Linux Kernel 2.6.29 Released 265
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.29. The new features include the inclusion of kernel graphic modesetting, WiMAX, access point Wi-Fi support, inclusion of squashfs and a preliminary version of btrfs, a more scalable version of RCU, eCryptfs filename encryption, ext4 no journal mode, OCFS2 metadata checksums, improvements to the memory controller, support for filesystem freeze, and other features. Here is the full list of changes."
Kernel Graphics Molesting (Score:5, Funny)
btrfs (Score:2)
Pronounce: Butterface.
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Won't someone please think of the pixels?!
The most important missed out feature (Score:5, Informative)
I can't believe this wasn't mentioned..
Here's what the new linux logo looks like [blogspot.com] for this release.
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Furry comes to mind, impressive animal comes to mind, but cute?
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Well when you consider that the other animal that used to be on the island was a Tasmanian Tiger [wikipedia.org], maybe it's just cute for Tasmania.
Maybe not as cute as a Koala but damn it's so sad to see the little guys with those horrible facial tumours [wikipedia.org] . Besides the loss to humanity of the only known remaining carnivorous marsupial in the world would be an incredible tragedy. So, until a cure is found for the incredibly rare transmissible cancer that's kil
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I'm pretty sure that opossums eat meat as well... did you mean predatory instead of carnivorous?
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I did, thanks for that, but I didn't know that opossums were carnivorous - so thanks for that too.
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opossums are omnivores and will eat most anything. From garbage can contents, to road kill, to pretty much anything they can get their paws on.
This does not qualify them as predatory carnivores. They are more opportunistic in what they eat from day to day. Bugs, frogs, carrion, apple cores, etc ...
Re:The most important missed out feature (Score:5, Informative)
I am impressed that Torvalds knows about this issue, and credo to him for raising people's awareness.
There's rather more community history behind it than that. The below is from memory based on various coverage I read on LWN and the like, but not fact-checked to be positive my memory is correct, so verify before acting on it as fact.
I believe it was at the annual linux.conf.au, tho I'm not sure but it was some such conference, widely attended by Linux kernel hackers, that the presentation was made. There was apparently a fairly big charity pledge drive related to the issue, with many of the kernel hackers taking part. Various ones of them, in addition to pledging their own money, pledged various acts should the conference pledge drive reach whatever goal ($10K, maybe?).
Well, the pledge drive was quite a success, and the various hackers either have or are in the process of fulfilling their various promises as a result. One of the ones that made Linux hacker community (and LWN) headlines was Bdale Garbee's pledge, to shave his beard. He hadn't been beardless in, I think, well over a decade (15 years? longer?). There was an LWN article on it with a photo (taken I believe at the closing ceremony or traditional post-conference party) of Linus as barber, doing the honors! =:^)
That's actually how I first heard about the whole thing, seeing that photo and reading the accompanying article. But apparently Linus' own pledge was to name a kernel version after the Tazmanian Devil. But he has actually gone one better, changing the logo for .29 as well as the name.
This logo, BTW, is the one the kernel framebuffer driver optionally displays at the top of the screen during boot, if the framebuffer is activated and the config option set to do so. There's a single logo displayed for every CPU/core, so my dual dual-core Opteron displays a nice row of four such logos. I can only imagine the row of 32 of the things on say a quad-socket oct-core machine. =:^)
Anyway, I've been running a kernel compiled directly from git for a few months now (switching to the stable series between release and rc2 or so, only running mainline git between rc2 and release), and am currently running:
$uname -r
2.6.29-rc8-223-ga1e4ee2
So I've had the pleasure of seeing four of these little beasties at boot for a week or so, now. =:^)
Anyway, it's not just Linus. It's the entire kernel hacker community that got involved, thanks to linux.conf.au. =:^)
All that said, while I obviously knew more about the Linux/kernel community side of things and had a bit of general awareness from that, I hadn't bothered reading up on the disease itself until taking the opportunity to click that nice wikipedia link you so thoughtfully provided. Now I know a bit more about it, and am hopefully returning the favor with the above info on the Linux community side of things.
OK, I did an LWN search and here's some relevant links, so folks can fact-check what I wrote above, as well as quote something more authoritative than just some /. post.
LWN 2.6.29 kernel announcement (mentions the code name):
http://lwn.net/Articles/325047/ [lwn.net]
That points to Linus' actual announcement (LKML announcement as seen on LWN):
http://lwn.net/Articles/325048/ [lwn.net]
The kernel gets a new logo (a comment links the actual git commit by Rusty Russel):
http://lwn.net/Articles/323966/ [lwn.net]
Beardless Bdale (It'd be interesting to see the stats for this one as related to the Linus in a swimsuit one, I think also linux.conf.au from a few years ago, dunk tank FWIW, see below.)
http://lwn.net/Articles/316282/ [lwn.net]
(FWIW, LCA/linux.conf.au, correct. AU$35-40K raised according to "beardless". With the awareness brought by 2.6.29 related publicity, hopefully much more
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Thank you for that, and thank you Linux community!
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He knows about Devils because the latest Linux.conf is being held in Tasmania.
And Koalas can be vicious. If you believe in evolutionary biology (I hope there are no Texans in the room...) then you should note that they were once carnivorous. I'm not too aware of any marsupials that devolved from meat eating to eating leaves, but there you are.
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Kangaroos! There was some fossil evidence of them in a carnivorous state. Big, scary fast with teeth. Even today they can be shitheads as herbivores. I was feeding a doe and she dug her claws into me so I wouldn't leave until she ate all the birdseed that was actually for the parrots. Lucky kangaroos taste good.
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There's a park in Japan (Nagoya?) where the deer are 'tame' and grandma types make some money selling crackers to the tourists. The parents buy the crackers and hand them to their children to feed the 'cute' deer. The deer (if the kids are small enough) then nock the kids down so they drop the crackers and proceed to go about eating all the crackers, not the trickle that was coming out of the kids' hands. Then the grandmas come and kick the deers' asses since when they misbehave it cuts into their income
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Two heads? That's not a missed out feature!!!
Re:The most important missed out feature (Score:4, Insightful)
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Starving girls with swollen bellies aren't on the edge of extinction.
Neither are Tasmanian devils. According to wikipedia the Tasmanian devil is merely endangered [wikipedia.org]. While the Vancouver Island Marmot [marmots.org] is is critically endangered [wikipedia.org].
Plus the marmot [marmots.org] is cuter than the Tasmanian devil [wikimedia.org]. Maybe someone can talk Mark Shuttleworth into a Marmot release of Ubuntu. Marginalized Marmot anyone?
Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Funny)
Filesystems in the kernel, savages!
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesystems in the kernel, savages!
Give it five to ten years. Linus will have to move all that bloat out of the kernel. I wonder if he will start again from minix 3?
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I'm a relative newbie, but don't you need some filesystem support in the kernel so you can load the modules off the disk?
Like say you had three non-swap partitions: / /boot /movies
/boot is EXT2
/movies is something else, like XFS, ZFS, ReiserFS
/ is EXT4
Wouldn't you need EXT4 support in the kernel so you could load the rest of the OS? Then you could use whatever (possibly even a userland module) to mount /movies...
Someone please enlighten me, I don't know much about the kernel.
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Informative)
You only need rootfs, which is a special type of ramfs that loads the initramfs image. initramfs is loaded by the bootloader, so probably GRUB or LILO or ELILO.
Then if every other filesystem was based on FUSE, you would load the initramfs with the FUSE module, the FUSE setup programs and a config file.
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone wants an initrd/initramfs to be 'required' to boot. Options, always preserve your options.
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Informative)
Then if every other filesystem was based on FUSE, you would load the initramfs with the FUSE module, the FUSE setup programs and a config file.
Actually, user space filesystems are nice, but they are way too slow for implementing a high speed server and/or even a decent desktop machine. They are good for experiments and pioneering work though (like GMailFS and SSHFS), but having a good set of fast, basic filesystems in the kernel is just obligatory AFAIK.
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:4, Insightful)
A database management system is nothing but a fancy filesystem with structured files, yet they are often used in servers and perform just fine.
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A database management system is nothing but a fancy filesystem with structured files
And some databases come with their own built-in filesystem drivers!
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/TWP_Oracle_HP_files.pdf [oracle.com]
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No. You just need a multi-image bootloader. Like GRUB. Then you load the appropriate filesystem up as a module, the same way you load the kernel up in a single-image bootloader - by pre-caching the block numbers.
Re:Filesystems in the kernel! (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't work like that. The kernel never uses its own filesystems' support to load itself... How could it if it hasn't been loaded yet? That's the job of a "boot loader". The most user boot loader currently is Grub, and previously was Lilo.
Grub supports some filesystems, so it can access them and load the kernel. Lilo did not support filesystem, so there was a tool that you needed to run each time you changed the kernel. That tool built a list of blocks, so that Lilo could load the kernel (from those blocks) without really understanding the filesystem.
