Computer Science from the Bottom Up — A free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals and system library fundamentals.
Category: Linux
Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.
And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.
Linux and open source have won
I knew this would happen for a long time. I knew it happened. But even if that’s nothing new, it’s still nice to hear – “Linux and open source have won, get over it“:
In 2015, Microsoft embraced Linux, Apple open-sourced its newest, hottest programming language, and the cloud couldn’t run without Linux and open-source software. So, why can’t people accept that Linux and open source have won the software wars?
This is a huge and import change in technology, which has major affect on the rest of the world. It’s nice to know that I’ve played a small part in that.
Files Are Hard
“Files Are Hard” is one of those articles that show how complex even the simplest of things are. How complex is writing to a file? Well, quite. Especially if you want to make sure there’s no corruption in case of a crash. It goes both over the theory and practice, looking at different file systems.
darktable 2.0 released
For those people who think Gimp is the only image editor on Linux, here’s darktable 2.0. I mentioned it briefly before, but never linked to it. Linux Weekly News has reviewed the release candidate recently. Have a look at the features page – it’s quite extensive. If you are more of a visual person, there here are a few screenshots.
CPU Steal Time. Now on Amazon EC2
Yesterday I wrote the blog post, trying to figure out what is the CPU steal time and why it occurs. The problem with that post was that I didn’t go deep enough.
I was looking at this issue from the point of view of a generic virtual machine. The case that I had to deal with wasn’t exactly like that. I saw the CPU steal time on the Amazon EC2 instance. Assuming that these were just my neighbors acting up or Amazon having a temporary hardware issue was a wrong conclusion.
That’s because I didn’t know enough about Amazon EC2. Well, I’ve learned a bunch since then, so here’s what I found.
Continue reading CPU Steal Time. Now on Amazon EC2