5 Free Linux Apps You Can't Do Without PC Authority: "Like a digital Swiss Army knife, these are the Linux utilities and tools that are so useful you won't know how you ever did without them." (Nov 2, 2009)
Linux Today Features
Linux Today Sticky Page On this page we'll maintain links to important articles and documents that pertain to Free Software, Linux, and the tech industry. Please submit your suggestions to editors@linuxtoday.com. Thank you! (Jun 15, 2009)
Small Features
The 10 biggest failures in IT history 10 Things: "I recently shared a list of events I believe were pivotal in shaping today’s IT industry - things like the development of COBOL and the creation of UNIX. This time around, I’ve listed a few of the biggest failures in IT..." Nov 1, 2009
Helping Out SSDs (Nov 4, 2009, 22:33 UTC) (1573 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "The last article talked about the anatomy of SSDs and the origins of some of the their characteristics. In this article, we break down tuning storage and file systems for SSDs with an eye toward improving performance and helping overcome some of the platform’s limitations."
3Leaf makes big SMPs out of x64 clusters (Nov 4, 2009, 09:03 UTC) (1085 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Register: "Everybody is looking to shake up the server business this days, it seems. But everyone had better get in line behind 3Leaf Systems, which is launching its much awaited "Aqua" system pooling and virtualization chipset and an intriguing x64 system to match."
Red Hat Takes on VMware, Microsoft in Server Virtualization (Nov 4, 2009, 04:33 UTC) (1863 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) eWeek: "Red Hat officials said the platform—which includes as standalone hypervisor and manage-ment software—offers users better performance at a lower cost than com-peting products from VMware and Microsoft. A management solution for virtualized desktop environments will be available in early 2010, they said."
Setting up a MySQL Cluster for your Linux desktop (Nov 3, 2009, 13:32 UTC) (1286 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Gazette: "So, what is MySQL Cluster? It is a database solution which tries to solve high availability issues by using multiple synchronous masters (for the lack of a better phrase) in a shared-nothing environment. In order to solve a lot of the latency issues associated with multiple masters, it keeps all the indexed data in memory to enable fast processing of the data."
Quanta opens servers to 100-core Tilera (Nov 2, 2009, 15:04 UTC) (1223 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Channel Register: "Upstart multicore, Linux-compatible chip maker Tilera don't need no stinking tier one server makers. That means no IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or Sun Microsystems. At least not yet."
Intel Wants Servers to Have Open FCoE Inside
(Nov 2, 2009, 12:04 UTC) (2066 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Enterprise Storage Forum: "Two years ago, Robert Love, a senior software engineer at Intel, unveiled a new open source project called Open-FCoE to the Linux community."
Amazon RDS out to eat open source vendor lunches with MySQL (Oct 30, 2009, 16:08 UTC) (1810 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) InfoWorld: "One way for open source vendors to respond is through proprietary features. News that Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a MySQL 5.1 relational database in the cloud has met with a lot of interest. On the surface, this is good news for open source users and proponents."
Data By The Numbers (Oct 28, 2009, 12:18 UTC) (1380 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "When dealing with large distributed systems, knowing some basic performance and failure numbers helps you understand what you can reasonably expect both in terms of performance and reliability."
Open Source Meets the Cloud (Oct 26, 2009, 20:19 UTC) (1206 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Janakiram MSV: "The biggest concern and risk involved in moving to the cloud is security, privacy and reliability. Most of the customers would want to know what lies beneath the Cloud platform before betting their business on it."
How Virtualization Exacerbates Fragmentation (Oct 23, 2009, 17:32 UTC) (2077 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "A few weeks ago, ServerWatch covered the importance of fragmentation, particularly with Windows servers. That article touched on the fact that virtualization seemed to worsen fragmentation. This article delves into that subject in more detail to explain further as well as to highlight a few user examples of the phenomenon."
Big Blue kills off CSM clustering (Oct 23, 2009, 15:02 UTC) (1192 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Channel Register: "But Big Blue has now cleaned house, killing off its closed-source Cluster Systems Management (CSM) tool and tapping its own open source Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (known as xCAT) as its replacement."
Does Fragmentation Hurt Storage Network Performance? (Oct 21, 2009, 10:34 UTC) (1377 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Enterprise Storage Forum: "Is fragmentation a big issue affecting storage area network (SAN) performance? Some say no, while others say yes, but what's interesting is that both sides argue their point emphatically. So what's the deal with SAN fragmentation?"
Cloud Computing Too Costly in the Long Term? (Oct 20, 2009, 12:32 UTC) (1960 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux.com: "During their own Sept. 29 Cloud Computing Summit, IDC made what at first glance sounded like a self-defeating statement: clouds, in the long run, are actually a more expensive option than a company running its own datacenter."
