Slashdot Mirror

XFS writes "OSNews got their hands on the latest version of IRIX, 6.5.17 (released in August), and they have published an interesting article about it and they explain why IRIX was and still is, one of the best workstation Unices out there. Especially when it comes to multimedia/GL performance. I hope SGI will do something with IRIX though, as they seem to have let it fall behind and be one of these great technologies that get lost through various corporate focus shifts..."

foobar104 writes "Details are scarce, but SGI announced this morning that their prototype Itanium 2 system has demonstrated more than 120 GB/s to and from main memory on the STREAM TRIAD benchmark, which is the fourth best result in the world. For comparison, the Cray C90 sustains 105 GB/s, while an even larger Sun Fire 15K clocks a measly 55 GB/s. The interesting part? The system wasn't running IRIX, SGI's proprietary version of UNIX. It was running Linux. More information on STREAM TRIAD, including results from other systems, is available here. The system, incidentally, was an Origin 3800 straight out of manufacturing equipped with Itanium 2 processor modules. SGI will start selling the systems early next year."

WWYD asks: "I am going to be setting up a fresh web server for the company I work for and am looking for some advise. It will be a Redhat 7.3 / Apache / PHP standard everyday setup that will be hosting 50+ radio station sites. My question is about SGI's XFS file system. I've been running it at home and love the recovery time after the system dies. (I experiment a lot). Would XFS be a good filesystem for a web server?"

Sesse writes: "SGI announced yesterday that the OpenGL 1.4 specification was agreed upon by the ARB. Trying to minimize the gap between D3D8 and OpenGL, the standard adds a lot of functionality already common (being exposed as extensions in many drivers today), but more importantly brings a standard specification for vertex shaders. This should be good news for anybody doing cross-platform eyecandy :-)" This announcement is related to, but broader than, the one mentioned earlier about bringing OpenGL to mobile devices.

Little Hamster writes "SGI and Nokia have signed an agreement to co-operate on the development of a 3D standard suitable for all embedded mobile terminals, based on OpenGL. This could be used for bringing real 3D Games to mobile devices, 3D global positioning systems, 3D representations of buildings or even creating entire interfaces in 3D. You can also find the press release press release here."

Little Hamster writes "SGI and Nokia have signed an agreement to co-operate on the development of a 3D standard suitable for all embedded mobile terminals, based on OpenGL. This could be used for bringing real 3D Games to mobile devices, 3D global positioning systems, 3D representations of buildings or even creating entire interfaces in 3D. You can also find the press release press release here."

Little Hamster writes "SGI and Nokia have signed an agreement to co-operate on the development of a 3D standard suitable for all embedded mobile terminals, based on OpenGL. This could be used for bringing real 3D Games to mobile devices, 3D global positioning systems, 3D representations of buildings or even creating entire interfaces in 3D. You can also find the press release press release here."

James Palmer writes: "I have always been enamored with SGI's Iris Indigo. Recently I resurrected an old Iris Indigo by retrofitting it with an ATX motherboard and powersupply." Lots of gruntwork here for a very impressive result.

dmendesf asks: "The Octane2 workstation from SGI has a neat trick called PowerDuo that enables a single station to be driven by 2 keyboards, 2 mice and 2 monitors. Is it possible to do the same with Linux and USB mice, keyboards plus Dual Head videoboards?" How difficult would it be to develop an X11 solution to do this? Now take this a step further: could this be done with the secondary machine a network connection away?

Jonathan C. Patschke writes: "SGI have finally unveiled their newest-generation visual workstation, the Silicon Graphics Fuel. Features include a MIPS R14k CPU, Vpro graphics, and a PCI bus (finally)." As you would expect from SGI, it looks good, and the specs are impressive. I only see IRIX listed, but with the specs on this thing, it may not be slow :)

Jonathan C. Patschke writes: "SGI have finally unveiled their newest-generation visual workstation, the Silicon Graphics Fuel. Features include a MIPS R14k CPU, Vpro graphics, and a PCI bus (finally)." As you would expect from SGI, it looks good, and the specs are impressive. I only see IRIX listed, but with the specs on this thing, it may not be slow :)

