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Alan Cox (in his daily log) talked about fixing K7 support when his Athlon arrived.

(August 19th entry from this page) "AMD Athlon arrives at last. Its fast, very fast and the kernel is not yet optimised for the K7. The first problem I found is that 2.2.x with MTRR support crashes on boot on the K7. Fixed that with some bits from Linux kernel that had been done without a K7 or docs by someone who guessed very well indeed. "

So get 2.2.13, it should work :-)
---

First I must warn all that I have long since dropped out of my business analysis train of thought as I steadily receded back into loving electronics and OS's - *NIX being my favorite.

Businesses and managers are very impressionable folks. In that I mean they truly believe in commercialism. I have worked with government and commercial sector and I have seen the way salesmen can appeal to these goons. With the government it is - well kinda perverse in a way but it works, with business it's easy -- we offer you this and get that.

So let's break off and follow that last statement for a second, we offer this and we are saying you get that.

Now let's apply the late 80's early 90's MS edition of that very same statement:

If you want that you must buy this in order to survive and have that, oh yeah we forgot to mention you have to also buy this other pile of sh*t as well but we can get inot that later . . .

Now come back to the present.

Joe Blow IT Manager, the very same schmuck whose light up when the dancing paperclip "finally does voice recognition" (f*n idiot) sees this. He now says - sh*t, maybe sinking all of that $$$$ into M$ could kick back - - QUICK, what do the other InfoWorld Ad say? Who should I turn to?

Yes this will happen. Even some delusional idiots will actually turn to Apple to solve their "hi end needs". This will be the first fallout.

But hey, all society advancement comes at great pains and cost, this will be one of them. By the same token just as many smart IT Managers will sit back and "see where things are going" and probably apt for a conservative UNIX Company or quite possibly FreeBSD or Slakware (despite it's "freeness" Slakware still boasts the best uptime and stability in distro - not neccessarily kernel).

IT Managers, believe it or not, think very short term as within 2-3 years or so. They are not forward thinkers (well not most of them I am sure the gang at Red Hat might take me up on that) so many saw NT as a good thing for the next year or maybe 2 years. This makes sense when the byline of your job is "keep from gettin' fired".

So, first, businesses will begin to lose confidence in MS, some will stick with them but many (as is already happening) will turn to companies like VALINUX and Sun.

The home computing market gradually lags anyway due to out of pocket expense limits so breaching the MS infiltration will take several years, but I believe as more becomes available and usable, more home users will seek alternatives. They may or may not turn to Linux, that is hard to tell (but I can say, the time is ripe for FreeBSD to make it's move).

Ultimately home users will not change their hbits for a long long time, I think everyone already sees this. I expect a shift to take place in 2-3 years (given the current buying trends).

I mention them in the same context here because I mean the same thing - both GNU / Linux and OSI now will see something that has been slowly and quietly happening for a long time.

Converts

Developers and geeks alike will also lose confidence in the almighty M$. We now will be given an opportunity to bring in and cultivate untapped talent that simply "didn't know any better" but have now awoken. This will most likely happen (in large numbers) after a ruling which is pretty sure to go against M$. It is already happening, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Linuxnewbie.org's mailing list jumps a little next week.

This isn't much different from other breakups as far as business is concerned. Geeks, however, will reap great reward which as all /. readers know is what matters.

The best fair metric for chip performance seems to remain SPECint95 and SPECfp95 (www.specbench.org).

By that metric, the fastest recorded RISC and CISC speeds (1 per architecture) are the following:

700 MHz 21264A Compaq AlphaServer GS60E:
39.1 SPECint95 / 68.10 SPECfp95 (or w/ minimum optimizations, 34.7 SPECint_base95 / 54.5 SPECfp_base95)

733 MHz Pentium III (i840) Intel:
35.6 SPECint95 / 30.4 SPECfp95 (no _base figures available, figures from Intel, not yet on SPEC website)

440 MHz PA-8500 HP N4000:
34.0 SPECint95 / 51.4 SPECfp95 (30.8 int_base / 48.7 fp_base)

450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Sun Ultra 60 Model 1450:
19.7 SPECint95 / 27.0 SPECfp95 (16.2 int_base / 23.90 fp_base)

300 MHz MIPS R12000 Origin 2000 2-way:
18.4 SPECint95 / 34.4 SPECfp95 (18.1 int_base / 30.1 fp_base)

340 MHz PowerPC RS64-II IBM H70:
16.0 SPECint95 / 21.2 SPECfp95 (13.7 int_base / 20.2 fp_base)

Thus the answer to your question is "Yes, Alpha remains the fastest", with the important caveat that the 10% performance advantage over Intel comes at a significantly higher price. All other RISCs are slower than the fastest Intel systems, at least in terms of uniprocessor integer performance, the best single predictor for most CPU-limited applications.

Note that Apple G4 performance, and performance of IBM's latest S80 (450 MHz Power RS-III) aren't discussed by their respective vendors. If you extrapolated the G4 performance from the mildly similar 340 MHz Power RS-II, performance of a 500 MHz part would be around 23.53 SPECint with SPECfp at 31.8. IBM's Power PC 604e parts have slightly lower integer performance and much lower floating point performance at the same clock rates as the RS-II (375 MHz 604e runs 15.1 SPECint, 10.1 SPECfp,) so even if there are some other G4 improvements, I doubt the 500 MHz G4 will be beating a 733 MHz Pentium III.

Note that these benchmarks don't measure performance of vector-processing chip features like MMX used by a few apps like Photoshop.

--LP

P.S. (Sidebar: The minimal performance value-add of RISC over Intel is is why I think Linux's highly touted multi-architecture support for RISCs is exactly a glowing scalability feature as some apparently make it. I guess 64-bits and floating point comes in handy for a few apps. Other than that, it's a nice plus for legacy hardware that grows less relevant by the day. )

Linux has had some sort of SMP Support since version 2.0, and although this has had it's problems along the way - things are well on their way to improvement. Perhaps it is time for an update on how SMP improvements have progressed.

If you ask Google "What the best operating system in the world?", and all of a sudden the link order changes:

1. Welcome to Microsoft's Homepage
2. The Linux Home Page
3. The FreeBSD Project

1. Yahoo!
2. altavista.digital.com (huh? what's with the old addy?)
3. www.metacrawler.com

Google's team may have been being just a bit silly, but OTOH, they can't make a handler for every possible approach to the questions they want to answer differently.

Looking for sense in search engine data and results is like making a psychoanalysis of an IRC bot.

I know that the link was pointed out before.

But I think that people reading the 2.2.13 thread
here should find out directly about the 2.2.13 new/uptedated stuff.

So here we go:

Linux 2.2.13 Release Notes

Platforms:Alpha (see notes), PowerPC, Sparc, X86

Introduction
Linux 2.2.13 is the latest update to the Linux kernel tree. It fixes the memory leak bug in the 2.2.11 kernel. In addition it updates various drivers
and the platform specific support. The out of the box tree supports the Alpha, PPC, Sparc and X86 platforms. MIPS is mostly merged but you
should obtain the platform specific tree. ARM and M680x0 users should get their platform specific tree.

Errata

Compilers
This code is intended to build with gcc 2.7.2 and egcs 1.1.2. It is known that not all of it builds validly on the x86 CPU's with gcc 2.95. As far
as we know these are Linux not gcc issues. Fixes for gcc 2.95 to gcc 3.0 may go into Linux 2.2 in time. You should therefore not use gcc 2.95
to build stable kernels for the moment.

Binary Compatibility
Linux 2.2.13 changes a few internal system structures. You may need to rebuild a few third party modules such as pcmcia-cs when upgrading
from older kernels to this one.

