A quick look at some popular distros and what they’re up to:

SLES

SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is Novell’s enterprise Linux distribution targeted at the business market.

It is a common mistake (which I sometimes make myself) to refer to both SLES and openSUSE as just “SUSE”, but these are different distros.  See below for openSUSE.

There is also a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), based on the same codebase as SLES.

Current stable release: SLES 10 (SP2).  ReiserFS is the default file system. ext3, XFS and JFS are also available.

Next release: SLES 11 some time in 2009.  (March 2009 was mentioned but later deleted on one Novell webpage).   ReiserFS will be replaced by ext3 as the default filesystem in SLES 11.

openSUSE

The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell.

Current stable release: openSUSE 11.1.  Uses 256byte inodes.  ext3 has been the default filesystem since this was changed from ReiserFS for openSUSE 10.2.

Next release due: openSUSE 11.2 planned for September 2009.

RHEL

RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distro.  It is the most common Linux distro used in business.

There are also several other distros which are rebadged versions of RHEL such as Oracle Enterprise Linux, CentOS (Community ENTerprise OS), and WBEL (White Box Enterprise Linux).

Current stable release: RHEL 5.3.  RHEL 5.3 includes GFS2 (Global File System) clustered file system for storage area networks.

Next release: RHEL 5.4 due in August 2009.  RHEL 5.4 will standardise on KVM for virtualization although Xen will still be supported.

Fedora

Fedora is Red Hat’s community Linux distro.  Originally Red Hat used to produce just the one distro “Red Hat Linux”, but they decided they needed to reserve their trademark for the enterprise market. So Fedora was split off for the community and RHEL for the enterprise.  A large number of businesses and many of our customers use Fedora not RHEL though.  New Linux features appear first on Fedora before being adopted by RHEL.

Current stable release: Fedora 10.  Fedora 10 defaults to creating 256byte inodes and using LVM. XFS and ext4 are available.

Next release: Fedora 11 due for 26 May 2009.  ext4 is the default file system for Fedora 11, Btrfs will be introduced as experimental, ext3 and XFS will still be available.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community distro, but Cannonical also sells Ubuntu support for business customers.  Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, but is much easier to use and administer.  Motto is “Linux for Human Beings”.

Current stable release: Ubuntu 8.10.  Ubuntu 8.10 defaults to creating 256byte inodes.

Next release: Ubuntu 9.04 due for 23 April 2009.  The default file system for Ubuntu 9.04 will still be ext3 with ext4 available at installation as an option.

Thinstation

Thinstation is a small, simple yet very powerful Open Source “thin client” operating system.  It was designed as a thin client Linux distribution turn a PC a full-featured thin client.

Although no one is employed to work on Thinstation it has reasonably active development.  There are currently three branches of Thinstation being worked on.

Thinstation 2.2.2 is the stable version and was a bug fix release to 2.2.1.

Thinstation 2.3 is Beta.  I tried this out , but didn’t have much luck with it (pcnet32 wouldn’t work), so instead I upgraded the kernel in 2.2.1.  Thinstation 2.3 will have kernel 2.6.24.7.

Thinstation 2.4 is in Alpha. With this branch Trevor has changed the build process from running jailed inside another Linux to running on a virtual machine.  Thinstation 2.4 works just fine for me, but Trevor hasn’t yet made the build VM available, he says it is a “little large at the moment (6Gb)”.  I’m eager to get a copy of this.

Mandriva

Mandriva Linux (formerly MandrakeLinux) was once the popular “Linux for the masses” distro.  (Mandrake Linux est un système d’exploitation convivial.)  Then came Knoppix, then Ubuntu.  It still has a loyal following though.  We have customers using Ghost with Mandriva so I have done support for it.

Current stable release: Mandriva 2009.  Mandriva has used 256byte inodes since 2008.1.

Next release due: Mandriva 2009.1 planned for 29 April 2009.  This release will have ext4 available, but not the default.  ext4 is not yet supported for /boot file system.

Debian

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.

Current stable release: 5.0 lenny.

Next release due: testing squeeze.

Asianux

Asianux is an enterprise Linux distribution developed by the Asianux Consortium consisting of: Red Flag Linux from China, Miracle Linux from Japan, Haansoft from Korea, VietSoftware from Vietnam, and WTEC of Thailand.

Current stable release: Asianux 3.0.

Next release due: unknown.

(I realize in spite of the name of this website it’s been a long time since I published a software related post. I’m taking the lazy approach of linking to someone else’s articles.) My former colleague Andrew has published a great little series on the Boost C++ Libraries. The intention of Boost is as a proving ground for C++ libraries being considered for inclusion in the C++ standard, so probably many of these will soon appear in C++ 0x.

The C++ Boost Libraries

1. Introduction
2. boost::assign
3. string algorithms
4. boost::date_time
5. boost::filesystem

(updated: Added Part 5 link, 20 March 2009)

No man is an island if he’s on at least one mailing list.

Why don’t Linux systems come with fortune, Message of the Day installed by default any more?

To install on Fedora 9: “yum install fortune-mod”.

When a user clicks the close button [x] on our X11 application we want it to pop a a dialog asking “do you really want to quit?”. This is a plain X app. No fancy GTK or QT widgets here. So how to catch the “window is being closed” message?

The answer is to tell the Window Manager we are interested in these event by calling XSetWMProtocols and registering a WM_DELETE_WINDOW message with it. Then we’ll get a client message from the Window Manager if someone tries to close the window, and it won’t close it, it’ll leave that us up to us. Here’s an example….

// example.cpp
#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xatom.h>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
   Display* display = XOpenDisplay(NULL);
   Window window = XCreateSimpleWindow(display,
                                       DefaultRootWindow(display),
                                       0, 0,
                                       500, 400,
                                       0,
                                       0, 0);

   // register interest in the delete window message
   Atom wmDeleteMessage = XInternAtom(display, "WM_DELETE_WINDOW", False);
   XSetWMProtocols(display, window, &wmDeleteMessage, 1);

   std::cout << "Starting up..." << std::endl;
   XMapWindow(display, window);

   while (true) {
      XEvent event;
      XNextEvent(display, &event);

      if (event.type == ClientMessage &&
          event.xclient.data.l[0] == wmDeleteMessage) {
         std::cout << "Shutting down now!!!" << std::endl;
         break;
      }
   }

   XCloseDisplay(display);
   return 0;
}

Compile with g++ example.cpp -o example -lX11

WordPress 2.5.1 showed up in the Fedora Yum repository, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. Went pretty smoothly. I upgraded WPG2 to 2.3.0.5 while I was at it. The G2 button wasn’t showing up in the editor, but a cache clear has fixed that. I was worried about the theme, but it looks like it is all compatible. Still getting used to the new WordPress Dashboard, I guess it grows on you?

I also installed Finch on my server (rata). Finch is the text UI equivalent of Pidgin. Having a TUI messaging client is great, because I can use it over SSH.