Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 13, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Everything you wanted to know about being a Linux kernel developer (but were afraid to ask)

So you want to be one of the few, the proud, the Linux kernel developers do you? Well, it’s not easy. But, if you’ve got the right stuff, Linux is looking for a few good programmers.

On August 13th, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Linux, published a guide to how to participate in the Linux kernel community. This 30-page ebook, How to Participate in the Linux Community, was written by noted Linux authority and executive editor of LWN.net (formerly Linux Weekly News) Jonathan Corbet.

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August 12, 2008
by sjvn01
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The biggest Blue Screen of Death ever

No… Ah stuff; there I was watching the Olympics opening ceremonies when I thought, for just a second, that I saw a BSOD during the run up to the lighting of the Olympic flame. It turns out I hadn’t been spending too much time at the keyboard. It seems that during the lighting ceremony that Windows really had fouled up on the world’s largest stage.

You can see the evidence at the Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. I wonder what newly retired Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who was in Beijing for the Olympics, thought?

Adding insult to injury, the mis-behaving computer wasn’t running Vista. It was running XP.

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August 12, 2008
by sjvn01
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Provisioning on Bare Metal the LinMin Way

It’s one thing to install Linux or Windows on a system of your own, it’s an entirely different thing to install Linux or Windows on a couple of dozen to a couple of thousand PCs. That’s where LinMin comes in with the newest version of its flagship bare metal installation program, LBMP (LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning) 5.2
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The fundamental fact of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is it does just what it says: It lets you install Windows and a variety of Linuxes, including Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and Asianux, on PCs and servers without operating systems. All together, LinMin can install and provision Lover 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.

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August 11, 2008
by sjvn01
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Windows’ days may be numbered

Could Microsoft be switching away from Windows?

Some very interesting documents have been leaking out of Microsoft. They clearly indicate, believe it or not, that Microsoft is considering shifting its users from Windows to a new operating system: Midori.

And, when I say “new,” I mean new. This isn’t the kind of lip-service change that we saw with David Cutler and NT or Jim Allchin and Vista. Midori, under Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy, isn’t a cosmetic change; it’s a completely new operating system.

Midori is being designed from the ground up to be a distributed operating system running on top of multiple hardware systems and virtual machines. That’s one heck of a change from what has always been a single-user operating system designed for a stand-alone PC.

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August 11, 2008
by sjvn01
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Giving an old Windows hand some Linux advice

I see my colleague Preston Gralla is looking for the best Linux for a Windows pro. That’s a good question with several good answers.

Preston’s son Gabe gave him some excellent advice when he recommended Wubi. This is the Windows’ world easiest Linux installer. With it, you install Ubuntu 8.04 just like it was any other Windows application. Download it, click the install button and let it rip.

It installs Ubuntu, from the Windows’ user viewpoint as a single directory. You don’t need to re-partition your hard drive, burn a CD, or do anything that any Windows user doesn’t know how to do. Once installed, the next time you reboot your PC, you’ll have the option of booting into Ubuntu as well as XP or Vista. If you don’t like it, you just uninstall it just like any other Windows program. No fuss. No muss.

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August 8, 2008
by sjvn01
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Three things the Linux desktops needs to do to beat Windows

San Francisco, Calif.–While at LinuxWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I chaired the panel on what the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that are pre-installing Linux on their PCs are up to and I attended another panel on what the Linux desktop architects have planned. One theme that showed up at both functions is: “What does Linux need to do to compete more successfully on the desktop?” We came up with several pain points, but some of them are clearly hurting Linux more than the others.

Number one with a bullet is one that most of you never think of but, trust me, the PC vendors and developers are painfully aware that Linux needs to do a much better job of managing power. With more and more of us doing our work on laptops, netbooks, and the like, getting the most out of battery life is becoming increasingly important.

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