Security Notes
2.2.13 fixes numerous small security issues. Most of these were not publically known and exploited. Nevertheless anyone with untrusted local
users should upgrade. Other users are recommended to upgrade.

Architecture Updates

Alpha

i386
The APM code works around a Thinkpad BIOS error reporting bug.
The EBDA BIOS pointer is now honoured if it appears sane. This should fix problems with some large SMP boxes.
A TLB handling race on SMP boxes has been fixed.
The APIC support has been updated.
Workarounds have been added for audio bugs in the MediaGX CPU.
Workarounds have been added for an ISA DMA hang on the VIA Apollo Pro.

MIPS

PowerPC
A collection of PowerPC updates have been merged with the main tree.

Sparc
A bug in the locking of the video card drivers on SMP boxes has been fixed.
General updates and merges of Sparc fixes into the main tree.

Core Updates

A.out loader
Bugs have been fixed in the ZMAGIC loader code.
Bad PCI cards
A PCI card with faulty configuration entries for the devsel could cause a crash when the /proc/pci file was viewed.
Boot up
On some boots machines with very large numbers of processors may not successfully boot all processors. This is now fixed.
Bottom Half Locking
An SMP race in the bottom half handling has been fixed.
Buffer Leak
A buffer leak has been fixed.
Console logging
A race with klogd and the console has been fixed.
Optimisations
The ISA DMA handling in the memory allocator has been optimised.
PCI
Fixes have been made to the PCI multi-function handling.
Shared IRQ's
A shared IRQ handling bug was fixed.
Signal queue corruption
A bug in the real time signal queue handling has been fixed.
Task counting
An SMP task counting race has been fixed.
VM cache handling
A bug where mmap data might not get written back has been fixed.
Xntp
The NTP code has SMP locking fixes.

Driver Updates

BTTV TV card
ADS data update. Fixed schedule in interrupt crash. Updated tuners.
CD-ROM drivers
The CD-ROM drivers have been updated.
C-Media CM8338
A vendor supplied driver has been added.
Console
TIOCCONS tests have been updated.
Cyclades
The cyclades driver has been updated.
EEpro100
The EEpro100 card could lock up on configuration if it shared an IRQ.
EEpro100
The EEpro100 driver now supports the Ultrasparc.
IDE on SMP boxes
The IDE code has been updated to fix several hangs on SMP machines, especially when the machine has the IDE IRQ shared.
ESS Solo
The ESS solo claimed extra I/O resources.
ISDN
The ISDN layer and drivers have been updated.
MSP 3400
The MSP3400 driver for the sound decoders on some TV cards has been updated.
Multisound
The Multisound drivers have been updated.
Neomagic Audio
An audio driver for the Neomagic 256 has been added.
PCWD
The PCWD Watchdog driver has been updated.
SB1000 Cable Modem
Documentation has been updated.
Serial
The 16450/16550 driver didn't correctly reset the FIFO settings on a manually requested chip change.
Memory leaks fixed.
Sound
The core sound code has been updated to handle the ARM.
SoundPro
The documentation has been improved.
SX Serial driver
Small fixes have been made.
Synclink
The synclink driver has been updated
Trust radio card
This is now supported.
VIA 82Cxxx audio
The VIA 82Cxx audio is now supported.

File System Updates

Amiga RDSK
The Amiga partitioning code has been fixed to remove a leak.
Ctime
The ctime of a file is updated on a rename.
Ext2 flags
The ext2 attribute flags could be mishandled.
ISOfs
A small bug in the ISOfs handling has been sorted.
Procfs
The procfs allowed some files to be opened by incorrect names.
QNXfs
Memory corruption in the QNX code has been fixed.
Quota
Small quota bugs were fixed.

Miscellaneous Updates

Message formatting
A couple of message formatting errors/typos have been cured.
Poll
Some internal code tidyup has been done.

