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Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer micro web application framework for Perl hit CPAN! In these two years, the project had countless valuable contributions from a large list of contributing users, gathered over 300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 pull requests submitted… amazing stuff.

Perl Weekly is a brand new publication by Gabor Szabo well known Perl developer, consultant and trainer. The intention is to bring you the most important news and articles in the Perl World, on a weekly basis. Straight to your mailbox.

I've decided to start this blog and share my experience with Debian wheezy/sid, the development branch of Debian GNU/Linux. It's the leading edge, but sometimes also the bleeding edge of Debian development.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

Current default for X servers as shipped in various distributions is to not enable the traditional Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to kill the X server. If you would like to re-enable this feature, you may do so in your desktop's Keyboard Preferences application.

Mark Jason Dominus' Higher-Order Perl book is now available for free download in PDF format by virtue of special permission from the publisher. The book is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It's about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions. That way your code is more flexible and more reusable. Instead of writing ten similar functions, you write a general pattern or framework that can generate the functions you want; then you generate just the functions you need according to the pattern.

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

A neat script that notifies you when upstream Debian repository has changed, in real-time! So you can upgrade your Linux right away!

Oracle 11g database has been released just a few days ago, exclusively for Linux at this time. Here's a short review of it's installation, together with screenshots, on an unsupported Debian GNU/Linux distribution - to make it more interesting. While there's lots of great open source databases to choose from, we should still admire Oracle's continued support of Linux OS in enterprise environments.

Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler. Fortunately, the driver needs only few simple fixes to compile properly.

The Linux kernel process scheduler, as you know it, has been completely ripped out and replaced with a completely new one called Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS). How fair it will be, remains to be seen, but in the meantime here's what it's original creator Ingo Molnar has to say on the subject: 80% of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an "ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU" on real hardware.

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community.

The other day I stumbled upon this neat tool that helps cleanup your GConf registry, called GConf Cleaner. While GNOME registry size isn't nowhere near the size of Windows registry, and thus shouldn't slow your computer too much, it's still nice to have a tool that cleans unused and obsolete entries.

You've finally made the move to a Windows-free computer, you're enjoying your brand new Linux OS, no trojans/viruses, no slowdown, everything's perfect. Suddenly, you need to update the BIOS on your motherboard to support some new piece of hardware, but typically the motherboard vendor is offering only DOS based BIOS flash utilities. You panic! Fortunately, this problem is easy to solve...

It's a known fact that although disk storage capacities are improving at an impressive rate, disk performance improvements are occurring at a rather slower rate. Here are the two techniques for measuring disk performance in Linux. With a little bit of torturing, and some fun on the way, find out how fast your hard disk drive really is.

The upcoming 2.6.20 Linux kernel is bringing a nice virtualization framework for all virtualization fans out there. It's called KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. This article tries to explain how it all works, in theory and practice, together with some simple benchmarks.

These are the first benchmarks of the upcoming ext4 file system for Linux which promises improved data integrity and performance, among with less limitations. While the ext4 file system is still in the early stages of development, it's already showing some performance improvements.

If you're a heavy user of the Linux VGA console, you'll like this feature. Recent 2.6 kernels have added support for soft scrollback. This feature enables you to have much bigger scrollback buffer than the standard console has, at the price of slightly slower console output.

CFQ (Complete Fair Queuing) I/O scheduler will become the default one in the upcoming 2.6.18 kernel, replacing the current anticipatory I/O scheduler. This has been planned ever since 2004. and we'll soon see how it works in practice. One of the nice new features that CFQ brings is setting I/O priority per process.

While we won't see native port of the excellent ZFS filesystem for Linux in the foreseeable future (because Sun's CDDL is incompatible with GPL), this is the next best thing: ZFS on FUSE/Linux.