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The Eee PC is not only an excellent way of promoting Linux among the masses, it is a great device to have around the house

Interviews The A-Z of Programming Languages: BASH/Bourne-Again ShellWhen the Bourne Shell found its identity

in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

In BASH's case, the problem to be solved was a free software version of the Posix standard shell to be part of the GNU system.

Fedora 9 will include KDE 4.0.3 by default, so this is a look at the progress of one of the major free desktop environments. KDE 4.0 was released January 11, 2008 after a couple of years of discussions and hype. The initial release was followed by a succession of minor releases that fixed many of the glaring bugs. The project that was initiated on October 14, 1996, so its developers have nearly a decade of experience now. While a lot of things have changed, there is still a familiar feel from its initial days. So what has changed?

The new Kickoff menu is a bit unusual and takes time to get used to.

The KDE project has taken a big risk, hoping to jump-start innovation. I hope they get it right. Along with the interesting acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia, the future is exciting and uncertain… and that’s just the way I like it.

Purchase a new PC or motherboard soon, and the chances are good that it will come with two built-in network interfaces -- either two Ethernet jacks or one Ethernet and one Wi-Fi. Tossing in a second adapter is an inexpensive way for the manufacturer to add another bullet point to the product description -- but what exactly are you supposed to do with it? If you are running Linux, you have several alternatives.

UBIFS is a new filesystem designed to work with flash devices, developed by Nokia with help of the University of Szeged. It's important to understand that UBIFS is very different to any traditional filesystem: UBIFS does not work with block based devices, but pure flash based devices

In this release, Ext4 is adding one of its most important planned features: Delayed allocation (also called "Allocate-on-flush"). It doesn't change the disk format in any way, but it improves the performance in a wide range of workloads.

Linux 2.6.27 kernel released 9 October 2008.

Preemption The server kernel has kernel preemption turned off (CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y), while the desktop kernel has it enabled (CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y, CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y). Preemption works along with scheduling to fine-tune performance, efficiency and responsiveness. In non-preemptive kernels, kernel code runs until completion; the scheduler can't touch it until it's finished. But the Linux kernel allows tasks to be interrupted at nearly any point (but not when it is unsafe, which is a whole huge fascinating topic all by itself), so that tasks of lesser-priority can jump to the head of the line. This is appropriate for desktop systems because users typically have several things going at once: writing documents, playing music, Web surfing, downloading and so on. Users don't care how responsive background applications are; they care only about the ones they're actively using. So if loading a Web page takes a little longer while the user is writing an e-mail, it's an acceptable trade-off. Overall efficiency and performance are actually reduced but not in a way that annoys the user. On servers you want to minimize any and all performance hits, so turning off preemption is usually the best practice.