Linux

Last week, the Linux Foundation took control of the linux.com domain, which hopefully might become the central source of information about Linux (here you can find the official press release).

I think that this is a great opportunity for the Linux community, which could bring a whole new level of information sharing between users and experts. If you’re somehow involved with Linux, this is a good time for you to participate and have your opinion heard. You can start by visiting the IdeaForge and voting for the topics you’d like to find at Linux.com (or you can also propose your own).

On a side note, there’s something that I’d like to mention about the ideas proposed at IdeaForge. So far, these four proposals are amongst the most voted ones:

• Linux Hardware Database
• Hardware Central Product Directory
• Get hardware manufacturers to be more supportive of Linux
• List of safe hardware to buy in Linux

It seems obvious that there’s a pattern here: hardware support is still Linux’s Achille’s heel.

I have talked about this recently in Linux and the Curse of the Missing Drivers, where I proposed a simple outline describing how a hardware information repository should look and work.

I’m just one amongst the thousands of Linux users that surely have faced hardware issues at some point, so the least I can do (besides proposing some ideas to revert the situation) is casting my vote at IdeaForge in order to support the hardware-related initiatives. Of course, I’ve already voted for all of them. Have you voted yet? If you haven’t, please take 5 minutes of your time and do it, since you can actually help to make a difference.

Posted by Marcus Friedman

Being a Linux advocate, I could go on and on writing about all the reasons that make it an excellent computing platform. I’ve been using Linux as a server system for more than eight years, and also on the desktop since 2006.

Many people believe that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, and in fact you could find hundreds of articles explaining why. And whether we like to admit it or not, the hard truth is that sometimes Linux on the desktop sucks, big time.

Many times though, the problems with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself but with factors that are external to the operating system. For example, poor hardware support is one of the reasons why Linux on the desktop won’t be going mainstream any time soon. But is it Linux’s fault? Certainly not. The one to blames are probably all of the incompetent or unethical manufacturers that don’t release the source code for their drivers.

In spite of that, during the last years, hardware support on Linux has improved dramatically, and that’s mostly because thousands of developers around the world have spent inordinate amounts of time and energy on reverse engineering and open source driver development. Anyway, hardware support is still very far from what users of other platforms usually expect.

Continue reading "Linux and the Curse of the Missing Drivers"

Posted by Marcus Friedman

Debian Lenny was officially released today, almost two years after its previous version.

This release includes several important improvements. The following list highlights just a few of them:

• Linux kernel 2.6.26
• Xen 3.2.1
• Hypervisor independent virtual machine management (supports kvm, xen, qemu, kqemu)
• qemu can now use hardware-based virtualization (KVM)
• Graphical front-end for virtual machine management
• Xorg 7.3 (the X server autoconfigures itself with most hardware)
• LXDE desktop environment
• Full support for the Asus Eee PC

Some people criticize Debian because of the extended period between stable releases. I think that’s unfair. The only time in Debian’s history when there was a truly extended period between releases was during the transition from Woody (July 2002) to Sarge (June 2005). Every Debian version since 1.1 (except for Sarge) was released in less than 24 months from the previous one. [ see Debian release history ]

Although it would be nice to have a shorter release cycle (for example, 18 months), I think that for a distribution like Debian, anything under 24 months is acceptable. Let’s not forget that Debian isn’t just an average distribution: it offers 3 development branches, it supports more than 10 different hardware architectures, it comes with more than 23,000 software packages and it has a reputation of being the most reliable non-commercial distro available. It seems obvious that you cannot release new versions of such a complex product every year and still maintain its reliability. And Debian developers take the word stable pretty seriously.

Continue reading "Debian Lenny is ready for you. Are you ready for Debian?"

Posted by Marcus Friedman

I had my first contact with Linux back in 1997, when my boss threw me a set of Slackware CDs, asking me to set it up on some workstations at one of our computing labs.

Coming from a SCO Unix background, the setup process of Slackware didn’t seem that bad, though by today standards, the installer program was in the stone age. Even setting up an ethernet card was something that put a test on your patience.

The GNU/Linux environment didn’t seem alien at all, besides some small details, but that’s always where the devil is. What was entirely new to me was the free software philosophy. But that’s a story for another time.

Continue reading "All roads lead to Debian"

Posted by Marcus Friedman