HawaiianMayan asks: "Sure, if you're a collector you might have a working computer from the 60s or even the 50s in your basement or garage. But what about from the 20s or 30s? Lately I've been dreaming of a retro-futuristic computer, with all the convenience of a modern desktop (I don't want to deal with punchcards!), but styling from the early part of the 20th century. I'm wondering if any of the hardware hackers out there are working on anything like this. It would need an appropriate case, a manual typewriter keyboard, a black and white screen, preferably enlarged by a nice freznel lens, and lots and lots of nixie tubes, knobs, and blinkenlights. Would it be too much if the numeric keypad was a rotary dial?" Think about the computer props used from such classics like Max Headroom (both the movie and the TV series) and Brazil, and you'd be very close to what the submittor is looking for. I must admit, making a computer in this fashion would certainly be a break from the beige box and monitor!

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

1) list of changes for the common folk
by e40

One thing that is really missing is a list of changes in each kernel release that is meant to be consumed by the masses. The "changelogs" that are offered up are sorely lacking for us non-kernel hackers. What I'd like to see is a prose description of the changes in each version. Something like Release notes for 2.2.18 by Alan Cox [linux.org.uk] is a step in the right direction, but some of it is even a little too technical. For example, in the above document, set_current_state

* Fixed potential SMP race

means little to me and probably a lot of other people. Under what condition does this occur? The question why should I care about this change? should be answered for each entry.

How do you feel about doing something like this?

MT: I agree on that the changelog is "not for end users."

As I've seen several requests, I'll try to do more extended changelogs.

However, please note that right now I'm giving higher priority to fixing problems than to writing extended changelogs.

2) diary
by Lennie

Do you have a diary, like Alan Cox we can read?

Because we all like to know, if you'll actually be doing what your gonna promise now :)

MT: No I don't, sorry...

3) Kernel growth -- is it a problem?
by connorbd

While I am a passionate Linux supporter, I have also come to the conclusion that kernel bloat is likely to be a major issue fairly soon. It appears to have been the case for some time that =486 systems Need Not Apply, and Red Hat in particular has become a rather memory-hungry distro (it won't even install on my 16MB Pentium system, though I doubt this is really a kernel issue). The end result is that Linux seems slowly to be growing out of the lower-end used-server-in-a-closet market that helped it get so big in the first place.

My question: I presume kernel bloat, both in terms of code size and resource demands, can impact heavily on maintainability. Do you see this as a significant issue for the future, how much of a problem is it, and is it something that can be easily addressed without tearing apart the code base and reorganizing it from the ground up?

MT: Core kernel bloat is a _very_ bad problem. However, I'm pretty confident Linus is not going to allow that on 2.5, though.

About more drivers/fses being added to the kernel, well, thats a bad problem for maintenance.

All we can do about it is to make sure all accepted code to the kernel is clean, simple, and well designed to make maintenance easier later...

4) code control
by brer_rabbit

Have you thought about putting your changes under some sort of version control software? If you started putting the kernel/patches under CVS, maybe the rest of the kernel crowd would follow.

MT: I'm releasing pre patches now pretty often. However, I could export my local CVS, yes.

I might do that in the future.

5) Any plans to improve documenting the kernel?
by Carnage4Life

Currently the Linux kernel is filled with functions that are either poorly documented or completely undocumented. One of the purported benefits of Free Software is that many developers can jump in and help yet when you have functions like __free_pages_ok [linux.no] in page_alloc.c that are important, complex yet the only comment is:

"Buddy system. Hairy. You really aren't expected to understand this."

Doesn't this somehow defeat the point of the source being available in the first place? Basically the question I have to ask is this, "I have flirted with the thought of sending comment only patches to the kernel to further help people understand certain subtleties (e.g. why the pprev and next pointers in user_struct are not what they seem) in the source code especially CS students who are learning about the kernel in operating systems classes. If someone were to start such a program would such patches be accepted into the kernel?

MT: Yes, I would accept such patches as long as I agree with the documentation _and_ as long as I have time to read all patches :)

6) A pretty generic question
by archen

How do you view Linux in the scheme of things? Mainly where do you think the niche of Linux is now, and where will it be years from now. How do you view the direction Linux tends to be taking compared to other OS's (Windows XP, FreeBSD, etc) - ["direction" is up to what ever you personally interpret it to be BTW]

MT: Linux has a lot of "niches": the embedded market, the home users market, the enterprise market: Handling all of those "niches" in the best possible way is a very nice challenge.

