Most Popular Articles

Ever wanted to learn Vim, but weren't sure how to start? No problem. We have you covered! This will be the first of a four-part (possibly longer) series covering how to use Vim and where to start using the world's best text editor. Note that this is an article explicitly for beginners new to Vim. If you've been using Vim for a while, all of this should look entirely familiar--and you might wonder why some topics aren't covered. Patience. We'll get to everything in due time, but there's a lot to... [more]

With the advent of Web 2.0 and Software as a Service, cloud computing has come into vogue. Cloud computing has become synonymous with providing services anywhere anytime with the basic requirement being access to the internet. As a new model, cloud computing promises to make any online service available without a large upfront investment in infrastructure. The economics of running a full infrastructure changes dramatically since you only pay for what you use.... [more]

In another step towards general release, the first beta of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0 was released today. LSB 4.0 will introduce a new application checker, a new shell script checker, and a new multi-version software development kit (SDK) that will enable developers to build applications to earlier LSB specifications without changing SDKs.

Creating applications with a visually appealing graphical user interface (GUI) requires some type of foundational toolkit to make the job practical. The leading candidates for Linux are the toolkits behind the two most popular desktop environments--namely GNOME and KDE. While they represent similar functionality, they are two totally different entities with different design philosophies and structure.

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month.

The gnuplot package can be used to generate some very slick two and three dimensional graphs. Tools such as IOzone make use of gnuplot to generate three dimensional plots letting you see the relative effect that the size of IO requests has on performance.

Part one of this article, Cloud Computing and Open Source, presented an overview of several cloud computing solutions available today that are friendly to open source. In this article we'll focus on one of these solutions, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and walk through the development of an open source mashup for EC2. Amazon EC2 is a top player in the cloud computing space and gives organizations the ability to leverage world-class compute resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.... [more]

Upon examination the Linux Standard Base, in the currently released form, is missing one large camp of developers and applications—namely Java. That’s not to say you can’t run Java applications on essentially every Linux distribution. What it does say is there is no “LSB certified” offering for developers to target, giving them 100% confidence that their application will run as they intend it to.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of Linux. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed). This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under ... [more]

In this third article, I will present some benchmark results for the systems I discussed before.