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.

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.

Linux 2.6.30 can be compressed using Bzip2 and LZMA, includes security framework Tomoyo and should boot faster. Tasmanian devil Tuz, who stood in for Tux as Linux mascot in 2.6.29, has been relieved of his duties.

Its here! The first openSUSE 11.3 Milestone. This is the first step toward the next openSUSE release. The most important goal of this first milestone is to test the build interactions between newly added features in openSUSE Factory, also known as “get the snapshot to build”. It is in no way feature complete or ready for daily usage.

Slax 6, the latest version of the modern, small and fast Slackware-based distro Slax, was released yesterday.Slax participated in the development of sqlzma patches, where the code implements LZMA - 7-zip compression - into squashfs filesystem. Squashfs now supports bigger block sizes than before. These two enhancements transform Slax 6 in one of the best compressed Linux distributions.

The third of seven scheduled milestone releases for 11.3 was completed and released on schedule. Milestone 3 focuses on using GCC 4.5 as the default compiler, leaving a great deal of the work in the hands of the openSUSE Build Service after a few issues (such as kernel panics) were resolved.

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.

Milestone 5 (of 7), a snapshot of the Factory “work in progress” build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download.

Milestone 6 (of 7), a snapshot of the Factory “work in progress” build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download.