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Thanks! Somehow, in all of the other GRUB vs. LILO discussions I've read this difference was never mentioned. GRUB being able to read filesystems makes a logical reason for using it instead of LILO.
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Tho, IIRC, GRUB doesn't currently grok EXT4 filesystems, so -as of the time of this writing- you can't make an EXT4-formatted device your boot device.
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http://grub.enbug.org/CurrentStatus?highlight=(ext4) [enbug.org]
grub2 currently supports ext4 and a google search will find you some patches to add it to older versions. I don't know if any distros include an ext4 compatible grub yet though, well aside from maybe gentoo ;)
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While the kernel and initrd are *loaded* by the bootloader, the kernel then needs to *understand* the initrd FS format. So at the very least, you need support for the initrd FS to be compiled into the kernel.
You could add another layer of indirection to initrd, but you would just be moving the problem. initrd is itself really a way to let you avoid compiling everything into the kernel needed to load the root FS. You move most of the device and FS drivers into initrd, get the boot loader to load initrd, a
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This is exactly how Syllable does things. All of it's filesystems, bus drivers and disc subsystems are loadable modules and we rely on GRUB to load them all at boot time, then the kernel initialises them all before it mounts it's root filesystem.
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OK, if you modify the kernel architecture enough, yes, you can move more of the loading burden into the boot manager, just list HURD. So how about support for software RAID, logical volume management, encrypted FSs, and the like? grub can't do all that stuff today. And it shouldn't. At some point, you are moving so much complexity into the boot manager that you are defeating the design purpose of simplifying the kernel.
Use an initrd. (Score:5, Informative)
Even in Linux, most distro's don't have full filesystems built into the kernel. Instead they only build in a tiny in-memory fs that allows them to read an initrd [wikipedia.org]. This means that they can have virtually any filesystem as a root filesystem without having to compile every conceivable filesystem into their general purpose kernel.
It is also possible to avoid ever booting in the way Linux machines boot. Instead, the boot process could act like the hibernate/resume functionality of Linux. So instead of loading programs into the address space from a filesystem, we simply read the resulting address space from disk. After all, some embedded devices don't need to ever use a filesystem, so in these cases loading a fs would be a waste of resources.
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Idiot!!! You can always remove bloat by not compiling the 'extra' stuff into the kernel !!!
Open Source man Open Source!!!
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New mascot (this kernel only) (Score:5, Informative)
As everybody knows, only important fixes will be merged into the mainline kernel at this late stage of the development cycle. One of the fixes merged by Linus on March 17 was a high-resolution SVG image of "Tuz," the mascot of the 2009 linux.conf.au conference. Tuz, in his new home at Documentation/logo.svg, serves to remind the world of the difficulties faced by the Tasmanian devil and how the linux.conf.au attendees supported the effort to save this species from extinction.
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If one wanted to help the plight of the Tasmanian devil, what would be the best thing to do (keeping in mind that I'm not in Australia)?
Re:New mascot (this kernel only) (Score:5, Interesting)
Hello. I have looked into this and found the following site. http://www.tasmaniandevilpark.com/index.html [tasmaniandevilpark.com]
The link to their donation form is http://www.tasmaniandevilpark.com/friends.html [tasmaniandevilpark.com]
Cheers
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Help introduce more female she-devils of course.
Wait, did you want a serious answer? How about Save the Tasmaian Devil [tassiedevil.com.au].
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Sadly, this is probably the one species that is threatened by extinction that is *not* the result of humans. A highly infectious cancer is wiping them out.
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That would temporarily save the ones in captivity. But they'll die out eventually due to poor genetic diversity (or, that's how I interpret it).
Better crypto support == goodness. (Score:5, Informative)
eCryptfs filename encryption
Here's the eCryptfs home page [launchpad.net] for more information on this nifty addition.
Yo Dawg (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry - "include the inclusion" just screamed out for this.
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Cross reference (Score:2)
Amount of drivers added (Score:2)
I was slightly disappointed when looking for the amount of drivers added for desktop users. Looking through the release log, I can only find one driver added for the home desktop user. It's for a new 3G modem, which is nice. I'd expected lots of other devices to be added, actually. One of the things that disappoints people when moving to Linux, is that it doesn't support their hardware.
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I know, but what I meant was new hardware. Linux often can't keep up with the rapid rate of new hardware flooding the market.
ext4 fs corrupted (Score:2, Interesting)
When upgrading from .28 to one of the latest .29 rc's, one of my ext4 filesystems got corrupted. Something to do with resize inode. Had to reboot my old .28 kernel to be able to fix it with fsck. No data loss that I'm aware of (lost+found was empty).