I don't see any "direction" to Linux, though: It can work well on several niches.

7) Why you?
by CmdrPinkTaco

This is not intended as a flame or a troll, more of an interview style question. I figure since we are the people who are putting our trust in this person to handle *our* kernel, that this should also be our chance to learn about the person responsible.

What makes you think that you can handle maintaining the Linux Kernel? What qualifications do you have and why should we (the people) trust you with the Linux kernel.

I realize that this is actually two questions, but they more or less go together in one answer.

MT: I think they chose me because I can deal with different people without ego fights. I usually avoid conflicts and instead I try to solve problems.

About qualifications: I've been working at Conectiva for some time (4 years) as a software developer. I'm working together with technical support, which makes me have an idea of usual end users problems/needs.

8) Patches
by return 42

Linus likes very small patches, everything broken down into little chunks of functionality. Alan is ok with bigger patches. What do you like and dislike in the patches people send you?

MT: I prefer patches which touch specific things only: what I really hate are patches which touch several kernel parts.

9) CML2, cvs, kdb, crypto and more
by iamsure

If during the course of your maintainership CML2 proves very successful (as I beleive it already has) would you consider using it instead of CML1?

Also, would you consider moving crypto into the main tree in the near future? Debian has, Redhat will "soon" ...

Would you consider using bitkeeper, cvs, or even complete changelogs with proper attribution of WHICH merges took place?

And finally, would you consider FINALLY bringing kdb into the main kernel? Linus doesnt want it, but he doesnt want it because he doesnt see the value. He didnt say he banned it ...

MT: About CML: Sure, I may consider including it in the future. Not now, though.

About crypto: I want to be out of legal problems. Sorry.

kdb: Maybe. Not now, though.

10) Alan Cox and politics
by melquiades

Alan Cox's stand on the changelog is clearly not only a matter of personal protection, but a political statement. He has chosen an issue that is tremendously important to Linux, free software, and software developers everywhere, and certainly it's right for him to be pursuing it.

But is the Linux kernel the right forum for politics? Do you feel that it's a bad idea to involve the kernel in politics -- a slippery slope in which the software itself becomes a political pawn? Or would you say that the kernel -- and all software -- has already become a political pawn, and Cox's actions are entirely justified given that free software's existence is under increasing threat?

MT: I'll try to avoid involving the kernel in political questions.

11) Sound drivers
by BlowCat

The sound drivers are very poorly written. A lot of code is duplicated. Not all drivers support some ioctls. Every driver has its peculiarities, e.g. some drivers reset dsp to mono, 8bit on DSP_RESET, some don't. Some support /dev/audio, some don't.

Not having ALSA in 2.4.x means no good sound support in the stable kernel for another year of two. Do you plan to integrate ALSA into the 2.4 branch? If yes, will it happen after it's done on the 2.5 branch?

MT: I do not plan to integrate ALSA on 2.4.x.

12) How do you plan to handle the big companies?
by hansendc

As all of us know, many large companies are putting large amounts of resources toward Linux. 2.4 will continue to be important to these companies because it is the version currently being shipped with the distributions, and will continue to be shipped for at east a year or two.

How are you going to deal with the submissions from people like IBM and SGI who are going to want to make significant changes to 2.4?

MT: If their changes are non intrusive and I agree with the way they are coded, sure I'll apply them. Why not?

13) Stability vs Features
by azaroth42

How do you intend to decide which new patches should be added to 2.4, the stable tree, and which are not to be included as being more appropriate to just 2.5, the unstable development tree? For example, do new or updated device drivers rank more highly than VM updates?

MT: I'm really trying to avoid new features which are intrusive: Those ones are for 2.5.

New features which are non intrusive are OK.

14) Threads
by Exmet Paff Daxx

What are your thoughts about threads? Specifically, do you support Linus's "Context of Execution" generality with clone() or are you going to focus more on plain POSIX pthreads compliance?

Any chance of Alan Cox's multi-threaded post-mortem debugging patch which dumps multiple core files for each lightweight process (LWP) making it into the kernel? How about support for post mortem debugging of multithreaded core files in general (right now there is zero support).

