Penguin 2k

Developed from the efforts and sentiments of millions of

users across the Internet, Linux has gained wide acceptance even from staunch

Windows users. Called a hacker’s OS in its infancy, Linux has many

distributions for desktops and the enterprise. Overall, Linux gained wider

acceptance this year from vendors, developers, and users. Let’s take a look at

some of these developments.

Linux is not only available on the x86 platform, but has also

been ported to RISC-based platforms like Alpha, SGI, and MIPS. This high

portability is due to the modular structure of the Linux kernel. Moreover, there

are ongoing projects for porting Linux to Palm Pilots and even Windows CE-based

handhelds. Under a project called Trillian, the Linux kernel has been ported to

Intel’s upcoming 64-bit Itanium processor. Various motherboard manufacturers

like Intel, VIA, and Ali are bundling Linux drivers along with the regular ones

for various versions of Windows. So, Linux can run happily on the latest

chipsets like Intel’s i815 and also supports ATA-66 (66 MB/sec burst transfer

rate) and the latest ATA-100 (100 MB/sec burst transfer rate) interface for hard

disks.

Hardware support

Earlier, Linux had a separate X server called XFree86 (the

Linux GUI) for each graphics chipset. However, this has ended with the release

of XFree86 4. With this, Linux drivers for each chipset can be developed as

loadable modules, just like drivers in Windows. XFree86 4 also uses what’s

called a DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure), which is somewhat similar to

DirectX in Windows. It’s a set of APIs that interact with the hardware, making

it easy to develop graphics and gaming applications on Linux. Voodoo 3 cards

support the DRI technology. nVIDIA has developed Linux drivers for its latest

chipsets, which can be freely downloaded from its Website–www.nvidia. com.

Linux has a separate X server for the NetMagic graphics chipset as well, which

is used in many notebooks.

Linux is improving its sound support with the ALSA (Advanced

Linux Sound Architecture) project. This is aimed at developing sound driver

modules for sound cards. Various sound applications are also being developed,

which will be as advanced as those on Windows platforms. Apart from the good old

OSS (Open Source Sound) projects, ALSA also supports popular chipsets like the

EMU10K1 for Sound Blaster Live sound cards and various Yamaha chipsets.

USB devices are fast becoming common, which has reduced the

popularity of serial (RS232) and parallel (Centronics) interfaces for

peripherals. The FireWire interface has been around for a while, and has gained

popularity among the multimedia community as a fast interface for video capture.

Linux has been keeping up with this trend, and offers support for FireWire with

kernel 2.3.99 and USB in kernel 2.4.0-test kernel (still under development).

Though DVDs are not very popular in this country, they’ve

gained a lot of acceptance worldwide. Their advantage lies in the fact that they’re

the size of CDs, but have massive storage capacity. DVD functionality can be

built into the existing stable kernel releases of Linux by downloading and

installing patches. Otherwise, the upcoming 2.3.x series would have this

functionality built in. Linux can now understand and use hardware DVD decoders

like Creative’s Dxr2. Dolby AC3 decoders for Linux like ac3dec are also freely

downloadable. The projects OpenDVD and LiViD are aimed at playing DVDs on Linux.

A company called InterVideo, which develops software DVD players for Windows, is

now porting them to Linux.

Software support

The core of Linux is its kernel. Though a Linux distribution

like Red Hat will offer you the latest kernel during its release, you can always

upgrade it by downloading the latest kernel source code or by applying patches

to the existing kernel. www. kernel.org is a good site for the latest kernel

downloads. Currently, 2.2.17 is the tested and stable kernel, and an alpha

release 2.4.0-test10 and an alpha pre-patch version 2.4.0-test11/pre4 are

available.

Windows has always enjoyed wider application support

vis-à-vis Linux. However, Linux has now been receiving a lot of attention from

software developers, and more applications are being ported to it. Corel

WordPerfect 8 and StarOffice 5.2 for Linux have been around for a while. Recent

news is that another office suite called Koffice from the makers of K-Desktop

Environment is in the making, though there’s no official release yet. Rumor

also has it that a Linux version of Microsoft Office has already been developed.

