Red Hat announced the newest version of their flagship Linux distribution today RHE (Red Hat Enterprise) 4.

This is more geared towards companies that need specific application support for things like Oracle or for those who need phone support, so it doesn’t affect the average Linux user that much. It’s nice to see they’ve got the latest major kernel version (2.6.9) in there now though, and some other nice features as well:

– Improvements to the ext3 filesystem
– LVM (logical volume manager) updates and improvements
– Better multi-processor support
– Security Enhanced Linux support

I’ve been using RHE 3 in a few spots for the past year or so and have been pretty impressed in terms of an ‘easy to use’ enterprise level Linux distro. Hopefully I can get a machine with the new version soon to test it out as well, since the price of around $1,500 is a bit much for me :)

The presentation this weekend I gave for the Milwaukee LUG (linux users group) went pretty well! There were about 27 people who showed up for the presentation on Saturday, one of which was Jenny, who was a trooper for sitting through all the Unix in-jokes and showing her support. It was nice to have her there, so she could see a little bit of what I actually do for a living instead of just hearing about it, and she says she learned a few things about Linux by being at the presentation.

For those interested, a PDF copy of my presentation on recompiling the Linux kernel is here.

One other person of interest in attendance at Saturdays meeting was Rick Miller, one of the original Linux kernel developers. When he said who he was during the beginning introductions, I have to admit I felt a bit nervous about giving a presentation on the Linux kernel to one of the original kernel developers.

It’s a bit like teaching a Greek literature class where on the first day, Aristotle himself shows up and lets you know he’ll be auditing your class. Well, maybe Linus Torvalds showing up for the presentation would be like Aristotle or Plato, but you get the point. I was giving a talk on something this guy had a part in creating, and that’s a bit daunting to say the least.

However, the presentation rolled on and out of the corner of my eye I found him nodding in agreement with me on most of the points I was making, and he jumped in a few times to clarify or provide some back story on certain other points which was interesting and educational.

At the end of the two hour talk, everyone seemed to have enjoyed the presentation, Rick included. He said he learned a few things about the 2.6 series Linux kernel which he wasn’t that familiar with from my presentation. That was a nice compliment to say the least.

Overall it felt pretty nice to get back up in front of a group of people and talk about something I’m familiar with, we’ll have to see if I can find other opportunities to continue doing it…

It’s been a long time since I’ve given any sort of presentation, but the drought ends this weekend when I give a presentation on compiling the Linux Kernel this weekend for the Milwaukee Linux Users Group (MLUG).

The meetings are held at the Waukesha County Technical College (directions here) in room B079 of he Business Occupations building, and I’ll be talking at 1pm. If you’re interested in the in’s and out’s of the Linux Kernel (and who isn’t?!??!) stop by for the presentation and say hi!

Hey, I still write about Linux and Technology too!

The 2.6.9 version of the Linux kernel was released yesterday, much to the delight of those of us who couldn’t burn CD’s with 2.6.8.1 :)

The French Government decided last week to replace 1500 of it’s WindowsNT servers with Mandrake based Linux servers:

The French Ministry of Equipment has chosen Mandrakelinux Corporate Server to replace 1,500 Microsoft Windows NT servers in a national scale deployment. Recently, Civil Service
Minister Renaud Dutreil was quoted in Reuters as saying “the competition is open” between open-source and Microsoft for the nearly one million government computers. Mandrakesoft is proud to supply the
operating system for the Ministry of Equipment deployment, and to supply open-source alternatives to governments around the world. – Mandrakesoft

1500 servers is a pretty big contract, congrats to Mandrake! Now, if only we could start getting the US government to start seeing the benefits of Open Source…

A double kernel release today from the Penguin gods.. The linux kernel 2.6.3 was released today, and has numerous fixes for things like SCSI, PnP, USB, ACPI, ALSA, IRDA, i2c, hotplug-PCI, NFSv4 and everyone’s favorite filesystem, XFS.

The older 2.4 series kernel was also updated today to version 2.4.25.

The newest edition of the Linux family is here, just in time for Christmas!

The 2.6 kernel has improvements in SMP, the VM, offers pre-emptive scheduling, a new sound architechture, crypto enhancements, and of course XFS!

Pardon me while I check to see if a certain XFS patch made it into the main 2.6 kernel yet ;)

Good news on the filesystem front! The XFS filesystem has been merged into the main 2.4 kernel this morning by Marcelo Tosatti (the 2.4 kernel maintaner).

I’ve been using XFS for just over three years and can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve been working on a patch over the last few months for the 2.6 kernel for a hardware specific XFS bug that causes it to crash on a particular Dual AMD motherboard. Getting a major chunk of code into the Linux kernel is a pretty big deal, especially when you consider that many of the main kernel developers don’t care much for XFS (whether thats because they develop their own competing filesystem (ext3, reiserfs, jfs) or because they still think of XFS as an archaic Irix filesystem) and there are a few XFS hooks into the VM of the linux kernel.

This is kind of a big deal because future stable 2.4 kernel releases will come with XFS ‘out of the box’ meaning device developers (for one) will be able to incorporate the features XFS brings to the table into their products and not have to worry about maintaing their own seperate kernel branch where XFS is included. This move also makes a lot of sense because XFS is already in the 2.6 kernel tree.

So thanks to all the folks who work on XFS for bringing a great filesystem into the mainstream!

The XFS filesystem has been in the press quite a bit over the past few days due to SCO’s claims of ownership over it and other technologies. This has led a lot of people to ask what XFS stands for. Even well known open source leaders aren’t sure what the acronym stands for it seems, as Bruce Parens refers to it as the ‘eXtent File System’ in discussion about the SCO claims.

So today Steve Lord, principal filesystem engineer at SGI and XFS developer, sent out the following note to clear up the confusion:

Just in case you were wondering what X stood for in XFS – some folks

out there seem to be putting the X in the middle of words recently.

The X does not stand for anything except X, it is not eXtent, or

eXtended or any other word.

Originally the project was internally refered to as xFS, presumably

until marketing came up with a letter or name which was deemed

acceptable. After a while the x just stuck without having a

meaning assigned to it, and it was capitalized.

Think of it as a little like the G in GNU, the X in XFS stands

for XFS ;-)

Steve