Category Archives: Operating Systems

The Benefits & Importance of Compatibility

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Goggle’s response.

While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem. By joining the Open Handset Alliance, each member contributes to and builds one Android platform — not a bunch of incompatible versions. We’re grateful to the over 85 Open Handset Alliance members who have helped us build the Android ecosystem and continue to drive innovation at an incredible pace. Thanks to their support the Android ecosystem now has over 500 million Android-compatible devices and counting!

via The Benefits & Importance of Compatibility | Official Android Blog.

From: Google has dropped an Android-shaped bomb on China’s mobile market

Baidu, for one, is in negotiation with a number of companies to develop smartphones using Baidu Cloud, a system that sits on top of Android and strips out Google’s services, replacing them with its own, Chinese versions. Given Google’s statement and the fact that it directly rivals Baidu, the Chinese search giant would be justified to feel Google may have scared existing Open Handset Alliance partners away from working with Baidu Cloud.

It’s worth noting though that Baidu has steered clear of calling Baidu Cloud an OS, likely in order to position its offering as one that supplements Android rather than supplanting it.

Google Objects to Acer-Alibaba Phone

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Google said it objected to the Acer device because Aliyun was a “non-compatible” version of Android, meaning that Alibaba allegedly created Aliyun by taking Google’s Android software and making changes to it.

via Google Objects to Acer-Alibaba Phone – WSJ.com.

After Acer postponed the phone’s launch this week, Alibaba issued a statement saying Google had told Acer that it would “terminate its Android-related cooperation and other technology licensing” if the phone was launched. An Acer official confirmed that Google had expressed concerns about the device.

Cambridge offers free online Raspberry Pi course

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The University of Cambridge has released a free 12-step online course on building a basic operating system for the Raspberry Pi.

The course, Baking Pi – Operating Systems Development, is aimed at students of 16 and over with some prior programming experience, “although younger readers may still find some of it accessible, particularly with assistance”.

via Cambridge offers free online Raspberry Pi course | News | PC Pro.

The Baking Pi course was compiled by student Alex Chadwick, and is just one of a growing series of tutorials by students working as summer interns at the university.

Our Planned Approach to Secure Boot

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At the implementation layer, we intend to use the shim loader originally developed by Fedora – it’s a smart solution which avoids several nasty legal issues, and simplifies the certification/signing step considerably. This shim loader’s job is to load grub2 and verify it; this version of grub2 in turn will load kernels signed by a SUSE key only. We are currently considering to provide this functionality with SLE11 SP3 on fresh installations with UEFI Secure Boot present.

via Our Planned Approach to Secure Boot | SUSE Blogs.

Development Release: Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1

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Nearly four years after the last stable release, the Damn Small Linux distribution is once again being actively developed. Yesterday John Andrews announced the availability of the first release candidate version 4.11: “Here is the first release candidate for Damn Small Linux DSL 4.11. The changes in this release are a step toward making DSL a friendly alternative for older hardware. I’ve fixed some bugs, updated some applications, and replaced others.

via Development Release: Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1 DistroWatch.com News.

Download here.

Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS

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We firmly believe that Oracle Linux is the best Linux distribution on the market today. It’s reliable, it’s affordable, it’s 100% compatible with your existing applications, and it gives you access to some of the most cutting-edge innovations in Linux like Ksplice and dtrace.

via Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS.

Hmmm.  We’ll see about that.

How is this better than CentOS?

Well, for one, you’re getting the exact same bits our paying enterprise customers are getting. So that means a few things. Importantly, it means virtually no delay between when Red Hat releases a kernel and when Oracle Linux does:

OpenBSD’s de Raadt slams Red Hat, Canonical over ‘secure’ boot

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Responding to a query from iTWire about what OpenBSD, widely recognised as the most security-conscious UNIX, would be doing to cope with “secure” boot, De Raadt said: “We have no plans. I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll watch the disaster and hope that someone with enough power sees sense.”

via OpenBSD’s de Raadt slams Red Hat, Canonical over ‘secure’ boot.

Red Hat’s method of ensuring that PCs certified for Windows 8 can boot GNU/Linux, announced by its community distribution Fedora, is to sign up to the Microsoft developer program and obtain a key which will be used to sign a “shim” bootloader.

using DD to image a disk over SSH

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What I like to do is log into the remote server and run “watch -n 1 iptables –list -v -n” to watch the byte count to give you an idea of how much data has been passed already. of course you’ll have to start iptables first if it isnt running.

via using DD to image a disk over SSH | daverdave.com.

This is pretty useful too.  I couldn’t do this using sshfs so googled and found that regular ssh works.  I do not like to image disks with disks running other than the one being imaged.  I find it too dangerous that a single mistype could wipe out a functioning disk.  Doing this over a nework seems much safer.  Here’s the command I used from the linked to article:

ssh desthost.domain.com “dd if=/dev/sda” | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1024k conv=notrunc,noerror

The destination host feeds the image.  The host that runs this command is a Knoppix live boot with the only HD running being the one being written to.  I suppose if I were to do this a lot then a dedicated image machine might prove useful with an HD to store the images and some OS and a burn HD in a hot swap slot.  The HD with OS and images would be expendible in that an accidental overwrite would be a mere inconvenience instead of actual loss of data.

ARM rival MIPS porting Android 4.1 to low-cost tablets

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MIPS is a processor licensing company that battles ARM, which dominates the tablet and smartphone market. But MIPS late last year sprang a surprise by announcing a US$99 tablet, in conjunction with a manufacturer called Ainol, based on its processor and running Android 4.0. The tablet was among the cheapest and among the first at that time with Android 4.0, but this year Google took the honors of releasing the first Android 4.1 device with Nexus 7, which runs on a quad-core ARM processor.

via ARM rival MIPS porting Android 4.1 to low-cost tablets – Google Nexus 7 tablet, Android OS, Android, smartphones, consumer electronics, processors, Components, MIPS Technologies, Google, Intel – Mobile Phones – Mobile – Techworld.