Cheap branches make for new uses.
Coverage of an odd mailing list thread suggesting that IBM is gearing up to slap an F/OSS license on their Java compiler and runtime.
Ross Burton builds the first real-world application using Kid Templates.
A report on what seems to be real forward progress in the Fedora project.
My notes on upgrading Fedora Core from 2 to 3 using the Yum package manager.
Why Java won't even be considered for most types of F/OSS applications until they ease up on the license.
Some thoughts about a simple backup system that takes advantage of a package management system.
First post!
Sometimes! Or, fork(2) is a very fast operation on legitimate operating systems. I didn't realize it could be as fast as spawning a thread, though.
Interesting thread wherein Linus describes the need for various types of Git workflows for leaf developers vs. maintainers. Lot's of talk about the pros and cons of rebasing in different situations.
Erik Engbrecht: "Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading."
I'm more than a little embarased that I've never heard of this utility. I think most modern kernels prioritize IO with normal nice, though...
Most of these are relevant to POSIX sh(1). This one gets me every time: echo <<EOF :)
Uggghhh. I just spent 30 minutes hunting some arcane tcsh bug caused by coreutils dircolors. This is my revenge. I don't even know I had any csh code running on this machine. It turns out that MacOS X's /usr/bin/which is implemented in csh. Dumb.
"... adds a chroot(2) facility to sshd, controlled by a new sshd_config(5) option 'ChrootDirectory'. This can be used to 'jail' users into a limited view of the filesystem, such as their home directory ..."
I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu's new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.
Finally: "this manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic UNIX command-line skills, but no previous knowledge of git."
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (with linproc mounted on /compat/linux/proc). I've always wondered why top(1) just kind of stopped being developed 10 years ago.
Dennis Ritchie: "There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for 'run commands', and the file began to be called 'a runcom'. rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage."
I can never remember nmap args for some reason...
EC2 is my current pick for most interesting / innovative tech development of the year. Everyone will have to have an EC2 clone by the end of 2008.
"Installation is left as an exercise for the reader."
"The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies. "
Brilliant!
Schwartz: "... we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform, and to the legal defense of free software innovators."
Looks like they're bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.
Vim add-in for viewing manpages, perldoc (both system and embedded), help, info, and php files. Maybe I'll finally be able to read all that GNU info doc I keep hearing about in the GNU coreutils man pages.
"To average users, the suggestion that they use the command line – or the shell, or the terminal, or whatever else you want to call it is only slightly less welcome than the suggestion that they go out and deliberately contract AIDS." That's a damn sham
Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I've prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd's sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.
Some detail on rsync's "rolling checksum" algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.
Very nice look at different methods (good and bad) for handling the command line in sh scripts.
I'm gonna give this a try for managing home directories now that I've convinced myself that version control is the wrong solution. I moved my homes from CVS to SVN a couple years ago and just tried going with bzr but VCS just isn't right here.
"... cron's pathological behavior has be petrified into the Unix standards. So if it isn't broken, it isn't cron."
Pretty much what you thought but with great detail :)
"The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does."
I've read the following line five times but it refuses to compute: "... and now it sounds like Dell will be buying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates from Microsoft ..." Huh? Looks like I should have further researched the MS/Novel deal.
Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I've seen in years.
What's next? which(1)?
Michael Dell runs Ubuntu 7.04 on his personal laptop :)
Nice look at techniques for writing portable sh.
"Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve." :)
Seth is on the market. Hire him.
"et see" :)
A complete look at the little used utilities for processing arguments in scripts.
Lots of stuff from Sun (ZFS, dtrace), Linuxulator translates Linux syscalls to BSD syscalls with not performance penalty, lots of performance enhancements to the network stack from the card up, and a new malloc.
Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn't understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.
Wow, I'm surprised I've never seen anything about this before.
I've been using a fetchmail, procmail, and mutt setup on my Mac for a few months now in an attempt to get control over five different mailboxes and it's working pretty well. If you've got some free time and lots of mail, consider playing around with one o
Whose going to get this running on OS X? I guess it doesn't really matter. I can always X over to a Linux box...
This seems like really bad news to me.
"Dependency management is probably the most important contribution of open source to software engineering." -- I don't know about that but it's definitely up there. It's mind boggling that MS hasn't developed some form of package management.
Best UNIX productivity article I've read in a long while.
... and not just the usual suspects either.
Lot's of things I've wanted to say in here...
Stallman on the EU software patent mess.
