Hewlett-Packard is taking out cheap insurance with its hiring

of open-source advocate Bruce Perens, just in case Linux

becomes more of a force in the marketplace than anyone

expects.

As we approach the holidays, Dennis E. Powell is preparing

a list and checking it twice a wish list of applications and

hardware that would benefit the Linux world.

Looking for clustering solutions for Linux? Here's the scoop on solutions that started shipping recently.

Have you been waiting for a consistent journaling file system for Linux? The wait is over, according to this SearchEnterpriseLinux.com story. Here is a look at what is already available and what's on the way.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com reporter Beth Quimby sums up the week's Linux-related news. Get info about a new Linux unit, a deal between a China Netcom and Bluepoint Linux and a new evolving book about Red Hat Linux 7.

After full integration of the RPM patches into APT, it will have

the potential to become the standard package management

frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions

and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least

one important system administration tool.

It is claimed that Linux is more robust, more secure and more

efficient in its use of hardware resources compared with the

market leader in Intel-based systems, Microsoft Windows NT.

That's all fine and good, but how do you know Linux is using

your hardware to its fullest? Here are tips on manipulating

some of Linux's performance-tuning parameters to make the

system scream.

RAID, short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, is a method whereby information is spread

across several disks, using techniques such as disk striping (RAID Level 0) and disk mirroring (RAID

level 1) to achieve redundancy, lower latency and/or higher bandwidth for reading and/or writing, and

recoverability from hard-disk crashes.

Great set of documentation describing SCSI and RAID.

Why you should use them and how to go about optimizing

them for your IO needs. Also contains numerous links to

other high performance computing resources.

For developers building tiny Linux applications BusyBox is a great place to start. Busybox, originally created by Bruce Perens (now maintained by Erik Andersen and sponsored by Lineo), bills itself as "the Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux."