Linux in the news

Red Hat looks under Linux's hood (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at Red Hat's open source projects. "Trying to take a more active role in open-source programming, Red Hat has created a team of 34 programmers to work on nothing but next-generation software, the company plans to announce Tuesday."

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My sysadmin toolbox (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier lists his top ten software tools, on Linux.com. "The first time I read about GNU Screen, I thought it was a bit of a silly program. Why not just open a bunch of xterms, instead of mucking about with all the complex keybindings used by Screen to switch between its windows? Sure, it might be useful if you only work from the console, but how many folks really do that anymore? Then I actually spent a little bit of time with Screen, and I found out what a valuable utility it really is. Instead of worrying about dozens of xterms, I could have a single terminal window with multiple Screen windows that I could switch between easily and quickly."

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Red Hat Wants Xen in Linux Kernel (eWeek)

eWeek looks at the ongoing process of getting Xen into the kernel. "Ian Pratt, of the University of Cambridge in England and the leader of the Xen project, said there were a number of reasons for the delay in including Xen in the kernel. Primarily, Xen 3.0 had suffered from a bit of feature creep. Physical Address Extension (PAE) 32b support and Virtualization Technology, for example, were added very late in the cycle. 'We were aiming for an end-of-summer release, but this now looks on target for December,' Pratt said."

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Desktop Linux 'like teenage sex' (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers comments by Red Hat's CEO Matthew Szulik at a recent conference. "One area where open source software hasn't caught on widely is on the desktop, an area where Red Hat has a modest product aimed at a relatively narrow set of customers such as those manning the phones at call centres. Desktop Linux is a tough nut to crack, Szulik said. "The desktop is like teenage sex. Everybody's talking about it, but nobody's doing it," Szulik said." No analogies were given for the Windows desktop, however.

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Linux PCs: Customer service or lip service? (ZDNet)

ZDNet has discovered that the major computer vendors are still not going out of their way to offer desktop Linux systems. "While American consumers are having a hard time finding Window-less PCs, their counterparts in Europe, Asia and Japan have a much easier path. Outside the United States, it's easier to buy a desktop with non-Microsoft operating systems pre-installed. HP's Web store in the Netherlands offered three HP Compaq computers with Windows XP, Suse Linux 9.3 or FreeDOS for the same price. These models retail starting at $806 (669 euros), excluding sales tax."

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GPL Undergoes Major Revisions (eWeek)

eWeek takes a look at the GPL v3.0. "There will be eight people working full-time on all the processes around GPL 3, but there will also be some 60 other people chairing committees and playing major public roles in the discussions. "But they will be outsiders with interests and stakes and concerns. I also expect there will be many thousands of people who want to be heard, and they are all important to the process," Moglen said."

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Free Remote KDE Desktops from CosmoPOD.com (KDE.News)

KDE.News interviews Stephen Ensor of the CosmoPOD project. "CosmoPOD.com offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE's Kiosk framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor."

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CLI Magic: GNU find (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at the GNU find command. "If you're forgetful like me, you may sometimes need to help finding a file you created or modified just an hour ago because you can't remember its name. You can still use find to locate it. Instead of using find with the -name option, use find -amin -60 to see a list of all files accessed within the past 60 minutes. Note the minus sign before the 60 in that example. In this context, it means less than. If you leave it off, you will only see files accessed exactly 60 minutes ago, or if you use a plus sign instead of the minus, files accessed more than 60 minutes ago."

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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)

This installment of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin looks at some of the early Linux distributions. "The first of these was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil (in the Old Norse Edda, Yggdrasil is the "world ash," from a branch of which Odin/Wotan made his spear). Yggdrasil alpha was released on 8 December 1992. It was called LGX: Linux/GNU/X -- the three components of the system. Recall that Gilmore, Tiemann and Henkel-Wallace formed Cygnus in 1989. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was "definitely uninterested in joining forces with Cygnus." Yggdrasil beta was released the next year."

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High-Performance Linux Clustering (developerWorks)

developerWorks shows how to build a working Linux cluster. "This article covers parallel algorithms, and shows you how to write parallel programs, set up clusters, and benchmark clusters. We look at parallel programming using MPI and the basics of setting up a Linux cluster. In this article, meet OSCAR, an open source project that helps you set up up robust clusters. Also, get an overview of cluster management and benchmarking concepts, complete with detailed steps to run the standard LINPACK tests on a cluster."

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Advanced Linux LDAP authentication (Linux.com)

"American" Dave Kline continues his Linux.com series on LDAP configuration with part two. "In an earlier look at LDAP, we set up a simple LDAP-based authentication system. We configured client machines to retrieve authentication information from a server running OpenLDAP. Now let's go further by enabling encryption and looking at how to make user modifications through LDAP."

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Paranoid Penguin - Single Sign-on and the Corporate Directory, Part I (Linux Journal)

Ti Leggett shows how to use Kerberos and OpenLDAP for managing centralized authentication in a Linux Journal article. "Author Ti Leggett presents the first in a series of articles focused on building a secure corporate directory, including support for single-sign-on that's scalable up to thousands of users."

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All hail the speed demons (O'Reillynet)

Here's an O'Reillynet article on the efforts to speed up Linux desktop performance. "What I find so interesting about Waldo's, Federico's and Michael's work is that they are playing with something of a black-art. Performance optimisation is something that not only requires an expansive knowledge of how software is built and represented in memory, but also how to optimise code and the way code is interpreted."

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Network monitoring with Cacti (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Cacti for monitoring Linux servers. "I recently set up three new servers at my university. To monitor and track various parameters, I decided to install Cacti to see if it lived up to the description. I previously used MRTG to monitor our network, but I was never able to configure it to my complete satisfaction. MRTG is pretty complex, and takes a lot of getting used to. The network in question comprises about 600 nodes. Three Linux servers prove DHCP, DNS, Squid network caching, and other services. The devices that I needed to monitor were the three servers themselves, some Layer 3 managed switches, Wi-Fi access points, and a few workstations."

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Hardware emulation with QEMU (Linux.com)

Linux.com takes a look at QEMU. "QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux."

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Does Slackware still matter? (Linux-Watch)

Alan Canton compares Slackware to other distributions on Linux-Watch. "Unlike Slackware, most Linux distros have by now moved on toward newer and better (IMO) package management systems, as well as either full-fledged GUI admin modules or a collection of easy-to-run scripts that you can use to configure your system. Only in Slackware do you actually have to go in and edit xorg.conf. Just about every other distro has a GUI module or a script that will easily let you set the resolution or dpi of your display."

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BeOS rises from the grave, takes the name ZETA (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers the release of ZETA Live CD 1.1. "In the aftermath of Be, Inc.'s demise, several Be-like projects sprang up -- notably OpenBeOS, an open-source clone of the original BeOS (later renamed Haiku), BlueEyedOS, and Cosmoe, both reimplementations of the BeOS APIs running on top of the Linux kernel. But ZETA remains the only true descendant of the real BeOS code."

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An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at the current state of online book archiving and the recently launched Open Library effort. "When it comes to digitizing books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitize all the world's books and make them universally available."

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Why Wikipedia isn't like Linux (The Register)

Andrew Orlowski compares Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, to Linux. "Of Encyclopedia Britannica, David says "It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the truly great books of Anglophone culture and it's doomed." Oh. Why does David want to replace something truly great and of high quality with something mediocre? He says it's inevitable: "Commercial encyclopedias are doomed anyway because, as Microsoft is finding out with Linux, it's hard to compete with free. "If we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia, because everything else will have been undercut.""

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