The Linux Chronicles

Translator For Hire

2007-10-31T16:05:00.000+00:00

Reposted here from my other blog:

My friend Kirsty J. McCluskey has set up a web page offering her services as a translator and tutor for hire. Besides English, she's fluent in French, German, Spanish and Russian (yes, count 'em, five) and can translate texts from any of those languages to English. She can teach you these languages too, as she offers online tutoring for them as well as history and writing. She's a brilliant lady, a Cambridge graduate, and she's had a ton of experience with this kind of thing.

I'm posting this here because Kirsty needs help to get the word out about her translation and tutoring service, so if you need translation done or language tutoring do visit her webpage and take a look at what she's offering.

GPL3 Draft Available

2006-01-16T17:30:00.000+00:00

There’s a draft of the GPL3 available at the Free Software Foundation website. There's also a wiki there you can contribute to.

Ubuntu 5.10 Released

2005-10-13T04:52:00.000+00:00

Ubuntu fans, cheer and check it out. The highlight (for me at least) is Gnome 2.12.

Debian Gets X.Org

2005-07-17T16:43:00.000+00:00

Debian Sid has finally migrated to X.org. This was a long-awaited update, as it was put on hold until the release of Sarge. Another major change is the update of the C++ ABI. Some breakage may occur in Debian Sid at this moment, and will take some time to settle down.

Stable Kernel Patch 2.6.12.3 Released

2005-07-16T08:21:00.000+00:00

A small patch with miscellaneous fixes. Announcement and changelog here, download patch here.

Kernel 2.6.13-rc3 Patch Released

2005-07-13T14:15:00.000+00:00

Short log, big diff. Announcement here. Expect LKML traffic to go down during Kernel Summit and the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

Kernel 2.6.13-rc2 Patch Released

2005-07-06T18:05:00.000+00:00

Linus sent an announcement on Tuesday on the availability of the 2nd rc patch for kernel 2.6.13. There seems to be a bit of confusion on whether this is rc2 or rc3, as Linus mentions rc3 in the body of the email and in the git commit message, but the Makefile, tags and patch file name all show rc2 (so it should be rc2).

Software Patent Directive Struck Down In EU

2005-07-06T17:58:00.000+00:00

Today marks a win for free software practitioners in Europe, as the EU parliament has struck down the Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions. The EU is safe from software patents, for now. However we need to be vigilant for any more attempts to pass such legislation, as the pro-software patent corporate lobbyists will try again, somehow.

Stable Kernel Patch 2.6.12.2 Released

2005-06-30T12:13:00.000+00:00

Chris Wright has released 2.6.12.2, with minor fixes for socket hashing, ACPI, some memory fixes, a spinlock bug fixed in the e1000 driver, a fix for the qla2xxx driver and a typo fix.

Kernel 2.6.13-rc1 Patch Released

2005-06-29T20:29:00.000+00:00

Linus announced the first -rc patch to 2.6.13 yesterday, with fixes and patches all over the map. Linus noted that the 2.6.12 release was not badly delayed by the Bitkeeper-to-git transition, and hopes the 2.6.13 cycle won't take as long. Read the Changelog for more details.

More On Cell SPUs and SPUfs At Developerworks

2005-06-29T17:18:00.000+00:00

Arnd Bergmann has written an article on the new Cell processor and the abstractions that Linux uses to access the SPUs. The design is very Unixlike, with access to the SPUs done via a virtual filesystem. An interesting followup to the details released during the unveiling at Linuxtag, the article also has some nice links to more information about the new processor and the PPC architecture.

Linux-based Cell Workstation Unveiled At Linuxtag 2005

2005-06-25T18:55:00.000+00:00

One of the awaited presentations at Linuxtag 2005 was the unveiling of the PPC64 Cell processor workstation, running Linux. The Linuxtag blog (in German) reports that the workstation was running a slightly modified Fedora Core 3 distro. One of the most interesting features of the Cell is a tiny virtual filesystem on each SPU ("synergistic" processing units), stored on the 256K of local memory. The functionality of the SPU can be accessed via this filesystem, such as loading a program context into memory by writing a virtual file. Check out the Linuxtag links for pictures and more stories from the event.

