LinuxDevices.com
interviews Victor Yodaiken, project leader for RTLinux, about the future of RTLinux.

Dr. Thomas Pabst himself
reviews the nVidia drivers for Linux 3D at Tom’s Hardware. He compares Linux performance to Windows 98.

The Hard Hat Linux Cross Development Kit, version 1.2, is now available, according to a
press release on this page at Business Wire.

Michael S. Mimoso writes “Another batch of Who Wrote Linux tall tales offers a few more possibilities into the origins of the operating system.”

I came out with my explanation of Linux’s origins — I wrote it! — right after Kenneth Brown, president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, claimed that Linus Torvalds stole Linux from Minix. Now, Linux’s creators are coming out of the woodwork, as thick as flies or, if you ask me, thieves.

Korean appliances manufacturer Samsung Electronics is reportedly prepared to use Linux as the major operating system in its products.

by Peter Johansson

An old laptop of mine fubared its Linux partition beyond (easy)
repair so I decided a clean install was the way to go. When I went to
install a recent Debian system I had trouble with PCMCIA under the
2.2 kernel, and XFree gave me a blank screen under 2.4. Knoppix,
however, made everything work automagically (with the exception of
sound).

I thought for a minute… hmmm… I can compile a custom
kernel for the box as I had always done in the past, or I can simply
copy the Knoppix CD-ROM with its compressed filesystem onto the hard
disk. Since the box has only 1.5 GB of disk available, things have
always been a tight squeeze, but with Knoppix I would get a pretty
complete install in only 700 megs, albeit with the cost of some speed
to decompress applications on startup.

So I gave it a shot, and sure enough, it worked pretty darn well.

The only problem was the lack of persistent configuration. Knoppix
supposedly has some tools that will allow you to save configuration
info, but I haven’t played with them yet. But it is pretty trivial to
write a script to tweak things after the fact.

The only “problem” with Knoppix is that the CD-ROM is updated every few
weeks and that there is no way to download just the changes — the
complete ISO image must be downloaded for each upgrade.

In any case, getting a compressed Knoppix to run from your HD is as
simple as the following:

1. Copy the contents of the CD-ROM to your hard disk. I created a 750
   meg partition for this, but strictly speaking I’m not sure this is
   necessary. (Knoppix seems to scan for its compressed disk image,
   so you might be able to stash that anywhere)
2. Mount the boot.img file via a loop mount point to copy off the
   kernel and initrd files.
3. Configure grub or lilo to boot with these. You’ll probably want to
   specify some boot options, at the very least, changing from the
   default German keyboard and language.
4. Reboot. Then magic happens.

This is, without a doubt, the quickest and easiest O/S install I have
ever performed, and the “magic” part is that it was on an old laptop with such a small hard drive it would be almost impossible to make any other full-featured Linux distro and a full set of useful applications work on it.

Michael S. Mimoso writes
“Major Linux vendors like Red Hat are finding success penetrating data centers in vertical markets like the financial industry. Financials often grow
their own applications in-house and it’s easier to port those C and C++ programs and entire solution stacks to Linux in vertical markets. That said,
there are still frontiers Linux needs to conquer, according to Red Hat executive Mark de Visser, who addresses management of open-source deployments
and common questions enterprises have about Linux in part two of this question-and-answer interview with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.”