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A lot of the super serious business press has been writing that this decision will finally relieve Nokia of its outdated symbian OS. Please tell me nobody in charge of real money is reading these papers?

First kernel release date:
2004 - EKA2 (Symbian)
    2003 - Linux 2.6.0 (Android, Meego)
    2000 - Mac OS X (Apple iOS)
    1997 - EPOC32 inspiration of the written from scratch EKA2 symbian kernel
1996 - Windows CE (Windows phone)
    1995 - Linux runs on ARM
1991 - Linux 1.0.0 (Android, Meego)
1986 - Mach (OS X, Apple iOS)

UI API release date:
~2005 - SGI(android) turned into android in 2008
1992 - QT (symbian) ported to symbian in 2008
1989 - NeXT turned into OS X in 2000, iOS in 2007
1993 - WinNT turned into WinCE in 1996

Symbian was designed for mobile use, giving some core advantages that are near impossible to bolt onto an OS later on. It was designed for ARM instead of X86 and it was designed for lower power use. For example it tries to limit the amount of context switching needed during idle time. WinCE and Symbian EKA2 have the only kernels which can claim being designed for real-time tasks which matters for devices that have the main processor doing signals processing.

I only see one obstacle to Nokia having the nr1 spot in WW smartphone sales. Everywhere in the world people buy Nokia phones except in the US. Odds are an OS isn`t gonna change that. Buying RIM might do the trick.

The obvious choice would be to forget QT and port over enough of the android platform to run a lot of android java apps on Symbian. (Java and opengl are already done, SGI is not) It means a headstart over all those people who are working on porting linux to whatever their hardware people brewed up this time. It should be possible reuse a bit of Nokia specific stuff since its possible to wrap abstract java interfaces and a java based gui over existing code.

It would mean that a large chunk of the android apps out there will suddenly work on symbian.

This windows move is a suicidally stupid, poisonous and as desperate as McCain putting Sarah Palin on the ticket.

The most interesting point is missing from the article quote: a patch was provided by Alan Cox to commit his decision:

--- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100
+++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100
@@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@
  S: Maintained

  TTY LAYER
-P: Alan Cox
-M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
-S: Maintained
-T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/
+S: Unmaintained
  F: drivers/char/tty_*
  F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c
  F: include/linux/serial_core.h

It is pretty explicit, maybe more than words.
It's a sad that such conflicts happen, but its usual in larger projects.
Sometimes the LKML and Linus especially lack the delicatness to say things,
even if they may be right, saying things in a way that do not offend people
is often the best way to keep their attention and motivate them going toward
the direction wished.

Let's hope Alan will continue its work on other areas for the benefits of the community.

> Quite frankly, I don't understand why I should even have to bring these > issues up. You should have tried to fix the problem immediately, without > arguing against fixing the kernel. Without blaming user space. Without > making idiotic excuses for bad kernel behavior. > > The fact is, breaking regular user applications is simply not acceptable. > Trying to blame kernel breakage on the app being "buggy" is not ok. And > arguing for almost a week against fixing it - that's just crazy. I've been working on fixing it. I have spent a huge amount of time working on the tty stuff trying to gradually get it sane without breaking anything and fixing security holes along the way as they came up. I spent the past two evenings working on the tty regressions. However I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the new maintainer. --- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100 +++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100 @@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@ S: Maintained TTY LAYER -P: Alan Cox -M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk -S: Maintained -T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/ +S: Unmaintained F: drivers/char/tty_* F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c F: include/linux/serial_core.h

You mean like this? http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/

Mutt is amazing... All you need is a pine muttrc file, one example is here

http://www.dotfiles.com/files/27/263_.muttrc

and then check out Tesla Gwynne's muttrc for more fun:
http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/BitsAndPieces/muttrc-1.2

The online muttrc generator
http://muttrcbuilder.org/

It may not win you over, but wow, mutt can be super quick to do mighty things.

I hope this image will work for you.

http://zenii.linux.org.uk/diary/

So, you're saying there wont be a USB charging adaptor...?

They tried.

Yes.