Worse is better.
Beautiful. Our pal Stephen O'Grady gets a nice quote in this one. To the moon!
"Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens)"
Seth on the recent Fedora Foundation announcement: "It reminds me of the announcements about 2 years ago for something called the Red Hat Linux Project."
I don't even know what to think of this...
Debunking the common myth that anyone can commit changes to any F/OSS project whenever they.
Haha! SCO is out of control.
A great snap of Seth Vidal, quite possibly the best project leader I've ever had the privilege of working with.
Need to move away from history | grep -i
Came across this odd section in a "leaving Emacs for vi" document and it has a really interesting description of the history of FSF/GNU, Linux, and the evolution of Free Software. Seems out of place in this document but is worth reading.
Brazil gets it. They could be the international version of Silicon Valley in the next five years...
I'm seriously considering considering moving to Brazil. That country is really starting to get their shit together and the gov seems close to the people.
From Oct 23, 2000 issue of the German language magazine c't
Introduction to being a complete bad-ass.
"Save Money, Save Time, Save Your Ass"
Demo of 100% free Java/Eclipse natively compiled with gcj. This is slated for Fedora Core 4.
I almost puked when I read this. I hope there's just been a mix up or something.
Looks like a nice little upgrade..
A nice and simple theme for GTK2/GNOME desktop environments (click thumbnail image to see larger screenshot).
Decent coverage of recent Fedora activity. Things should start kicking up here now that Fedora Extras CVS is available and Seth Vital is taking a more active role.
A look at the past, present, and possible future of GNOME culture.
Linus on Solaris going OSS.
Supposedly kick ass video game for OS X, Linux, and Windows. Free demo available.
"Nobody really modifies the source of open source software." -- somebody didn't get that memo; possibly all of australia..
Cool. This is one of the most frequent requests on yum-devel. Not sure who's behind this though because I don't remember seeing it discussed on the mailing list.
Best bug report I've ever seen in my life.
Icon's fictitious #redhat IRC transcript relaying some of the issues surrounding the Fedora project from the community's POV. This is a few months old. I hope some of this has been cleared up.
Sorry, no one is getting christmas presents from me this year.
All on one page :)
Instructions for getting a FC3 installed and up to snuff.
I hope they keep this semi-technical. First issue looks pretty good.
This is a really good idea.
Maybe Balmer could include the fact that msn search runs on Linux in his next "Get The Facts" campaign.
when you can't afford a google appliance...
probably true. shrug..
Seth Vital provides a list of things that need to happen for Fedora to be successful moving forward. Note that most of these have been problems that received little attention since Fedora 1.
for some reason, anytime I'm reading ballmer, I always get that charlie-brown-on-the-phone-voice in my head. -- Wah wah.. Wah wah wah wah, wah wah...
Some guy is trying to buy the GPL off the Linux kernel by contacting individual copyright holders and offering them cash.
yeah whatever... I've been trying to learn emacs for years.
Neal Stephenson on UNIX.
"KDE and GNOME have both gotten much better, but let's get real. They're not even in the same ballpark." -- Ouch. True though...
Tim Bray with an objective look at something that's hard to talk about without using the words "bullshit" or "fukt" or "broken". We need more people like Tim. I tend to just bitch.
Protect your intellectual property now or risk having your business sacked by open souce-touting bandits!
Some really good info on various methods of dealing with synchronization between processes on *NIX based systems.
imagine that.
History of WinFS (hint: OFS)
'bout time.
ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump
"share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems" via PhotoMatt.
Red Hat Exec Michael Tieman's comments on Microsoft's weird move into the open source mindview.
Title is a bit misleading. GNOME feels they have reached Windows' level of functionality (I'd agree) and are now shooting to bring the featureset in line with Apple's OS X.
"..provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium." - Maybe I will be able to put these 7 Gmail invites to good use after all.
"The ad contained a graph comparing the cost in US dollars between Linux running on two z900 mainframe CPUs and a Windows Server 2003 image running two 900MHz Intel Xeons chips." Since when are mainframe chips only 10 times more expensive than x86 chips?
After using Emacs for three years, I think I finally need to learn how to use it. This has some good pointers.
Conference for Linux enthusiasts of all kinds. Right down the street from me at OSU.
Tim Bray on all the recent news about linux's 283 patent infingements.
"In the first quarter of 2004, SCOsource realized only $20,000 and in the last quarter the revenue from IP licensing came to a mere $11,000."