Microsoft’s Pink/Danger backup problem blamed on Roz Ho (Oct 19, 2009, 14:02 UTC) (2097 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) RoughlyDrafted Magazine: "Danger’s Sidekick was designed to use a mission critical service operating under the assumption that users did not need to act to secure their data themselves. In fact, users had no capability to back up their devices’ data."
Linux Tuning The Virtual Memory (VM) Subsystem (Oct 18, 2009, 16:04 UTC) (2996 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Cyberciti: "Since I've high performance RAID controller I need to decrease the number of flushes. How do I tune virtual memory subsystem under Linux operating systems for better performance?"
KVM Aims for King of the Virtual Hill Status (Oct 18, 2009, 04:04 UTC) (4731 reads)
(4 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "Red Hat's KVM virtualization technology is so advanced that it will inevitably consign the Xen hypervisor to the technological scrap heap."
Penguin's HPC Waddle (Oct 17, 2009, 20:03 UTC) (2284 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "Penguin Computing has dedicated itself to developing best practices for Linux-based systems, software and services. In particular, it has gravitated toward the high performance computing (HPC) space."
Sidekick Snafu: Data Restored But Lawsuits Filed (Oct 16, 2009, 21:02 UTC) (2321 reads)
(6 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss."
Reduce Linux power consumption, Part 3: Tuning results (Oct 16, 2009, 09:02 UTC) (2641 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "In Part 3, the author compares the performance of the five in-kernel governors in both tuned and untuned states to show you how to optimize a Linux-based System x server."
Recent Foibles Expose Dark Side of Cloud Computing (Oct 15, 2009, 22:33 UTC) (1756 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "Now you and I might have assumed that Apple would do something simple like test the world's most advanced operating system to see if it would destroy all that data *before* releasing it to the public."
The Return of the Vector Processor (Oct 15, 2009, 12:03 UTC) (2354 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "Which brings me to the Nvidia Fermi architecture. In terms of HPC it is also no lightweight. I believe it is going to be a game changer."
Tuning CFQ - What Station is That? (Oct 15, 2009, 07:33 UTC) (1779 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "The last article was a quick overview of the 4 schedulers in the Linux kernel. This article takes a closer look at the Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler and how you can tune it."
Young Developers Get Old Mainframers’ Jobs (Oct 10, 2009, 16:02 UTC) (4277 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Datamation: "Last spring one of my co-workers went to college campuses to recruit prospective “young mainframers.”
Young mainframers? Isn’t that an oxymoron?"
Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises (Oct 9, 2009, 23:35 UTC) (2162 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Enterprise Storage Forum: "It seems like just about every day brings with it a new cloud storage product announcement from vendors big and small, but the reality is that beyond enterprise firewalls, cloud storage's potential is limited."
NAS Performance Comparison: Windows Server vs. Linux vs. OpenSolaris (Oct 8, 2009, 05:34 UTC) (5423 reads)
(7 talkbacks)
(feedback) Flexsense: "The purpose of the benchmark is to compare the performance of NAS software bundled with server operating systems on an identical hardware platform using a highly diversified set of file read, write, search, analysis and delete operations."
London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux (Oct 7, 2009, 21:32 UTC) (3774 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) Cyber Cynic: "The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September"
10 Reasons You Need to Look at ZFS (Oct 7, 2009, 21:02 UTC) (3469 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: "Sun's open-source ZFS file system has some amazing features. It was originally designed for Solaris and unveiled in 2005, but you'll also find it in OpenSolaris and related distributions. In the future it may well become a popular file system to run with Linux and BSD as well."
5 Simple Changes to Reduce Hard Drive Failures (Oct 7, 2009, 00:04 UTC) (5395 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "Google's landmark research document, "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population," published in 2007, provided a huge amount of information about consumer-grade SATA and PATA drives used in the company's servers."
Run your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, part 1 (Oct 6, 2009, 04:33 UTC) (2639 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Seeing the fnords: "With the recent Ubuntu Server 9.10 beta release, you are now able to easily deploy that infrastructure from the CD installer."
London Stock Exchange buys MillenniumIT (Linux-based) (Oct 5, 2009, 18:33 UTC) (2913 reads)
(5 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBSJ News: "The question of whether London Stock Exchange (LSE) will replace its £40 million ($65 million) TradElect platform, supplied by Accenture, has finally been answered: yes, it will."
DRM for Radeon HD 4650,4750 & PVOPS Kernel 2.6.31.1 (Oct 5, 2009, 00:03 UTC) (2310 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Xen Virtualization on Linux and Solaris: "The most recent DRM Radeon support features of Jeremy Fitzhardinge kernel have been enabled and tested at Xen 3.5 Dom0 on top of Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Beta) Server."
