About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.

Now you see things like people managing to do the original Super Mario Bros game from the 80s in under five minutes, and I do mean people. There are actual humans frobbing plastic controllers doing this! Just dig around on your favorite giant video-streaming site if you need evidence of this happening.

So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope.

DebianDog is very small Debian Live CD shaped to look and act like Puppy Linux. Debian structure and Debian behaviour are untouched and Debian documentation is 100% valid for DebianDog. You have access to all Debian repositories using apt-get or synaptic.

From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successful) writing my own spinlocks, mutexes and condition variables and even contributing a patch to the Linux kernel. The main thing I’ll try to answer is to give some more informed guidance on the endless discussion of mutex vs spinlock. Besides that I found that most mutex implementations are really good, that most spinlock implementations are pretty bad, and that the Linux scheduler is OK but far from ideal.

A shell tool from GNU for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers; it can split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

As the name implies, Task spooler is a Unix batch system that can be used to add the Linux commands to the queue and execute them one after the other in numerical order (ascending order, to be precise). This can be very useful when you have to run a lots of commands, but you don't want to waste time waiting for one command to finish and run the next command. You can queue it all up and Task Spooler will execute them one by one. In the mean time, you can do other activities.

by Ben Laurie

The modern world doesn’t look like this at all. All the files on a typical computer belong to a non-expert user (for simplicity I am ignoring shared devices — this doesn’t really undermine the argument as I hope you will see). Indeed, the whole computer typically belongs to a single user. Printers do not need accounting and similarly belong to the same user. The enemy is the software that is running on the machine. Users no longer have a good understanding of the software they run. Software is enormously complex and uses all sorts of resources, many distributed over multiple systems, to accomplish their tasks. And frequently their task is only superficially in service of the user.

In short, the old threat model was untrusted tenants, trusted software, unit of protection is files and devices. The new threat model is trusted tenants, untrusted software, unit of protection is individual data items.

From Josh Mcguigan.

This is a tutorial on building your own shell using Rust, in the spirit of the build-your-own-x list. Creating a shell is a great way to understand how the shell, terminal emulator, and OS work together.

Imagine mobile phones running a desirable operating system, at a reasonable cost. Not running Google or any other “data hungry” services.

And at the same time, mobile phone operating systems where personal and corporate users can install and use the mainstream applications of their choice, if they wish so.

That’s what /e/ is going to provide: attractive mobile phone operating systems with better privacy.

Qubes is a security-oriented, free and open-source operating system for personal computers that allows you to securely compartmentalize your digital life.

Deep dive into Go Memory Management. This post gives an overview of Physical memory, Virtual memory, how Operating System interacts with hardware to run applications.

Systemd è un ambiente avanzato nel quale è possibile confinare programmi e distribuzioni, ideale anche come container per testare applicazioni in fase di sviluppo

Olimex Ltd is a leading provider for development tools and programmers for embedded market. It is established in 1991 in Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria.

The company has over 20 years’ experience in designing, prototyping and manufacturing printed circuit boards, sub-assemblies, and complete electronic products.

Extensive knowledge is in analog, digital, and microcontroller design, and we offer our own-designed development boards, programmers and emulators for rapid prototyping ARM, AVR, MSP430, MAXQ and PIC microcontrollers.

Olimex is recognized as an approved Third Party Hardware Developer by Texas Istruments Inc., Maxim-Dallas Inc., Atmel Inc., Philips Semiconductors Inc., ST Microelectronics Inc., IAR Systems AB, Cirrus Logic Inc., OKI Semiconductor Inc, Energy Micro Inc., Microchip Inc. and we have over 30,000 active customer accounts who regularly use our services for electronic boards development and prototyping. Our design capabilities are backed by our own PCB prototype production and assembly facility, so all designs made by us are created with Design-For-Manufacturing in mind - which guarantees that they are optimized for reliability and provide cost-effective solutions for our customers.

We are a company of about 20 high qualified Engineers. One third of us have a PhD degree. We also have over 10 years of experience in national and international research projects.

A collection of RPMs for making Red Hat and Fedora Core platforms good for music.