Network Updates

1 Second Delay
A bug in the traffic scheduling that could cause 1 second delays in packet transmission is fixed.
3c527
This driver now should work in a multicast environments.
3c529
A confusing message on load has been fixed.
3c59x/3c90x
The driver recognizes some of the newer cards.
64bit cleanness
The 8390, ne2k-pci and rtl8139 drivers have been updated to be 64bit clean.
Amateur radio
Several amateur radio protocol updates.
Arcnet
A crash in the arcnet driver has been fixed.
ATP Ethernet
The delay loops in this driver were faulty and have been fixed.
Davicom DM9102
A vendor provided driver has been added.
Defragment
The always defragment feature is now run time configured.
EEpro
The EEPro driver supports multiple cards now.
IPX
A bug in the IPX packet forwarding for netbios flood fill has been fixed.
Masquerade
Fixes have been made in the masquerade list and memory handling.
Networking
Assorted small fixes have been made.
NFS Logging
A collection of debugging log messages have been removed.
SiS 900 driver
The SiS900 driver had a compile bug in some situations.
SMC Ultra
An oops on module unloading has been fixed.
Thunderlan
Thunderlan now unloads if it finds no cards. It also takes module parameters.

SCSI Updates

Acard ATP870-U
This driver had problems with earlier 2.2 kernels. It should now be stable both compiled-in and as a module.
Advansys SCSI
The Advansys scsi driver has been updated.
DVD handling
The DVD handling code has been cleaned up.
EATA SCSI
The EATA SCSI driver has been updated and now supports Alpha
IBM ServeRAID
An IBM contributed driver is now included.
NCR 5380
A problem parsing command line options when the NCR5380 is compiled in has been resolved.
NCR 53c710
A driver has been added for generic NCR53c710 devices.
Qlogic FC
The Qlogic fibrechannel driver has been updated.
Qlogic ISP
Updates and bug fixes.
Scsi Generic
Documentation updated.
Symbios 1510D
The Symbios driver now supports this code.

Security Updates

Chown
Chown now clears the setuid bit.
Clone
The CLONE_PID flag is no longer available except to the kernel.
Exec
A denial of service attack in the execve() code has been fixed, as well as a potential case where a corrupt argument set could be
passed to the process being executed.
Mknod
Mknod no longer follows symbolic links.
Rate limiting error logs
The a.out and Sunrpc layers now limit their error logging rate.
Procfs
The stack pointer is not visible to other processes when it might provide useful info to an attacker.
Shared memory
The amount of shared memory allocatable is now configurable.
Signal handling
Sending non standard process exit signals is now restricted to thread groups.
TCP Sequence Guessing
A bug allowing TCP sequence guessing has been fixed.
TTY Locking
A tty locking bug that could allow denial of service attacks.

ATI, till a few months ago, had provided no support. They are welcome, but not leaders like Matrox and a few other companies out there. See the Video for Linux and the ATI driver pages.

Since Alan Cox have been taking over the 2.2 kernel branch, there's lot of good info about it at www.uk.linux.org and at his diary.

Since Alan Cox have been taking over the 2.2 kernel branch, there's lot of good info about it at www.uk.linux.org and at his diary.

I own the "Linux Device Drivers" by Alessandro Rubini. It is a good book for learning the (somewhat) confusing driver interface under Linux. However, I think a new revision of this book is needed to address things like:

• Operating within an SMP environment.
• Programming to the new APIs, such as:
• ISDN4Linux
• Video4Linux
• I2O
• Dare I say, USB
• Insert your favorite new API here.

Tuning your device drivers; specific hints for character drivers, block drivers, and net drivers.

A special section devoted to writing and maintaining a kernel version independant, mostly binary, device driver (for more closed companies). This could yield a wider base of companies that support Linux, as they don't want to, "give away the family jewels."

