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Psssst, I got the low-down on the secret evidence sealed in the case right here.

Still using the 2.7 kernel? I didn't know gentoo had forked its own kernel and incremented version numbers.


Note sarcasm.

I have ADSL from Telus, the local phone company.

On well-connected sites I routinely hit 1.5 MBPS downstream (handy for new Linux kernels :-), and my line would support 9 MBPS if I was prepared to fork over the $$$. It costs me about $CDN 30.00 a month.

I own my modem, though Telus would happily rent me one for 5 bucks a month.

...laura

you try finding every hole in millions of lines of code

That would be a hell of a lot easier to do if I had access to the code.
Lots of people do it constantly!

Alan Cox seems to be trying to stablize 2.6 with his -ac patchset.
I think I may be moving over to that from the vanilla releases of 2.6.

Ever heard of PAM? http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/whatispam .html/

Pluggable Authentication Modules Want a new method of authentication? Just write a PAM module!

http://www.kernel.org/

http://www.artfiles.org/mozilla.org/firefox/releas es/1.0/(Germany)
ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/Mozilla/firefox/releases/1 .0/
http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/pub/mozilla/firefox/release s/1.0/
ftp://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/pub/mozilla/firefox/releases /1.0/
ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/mozilla/firefox/releas es/1.0/
http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/mozilla/firefox/relea ses/1.0/
http://sunsite.rediris.es/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/ releases/1.0/
ftp://sunsite.rediris.es/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/r eleases/1.0/
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mozilla/firef ox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele ases/1.0/ (US)
ftp://trillian.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mozilla.org/firef ox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.ussg.indiana.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fir efox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.oregonstate.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fire fox/releases/1.0/
http://mirrors.kernel.org/mozilla/firefox/releases /1.0/ (US)
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/mozilla/firefox/releases/ 1.0/ (US)

http://www.artfiles.org/mozilla.org/firefox/releas es/1.0/(Germany)
ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/Mozilla/firefox/releases/1 .0/
http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/pub/mozilla/firefox/release s/1.0/
ftp://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/pub/mozilla/firefox/releases /1.0/
ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/mozilla/firefox/releas es/1.0/
http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/mozilla/firefox/relea ses/1.0/
http://sunsite.rediris.es/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/ releases/1.0/
ftp://sunsite.rediris.es/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/r eleases/1.0/
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mozilla/firef ox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele ases/1.0/ (US)
ftp://trillian.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mozilla.org/firef ox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.ussg.indiana.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fir efox/releases/1.0/
ftp://mozilla.oregonstate.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fire fox/releases/1.0/
http://mirrors.kernel.org/mozilla/firefox/releases /1.0/ (US)
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/mozilla/firefox/releases/ 1.0/ (US)

pssst, there is another firewall you can download from here for free!!! Can you believe that??? But shhh! keep it quiet or they'll shut down the mirror.

No, he created a kernel, he created a GPL licensed, monolithic and modular kernel.
Linux is _just_ a kernel

By definition of the word Operating system, you're right. Still, though free kernels and user land utilities existed well before Linux, it was his project that kicked off a lot of development around open source operating systems.

Without Linus there would be no Linux, and that's the simple truth.

As FreeBSD user I am well aware of the diversity of ongoing efforts delivering us the final product of a free operating system. Still all the lot would not be possible without the people fighting at the front.

I'll have to stick by Theo on this one, there is a lot of whining about Nvidia binary drivers for their video cards, but that seems to be all it is, whining.

That's just a statement of your personal opinion, not being backed up at all. Just like Theo's. Insulting on the basis of such arguments is unprofessional and does no one any good. Why not try to get together in a proper forum that actually allows bidirectional communication?

No, he created a kernel, he created a GPL licensed, monolithic and modular kernel.
Linux is _just_ a kernel

By definition of the word Operating system, you're right. Still, though free kernels and user land utilities existed well before Linux, it was his project that kicked off a lot of development around open source operating systems.

Without Linus there would be no Linux, and that's the simple truth.