1. You're gonna need multiple Linux flavors and versions from multiple sources that specialized in these platforms.
   
   • ALPHA
     
   • ARM
     
   • I686
     
   • IA64
     
   • M68K
     
   • PowerPC PenguiPPC Denx
     
   • MIPS
     
   • S390
     
   • SuperH
     
   • UltraSPARC
     
   • X86_64
     
   
   
2. To determine which versions of crosstool (compiler, linkers, debugger), check out The Matrix Guy (Dan Kegel), or more specifically THE MATRIX of workable gcc/g++/ld/gdb.
   
3. To ease your pain of figuring out the "./configure" options, definitely checkout PTXDist. Menuconfig is similar to Linux 'make menuconfig'. PTXDist also help to build a root file system in a jiffy, which in my book, is a PLUS!
   

Wrong, wrong, wrong....

http://zenii.linux.org.uk/~telsa/GDP/gnome-faq/ind ex.html#AEN37

mmmm There are Geeks in gray suits with an MBA. and even some without a gray suit, but still geeks and still with an MBA. http://zenii.linux.org.uk/diary/

Yeah, but I bet your wife's fucking ugly. I what the FUCK is that http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~telsa/index.html? Jesus FUCKING christ? Who would want to fuck her? Who would want to eat that pussy?

Why doesn't she even get some nice glasses? Or do her hair? Or get her dental done?

I mean for fuck's sake! Honestly!

RiscOS computers (previously called Acorn computers) have had the OS on a ROM for the last 16 years, but it doesn't stop you from running Linux on it.

In the UK it is already legislated that you can't mess with your hardware, and trying to mod a PS2 can land you in jail. You make a good point about the xbox, even though they failed, but if a 3rd party is making the machine then they don't have much incentive to lock it to Windows unless bribed by M$.

Phillip.

According to the Linux Arm machines page, the config type is CONFIG_MACH_NOKIA770 but I wasn't able to find this in the Linux OMAP patches.

Any ideas about where a .config file is that I can use?

There have been several good answers to your question, but if you're really new to compilers, you might want a little more context. Want a quick lesson in how compilers work? If you're willing to accept some gross oversimplifications, here's how most modern compilers work:

1) Tokenize the input. For example, if you were compiling perl, you might choose to turn "print $foo" into three tokens; KEYWORD_PRINT, TYPE_SCALAR, and IDENTIFIER('foo'). The output is typically a stream of tokens. This step might be done by lex or flex.

2) Parse the sequence of tokens using a set of rules called a grammar. For example, "TYPE_SCALAR" followed by "IDENTIFIER()" is might match a rule to generate a variable called "$foo", and "KEYWORD_PRINT" followed by a variable means call the function print on the contents of the variable. The output is typically an abstract syntax tree (AST); a high-level data structure representing the program. This step might be done by yacc or bison.

3) Match the AST against a series of rules to output the final code. This might actually be two steps; you might generate something into a low-level register transfer language (RTL) that looks very much like assembly, and then turn THAT into actual machine instructions.

At each stage, you might choose to optimize the output. You might also insert optimizations passes between steps. (For example, you might insert a pass between 2 and 3 to optimize the AST into a simpler AST.)

Before SSA, GCC sort of skipped making any high-level AST; it used to go from parsing almost immediately into a RTL. You can still optimize RTL, but since it's pretty low-level, it misses out on higher-level context and made some optimizations really difficult.

SSA is simply a form used for the high-level AST. Why SSA? It is a very nice form to optimize. Read the wikipedia article for more details on why SSA is particularly useful for some optimizations.

Page 181 of this PDF file from the 2003 GCC Summit explains the flow of the GCC compiler.

Another example of linux overexposure.

Still, as previous news stories here have shown us, married, old staff are not as innovative or useful as young hopefuls, so perhaps this plan isn't so bad on Google's part after all.

Useful is an interesting word to use here. Are you suggesting that somehow a technology company should get rid of their "married, old staff" because they are no longer userful? I would venture to say they would be releasing nearly all of their experience and corporate knowledge.

Tell AC and ESR that they're useless and no longer innovative. I'm sure they'd agree.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Cox only communicates in Welsh, so only the other 3 people who read Welsh can really be exposed to and snotty rationalizations

...is that there are a gazillion ways to do it, and every cluster vendor comes up with their own way, and there is no agreed-upon standard yet to easily deploy these things (AFAIK). Now the fact that there is no single vendor controlling how clustering works is a good thing, without a lack of a good standard as to what a clustered environment will offer to the application developer, the task of setting up clusters for different types of applications remains a tedious task.

