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HTTP/2 302 server: nginx date: Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:51:03 GMT content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 content-length: 0 x-archive-redirect-reason: found capture at 20081017001232 location: https://web.archive.org/web/20081017001232/https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/atom.xml server-timing: captures_list;dur=0.548111, exclusion.robots;dur=0.020818, exclusion.robots.policy;dur=0.013816, esindex;dur=0.023213, cdx.remote;dur=23.676213, LoadShardBlock;dur=215.969629, PetaboxLoader3.datanode;dur=55.868584, PetaboxLoader3.resolve;dur=130.699811 x-app-server: wwwb-app201 x-ts: 302 x-tr: 262 server-timing: TR;dur=0,Tw;dur=0,Tc;dur=1 set-cookie: wb-p-SERVER=wwwb-app201; path=/ x-location: All x-rl: 0 x-na: 0 x-page-cache: MISS server-timing: MISS x-nid: DigitalOcean referrer-policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade permissions-policy: interest-cohort=() HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:51:05 GMT content-type: text/xml x-archive-orig-date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:12:09 GMT x-archive-orig-server: Apache x-archive-orig-p3p: policyref="https://www.oreillynet.com/w3c/p3p.xml",CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa IVAa IVDa CONo OUR DELa PUBi OTRa IND PHY ONL UNI PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA PRE" x-archive-orig-x-powered-by: PHP/4.4.3 x-archive-orig-status: 200 x-archive-orig-x-cache: MISS from olive.bp x-archive-orig-x-cache-lookup: MISS from olive.bp:3128 x-archive-orig-via: 1.0 olive.bp:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE13) x-archive-orig-connection: close cache-control: max-age=1800 x-archive-guessed-content-type: text/xml x-archive-guessed-charset: ibm852 memento-datetime: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:12:32 GMT link: ; rel="original", ; rel="timemap"; type="application/link-format", ; rel="timegate", ; rel="first memento"; datetime="Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:42:51 GMT", ; rel="prev memento"; datetime="Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:11:11 GMT", ; rel="memento"; datetime="Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:12:32 GMT", ; rel="next memento"; datetime="Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:35:58 GMT", ; rel="last memento"; datetime="Tue, 18 Feb 2014 15:04:52 GMT" content-security-policy: default-src 'self' 'unsafe-eval' 'unsafe-inline' data: blob: archive.org web.archive.org web-static.archive.org wayback-api.archive.org athena.archive.org analytics.archive.org pragma.archivelab.org wwwb-events.archive.org x-archive-src: 52_6_20081016203023_crawl101-c/52_6_20081017001032_crawl103.arc.gz server-timing: captures_list;dur=0.530497, exclusion.robots;dur=0.023146, exclusion.robots.policy;dur=0.014357, esindex;dur=0.010840, cdx.remote;dur=235.329834, LoadShardBlock;dur=480.766373, PetaboxLoader3.resolve;dur=406.333175, PetaboxLoader3.datanode;dur=208.049857, load_resource;dur=207.449378 x-app-server: wwwb-app201 x-ts: 200 x-tr: 958 server-timing: TR;dur=0,Tw;dur=0,Tc;dur=0 x-location: All x-rl: 0 x-na: 0 x-page-cache: MISS server-timing: MISS x-nid: DigitalOcean referrer-policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade permissions-policy: interest-cohort=() O'Reilly Linux DevCenter Blog tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15 2008-05-23T12:00:16Z O'Reilly Linux DevCenter Blog Movable Type 3.21 Server load: a return tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23810 2008-05-23T12:00:16Z 2008-05-23T12:00:16Z

A while back I was asking about how to look at server load issues. I wound up using collectd, which was pretty useful. I identified a handful of disk I/O spikes - unfortunately it's hard to match these up against...

Juliet Kemp A while back I was asking about <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2008/03/server_load_and_keyboards.html">how to look at server load issues</a>. I wound up using <code>collectd</code>, which was pretty useful. I identified a handful of disk I/O spikes - unfortunately it’s hard to match these up against the subjective delays/lag problem. However, I looked into ways to improve I/O handling, and found <a href="https://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/linux-pdflush.htm">information about caching and <code>pdflush</code></a>. I’m currently experimenting with upping <code>/proc/sys/vm/swappiness</code> (to 90), to encourage more swapping to disk - on the grounds that I do have an active server, and I’d rather use the disk cache more. I think. I’m a little unsure of my logic here, but so far this seems to have improved the situation a bit, so maybe I’m on the right lines. What's the "Linux Tax" Worth to You? tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23773 2008-05-20T14:00:01Z 2008-05-20T14:00:03Z

In When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?, I mentioned that I'm considering upgrading my System76 laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper: Dude...

chromatic In <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2008/05/when_do_you_trade_in_your_gibb.html">When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?</a>, I mentioned that I’m considering upgrading my <a href="https://www.system76.com/">System76</a> laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2008/05/when_do_you_trade_in_your_gibb.html#comment-3678583">A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper:</a> <blockquote>Dude - you just paid a $350 ‘Linux Tax’ by NOT going mainstream in your hardware…</blockquote> Maybe so, but I think not. It depends on what you value. Suppose my time is worth $70 an hour. That’s low for a consulting rate, but assume that I’m not busy to capacity. (I do find time to watch Battlestar Galactica.) That $350 represents five hours of work on my part. If buying from System76 saved me five hours of work, the transaction was worthwhile. I bought this laptop at the end of 2006, before Dell sold pre-installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux to individual customers. Assume it takes an hour to install Ubuntu, from deciding I want to do it through downloading and burning an installation CD to logging in for the first time. It came preinstalled on my laptop, so there’s one hour of the five. This is the best-case scenario, where all of my hardware works out of the box without customization. Now suppose that whichever components Dell bought out of someone’s truck in their parking lot the day before they put together that laptop weren’t completely supported by free software drivers. I might have had to upgrade my kernel manually, or set up ndiswrapper, or live without suspend/hibernate support for days, weeks, or months. (An extra two minutes every day of shutting down and rebooting eats up that four hours in six months.) Do I know I would have had those problems? No. I don’t know that for sure. Has everything on this laptop been perfect? Again, no — but I expect laptops to have problems occasionally, especially as free software evolves at its quick pace. Yet my laptop worked correctly, right out of the box. Maybe that’s not worth a few hours of work for you. It certainly was for me. Fedora 9: Sulphur Released tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23729 2008-05-13T17:33:16Z 2008-05-13T17:48:27Z

Fedora 9 is now available - https://get.fedoraproject.org/ As someone thats been working with it for months already I'm quite pleased with this release...