As FreeBSD user I am well aware of the diversity of ongoing efforts delivering us the final product of a free operating system. Still all the lot would not be possible without the people fighting at the front.

I'll have to stick by Theo on this one, there is a lot of whining about Nvidia binary drivers for their video cards, but that seems to be all it is, whining.

That's just a statement of your personal opinion, not being backed up at all. Just like Theo's. Insulting on the basis of such arguments is unprofessional and does no one any good. Why not try to get together in a proper forum that actually allows bidirectional communication?

Installing and administering the various open source tools can be tedious work, especially without documentation of how to put things together.

A quick Google search though reveals a lot of free papers and manuals on this very topic.

You forgot one.

> Yeah, who wants a common driver API for video, network, or sound cards...

I don't understand why a common driver API is not possible to do in C... Would you care explaining?

> Not to mention that drivers are all about abstracting the hardware and interface implementation from the OS itself anyway...

Does that mean we should give up on transparency?

> You can do some pretty neat things in C++ if you know what you are doing. If you don't know what you are doing, you can do some pretty crappy things.

This (again) begs the question: what can you do in C++ that you can not do in C? Is it just because classes, objects, constructors, destructors, inheritance, and all that crappy OOP stuff is specificly declared that C++ is that superior? You can do pretty well the same in C! There is absolutely no consistent technical reason supporting the use of C++ in the Linux kernel!

Quoting the FAQ that you should indeed read since there are some Linus quotes there:

Should the kernel use object-oriented programming techniques? Actually, it already does. The VFS (Virtual Filesystem Switch) is a prime example of object-oriented programming techniques. There are objects with public and private data, methods and inheritance. This just happens to be written in C. Another example of object-oriented programming is Xt (the X Intrinsics Toolkit), also written in C. What's important about object-oriented programming is the techniques, not the languages used.

Cisco has more bandwidth than Torvalds?* We need to do something about that.

The pipe to the server containing Linux has at least 1 Gbps of sustained throughput. How big is Cisco.com's pipe?

I have been beating the bushes hard looking for the best Athlon 64/socket 939 MB combo for Linux.

The nforce3 apparently suffers from some IDE problems and a bug report has been filed.

I am currently leaning towards the MSI K8T Neo2 FIR.

I would like to hear about Linux on nforce4...

Also, this site seems to be giving hardware reviews under Linux a go. Any other good Linux-centric hardare sites?

It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure.

Very true...

It is interesting to note that the new GNUstep Live CD was announced on GNUstep Core News in June:

What is it?
GNUstep Live CD contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X). Display Postscript is one of its powerful features. It includes an excellent application called Gorm for RAD (Apple Software Design Guidelines). More about the Objective-C Language.

Features
Software using GNUstep (Addresses, Agenda, AClock, Affiche, CamelBones, Camera, Charmap, Cenon, Connect, Cynthiune, DisplayCalibrator, EasyDiff, EdenMath, Gridlock, GMines, Gorm, Gomoku, GNUMail, GNUstep-icons, GNUWash, GWorkspace, HelpViewer, ImageViewer, LuserNET, MPDCon, ProjectCenter, PRICE, Poe, Preferences, PlopFolio, Preview, Renaissance, Stepulator, StepTalk, StepBill, Terminal, TalkSoup, TextEdit, ViewPDF, VolumeControl, Waiho, WildMenus, Zipper)

In development and not yet on the CD (3DKit, AgentFarms, Burn / CDPlayer, Duncan, Emacs on GNUstep, Encod, Expense, GTAMS, GRASStep GIS, GShisen, GNUstepWeb (WebObjects 4.x), GNUstepWrapper, ILogin, Installer, InnerSpace, LaTeX Service, Localize, MusicKit, MyWiki / MyLibrary, ModPlugPlay, Paje, Pixen, Popup, Position, Rhydot / Skfxdemo, RSS Reader, WebKit / SimpleWWW, Tryst)

