I've covered tons of different scientific applications you can run on your computer to do rather complex calculations, but so far, I've not really given much thought to the hardware on which this software runs. So in this article, I take a look at a software package that lets you dive deep down to the level of the logic gates used to build up computational units.

Brendan Higgins recently proposed adding unit tests to the Linux kernel, supplementing other development infrastructure such as perf, autotest and kselftest. The whole issue of testing is very dear to kernel developers' hearts, because Linux sits at the core of the system and often has a very strong stability/security requirement. Hosts of automated tests regularly churn through kernel source code, reporting any oddities to the mailing list.

Do you remember your first distro? The first version of Linux I truly used, for any length of time, was back at the end of the 1990s—in Ye Olden Times, when 56k modems, 3.5" floppies and VGA CRT monitors reigned supreme. Linux itself had been a thing for a number of years by this point—with both SUSE (then known as the gloriously mixed-case and punctuation-filled S.u.S.E.) and Red Hat doing good business supporting it—when I decided to really give this "Free" operating system a try. Because I'm a nerd. And that's what we do.

A snapshot of the current state of Desktop Linux at the start of 2019—with comparison charts and a roundtable Q&A with the leaders of three top Linux distributions.

Put the fun back in computing. With this weekend's reading, we encourage you to build yourself an internet radio station, create your own Audible or even live-stream your pets on YouTube. Sky's the limit with Linux. Enjoy!   Building Your Own Audible by Shawn Powers

On November 12 at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany, the Linux foundation formally announced the Ceph Foundation. Present at this same summit were key individuals from SUSE and the SUSE Enterprise Storage team. For those less familiar with the SUSE Enterprise Storage product line, it is entirely powered by Ceph technology.