linux

Our Assignment

Doc Searls — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 23:18:55 +0000

We need to protect the freedoms in which Linux was born and grew up.

I've been with Linux Journal since it was a gleam in Phil Hughes' eye, back in 1993. Phil's original plan was for something he called "a free software magazine". I was one of the friends Phil recruited to think and talk, mostly by e-mail, about how to make the magazine happen. The project was pretty far downstream when Phil sent the whole thing sideways with five words: "There's this kid from Finland...." That was the first I'd heard of Linus, or of Linux. But Phil was one of the world's experts on UNIX (having fathered many UNIX publications in previous years), and he was convinced that Linux was exactly the free operating system the world was waiting for. He was right.

And so Linux Journal was born, in March 1994, just as Linux itself arrived at version 1.0. Its first Editor in Chief was Bob Young, who knew almost nothing about Linux when Phil recruited him. ("He was selling circuit boards or something from a booth in the back of a tradeshow", Phil said.) Not long after that, Bob left to start a Linux company of his own, called Red Hat.

The first piece I wrote for Linux Journal was an interview with Craig Burton for an insert called Websmith. Craig sought me out, because he wanted to alert the Linux folks to LDAP, which he said was throwing a monkey wrench into Microsoft's plans to do for networked directories what it had done for desktop operating systems. Craig was right, and the wrench worked.

I started writing full time for LJ in 1998, covering the open-sourcing of Netscape's browser (now known as Firefox) and the creation of its new parent, Mozilla.org. This coincided with the birth of the open-source movement and the dot-com explosion, for which Linux itself was ground zero. The biggest IPOs of 1999 (a record IPO year) were Red Hat, Andover (which had earlier acquired Slashdot) and VA Linux (which later acquired Andover). Linux Journal also had offers at the time to sell out, but Phil turned them down. If he had said yes, some of us (especially Phil) would have scored big, but Linux Journal would have been long gone by now.

Go to Full Article

Linux Kernel News - November 2013

Shuah Khan — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 17:24:04 +0000

by Shuah Khan

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

3.13-rc2 has been released on November 29th. This release candidate includes several small bug fixes. Please read the 3.13-rc2 release announcement.

3.13-rc1 was released on November 22nd with usual mix of patches, 55% drivers, 8% architecture code, 9% network updates, and the rest is spread out (fs, headers, tools, documentation). The nftables, multi-queue block layer, and the odd Little-endian PowerPC support are some of the features. You can find the 3.13-rc1 release announcement. Please read Little-endian PowerPC for more information.

3.12 was released on November 7th 2013. This release adds support for offline deduplication in Btrfs, automatic GPU switching in laptops with dual GPUs, a performance boost for AMD Radeon graphics, better RAID-5 multicore performance, improved handling of out-of-memory situations, improved VFS path name resolution scalability, improvements to the timerless multitasking mode, separate mode setting and rendering device nodes in the graphics DRM layer, improved locking performance for virtualized guests, XFS directory recursion scalability improvements, IPC scalability improvements, tty layer locking improvements, new drivers and many small improvements. Please find the full list of 3.12 changes for details.

Stable release News

As of this writing the latest stable releases are as follows:

Go to Full Article

September 2013 Linux Kernel News

Shuah Khan — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 19:16:57 +0000

by Shuah Khan

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

Linus Torvalds closed the 3.12 merge window when he released 3.12-rc1. tty layer and scalability improvements received a special mention in the release announcement. The tty layer cleanups lead to per-tty locking which will result in better performance on some work-loads.

The directory entry (dentry) object represents a component in the filename path. For example, in the path /usr/bin/yelp, each individual component in the path, /,usr,/,bin,/,yelp are all dentry objects. Using dentry objects helps make the process of validating and resolving each competent in the path easier. With the dentry reference or usage count scalability work that is included in 3.12-rc1, the filename caches now scale very well in 3.12. This work eliminates the per-dentry lock contention even on the same file or directory lookups.

Please read the 3.12-rc1 release announcement for a list of what else is in this release.

3.12-rc2 release came out one week later on September 23. This release contains a few driver bug fixes and 24 AMD Radeon driver patches from Alex Duecher. In addition to several bug fix patches, dynamic power management enablement for current and upcoming AMD processors Trinity, Kaveri, and Kabini is in this rc release. Please read the 3.12-rc2 release announcement for complete release notes.

3.12-rc3 is released on September 29 2013. This rc has seen some churn in mm area with reverting a few commits that were still being discussed, and allow the discussion to be completed and patches revised as needed. Bulk of the changes are in the driver space and new lockref support for ARM and s390. Please read the 3.12-rc3 release announcement for complete release notes.