The currently used window manager is Window Maker.
Rescue System (lde, gpart, parted, grub, raidtools, portmap, nfs-common, QTParted)
3d Software Blender, Wings3d, Games NetHack, Jump n Bump and SuperTux, LaTeX, TeXmacs, Emacs, GIMP2
Tools (screen, irssi-text, ngrep, tcpdump, openssl, ssh, imagemagick, netpbm, nail, iptraf, mc, gnupg, ibackup, cowsay, hdparm, feh, tetradraw)
The Debian GNU/Hurd K6 mini.iso for easy installation in /cdrom/hurd
C Compiler and development environment
Webbrowsers (dillo, links2), TV Software (xawtv, alevt)
Some music (www.chiptune.com, www.maktone.tk)

This is a very interesting project, though of course not as popular as Knoppix.

It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own. [...] Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...

Imagine the efforts on Knoppix would instead had gone into GNUstep Live CD... Imagine the development efforts on Linux would instead had gone into The Hurd... Just imagine... The entire computing world as we know it would be completely different. But what do we expect? People have no idea that GNU even exists, let alone the kernel development! Just few days ago Slashdot posted a story about the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds with this opening paragraph: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmer

Not charging per core, whew, thus reducing our enterprise's total cost of operation!

That's utterly false. Every distribution gives credit to the base system GNU and the Linux kernel. You sir, are not up on your facts.
http://www.kernel.org/ and http://www.gnu.org/ are good places to start.

So ALL software that runs on Linux is open source? There is some little flag in an obscure part of the kernel that can tell if the binary being run had the full source included with it? Goddamn, you're an idiot.

The situation with closed-source binaries in the linux world is the same as in the Microsoft Miniverse - either you trust them, or you don't - with one exception. The underlying platform is open under linux, so you don't have to worry about the OS lying to you as to where the problem is, like Windows used to do every time it crapped out, and would blame whatever random program was running at the time (remember those days?).

The joke was that Windows always blamed everyone else, even when it was a Windows bug, and Netscape always blamed itself, even when it wasn't its own fault.

There's nothing preventing you from running an untainted kernel under linux. There's no such thing as an untainted kernel under Windows.

you must be new here. Linus has done some amazing things

Windows at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.

The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...

It's worth pointing out that XMPP is not just for instant messaging.

XMPP standardizes a method for exchanging structured information streams between autonomous entities -- by they human or automated agent.

Thus, when you (as an engineer) need to set up a network of programs that all communicate with each other, you don't have to roll your own protocol, XMPP can do it for you.

Although IRC "botnets" have existed for quite some time, they are typically very primitive and exist mostly in the realm of script kiddies. Further, IRC is unformatted, unstructured, un-standardized text, making it very difficult to parse reliably.

XMPP allows networks programs to communicate with each other in a "native" language -- data structures -- rather than attempting to glean information from a line of IRC ASCII.

I'm currently using XMPP for several local applications: backup agents communicating with each other, sending and receiving mon monitors and alerts, an improved (RSS-like) syndication system, and more.

This ain't your grandfather's IM protocol.

Two clues for you.
1. PDF is an open format.
2. It's only reader-unfriendly if you have a shitty OS.

From http://www.kernel.org/:
"These days it also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64 and CRIS architectures."

Check, check, check, check, check, dunno, check, in progress, in progress, check, check, nope (who needs Itanium? :-P), check, check, never heard of it.

From http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1 .6.2.html:
"The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, UNIX-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD runs on 52 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 11 distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6.2 release contains complete binary releases for 40 different machine types."

There are certainly some that Linux supports that NetBSD doesn't, but not many. And as far as sheer number, NetBSD wins hands down.

Besides. At a certain point, you get past the serious marker, because you've exhausted all the common platforms. At that point, only one thing matters: Can I run *Nix on my Atari?

There's a reason some people continue to run these old systems. Some of it has to do with just fearing change for critical systems. If it works, why break it? Also, often times custom third-party applications that may have cost millions to write initially, but are no longer supported, may cost many millions more to migrate to a newer supported solution.

