World Of LINUX

BIOS boots to Linux in one second

2008-03-31T04:48:00.000-07:00

Firmware company General Software announced that it is selling customized, quick-booting versions of its Linux-compatible BIOS firmware to the medical device industry. The company says its "Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology" can boot to lilo (Linux loader) in less than a second.

Fast boot times are key in the medical device market, where products compete on "time to waveform" (TTW), General Software said. Yet, most BIOSes available for x86 chipsets were built for the desktop market, and thus have not been optimized in this area, according to Steve Jones, General Software CTO.

Jones explained, "Hard drive spin-up normally takes so long that the BIOS has to wait for it anyway. Take away the spin-up time and you're left with POST that should complete in hundreds of milliseconds, but instead takes tens of seconds."

Jones said that after hard drive spin-up delays, waiting for video card firmware to load is another major time-waster. "Depending on the video controller, it can take between 0.5 and 5 seconds, typically. Next to hard drive spin-up, this is actually the most significant part of POST and accounts for most of the time spent in the one-second measurement here. Other things, like keyboard controller initialization, mouse and keyboard device initialization, and USB initialization, all take hundreds of microseconds, and basically nickel-and-dime the POST time."

Jones said the claimed sub-second boot time to lilo was measured between pushing the reset button on a Soyo motherboard with an Intel 815-class chipset, and the moment when the lilo prompt appeared, showing that the drive was being read. Jones says the feat was accomplished by using "Quick Boot" tuning tools available in the General Software Embedded BIOS Adaptation Kit, which is said to offer more than 1,000 configuration options at the source level. Using it, General Software or Kit licensees can tune x86 BIOS code to specific hardware, eliminating the time-consuming scans and unneeded code branches found in desktop x86 BIOS code. Another touted benefit is faster certification, since there are fewer code-paths to test.

Jones said General Software also created one BIOS capable of booting Windows Vista to a usable desktop in 24 seconds, where the same board with a traditional BIOS took 72 seconds. Much of the speed-up was attributed to building a UDMA-capable driver into the BIOS, enabling it to load the OS into memory much faster than traditional BIOSes, which use slow PIO (programmed I/O) data transfers.

General Software said its medical device customers include Siemens Acuson and GE Healthcare.

Availability

Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology is available now for a wide variety of devices, including medical equipment.

Asus: alas poor Linux Eee PC we fare thee well?

2008-03-31T04:41:00.000-07:00

Since Asus announced that it would release a Windows XP version of phenomenally popular Eee PC for the extra cost of a Windows license, market pundits have been kissing the cheaper Xandros Linux version goodbye. However, Asus is ambivalent about the issue.

According to a number of reports, Asus expects the Windows XP version of its sub-1kg notebook with 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash and a 7inch screen, to comprise more than 60% of sales of the device, leaving the Linux version in its dust. However, the company insists that the Linux version will still be sold. And why wouldn't it?

Ever since it came on the market in October 2007, the Linux version of the Eee PC has sold hundreds of thousands of units worldwide. For users who want a small lightweight computer that can surf the Web in Wi-Fi hot spots, exchange Skype messages and emails using Gmail, do basic office productivity functions using Open Office, the Linux Eee PC is perfect.

Linux and FOSS were made for such a machine - lean, cheap, easy to use and nothing more to spend. And certainly nothing extra to spend on resource sucking anti-virus and anti-spyware packages.

So why has Asus decided to put out more expensive Windows XP versions of the Eee PC? Simple - people want them.

Earlier this year, a friend showed me his Eee PC recently purchased in an electronics market in Thailand. It was running a version of Windows XP that had been loaded by the store. In fact he says that's the reason he bought it. He was browsing stores looking at Linux Eee PCs with mild interest but as soon as he came across a unit that was running Windows, he snapped it up. Why?

My friend is a self-confessed unsophisticated tech junkie but when it comes to computers all he knows is Windows. He believes Windows is better because that's what he's familiar with. He can also run iTunes on Windows (he's also a music junkie) and Skype is more advanced on Windows. He can even run IE7 and Outlook Express (heaven knows why he would want to).
n a nutshell, multiply my unsophisticated consumer friend by hundreds of millions and you've got a ready made market for a Windows XP version of the Eee PC, complete with its bloatware, susceptibility to viruses, system slow-downs and freezes while the security software does its regular scans and its inflated price. Like it or not, it's the way things are.

