At Debconf 9, Steve Langasek delivered a talk on pam-auth-update, which included a tongue-in-cheek slide about how it had come to be. He pointed out that this project had required about six years of “thinking” and two months of actual development, and that this seemed to be a pattern exhibited by a number of notable Debian projects.

Netcraft continues to paint deceiving pictures of the Web

Signs indicating that C# is not catching on raise questions about the essence of Mono

I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. I installed the latest stable version of Ubuntu and he immediately fell in love. What came next was a bit of a shock.

I heard about Tiny Core Linux a few months ago and given its description as a minimalistic Linux designed to build to your own specifications from the ground up it sounded right up my alley.

We had Microsoft releasing some 20,000 LOC of Linux drivers so that Linux can run faster on their Hyper-V solution. A lot of MS PR saying how they love interoperability and how cool they are. I will be the first to say that I was in shock (and I bet I wasn't the only one). After all, we are talking about a license that their managers explicitly hate so why release code under that license then?

You can make MPlayer play h264-encoded video files a lot faster on multicore machines if you graft some libraries from the ffmpeg-mt project into the resulting mplayer binary. We need to recompile for this.

I am in the middle of CentOS and Ubuntu comparison frenzy. It started with an attempt to assert quality of Linux distributions made for busy people. Today I am considering packaging. When comparing Ubuntu and CentOS packaging systems, first thing that crosses my mind is that, well, size matters. Ubuntu has nearly 70000 packages. CentOS has around 6000.