Lars Marowsky-Brée had a paper in the proceedings of OLS 2002 describing the problem and a suggeted solution in his paper entitled "The Open Clustering Framework". I'm not sure how far standardized clustering has come since then. Anyone has any insight on the matter?

Presentation:

Real Media File (31kbit, 7.5MB,
320x240res)

mpg video (120kbit, 25.5MB,
160x120res)

High quality DivX and 330kbit mpg files available here

DivX version also available in the business club members section

Questions:

Real Media File (31k, 3.3MB, 320x240 res)

mpg video (120kbit, 11.2MB, 160x120 res)

High quality DivX and 330kbit mpg files available here

DivX version also available in the business club members section

Presentation:

Real Media File (31kbit, 7.5MB,
320x240res)

mpg video (120kbit, 25.5MB,
160x120res)

High quality DivX and 330kbit mpg files available here

DivX version also available in the business club members section

Questions:

Real Media File (31k, 3.3MB, 320x240 res)

mpg video (120kbit, 11.2MB, 160x120 res)

High quality DivX and 330kbit mpg files available here

DivX version also available in the business club members section

• Jörg Schilling, cdrtools
  
• Donald Becker, linux ethernet drivers, Beowulf
  
• thekonst, centericq (a console IM client)
  
• Alan Cox, linux kernel guru (I hate that word, but it fits), including being the primary maintainer of the 2.2 tree
  
• Paul Vixie, Vixie cron, BIND, ISC

Putting Alan Cox on a Chip has produced a snapshot related to this story.

That he signed an NDA doesn't matter any more, as S3 themselves released the driver Try http://www.linux.org.uk/~alan/S3.zip for the S3 Savage driver, and http://www.linux.org.uk/~alan/CLE266.zip for the CLE266 MPEG decoder driver.

That he signed an NDA doesn't matter any more, as S3 themselves released the driver Try http://www.linux.org.uk/~alan/S3.zip for the S3 Savage driver, and http://www.linux.org.uk/~alan/CLE266.zip for the CLE266 MPEG decoder driver.

The strongest party in the UK against Software Patents is (as usual) the Green Party.

A quote from the party:
The GP strongly opposes software patenting. Copyright works well enough to protect IPR (Intellectual Property Rights). The flag of IPR must not be used to give more power to rich corporations while preventing the general use of useful cheap software.

Google for more info, but a couple of links are here:
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/index.php?nav=article s &n=68>First Link
Second Link

The second link recommends either the UKIP or Green Party for restricting EU control over the UK, but vote Green for the less xenophobic, racist and altogether saner option.

Here in the UK, the UKIP (UK Independence Party) seem to have picked up a lot of of support over this issue. See this open letter from Alan Cox http://www.linux.org.uk/open.l.html

Seeing as how Linux runs on just about every popular chip out there, your comment has no basis behind it. As a matter of fact, we can thank Windows for our dependancy on the x86 architecture, as it is the only platform it CURRENTLY runs on, until they finally release the 64bit version. You are an idiot who has only been first once in your life, in the shit for brains line. I do feel sorry for you however, it must be difficult living life with an IQ of 12 and a hockey helmet on head.

They have WiFi (including WEP-128, and a VPN client compatible with Poptop), a graphical SSL web browser, an email client, and can even do SSH2. It's an Xscale 400MHz based PDA, so it may even run Linux some day. :-)

Well, here: http://www.linux.org.uk/SMP/title.html it says: "the initial port was made possible thanks to Caldera".... Maybe that's why SCO said it will soon sue the BSDs... =)

/*
* x86 SMP booting functions
*
* (c) 1995 Alan Cox, Building #3 <alan@redhat.com>
* (c) 1998, 1999, 2000 Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
*
* Much of the core SMP work is based on previous work by Thomas Radke, to
* whom a great many thanks are extended.
*
* Thanks to Intel for making available several different Pentium,
* Pentium Pro and Pentium-II/Xeon MP machines.
* Original development of Linux SMP code supported by Caldera.
*
* This code is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or
* later.