Meanwhile, does this portend the demise of the Linux Eee PC? Absolutely not! They're still flying off store shelves in volumes that no other Linux consumer computer has in history. For the first time ever, I can go down to a local major electronics and office products chain store and buy a Linux Eee PC off the shelf. The market for consumer Linux computers has been established. Chances are Asus will keep it that way.

2008-03-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World. Zemlin met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill this week to talk about Linux topics ranging from overtures to Microsoft to the progress of Linux on the desktop.

InfoWorld: What's the role of the Linux Foundation?

Zemlin: We obviously are the home of [Linux founder] Linus Torvalds. We sort of focus on three main areas in terms of the platform. The first area is to promote Linux as a technology solution, and that's across embedded, mobile, server, desktop computing. We respond to competitive marketing on behalf of the platform, so when competitors are out spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about open source or if there is a general lack of understanding of open-source licensing practices or governance practices, our organization plays a role educating [the] industry and end-users on those issues. We protect the platform by allowing people like Linus Torvalds to work as fellows at the foundation so that they can be neutral actors in a mass collaboration project like Linux. We manage the Linux trademark. We have a legal defense fund for the platform. We work with the USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) on patent quality issues. And we do that work to improve the quality of software patents and protect the platform. And then finally, we work on the standardizing the Linux platform.

InfoWorld: What kind of legal protection does Linux require? And has anything ever come of the Microsoft protest that there's Linux code that they patented or something to that effect?

Zemlin: What they were talking about were patents that Microsoft holds in a range of areas. They didn't actually disclose what those were, but in general felt that they overlapped with other technology. No, nothing ever became of it because everybody holds patents on everything out there lately in software.

InfoWorld: You have a legal defense fund. Should people have legal concerns about using Linux?

Zemlin: Just like any other major software platform, there'll be patent trolls or opportunists who try to harm the platform. The SCO Group was a good example of that. In fact, the legal defense fund was created to assist in defense of the platform in the SCO lawsuit. And so that's a good example.

InfoWorld: What became of that?

Zemlin: SCO lost the lawsuit, it was found that there were no copyright infringements that were there in the Linux platform, and it was proven that Novell indeed owned the copyright to the software that SCO alleged was theirs. And SCO was de-listed from Nasdaq and is now in bankruptcy proceedings.

InfoWorld: Is there anything happening as far as using the GNU General Public license version 3 for Linux, or is that just not happening?

Zemlin: It's not happening today. In the future there may be, but I think it's unlikely at this point. Linus, who is fairly influential in the license decision, has publicly stated that he's not interested in GPL3 at this time.

What Is the Linux Shell?

2008-03-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

To use Linux--or any Unix-like system, for that matter--you need to know a few things about shells. A shell is a program that acts as an intermediary between you and the guts of the operating system. In a DOS environment, command.com acts as your shell. Linux shells have more interesting names (like bash, pdksh, and tcsh), but they do pretty much the same thing. In addition to translating your commands into something the kernel can understand and act upon, the shell adds some important functions that the base operating system doesn't supply.

Using a Linux shell means working with a command line, which is much like working from a DOS prompt. Modern version of Linux come with graphical user interface (GUI) but some Linux tasks can only be done from the command line. The knowledge of how Linux works that you'll gain in this section will provide the foundation you need to use Linux successfully and efficiently. Here's a description of the basic features of all Linux shells, a preview of the functions they perform, and a rundown of what you'll learn in this section.

Prompts A prompt is a character or string of characters (such as $ or #) that the shell displays when it is ready to receive a new command. You'll learn about the different types of prompts and how to customize them to suit you and the way you work.

Command resolution When you enter a command, the shell must determine which program to run in order to perform that command. You'll learn how shells do this and how to change the command resolution process to suit your needs.

Job control Linux lets you multitask (run more than one command at a time). You'll learn how to start, list, and stop tasks; you'll also learn the difference between foreground and background task execution.

Command history and completion When you're entering lots of commands, sometimes you want to repeat the previous command or issue a similar one. You'll learn how to recall and modify previously entered commands, as well as find out about some keyboard shortcuts that can automatically complete your commands for you.

Wildcards and aliases Wildcards let you process a whole bunch of files at once, instead of having to repeat the same command for each file. You'll learn how to use two types of wildcards and how to create aliases for commonly used commands.

Piping and I/O redirection Sending the output of one program directly to another program or to a file can save you time and keystrokes. You'll learn how to pipe program output (connect programs together) and how to make a program get its input from a file instead of the keyboard.

This section will look at each of these functions in detail and teach you how to use them to your advantage. But first--a few shell preliminaries.

What Are The Most Important Linux Commands?

