Articles by Ferdinand Thommes

This morning, just before LinuxTag conference opened it’s gates, we shipped our first release in 2013. The conference has picked up momentum by now as has the seeding of our torrents. Besides that, the images should have propagated to our mirrors by now.

The release notes will inform you that we ship Kernel 3.9.3,  KDE SC 4.10.3 and XFCE 4.10. Besides that for the first time we officialy present GNOME 3 and a noX as a variant with no X-environment at all. Give it a spin while it’s hot and spicy.

Greetings from LinuxTag Berlin 2013, Europes biggest Linux event.

Alan Cox, one of the longest standing kernel-developers next to Linus Torvalds, leaves the kernel team and his job at Intel, for personal reasons having to do with his family.

Kernel-Developer for more than 20 years, Cox has implemented a new network stack all by himself in the early 90s and from thereon rose to become number two in the ranks of the kernel-devs. Hardly anyone else has such a solid knowledge of the complexity of the kernel as he does. Linus Torvalds, that he does not always agree with on technical questions, joked about him once, saying:

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he’s actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well. ”

Up to the release of Kernel 2.6 Cox was the operative number two as well. Since then, he only takes care of parts of the Kernel like the serial drivers that he was responsible for until now. His most important achievements were, besides his care for Kernels 2.2. and 2.4, the implementation of SMP in Kernel 2.0. In his professional life during the last years, Red Hat and Intel payed him to work on the Linux Kernel full time.

In his announcement he left it open, that he might be back if the situation allows him to do so. He will not only be severely missed by his colleagues on the kernel team but also by the community for his often sarcastic, witty analysis and comments, where he was never far from the truth.

Today is Setting Orange, the 63rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3178 (man ddate) . As we all know, the world is coming to an end today.  Even though U.S Government is telling us, it’s not happening, what do they know?

So we prepared a little endtime art. We uploaded this as an art package, so if you like to install it, do apt-get update && apt-cache search siduction-art | grep eow .

Let’s hope, the Mayans knew nothing about calendars.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 

We uploaded the final images for siduction 2012.2 – Riders on the Storm last night to the mirrors. We hope, we fixed all issues that you had found in the release candidates. The release notes can be found on our website and the images are ready for download. Torrents will be added during the day. I hope, you will get fun and productivity out of this release. Also be prepared for a little surprise for Christmas.

Happy computing, everyone.