NT 4 was released in August 1996. A month prior to that Linux 2.0 was released.

The 2.0 series kernel is still being maintained, and I would argue is still an acceptable server platform (albeit ancient). Just keep patching your daemons and your firewall rules up to date, and you should have no problems. And if I were the admin of a multi-million dollar system with custom third-party applications that were written in 1996, and the original admin team has left and the programmers are all gone, you'd have a lot of work convincing me to attempt a migration to 2.6. What would it gain me or my organization?

Things licensed as Open Source do better on "just the facts" vs hype. Maybe it's because their audiences would take them to task if they did otherwise, but description of things such as GCC, Wikipedia , the Linux kernel, the GIMP, to name just a few, are completely factual. Not entirely free of marketing but tolerable are the Linux site's description of Linux, OpenSSH, bzip2, Project Gutenberg, and an XWindows organization X.org.

Particularly note Wikipedia and Google. The description of Wikipedia was made and chosen by the users. I can't think of a better testament that what users really want is just the facts. And Google understood that the last thing a person wants to do when anxious to find something quick is be forced to wait for a bunch of pointless graphics and generic ads to load. Really aggravating when on dial-up. Before Google, I got to where I knew just when to hit the stop button when loading Yahoo's main search page so I'd get the text input line and search button and miss all the extra crap they used to put on their main page.

Of course open source isn't totally above marketing. FreeBSD, Mozilla Firefox, KDE, Apache, OpenOffice all lay it on. They can point to all kinds of statistics to justify their hype, but the hype is still irritating when it catches my attention. These are easy to accept in spite of the marketspeak because I've heard from elsewhere that they're good.

Bad though some of those are, Microsoft is worse. Maybe what MS does should be called extreme marketing? In a few moments of searching, I was unable to find even a badly overblown description of just what Windows XP or MS Office is and during the search was wading through hype about MS's latest whatever: "Try the new digital music experience from Microsoft. You'll love it!"

As for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I will spend a little time trying not to do that, but when it does happen I hope it clues the promoters in to realizing they made the waters too murky. Accepting something in spite of murk is not the way to persuade them to clean up. I like to tell them about it too. You never know when commentary might actually be heeded. I'm sorry if a good thing gets short shrift, but when time is limited, books will be judged by covers. People are often asked to try to word emails so spam filters will pass them. I feel I'm not asking too much of marketing to do the analogous.

Your fault for using a shitty OS.

Jim Trocki would be near the top of my list. Jim is the creator of mon http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/ and he uses vi.

Oh and as a Linux user looking forward to FreeBSD 5 to try it out, I've heard plenty about it's ports system but I have yet to hear what kind of binary support (eg. apt) if any it has...

I used Linux, TerminatorX a broken optical mouse and a $10 used turntable I bought from a grandmotherly looking ladies garage sale.

Picture here

It is up to the hardware vendors to make sure their drivers are compatible with the linux kernel. If the vendors don't see a market need for Linux drivers, they wont spend the time & money to create them. Without drivers, the market stays small.

The easiest way for vendors to get and maintain Linux drivers is to release the specs or source code to the kernel developers and let them maintain it! But vendors are nervous about competitors learning secrets from the driver code about the internals of the hardware, so often they dont.

The rest of the problem is handled by Project Utopia

Project Utopia is really an umbrella project of a bunch of smaller open-source projects. Included are the 2.6 Linux kernel, udev, HAL, and other policy pieces like gnome-volume-manager. From the end-user perspective, the idea here is plug-and-play in the non-techinical sense. When you plug in a piece of hardware, it should Just Work.

It is up to the hardware vendors to make sure their drivers are compatible with the linux kernel. If the vendors don't see a market need for Linux drivers, they wont spend the time & money to create them. Without drivers, the market stays small.

The easiest way for vendors to get and maintain Linux drivers is to release the specs or source code to the kernel developers and let them maintain it! But vendors are nervous about competitors learning secrets from the driver code about the internals of the hardware, so often they dont.

