The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird “assisted” Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called “Where Linux kernel documentation hides.” The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention.
The 2.6.25.12 stable kernel update is out. This release contains over 40 fixes for a wide variety of problems.
A lot of people view Windows as Linux’s main competition, largely because Microsoft has, by far, the majority of the market and is considered “the standard” by most people. Mark Shuttleworth and I disagree.
The Var Guy, and plenty of other people, are reporting that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, said during his keynote at OSCON, that Linux must not just match but exceed Apple’s Mac OS X, strongly implying that Apple - not Microsoft - is Linux’s main competitor. I agree. Here is why:
Last year I wrote a review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard for O’Reilly in January. Five months later I decided a new review was in order for Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO because the two weren’t based on the same code and the changes were great enough to make the SOHO release seem like an entirely different version from Standard. This past March I reviewed Vector Linux 5.9 Standard and once again I find the changes in the SOHO release warrant a separate review.
For those not familiar with Vector Linux it’s a decade old distribution based on Slackware that provides many of the user friendly tools and features offered by the largest and most popular distributions. I’ve often compared the Standard edition to Xubuntu with it’s relatively lightweight Xfce default desktop while the SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) edition is comparable to Kubuntu, with a fully integrated KDE desktop. That hasn’t changed. In addition Vector Linux SOHO 5.9 remains a 32-bit operating system. The 64-bit version of Standard is still in beta an no plans for a 64-bit SOHO edition have been announced, a fact which may limit interest somewhat even though the 32-bit release runs perfectly well on most 64-bit systems.
Linus Torvalds:
‘I’ve used different distributions over the years. Right now I happen to use Fedora 9 on most of the computers I have, which really boils down to the fact that Fedora had fairly good support for PowerPC back when I used that, so I grew used to it. But I actually don’t care too much about the distribution, as long as it makes it easy to install and keep reasonably up-to-date. I care about the kernel and a few programs, and the set of programs I really care about is actually fairly small.
And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.
Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I’ve never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it’s supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn’t use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it. ‘
Towards Speedy, Inexpensive, Transparent and Accountable Justice
Recently the Judicial Departments has taken steps towards the opensource softwares and they have started the operations for that they initially distributed around
10000 nos of laptops of hp along with the Redhat enterprise linux 5 along with the internet connection to their officers.
Supreme court of india started the E-committe which is taking all the initiation of this. Also started their centralization process by which all around the world the litigant public can access the information about their cases and necessary information. and to stop the deception by the others (like some bad advocates, mediators for now showing the case status).
Since last month’s release of Catalyst 8.6 for Linux we’ve seen the introduction of the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 graphics cards and we’ve been allowed to share with you that CrossFire is coming to Linux along with other yet to be announced features. Today AMD has released the Catalyst 8.7 Linux driver and it doesn’t deliver any new ground-breaking features, but it does bring a few improvements.
In fact, the new features in this release are just bringing official Ubuntu 8.04 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2 support…
Inquisitor team is pleased to announce Inquisitor v3.0 – a first major open-source version of the platform. After initial announcement of Inquisitor branch 3.x in August 2007, it’s a fruit of almost a year of labor.
Inquisitor version 3 is a major redesign of older 1.x and 2.x systems. New features:
* Modularity: it consists of dozens of interconnected and interchangeable modules with well-defined API; one can easily add new modules to add new tests, detections, production steps, etc.
* Three varieties: standalone (runs on top of already installed OS), live CD (can be used to analyse/test just one home computer), enterprise (server-controller network boot).
* Flexibility: every test parameter can be adjusted, all system can be customized.
* Server-controlled testing: server-based version includes a database that stores all the data on all computers that were tested by Inquisitor. If only some parts of hardware will change, clever scheduler won’t redo all the long testing, but only tests relevant to hardware changes.
* Distributed workload: due to modular architecture, Inquisitor can be easily distributed across a cluster to distribute load or make a geographically distributed system.
For those who would like to try Inquisitor, the easiest way is to download a 130MB ISO, available for both x86 and x86_64 from http://www.inquisitor.ru/.
Comments and especially bug reports are welcome.