A really good summary of the new features of the 2.6 kernels is in Dave Jones' the Halloween 2.0 document. It also points out a lot of the common problems people have when migrating from 2.4 to 2.6 and how to work around them, so it's well worth a read.

http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/sna pshot/
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/sna pshot/gcc-ssa-3.5ssa-0.20040129.snapshot.src.rpm (24.4M)
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/gccsummit-2003-proceedings.pdf (1'383'108 bytes)
== http://www.linux.org.uk/~ajh/gcc/gccsummit-2003-pr oceedings.pdf (1'383'108 bytes)
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/nordu2003-slides.pdf (102'895 bytes)
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/nordu2003.pdf (153'101 bytes)
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/tree-ssa-gccs03-slides.pdf (90'925 bytes)
http://people.redhat.com/dnovillo/pub/tree-ssa/pap ers/tree-ssa-gccs03.pdf (87'507 bytes)

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/devel/binutils/binu tils-2.14.90.0.8.tar.bz2 (11'015'696 bytes)

open4free

This article sounds completely stupid. Someone didn't know that pulling 64-bits across the bus( reading/writing can take longer than 32-bits? Never thought of the caches?

Just read the GCC Proceedings, there's explanations and benchmarks of the why/how/when of x86-64 in 32 vs 64-bit mode, both speed of execution and image size.

I think 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source (and Linux, in particular) thanks to the advances made in 2003. Linux is finally a term that is recognized by many businesses, and the concept of 'open source' is invading even the most stoic of companies. More developers than ever are joining the ranks (although many only because they're out of work, unfortunately), and there are lots of cool projects.

Mike Home, who works on Wine, posted a great summary of planned open source developments in 2004, mentioning Wine's continuing development (0.9 should be out in 2004), and planned leaps in KDE and GNOME. GNOME will finally get a full and stable version of Epiphany, too.

Development continues on Perl 6 and the Parrot virtual machine, and I am particularly interested in the development of Dashboard, a GNOME 'just in time' information manager project created by Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame.

Alan Cox should have his MBE this year, er, MBA, rather ;-) And perhaps he'll stop using Welsh only on his diary. And as discussed over at KernelTrap, Reiser4 may also be merged into 2.6, although this is not certain, and may be merged into 2.7 first for further testing.

So, what do YOU see happening in open source in 2004? Fill us in on what you plan to do, and why 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source, Linux, and all. What technologies are going to spring up this time around?

Alan Cox did a lot of work on the "Alpha Linux" stuff for redhat. He always seemed to have the answers when those of us that used Alpha based machines ran into problems. His "online diary" can be found at http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/ and when he was deeply involved in the kernel, I used to read it constantly because the stuff he was working on was the stuff that interested me. This interview just confirms one thing for me. I owe him a great big Thank You, his help to Linux over the years has been invaluable. Should I ever meet Alan, he's going to get a beer on me.

AngryPeopleRule

You might want to keep an eye on your 2.6.0 machine if it's on a network that's readily accessible to the outside world. Apparently not all of the security fixes that occurred in the 2.4 line have made it into 2.6.0.

Dave Jones' post halloween document, which is mentioned in an earlier post as a good summary of changes, mentions the following (near the bottom):

Security concerns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Several security issues solved in 2.4 may not yet be forward ported
to 2.6. For this reason 2.6.x kernels should not be tested on
untrusted systems. Testing known 2.4 exploits and reporting results
is useful.

http://www.linux.org.uk/~davej/docs/post-halloween -2.6.txt

It's still quite detailed, but it's easier to read.

Read Dave Jones' post halloween document. It summarizes the differences between 2.4 and 2.6.

For a summary of changes from 2.4 to 2.6, read Dave Jones' "post-Halloween" document. (The Changelog only lists changes from -test11 to 2.6.0 and so is not very useful. However, a full Changelog from 2.5.0 to 2.6.0 would be massive information overload, as well as just not terribly useful for a broad picture of what's different.)

Read Dave Jones' "post-Halloween documents". You'll have to read them from backups, since the host davej's website is usually on recently suffered some sort of catastrophic hardware failure.