Any rants about threading as a general topic would work.

MT: I do support Linus's "Context of Execution" idea, yes.

About Alan's multi-threaded post-mortem debugging patch: I haven't read it yet. But I might apply it.

15) Age a question?
by debrain

If what I've read is correct, you are the youngest maintainer for this kernel. Do you have any feelings on a social level, regarding much of the peer review and critism will come from people who are older? (and very possibly set in their ways, and potentially intimidating)

MT: I don't have any feelings wrt age. I just hope that older people don't take that into account.

16) Expectations
by MikeBabcock

In the time you've been aware of or been using Linux, how have your expectations for what it ought to be or eventually become changed? I know in the time I've used it I'd never expected it, for example, to become a desktop OS but rather a good server or embedded product. What did you expect when you first started with Linux, and what do you expect now?

MT: I expected it to be a server system when I started using it.

Now I expect it to be a Unix system which can work in a lot of different environments. :)

17) Hit by a bus
by moonboy

I'd hate to stray from the status quo where standard interview questions are concerned, so in keeping with it, I ask:

What's it like knowing that, if (God forbid) Linus and Alan were hit by a bus, you might be "The Man"?

Hey, someone had to ask.

MT: I don't know, dude.

18) Re:Do you use a distribution?
by bfree

To rewrite the above question the way I'd like it asked:

What operating systems and platforms do you personally use and which ones do you also use (and why)?

MT: I use Linux for work and sometimes I use Windows to play games.

Do you run a common environment on all your machines (in as far as possible) or do you run different things in different places and which environments do you prefer for what?

MT: I do run Linux on all of my machines. I like to take a look at other OSes when I have time...

What development tools do you use (especially for the kernel), would you do anything differebtly for the kernel (like make it compile with other compilers) if you could (or will you) and would you like to (or will you) place the Linux stable kernel into CVS or another version control system?

MT: I use vi for editting source code and gcc to compile the kernel. :)

No, I'm not going to put the kernel in any kind of version control system because I have to know what goes into the kernel.

One thing which I'm going to do, and which matters, is the use of STP in each -pre release of the kernel.

I hope the SGI guys can get STP stable and working well soon.

Do you feel any personal preferences for anything might actually be in anyway reflected in your work as the stable kernel maintainer?

MT: No.

Do you have a good lawyer?

MT: No. Actually, I don't have a lawyer at all and I hope I'll never have to use one on Linux related issues.

Are you planing on travelling to the U.S.A.> (for all I know you live there, excuse my ignorance:-)? [Note: Marcelo lives in Brazil.]

MT: No. I may go to some congress, though. Not sure yet, though.

Have you experience dealing with politicians, business leaders and large groups and do you see this as a part of your job description? MT: I do not have experience dealing with politicians, business leaders or large groups. I see that as part of my job description, yes. I hope I can learn that with time...

When you stop maintaing the stable kernel, what would you like people to be saying about your reign?

MT: That it works well. ;)

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Kerneltrap interviews Keith Owens this week, an experienced kernel hacker who has long contributed to the Linux kernel. His contributions include updating ksymoops and modutils, both of which he maintains. He also works on kbuild 2.5. Earlier, he built the original Integrated Kernel Debugging patch. He's also working on kdb and XFS. Check out the interview." Lots of good information in here about things to expect in 2.5.

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Kerneltrap interviews Keith Owens this week, an experienced kernel hacker who has long contributed to the Linux kernel. His contributions include updating ksymoops and modutils, both of which he maintains. He also works on kbuild 2.5. Earlier, he built the original Integrated Kernel Debugging patch. He's also working on kdb and XFS. Check out the interview." Lots of good information in here about things to expect in 2.5.

Packetknife writes: "It would seem SGI has dropped support for their Pro64 compiler suite. Many people are aware that SGI has some of the best compiler people in the business. Their contributions would be most excellent and I'm hoping they continue heavy support for GCC. Either way, they are asking for feedback. Please send email to IA64devtools@oss.sgi.com to let them know you want this project to continue and contribute to GCC as well. Any work SGI does on the compilers will help all platforms and the whole community."