Mike McGrath Fedora 9 is now available - <a href='https://get.fedoraproject.org/'>https://get.fedoraproject.org/</a> As someone thats been working with it for months already I’m quite pleased with this release. For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Fedora Project it’s a Red Hat sponsored community project. It has its own board (which in the next month or so will consist of 5 elected seats and 4 Red Hat appointed seats… Red Hat no longer has majority control.) Most of its contributors are volunteers (roughly 2/3’s are non Red Hat). And most importantly, the Fedora Project’s flagship product is Fedora the operating system. Fedora has always been a place where new technologies can be found and worked with. Fedora 9 is no exception. Some major enhancements in Fedora 9 include: <ul> <li>PackageKit - A new graphical interface for package management.</li> <li>KDE 4</li> <li>Firefox 3</li> <li>OpenJDK6</li> <li>Encrypted root filesystem support</li> <li>Preupgrade abilities from Fedora 8</li> <li>Persistent Live USB support</li> <li>FreeIPA for identity management</li> <li>Upstart</li> <li>EXT4 support</li> </ul> Take a look, check them out. Every time I write one of these things someone says “no thanks, I’ll stick with Debian” or some other distro. To those people I say, super! Different distro’s for different use cases. But I’ll remind you that what is in Fedora now will be in the next release of $YOUR_DISTRO, with the live media why not take a look? You can download Fedora 9 as a live or installable image at <a href='https://get.fedoraproject.org/'>https://get.fedoraproject.org/</a>. To learn more about getting involved and getting started with Fedora go to <a href='https://join.fedoraproject.org/'>https://join.fedoraproject.org/</a> The Fedora 10 alpha freeze is only 2 months away! Come be a part of it! When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron? tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23720 2008-05-13T00:30:56Z 2008-05-13T00:30:59Z

My main computer these days is a laptop from System76. I was very happy to support a vendor willing to ship and support a laptop without the Microsoft or Apple tax, and very pleased to have hardware supported by a...

chromatic My main computer these days is a laptop from <a href="https://www.system76.com/">System76</a>. I was very happy to support a vendor willing to ship and support a laptop without the Microsoft or Apple tax, and very pleased to have hardware supported by a Linux distribution. That was a couple of Ubuntu releases ago. Now that <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyHeron">Hardy Heron</a> is out, I feel the urge to run through the upgrade. Improved battery life is one big draw, but getting updates for all sorts of software I rely on is nice. (New Wine, new Valgrind, new Firefox, new GCC….) Upgrades are never 100% perfect, though. There’s always a risk of mishap that’ll take me a few days to straighten out. I don’t have any talks to give or books due in the next several weeks, so the timing seems good, but perhaps I should wait a few days more for the early adopters to expose any bugs that I’m happy not to fix? I know plenty of people like <a href="https://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/jzemlin/">Jim Zemlin</a> who were very happy to run pre-release versions of Hardy Heron, but he had <a href="https://www.kroah.com/log/">Greg K-H</a> to help him out. How do you decide to upgrade? Linux vs. Windows Metrics -- Nothing Is Quite What It Seems To Be tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23620 2008-05-01T19:32:37Z 2008-05-01T21:42:33Z

10 days ago the Linux Loop blog had a post titled "Linux Eee PC Far Faster Than Windows Version". I'm sure many Linux users nodded and had assumed as much. The author compared the times of three tasks: boot up,...

Caitlyn Martin 10 days ago the Linux Loop blog had a post titled <a href="https://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/04/21/linux-eee-pc-far-faster-than-windows-version/">“Linux Eee PC Far Faster Than Windows Version”</a>. I’m sure many Linux users nodded and had assumed as much. The author compared the times of three tasks: boot up, loading Firefox, and shutting down. That’s hardly a comprehensive set of tests. Some people commented to dismiss these metrics as “meaningless”. They aren’t meaningless but they certainly aren’t the whole story. Others pointed out that IE on Windows was faster than Firefox on Linux and that MS Works was faster than OpenOffice. Some then responded that Works isn’t the equivalent of OO and that MS Office would be a better comparison. It all got a little shrill with those who believe that Linux is faster than Windows and those who say it isn’t so talking past each other and resolving nothing. I’m going to try and sift through the morass and say what I think the numbers really mean and what they don’t mean. Those with an agenda, either agenda, will, I’m sure, attack what I have to say. I think anyone who really tries to look at things objectively probably won’t. I’m just not sure that very many people are truly objective. In the interest of fairness let me disclose where I am coming from: Yes, I tend to have a pro-Linux bias. I also have a bias against hype and B.S. When it comes to my professional life I’m an IT mercenary. If someone wants me to support Windows systems along with Linux or UNIX systems I will gladly take their money and do the work. I also won’t evangelize on behalf of Linux. Why not? In business everything comes down to a cost vs. benefits analysis and there are situations in the real world where a change of OS is far too costly to justify any perceived benefits. There are many situations where Windows or commercial, proprietary UNIX really and truly is the best fit. Back to those pesky metrics… If you read the blog headline or the comments this is mostly portrayed as Linux vs. Windows. In reality that just isn’t true. These numbers only compare Xandros preloaded on the Eee PC with Windows XP preloaded on the Eee PC. All Linux distributions are not created equal. On my five and a half year old Toshiba laptop, a box with specs very close to those of the Eee PC, some distributions are much faster than others. For example, Kubuntu is much slower than Vector Linux SOHO even through both have a KDE desktop. There are people running all sorts of Linux distributions on the Eee PC. I’ve also seen where some users have managed to strip down and shoehorn Windows Vista onto one. These metrics are about one specific laptop, one specific distribution and version of Linux, and Windows XP only, nothing more. One of the Windows supporters tries to make the claim in the comments that Xandros must be well tweaked on the Eee PC and that XP must be poorly configured. Anyone who has tried XP on a system with similar specs knows that isn’t true. Asus primarily sells Windows machines just like all the other major laptop vendors. They know how to configure XP. The fact is that both operating systems are well configured and optimized by Asus. That brings us back to the numbers. There is no denying that on identical hardware running an identical application (Firefox) that Xandros is significantly faster than XP. Any comparison of dissimilar apps (IE vs FIrefox or Works vs. OpenOffice) is an apples and oranges comparison. It tells us nothing about the speed of the underlying OS. What if I compared AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of OO? Might Linux seem faster again? It’s not a fair comparison, is it? Similarly, the time to shutdown or start up is a fair comparison and Xandros is clearly faster than XP again. All the arguments dismissing this as unimportant to most people doesn’t change the fact that Xandros is faster at this given task. What does this all prove? Not much, really. I think most people who have had significant experience with Linux know that in general, with identical apps, a well configured and optimized Linux system will outperform a well configured and optimized Windows system by some measurable amount. Whether that amount is significant or not depends on the application and what is important to the user. In the real world there are very few situations where people will chose Linux simply because it’s faster. As the critics of the blog post correctly point out Asus delivers the Eee PC with applications that work very well on the laptop regardless of which OS is chosen. In the final analysis the blog post is little more than Linux hype. There are far more compelling reasons to buy an EeePC with Xandros rather than Windows. Is there any value to the blog post? In fairness, yes, there is. It adds to an already large body of evidence that Linux scales down to low spec and legacy hardware easily. In general Linux is the better choice for such machines because it’s modular. You can leave out bits you don’t need. You can choose a lightweight desktop or lightweight applications, trading some features for faster performance. That faster performance is often the difference between comfortably usable and totally unusable on older or slower hardware. Linux distributions, good solid ones, built specifically for limited performance hardware are readily available. In the Linux world lightweight applications and desktops are under current support and development which means that if a security vulnerability or a bug is found it gets fixed. Folks who choose to run Windows ‘98 instead on older hardware are stuck in place. Windows XP Lite is a much better alternative but it adds cost and people who are running legacy or low spec hardware are usually very cost conscious. Lightweight apps are less plentiful for Windows and in many if not most cases they will cost the user additional money they may not want to spend. What usually makes Linux painful or impossible for the average Joe or Jane user is the task of installation and configuration. Asus took away that pain by offering a very attractive little box at a good price with an easy to use, ready to go Linux installation. Now the trick is getting Joe or Jane user to seriously consider that the Xandros Linux version, if they did their own cost vs. benefit analysis, really is the better choice and not just because it boots up faster. GRUB Legacy, Ext3/4 smackdown tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23619 2008-05-01T19:03:18Z 2008-05-01T19:07:43Z