2008-03-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Working from a Linux command line is not always intuitive, especially since there are hundreds of different commands with a myriad of switches and flags to make things even more confusing. You certainly don't need to know all of them to make good use of your Linux system, but there is a certain set of indispensable tools with which you should be familiar.

We've covered a handful of commands in previous sections that let you work with the shell and your file system. The commands covered in this section will complement what you've learned and give you some essential tools to manage your Linux environment. (You'll also be able to use these commands on other Unix-based systems.) You'll pick up other important commands in the "Text Editors" and "Slicing and Dicing" sections but you should first master this starter set to build the skills that will help you perform common Linux tasks more easily.

If You Need Help, Ask the man

Assuming you can remember the right command for a particular job, it's tougher still to remember all the switches associated with that command. The man command (short for manual) will help you on both counts by displaying pages from online manuals and telling you which commands may be relevant to the task at hand.

Say you want to change your password, but you don't know the command to do it. You can use the man command plus the keyword flag, -k, to search by keyword password for relevant commands:

# man -k password
passwd passwd (1) - change login password
pwck pwck (1m) - password/group file checkers
vipw vipw (1b) - edit the password file

You can probably deduce that passwd is the correct command. But before blindly issuing any Linux command, you should know the proper syntax and understand what the command might do to you first. Using man with a command name will display all you need to know (probably more) about a command. For example, entering

# man passwd

will display

passwd(1) User Commands passwd(1)
NAME
passwd - change login password and attributes
SYNOPSIS
passwd [ name ]
passwd [ -d | -l ] [ -f ] [ -n min ] [ -w warn ]
[ -x max ] name
passwd -s [ -a ]
passwd -s [ name ]

DESCRIPTION
The passwd command changes the password or lists
attributes associated with the user's login name.
--More--(5%)

(The man command pauses after each screenful and waits for you to press the spacebar before continuing.) The word More at the bottom of each page indicates how much of the help has so far been displayed. The terms in square brackets are optional parameters (-d, -l, -f, for example); vertical bars indicate that the terms on either side are mutually exclusive--you can use only one at a time.

UNIX Tutorial (commands)

2008-03-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

quota

All students are allocated a certain amount of disk space on the file system for their personal files, usually about 100Mb. If you go over your quota, you are given 7 days to remove excess files.
To check your current quota and how much of it you have used, type

# quota -v

df

The df command reports on the space left on the file system. For example, to find out how much space is left on the fileserver, type

# df .

du

The du command outputs the number of kilobyes used by each subdirectory. Useful if you have gone over quota and you want to find out which directory has the most files. In your home-directory, type

# du -s *

The -s flag will display only a summary (total size) and the * means all files and directories.

gzip

This reduces the size of a file, thus freeing valuable disk space. For example, type

# ls -l science.txt

and note the size of the file using ls -l . Then to compress science.txt, type

# gzip science.txt

This will compress the file and place it in a file called science.txt.gz

To see the change in size, type ls -l again.

To expand the file, use the gunzip command.

# gunzip science.txt.gz

zcat

zcat will read gzipped files without needing to uncompress them first.

# zcat science.txt.gz

If the text scrolls too fast for you, pipe the output though less .

# zcat science.txt.gz | less

file

file classifies the named files according to the type of data they contain, for example ascii (text), pictures, compressed data, etc.. To report on all files in your home directory, type

% file *

diff

This command compares the contents of two files and displays the differences. Suppose you have a file called file1 and you edit some part of it and save it as file2. To see the differences type

# diff file1 file2

Lines beginning with a < denotes file1, while lines beginning with a > denotes file2.

find

This searches through the directories for files and directories with a given name, date, size, or any other attribute you care to specify. It is a simple command but with many options - you can read the manual by typing man find.

To search for all fies with the extention .txt, starting at the current directory (.) and working through all sub-directories, then printing the name of the file to the screen, type

# find . -name "*.txt" -print

To find files over 1Mb in size, and display the result as a long listing, type

% find . -size +1M -ls

history

The C shell keeps an ordered list of all the commands that you have entered. Each command is given a number according to the order it was entered.

# history (show command history list)

If you are using the C shell, you can use the exclamation character (!) to recall commands easily.

# !! (recall last command)

# !-3 (recall third most recent command)

# !5 (recall 5th command in list)

# !grep (recall last command starting with grep)

You can increase the size of the history buffer by typing

# set history=100

Linux Game : Wesnoth

2008-03-06T21:55:00.000-08:00

Group:

Strategy

Author:

Wesnoth team

Size:

66 MB

Homepage:

http://www.wesnoth.org

Description:

Turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Build your army, selecting, from one mission to the next one, your most experienced fighters. Fighters you did recruit among a great number of units, offering various strategic strengths and weaknesses on different terrains and against different opponents.

