LWN.net

LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 20, 2004

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 20, 2004 is available.

Interview: Andrea Arcangeli

KernelTrap interviews VM hacker Andrea Arcangeli. "The VM at large is a big heuristic, and there's no perfect formula you can use to tell which page it's time to swapout to disk when, nor you can exactly predict how well the swapping will behave at runtime until you test or simulate it; that is the really hard part of the VM.'

Debian Weekly News 2004/20

Here's the Debian Weekly News for May 18, 2004. In this issue: an interview with Miguel de Icaza, new K6 mini iso images, the status of the Java to main effort, Debian powered binoculars, the status of GNOME 2.6 for unstable, and several other topics.

Presenting FEDORA CORE 2

It's official: Fedora Core 2 is out. "Including musical numbers such as 'Who Let Fedora Out?' by the Slashdot Men, 'The Download Goes On' by Celeron Dion, and 'The Hacker in Me' by Shania Sane. 'It's a singing, dancing extravaganza!' says the Rawhide Daily News." As of this writing, not all of the mirror sites had opened up yet, but that should change quickly. Click below for the full announcement.

California Digital and Lawrence Livermore Deploy Fastest Linux Cluster

California Digital, Quadrics, and Intel have announced that they have successfully deployed the "most powerful Linux supercomputer ever built", a 4,096 Itanium 2 processor based Linux cluster code named "Thunder" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

GNOME 2.6.1 released - Gnome Installation Guide updated (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop reports on the release of GNOME 2.6.1 with lots of bug fixes and improvements. Also an updated GNOME Installation Guide has been released.

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The May 10 Gentoo Weekly Newsletter is out; this issue looks at the status of the Gentoo Documentation Project, proposed changes in how kernels are handled in Portage, and various other topics.

Single-kernel real-time Linux supports dual-PPC VMEbus board (LinuxDevices.com)

LinuxDevices covers the TimeSys release of a single-kernel real-time Linux board support package as well as a complete development toolset for a dual-PowerPC processor VMEbus single board computer targeting military and aerospace applications.

The People Behind KDE: Helio Chissini de Castro (KDE.News)

This week the People Behind KDE travels to Brazil to talk with Helio Chissini de Castro. "The first time I took on KDE, I got Ark maintainership. After that I started packaging Conectiva Linux independent packages. Today I work on Kmix, solve a bug, or another time I try to see whats happening with Ark (since I plan to pass maintainership to the other new guys :-). On a non developer basis, I got the task to be the primary contact on South America and the personal task to annoy some guys of core kde from time to time... :-) And of course, I work hard on PR to show KDE to the Brazilian masses." (Found on KDE.News)

The 2.6.6 kernel is out

Linus has announced the availability of the 2.6.6 kernel. Changes since the last prepatch include an NTFS update, an XFS update, some small virtual memory patches, an ACPI update, various architecture updates, and lots of fixes. The list of changes since 2.6.5 is much more extensive, including POSIX message queues, significant ext2 and ext3 filesystem performance improvements, the "laptop mode" patch, 4KB stacks for the i386 architecture, non-executable stack support for several architectures, a big reiserfs update, the lightweight auditing framework, the "completely fair queueing" I/O scheduler, TCP "Vegas" congestion avoidance, and much more. The long-format changelog has the details.

Open Source in Africa (O'ReillyNet)

Here's an O'ReillyNet report from the Africa Source conference. "This meeting, called Africa Source, was the first event of its kind, bringing together developers from roughly 25 countries on the continent, as well as visitors from a dozen countries outside Africa. Africa Source had several organizers, including SchoolNet Namibia, The Tactical Technology Collective, and The AllAfrica Foundation, with support from The Open Society Institute, and USAID."

GUADEC 2004 Press Release (GnomeDesktop)

GUADEC 2004 has announced an international slate of speakers at the Fifth Annual GNOME User and Developer Europe Conference (GUADEC 2004). GUADEC will be held at Agder University College in Kristiansand, Norway, from June 28-30, 2004.

Reboot Linux faster using kexec (developerWorks)

developerWorks looks at the kexec patch. "Kexec is a patch to the Linux kernel that allows you to boot directly to a new kernel from the currently running one. In the boot sequence described above, kexec skips the entire bootloader stage (the first part) and directly jumps into the kernel that we want to boot to. There is no hardware reset, no firmware operation, and no bootloader involved. The weakest link in the boot sequence -- that is, the firmware -- is completely avoided. The big gain from this feature is that system reboots are now extremely fast." (LWN also looked at kexec in November, 2002).