There are some "interesting" issues being raised due to an incompatibility between e2fsprogs and GRUB legacy that results in non-booting systems. Newer versions of e2fsprogs default to creating new Ext3 filesystems with 256-byte sized inodes, instead of the old default...

Carla Schroder There are some “interesting” issues being raised due to an incompatibility between e2fsprogs and GRUB legacy that results in non-booting systems. Newer versions of e2fsprogs default to creating new Ext3 filesystems with 256-byte sized inodes, instead of the old default of 128. GRUB legacy has absolutely no clue what to do with 256-byte inodes, so it barfs up the “Error 2: unknown file or directory type” message and sits back down. GRUB legacy will not be patched to support 256-byte inodes. Yay! But this is a transitional problem; read all about it here: <a href="https://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6480/1/">GRUB vs. the Inodes: Who Needs a Bootable System, Anyway?</a> IE7, CSS, and rollover menus tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23549 2008-04-24T15:56:31Z 2008-04-24T15:56:34Z

This week's discovery: a bug with IE7's CSS handling (I'm sure you're all very surprised), and the workaround. The bug: I have rollover submenus, set up with CSS. In Firefox and Safari they behave as expected: the submenu pops up...

Juliet Kemp This week’s discovery: a bug with IE7’s CSS handling (I’m sure you’re all very surprised), and the workaround. The bug: I have rollover submenus, set up with CSS. In Firefox and Safari they behave as expected: the submenu pops up on rollover, and then you can navigate the mouse to the submenu item you want and click on it. In IE7, when you try to navigate to the submenu items, as soon as your pointer moves off the rollover-trigger item, the submenu vanishes. Most irritating. The eventual solution was to give the submenu a background image (also in CSS). This background image doesn’t need to actually exist (mine doesn’t, to save creating a transparent one) - just the call to it seems to be sufficiently to counter the bug. I confess to having no idea whatsoever why this works, but work it does. In fact you probably do want the background image file to exist (to avoid errors in your logs), but just touching it will be fine. (I would like to extend intense gratitude to whoever it was put me onto this; unfortunately I went through so many different sites over the hour or so I spent struggling with this that I don’t know who or where it was that I found the idea. I’m still very grateful to them, though.) Is Linux Really Outgrowing Its Stereotypes? Does It Matter? tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23523 2008-04-22T22:04:26Z 2008-04-22T22:16:50Z

Last month distro-review ran an article titled 10 ways that Linux is outgrowing the stereotype and becoming the best OS. While I agreed with all 10 points in the article something just didn't sit right with me. I bookmarked the...

