Top 5 iPod Alternatives for Linux Users Learning Ubuntu: "Why support a company that doesn't support what you use?
The iPod is a great MP3 player, but there are several other MP3 players which are better then the iPod, and support all of the major operating systems as well." (Nov 15, 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
Editor's Note: Cloud is Just Another Word for "Sucker"
We might warn about privacy, security, and reliability problems in cloud computing, but it's coming and we can't stop it. So do we join the cloud party? Heck no. Nov 14, 2009
SSDs Take Center Stage (Nov 19, 2009, 14:33 UTC) (1262 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Enterprise IT Planet: "Solid state drives (SSDs) — also known as flash — are everywhere. In fact, they may even have done a great service to mankind by diverting messaging away from green IT. The big server and storage OEMs seem to have gotten over their fixation with green IT, courtesy of their enthusiasm for SSD."
Why NAS Might Overtake SAN Storage (Nov 17, 2009, 20:47 UTC) (1912 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Enterprise Storage Forum: "Many IT organizations today are scratching their heads debating whether the advantages of implementing a SAN solution justify the associated costs. Others are trying to get a handle on today's storage options and whether SAN is simply Network Attached Storage spelled backwards."
Some PowerTOP updates (Nov 17, 2009, 14:33 UTC) (1119 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Arjan van de Ven's blog: "There are three new power saving checks in the current git version of PowerTOP. Each feature needs a small kernel patch to give PowerTOP the information it needs; the three patches are currently making their way through the various maintainer trees and code reviews, hopefully for inclusion in the 2.6.33 kernel."
GNU/Linux Just Became Topper (Nov 17, 2009, 13:03 UTC) (1916 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Open Enterprise: "One of my favourite sites for anyone benighted enough to believe that Windows is in any sense superior technology to free software is Top500."
Rackspace CEO says cloud computing is a game changer (Nov 16, 2009, 19:04 UTC) (995 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Cloudy News: "Rackspace has been an especially hot company on Wall Street... Rackspace grew its topline at an enviable 17 percent year-over-year.
The company’s CEO is giving cloud computing a healthy share of the credit."
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores (Nov 16, 2009, 15:34 UTC) (2097 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Register Hardware: "The single biggest transition in the list is the move to quad-core - and in some notable cases, six-core - processors inside supercomputing systems. And most of the machines on the list now run Linux with x64 processors."
Introduction to iSCSI (Nov 10, 2009, 13:33 UTC) (2126 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "iSCSI is one of the hottest topics in Storage because it allows you to create centralized SANs using TCP networks rather than Fibre Channel (FC) networks. Get a handle on the main iSCSI concepts and terminology."
Linux Powers Climate Research: 400TB of Data and Counting (Nov 9, 2009, 17:33 UTC) (1290 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) LinuxPlanet: "A Linux-powered cluster holds one of the world's largest distributed databases. Juliet Kemp reports on the CERA-2 (Climate and Environmental Retrieving and Archiving) database system, which fuels a vast international archive and data distribution center for climate research data."
KS2009: How Google uses Linux (Nov 9, 2009, 14:03 UTC) (2399 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) LWN.net: "There may be no single organization which runs more Linux systems than Google. But the kernel development community knows little about how Google uses Linux and what sort of problems are encountered there."
Helping Out SSDs (Nov 4, 2009, 22:33 UTC) (1838 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) (1316 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) (2443 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) (1664 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) (1453 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) (2310 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) (2072 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) (1572 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) (1536 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) (2331 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) (1354 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) (1619 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) (2283 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) (2298 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) (3194 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) (5175 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) (2844 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) (2562 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) (2789 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) (1969 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) (2484 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) (1915 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) (4651 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) (2375 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."