• the humble programmer (1972; dijkstra, e.w.; communications of the acm, vol. 15 (10), 859-866)
  cool stuff. read it. it's not really technical.
• learning by doing with simulated intelligent help (1988; carroll, j.m. & aaronson, a.p., communications of the acm. vol. 31(9), 1064-1079)
  this is interesting because back then they already collected a lot of evidence why crap like clippy is not going to work. it's also one of the rare examples of a paper where researches explain why their great idea isn't so great after all.
• the errors of tex (1989; knuth, d.e., software practice and experience, vol. 19(7), 607-685)
  it's a classification of the various bugs in tex. nice to know that people smarter than me make the same mistakes.
• exception handling: issues and a proposed notation (1975; goodenough, j.b.; communications of the acm, vol. 18 (12), 683ff)
  if there are still people around who thing the try/throw/catch thingy was invented by C++; unfortunately it's difficult to read
• the trouble with unix: the user interface is horrid (norman, d.a.; datamaton)
  i can't find my dead-tree-copy right now. there seems to be an online version, but it lacks the rebutal by some unix dude, which AFAIR is printed in datamaton. there are mostly 2 things intersting about this: first, this is the same norman that moved on to be a founding member of the usability genre ("design of everyday things" and stuff). second, while most of the problems pointed out in the article have been fixed by now, the same kind of design mistakes are made over and on again by the unix comunity still today.
  my favourite part: norman points out that unix doesn't produce error messages. the unix dude replies that's ok because if it would, it could break all the programs that expect the output to match a certain pattern. (years later, someone smarter than him invented stderr.)
• mathematics of programming (1986; hoare, c.a.r; byte august 1986, 115ff)
  this is a horrible paper. i never managed to read it to the end. however it is interesting insofar as that it's quite obvious why nobody reads this kind of papers. basically, it full of selfsatiesfied mathematical brainwanking and shoulderpadding. so IMO its main point is to show why developers and mathematicians are not working together anymore (like they did until the 70ties)

Besides which, I bet a part of the reason it works so well is that Apple control the hardware they build iMacs from. Unlike x86 OSes it doesn't have to put up with being run on whatever hardware the local semi-competent PC building firm happen to throw together. Now I know some x86 OSes are better than others, but it just has to be easier writing an OS where you know exactly what hardware configurations it will be used on.

Just because it's not mentioned, doesn't mean it's not there. Like someone else said, it's more a question of defaults.

Any recent Linux distribution will have IPTables installed (ealier versions had ipchains).

Starting around RH7.3, RedHat started running lokkit by default on system setup. What lokkit does is, for any setting other than 'none', it locks out all/most incomming connections, but lets you specify that you want to allow specific ports inbound (like SMTP, FTP, SSH).

Like they said, it doesn't replace the work of an enterprise security admin, but it does make for a decent first attempt for most home/SOHO users. I used it as the starting point for my own rules.

Then you must not be using Linux. Some cool folks like this guy (not to mention this guy) are working hard at making Linux work on the EPIA -- but it doesn't have to be this hard. I've been keeping my eye on these MiniITX boards for some time now, but I'm waiting until I can do everything I want (play DVDs and DivX files, maybe run a couple emulators) without reverse-engineering drivers. Maybe this new board will make it happen.

You might try an Arm processor, many of which have great built-in features (like NIC, daq, memory management). You can get demo boards, and run linux + related gnu tools on them. ARM-based systems make great embedded/distributed systems (aka 'the future'), and are a useful to learn for the old-resume.

I used to quite ritually read his Diary online at http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/ until he started writing it in Welsh! Did anyone else suffer from a similar fate?

I thought Alan lives in Wales (Swansea?), not England. It's certainly the impression one gets from his diary..

It is important to note (for non-British /.ers) that Wales is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island, as is England, and thus, Wales cannot be part of England.

This distinction is something that has been fought over for many hundreds of years.

If that were the case then why would they send threatening letters to those who have compiled Linux on x86 and alpha? Also--there's no mention of sequent or anything here and the comments indicate that the work is based on...

/*
* arch/s390/kernel/smp.c
*
* S390 version
* Copyright (C) 1999,2000 IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH, IBM Corporation
* Author(s): Denis Joseph Barrow (djbarrow@de.ibm.com,barrow_dj@yahoo.com),
* Martin Schwidefsky (schwidefsky@de.ibm.com)
*
* based on other smp stuff by
* (c) 1995 Alan Cox, CymruNET Ltd <alan@cymru.net>
* (c) 1998 Ingo Molnar

I believe stuff must be some sort of technical term. Better question...why do they keep changing their story with each press release? Who will be the Mark Furhman of this case? Will the glove fit?????

Holy FUD, Batman! Tune in next week^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htomorrow. Same SCO time. Same SCO channel.