interesting read.
I told you there would be drama! Apparently ESR and Fedora have had an interesting relationship.
Last year you noted that our infrastructure by FC5 was great. Yum was
doing upgrades well and we no longer suffered from "egregious fuckups."
But now you say it's a huge problem again in the current email by noting
our "incompetent repository maintenance" and our non-statically linked
rpm. So what is the problem? Is it user incompetence or are you
actually aware of the infrastructure changes that take place or are
taking place? Reading your message, my guess is you are just
misinformed and that frustrates you.
Linux.com reports on the big story (hehe) that ESR gives up on Fedora. Sounds like he discovered what I found years ago.... that RPM sucks is sub-optimal for my own personal use. Wonder if this'll throw the linux community into a tizzy?
For my own future reference, here's a good story on the much underused lsof and a nice cheatsheet for its various incantations (before I only really did an 'lsof -n | grep processname' or a 'lsof -p pid').
Youtube has the series of videos from Jono Bacon on Herding Cats. Jono is part of the Ubuntu team. Interesting stuff, totally about 50 minutes in length.
OMG! Why has no one told me about /dev/bollocks, the A middle-manager emulator for the Linux Kernel. It even has a perl module to help manipulate it. Basically it creates a file in /dev that will spew out random bullshit on demand! Too bad it's kernel 2.4 only :(
What easier way to install a Linux distro than going to a web page and running a little .exe? That's what goodbye-microsoft.com aims at. A little .exe modifies your boot screen to give you a choice to go to the debian installer (which appears to be all graphical and sexy now). Probably not something you should do without a bit of prior preparadness of course, but if you have a new computer, it's a lot faster than burning a CD and rebooting to get some linuxy-goodness installed.
A quick little story on kernel trap on Improving KVM Performance With A Tickless Kernel from the mailing list. Basically a patch (dyntick) that improved KVM (the built in kernel virtualization module if you didn't know that) performance. It basically removes some wasted cycles doing interrupts that aren't needed (I think I got that right).
Anyway, looking forward (still) to playing with this and KVM in general.
Found another article (with screenshots) on Linux KVM Virtualization Performance. KVM is the new kernel model virtualization technique, which allows you to run other OSs through a kernel module, very similar to vmware or Xen, but without the need for a modified kernel (Xen) or non-free application (vmware) and with increased performance because of how close it can run to the kernel (a la Xen).
Only sucky part is that you need a CPU with VT technology (either from Intel or AMD) built in. Of course, this means just about any CPU you buy these days, but not necessarily older ones.
I'm looking forward to playing with this new stuff. Here's an article on user-friendly virtualization for Linux.
Update: Found a video of KVM in action, running Windows XP on a Fedora Core 6 system using the latest kernel virtualization technology. Check out the cool XGL cube rotate!
Found a good tutorial on how to Encrypt devices using dm-crypt and LUKS.
Here's a good article on what happens When Linux Runs Out of Memory. It goes deep into the ins and outs of OOM (out of memory) situations and exactly what is going on when say, you run your backups and mysqld gets killed by the "OOM-Killer". Not that I'm talking from personal experience, no, not at all :P
So sometimes completely pointless eye candy can still be fun. Take the burning menus plugin for Beryl (XGL). It makes your menus look like they appear from flames when they are opened.
Here's a collection of Ballmer's Anti-Linux rants, and (for humors sake) an open letter to Microsoft from a Linux user.
Looking at what Ballmer has said about Linux previously, I'm getting less happy with the whole deal, assuming anything actually happens as a result of it of course.
Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!
Anyone have any experience with upstart - event-based init daemon? The program was developed for Ubuntu (who released 6.10 today).
It sounds pretty interesting, from this page on the Gentoo forums:
Upstart brings the concept of an event-driven init system, taking benefit from hotplug to decide when to start processes. Eventualy upstart should even replace crond and inetd (InitNG has similar plans to cron). Besides a dependency awareness (like the current gentoo initscripts), parallel startup (idem) and better hardware utilization (like InitNG and others), Upstart is supposed to bring response to ACPI events, avaliability of network connections and so on.