NewsForge: NewsVac

Remote backup using ssh, tar and cron
2004-05-20T14:06:00+00:00
TrialOfFire writes "Are you looking for a solution to backup your data to a remote location? While a solid backup solution such as Arkeia or TSM from IBM are nice from an enterprise point of view, simpler solutions are available from a home user's perspective. I will walk you through on you how you can backup your data to a remote server, using the default tools available on all linux systems. In a nutshell, we will use ssh capabilities to allow a cron job to transfer a tarball from you local machine to a remote machine."

Transmeta to add antivirus feature to chips
2004-05-18T17:00:00+00:00
Following in the footsteps of rival chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Transmeta is working to make its microprocessors capable of protecting computers from virus and worm attacks.

OGRE open-source graphics engine releases 0.14.0
2004-05-16T15:56:00+00:00
Steve Streeting writes "OGRE is a fast, flexible, elegantly designed real-time graphics rendering engine released under the LGPL for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. This new release brings a number of significant enhancements to OGRE's rapidly growing open source and indie game developer community, including multiple shadow techniques, hardware skinning, easier projective texturing, external texture sources (such as video), simpler integration with ragdoll support, and much more.

Week in review: Net portal wars
2004-05-15T20:30:00+00:00
Rivals Yahoo and Google launch assaults on each other's territory as the fight for the Internet search dollars heated up.

Pleasantly Surprised with Knoppix Linux
2004-05-13T13:16:00+00:00
Guest writes "Windows server administrator Joel Pomales tries out Knoppix Linux and finds that it's much better than he ever thought it would be."

Source-based Linux distributions from a beginner's perspective
2004-05-11T12:00:00+00:00
I recently decided to build a Linux installation from scratch. I am not a programmer or a professional writer. I am however, very enthused with Linux and want to offer my experiences to other non-programmers in the hope that it will inspire or invite them to take the plunge from Windows to Linux. I also hope that my comments will be read by programmers, to see opportunities for themselves to make their Linux creations more available to non-programmers. To preface this article, I want to say that I don't believe that any one distro is better, worse, good or bad. I really know very little about Linux and this story should be proof of that. So, to the programmers that read about my mistakes with their creations, please don't be offended.

Intel launches Dothan mobile processors today
2004-05-11T10:00:00+00:00
Anonymous Reader writes "Intel today announced the release of it's new Dothan mobile processors. These chips belong to the very successful Pentium M family with more than noticable enhancements in the overall architecture. Read the full story here."

Review of 'Samba-3 By Example'
2004-05-11T08:00:00+00:00
TBR writes "Who doesn't love to Samba these days? It's one of the joys of Linux and open source, and one of the keys to infiltrating Linux boxes into Windows shops. However, there's a world of difference between setting up a basic file and print box and moving a complete Windows environment over to Linux. It can be a steep learning curve, which is where John Terpstra, author of the Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide, does us all a big favour with this book. Starting with the most basic of configurations, this book shows us how to achieve increasingly complex migrations from Windows. From a simple small office network right through to distributed 2000-user networks to migrating an NT4 domain, the reader is walked through step-by-step, with detailed explanations of how and why things have to be done. Each scenario comes complete with configuration files, installation details, network settings etc. Additionally each scenario comes complete with a FAQ to mop up those questions not answered in the main body of the text. Read the rest of the review at TechBookReport"

Giving XFce4 a Spin
2004-05-11T07:00:00+00:00
Guest writes "XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. It's based on the GTK+ toolkit version 2. Rahul Gaitonde is reviewing XFce and he includes some screenshots."

AMD launches low-powered Athlon processors
2004-05-06T21:32:00+00:00
Anonymous Reader writes "Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) finally launched its low-powered mobile Athlon processors today, as expected earlier."

Deploy a C application as a grid service
2004-05-06T19:31:00+00:00
Anonymous Reader writes "The new programming model of grid services allows applications to be abstracted through their interface, enabling cross-platform and cross-programming language interoperability. This article demonstrates this by showing how to implement and deploy an existing application as a grid service using the IBM® Grid Toolbox for Multiplatform."