Rating:

79%

Linux Game : The Mana World

2008-03-06T21:51:00.000-08:00

Group:

RPG

Author:

The Mana World team

Size:

3.5 MB

Based on:

C++, SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_net, Guichan, PhysFS, libxml2, libcurl

OS:

Linux, Windows

Homepage:

http://themanaworld.org/

Description:

An effort to create an innovative free and open source MMORPG. Uses 2D graphics and aims to create a large and diverse interactive world. The project includes the development of both a client and a server, as well as the development of an online world.

Rating:

63%

Linux Game : Project Diaspora

2008-03-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Group:

Space shooting

Author:

Nighsoft

Size:

17 MB

Based on:

C++

OS:

Linux, Windows, Mac OS

Homepage:

http://www.nighsoft.net

Description:

Project Diaspora is a space based rpg where you pilot a ship and take on the universe as a lone pilot. The game is designed so that you may quickly join player made guilds to increase the strength of your efforts. In this game you can trade between planets, or fight rogue pirates for cash while your guild collects taxes on everything you do and other players do. All ships are fully customizable. The planets in this game can be taken over to help the guild in making a monopoly out of the universe. One thing that is particularly unique about this game is that the server structure is designed to handle multiple servers to act as one, which means the public can download and run their own server to expand the main universe.

Rating:

65%

KDE 4.0 Alpha 2 Released

2008-03-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

KDE Community are now immensely proud to have put the second Alpha version of what will probably be the worlds most popular desktop environment in a few years.

Hundreds of KDE hackers are now conspiring to make the best graphical user interface environment ever created in Glasgow, Scottland. A preview of their plans for world desktop environment domination was releasted from there on July 4th, 2007.
0.1. New Desktop

The KDE 4 desktop will look very different from KDE 2.x and 3.x. The new user interface is codenamed Plasma and it rumored to be very slick.

0.2. It's Alpha

Note that this KDE 4 release is only there to let you try it and see what it looks like. You can see what the plans are and what KDE 4 will probably look like, but it's not even worth trying to use this on a daily basis. Alpha2 is for geeks who want to know what the worlds future desktop environment will look like, it's not to be deployed and rolled out to every desktop system in all the worlds large and greedy corporations.

The http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/ KDE 4 SUSE is a good way to test try it out without installing anything on your computer.

various - Linux review

2008-03-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

Linux has been developing at a rate of knots since its inception. Currently, so much software is available that many distributions ship with multiple CDs or even, in the case of SuSE, a DVD. The amazing thing about Linux is that nearly all available software is under the General Public License, which means that the software itself is in most respects free, while Linux remains one of the most stable and reliable operating systems available.

With its roots in UNIX, Linux has a reputation for being complex. While sterling work has resulted in highly usable graphical environments such as KDE 2 in recent times, the strict interface guidelines provided by Microsoft don't exist, and so many users will find some applications alien. This is a strength as well as a weakness for Linux since it increases innovation and choice just as much as it detracts from initial ease of use.

Of the many varieties of Linux available, some cater for Windows users wishing to dip their toe in, such as ZipSlack, which can be installed in a DOS partition or run entirely from a ZIP disk. Some provide user-oriented environments that have been designed to make Linux feel like home to ex-Windows users, such as Corel Linux, Caldera and Linux Mandrake. Some just give everything and leave users to figure it all out, such as SuSE Linux, and some are more server-oriented, such as Turbo Linux and RedHat.

For the adventurous, Linux can provide nearly everything that Windows can in terms of productivity applications, and can also offer a growing number of games. We would recommend Linux Mandrake to users itching to try something a bit different on their PC. It represents great value and supports a wide range of hardware with simple configuration. Linux continues to gain popularity for many good reasons, and it's an inexpensive software solution, but it is still best suited to those with some technical ability.

Red Hat Linux

2008-02-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular, "middle-aged" Linux distribution (not as old as Slackware but older than Ubuntu) upon its discontinuation in 2004.

Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It is the first Linux distribution to use RPM as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.

Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. The source code of RHEL remains available for free, and has been the basis for several other Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones such as CentOS. Fedora, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for the home environment. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007.

Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.

As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This had little effect on English-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic, bi-directional and complex script languages along with European languages. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users, whose legacy ISO-8859-based setups were broken by the change[citation needed].

Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme.

Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties are required in the United States. Support for Microsoft's NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.

Linux Fedora Project

2008-02-27T03:11:00.000-08:00

is the community responsible for producing the Fedora Linux distribution, along with a variety of other projects. It is the result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux (RHL) and old Fedora Linux projects in September 2003, and is officially sponsored by Red Hat, which has employees working on the project's code. The Fedora Linux project developed Extras packages for older Red Hat Linux distributions (RHL 8, RHL 9, FC 1, FC 2) before it became part of the Fedora Project.

When Red Hat linux split between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the fedora project it left existing small business and home users with some uncertainty about what to do. Red Hat Professional Workstation was created at this same time with the intention of filling the niche that RHL had once filled but it was created without a certain future. This option quickly fell to the wayside for non-enterprise RHL users in favor of the Fedora Project. Recently the Fedora community has been thriving, and the Fedora distribution has a reputation as being a fully-open distribution that focuses on innovation and close work with upstream Linux communities.

The project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Red Hat retains liability for its actions. The Fedora Project Board is responsible for the direction of the Fedora Project and comprises five Red Hat appointed members and four community-elected members. Additionally, Red Hat appoints a chairman who has veto power over any board decision. Within Red Hat, this chairman holds the position of "Fedora Project Leader". Red Hat at one point created a separate Fedora Foundation to govern the project , but after consideration of a variety of issues, canceled it in favor of the board model currently in place.

The project facilitates online communication amongst its developers and community members through public mailing lists and wiki pages. It also coordinates an annual summit known as the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (commonly called FUDCon). Additional conferences have taken place in Germany, England and India.

The Fedora Project consists of a number of smaller subprojects.[8][9] As of February 2007, these subprojects include:

* Fedora Engineering Steering Committee provides the day to day technical operations of the Fedora Project.
* Fedora Documentation provides manuals, tutorials and reference materials to accompany Fedora Project releases.
* Fedora Translation works to translate software, documentation and websites associated with the Fedora Project.
* Fedora Marketing strives to increase the size of the Fedora Project user and developer communities.
* Fedora Ambassadors represent the Fedora Project at various events.
* Fedora Artwork is responsible for creating a pleasing and consistent visual experience.
* Fedora Infrastructure maintains those computer services upon with the Fedora Project depends including mailing lists, the website and wiki, CVS repositories and the Extras build system.
* Fedora Distribution manages distributing Fedora on physical media.

What Is Linux??

2008-02-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

Linux (commonly pronounced IPA: /ˈlɪnəks/ in English; variants exist) is a Unix-like computer operating system. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development: typically all underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.

The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The GNU contribution is the basis for the alternative name GNU/Linux.

Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux is supported by corporations such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, supercomputers, video game systems, such as the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, several arcade games, and embedded devices such as mobile phones, routers, and stage lighting systems.

Linux is a modular Unix-like operating system. It derives much of its basic design from principles established in Unix during the 1970s and 1980s. Linux uses a monolithic kernel, the Linux kernel, which handles process control, networking, and peripheral and file system access. Device drivers are integrated directly with the kernel.

Much of Linux's higher-level functionality is provided by separate projects which interface with the kernel. The GNU userland is an important part of most Linux systems, providing the shell and Unix tools which carry out many basic operating system tasks. On top these tools form a Linux system with a graphical user interface that can be used, usually running in the X Window System.

Most Linux distributions support dozens of programming languages. The most common collection of utilities for building both Linux applications and operating system programs is found within the GNU toolchain, which includes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the GNU build system. Amongst others, GCC provides compilers for Ada, C, C++, Java, and Fortran. The Linux kernel itself is written to be compiled with GCC. Proprietary compilers for Linux include the Intel C++ Compiler.

Most also include support for Perl, Ruby, Python and other dynamic languages. Examples of languages that are less common, but still well-supported, are C# via the Mono project, and Scheme. A number of Java Virtual Machines and development kits run on Linux, including the original Sun Microsystems JVM (HotSpot), and IBM's J2SE RE, as well as many open-source projects like Kaffe. The two main frameworks for developing graphical applications are those of GNOME and KDE. These projects are based on the GTK+ and Qt widget toolkits, respectively, which can also be used independently of the larger framework. Both support a wide variety of languages. There are a number of Integrated development environments available including Anjuta, Code::Blocks, Eclipse, KDevelop, Lazarus, MonoDevelop, NetBeans, and Omnis Studio while the long-established editors Vim and Emacs remain popular.