Packetknife writes: "It would seem SGI has dropped support for their Pro64 compiler suite. Many people are aware that SGI has some of the best compiler people in the business. Their contributions would be most excellent and I'm hoping they continue heavy support for GCC. Either way, they are asking for feedback. Please send email to IA64devtools@oss.sgi.com to let them know you want this project to continue and contribute to GCC as well. Any work SGI does on the compilers will help all platforms and the whole community."

Packetknife writes: "It would seem SGI has dropped support for their Pro64 compiler suite. Many people are aware that SGI has some of the best compiler people in the business. Their contributions would be most excellent and I'm hoping they continue heavy support for GCC. Either way, they are asking for feedback. Please send email to IA64devtools@oss.sgi.com to let them know you want this project to continue and contribute to GCC as well. Any work SGI does on the compilers will help all platforms and the whole community."

Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."

Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."

Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."

green pizza writes "In prepairing for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (the FF movie), I found the following articles on the technology behind the picture. Very impressive stuff, I like how they developed their own modeler plugins and render shaders to get even closer to photorealistic humans. What did amaze me, though, was their heavy use of Silicon Graphics systems, as I was under the impression that the movie was developed on Sony GSCube machines. Turns out the movie was modeled and composited on SGI systems and rendered on a huge Linux cluster. SGI's press room has information, as well as fan movie sites, aplenty."

green pizza writes "In prepairing for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (the FF movie), I found the following articles on the technology behind the picture. Very impressive stuff, I like how they developed their own modeler plugins and render shaders to get even closer to photorealistic humans. What did amaze me, though, was their heavy use of Silicon Graphics systems, as I was under the impression that the movie was developed on Sony GSCube machines. Turns out the movie was modeled and composited on SGI systems and rendered on a huge Linux cluster. SGI's press room has information, as well as fan movie sites, aplenty."

Zurk writes: "SGI is turning off its famous employee web server http://reality.sgi.com on August 15th. The machine has been running for nearly 10 YEARS and has resulted in a number of really kewl IRIX applications (and some linux ones as well) distributed from employee web pages at SGI. Games/source code/pictures/irix tips and examples of working life at this once great company will no longer be available." Seems like the sort of thing that every business ought to maintain, for employee sanity and general niceness -- too bad this one is about to go.

mirko writes: "Here's a link to some weird projects that consist of recycling old servers. You have the SGI Fridge, but also the VAXbar, the SGI Espresso Machine, the VaxTap2000Pro and the SGI HiFi-Miniset. Now that you recycled the case, you can get inspiration from this project in order to recycle their inside components..." We've linked to some of these before, but a couple of them are new (to me, anyway).

Slashback tonight with stuff to chew on re: XFS, the baseball-Everquest connection, and whether it's safe to login at SourceForge. Oh, and yet more on the state of HAL. Please read safely.

XFS on track Have no fear for XFS at present! Thanks to Steve Lord, Principal Engineer, Filesystem Software at SGI (no relation), for the following positive news about journaling file systems for GNU/Linux systems:

splord writes "I just became aware of the slashdot posting based on email I send to the XFS linux list yesterday and I want to clarify a couple of points.

1. Linuxcare was not 'sponsoring' the port, SGI was paying Linuxcare for work on the port. This contract was terminated by SGI and Linuxcare management, all the technical people involved wanted it to continue. I believe it was financial considerations on the part of both companies which resulted in the termination of the contract.

2. SGI is not stopping work on the port, but reduced headcount will change how fast we can respond to questions and problems.

I personally remain committed to working on the port, even if at some point SGI does not. Martin Peterson of Linuxcare has also stated he will continue doing XFS work on his own time. For now however, SGI does remain committed to the port, and work will continue."

Strike Two! OakLEE writes "Following up on last weeks article about the Everquest grudge between baseball players Curt Schilling and Doug Glanville, ESPN put this article in which Schilling accused Glanville of "slanderous lies being spewn, about the kind-hearted (computer) dwarf of mine. Stout and strong, yet gentle is he. But he will not allow his good name to be dragged through the mud by a reckless goof of a Paladin." They plan a "re-match" later online this week."

It's back for a hopefully not-too-limited time! After being compromised not long ago, everyone's favorite all-in-one Open Source development site SourceForge is back up. Interesting account of how it was compromised, too. Small comfort that it had to do with a stolen password rather than a code exploit, but even small comforts feel good.

