ARM has announced a partnership between it and Canonical (of Ubuntu fame) to produce chips for netbooks. The chips will compete directly with Intel’s Atom CPUs and VIA’s C7 series. Canonical is porting Ubuntu to run on the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors and is set to be released in April 2009.
Archive for the ‘Distributions’ Category
ARM to release netbook chips
Thursday, November 13th, 2008Quickie: Ubuntu 8.10 released
Friday, October 31st, 2008Ubuntu 8.10 has been officially released. I’ll have some screenshots once I figure out how to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions in it.
In the mean while I’m going to have to leave you to download the live CD to try it for yourself.
Wikimedia moves to Ubuntu servers
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Wikimedia, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia and its related sites (Wiktionary, etc.), has moved its entire server infrastructure to Ubuntu Server. In the pas Wikimedia has run a mixture of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Fedora.
“It definitely has gotten a lot simpler,” Vibber said. Mass upgrades can be done more easily, and the data center can be managed as a unit, he said.
“We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing” and runs the same software, Vibber said. “Everything is a million times easier.”
The move has been seen in the industry as a major victory for Ubuntu Server, and other community based distributions, such as CentOS.
ComputerWorld [via Slashdot]
Ubuntu 8.10 screenshots
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
As promised in my previous post, here’s a gallery of screenshots from Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” Beta.
The look hasn’t really changed that much, and the install procedure is nearly identical with previous Ubuntu versions. All these screenshots are from a virtual machine in VirtualBox, so they do contain bars above and below the window that won’t be there in a real install.
Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Canonical have just officially released the first beta of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. This new version of Ubuntu comes with a slew of improvements over 8.04, which was released back in April this year.
Codenamed “Intrepid Ibex”, 8.10 continues Ubuntu’s
proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source
technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
Gentoo cancels release
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Gentoo has apparently cancelled it’s 2008.1 release, making this the second time in 12 months that a release has been cancelled. Instead of using the usual twice yearly release cycle that most other distributions have, Gentoo developers are opting for a continuous approach.
In place of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice this emphasises the use of minimal installation images which are then supplemented with updated packages straight from Gentoo servers and mirrors.
“We need to work harder to communicate the relative irrelevance of releases in a live distribution like Gentoo,” Gentoo developer Donnie Berkholz explained to InternetNews.com. Releases “have an overly large impact on what non-Gentoo users think of the health of the distribution, so problems with a small team within Gentoo are magnified in their effect on public opinion.”
Having recently converted my laptop to Gentoo, I can attest that this system seems to work quite nicely. Portage, Gentoo’s package management system, really does the job. Dependencies are resolved correctly at least 99% of the time and updating the entire system is a breeze.
While installing large applications such as OpenOffice or Gnome might take some time (i.e. hours and hours as everything is compiled locally), things do largely work quite nicely once installed.
InternetNews [via Tectonic]
Three of the worst Linux distros
Sunday, September 28th, 2008-
- gOS
-
- ZeBuntu / ZevenOS
-
- Linux XP
As we all know, there lots of distros out there that excel in different areas and niches. Ubuntu is great for beginners and desktop use, Red Hat/SuSE for the corporate types, Gentoo for control freaks (don’t get me wrong, Gentoo’s great…) and so forth. And then there are the distros that make us Linux affcionados bow our heads in shame. Distributions like Linspire (formerly Lindows), gOS, Linux XP and so on.
To this end, the Internetling blog has a post outlining the three worst offenders: gOS, ZevenOS, and Linux XP. The last of these even appears to be in violation of the GPL as they only offer a 30-day trial version for download.
10 alternative operating systems
Sunday, September 28th, 2008-
- AmigaOS 4.1
-
- AROS Research Operating System
-
- DexOS
-
- MorphOS
-
- ReactOS
-
- Syllable Desktop
Royal Pingdom has a post covering some of the more obscure operating systems out there. On the list you’ll find SyllableOS, Haiku, AmigaOS 4.1, and seven others. How big a role these niche OSes will play in tomorrow’s computing is debatable, but they are options for the chronically OS curious.
Royal Pingdom [via Tectonic]
Ubuntu 9.04 == Jaunty Jackalope
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Yesterday Mark Shuttleworth announced in a mailing list that Ubuntu 9.04 would be know as Jaunty Jackalope. The next version of Ubuntu, due next month, is known as Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.
lists.ubuntu.com [via Ars Technica]
Finnix: Compact Linux distribution for system administrators
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
Linux.com has an interesting review of a Linux distribution called Finnix. Finnix is a lightweight distro, based on Debian testing, built especially for system administrators. What’s more, Finnix is comparitively tiny, “currently the entire distribution is over 300MiB, but is dynamically compressed into a bootable image of about 100MiB.”
Finnix 92.0 is a useful distribution for system administrators. With many tools covering jobs such as data recovery, hardware diagnostics and benchmarking, network services, and monitoring, this distribution can greatly help an administrator. However, Finnix is not for the average user accustomed to booting up a system and doing things graphically. While Finnix’s CLI-based tools are not that complex, one must have the necessary knowledge to fully understand how to use them.
I was satisfied with the packages included in this distribution, especially the filesystem management and recovery utilities, as well as the CLI backup tools. For serious network troubleshooting, I would recommend instead distributions such as Network Security Toolkit or BackTrack, which are specifically intended for such purposes.