Most Popular Articles

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

Once upon a time, Java was persona non grata on Linux distributions.

Your programs are more reliable and often faster when you code with careful memory techniques. Those advantages come at a low cost, too: the ideas behind the five tips presented below are simple enough to understand on a first reading. Start to practice them today, and you'll soon see pay-offs in the the applications or libraries you write.

Linux today supports more hardware devices than any other operating system in the history of the world. It does this using a development model significantly different from the familiar Windows device driver model. The Linux development process continues to evolve to better support the needs of Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs), distributions, and other members of the community, and the advantages of the Linux model are increasing with time.

While Linux is officially a monolithic kernel, it does permit dynamic extensibility with loadable kernel modules. In this article, we'll explore the various tools and processes that support dynamic kernel customization. We'll also explore the various configuration mechanisms available for module configuration.