Quick, only 7 months left! mvw writes "Two interesting features on the state of AI:

• Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality is an article by Douglas B. Lenant, who is working on project cyc (pronounced psyche), a huge database of common knowledge with inference system, and gives his profound opinion and critique on 2001's HAL computer and how real intelligent computers should behave.

• It's 2001. Where Is HAL? is a lecture from AI legend Marvin Minsky (formats: video, mp3, transcript), who next to giving lots of funny annecdotes (e.g. what robotics and ESP have in common and why building physical robots is a stupid idea for students) talks about the state of present AI and some interesting ideas how to move on, that will be explained in detail in his upcoming book The Emotion Machine.

  His prior book Society of the Mind was about Minsky's view of the mind being the result of the workings of a lot of different mental processes. This time he focusess on the question of knowledge representation and the need to keep a bag of different ones around to be able to understand and solve problems (great dissing of neural nets, genetic algorithms and statistical methods :-)

Regards,
Marc"

foobar104 writes: "Today SGI announced their SGI 750 server, a dual-processor IA-64 system based on the W460GXBS2 motherboard from Intel. The 750 will ship with Linux (probably SGI's tweaked version of Red Hat; that's what they've used before), and they say it'll be available in July. (Usually that means first customer shipment in July, with volume shipments coming sometime after that.) The press release is here, and more technical info can be found here. In other news, HP also announced some IA-64 products today."

foobar104 writes: "Today SGI announced their SGI 750 server, a dual-processor IA-64 system based on the W460GXBS2 motherboard from Intel. The 750 will ship with Linux (probably SGI's tweaked version of Red Hat; that's what they've used before), and they say it'll be available in July. (Usually that means first customer shipment in July, with volume shipments coming sometime after that.) The press release is here, and more technical info can be found here. In other news, HP also announced some IA-64 products today."

foobar104 writes: "Today SGI announced their SGI 750 server, a dual-processor IA-64 system based on the W460GXBS2 motherboard from Intel. The 750 will ship with Linux (probably SGI's tweaked version of Red Hat; that's what they've used before), and they say it'll be available in July. (Usually that means first customer shipment in July, with volume shipments coming sometime after that.) The press release is here, and more technical info can be found here. In other news, HP also announced some IA-64 products today."

Andrew Klaassen writes "Layoffs at SGI yesterday hit, among other things, the XFS for Linux project. Project lead Steve Lord writes, "We do intend to keep working on XFS linux, and I do intend to work really hard to get it into the distributions and Alan and Linus's kernels, [but] it will take us a little while to regroup our efforts and to work out our priorities on the project...." He also mentions that LinuxCare will no longer be helping out with funding for the port."

Andrew Klaassen writes "Layoffs at SGI yesterday hit, among other things, the XFS for Linux project. Project lead Steve Lord writes, "We do intend to keep working on XFS linux, and I do intend to work really hard to get it into the distributions and Alan and Linus's kernels, [but] it will take us a little while to regroup our efforts and to work out our priorities on the project...." He also mentions that LinuxCare will no longer be helping out with funding for the port."

Andrew Klaassen writes "Layoffs at SGI yesterday hit, among other things, the XFS for Linux project. Project lead Steve Lord writes, "We do intend to keep working on XFS linux, and I do intend to work really hard to get it into the distributions and Alan and Linus's kernels, [but] it will take us a little while to regroup our efforts and to work out our priorities on the project...." He also mentions that LinuxCare will no longer be helping out with funding for the port."

Slashback items tonight on India's satellite launch, a bi-coastal EFF-organized protest (yes, will involve leaving your cubicle, basement, silo, remote farm, etc.), Apple not falling far from the tree, and the death of Indrema. Read on below :)

Show your truuuuueee colors ... h0mee writes: "Howdy! This has already been posted on slashdot, but we still need more volunteers showing up at the protests. This protest is being organized by the EFF against federally mandated censorware in schools and libraries. The protests are occuring on this friday in the SF Bay Area and the NYC areas. I'd like to remind slashdot readers on the completely cynical side that even small groups of protestors showing up will have big impacts, as the FCC will be caught completely off guard by hordes of angry geeks showing up- this protest can make a difference! Please check out the EFF's protest page on this for more info for coordination and ridesharing, or this rant on craigslist for SF bay locals. Show your geek pride, and help us distribute Clue to the FCC!"