Here are some getting started docs which has some more specifics.
Linux.com has a nice first look at Gaim 2.0. For those who don't know, GAIM is a trillian-like instant messanger client for GNOME which does MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and just about everything under the sun. The 2.0 version is the first major update in quite a while and looks good!
Saw this headline on my MythTV box this morning while browsing the latest news using it's built in RSS reader. What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux. Unfortunately I had to wait until I got to work to read it, as the MythTV RSS reader reads the articles with Konqueror, which pops up an 'accept cookies' box that I can't answer with the remote, and I don't have a mouse hooked up to the box to deal with it, so I have to read around this stupid box in the middle of the screen. No worries, MythTV just had a new release (.20) which looks exciting. The big question of course is do I upgrade and potentially have to re-do my nicely setup for everything but RSS system :)
Oh right, the article. Pros and cons of 64bit Linux, nice for people looking at jumping into the 64bit world. As a note, this server, UFies.org, runs Gentoo compiled under the AMD64 profile (even though it's got intel CPUS), meaning it's all running 64bit. Nice and up to date, and one of the few (IIRC) distros that fully supports current software in 64bit.
Some interesting memory benchmarks comparing the major Linux desktop memory usage. From the conclusion:
Ok, that's it. I tried quite hard to get these numbers and make sure they're usable. I however cannot rule any possible mistake and I'm obviously biased, so while I tried to be fair, I probably quite wasn't (however, since I myself was curious about the results, what would be the point of cheating?). So, in case you don't believe me or these numbers, you're free to redo this yourself, as long as you do your benchmarks somewhat correctly (it's really simple to do them incorrectly, trust me). In fact, since this is actually several months old, it would be nice if somebody tried with GNOME 2.16 and saved me the work.
On the other hand, it's nice to see that developers are taking more pains to reduce memory usage, or at least in the dev lists I watch for GNOME (2.14 and 2.16 had major focus on reducing memory use). Just because memory is cheap doesn't give you the right to use it up with poor programming.
hub points to a good article on Processing RAW image files on Linux. Mostly interesting to the digital photographers among us.
A neat looking tutorial on Writing device drivers in Linux. Very well laid out and easy to understand and read. Only question now is what needs a driver written for it? :)
All I can really say is "holy shit" and "I want this now". Wonder how long before this is included in the mainline GNOME release and standard distros.
Did I mention "wow"?
It's obvious that some filesystems are better for some things than others, and there isn't a huge winner that does good in everything. However, I was really surprised as to how many benchmarks ReiserFSv4 lost. Reiser4 was slowest for removing lots of files and directories, finding lots of files and directories, and creating and copying files. Granted, some of these are Reiser4 losing by half a second, but other times it's losing by almost 15 seconds (copy a 1 gb file). For me this is interesting simply because of the Reiser4 claim that it's the fastest filesystem around. Of course, we all know lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Of course, I think I trust the benchmarks from LG than from the ReiserFS site :)
Ext2 (the non-journaled FS) kicks everything else's ass a lot for speed, but that's mostly because it's a more simplistic filesystem. For the CPU utilization for the tests JFS looks like it comes out ahead, as it does in the final 'total test time' graph.
Remember the whole 'tools in the toolbox' thing. Course, I'm still not sure what to put as the filesystem for the up-and-coming new ufies.org box... will probably stay with ext3 unless someone has a really good reason to go elsewhere.
Red Hat has announced it will push for Xen integration in the Linux kernel, and that virtualization and stateless Linux is the way to go. Hooray! But wait--what's the buzz all about? What's so special about virtualization anyway?
More information on this is available at the Fedora Xen quickstart wiki page.
via omninerd]
Now I just need a windows client :)
Gentoo is a one-of-a-kind distribution, simple yet powerful. The only drawback is that it can take very long to compile software (I would love to test Gentoo on a AMD64), but the results made me forget that.This is true enough, but after the inital "big ones" (gnome, kde, X, etc) on modern hardware it's really easy to get used to the time to emerge a package.
