UpFront

1. Number of new toys the average child gets per year: 70

2. Size of the “baby industry”, in trillions of dollars: 1.7

3. Number of computers donated to the World Computer Exchange: 26,695

4. Schools, orphanages and libraries served by the World Computer Exchange: 2,543

5. Youth connected per year by the World Computer Exchange: 1,079,110

6. Number of languages other than English among contributors to DistroWatch: 42

7. Number of countries covered by Linux-hosted Global Voices Online: 192

8. Number of authors for Global Voices: 101

9. Number of languages into which Global Voices is being translated: 11

10. Number of computers in the Windsor Unified School District (California): 2,500

11. Percentage of computers at Windsor Unified to be replaced by Linux thin clients: 50

12. Estimated thousands of dollars in energy saved annually by Windsor Unified School District, thanks to Linux servers and thin clients: 25

13. Estimated thousands of dollars in energy saved annually by Windsor Unified School District by switching to free software: 50

14. Estimated thousands of dollars in equipment costs saved annually by Windsor Unified School District by switching to Linux gear: 280

15. Number of dollars in four spent on energy in schools that is unnecessary: 1

16. Months children at Villa Cardal, Uruguay, had spent with beta XO OLPCs: 6

17. Average number of files created per XO by Villa Cardal kids: 1,200

18. Number of MB, +/–10, produced per machine by Villa Cardal kids: 40

19. Thousands of XOs due for Uruguay in 2008: 90

20. Thousands of XOs ordered by Peru in December 2007: 260

1, 2: Pamela Paul in Parenting, Inc.

3–5: World Computer Exchange (May 10, 2008)

6: DistroWatch.com

7–9: Global Voices Online (www.globalvoicesonline.org)

10–14: The Press-Democrat (pressdemocrat.com)

15: Ed Tech Magazine (edtechmag.com)

16–20: Ivan Krstic

Geoff Goodell has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard and is currently researching Internet surveillance and network neutrality. Recently, I found myself sitting next to Geoff, who was typing casually at a furious speed on his ThinkPad, while looking at a black screen divided into four quadrants, each apparently operating in command-line mode with colored type far too small for my old eyes to read, but obviously quite legible to Geoff. Because it was too hard for me to eaveswatch, even at close range, I asked him if he was an Emacs or a vi guy. He smiled and replied, “vi”.

So, I asked him to let us know the rest of what he used, and here's his reply:

Having to reboot production systems to incorporate security patches is a pain. How much better would it be simply to graft the patch onto an already running kernel, and let it keep running? This is exactly what Jeff Arnold has been working on. He calls it KSplice, and at least for the moment, it supports any kernel that can load a module. The kernel itself doesn't have to support the feature explicitly. The way it works is that the user supplies the source tree for the running kernel and the patch to graft on. Then, KSplice compiles the patch and loads modules that apply the patch internally. Because of the interest it has generated, it's looking very likely that KSplice will be accepted into the kernel tree, at which point it might stop supporting kernels that don't know about it.

One obstacle standing in the way of Jeff's work is Microsoft's legal department. During the course of discussion, it came out that patent application 10/307,902 from 2002 seemed to cover Jeff's idea. And, although a number of folks, including Gilles Espinasse and Willy Tarreau, said they'd been “hot-patching” operating systems since the 1990s and earlier, Bill Davidsen felt that trying to launch a challenge against a Microsoft patent would be prohibitively expensive. However, according to Jeff, the patent application was rejected by the patent office. So, Microsoft may give up at this point, depending on its current internal weirdness level.

NFS is a lovely filesystem, but it has various problems that make people want to replace it. One of the latest attempts is POHMELFS, or Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System. POHMELFS is written by Evgeniy Polyakov, and it is a user-space layer that can be applied to any back-end filesystem, such as ReiserFS or XFS. It also seems to outperform NFS fairly significantly, at least according to the tests Evgeniy has performed so far. But, it's still only ready for playing around with. People shouldn't use it to store data they want to keep. Evgeniy says it's too soon to talk about the filesystem being reliable for use. He's been able to do regular user activity on it without a problem, but he expects to find bugs, POSIX conformance issues and other issues.