I think this was originally an ext4dev fs from the .26 era. I have been staying with .28 since. This is a 322 GB fs which is not critical for boot, but obviously I don't want to lose data.
Perhaps I ought to backup and recreate the fs under .29.
KMS is Intel-only for now (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Access Point Wi-Fi? (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm I'm pretty sure thats the ability to act as a wifi access point, which windows can't do yet.
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Access Point Wi-Fi - HOW?? (Score:2)
Someone- please tell me what usb wifi adapter product can be used to make this happen? I have searched and found some related docs that mention support being limited to a couple chipsets. Which always confused my too-much-but-too-little networking knowledge. The git commit message here mentions nothing about hardware support limits. My prior test, perhaps invalid, was to take a fedora-9 box, buy several usb adapters, and type "iwconfig bla mode master" hoping for success, but never seeing success. I al
Not what you are asking for but... (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux wireless drivers page lists which drivers support master/access point mode [linuxwireless.org] (see the AP column). The list isn't perfect (the hostap driver definitely supports AP mode :-) but it seems to be a case of omissions. The table also says what form factor the supported chipsets come in (so you can tell which ones you will be able to get in USB form). I'd guess the rt2500usb or p54usb drivers would be your best bet.
Another useful page is the Linux wireless chipset directory which tries to list which cards have which chipsets [passys.nl] (there's even a single page table with all the added chipsets but I won't link to it from here). This lets you build a list of boxes with the desired chipsets inside them (finding out whether this is true in reality can in itself can be a fraught process though). The chipset is really the important part in all of this.
I'm not going to point to an Amazon page because I have not bought a USB wifi card with the capabilities you describe from Amazon. I'm in no position to tell you that XYZ USB device on Amazon definitely works as I haven't done it myself. I have used hostapd on Linux and OpenBSD before now on a creaky old Prism 2.5 card and that worked for me but again that's not what you asked.
Finally here's a guide to using hostapd to set a card up in access point mode [kernel.org] (just using iwconfig to set master mode is not enough). Googling for hostapd linux will turn up plenty more guides which may be easier to follow.
Good luck!
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Ummm I'm pretty sure thats the ability to act as a wifi access point, which windows can't do yet.
you can do that on windows too, but like on linux you can't set the wifi card in master mode with all drivers, some support it and some don't
for example I have the wifi-ap edition of an asus mb that can do that
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Ummm I'm pretty sure thats the ability to act as a wifi access point, which windows can't do yet.
Yes it can, i use it daily so i can connect to the internet with my cell phone using my laptop's net connection over wifi. Just turn on internet connection sharing and create an ad-hoc network.
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Mac can't do it either. Ad-hoc is not the same as being an access point.
Re:Access Point Wi-Fi? (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't built into the kernel though (nothing much is on Darwin). This Linux feature they are talking about now has been around for a while. It hasn't been built into the kernel before though.
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I thought you could "bridge" connections in XP? I'm too lazy to boot it up and try.
But yeah, Mac's can do this through the "Sharing" portion of System Preferences. I use it every time I install Ubuntu and don't yet have the wireless working :)
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That's not the same thing. Bridge literally bridges the two NICs much like a switch (network people please correct me if I'm wrong). From what I've seen, ad-hoc is one client to one client, no more.
I have a Zydas ZD1211 something or other USB 802.11b/g whose Windows driver allows to act as an access point. In my case at least, Windows doesn't provide the necessary options-I can choose ad-hoc or infrastructure client mode.
I need the driver support for AP mode to set (useless) MAC filtering, SSID, broadcas
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Bridge does only do layer 2 switching between the 2 NICs and would not provide DHCP or routing. However, if you use "Internet Connection Sharing", it turns the computer into a basic NAT router. Very basic. Although, since you are sharing over ad-hoc, I don't think you can use WPA or WPA2 (could be wrong about that). More than one client can access the ad-hoc network. However, they have to support ad-hoc mode. For example, the Nintendo DS only supports infrastructure mode and will not connect to an ad-hoc ne
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I just plug in my printer, use the add printer wizard
People still do this?
Re:Drivers??? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find really weird is that on Windows, the default paper size is always "letter", when most people use A4.
Not in the U.S.
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What I find really weird is that on Windows, the default paper size is always "letter", when most people use A4.
Not in the U.S.
