LinuxCon North America
LinuxCon North America
At the recent LinuxCon North America [1] in Vancouver, Canada, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the start of the Linux Kernel project. Many of the best developers in the community were there, and we had “gala” events celebrating the past 20 years. Although the Linux kernel tends to dominate aspects of computing such as high-performance computing, embedded systems design, and servers, several people acknowledged that we still have not enjoyed “the year of the Linux desktop.”
This particular conference stirred up a lot of retrospection. Jon Corbett, who normally does a bang-up job telling us what is new in the Linux kernel, went back a bit in time and showed some of the early timeline issues that almost derailed kernel development. Fortunately, the community was ready to tackle those issues, which tended to be more procedural and structural, concerning how to scale development, than technical, concerning how to scale the kernel itself.
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM gave a fascinating view into some of the early meetings that IBM had on the Linux kernel and the decisions that led them to invest that first billion dollars. What was really news to me was the effort IBM made to investigate and view Linux from every angle before making that decision, and one of the main considerations was that “Linux would run on everything.” IBM realized that the community would make Linux run on everything from the very smallest computers to the very largest, and to them, this created real value for the OS that could not be matched by any other operating system.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
PipeWire 1.0 Officially Released
PipeWire was created to take the place of the oft-troubled PulseAudio and has finally reached the 1.0 status as a major update with plenty of improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Rocky Linux 9.3 Available for Download
The latest version of the RHEL alternative is now available and brings back cloud and container images for ppc64le along with plenty of new features and fixes.
-
Ubuntu Budgie Shifts How to Tackle Wayland
Ubuntu Budgie has yet to make the switch to Wayland but with a change in approaches, they're finally on track to making it happen.
-
TUXEDO's New Ultraportable Linux Workstation Released
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 blends portability with power, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU.
-
AlmaLinux Will No Longer Be "Just Another RHEL Clone"
With the release of AlmaLinux 9.3, the distribution will be built entirely from upstream sources.
-
elementary OS 8 Has a Big Surprise in Store
When elementary OS 8 finally arrives, it will not only be based on Ubuntu 24.04 but it will also default to Wayland for better performance and security.
-
OpenELA Releases Enterprise Linux Source Code
With Red Hat restricting the source for RHEL, it was only a matter of time before those who depended on that source struck out on their own.
-
StripedFly Malware Hiding in Plain Sight as a Cryptocurrency Miner
A rather deceptive piece of malware has infected 1 million Windows and Linux hosts since 2017.
-
Experimental Wayland Support Planned for Linux Mint 21.3
As with most Linux distributions, the migration to Wayland is in full force. While some distributions have already made the move, Linux Mint has been a bit slower to do so.
-
Window Maker Live 0.96.0-0 Released
If you're a fan of the Window Maker window manager, there's a new official release of the Linux distribution that champions the old-school user interface.