Caitlyn Martin Last month distro-review ran an article titled <a href="https://www.distro-review.com/10-ways-linux-is-outgrowing-the-stereotype-and-becoming-the-best-os">10 ways that Linux is outgrowing the stereotype and becoming the best OS</a>. While I agreed with all 10 points in the article something just didn’t sit right with me. I bookmarked the article and gave it a good long think. My conclusion: the facts are correct but there are problems with both the premise and the goal of the article. My problem with the premise is in the opening paragraph: <blockquote>I’m occasionally asked “why do you bother with Linux?” by people who haven’t used it recently under the assumption that it’s difficult to use, counter intuitive, geeky, nerdy and any number of other adjectives.</blockquote> I hear that too. People who tried Linux back in the ’90s often came to that conclusion and haven’t tried it since. Microsoft, Apple, and their supporters certainly do all they can to maintain that stereotype. Having said that, the question I here far more often from non-technical people is “What’s Linux?” Outside technical circles a lot of people have never heard of Linux or if they have heard the name it simply didn’t register. Think about the recent Apple commercials. You know, the ones that start with “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC”. They make the assumption that PCs all run Windows and that Macs all run Mac OS X. So do most people. In the next sentence the article states its goal: <blockquote>However it is my intention to raise awareness that Linux is remarkably usable these days, so on that note let’s start looking at how Linux has outgrown that stereotype.</blockquote> The article then details all the wonderful advances in Linux. It’s all accurate and spelled out in clear language. There’s only one problem: these points all assume you have Linux installed and running or, at the very least, that Linux installation is a no-brainer. The sad fact is that the average Joe or Jane user has never installed an operating system and probably never will. They use what comes on the computer. Changing operating systems is too much work to even consider. Why should they if they think their computer is working just fine for them? They need a reason to want to learn something new and do extra work that they think, rightly or wrongly, is difficult. What’s the incentive for them? The article actually mentions a couple of incentives. The first is cost. Well, Windows comes “free” with most PCs. Yes, you and I know that it’s close to $100 of the real cost but to most people who buy at their local retail big box store that’s an unavoidable cost. You could mention the cost of office software, for example, but <a href="https://www.openoffice.org">OpenOffice</a> is available for Windows too, isn’t it? That cost savings has been around for a number of years and most people still use Microsoft Office because it’s what they know. If you mention other free applications you are likely to be asked if they are as good as what’s available for Windows. Then there’s that nasty requirement to learn something new. Is the cost savings worth more than their time and their frustration? Probably not. The article goes on to talk about frequency of updates. Most average users don’t know from security and don’t want to know. If it’s all automated and they don’t have to think about it that’s fine. Otherwise don’t even try to sell on this point. Even fairly sophisticated users think of security as something that doesn’t apply to them. I’m reminded of a time when I supported a lab full of highly educated and competent scientists running SGI workstations with the IRIX operating system. When security issues were raised one answer I received was: “We’re in the business of science, not security.” This was after a major security incident had bit them you know where and cost the scientist who said this many hours of lost productive time. Security was still simply an inconvenience. The article moves on to the desktop, citing the eye candy of Compiz-Fusion and the choices available to Linux users (<a href="https://www.kde.org">KDE</a>, <a href="https://www.gnome.org">GNOME</a>, <a href="https://www.xfce.org">Xfce</a>, etc…) Most Joe or Jane users think of their computer like an appliance. Choices? Why bother if what they have works? Eye candy? Nice for nerds and kids, I suppose. All 10 points in the article are valid. None of them, nor any other efforts at Linux evangelism over the last decade, have worked when it comes to moving the masses towards Linux in the home and office on the desktop. Look, I’m not critical of the article. It may even convince a handful or people to give Linux a look. It, and articles like it, won’t have a major impact. What will win the day for Linux? The only answer is to get it into people’s hands in one of two scenarios: The first scenario is where Linux isn’t the selling point. It just happens to be the OS used for the computer that fits the needs of Joe or Jane user best. The <a href="https://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24">Asus EeePC</a> is probably the best example of this to date. Hundreds of thousands were sold before a Windows version was even available and many people <a href="https://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/01/29/how-the-asus-eeepc-showed-me-i-was-wrong-about-linux/">tried Linux for the first time and liked the experience</a>. I give tremendous credit to both Asus and the folks at <a href="https://www.xandros.com">Xandros</a> for a beautiful job of Linux integration onto a low cost platform that was and is compelling. Despite the obvious success Best Buy and other retailers are now selling the same EeePC with Windows XP installed because they assume it will sell better and Windows is what people want. Sadly, despite all the evidence that this isn’t necessarily true Asus’ commitment to Linux isn’t sufficient for them to market against the stereotype even when they have a product with a track record of successfully defying conventional wisdom. Some of Asus competitors have fared poorly. The <a href="https://www.everex.com/products/cloudbook/cloudbook.htm">Everex CloudBook</a> has been dropped by WalMart stores and relegated to their website where Linux PCs have been available for a few years now. The Everex product, despite superior specs, doesn’t perform as well as the EeePC and didn’t get the gee whiz reaction that the Asus product got. I still remember a Wall Street Journal article panning Linux as not ready for the masses after he tried a newly released Dell laptop with <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu</a> installed but, by Dell’s own admission, very poorly configured. None of these failures are the fault of Linux. Linux was and is ready for the masses. It just wasn’t ready as sold. This is a perpetual problem Linux faces. It’s a non-commercial operating system that desperately needs commercial marketing to succeed on the desktop. We’ve seen successful commercial marketing by Red Hat, IBM, etc.. in the server room so this isn’t an impossible scenario. I’m just not sure how Linux distributors can sell hardware vendors and retailers on the concept. Efforts so far have met with some limited success at best. There is a second scenario that I believe offers the best chance at wider Linux desktop adoption. If Joe or Jane user had to use Linux at work, if they truly didn’t have a choice, they’d learn it. Once they learned it they would mostly like it. Once they see it as faster or better or easier than Windows for themselves then they will likely bring it home, too. The problem is that it will have to be force fed to them. How will that happen? Linux distributors and hardware manufacturers will have to make a compelling case for Linux on the corporate desktop. They will have to decide that is their next big chance to make many dollars or euros or dinars or shekels. These are the same companies, for the most part, that successfully made the case for Linux in the server room with a great deal of success. Here is a reality many in the Open Source community don’t like to face. A partnership with commercial interests must continue to be expanded and exploited, even with companies that truly aren’t sold on Open Source in the first place. That is where an article like the one at distro-review might actually be useful. It’s another sales tool. Nothing is wrong with the information in the article. It’s just targeted at the wrong audience . Preaching to the proverbial choir is nice and gets you lots of pats on the back. It just doesn’t produce a lot of tangible results. Makefiles tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23414 2008-04-10T16:01:45Z 2008-04-10T16:01:46Z

Radio silence here of late as I have been moving old website to new website; a process which is time-consuming and gives rise to a very long to-do list, but which isn't remotely interesting to anyone else. Although I have...

Juliet Kemp Radio silence here of late as I have been moving old website to new website; a process which is time-consuming and gives rise to a very long to-do list, but which isn’t remotely interesting to anyone else. Although I have discovered that IE7 handles CSS boxes, percentages, and padding differently from Firefox/Safari/Opera. (This irritates but does not surprise me.) I’ve also been dealing with some user queries about compiling Fortran. Can anyone recommend a good online beginner’s tutorial on the general subject of makefiles, or on the specific subject of makefiles for Fortran? Or a decent Fortran book? A Linux Driver Project status report tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23396 2008-04-08T21:23:26Z 2008-04-08T21:23:28Z

Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project, which combined education and mentoring with the promise to write Linux drivers for any hardware manufacturer willing to work with the project. Greg has just released the Linux...

chromatic Just over a year ago, <a href="https://www.kroah.com/log/">Greg Kroah-Hartman</a> announced the <a href="https://www.linuxdriverproject.org/">Linux Driver Project</a>, which combined education and mentoring with the promise to write Linux drivers for any hardware manufacturer willing to work with the project. Greg has just released the <a href="https://www.kroah.com/log/linux/linux_driver_project_status-2008-04.html?seemore=y">Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008</a>. LWN has comments at <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/276973/#Comments">A Linux Driver Project status report</a>. Greg’s comments are particularly interesting: <blockquote>The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company. … After much cajoling and harassment on my part, I’m happy to say that the Linux Foundation’s Vendor Advisory board’s top 10 list of things that need to be worked on with Linux doesn’t mention drivers at all. So let’s put this myth to rest once and for all please.</blockquote> Of course, the quality of support of certain devices is still an issue — in particular certain wireless cards and, as always, 3D devices. Instant Messaging for Introverts, or Rude is Plain Old Rude tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23386 2008-04-07T18:49:11Z 2008-04-07T18:50:11Z

Instant Messaging for Introverts This is an excellent article about the intrusiveness of modern "always on" communications tools, especially instant messaging. The author framed it as an introvert vs. extrovert problem, which I'm not sure is a correct assessment- to...