The rest of the problem is handled by Project Utopia

Project Utopia is really an umbrella project of a bunch of smaller open-source projects. Included are the 2.6 Linux kernel, udev, HAL, and other policy pieces like gnome-volume-manager. From the end-user perspective, the idea here is plug-and-play in the non-techinical sense. When you plug in a piece of hardware, it should Just Work.

The point I gave up on Mandrake was when I tried to copy an 8 meg file from one folder to another on a stock Mandrake installation on a Pentium IV 3.4MHz with 2G of RAM and a 120G HD. I was sitting there for more than 20 minutes, doing something that would have taken a few seconds on my Pentium Pro running NT 3.51. 20 minutes. And during this time, Mozilla was frozen, and VIM was virtually unusable.

Can anyone tell me why people still use Mandrake when there are superior offerings out there?

Does this version work any better?

Can anyone tell me why people still use Mandrake when there are superior offerings out there?

If all software was free, why would anyone bother developing it?

Gee, I can't think of anyone who would develop software without getting paid for it...

But seriously, there are several reasons people would write software whose price is 0:

• People want better software to do $WHATEVER (for values of $WHATEVER that make money, which is most of them), so they write it
• People want to get a job as a programmer so they write a software package to prove they aren't total code monkeys
• People like fame; they like being admired and appreciated
• An industry consortium decides they need an open, standard, free way to do $WHATEVER
• Some people have a political motivation to undermine proprietary software (we may not have that same motivation; but it is a real driving force for some people)
• Some people like to help others (ditto)
• Your company might want to make your product universally (or nearly so) used in order to be able to charge money for training, certification, etc.
• I mentioned 15 high-profile products that are competitive with best-of-breed and are available for $0 (and not all of it is Free as in speech). All of them were written because one of the above bullet points (or one I forgot) applied.

There are lots of motivations for people's actions besides money.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/

Ask google?

It is a long list, but considering this , this , this , and this , just to name a few in the past few months, it really is quite a small list. /home/AC

It is a long list, but considering this , this , this , and this , just to name a few in the past few months, it really is quite a small list. /home/AC

It is a long list, but considering this , this , this , and this , just to name a few in the past few months, it really is quite a small list. /home/AC

It is a long list, but considering this , this , this , and this , just to name a few in the past few months, it really is quite a small list. /home/AC

Oops, bit of a cock up in the NFS Client code... so much it warranted a mini-minor version... http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/Change Log-2.6.8.1 I'll agree with others... I'm awaiting 2.6.8.SP2 :)

1. I think Linux is a great kernel, but a 42 MB download is really a bit too much for my liking.

[ suggestions for reducing the source update snipped ]

The upgrade patch from 2.6.7 to 2.6.8 is under 4MB and can be found right along with the complete source here.

Splitting the kernel source into parts would be a logistical problem...and I'd rather the developers not be bothered with it. If you want source, and you want small file sizes, using a diff to patch a previous release is a reasonable compromise. There are plenty of comments on the web on how to apply these patches, so being a developer isn't even necessary.

Most of the suggestions you have would be appropriate for a binary release, though binary kernel packages are much smaller anyway so much of the benifit there is also lost.

That said, there could be improvements on the package updates for just about every package ... I don't know any that do atomic updates (ex: MD5 sums of the files and fetch only the ones that differ...or apply a patch to make the files match.). That would be quite handy for mass deployment of files over a LAN to cut down network traffic; push out the update details to the clients, have the local systems check if they need a specific file, have the local systems report back what they need or if they are already OK. Not ideal for every situation, though it could be benificial. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tivo updates are handled like this.

The latest is actually 2.6.8.1. The (very short) change log for that version can be found here. Looks like there was an NFS bug in the 2.6.8 release that needed to be fixed.

Mirrors

Last I checked there isn't a BitTorrent client included with Linux.

My SBLive! and GeForce 2 have always worked fine in two K133[A] boards I've owned, with a variety of Athlon and Duron processors, running all sorts of operating systems.