Tux, the Linux penguin mascot, will be taking a break during the Linux 2.6.29 kernel cycle. Committed to the Linus's kernel tree last night is a new temporary logo known as Tuz. Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil, which is a species in danger of becoming extinct.

There has recently been a discussion about GNU switching from bzip2 to lzma for their distributed tarballs. They still offer gzip tarballs as an alternative. However, Gentoo has been preferring the bzip2 tarballs mostly due to the improved pack ratio of bzip2. Unfortunately, the software for lzma is not (yet) as mature as some would like.

LZMA is an improved version of famous LZ77 compression algorithm. It was improved in way of maximum increasing of compression ratio, keeping high decompression speed and low memory requirements for decompressing. lzma command line tool has a similar interface to gzip(1) and bzip2(1) and is intended to make use of LZMA compression easy for the users who are already familiar with gzip and bzip2.

The maintainer of the Linux stable series has released kernel version 2.6.29.1. It contains nearly 50 fixes and minor enhancements for the ten day old Linux 2.6.29 which saw Tuz the Tasmanian devil stand in temporarily as mascot.

Ever socially aware, Linux has a new mascot for a short while. Tuz will instead embrace the boot screen of many a distro in kernel 2.6.29.

Faster suspend and resume, better utilisation of power saving mechanisms for I/O devices and a range of performance enhancements are just some of the kernel infrastructure changes in Linux 2.6.34

Perhaps the title should have been; ‘the lack of a suitable compressed file system on linux’. A compressed file system in this case refers to a setup where the files are saved on the disk in a predefined compressed format (such as gzip or bzip2). When you read from those files they will be automatically decompressed by the file system.

There’s no nicer way to say it… I’m running out of disk space. I have three options: buy a larger hard drive, delete some files to free up space, or compress some of the data.

There are various ways to build a live cd and since 11.2 Milestone 1 there is a new one: clicfs. I’ll try to explain: