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The picotux 100 is the world's smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.

KDE 4 porting continues at great pace, with more applications able to be compiled with CMake daily. Portability fixes for non-X11 platforms. KDiskManager, a KDE 4 application for disk management - based on Solid - is imported into KDE SVN. Andreas Nicolai, the maintainer and lead programmer of KTouch, a touch-typing tutoring application in kde-edu, starts a consultation regarding the future of KTouch:

AMD apparently wants to set up a research group in Dresden not only to optimize Linux for its own processors, but also to integrate the requirements of the open operating system in the development process for future processor generations. At least, that's what three ads for the Fab 36 would seem to suggest: the company is looking for a Linux kernel developer, a developer for the virtualization of operating systems, and a developer of operating system tools for the "Operating System Research Center" in Dresden.

Tonight the People Behind KDE interview series brings to you a half-interview with Frans Englich, only half because he could not find a photo to submit. This man is a KDE developer whose most recent work is on KDOM and XSLT. Because the Commit Digest is back at the weekend, People Behind KDE will be moving to a new mid-week slot from now on.

Last issue we began to explore the issues involved in moving from a Windows-based desktop with Microsoft proprietary apps to a Linux desktop with open source apps. Novell had announced a project to do that internally back in March 2004, and has now moved all of its employees to a Linux desktop - albeit for the majority of them one that can dual boot to Windows. One reason could be the unavailability of open source apps that include all of the functionality of the Microsoft apps they would replace, and we talked about that in the last issue.

"Hi, my name is Oracle and I'll be your Linux company today." In this Cyber Cynic podcast, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks, will Oracle really try to become a Linux power?

  LXer Feature: 20-Apr-06

I am a member of the Phoenix Linux Users Group or PLUG, and at our last meeting Google gave a presentation on how Linux is used at Google. Vince and Pat explained what Linux is used for and many of the challenges they have faced in pushing the Linux envelope.

  LXer Feature: 21-Jan-06

Last week, LXer Editor-in-Chief, Don Parris had strong words for Microsoft's Port 25 project. He suggested that Microsoft's appalling behavior has left a credibility gap that would hurt their Port 25 effort. The question remains whether Microsoft can or will change their behavior. Can Microsoft earn the trust of the FOSS Community? Will they even try?

KOCHI: The Software Division of Computer Society of India in association with CICC, Singapore, National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software of CDAC, Chennai, and RMK Engineering College, will hold a five-day southern regional training programme on Open Source Software from May 22 to 26 in Chennai.

You might know how to write code or build applications, but do you know what is required of a good Linux sysadmin?

The coming of Fusion, both as products and architecture, is inevitably set to change the ground on which applications development has stood for many years, as is its part in the move towards delivery Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). But the company is aware it is now stepping out into uncharted ground, where some of its claims are inevitably based on assumption.

This week, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released updates to address security problems with Firefox, Cacti, the Mozilla Suite, the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) and several others.

Xandros, provider of easy-to-use Linux alternatives to Windows, and TOLIS Group, developer of the ultra-reliable BRU announced an agreement to integrate a complete BRU backup and recovery system into the forthcoming Xandros Server – the first truly viable alternative to the dominance of Microsoft Windows servers in the SMB (small-to-medium business) and departmental markets.

While explaining the new splice() and tee() buffer management system calls [story], Linus Torvalds made reference to some possible future extensions. This included vmsplice(), a system call "to basically do a 'write to the buffer', but using the reference counting and VM traversal to actually fill the buffer." Reviewing the implications of using such a system call lead to a comparison with FreeBSD's ZERO_COPY_SOCKET which uses COW (copy on write).

Linus explained that while this may look good on specific benchmarks, it actually introduces extra overhead, "the thing is, the cost of marking things COW is not just the cost of the initial page table invalidate: it's also the cost of the fault eventually when you _do_ write to the page, even if at that point you decide that the page is no longer shared, and the fault can just mark the page writable again." He went on to explain, "The COW approach does generate some really nice benchmark numbers, because the way you benchmark this thing is that you never actually write to the user page in the first place, so you end up having a nice benchmark loop that has to do the TLB invalidate just the _first_ time, and never has to do any work ever again later on." Linus didn't pull any punches when he summarized:

"I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home."

I'm a young Linux developer from Serbia and Montenegro and a big fan of networking under Linux. Most of my favorite tools help with Linux networking and data security.

If the slow booting time of your Linux box is driving you crazy, consider parallel booting techniques.