Tag Archives: Linux

Linux apps anywhere

Linux, ,

LINA is a virtual machine that aims to run linux applications on any operating systems.

The concept is similar to the Java VM, write your application in C, C++ ( and other languages supported in the future ), compile it with LINA and it will run on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and maybe other OS. You will be able to run command line programs as well as gui applications that rely on GTK or QT and they will look native to the OS were you will run them.
Of course there is some overhead that will make your applications around 2x slower, but they say the performance will improve.

LINA VM and the tools that will be used to compile applications will be released using a dual license similar to MySQL's licensing model: GPL for those that release their applications under GPL and commercial for those that want to release proprietary applications.

The developement seems to have started 4 years ago but nothing has been released yet. The plan is to release the virtual machine and compiler tools this month.

Yet another perfect server

Linux, ,

A of howtos start like that "The perfect Server" or "The Perfect Descktop" or "The perfect Setup". Howtoforge has lots of howtos like that. Their latest "the perfect server" literally shows you, ( because the howto has more screenshots then words 🙂 ) how to install Centos 4.5 and the servers that you need for hosting sites with mysql, php, email ftp and a control panel - ISPConfig.

A howto for each version

This is not their first "the perfect server for centos" howto, they had one for centos 4.4 and one for centos 5.0. Wonder how much different is Centos 4.4 from 4.5 and more exactly how much different if the howto for 4.4 from the one for 4.5? Well they replaced the version everywhere in the text and luckily the install gui was similar so they did not have to change the screenshots :). For 5.0 they did not have so much luck, they had to change the screenshots, and a add some more.

Made for Robots

What I don't like about these kind of howtos is that they don't explain much about the software you're installing, and they don't tell you why you do what they tell you to do. At some point they show you a screenshot and the only text is "in the next screen click next". That's not very useful, you don't learn anything like that. If something goes wrong or if you're trying to set things up on a different distro or disfferent OS you will not know what to do unless you're lucky to find a similar howto for your distro.

One other thing I don't like is that they show you even how to install Centos. Why not do a separate howto just for that, this way I will not get bored by those installation screenshots and they would get more space for writing some more/good details about what they are doing.

de-mono-ification

General, ,

Today I removed mono completely from my gentoo system. I'm not sure how it got there, but gnome seems to use it the ebuilds in gentoo seem to have it activated by default. Well I don't need that, and it drew my attention on it when I did an update and it didn't want to compile. Well I had a pretty good solution for that. 🙂

It's sad that the gnome developers ( some of them working for novel ? ) chose mono for who knows what stuff they wanted to do. It's hard for me to understand this. When you have so many free-not -microsoft-.net-clones out there and when you already have your project written in C+, why in the world start to write pieces of gnome in mono. Yeah so Microsoft claims Linux infringes it's patents well let's make them right 🙂 , let's clone their main programming language that they love so much. Oh wait we're safe now that novel has made a deal with them.

The future is not so bright for gnome, I'm not sure I'm going to use it much longer. Gotta start searching ... What are your preferences in desktop managers ?

the ubuntu buzz

Linux,

there seems to be quite a buzz about ubuntu these days,. Digg and other similar sites are full of stories about "the perfect ubuntu setup", "the perfect ubuntu server" and others like that.

Well maybe not today cause now we have bigger problems.

We're shocked by engadget's / apple , iphone delay anouncement 🙂 , even though they also announced it was a mistake, basically fake news, apple fanboys seem to be still affected by it.

Another "big" problem seems to be with the Microsoft announcement that linux code infringes their patents ( come on ... you want more then novel and dell ? is red-hat the last one ? ) I think they also tried this back 2004 but this time they specified the exact number that each subsystem infringes ( kernel, email , gui ... ) so we're back at the old "linux contains code patented by microsoft FUD" but after this we sould see some more ubuntu stories.

Oh yes ubuntu is so hot, especially now that dell will ship desktops preinstalled with ubuntu.

I was never eager to try ubuntu, I don't know why but the whole "linux for human beings" didn't catch me. I guess I never knew linux was not for human beings before ubuntu.

Anyway few days ago I did my first ubuntu install. Can you believe that ? my first. and guess what ? I installed it on a brand new dell inspiron 1501 that had freedos pre installed.

First impression: ubuntu is not bad at all. But I didn't really get the chance to use it for more then one hour cause it was not my computer. My wife's friend just bought her computer and she wanted windows there but ended up with ubuntu 🙂 .

Good experiment, overall she liked it and still using it.

freebsd 7.0 outperforms linux

freebsd, Linux, , , ,

The development version of FreeBSD ( 7.0 ) seems to scale a lot better then linux on SMP systems.

A combination of latest freebsd scheduler ULE 2.0 that is built into FreeBSD 7.0, the libthr threading library and a patch (not commited, yet ? ) that addresses poor scalability of file descriptor locking and some other patches is what made a system with 8 core amd64 cpu and 16 GB of ram outperform linux by a factor of 4 in MySQL tests.

The tests were performed using sysbench OLTP benchmark, a tool designed for testing mysql performance.

Brief test results: Linux is actually a little ( ~ 2% ) faster then FreeBSD for less then 9 clients, but when the number of clients grows to 20 linux performance drops a lot and FreeBSD's performance stays the same.

More details about the test here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html

DRBD 8.0.1 released

General, Linux,


This is a maintenance release of the 8.0 code that fixes a few bugs as the original accounce says:

Tara! The first maintenance release of the 8.0 code:

8.0.1 (api:86/proto:86)
--------
* Fixed some race conditions that could trigger an OOPS when the loca disk fails and DRBD detaches itself from the failing disk.
* Added a missing call to drbd_try_outdate_peer().
* LVM's LVs expose ambiguous queue settings. When a RAID-0 (md) PV is used the present a segment size of 64k but at the same time allow only 8 sectors. Fixed DRBD to deal with that fact corretly. Continue reading DRBD 8.0.1 released →

drbd 8.0 released

Linux, , ,

DRBD ( Distributed Replicating Block device ) is a Linux block device that is designed to mirror a whole block device over a network link. Today the team developing DRBD released version 8.0

Among many bug fixes and improvements in the new version we find support for primary/primary ( two way synchronization ) for distributed file systems such as OCFS2 and GFS, optional peer authentication with a shared secret and improved tunable after-split-brain recovery strategies.

Continue reading drbd 8.0 released →