"Most people" don't live in the US. I think somewhere around 94% of the world's population live elsewhere. But even in local Windows versions (in Israel, at least) the system is set for "letter" paper.
US+Canada dominate the anglophone world (Score:3, Insightful)
"Most people" don't live in the US.
Most people living in English-speaking industrialized countries live in the United States. Add up the population of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the two-thirds of Canada that isn't Quebec, and you still have less than half the U.S. population. (This might change somewhat once India industrializes further.) Besides, Canada uses US Letter paper too [about.com]. So if you publish one edition of a desktop environment for the English language, and not separate editions for North America and the C
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He was just being through
redundant
redundant
redundant
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Wrong. There is a British localisation of Windows, to deal with the fact that we have different keyboards, currency, timezone and spellings. You can pick UK as an entity distinct from the rest of the Anglosphere in the installation process, much as you do with the friendlier GUI installers on Linux.
Don't know what Ash-Fox is talking about re: paper sizes though, all my Windows comps chose A4 as the default paper size.
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"US Letter" aspect ratio (1.28) is more distant from golden ratio (1.61) than "A4"'s (1.41).
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A4 isn't meant to be equal to the golden ratio. It is meant to be 1/Root2, or Root2, depending on your outlook on life. Designed such that if you stick two of them together, you get the next size up. Or on cutting one in half, get the next size down; again, depending on your outlook on life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size [wikipedia.org]
Re:Drivers??? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The golden ratio isn't really all that useful for writing paper.
Except that, when you have an long-side-leading A4 printer, it can also print A3, because the long side of A4 is the same as the short side of A3. It makes the printer a little more versatile.
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What I find really weird is that on Windows, the default paper size is always "letter", when most people use A4.
In the United States, just about everyone uses "US Letter" (8.5 in. × 11 in., or 216 × 279 mm), and not "A4" (210 × 297 mm), which means that oftentimes on Linux, you have to remember to switch from A4 to Letter. In other words, there isn't really a sensible default for everyone.
Simple solution. If you live in a country that uses the metric system (most of the world) then use "A4". If you live in a country that still uses the Imperial System (the USA and a few other countries that are slowly converting to metric) then stick to "Letter".
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I hope you don't mean to imply that the US is slowly converting to metric. We are not and probably never will. I learned the metric system from a young age because we were taught that it would eventually be the standard in the US as it is elsewhe
Re:Drivers??? (Score:5, Informative)
As long as you followed step #0. Check printer compatibility here [linuxfoundation.org] and scanner compatibility here [sane-project.org]. Unless they got a Tux logo or something, because there are still devices that don't have Linux drivers. I agree, when it works it works much better on Windows and most things work, but a two minute googling may still save you a lot of grief. Plus, there's nothing wrong with supporting manufacturers that really have first-class Linux drivers.
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Plus, there's nothing wrong with supporting manufacturers that really have first-class Linux drivers
Well, you don't mention them by name., but I am guessing your referring to HP.. which is always a pretty safe bet for compatibility, and their software for Linux is pretty good.. so I'll support them by saying that my recent purchase of a cheap all in one HP printer turned out to be pretty cool.. and I did your google thing as well.. when I had run across the printer and liked the price, the first thing I di
Dataloss under Ext4: Obama to blame. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dataloss under Ext4: Obama to blame. (Score:4, Insightful)
After the Ext4 [launchpad.net] dataloss [slashdot.org] discussion, [slashdot.org] and the "Don't fear the fsync()" [thunk.org] posts, I don't want to hear about Ext4, fsync(), or data loss again.
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After the Ext4 dataloss discussion, and the "Don't fear the fsync()" posts [...]
right after this awesome discussion I've had two servers crash horribly. I accept this as further proof that we need should not anger the data loss gods (monsters? demons?) with such heretic talks.
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Yes, but it's a more general issue of changing the order of operations. If I write a file and then rename it, I expect the writing to happen before the renaming. If I write to the file in two different places, I expect the actual writes to occur in the order I made them. ext4 designers evidently decided that they knew better how to order the writes, breaking everyone's expectations in the process. Sure, it probably improves performance because you can minimize seeks by ordering writes in a particular order,
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You see, all global data loss incidents are actually perpetrated by a shadowy cabal of operatives loyal to the American President, with the goal of putting honest, hard working I.T. professionals out of work and on welfare. As the welfare state increases, those poor lost souls will be thankful for the support they're receiving from the system, encouraging them to vote for the candidate most likely to support ongoing benefits.