Carla Schroder <a href="https://db.tidbits.com/article/9544">Instant Messaging for Introverts</a> This is an excellent article about the intrusiveness of modern “always on” communications tools, especially instant messaging. The author framed it as an introvert vs. extrovert problem, which I’m not sure is a correct assessment- to me it’s manners vs. rudeness. Some folks think because they have instant messaging it’s OK to be constantly interrupted, or to constantly interrupt other people for every trivial thing. Well, no, it’s not OK. The author of this article, Joe Kissell, is a man after my own heart. He doesn’t care for instant messaging, and doesn’t have much use for cell phones either. Mr. Kissell writes: “The introvert trait of not dealing well with interruptions comes into play in a couple of different ways with IM.” Nobody, but nobody works efficiently with interruptions and juggling multiple tasks. Not mothers of multiple small children, not ER doctors, not computer geeks- nobody. They’re fooling themselves if they think they are. It’s fashionable these days to claim all manner of elite multi-tasking skills, and the ones who think they are so wonderful at it are not nearly as productive as the boring old-fashioned types who plug away at one task at a time, and who stop only when they get to a good stopping point. Too many people substitute endless pointless phone calls, texting, IM-ing, and emailing as substitutes for plain old knuckling down and getting their work done. They’re like teenagers going through the must-be-connected-to-friends-24×7 phase. I hate to break the news, but eventually the time comes to be a grownup. “This is why I love email as a mode of communication. I get many dozens of messages every day, but I can answer them whenever I want.” Metoo! And, like Mr, Kissell, I usually take time to respond carefully, and make several revisions before I hit “send”. I wish more email users would do that. I get tired of folks who can’t even read a whole message before replying, and ask stupid questions that are already answered. And then don’t bother to frame a coherent reply, but just dash off some stream-of-consciousness babble without spell-checking, proper capitalization and punctuation, and reasonable grammar. Even bloggers find excuses for not having basic competence in their native languages- they don’t get paid, so it’s ok to be sloppy and incoherent. Or they’re just so, so busy and important they don’t have time. Then there’s the poor sods who are chained to their damned cell phones, and who are incapable of letting calls go to voicemail. It’s like a mental illness. I’m offended when I’m visiting with a friend who won’t shut the darned thing off while we’re together. That’s rude. They’re so sure it’s going to be vitally important- ha. In all the years we’ve had cell phones, it has yet to be vitally important. These are the same kinds of weirdos who leap out of the shower to answer the phone. I answer my phone when I jolly well feel like it, and am perfectly comfortable listening to it ring forlornly in the other room. Mr. Kissell knows that the demands of some jobs require a lot of availability, and for those, IM, cell phones, and mobile messaging are useful. But for most people they’re just adult pacifiers. Time to shed the Binkys and grow up. <a href="https://www.parents.com/toddlers/development/behavioral/bye-bye-binky-ending-the-pacifier-habit/">bye-bye-binky-ending-the-pacifier-habit</a> Don't Work Downstream from Redmond tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23305 2008-03-27T14:00:01Z 2008-03-27T14:00:03Z

Matt Asay makes one crucial observation in Microsoft's dilemma: The importance of the downstream: To work within the open-source community... Microsoft must stop polluting the downstream with patent encumbrances. (Emphasis in original.) This is my problem with Microsoft's patent pledge,...

chromatic Matt Asay makes one crucial observation in <a href="https://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9899201-16.html">Microsoft’s dilemma: The importance of the downstream</a>: <blockquote>To work within the open-source community… Microsoft must stop polluting the downstream with patent encumbrances.</blockquote> (Emphasis in original.) This is my problem with Microsoft’s patent pledge, with the Microsoft-Novell deal over codecs for <a href="https://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight">Monopolight</a>, and just about everything coming out of Redmond except for the pretty words of the open source interoperability lab. Discriminatory distribution clauses are contrary to the four freedoms of software. Couching that discrimination in the language of business ($40 billion in annual revenue seems like a pretty fair return for $7 billion in annual research to me) and waving the tired old tatters of the flag of innovation doesn’t make that discrimination right, and it doesn’t hide it very well. If Microsoft wants to interoperate with free software at the source level, it has plenty of source code — all of Microsoft’s own source code and all of the free software ever distributed. If Microsoft wants to interoperate with free software at the business level, it could start by removing legal roadblocks to interoperability. The fact that the company continues not to do so leads me to believe that Microsoft doesn’t really want to interoperate with free software at a business level. As long as the company offers only jingoistic pats on the head to us misguided little hackers laboring part time in our basements with no commercial aspirations, there’s little point in considering anything that comes out of Redmond as useful. In eight months since Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/07/what_will_change_at_microsoft.html">What Will Change at Microsoft with Regard to Patents and F/OSS<?a>, nothing interesting has happened. OSCON’s four months away. Maybe Bill Hilf will have a big announcement then — maybe he’ll have set up mail filters. Don’t hold your breath for a sane patent strategy. Taking A Good Long Look At Vector Linux 5.9 Standard tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23298 2008-03-26T07:39:47Z 2008-03-27T04:36:48Z

Over the past 14 months I've reviewed two previous releases of Vector Linux: Vector Linux 5.8 Standard and Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO. Anyone who has run those versions of Vector Linux would find the new version quite familiar. In reality...

