Linux Magazine October 2024

Dear Reader, Are fortunes changing for Google? Many observers think so, but trillion dollar companies have ways of making problems go away. It does seem like they are on a bit of a losing streak when it comes to government tolerance of their anti-competitive behavior. The EU has been leveling fines against Google for years, and last year, the European Commission issued a formal antitrust complaint, suggesting that breaking up the company might be the only remedy [1]. Earlier this year, the EU began investigating Google under the new Digital Markets Act [2], which is designed to prevent gatekeeper companies from controlling their markets. The EU deserves credit for their diligent pursuit, but because Google is a US company, the recent antitrust finding by the US District Court of DC…

Debian 12.6 64-bit For many readers, Debian needs no introduction. It is one of the oldest, most popular, and most influential distributions of all time. Much of its status is due to its strict package guidelines and security updates. These updates are available as released, but periodically they are bundled into point releases to make them as accessible as possible. Debian 12.6 is currently the latest point release for Debian 12, aka bookworm. Preceded by five point releases, Debian 12.6 offers few new packages. What it does include is over 130 bug fixes for both minor and major packages and some 60 security updates. A handful of minor packages have also been removed for various reasons, and the installer has been updated. With these changes, it is the most secure…

Ubuntu 24.10 to Include the Latest Linux Kernel Canonical announced that Ubuntu 24.10 will be the first release to ship with the latest upstream kernel. That means “Oracular Oriole” will come with Linux kernel v6.11. Previously, Ubuntu shipped with kernels that would soon reach end of life (EOL), which was driven by Canonical’s need to always ship what they knew would work and had been sufficiently tested, vetted, and updated. According to the Ubuntu Kernel Engineering Director, Brett Grandbois (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/kernel-version-selection-for-ubuntu-releases/47007), the old policy was a conservative “wait and see” approach, which guaranteed stability on the appointed release day but proved unpopular with consumers looking for the latest features and hardware support. Under the new policy, Grandbois states, “Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux…

Speeding Up the Dentry Cache Linus Torvalds wrote an experimental patch intended to speed up filesystem operations, specifically the directory entry (dentry) cache. However, he didn’t really like his own patch – even though it worked. He hoped one of the kernel developers might do it better. The dentry cache is a lookup table that sits in RAM and is used by the rest of the kernel to identify exactly where a desired file or directory is located on disk. Whenever you open, read, or edit a file, or anything like that, you use the dentry cache. Typically, you really want that dentry cache lookup to be as fast as possible. You don’t want to sit around waiting for your file to open. Especially if “you” are not a person…

Large language models (LLMs) such as the ones used by OpenAI’s [1] ChatGPT [2] are too resource intensive to run locally on your own computer. That’s why they’re deployed as online services that you pay for. However, since ChatGPT’s release, some significant advancements have occurred around smaller LLMs. Many of these smaller LLMs are open source or have a liberal license (see the “Licenses” box). You can run them on your own computer without having to send your input to a cloud server and without having to pay a fee to an online service. Because these LLMs are computationally intensive and need a lot of RAM, running them on your CPU can be slow. For optimal performance, you need a GPU – GPUs have many parallel compute cores and a…

Ever since package managers added automatic dependency resolution, installing software in Linux has been easy. The greatest difficulties arose from attempts to use different package formats, such as Debian’s Alien. These attempts were never fully successful and were widely ignored. However, with the popularity of universal formats such as AppImage, Snap, Flatpak, and web applications, package management has become more complex, with each format using its own commands for administration. Formerly known as fpakman, bauh [1] is designed to simplify package management by using a single interface for all formats. In addition, bauh is one of the easiest interfaces available for package management either on the desktop or at the command line, despite the fact that some of the interface’s details need to be improved. Currently at release 0.10.7, bauh…