Hey, stop looking at me! And no feeling, either! In response to CmdrTaco's recent post about Apple moving yet again to block the makers of Apple-reminscent themes, WillAdams writes:h "The response, and the original letter are up at http://www.macthemes.org.

They'd like a lawyer..."

Sounds fair. Soon lawyers defending Open Source will take over as the heros of the software world. "Didn't there used to be programmers, too, dad?"

Up in the air, Junior Birdman w00ly_mammoth writes: "After an aborted attempt, India has launched a satellite rocket. Signals from it were picked up in Canada. The Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, or GSLV-D1, is capable of giving the nation communication and military capabilities, according to western analysts. The US has been concerned about this development for a while. This could also rattle the aerospace industry, since it marks an entry into the lucrative satellite launch market."

(Invent your own aphorism involving ashes, phoenixes and plant life.) impaler writes: "Games Mania has a story with three people's views on the death of indrema. They interview Mark Collins (author of Linux Game Programming), Clinton Ebadi (me / that lamer that does nothing useful), and Steve Baker (of TuxKart fame). All three offer different opinions on why indrema went down."

Speaking of games, ryants writes: "OpenGL.org is reporting that NVidia's GeForce3 meets or beats the functionality available in DX8 via OpenGL extensions. This bodes well for Linux gaming." Take your grains of salt, head out back, and play some TuxKart;)

One of the things I try to focus on with Ask Slashdot questions are issues involving trademarks and the big guy trying to rob the little guy out of a name, or a domain that they may have had for years. Although this was necessary to stop the domain squatters out to make a quick buck, it seems to have turned into a corporate right to harass everyone. Long before the internet was a household name, people registered domains or created project names that they didn't think would cause problems and now, years later, they are finding out how wrong they were, and how the laws can rob their project's identity. What follows is a question regarding SGI their quest to go after anyone with any name starting with "Open" or containing "GL". How long is it, before corporations begin to carve up the English dictionary and we won't be able to use a single word without following it with "(tm)"?

DooMWiz asks: "I am the author of the Open Image Library (OpenIL), an image library under the LGPL license at openil.org. Several weeks ago, I was shocked by the appearance of an e-mail from a Silicon Graphics, Inc representative. Apparently, they are "concerned" that 'OpenIL' may infringe on their 'OpenGL' trademark. I am not a trademark lawyer, nor do I have any real knowledge of trademarks. Even if I had some kind of justifiable way of proving that 'OpenIL' could not possibly be confused with 'OpenGL', I probably would not pursue it, since a college student with very limited resources against giant SGI would be messy for me. I'm really not *too* upset about being asked to change the name, but during the course of this, I sent several e-mails to the SGI rep, and his replies indicated some disturbing news. He claims that he has already talked to OpenCL about changing their name and that he plans to pursue the ever-popular OpenAL, which isn't just a one man operation like OpenIL. OpenAL may have the resources to fight something like this, since it has nothing to do with SGI's business model but is backed by large companies. Lastly, SGI has a trademark on 'GL', and the rep also claims to plan to pursue projects with 'GL' in their names. Projects like GLScene and DemoGL come to mind and may be in trouble. Anyone with trademark experience have any advice on what course of action to take? Dropping the 'OpenIL' name seems like the easiest way out."

deran9ed writes: "Silicon Graphics plans to introduce a version of its Origin 3000 series computer built around Intel's 64-bit IA-64 Itanium processor running Linux, according to SGI Chairman and CEO Robert Bishop. The current Origin 3000 computers from SGI are built around processors from MIPS Technologies and run SGI's proprietary Irix operating system. SGI has not decided as yet on the name for the new product line. Infoworld article."

deran9ed writes: "Silicon Graphics plans to introduce a version of its Origin 3000 series computer built around Intel's 64-bit IA-64 Itanium processor running Linux, according to SGI Chairman and CEO Robert Bishop. The current Origin 3000 computers from SGI are built around processors from MIPS Technologies and run SGI's proprietary Irix operating system. SGI has not decided as yet on the name for the new product line. Infoworld article."