ReiserFS has migrated its development from the NameSys servers to kernel.org, where work is continuing. Edward Shishkin and others continue to develop the filesystem in spite of Hans Reiser's murder conviction.

There have been various other maintainer updates. Greg Kroah-Hartman is no longer the PCI maintainer; he's handed the whole kit and kaboodle off to Jesse Barnes. Timur Tabi has listed himself as the official maintainer of the Cirrus Logic CS4270 sound driver, the Freescale QUICC engine library, the QUICC engine UCC UART driver and the Freescale SOC sound drivers. And, Zhang Wei has abdicated maintainership of the Freescale DMA driver and handed that project over to Li Yang.

The politics of competing filesystems is never pretty. LogFS wants to support Flash drives, but its development has been slower than some people would like. So, Artem Bityutskiy and Adrian Hunter recently announced their own alternative, UBIFS, that is apparently quite a bit further along than LogFS. It's faster, more stable and more featureful, although it still has trouble with devices larger than 64G. LogFS, developed by Jorn Engel, also came out with a new release, perhaps partly in response to the UBIFS announcement. Of course, nothing says there can't be two co-existing Flash filesystems, but apparently one of the motivations for UBIFS was the relatively slow pace of LogFS development. Artem in particular seemed bitter about this, especially since it appeared that various folks were suggesting waiting for LogFS instead of developing UBIFS, while UBIFS was already superior to LogFS.

Matthew Wilcox and others are trying to eliminate as many semaphores as they can from the kernel, and replace them with simpler locking structures, such as mutexes, spinlocks and completions. The problem is that semaphores provide additional features that are hard to mimic with those other types of locks. For example, semaphores can manage access to a cluster of resources, while other locks basically are just on/off switches. The benefit of eliminating semaphores is that it's possible to gain speed and, in the case of single-processor systems, to optimize the lock entirely out of the compiled binary, resulting in further speed gains. But to do this, key features of semaphores have to be mimicked near any lock that replaces one. Matthew, Arjan van de Ven and Ingo Molnar are addressing this by developing kcounter, which will provide ways of managing access to clusters of resources, similar to how semaphores do it.

Unfortunately, kcounter takes a cookie-based approach, similar to other things that have been seen in the kernel before, which have resulted in what David Chinner characterized as a very ugly interface. Hopefully, kcounter will avoid that pitfall, although it does seem as though a significant speedup might justify a little cookie ugliness. That question undoubtedly will spawn some lively debate.

WiiLi (www.wiili.org) is a Linux port in the works for the Nintendo Wii. Drivers are being developed for Wii features, including the SD card slot, wireless 802.11b/g and Bluetooth hardware, and for the remote.

A proof-of-concept Wii distribution was rolled out earlier this year by the GameCube Linux Project. It relies on a Twilight Hack developed by Team Twiizers. The hack leverages an exploit in a Wii game title to launch a Linux bootloader (see a video of this in action at www.linuxjournal.com/content/meet-mii).

We're eager to see Linux on the Wii. In the meanwhile, settle for seeing Linux Journal on the Wii—we all have our own Miis here in the office. Add Linux Journal as a Wii friend, and we'll send you any Linux Journal staffers you'd like. Our console number is: 2924 2525 5556 2687 (post yours in the comments at www.linuxjournal.com/content/meet-mii, and we'll add you too).

A few weeks ago, I was flying west past Chicago, watching the ground slide by below, when I spotted the signature figure eight of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, better known as Fermilab. I shot some pictures, which I put up at the Linux Journal Flickr site (www.flickr.com/groups/linuxjournal/pool, which runs on Linux too).

I figured Fermilab naturally would use Linux, and found that Fermilab has its own distro: Fermi Linux. Its public site provides a nice window into a highly professional and focused usage of Linux. Within Fermi Linux, specific generations are known as Scientific Linux Fermi, each with version numbers and the code names Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom, Up, Feynmann, Wilson and Lederman.

