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Can you say "under the hood"? That's what Understanding MySQL Internals is supposed to teach, "in a nutshell" to coin a phrase. To quote part of the back cover, "MySQL's source code is open in the sense of being publicly available, but it's essentially closed to you if you don't understand it". Good point and one we tend to forget in the context of "open source". MySQL or any other open source code might as well be locked up in a vault and administered by Microsoft if you don't know what the code is and how to work with it. As a former member of the MySQL Development Team, Sasha Pachev is (or should be) positioned to take the reader on a guided tour of the inner workings of MySQL. Let's see how he does.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. This article focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP, because as the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests.

The task of tracking regressions between kernel releases has been picked up by Michal Piotrowski who maintains a"known regressions" wiki page at Kernel Newbies. The list is divided into sections and mailed out to the lkml after each release candidate.read more

The quality of my VoIP phone calls suffered whenever I was downloading or uploading anything. This was irritating, especially for those calling me (I heard them better than they heard me). So I poked at Iproute2 and other howtos, especially with regard to VoIP traffic, but I couldn't find anything that worked well. After some playing around, I've found settings that were right for me: consistant VoIP quality, regardless of any activities on the wire.

Jesse Barnes posted a summary of recent efforts to improve the Linux kernel's support for graphics, "in collaboration with the guys, we've been working on enhancing the kernel's graphics subsystem in an attempt to bring some sanity to the Linux graphics world and avoid the situation we have now where several kernel and userspace drivers compete for control of graphics devices." He then explained, "there are several reasons to pull modesetting and proper multihead support into the kernel: suspend/resume, debugging (e.g. panic), non-X uses, and more reliable VT switch," going on to offer detail on each of these listed reasons.

Can they get any more undignified or childish? This is the biggest software company on the planet, and the most obscenely rich company of all time. Yet they pout, throw public tantrums, and emit the most amazing line of pure baloney on a regular basis. Nothing is ever good enough and everyone picks on them, all those mean governments and unhappy users and mouthy Linux hippies and everyone.

Ever find yourself with too many passwords to remember and no idea where to keep them so that only you can find the password list? Creating a password.txt file in your root directory is out of the question, as is a password-protected OpenOffice.org file. A piece of paper hidden somewhere is not a good idea, because after you forget where did you put it, someone else will find it and abuse it. Instead of these approaches, consider using steganography, a method for hiding sensitive information inside some other object, typically a JPEG picture or a sound file.

LXer Feature: 21-May-2007

An overview of the second annual Ruby on Rails conference held in Portland, Oregon, May 17th - 20th. Covering the talks in great detail would take far to much space, so this article will try to cover the key points and give links to find out more.

Partnership gives Linspire & Freespire users single-click access to easy-to-use, consumer friendly desktop virtualization software

The May 8th-11th OSHCA meeting in Kuala Lumpur, presentations are online nowhere.

All users and developers of Joomla!, the open source content management system, will have an opportunity to meet in Cape Town on June 16.

Much has been written about Microsoft’s allegation of patent infringements in Linux (by which I’m sure they mean GNU/Linux ;-) ). I don’t think Microsoft is the real threat, and in fact, I think Microsoft and the Linux community will actually end up fighting on the same side of this issue.

So it's hours away from the last days of qualifying, truly a now or never moment. Our car is a heap of scrap metal, our driver is busted up in the hospital and while we have "a car" ready for back up, I don't think it was even out of the cosmoline yet. Just kidding...we don't use cosmoline any more. Darrell Soppe our Crew Chief goes into Super Darrell Mode. With some of the best guys in the business, he sets out to put the pieces together.

Before we announce the availability of Ubuntu 7.04 on select Dell client systems, I'd like to give an overview of what customers can expect from our initial Ubuntu offering.

[This should answer many of the questions LXer readers have about Dell's upcoming Ubuntu Linux offering - dcparris]

Roberto Moreno was on the bubble, although not necessarily in danger of missing the Indianapolis 500. But instead of waiting to see what the likes of Jimmy Kite or P.J. Jones could do in their unqualified machines, the 48-year-old Brazilian took his status into his own hands, pulling a slow speed off the board and replacing it with a stout effort better than those of a half-dozen cars on the grid.

I just got back from the track... and what a day for Chastain Motorsports... what a day for Roberto Moreno... what a day for the Linux community!

Ever wished you could display more than one site in Firefox at a time? I'm not talking about tabbed browsing, I'm talking about seeing two sites next to one another without having to juggle two browser windows. Firefox doesn't do this natively, but with the Split Browser extension, you can juggle two or more sites in one browser window.

We've had screaming allegations of fraud, screaming tires and people as our car slammed into a wall at two hundred miles per hour. (alleged) screams in the small hours of the morning as Chastain crew members battled the clock to put a car back together. Even screams of joy as Robert Moreno amazingly squeezed an additional 4 miles per hour out of a car that had been a doorstop less than 72 hours before.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: User-visible functionality added in Plasma. Support for animated SVG images in SuperKaramba.

What makes Windows users so darn dumb?