What we need is the definitive guide. A portable, referrable, assemblance of all Linux device driver knowledge to promote the growth and acceptance of Linux as an O/S in the buisness and even the hobbiest communities. Such a book would also raise the bar for performance within the average driver-- something which would help Linux win those benchmark tests. To support this argument, approach your favorite monolithic hardware manufacturer and ask him what tools they are using to support Linux into the future. If they answer with:

• "I don't know."
• "We have an older book to refer to."
• or, "A collection of websites."

If I could write, and could write good enough driver code, I would do it myself.

-AP

AFAIK Stephen Tweedie (Red Hat) has fixed the VM/VFS to deal with 64-bit files (even on 32-bit platforms). He now is at Linux Kongress, maybe we will hear more about this once he's back. So you do not have to wait for XFS to get 64-bit files. On a related note, Stephen Tweedie has also released his journalled-ext2fs (called ext3fs), the patch can be downloaded from here. Linux kernel development has really accelerated in the last couple of months ...

How many people will be turned away from /. by those events?

Tom Christiansen sure looked disgusted with Good riddance, Slashdot in the title of his post.

I understand that seeking attention is part of the puberty process, but if you kids have really chosen Linux as your operating system of choice because you think it has potential, not just because you hate (or think you hate) Windows, then please, act so.

Good way to get attention from the linux crowd:

• Submit interesting/meaningful comments... Be mature, that's you're chance to be listened to!
• Code! Didn't Alan Cox said something like he wished /. would be more first patch! rather than frst psot!!!!!!
• If you can't code, do something for the community! submit bug reports, write documentation, help people installing Linux...
• Last but not least, please do not annoy anybody... Sure this isn't a perfect world, but if you call yourself a Linux user, behave like one and show respect.

Now, nobody actually asked you to use Linux. If you get pissed at people because you can't use it, there are alternatives!
Download the latest litestep and show your hax0r dude friends on IRC how cool you are while running those warscr1pts on your illegal copy of mirc...

---

Please don't consider this a troll; I consider Alan to be a demi-god. However, it is a general thing I've noticed about hard-core hackers:

Why are so many hackers sporting disgusting, filthy, unkempt beards (hint: facial hair growing on your neck is not attractive), long unwashed hair, etc.? I mean, do you people actually think you look good? (cf. Alan Cox's mug shot)

Here's a hint: Women do like brainy guys. But if you're hoping to get laid between coding sessions, think about taking a shower, and trimming your beard so that it looks kempt (or consider shaving it off completely).

You can see what have changed at: www.kernelnotes.org. And since it is Alan Cox who takes care of the 2.2-tree now - probably also at his diary, www.uk.linux.org/diary.

This microsoft-typo site re-directs you to www.linux.org ... :)

www.microsfot.com
www.linux.org

On the other hand, I don't think he should bear the cost of hosting Open Source projects either. There are some less costly methods of hosting those projects.

For example, I have a host at the University of Utrecht who is allowing me to use some of their bandwidth for free. I am willing to host some open source projects and have all the resources available. Whenever I need more bandwidth, hardware or whatever, there's always been a nice company that came up and offered help.

Just mail me (email on my home page) if you need to host an Open Source project on NL.linux.org...

There are two X alternatives that I can think of besides the Berlin mentioned. One of them is The Y Window System, by the Hungry Programmers (specifically Christoph Toshok), which isn't very far along and as far as I can tell hasn't been worked on in a while (since about February 1998). It promotes the use of a single fixed depth, which I think is a bad idea. It does have some good ideas though, like a somewhat separate memory architecture. Download here.

The other one, NanoGUI, was originally developed by Alan Cox. It was designed with a lightweight memory footprint in mind. I'm not sure if it supports networked display, though, but I believe they're going to at least port VNC. It's being used on the new Linux7k project, which is attempting to create a usable Linux system for the Psion 5 series palmtop (it uses an ARM7 processor). It seems to be undergoing active development. Download here.

So I hope that's a good starting point.

