I haven’t really mentioned it much, but the few times in the past month that I’ve used Ubuntu 10.04 have been rather disappointing. Disk access seems to be one of the biggest problems for me. I usually blame the filesystem.

A trip to New York City to discuss HPC is a nice diversion from the basement life style.

A new version of a major Linux server OS distro: interesting. A new version of Windows: intriguing. A new version of OS X: could be fun to play with. But a new Linux kernel? Big deal.

To test the performance claims of Arch versus others, we have compared the performance of the newest Arch 2010.05 media against Ubuntu Linux.

While it's pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you'd like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you'll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product.

For some users (myself included) GRUB is a critical screen where you can select which operating system you want to load. That could be a different Linux kernel on the same OS, a different Linux distribution altogether or even Windows. Usually the way GRUB works by default is the user gets to select which kernel/OS they want to load with a time delay before a default kernel OS loads.

The ethtool utility provides ethernet card information and management to die for. Do you think you have a network bottleneck that’s somehow related to your NIC’s speed or other settings? If so, ethtool might be the utility that will save the day and many painful conversations.

This is the last development release for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. A few days left now before final release planned for 3rd of June. Included are Linux Kernel 2.6.33.4, KDE software compilation 4.4.3, GNOME 2.30.1, Amarok 2.3.1, Firefox 3.6.3, OpenOffice.org 3.2, and more free software.