Caitlyn Martin Over the past 14 months I’ve reviewed two previous releases of Vector Linux: <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/01/new_releasecool_canadian_distr.html">Vector Linux 5.8 Standard</a> and <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/06/kde_built_for_speed_vector_lin.html">Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO</a>. Anyone who has run those versions of <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com">Vector Linux</a> would find the new version quite familiar. In reality the changes between 5.8 and 5.9, which was released in December, are like day and night. For starters up until now Vector Linux was a 32-bit distro. A <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5927.0;topicseen">64-bit version</a> of Vector Linux 5.9 Standard is currently in beta and looks very promising. However, since it is still beta code I’m restricting my review to the 32-bit version. Last year Vector Linux came in four flavors. The list has now been expanded to seven different variations on the distribution: Standard, Deluxe, SOHO, Live, Light, Mini, and Light Live. SOHO, with <a href="https://www.kde.org">KDE</a> as the default desktop and all the most popular applications, is the full featured version. Standard is based on the <a href="https://www.xfce.org">Xfce4 desktop</a> and provides superior speed and performance. Both are freely downloadable. Deluxe, <a href="https://vectorlinux.com/website2/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=2&MMN_position=12:12">available for purchase</a>, is Standard plus a second CD with additional applications including KDE and <a href="https://www.openoffice.org">OpenOffice</a>. <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5145.0">Live</a>, as the name implies, is a live CD version of Standard. <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5923.0;topicseen">Light</a> is a paired down, extremely lightweight version designed to run on older systems with as little as 64MB of RAM. In reality it will run with less than that. Light is built around either a <a href="https://joewing.net/programs/jwm/">JWM</a> or <a href="https://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/">Fluxbox</a> desktop and lightweight applications. Mini is a further reduced version of Light that fits on a 5cm/3″ mini CD and requires only 1.1GB of disk space. Finally, Light Live is, as you’d expect, the live CD version of Light. So far only new Standard and Deluxe versions have been released but the others, all in various stages of development and testing, can already be sampled. This review will stick strictly with the Standard version from here on out. My main box for testing Vector Linux 5.9 Standard my aging general purpose laptop, a five year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM). Though this system has adequate memory for any current Linux distro it’s sufficiently challenged in terms of processing power for KDE to be sluggish and for <a href="https://www.gnome.org">Gnome</a> to be noticeably slower than Xfce4 in most distros. Vector Linux is almost to the point where it can seriously considered by almost any user, not just someone experienced with Linux, as most things do work as they should out of the virtual box. Some issues still require manually editing configuration files. I had hoped that by this point VL would be as user friendly as any distro out there but it isn’t there yet. Installation and Configuration Vector Linux 5.9 Standard is available for download as a single iso image. I’ve used both supported installation methods: a conventional installation booted from CD-ROM and a hosted installation booted from another Linux distribution already running on the system. There are two scripts provided for hosted installs: one which runs from an iso image on a mounted filesystem and one which runs from a CD-ROM that isn’t bootable. Directions and all the tools needed for a hosted installation from DOS or Windows are also provided. Installation across a network and automated installations, such as Red Hat’s kickstart, are not supported. Vector Linux still uses an old fashioned text-based installer similar to <a href="https://www.slackware.com">Slackware</a>, which is fine as far as I am concerned. A new, snazzy graphical installer is still promised for Vector Linux 6. I didn’t test to see if the installer now checks for adequate disk space, a problem with the VL 5.8 Standard installer. You need at least 3.2GB for a reasonably complete installation. Disk partitioning is handled smoothly in VL 5.9. ext3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs, and trusty old ext2 are all supported. A list of common mount points is provided but the ability to define a non-standard mount point for a partition is lacking. Much like Slackware, Vector Linux still uses lilo and only lilo for the bootloader. Grub is available in the repository and can be installed after installation. Video hardware detection remains relatively poor compared to other distributions and has not improved since 5.8. For example when I booted up to the GUI I was once again left with a small display in the middle of my screen surrounded by lots of black space. No amount of fiddling with X configuration in vasm (the GUI configuration tool) can make it work the way it should. It turns out the Monitor section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file doesn’t have proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates set and you are warned about this possibility by the installer. In addition, some options required by my laptop screen aren’t set. This problem has shown up for other users of Toshiba laptops with similar chipsets as well. Most major distributions simply don’t have problems like this in 2008. In addition the installer doesn’t setup the system to load the kernel module needed to fully support my laptop at boot. I had to manually add: <pre>modprobe toshiba</pre> to my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file to correct this. On a plain vanilla desktop system this wouldn’t be an issue, of course, but I suspect other laptop users, not just those of us with Toshiba machines, will need to do some tweaking by hand to get their laptops to be 100% functional under Vector Linux. Printing and wireless networking aren’t handled by the installer and have to be configured after the system boots up for the first time. Expect to go into vasm or vasmCC to choose what services to start at boot as well. One unique option in the Vector Linux installer is the ability to chose between HAL and VL-Hot for managing removable media. HAL, used by most distributions, continually polls the hardware and can have a performance impact on slower machines. VL-Hot is triggered by udev events and offers faster performance. It also uses rather long mount point paths which can be annoying if you work at the command line a lot. VL-Hot uses a second desktop icon for unmounting removable media which might be confusing to some. This is typical of many of the innovations found in Vector Linux: power users will love the flexibility and newcomers will wonder what it all means. I think most newcomers to Linux will find HAL easier to deal with. <a href="https://www.seamonkey-project.org/">Seamonkey</a> is the default browser in Vector Linux. Alternate browsers (<a href="https://www.mozilla.com/">Firefox</a>, <a href="https://www.opera.com">Opera</a>, and <a href="https://www.dillo.org">Dillo</a>) are offered as options during installation. OpenOffice is not included in the iso but it is available from the repository after installation. <a href=:https://www.abisource.com">AbiWord</a> and <a href="https://www.gnome.org/gnumeric">Gnumeric</a> are installed by default and <a href="https://scribus.sourceforge.net/">Scribus</a>, a desktop publisher, is an installer option. <a href="https://www.gimp.org">GIMP</a> is also no longer included on the iso but rather is part of the new <a href="https://dweeberkitty.110mb.com/">Multimedia Bonus Disc</a>. The installer and the documentation are in English, period. No other languages are supported despite huge progress in other areas of internationalization and localization. Changes Since Vector Linux 5.8 There have been a huge number of changes in the latest release, both in applications and in configuration tools. Xfce 4.4.2 is the default desktop but VL has returned to the practice of offering alternative, lightweight desktops during the initial installation. This was dropped in 5.8. The alternate choices are JWM 2.0.1 and Fluxbox 1.0.0. KDE 3.5.9 is available in the repository as are a nice selection of lightweight window managers. If you choose Xfce you’ll find a much larger selection of panel applets available compared to 5.8. It’s still not the full selection from <a href="https://goodies.xfce.org/">Xfce Goodies</a> but I suspect most users will find what they want. Thunar is now the only fine manager installed by default but a number of others, including Xfe and pcmanfm, are available in the repository. The biggest steps forward are the tools to manage and configure the system. vasm, the graphical system configuration tool, still isn’t the prettiest out there but it has a lot of functionality and works flawlessly. It’s now joined by vasmCC. The new Control Center is a fully graphical, pretty, and very functional tool for system configuration with most but not quite all the functionality of vasm. It’s reasonably easy to use and generally quite intuitive. OK, it would be more obvious for newcomers if an icon in the Network section was labeled “Network Configuration” instead of “Netconf”, but that’s a minor quibble. Once you get to below the second level of icons things look suspiciously like vasm but that’s to be expected and everything still works flawlessly. <a href="https://wifi-radar.systemimager.org/">WiFi-Radar</a> now allows changing configuration settings within the GUI with a new preferences tab. You no longer a need to manually edit a configuration file to setup a wireless network interface. In addition, the semi-graphical alternative, vwifi, also works flawlessly. <a href="https://software.jaos.org/#gslapt">gslapt</a>, the graphical package manager, now correctly displays dependencies for most packages. All in all configuring Vector Linux is now easier than in any previous release in most cases. Under the hood Vector Linux now runs on a 2.6.22.14 kernel. An <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5717.0">updated 2.6.24.3 kernel</a> is currently in testing. It’s worked flawlessly for me so far but I did have to compile an updated madwifi driver to work with it. That should be included in the final package. Users who stick with the default kernel are well advised to install the <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5560.0">novmsplice module</a> to close a significant security vulnerability which came to light after VL 5.9 was released. Kernel level support for popular laptops works as expected. Tools for my laptop, such as toshset, are in the repository. Multimedia applications including XMMS, Xine, and optionally MPlayer have all been updated. Canada, the home of Vector Linux, has no equivalent to the DMCA so all the libraries and Win32 codecs are installed by default. Vector Linux is ready to play your mp3 files and DVDs right out of the (virtual) box. People in the United States will need to remove some packages after installation in order to comply with the law. k3b, the KDE tool for burning CDs and DVDs, is the nicest of its kind for any platform and