Stable release News

As of this writing the latest stable releases are as follows:

Go to Full Article

August 2013 Linux Kernel News

Shuah Khan — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 19:19:05 +0000

by Shuah Khan

Linus Torvalds released 3.11. Prior to 3.11 release, Linus's 3.11-rc7 announcement was posted to his Google Plus page on Linux's 22nd birthday. Here is what he had to say in his nostalgic and reminiscent statement of the passing of time in which so much has been accomplished.

"Hello everybody out there using Linux -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, even if it's big and
professional) for 486+ AT clones and just about anything else out there
under the sun. This has been brewing since April 1991, and is still not
ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in
Linux 3.11-rc7.

I originally ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), but others have taken over
user space and things still seem to work. This implies that I'll get the
final 3.11 release within a week, and I'd like to know what features most
people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll
implement them :-)"

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

3.11 is now released and 3.12 merge window is open. Several bug fixes have been included in the final 3.11 release. There are 80+ commits since 3.11-rc7 and here is short summary of a few critical fixes.

x86/mm: Fix boot crash with DEBUG_PAGE_ALLOC=y and more than 512G RAM
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/12/601

This fixes a bug that was introduced when was changed to to use #PF handler to to set memory mappings.

drm/i915: ivb: fix edp voltage swing reg val
http://www.spinics.net/lists/stable/msg18461.html

This fixes eDP link-training failures bug introduced in drm/i915 enhancements for Ivybridge eDP that causes a blank screen.

drm/vmwgfx: Split GMR2_REMAP commands if they are to large
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.dri.devel/90760

Fixes a bug that causes VM to die when a large SVGA command is issued. This change splits the command to avoid issuing large SVGA commands.

3.12 git pull request summary

One important feature that might be included in the 3.12-rc1 is the patch series that adds a CPU idle driver for the vexpress TC2 testchip. This work is an evolutionary step towards an ARM unified CPU idle driver based on the Multi-cluster power management (MCPM) framework.

This patch set adds:

Go to Full Article

Linux Graphics News

Bryce Harrington — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:00:00 +0000

by Bryce Harrington

The graphics stack in Linux comprises a number of distinct projects, and in this article we'll take a look at the current development of X.org, Wayland, and Cairo.

Linux graphics have undergone a major evolution over the past decade in two respects. First has been a shift from 2D system rendering, to today's hardware-accelerated 3D system compositing. Second has been a large-scale migration of graphics support from X down to the kernel level, where it can take maximum advantage of hardware capabilities. In recent years the former has exposed limitations in X.org's design, while the latter made it much easier to reimplement a graphics stack separately from X.

Thus there is now both the motivation and means to replace X, and this has led to a couple efforts to do just that. Wayland is slowly but surely becoming a useful affair, and Canonical's Mir efforts are offering a credible new challenge. Yet recently X.org has embarked on development of DRI3, demonstrating that this venerable project is not yet ready to fade into the sunset.

Stable Releases

xorg-server: 1.14.2 was released June 25, 2013.
wayland 1.2.0 and weston 1.2.0 were released on July 12, 2013.
cairo: 1.12.14 was released Feb 10, 2013, and is currently preparing for a possibly upcoming 1.12.16 release.

X.org Development

By and large, X.org is in maintenance right now, although some interesting development work is going on around the edges.

Of particular note this month, Keith Packard has been developing Present, an X server extension that handles redirected video in composited scenarios more cleanly. It provides a more direct path for applications to display visuals on the screen. This complements recent development work for the new DRI3 extension. See below for a more detailed examination of this new technology.

A new library, libevdev, was introduced by Peter Hutterer, which wraps the kernel evdev interface and provides abstractions for ioctls, SYN_DROPPED events, and device bit checking. The goal of this work is to establish a shared codebase for use by X.org, weston, and evtest. libevdev has received two releases so far, and is currently at version 0.2.

Multi-screen reverse optimus support was added to the Nouveau and Radeon drivers. This feature allows rendering to be done by the integrated GPU (typically Intel), and displayed through monitors connected to discrete GPUs (e.g. Radeon or NVIDIA graphics cards).

Go to Full Article

At Home With AV Linux

Dave Phillips — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:26:58 +0000

by Dave Phillips

My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop. As described in my previous article, the primary desktop box has been running an old but rock-steady 64 Studio 2.1 that has recently been replaced by a shiny new 64-bit Arch system. The secondary desktop machine and the laptop are both running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. However, while I like and enjoy using Ubuntu I hardly require two identical installations of the same Linux distribution, so I decided to replace one of them with AV Linux.