But www.fast.no seems to be running Linux. Anyway...according to the Uptime List, FreeBSD has much higher uptimes than Linux. Looks like it is the choice of the folks that don't reboot. I think those are mainly to be found in commercial environments like this one. Quite funny - a search for my nick/handle only finds results on /. and [fm] :)

But www.fast.no seems to be running Linux. Anyway...according to the Uptime List, FreeBSD has much higher uptimes than Linux. Looks like it is the choice of the folks that don't reboot. I think those are mainly to be found in commercial environments like this one. Quite funny - a search for my nick/handle only finds results on /. and [fm] :)

• I never got paid for Empire! by Billy Dee Williams (Score: 2) Monday, July 19 @10:22 PM EDT
  
• WHITE DEVIL'S CONSPIRACY by Al Sharpton (Score: 1) Monday, July 19 @10:23 PM EDT
• very funny movie by David Duke (Score: 1) Monday, July 19 @10:30 PM EDT
• S&M in Jedi by Carrie Fisher (Score: 3, Erotic) Monday, July 19 @10:31 PM EDT
• It's chilly down here! by Monica Lewinsky (Score: 2) Monday, July 19 @10:32 PM EDT

1. Elitism. While Slashdot is not uniformly as technical as some of the readers (Alan Cox, Tom Christiansen, and Bruce Perens all read Slashdot and I won't claim to be as skilled or as knowledgable as them :), it seems oriented towards a more technical audience. It has not, in the past, been a forum for informing people not already interested in the material it covers. It has also not, in the past, been a place as technically inclined as Freshmeat.
2. As for Jon's ability to get to the root of complex problems, I sometimes disagree. He has a knack for simplifying complex issues, but I don't always feel that he simplifies them accurately; he has and seemingly always has had an agenda behind his writing, and it appears to influence his writing. Whether I disagree or agree with the apparent agenda is a non-issue; in fact I agree and disagree about evenly.
3. Slashdot, in the past, has not catered to people trying to learn what the Internet is. It has largely catered to people around the same level technically as Rob Malda, and the other editors have influenced this. However, it feels like Jon Katz' contributions are a good bit afield of the others'.

If you want to help with the site, subscribe to the linuxperf@nl.linux.org mailing list by sending a message to Majordomo@nl.linux.org with "subscribe linuxperf" in the body of the message.

If you want to help with the site, subscribe to the linuxperf@nl.linux.org mailing list by sending a message to Majordomo@nl.linux.org with "subscribe linuxperf" in the body of the message.

Vistors can look at the archive at:

http://packetstorm.nl.linux.org/

UPloaders can use:

ftp://ftp.nl.linux.org/incoming/packet storm/

PLEASE, do everything in your power to save the knowledge in the packetstorm archive from being lost... (hint to moderators :)

Thanks,
Rik van Riel

Vistors can look at the archive at:

http://packetstorm.nl.linux.org/

UPloaders can use:

ftp://ftp.nl.linux.org/incoming/packet storm/

PLEASE, do everything in your power to save the knowledge in the packetstorm archive from being lost... (hint to moderators :)

Thanks,
Rik van Riel

• Linux.com
  
• Linux.org
  
• Red Hat Software
  
• Debian GNU/Linux
  
• Slackware Linux
  
  Thats all I can think of in the 10 seconds I took to write this. Hope it helps!
  

The Linux hardware vendors are some of the best corporate citizens I've seen in any industry. They wholeheartedly support the Linux community, because they realise that without it they wouldn't exist in the first place. I like the fact that Penguin Computing is providing servers for sites such as Linux Online, 32 Bits Online, and LinuxToday. Then you've got VA Linux Systems taking the time to ensure Linux.com doesn't get run over by corporate interests, but instead makes it a community interest site. Not to mention hosting Debian, GNU, and Themes.org. You've got to hand it to the Linux Store for pushing the envelope for low-cost systems.

