Last time, we looked at Fedora 8, one of the major Linux distributions currently available. We saw some of the features of this release and touched on a number of post-installation steps. This time, we’ll continue and take a closer look at some of these.
If you keep up to date with developments in Linux, you may know that Fedora follows a regular release cycle, similar to that of Ubuntu. Fedora 9 will in fact be available as you read this.
You can define journaling file systems in many ways, but let's get right to the point. Journaling file systems are for people who tire of watching the boot-time fsck, or file system consistency check process. (Journaling file systems are also for anyone who likes the idea of a fault-resilient file system.) When a system using a traditional, non-journaling file system is improperly shut down, the operating system detects this and performs a consistency check using the fsck utility.
A recent report from ABI Research highlights the rise of mobile Linux, estimating that 23 percent of the world’s smartphones will have a Linux operating system by 2013. It appears that much of that growth will come at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian, and that LiMo and Android will be the main beneficiaries. What the report doesn’t note is that last year ABI predicted that 31 percent of smartphones will have Linux by 2012.
Novell has released the last public version of OpenSuse 11.0 for testing — but significant problems still need to be ironed out before the software's final release later this month.
OpenSuse 11.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) appeared on Thursday, the same day Novell revealed strong growth in its Linux business, strengthening its position against Linux market leader Red Hat.
A community website devoted to sharing information about Linux-based NAS (network attached storage) servers has added a "GPL" page to collect vendor distributions of GPL-licensed source code. In the process of assembling the page, NAS-central.org ran across one alleged violator, says site co-founder Markus Toth.
The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said.
Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.
DIY: Do It Yourself. That's how Linux got started. A group of volunteers, inspired and led by Linus Torvalds, created the greatest DIY operating system the world has ever seen. You, too, can create your own Linux distribution. Here's how.
In 1999, the South African-born Mark Shuttleworth sold his internet company, Thawte, which provided digital certificates for websites, for more than $500m (£254m). After spending $20m on a trip into space, he started the Ubuntu project - named after an African word meaning "Humanity to others", or "I am what I am because of who we all are" - which has since become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution.
Most of the time, Linux is run from either an installation on a hard drive or a live CD/DVD distribution. The first is fast, but not very portable; the second can be run anywhere you have a computer and a CD drive with boot access, but typically isn't very fast. Over the last few years, though, we've seen the emergence of something that combines the speed of a hard drive install with the convenience of a live CD: running Linux from a USB flash drive.
A major problem has been revealed in Debian Linux and derivative packages, such as Ubuntu. Debian revealed the other day that a fix they made back in September 2006 had the unintended consequence of crippling the strength of their OpenSSL distribution.
OpenSSL is used, of course, for Secure Sockets Layer which provides authentication and encryption for web traffic, but it's also used for other cryptography functions. OpenSSL is a very important package that brought public key cryptography to the masses; prior to OpenSSL, https web sites were expensive and complicated to build.