What It Is

AV Linux is a complete Debian-based Linux distribution that includes optimized audio and video subsystems along with the expected wealth of system utilities and productivity software. A live version can be tested and used without disturbing your installed system, and an installer is provided if/when you decide to permanently add AV Linux to your boot menu.

Figure 1. AV Linux 5.0.1, at your service. (Full-size)

The AV Linux Web site tells us that the system is based on the stable "Squeeze" release from Debian Linux, the LXDE desktop and Openbox window manager, and the Remastersys utility. That last item is of particular interest - Remastersys can make a distributable copy of a personalized Debian or Ubuntu system, which is how AV Linux came into existence. At some point in 2007 Glen Macarthur recognized that his custom Debian-based audio/video production system could be useful to more users, so he spruced it up with some neat extras, pulled it all together with Remastersys, and voila, he created a new Debian-based media-optimized Linux distribution.

You can read the full story of the growth of AV Linux in its excellent manual. It's enough here to note that AV Linux has become a popular and recommended audio-centric Linux distribution. For good reasons, too, as we shall see.

Go to Full Article

Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 2

Dave Phillips — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:55:10 +0000

by Dave Phillips

In the first part of this series I introduced SuperCollider3 and its most basic operations. Now let's make things a little more interesting by adding a little randomization, a neat GUI, and some MIDI control.

Creating A GUI

Let's add a simple GUI to control the synthesizer. We'll employ the services of a SuperCollider Quark called AutoGui to make things easy for us novices :

    a = SynthDef(\sinetest, {arg out = 1, freq = 440; Out.ar(out, SinOsc.ar(freq))}) ;
    z = SynthDefAutogui(\sinetest, scopeOn:false) ;

Easy, just two lines of code to produce the synthesizer control panel seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. SuperCollider's AutoGui Quark at work.

As its name implies, the AutoGui class automatically creates a GUI to represent the elements of a SynthDef, i.e. a SuperCollider synthesizer definition. In the example, the SynthDef is built from our simple synth and an added output channel setter. AutoGui performs its magic on the SynthDef, and voila, we have a synthesizer with a graphic control panel, made with two lines of SuperCollider code.

AutoGui is one of many realizations of SuperCollider's GUI capabilities. Other interesting manifestations include Fredrik Olofsson's red* quarks, James Harkins' dewdrop library, the Crucial extensions, and the EZ-GUI classes. As in other aspects of the system, SuperCollider gives you more than one way to do the job.

Figure 2. The Hadron Quark on display. (Full size)

Before leaving our simple example let's look at something with a more ambitious GUI. Figure 2 shows off Batuhan Bozkurt's Hadron, a SuperCollider quark that include various GUI components. At first Hadron looks a little like SuperCollider in Pd's clothing, but Hadron is a personal system, not a general-purpose GUI. Like most examples of a SuperCollider GUI Hadron was designed originally for its creator's specific purposes, and thanks to its broader utility it's been packaged as a quark for other users to explore. My first experiments included the addition of more synths and effects processors on my canvas layout - with all states saveable and loadable - and I've started to look into the guidelines for writing my own Hadron plugins.

Notes On Notes

By now the sound designer might be a little interested in SuperCollider, but the composer might be wondering what the fuss is all about. Our tiny example merely plays a sine wave at a single frequency and a default amplitude value. However, consider the following code :

Go to Full Article

Spotlight on Linux: Linvo GNU/Linux

Susan Linton — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Susan Linton

After an earlier quick look, it seemed Linvo GNU/Linux was worthy of a spotlight. Linvo is a Slackware-based distribution featuring GNOME 2.32 and is shipped as a live image. The desktop is pretty and features a handy set of applications. In addition, additional applications are available through a popular one-click format.

Linvo has been in development since early 2009 and was recently added to Distrowatch's distribution database. Slackware has long been known as rock solid and stable, and Linvo dresses it up and brings some advantages over Slackware itself.

Some advantages over Slackware might be:

1. Live image
2. GNOME desktop (for those users)
3. Easy graphical installation in live environment
4. Additional packages
5. More packages through one-click Web interface
6. Desktop customizations & eyecandy

The Live Environment

Linvo live boots quickly straight into its pretty GNOME desktop. (Slackware is known for providing applications and desktops just as the developers release.) It takes advantage of autoconfiguration of the X Server and renders an autoprobed resolution. In testing, this resolution tends to be on the safe side of optimal. NVIDIA drivers are available from Linvo, but no proprietary ATI/AMD drivers are listed.