The Linux hardware vendors have shown a dedication to the community and customers that is rarely seen in this generally cruel marketplace. I sincerely hope they keep it up.

http://www.nl.linux.org/linuxperf/ may be of interest. It has pointers to a lot of performance monitoring related stuff in e.g. its links page.

Yes but they are not giving away the guaranteed I/O rate part of it. At least not according to this link though I can't find any mention of that in the news story or the SGI press release.

I haven't seen what EXT3 promises,

It will add journalling (see the white paper Stephen wrote), and probably extent based block lists and btrees by Ted Ts'o will be in there too.

Linux does need a journaling FS and XFS may be the best bet, but it won't happen quickly unless SGI puts some serious resources behind it.

SGI are employing kernel hackers and you can start to see some of the stuff they are getting up to

Also, just who has the resources to test large production systems (4+ CPUs) on an OS under test? Corporates, that's who. And they'll contribute their code to Open Source, right? Because...?

Hell, we've got MS helping us by looking for performance bottlenecks for us and that is already starting to bear fruit (I can't seem to link to that article right. Check out the article "Re:Thank you Microsoft!" by petchema. You will need Alt-F to find it.)

Personally, I think ext3 will rock. This isn't Stephen's first file system by a long chalk.

may have a price current purists will not like but will have to accept (ie less than Open Source code licenses

We can't succeed by destroying ourselves, and I don't think the Linux community will try. If XFS weren't Open Source then it would fail to gain any market share against ext3. But it will be Open Source, so it's a moot point.

Posted by sach:

Funny you should mention that. Myself and some other "migrated" users have been addressing that very need. We are putting together a website who's main goal is to aid M$ based administrators in migrating their services from NT to linux. We hope to have the beta site running by the end of the summer. There should be a formal anouncement some time in August.

Replying to myself -- how lame ;-)
Rhad Labs is doing some work on this also - there are more than Voxilla out there... check it out :-)

Rik has just moved the list over to majordomo (message came through all of 5 mikes ago). You can join the list by sending mail to

• majordomo@nl.linux.org

with the body

• subscribe linuxperf

and then come join the fun.

Note that we are taking a completely different approach to tunelinux. We're breaking it down into functional areas rather than specific applications. For example, to tune a, oh.. let's say samba server, you need to tune SAMBA, the kernel and a number of other things to get the best from your box. If you take the tunelinux approach, you'll only end up with a 50% solution because you'll just tune SAMBA, and not the kernel. The Mindcraft report is a classic for that. Yes, tune samba, but hey, the kernel still only uses 960MB of RAM. The "tuning samba" doc approach wouldn't cover that sort of information all in the one spot. Effectively you end up with the same problem as we have now - lots of documentation but so fragmented that you can't do anything useful with it.

http://www.nl.linux.org/linuxperf/

Rik van Riel has already started a linux tuning site over at nl.linux.org. Already there are some 50+ folks on the alias with documents starting to fly around the CVS system. Nobody has mentioned this site to us, so what's the deal?

NT 3.1 was released in 1991. Development was rumoured to effectively have begun in 1987. Linus didn't start development until 1991, and didn't "release" anything to anyone until 1993.

Perhaps you may find thi interesting. This is from the Microsoft Museum Timeline

Microsoft Launches Windows NT at Windows World

05/24/93 Microsoft formally launches Microsoft Windows NT at Windows World in Atlanta. Windows NT delivers a powerful, reliable and open platform for client-server solutions - business applications ranging from inventory management to sales automation to financial analysis. It can also scale to meet the user's increasing processing needs because it has no internal system constraints on resources and provides consistent support for Intel, RISC and multiprocessor systems. It is scheduled to be released in 60 days.

and this, from linux.org

Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released.

Having used NT 3.1 extensively, I can assure you that it was rushed and felt very beta. However, Linux .02 was released in 1991 and hit 1.0 in 1994. It spent a lot of time in development in between, but it was mostly stable from the get-go.

BTW, it took me longer to type this than to find these sources. Poke around first next time.