As far as browsers are concerned, Netscape Navigator 6 is the

latest version for Linux. Opera has also developed a browser for Linux, which is

in its beta release 4.0b2. The latest GUI for Linux, KDE2, has a browser called

the Konqueror, that supports JavaScript, HTML 4, CSS 1 and 2, and even

recognizes Netscape plug-ins, like those for Flash, RealAudio etc. Flash

plug-ins, as well as RealAudio and RealVideo are now available for Linux.

For programmers, Java compilers for Linux–as latest as

version 1.3–are readily downloadable. CORBA implementation in the form of the

CORBA ORB (Object Request Broker) is also available from OmniORB and VisiBroker.

Linux isn’t exactly known for its gaming support. However,

some commercial games like HopkinsFBI, Quake III, Soldier of Fortune, and

Descent 3 now have a Linux version. More games are expected to be ported with

the release of XFree86 4 and support for more graphics chipsets. If games don’t

natively support Linux, they can be run on top of an emulator like the

ever-popular WINE, which emulates Windows API on Linux for Win32 applications.

The Linux kernel, its applications, tools, utilities, etc are

scattered on the Internet. Linux distributors pack them all into nice boxes with

manuals, generally with text-based or graphical installation wizards. Some

companies also bundle their own tools, like Kudzo for hardware detection in Red

Hat, Yast in SuSe, and Linuxconf for system administration in Red Hat. Some of

the popular Linux distributions are Red Hat, Debian, SuSe, Caldera OpenLinux,

Mandrake, and Slakeware. This year also saw some new entrants like Storm Linux,

Corel Linux, and Arayabhatt Linux.

Shekhar Govindarajan

Growth

susceptibility of system information

"dmesg" is a file that

contains boot-up messages and is perhaps the smallest of the log files.

"maillog", as is obvious, contains a log of all incoming and outgoing e-mail.

These are created by the message transfer agent (MTA) on the system. Sendmail is the

default MTA on Linux, and logs generated by it are logged in maillog. The amount of log

information in this file depends on the log level setting in the sendmail configuration

file sendmail.cf.

"messages" is a good storehouse

of information. The kernel and many other applications that you use are programmed to log

their information to this file. The log information in this file is coordinated by a

mechanism called syslog (short for system log), with the syslog daemon (syslogd) providing

the mechanism on the system. "named" logs its messages in this file, and so does

"pppd" when you use it in debug mode. I have a small script, "nuke"

that I wrote to kill processes on my system, and this uses syslog to log information in

the messages file about the processes it killed. The "secure" file logs connect

and login attempts into your ftp server, as well as failed remote login attempts into your

machine. The "wtmp" file provides a record of user logins and their session

times, and "last" is a utility that uses this file to provide the data in a

readable format. last is typically used to examine the chronological sequence of logins to

the system.

Now that you’ve some idea of how

system information uses up disk storage, it’s important to prune these files and

release disk space. logrotate can be used very effectively to do this. But, it isn’t

enough to rotate and throw away the system information. It’s essential to scan the

system information at least on a daily basis, to ensure that the system and all

applications are working fine. From the system security perspective, it’s an

invaluable practice to scan this information. Hence, there is a need to backup these

important log files. (Refer to the article Backups and Disaster Recovery in PC

Quest, March 1999, page 83)

I’ve touched upon a very small but

essential part of system administration here. The amount of system log information

generated is proportional to usage, the number of users as well as the applications

running. For example, if it’s a personal machine and you use e-mail heavily,

you’ll probably have to pay attention to the size of /var/log/maillog.

If as a systems administrator, I were to be

granted a wish, I’d wish that future releases of Linux include in them an automated

report generator that would give me a report periodically—a summary of the valuable

information in all these log files. In my next article, we’ll take a closer look at

logrotate.