Linvo plays it safe with GNOME 2.32 and its familiar typical setup. This usually, and does in Linvo, consist of an upper panel housing a few applets on the right and the three menus on the left. Below is the other panel for the application taskbar and desktop pager. In the application menu are applications such as GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Evolution, Chromium, Brasero, Totem, plus lots of accessories and tools.

The hard drive installer is quick and easy as well. It only asks a few questions in a compact user-friendly format. It does its job fast with no problems. The only complaint is that it installs a bootloader automatically without giving the user a choice or the choice in systems added. It adds an entry for every system available (as most would want).

The Installed System

The installed desktop is practically identical to the live environment minus the Install icon on the desktop. One icon one might notice instead is the Getting Started. This will open a browser to Linvo's Website where users can peruse information about Linvo, visit user support forums, or install extra applications through what some may call one-click links. The forum isn't really busy, but it appears questions are promptly answered.

Go to Full Article

Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World of SuperCollider3, Part 1

Dave Phillips — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

SuperCollider3

SuperCollider is composer/programmer James McCartney's gift to the world of open-source audio synthesis/composition environments. In its current manifestation, SuperCollider3 includes capabilities for a wide variety of sound synthesis and signal processing methods, cross-platform integrated GUI components for designing interfaces for interactive performance, support for remote control by various external devices, and a rich set of tools for algorithmic music and sound composition. And yes, there's more, much more.

This 3-part article combines a preview of SuperCollider 3.5 and a review of The SuperCollider Book, the latest audio-related tome from the press at MIT. I'll introduce the system and some of its components, with example code and screenshots (I love screenshots), then I'll be your tour guide to some interesting SuperCollider projects and Web sites. I'll conclude with a summary of my impressions of SuperCollider, followed by my review of The SuperCollider Book.

Background Bits

In 1996, SuperCollider was released as a closed-source commercial program available only for the Macintosh computer. In 2002 the source code was released to the public under the GPL. Since then development has been consistent and impressive, and the system is now available for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows, with a high level of cross-platform compatibility.

SuperCollider has been designed as a client/server arrangement, with a clean division between its audio processing parts (scsynth) and the language used to control those parts (sclang). In a typical application the synthesizer is started in a separate process, then the user writes code in a text editor (e.g. Emacs, Gedit, vi/vim) configured for operation with SuperCollider. The editor configuration usually includes mechanisms for controlling the server state and for sending code to the synthesizer for rendering, often as a realtime process.

A complete list of SuperCollider's capabilities would be beyond the scope of this article. Synthesis primitives are well-represented by a variety of oscillators, filters, effects, and control mechanisms (envelopes, gates, triggers). SuperCollider has borrowed the unit generator concept - i.e. an audio processing "black box" - from the MusicN languages. Users combine unit generators to roll their own synthesis and processing graphs into what SuperCollider calls a SynthDef. Many predefined SynthDefs are available, and it's easy to create your own.

Go to Full Article

The Linux Desktop: We've Arrived.

Kevin Bush — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Kevin Bush

Linux Desktop articles are all over the place. I can hardly open up a browser without tripping over one. Most of them are negative whine-fests, complaining that Linux is too hard for new users, or has become too dumbed-down for technical users, or the fonts are ugly, or the next generation desktop environments are too different, or... well I could go on, but I think you get the point. So today, I feel like whining about the whiners. Give em' some of their own medicine, and bring something a bit different to the table: A positive viewpoint on the state of the Linux Desktop. Don't look so shocked, just keep reading.

We have what we need folks! The Linux Desktop has arrived. The solid foundation of GNU's tools and the Linux kernel; topped with many desktop environment choices and all the wonderful Linux desktop applications has got us there. Due to the hard work of the entire Linux developer community there is now a viable, open, free, full desktop computing alternative for those who seek it out. There are user friendly distributions out there for non-techies, and highly technical ones for those who prefer to build a custom desktop experience. Available in your favorite distribution's repositories are three modern and beautiful desktop environments to choose from. Ubuntu's Unity is becoming more polished and user friendly. KDE is mature and highly configurable. And Gnome 3 takes the minimal, "get out of my way so I can get stuff done" desktop philosophy to new heights. For those that prefer more classic desktop experiences there is the fast, stable, fully featured xfce4; and the super-fast lxde desktop. For the nerdiest of the nerds there are multitudes of fully configurable window managers out there; from tiling powerhouses like Xmonad, to flexible floating window managers like Openbox. Linux users have never had more choice and quality available for their desktops.

Go to Full Article