is now available as an option during install. KDE does not have to be installed to use k3b in VL, but a number of required KDE libraries are automatically included if you choose this option. The alternative is xfburn, a rather simplistic and limited CD burner designed to integrate with Xfce. Graveman, which I found to be horribly buggy, is no longer included. The number of games included in the iso image have been greatly reduced. The repository does contain a large selection of games that more than makes up for this. One of the most interesting new tools included in Vector Linux 5.9 is vpackager, a remarkably easy to use graphical tool to build packages from source. I suspect a lot of relatively new Linux users who looked at compiling software from source code as a daunting task will be surprised at just how easy it can be with vpackager. vpackager is also designed to work with <a href="https://www.delilinux.de/cruxports4slack.html">CruxPorts4Slax</a> but unfortunately that functionality isn’t quite ready from prime time just yet. When everything works properly there will be a truly easy way to install software directly from source. A <a href="https://www.vectorlinux.com/wiki/doku.php?id=howtos:porting">How-To for wriiting ports</a> for CruxPorts4Slack is included in the Vector Linux Wiki. Running Vector Linux 5.9 Standard Unlike Ubuntu (or Xubuntu or Kubuntu) the VL installer doesn’t leave you with a stripped down system to build on. It takes the approach used by larger distributions (i.e.: Fedora, Suse, Mandriva) and gives you a system with a fairly comprehensive set of applications immediately available after installation and configuration. One of the main reasons I keep coming back to Vector Linux after trying other distributions is because it clearly is the fastest distribution with a decent set of applications and features for my older hardware Once you get past installation and configuration I still give Vector Linux a slight edge over most other distributions in terms of a user friendly, well thought out desktop. I did run into a few bugs. As <a href="https://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2008/02/where_did_the_courier_and_helv_1.html">I previously reported</a> Vetcor Linux 5.9 installs a full set of fonts for X by default but only enables the TrueType and OpenType fonts. Installing a package called <a href="https://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-5.9/testing/base-apps/fontfix-1.0-noarch-2vl59.tlz">fontfix</a>, currently in the testing repository, resolved this problem. Another annoying but minor issue is a display problem in AbiWord. Vector Linux developers chose to go with the latest bleeding edge development version, 2.5.2, rather than the latest stable release. 2.5.2 generally works but I often get a floating part of the toolbar about halfway down my screen. It’s always on top and doesn’t go away when I change instances of AbiWord or even switch to another application window. It only disappears when I close the instance of AbiWord that caused the problem. I’ve also had some interesting (OK, weird) fonts and spacing magically appear in documents. The included version of Opera is also bleeding edge, a preview release of 9.50. It mostly works well but I’ve run into some issues with Javascript and a few web forms. The Vector Linux 5.9 repositories include far more packages than ever before. Unfortunately there is currently a large backlog of packages in the testing repository that haven’t made it to extra just yet. Users may need to enable the testing repository to find applications they want and then disable it again before doing a system upgrade. While the number of packaged applications for Vector Linux continues to grow rapidly it still falls far short of what is available for distributions like Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu, or Fedora. VL 5.9 is based on Slackware 12 and any Slackware packages, including those from third party sources like <a href="https://linuxpackages.net">linuxpackages.net</a> or <a href="https://www.slacky.eu">slacky.eu</a>, should work on Vector with one caveat: dependency checking may not work correctly. It’s pretty easy to end up in dependency hell if you enable third party repositories. Multimedia and graphics software, as well as software of interest to musicians, are not going to be an issue. The selection for Vector Linux is now truly up to par thanks to the new <a href="https://dweeberkitty.110mb.com/">Multimedia Bonus Disc</a>, which deserves a review of its own. Security Concerns and Package Management In my review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard I devoted a lot of space to package management, specifically the fact that for the first time in a distribution derivative of Slackware packages could be handled much the same way as they can in Debian based distributions using slapt-get and gslapt. gslapt is very similar in look and feel to synaptic and works in much the same way. slapt-get is similar to apt-get though the command syntax is different. Other distributions, i.e.: Wolvix 1.1.0, have followed suit. The good news is that throughout the lifecycle of Vector Linux 5.8 and now 5.9 doing a: <pre>slapt-get --update slapt-get --upgrade</pre> does precisely what you’d expect it to: cleanly upgrade your system by finding all the latest patches and updates and installing them. The bad news is that in Vector Linux 5.9 this functionality has been disabled from gslapt, the graphical alternative. Writing in the Vector Linux forum, one user who calls herself GrannyGeek put it this way: <blockquote>I’m not glad at all that the Mark All Upgrades and View Marked have been disabled. This is nannyism at its worst. I *like* to be able to see what upgrades are available in a way that’s less laborious than going through the whole lengthy list of packages. Marking upgrades and viewing what’s marked was a convenient way to do this.</blockquote> Disabling that feature was a really bad idea because it makes keeping a system secure difficult for a Linux newcomer. There is now no automated method within the GUI to determine what patches are out there and install them. It’s worse than that. While the Vector Linux developers have been lightning fast at getting new packages out to close security vulnerabilities since the release of 5.9, there is no set method to inform users that a patch is available or even necessary. A security section exists within the forum but it isn’t used. This wasn’t a big issue in VL 5.8 because one quick check of gslapt would show you what’s out there. That simply isn’t true any longer for users who aren’t knowledgeable and comfortable on the command line. Internationalization and Localization Support for languages other than English has always been an area where Vector Linux was weak compared to other distributions. There has been tremendous improvement in VL 5.9 in terms of providing the tools necessary for supporting a large variety of languages. What is still lacking are graphical configuration tools to allow a newcomer to change language, locale, and keyboard settings for the system default, individual users, or on a session by session bases. A wide variety of international font sets for languages that use non-Latin character sets are now installed by default. One one hand I’m not sure how many Vector Linux users are likely to need the Syriac or Ethiopic fonts which are installed. On the other hand Vector Linux is probably the only distro where probably every web page in the world will likely be displayed correctly out of the box. Whether a user can read what’s displayed is another matter. I should note that the full set of Cyrillic fonts for X is installed by default but not enabled. The fontfix package I referred to earlier does remedy this. In addition the selection of fonts for a given set of non-Latin glyphs is generally small. Additional font packages are beginning to show up in the repository. KDE i18n packages are in the main repository. fribidi, the software at the core of support for languages written right to left such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, is installed by default. The Xfce4 keyboard switching applet is also included. That applet doesn’t alter the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, though, so if you don’t have KDE installed you still have to manually edit that file to add support for additional keyboard layouts other than your chosen default. A full set of aspell dictionaries are now in the repository as are language packs for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird. This is a huge step forward. Strangely langauge packs for Seamonkey, the default browser in VL, aren’t there yet. Open Office internationalization packages and dictionaries are also still missing. If your goal is a truly localized system, not just a system running in English with support for other languages, you still need to do significant work to make it happen in Vector Linux Standard. Most all packages are now built with whatever translations are available. However, the default display manager is a rebuilt, trimmed down version of kdm. As previously noted language switching at login is not supported. If you want to change the default language or locale you have to do it at the command line and/or by editing appropriate configuration files. Conclusions Many of the issues I complained about in my previous review of Vector Linux 5.8 were fixed in 5.9. The installer still has some issues with hardware detection on my laptop. I had to do only minor configuration tweaking after installation and I was up and running. Someone with well supported desktop hardware might find the Vector Linux “just works” for them. Internationalization and localization are vastly improved in VL 5.9 but there still is a long way to go to make it user friendly and some packages are still lacking. Once you have Vector Linux installed, configured, and customized to your needs it’s an absolute pleasure to run. It’s fast and sleek and well thought out. Experienced Linux users and those willing to roll up their sleeves and learn will likely find Vector Linux to be one of the best desktop distributions out there. Newcomers and anyone else who just wants things to work after a simple installation may still find that getting Vector Linux 5.9 is still an exercise in frustration if there is anything that isn’t vanilla in their system. Those whose primary language is something other than English and aren’t bothered by the lack of GUI tools may find that Vector Linux 5.9 finally meets there needs. Newcomers to Linux and anyone uncomfortable with manually editing configuration files will find that getting VL to work for them in their own language is more than they bargained for. Vector Linux 5.9 is their best release yet. It just isn’t for everyone. Vector Linux was about 90% of the way to being about the best distro out there a year ago. While tremendous progress has been made in some areas in other areas, like keeping a system upgraded and secure, VL actually took a step backwards with this release. With a little more attention to the needs of newcomers Vector Linux could become the next big Linux distribution. I have yet to find a perfect Linux distribution and I have never written a review where I didn’t find something to complain about. Even with the issues I’ve raised Vector Linux is still my favorite distribution for the desktop or laptop. Server load, and keyboards tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23229 2008-03-13T13:47:25Z 2008-03-13T13:47:31Z

