Writing
Tagged “linux”
47 articles
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From Licenses to Liberation
I started out on Banyan VINES, NetWare and Windows NT, and came to Linux in 1996 to get out of a licensing problem. A look back at how Linux grew from a workaround into the thing everything runs on, what's still weak…
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What You Can Learn from Building a World of Warcraft Private Server
Standing up a World of Warcraft server emulator is a surprisingly complete lesson in Linux administration, compiling from source, databases, networking and running a community. What you'd learn, how the pieces fit, and…
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All the Linux (maybe)
How many Linux distributions are there? Hundreds, but they come in a handful of families. A guided tour of the ones worth knowing in mid-2024, family by family, from Debian and Fedora to Arch, NixOS and the Android…
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Gentoo Linux
Gentoo compiles everything from source, optimized for your machine, and for a few years in the early 2000s it was the coolest distribution around. It never became mainstream, and its culture is a cautionary tale about…
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Red Hat vs. Debian
The two great lineages of Linux: one built by a company to sell support, one built by volunteers bound by a social contract. How RHEL and Debian actually differ in release cycles, packaging, security defaults, support…
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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The first Linux distributions appeared in 1992 because installing Linux by hand was brutal. A few are still with us more than thirty years later, a few changed everything and vanished, and a few are footnotes. The…
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Debian turns 31!
On August 16, 1993, a Purdue student named Ian Murdock announced a new Linux distribution built in the open by volunteers. Thirty-one years later Debian is the foundation of Ubuntu, Mint, Raspberry Pi OS, Kali and…
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Challenging the Reign of UNIX and Linux
Every serious operating system in use today is either Unix, Unix-like or Windows, and the core ideas date from the 1970s. Is it time for something new? The projects trying, from Fuchsia and seL4 to Redox and Huawei's…
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The Linux Foundation Certifications
The Linux Foundation's certifications are hands-on exams on live systems, which makes them harder to cram for and more meaningful when you pass. Which ones exist in mid-2024, how they compare with Red Hat, CompTIA and…
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Speculative Future Where Microsoft Embraces Linux as the Core of Windows
A thought experiment, clearly labeled. Microsoft already ships a Linux kernel inside Windows, runs Azure's networking on Linux and maintains its own Linux distribution. What would it take for the next Windows to run on…
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CrowdStrike’s History of Releasing Software That Breaks Operating Systems
Friday's Windows outage wasn't the first time this year a CrowdStrike update took down machines. Linux administrators running Debian and RHEL had already been through it, months earlier and with far less attention. What…
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The Vital Role of Linux and Open Source Software in FinTech
Two days after a security update grounded banks and brokerages, it's worth looking at what the financial system actually runs on. Exchanges, trading firms, payment processors and banks run overwhelmingly on Linux and…