Gerald asks: "It's been three years since Microsoft and SGI announced that they were jointly developing Fahrenheit, the new 3D graphics API that would be better and more cross platform than both OpenGL and Direct3D. The dates indicated on the press release have all passed, and there has been no mention on it anywhere. I haven't even been able to find a Fahrenheit home page. So what's happened? Was Fahrenheit a decoy to get the graphics industry off the back of Microsoft when it first came out with Direct3D?"

Xose writes: "Oss.sgi.com has a note from the project coordinator: Due to the Apache Software Foundation's disinterest in adopting any substantive parts of the work presented here, SGI has decided that I should no longer actively contribute to this project or to the Apache HTTP server project. I will continue to port the patches to new versions of Apache/1.3 (but not 2.0) in my spare time and to accept bug fixes and enhancements contributed by folks like you. I'm glad that many people found my work useful and I'm sorry to see it end this way."

We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on: The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS ^[?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.

PhilLong asks: "SGI has a limited time offer for the 1600x1024 flat panel for $1500 US. What options are available to support the 1600SW under Linux or BSD, especially at 1600x1024? What I know so far, from DejaNews and phone calls is the following: they will bundle it with either a multilink adapter or an Oxygen VX1 PCI card with DVI out, the multilink will take standard VESA resolutions @60Hz and drive the monitor, it will also accept 1600x1024@60Hz (there's a list of cards that will do the 1600x1024 under Windows on SGI's site). The SGI Linux (Red Hat 6.2) workstations with the nVidia chips (and more recent than 0.95) drivers work through multilink, and possibly DVI. I'm not clear on that. The matrox G400 is said to support the 1600x1024 under DVI/windows with the DVI daughtercard. Does this work under XFree4 @ 1600x1024@60Hz? Does anybody know if the daughtercard will fit on a card with the two head output built in? MetroX doesn't support the 1600SW, but Xi (Friday) posted a patch for the accelX 6 to support the Oxygen VX1 card." This offer is only good thru December, so you better act soon if you're interested.

Saberwind asks: "Fed up with flicker problems when viewing 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 resolutions on even some high-end CRTs, and wanting a perfect image that I can hang on my wall, I'm ready to switch to LCD. I almost plunked down nearly $3000 for a 18.1-inch Viewsonic VP181. The ideal LCD would have a digital input, be at least 20" diagonal, be wall-mountable, have an orthagonal shape, and of course square pixels (regardless of the aspect ratio). Does anyone know where such holy grails might be procured?"

"I did some digging and found that while the VP181 is advertised as having a maximum resolution of 1600x1200, its native resolution is a piddly 1280x1024 (every image I've seen so far is intended to be displayed on a device with square pixels, and 1280x1024 crams a 5:4 resolution into a 4:3 space resulting in squished pixels) and the higher res is just emulated. Then there's the 17.3-inch SGI 1600SW, which does 1600x1024, but I understand it locks you into a specific video card and the product is no longer supported. Every once in a while we hear about new flat panel technologies being developed (IBM developed the QX20, a 20.8-inch, 2048x1536 LCD (this was last year. Where is it now?). Then there's the 22" Apple Cinema Display, which can do 1600x1024, but it's made by Apple, and I'm not quite so sure about that one."

Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."

Boone^ writes: "ZDNet is running an article on the future of Linux when used on Big Iron. Just a bit ago we read about running Linux on a large scale Alpha box, and SGI wants NUMA support in Linux so it can support their hardware configuration. The article talks about how memory algorithms used with 256GB machines would hamper performance on 386s with 8MB ram. So far Linus et al have been rejecting kernel patches that provide solutions for Big Iron scaling problems. How soon before a Big Iron company forks the kernel?"

Motor writes: "Things have been a bit quiet on the XFS front over the last few months, but a beta is finally here." They've got a document to to read before installing, as well as some installation notes on the site. It looks like it's a patch for 2.4.0-test5 kernel, and you can also get it as RPMs, or ProPack.

Motor writes: "Things have been a bit quiet on the XFS front over the last few months, but a beta is finally here." They've got a document to to read before installing, as well as some installation notes on the site. It looks like it's a patch for 2.4.0-test5 kernel, and you can also get it as RPMs, or ProPack.

SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?

SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?

SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?

SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?