I have a server (LDAP and NFS) which occasionally seems to take a while to react. Load average is consistently high (10-12 for 4 CPUs, which AIUI means 2.5-3 per CPU); response may also be being affected by disk I/O....

Juliet Kemp I have a server (LDAP and NFS) which occasionally seems to take a while to react. Load average is consistently high (10-12 for 4 CPUs, which AIUI means 2.5-3 per CPU); response may also be being affected by disk I/O. I’d like to find out which processes in particular are causing the heavy load, and possibly also to track disk I/O activity over say a 24 hr period. Unfortunately, this has exposed a shocking lack in my knowledge, viz: I have no idea how to do this, what tools are out there, etc etc. (Obviously I am fortunate never to have encountered performance issues before; all my machines have previously either Worked or Not Worked.) Any suggestions? (The other possibility is a network load issue, but as I’m not responsible for the network, tracking that might be tougher.) Another, unconnected query: I have been asked to source quiet/silent keyboards for a couple of my colleagues who are noisy typers. Any recommendations? I’ve looked at the Saitek Eclipse but it sounds like it’s not very tough. Bonus virtual biscuit for recommendations which are actually available to buy in the UK (the IBM Quiet Touch appears not to be, for example). Real biscuit available to anyone able to implement a biscuit-over-IP protocol; failing that I shall just eat them all myself. Schmoozing O'Reilly Authors tag:www.oreillynet.com,2008:/linux/blog//15.23223 2008-03-12T20:35:42Z 2008-03-12T20:36:47Z

O'Reilly has a brand-new feature, book forums at https://forums.oreilly.com/category/13/Book-Forums/. Gab with your favorite authors and other readers. I'll be posting tips and cool hacks that didn't make it into the Linux Networking Cookbook. Come on down and join the fun!...

Carla Schroder O’Reilly has a brand-new feature, book forums at <a href="https://forums.oreilly.com/category/13/Book-Forums/">https://forums.oreilly.com/category/13/Book-Forums/</a>. Gab with your favorite authors and other readers. I’ll be posting tips and cool hacks that didn’t make it into the Linux Networking Cookbook. Come on down and join the fun!

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