Linux Tops The Top 500

2005-06-25T15:44:00.000+00:00

The latest incarnation of the TOP500 List was released during the 20th International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2005) which took place from June 21st to 24th in Heidelberg, Germany. Linux runs on the top 3, and powers 8 out of the top 10 (the other 2 are System V derived proprietary Unix operating systems). The top computer is the PPC64-based BlueGene/L in Livermore, United States.

You can get more information (including abstracts) on the presentations at ICS2005 from the conference webpage.

nVidia Drivers 1.0-7667 Released

2005-06-24T14:15:00.000+00:00

A new set of (evil, proprietary etc.) nVidia graphics drivers are available for Linux on IA32 and AMD64/EMT64T. Additionally, you can get them for FreeBSD and Solaris x86 too. This looks mainly like a bugfix release for some of the problems faced on version 1.0-7664 of the drivers early this month.

Stable Kernel Patch 2.6.12.1 Released

2005-06-23T12:56:00.000+00:00

Chris Wright announced the first security update to kernel 2.6.12.1 to LKML. You can find the patch attached to his reply email, or alternatively you can download it from kernel.org.

Linus Torvalds On Software Commoditization

2005-06-22T04:43:00.000+00:00

The technology blog Good Morning Silicon Valley brings us an interview with Linus Torvalds on the future of open source, proprietary software and Microsoft. Hopefully, the eventual commoditization of software will break Microsoft's monopoly on software infrastructure, and thus level the playing field and bring forth more interesting things in the software landscape. The topic is also touched on in an essay by Ian Murdock, which will appear in the book Open Sources 2.0.

Andrew Morton Talks Potential Merges For 2.6.13

2005-06-21T19:12:00.000+00:00

Andrew Morton ponders the patches that will eventually make their way into 2.6.13 on LKML. The patches in question are the Oracle Cluster Filesystem, some memory management patches, some hope for Xen getting in, the long-awaited Reiserfs 4 may get in, inotify, FUSE for userspace filesystems (which is handy for experimental stuff like grid filesystems), kexec and kdump (handy for crash dumps and debugging) and more. The discussion is still ongoing.

Linux Hardware Incompatibility List

2005-06-21T04:36:00.000+00:00

David N. Welton has set up a list of hardware which is incompatible with Linux at www.leenooks.com. Depending on your inclination, this is either the stuff you should avoid buying (send a message to hardware manufacturers with your wallet) if you're shopping for hardware, or it's a list of stuff that you can write Linux drivers for (take up the challenge).

Kernel 2.6.12 Release Announcement

2005-06-18T05:43:00.000+00:00

Linus has just mailed the announcement of the release to LKML. The changelog on the kernel.org site isn't the full changelog, but the one from -rc2 onwards. Linus also added the explicit reminder that all patch signing-off information will be made public, and included it Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

Linux Kernel 2.6.12 Released

2005-06-18T04:33:00.000+00:00

We should expect an announcement from Linus soon, as kernel 2.6.12 has been released on kernel.org (and should also hit the various mirrors soon). The changelog can be found here. This is the first official release of the kernel after the source code management tool migration from Bitkeeper to Git. More information about the release can be found at LWN.net.

Hello, World

2005-06-16T00:00:00.000+00:00

Greetings, readers.

When Linux first started off as a personal pet project of Linus Torvalds, even he did not anticipate it growing into the kernel for the GNU project, and subsequently into a large-scale, enterprise-grade operating system which is not only entirely free (as in freedom), but also a significant player in the technological mainstream. Both Linux and free software shook the IT business world, and some people in that realm are still coming to terms with what Linux will eventually do for IT.

For the geek and free software hacker, the growth of Linux represents a very cool opportunity to build an entirely new and exciting software infrastructure together with the commercial software industry, but not beholden to it. This liberates us and gives us an opportunity to take computers and technology where our imagination takes us.

Therefore, this blog is to document these developments, for we live in exciting times.