Linus Torvalds was only 22 when he decided in 1991 to share with friends and colleagues the code of Linux, the new OS he had created. The computer science student at the University of Helsinki could not imagine the revolution his decision would cause through the IT industry in the years to come. In this interview, he talks about why he released the code, offers his views on Microsoft and says the future belongs to open source.
I began My Linux Experience back at the end of February and over the past five months I’ve managed to spend a fair bit of time dabbling and experimenting with a variety of Linux distros. Over these months I’ve learned a lot - a lot about Linux, a lot about the Linux community and a lot about myself and how I look at and interact with PCs.
The five month mark seems like as good a time as any to put some of these thoughts, feelings and finding out into the wild for comment and discussion.
LinuxWorld today played host to a demonstration of the vulnerabilities of Web 2.0, with SPI Dynamic's senior security engineer, Matt Fisher, offering some new examples of what criminals are doing online, armed with little more than a desktop browser. Cross-site scripting attacks are the number one online threat, according to the Mitre organisation, in part because they are so easy to do.
DELL has decided to expand sales of consumer personal computers loaded with the Linux operating system to Britain, France, Germany and China.
The world's No. 2 PC maker started selling Ubuntu Linux PCs to consumers in May in a program that was limited to the United States. Ubuntu is a free version of the software.
Linux software, the main rival to Microsoft's market-dominating Windows, has been one of the fastest-growing types of software on business computers over the past decade.
The prevailing wisdom about Linux on the desktop runs something like this: "I'll believe Linux is ready for the desktop as soon as you can give me a Linux distribution that even my grandmother can run." For some time, the folks at Ubuntu have been trying their best to make Granny -- and most everyone else -- happy. They've attempted to build a Linux distribution that's easy to install, use, configure, and maintain -- one that's at least as easy as Windows, and whenever possible, even easier.
Con Kolivas is a prominent developer on the Linux kernel and strong proponent of Linux on the desktop. But recently, he left it all behind. Why?
In this interview with APCMag.com, Con gives insightful answers exploring the nature of the hardware and software market, the problems the Linux kernel must overcome for the desktop, and why despite all this he's now left it all behind.
Read on for an honest appraisal of Linux, and why it has some way to go yet.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites and likened them to religious fanatics -- the latest sign of a growing schism in the open source community between business-minded developers like Torvalds and free software purists.
In an online post, Torvalds slammed executives at the Free Software Foundation, likening their mind-set to that of "religious fanatics and totalitarian states."
The next release of the Linux kernel will apparently gain an all-new scheduler said to deliver better desktop scheduling. Ingo Molnar's CFS ("completely fair scheduler") implements a fair scheduling approach long advocated by Con "Conman" Kolivas, a practicing Australian medical doctor specializing in anaesthesia.
Molnar, a Red Hat employee who maintains the kernel's scheduling subsystem, describes CFS as follows: "Eighty percent of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware."
Linux fans (myself included) love to argue to Windows users how much better the Linuxes are than Microsoft Windows. Now don't get me wrong, I am not posting this to disprove that Linuxes, BSD's, or any of the *nixes are better than Windows, they really are. However (and there's always a however) we tend to be very selective on what we tell you when it comes to the minor details. Take this as a confession, as an admission of those details you might not necessarily like about Linux.
OpenMoko, a project to create an open, Linux-based smartphone, and FIC (the manufacturer) have started shipping a phone for developers who want to play around with OpenMoko and get a jump start on application development, the Neo 1973, which features:
