Ten tricks to make Linux boot faster, Jul 30, 2008

Linux rarely needs to be rebooted but, when it does, it often takes longer than you'd like.

The other day I blogged about how the Foxconn G33M-S motherboard didn’t play nicely with Linux because it broke ACPI support. Well, as it turns out the problem isn’t a Foxconn one but it’s down to American Megatrends (AMI) having shipped a defective BIOS. Also, as it turns out, other boards are also affected.

In watching the many negative blog posts and comments about Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” — designed to try to distinguish perception from reality around Vista — I can’t help but wonder how different the take would be if it were Apple doing the same kind of marketing campaign.

I just renamed my two previous blogs about migrating from Windows XP to SLED 10 in a business environment as “Linux Desktop Odyssey” so everyone can easily keep up with my progress.

Purple Labs, a company based in France with a multinational management team, is pushing Linux mobile phones outward in capabilities and downward in price.

Considering how crowded many Japanese cities are, it’s not surprising that local vendors like Plat’Home are increasingly eco-conscious. Smaller systems just make business sense.

A company is now selling what it calls the "world's cheapest laptop," which at US$130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations.

The GNU/Linux operating system is blessed to have sound partition management tools like GParted which are very easy to use. However, when it comes to the management of 'virtual partitions' known as volumes, things are quite different.

On those infrequent occasions when you need to reboot Linux, you may find that the process takes longer than you’d like. Jack Wallen shares a number of tricks you can use to reduce boot times.

Donald Becker, an MIT grad who in the 1990s pioneered high-performance computing (HPC) with commodity components, returned to his alma mater recently to update the Boston Linux & Unix User Group (BLU) on the state of HPC and his work to make Linux clusters more powerful, more user-friendly and easier to manage

In an ITWire tale, Paul Harapin, VMware's managing director for Australia and New Zealand said Windows is already being replaced by virtual appliances running on Linux. In ten-years, there will be no more Windows.

Forget fear, uncertainty and doubt. How do Windows Vista and Linux really compare against each other? It’s one thing to talk about the familiar applications available to Windows users contrasted with the rich suite of free open source apps for Linux, but something totally different to actually compare the loads of the two operating systems as they perform functionally identical tasks.

As you might imagine, “the UNIX Haters Handbook” is a list of reasons to dislike UNIX. Concomitantly, the LinuxHaters blog does the same for Linux.

Face it: Linux is still intimidating to most PC users. And that has nothing to do with the occasional Linux snobbery that newbies can encounter when searching message forums for basic help in getting up and running.

Virtualisation is a technology that can work wonders: provide a testing environment, enhance your processing power, consolidate your computing resources, decrease running costs, preserve legacy apps and more! Here’s how virtualisation can benefit you and why the Linux route really beats out the competition.

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