Mike
--

There was a lot of talk about ACLs in 2.3.x on the linux-future list. Check out the archive.

Capabilities now seem to be the big topic on the list these days, though..

Subscribe to linux-kernel-patch and have them emailed to you :)

See http://www.linux.org/help/lists.html for details.

SegFault

I know that there is a mailing list for Linux kernel development on Sparcs. That would probably be a place to ask.

See http://www.linux.org/help/lists.html and look for "sparclinux" and "ultralinux" lists.

The top of the page has instructions on how to subscribe.

I'm currently looking to buy a laptop, and I had to rule out a lot of models just because of that damned chipset.

I found this on http://support.atitech.ca/faq/unix.html, and I thought it summed up ATI's braindead policy quite nicely:

"ATI's 3D Register Specifications are considered proprietary and confidential, and as such have NOT been made available to 3rd party software developers.

"3D acceleration support is currently limited to those drivers which are written by ATI to operate in Windows 98, Windows 95 and Windows NT.

"At this time, ATI has no intention of writing 3D Accelerated drivers for any UNIX Environment. We also have no intention of releasing the proprietary information required to implement a 3D driver."

Yeah, they're talking about 3D support, not 2D for X Windows, but I think it still says quite a lot about them. If you check Alan Cox's video4linux homepage, you'll see that ATI is just as enlightened with regard to their TV products: "Owing to repeated refusal by ATI to provide any useful documentation the ATI TV card is not supported. I strongly recommend you look at non ATI card combinations if you want TV on PC"

In short, ATI appears a braindead, backward-looking, Free Unix-unfriendly company. Do not buy ATI products.

To anyone else still looking for a laptop, many smaller vendors I've found are quite cooperative with users of non-Windows OS's. They sell laptops with Linux- or FreeBSD-compatible hardware, and are willing to sell machines without Windows on them and lower the price.

So far, I have gotten positive responses from several vendors, including Chembook, KeyData, ARM Computer, FOSA, Ergo Computing, and DFI.

Also, watch out for the ESS Maestro-2 audio chipset. As far as I know, it is not yet supported under Linux, but it is very popular in newer laptops. (Sorry if I'm drifting off topic; it's just that I've had wade through a lot of laptop info in the last two weeks in search of a linux-compatible laptop from a vendor who won't force Windows and other useless crap on me. I'd rather keep that hundred bucks, thank you very much Microsoft.)

Good luck,
ccg

That's because they have their web server misconfigured... the page is a php3 script that the server isn't parsing.

telnet stamped.org 80

Trying 209.81.8.249...
Connected to stampede.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /



Stampede Linux is an innovative, new approach to Linux distributions. We wanted a distribution
that was fast, easy for the new user, and awesome for the power user. So, we decided to create
Stampede.
[snip]

//_Stryker

Video4Linux in the 2.2 kernels is pretty nice, and there are a fair number of applications. Writing a command-line grabber is child's play, too.

Alan Cox has a reasonable page o' links.

There a many mini distributions of Linux out there that contain the bare minimum of what you need to get the system up and running. You can also take a look at what is contained in the A disk set of slackware. www.linux.org also contains a list of distributions including a lot of the minuature one.

If you live in the UK you can do something about these ridiculously boneheaded proposals (`duh, if we can't think of anything we'll, er, um, we'll just take the stupidest option...') -- register at stand.org.uk and prepare to lobby your MP. If it's good enough for Alan Cox surely it's good enough for you?

In the words of Alan Cox: Owing to repeated refusal by ATI to provide any useful documentation the ATI TV card is not supported. I strongly recommend you look at non ATI card combinations if you want TV on PC .

I think it's a good idea - we'll also need a pointer from .

Another good idea is to revive the Hardware HOWTO and to make a Black list section there.

--

ftp.nl.linux.or g
humbolt.nl.linux.org

ftp.nl.linux.or g
humbolt.nl.linux.org