Some also have LTS in their names. LTS stands for Long Term Support. It has a FAQ. The first Q is, “What is Fermi Linux LTS?” The A goes:

A follow-up Q goes, “I really don't want to get into legal trouble, please convince me that this is legal.” The A says:

Fermilab supports its own users and directs others toward Scientific Linux, which was codeveloped by Fermilab, CERN and other laboratories and universities. Troy Dawson is the primary contact for both Fermi Linux and Scientific Linux. On his own site, he explains, “Fermilab uses what is called Fermi Linux. It is now based on Scientific Linux. It is actually a site modification, so technically it is Scientific Linux Fermi. But we call all of the releases we have made Fermi Linux.”

While Fermi Linux's version history starts with 5.0x in 1998, Scientific Linux's history starts with 3.0.1 in 2004. Both sites' current distribution version pages have near-identical tables of releases, dates and notes. The latest version for both is 5.x.

In a comment to an on-line Linux Journal article (www.linuxjournal.com/article/8253), William Roddy wrote, “Scientific Linux will work in any environment Red Hat would, and even better. It's a work of art and genius, and in the field of high-energy physics, if this Linux didn't work, it wouldn't be used. Yet, it is useful to anyone. If you demand stability and security, you will not do better. It will always be there and it will always be free.”

By 1988, Larry Bird had already won the three-point shootout twice. In the locker room, while waiting to defend his title, he said to his opponents, “Who's finishing second?” Then he went out and won for a third time.

Ubuntu is in the same position. In DistroWatch.com's Page Hit Ranking, Ubuntu has been #1 for three years running. Mandrake (now Mandriva) was #1 in 2004. Ubuntu took over in 2005, then repeated in 2006 and 2007. Meanwhile, the “Who's finishing second?” question is always up for grabs, changing almost as constantly as all the other positions on down the list. Table 1 shows the results for three measures in 2008, taken on May 11.

Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that Ubuntu will hold its lead for at least the current year.

One could play for hours with Google Trends (trends.google.com). Not only does it show the spikes and slopes of search volume across time since the beginning of 2004, but it also lists the current top ten regions, cities and languages for each search. You can search for multiple keywords, comma-separated, and see colored lines for each. The results are usually more interesting than revealing. Such as:

What's more surprising are the top ten regions, cities and languages for each. Some results for Linux:

Some results for Ubuntu:

Google's qualification: “Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.”

Also keep in mind that these were results on May 13, 2008. Try them when you read this to see how they change. Having used Google Trends for a while now, I can assure you the answer is: a lot.

I predict an odd period in history, where famous quotes from techies will all be 140 characters or less.

—Keith Hopper, twitter.com/khopper/statuses/801585685

Here's to “Now” for as long as it lasts.

—Shelora Fitzgerald, quoted in an e-mail to Doc Searls

Productivity is up 99% because nothing is failing.

—Heather Carver, District Technology and Information Services Director for the Windsor Unified School District in California, which is migrating to a Linux-based system of servers and thin clients, www.edtechmag.com/k12/issues/may-june-2008/save-green-by-going-green.html

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result, Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a “dual-boot” option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar....Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.

—Associated Press, April 22, 2008, ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hXa0O9XLMsWfaqt-sI9FqFy2IewgD9073PPG0

It's easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom over OLPC's future. But keep things in perspective: they aren't as bad as they seem.

To the developers at OLPC and the tireless volunteer community contributors unsettled by Nicholas' plans—remember that no matter what happens, your work has not been for naught. Far from it. You brought the smiles to children's faces in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, Uruguay. Your work astounded me with the results, after little more than half a year, in the mountains of Arahuay, Peru. Bryan Berry's team is kicking ass on establishing a pilot in Nepal because of your work. And if you haven't read the linked articles yet, now's the time. Nothing can take away the real, palpable impact you've already had on children's lives.

—Ivan Krstic, April 25, 2008