Linux Blog

Well, I suppose a bit of an introduction is in order before I begin. I’m Aaron, a friend of Owen, and I’ve always been mystified by his ability to use Linux (command line wizard) to do just about anything he wants. Whenever he touches a machine, he’s able to take complete control over it by getting down to the very base of Linux and I’d find myself suddenly in awe at the wonderful things I’m seeing on either his machine or mine, because, somehow, he’s suddenly on my machine (he’s in my b4s3, k1ll1n my d00dz). So we came to the conclusion that, instead of my mystification, I start learning about this mysterious world of Linux and the Linux community.

For the first article, I reckon we should go into a brief, “Readers Digest” version of the history of Linux. Linux as we know it was developed in 1991 by Linux Torvalds based upon the GNU code written by, or at least announced by, Richard Stallman in 1983. Just knowing that dispels the myth that Linux is based upon Unix as GNU stands for “Gnu is Not Unix.” This often leads to the use of the term GNU/LINUX. Ok, moving on.
(Read on …)

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From InformationWeek I quote:

“Stop copying 2001 Windows. That’s not where the usability action is”

By this I think that Bob Sutor (VP of Open Source and Standards at IBM) meant that he didn’t want Linux developers to make a desktop OS. The article goes on to explain how he would like to see it further developments in Virtulization and making Linux more “green.” He believes that the Linux community has not done enough.

He’d like to see Linux take advantage of the small business market and help lower costs to businesses, but in order to do this “turnkey” applications have to be made that require little maintenance. I believe that small medium businesses can lower costs by running Linux technologies in the web applications market but not necessarily with desktop applications. Maybe this is something that should be leveraged? It would be hard to find open source developers that will work on a project that they have little interest in yet profits companies . But if an open source application became more mainstream then the developers would naturally follow as the application grew. Its sort of a catch 22. Who came first, the chicken or the egg?

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting article and I think that Bob Sutor should become an open source motivational speaker. Maybe IBM can fund a conference to get the Linux community to actually do something because they’re getting tired of waiting. I mean, how hard could it possibly be to motivate developers to create “turnkey business solutions” that will make IBM to ton of money?

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Its not often that I cover big news in the Linux community but I think these two Linux distributions are noteworthy.

Firstly Fedora 9 has been released. I was lucky enough to get the DVD ISO but have not yet had a chance to install it. I am however going to get to update a number of Fedora 8 boxes to Fedora 9 when I have deemed Fedora 9 stable for production. The feature list looks nice and hopefully the upgrades will go smoothly. It has been a while since I have looked at Fedora and I have to say I am very impressed with 8. It found most of my hardware (sound excused) and even has modern features that have come to lack in my next topic.

Slackware 12.1 was also released this month. This update to Slackware came quicker than previous versions and has a nice list of features that make me want to upgrade my slack box. As pat mentions better RAID, LVM support are among the list. Hal has been added so the properly configuring Slackware 12.1 should make Slackware a little more user friendly and stream the mounting of devices. I will confirm if the Slackware HAL fix is still applicable but from reading the Slackware release announcement it seems like it still needs to be done. I’ll document this pretty soon so stay tuned!

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