This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Feature: Guest Review: Sabayon Linux 3.5News: Mandriva’s netbook OS, Flaw in Package Management, Ubuntu’s Community QA, Linus InterviewReleased last week: CentOS 5.2 Live CD, BeleniX 0.7.1, BLAG Linux And GNU 90000Upcoming releases: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha1, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 3, Fedora 10 Alpha Reviewed….
Read more at DistroWatch
Well, the dog days of summer have begun to set in, so it’s not too surprising that the Linux blogs were relatively quiet last week. Linux geeks across the nation were no doubt seeking refuge wherever they could — it’s hard to withstand flames on the blogs when you feel like you’re aflame yourself! One topic that did set off quite a discussion, however, was an article Matt Hartley posted last weekend on Datamation regarding the question of purity on the Linux desktop.
If you’ve been checking out the newest VirtualBox beta for Mac OS X, or you’re intrigued by Linux but not ready to deal with virtualizing it, the Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index—or, as it’s skeevily nicknamed, veeDee-Eyes—has a host of pre-compiled, pre-configured images for you. No need to set up space, “boot” from a live CD and mess around with hardware config, as copies of Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and others are ready to run.
I have been using Linux in one capacity or another since I first downloaded a Red Hat ISO a number of years ago. What finally allowed me to go full-time with my chosen distro was not so much the progression of hardware detection and self-mounting partitions but the applications. Today, I would like to share some of my personal favorites with you.
Firefox. Total love/hate relationship with the browser. Despite finding it becoming more bloated with every release, I know every time I browse to a page with it, unlike Opera, it will not toss up some stupid compatibility error at me. That and the extensions are highly addictive, despite me keeping only two of them to avoid bloating my browser.
If you’re using an older NVIDIA graphics card and haven’t yet turned to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver, you may want to check out the latest NVIDIA legacy drivers. NVIDIA has updated its two oldest legacy drivers — the 71.xx.xx and 96.xx.xx series — for Linux…
Read more at Phoronix
If you’re looking at running some Linux benchmarks over the weekend, you’ll want to check out the latest release of the Phoronix Test Suite. We’ve released version 1.0.4 this morning and it contains mostly new suites and tests.
The new tests in Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.4 are for fio, Triangle Slammer, and a video extensions test…
Linus Torvalds, an acknowledged godfather of the open-source movement, was just 21 when he changed the world by writing Linux
Today, 17 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones. In fact ask yourself this: if Linux didn’t exist, would Google, Facebook, PHP, Apache, or MySQL?
Linus is the son of the journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, He was attracted to computers from an early age and attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to study Computer Science. In 1991, he purchased a PC.
The CentOS Development team is pleased to announce the
availability of the CentOS 5.2 i386 Live CD.
This CD is based on our CentOS-5.2 i386 distribution.
It can be used as a Workstation, with the following software:
# openoffice.org 2.3.0
# firefox 3.0
# thunderbird 2.0.0
# pidgin 2.3.1
# scribus 1.3.3.2
# xchat 2.6.6
# k3b 0.12.17
# gimp 2.2.13
Did you know that it’s possible to view the content of the biggest and most widely used online encyclopedia without the need for Internet connectivity? That’s right, Wikipedia, with over 10 million articles in 253 languages can be viewed offline in your Linux box anytime, anywhere.
There are actually 4 easy ways to take your favorite Wikipedia offline:
What does Linus Torvalds think about BSD? It’s not too pleasant.
Linus Torvalds - the creator of the Linux kernel and its current maintainer - is by all accounts a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric).
I often find it necessary to express my inner geek side through my t-shirts. Be it in the form of my views about politics, computers, nature or just confusing tees that most people don’t know what they mean. So today I will share with you 10 of my favorite geeky linux inspired t-shirts that I own. Please share your collection in the comments.
A new stable kernel is out. Three months in the making, Linux 2.6.26 boasts read-only bind mounts, “big-iron” KVM ports, USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, built-in support for remote kernel debugging, and a host of embedded architecture improvements, among other enhancements.
The newest stable kernel release was announced by Linux originator Linus Torvalds last Sunday. It brings 330MB of source code, via a 48.3MB bzip2-compressed download. Salient for embedded developers are a host of chip- and board-specific improvements, along with several interesting “big ticket” feature additions, such as built-in support for remote kernel debugging using KGDB.