For those th
Oh come on, that's totally on topic! (Score:5, Informative)
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Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) is extremely unusual as it is only one of three recorded cancers that can spread like a contagious disease. The cancer is passed from devil to devil through biting. The live tumour cells aren't rejected by the animal's immune system because of a lack of genetic diversity among Tasmanian devils.
See: http://tassiedevil.com.au/disease.html [tassiedevil.com.au]
Re:Oh come on, that's totally on topic! (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like it's time to change into my "Tasmanian Devil with huge friggin' tumor at the mouth" costume for the "I'm Linux" competition.
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And while were on that topic: Any Linux-based NTFS defragmenters?
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while we're on
I'M SORRY GRAMMAR NAZIS!
I promise I won't drop apostrophes any more!
Re:I have a dream..... (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry dude, you have to wait for kernel 2.8 for the joy and beauty modules that will enable your desktop product to have those attributes.
Re:I have a dream..... (Score:5, Insightful)
[sigh]
This again?
For the last time, Gnome and KDE are not going to merge! And we don't want them to merge! Healthy, friendly competition is good!
A Single-Unified-Linux-Desktop is neither desirable nor necessary for "world domination" or even "the year of the Linux Desktop"
Re:I have a dream..... (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding.
I'm honestly not sure it still applies to KDE in the 4.x era, but at least in the 3.x era, the philosophies were quite different. Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that /like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
The point is, forcing the devs and users who find the one policy most useful to follow the other one, surely is effective... at causing useless squabbles and getting nothing done! Keep the "there's only one true way" folks away from the "make it configurable for everyone" folks, and both types can continue to improve their product without getting in the way of each other.
Similarly of course with all the other "Linux is too divided" debates, from too many distributions, to vi/emacs, to... whatever. It's a free community and part of the strength therein lies in the freedom. Even if it were possible to take away that freedom to create one's own product, there'd be little point, as were it to happen, we'd just end up back with the monopolistic monstrosity that is MS. One size does NOT fit all, and encouraging differentiation and innovation, certainly based on common standards, but /only/ /based/ on common standards, is a /good/ thing.
That said, the one thing that does keep the Linux community from incompatibly splitting up much like the proprietary Unix community did is again, that it's all open and shared. Each distribution and individual app therefore has an interest not only in doing what it was created for really well, even if that splits from the community, but ALSO in following the common solution where it really doesn't matter for what it was created for, because every deviation from the common solution costs maintenance time and resources, time and resources that could otherwise be invested in bettering either the differentiating aspects further, or in advancing the common ones. In practice this dynamic ensures that individual solutions only diverge from the common where it really matters to them, because every divergence costs resources, and divergence just for the sake of it is thus less efficient and dies out relatively quickly, compared to those who focus resources on divergence only where it directly furthers their goals and on otherwise bettering the common solution, submitting patches upstream, etc. Thus, unlike the proprietary Unix solutions, divergence for the sake of divergence simply isn't efficient enough to survive, and ultimately dies. But where there's a good reason for divergence, that only serves to drive a sharper focus on bettering the different solutions that remain, driving the evolution of the community as a whole even faster.
(Umm... (looking around) I guess it's pretty obvious that I'm a "True Believer" (tm), isn't it. Yes, I am, and for that I'm not going to apologize! =:^)
Then what happens to XFCE? (Score:2, Insightful)
Windowmaker? IceWM? enlightenment?
These are available, but apparently the ONLY thing keeping "Linux from the Desktop" is that KDE and GNOME exist.
Nah, I don't buy it.
When they are merged, you'll be complaining that there's KNOMDE and WindowMaker and that you won't get "Linux on the Desktop" until they are merged.
Then WMKNOMDE and XFCE will stop there being "Linux on the Desktop".
And when there is only one desktop, it will be that it's the wrong one.
And when it's the right one, it'll be that GIMP is a stupid
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that /like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
so the best thing to do, is give a fully configurable system, and ship with a default set of configurations. Choose one at install: 'desktop', 'server', 'custom' or 'mom' configuration options.
dumbing things down because you think your users don't want options is patronising and stupid. even the ones who 'just want it to work' will occasionally disagree with a choice you made for them.
I think multiple desktop environments is still a good thing, but a unified development environment would be even better. Tha
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's an imagined tragedy. Yes, there is a lot of duplication of effort between the two camps. But tasking their combined developers with a single desktop system (GDE? KNOME?) is unlikely to make it twice as good, or get features completed twice as fast. Instead, it'll probably lead to the reverse.