This is a classifier for the Linux kernel's Netfilter subsystem that identifies packets based on application layer data (OSI layer 7). This means that it can classify packets as HTTP, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, etc, regardless of port. Our classifier complements existing ones that match on address, port numbers and so on.Basically this means your firewall can be told to say, block http traffic into the network and it'll work regardless of if some clever employee has set up a webserver on port 8080, or 31337. Wonder how slow it is though, doing regex matching on application layer data doesn't scream "speed" to me :) Course, with todays bandwidth and computer speed....
Part 2 is here.
...is an open-source general purpose virtualization tool designed to quickly define and test complex network simulation scenarios based on the great User Mode Linux (UML) virtualization software.Which basically means that you can use it to get your networking up and going with User Mode Linux. Going to have to check it out.
To put the Microsofties really on the spot, it's most effective to phrase your counters as questions, especially when you can use them to whack Microsoft with a combination of issues like TCO and security. Like this:I'm sure some microsofty or MS sympathizer can answer these of course. Scoble? You there? :)
- How many Linux machines have been zombied by Netsky, Sasser, MyDoom, or similar worms? Do your Windows TCO estimates include administrator time spent cleaning up after these infestations?
- Can you explain why Windows IIS websites are cracked or defaced more often than Apache ones, despite the fact that IIS runs less than a third the number of sites Apache does?
- Is Microsoft willing to add a hold-harmless clause to Shared Source licenses that protects shared-source licensees against being sued by Microsoft for alleged IP violations related to the software? If not, then please explain again how Shared Source is just the same as open source?
That said, these questions aren't really as relevant as what I think the genius of Open Source Software is, which is, wait for it, CHOICE. If you want to use windows, use it, if you want to use linux, use it, but having only one player in the field is just bad for everyone, and when that one player is known for deceit and mercilessly squeezing out it's competition through underhanded tactics, you know it's even worse. If the government wants to use OpenOffice instead of word they should be able to do so without having to fight through paid off congressmen, FUD campaigns, and Microsoft funded Reports just because MS doesn't want anyone else to get the business.
You can't beat it. You need to accecpt that it is there, a valid part of the computing landscape, like the Mac. You need to port your desktop apps to it and *try to make money on it*.
Remember doing that ? It's what you used to do before the monopoly. Before you tried to destroy what you can't control.
You can't destroy Linux. You need to work with it.
My favourite recent quote from Bruce Perens :
"Imagine what it took for Microsoft to piss off so many people that they're all willing to work night and day without pay just to bring that company down."
SMBFS allows Linux to mount a remote SMB share but until now it did not act like a UNIX file system, even if the remote host was Samba running on a UNIX or Linux machine.
I've personally played around with the 2.5.7[1-4] kernels a bit in trying to get my new motherboard to work (the nforce2 based A7N8X). I didn't notice a huge performance difference, even with the new schedular, but I was running a 2.4 kernel that had all the new 0(1) schedular stuff in it already. There are a few things in GNOME that need to be adapted for the new kernel still, but that'll happen when things get closer I'm sure.
The JabberD Quickstart package provides a graphical, user-friendly way to install, configure, and manage the JabberD instant messaging server. No hand-editing of XML files, no need to create spool directories, no messy configuration changes -- just a simple, step-by-step setup script that does all the work for you. It's the easy way to get started with Jabber. :)
The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1, a major feature upgrade to the third generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for Linux and other UNIXes.Let the compiling/downloading begin!
And I just got 3.1rc5 compiled! :(
host# g-cpan.pl Perl::ModuleNameAnd watch as it is created and installed for you, with any dependancies, automagically! You can then remove it and manage it with Portage just like all your other ebuild packages.
Good stuff, will have to try that out myself.
Update: Here is a better way to do it using gkrellmd.
