20 years have passed, and Linux is stronger than ever...

Linux Foundation celebrating 20 years of Linux

Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer, micro web application framework for Perl hit CPAN!

Dancer has come a long way since then, thanks to the awesome community and user base built up around the project since then.

In these two years, Dancer had countless valuable contributions from a large list of contributing users, gathered over 300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 pull requests submitted... amazing stuff.

Read more in bigpresh blog entry.

You are busy churning out code or managing the developers. You care about Perl but don't have time to go through tens and hundreds of articles and blog posts every day. You want to keep an eye on the development of perl without drowning in a sea of blog posts. You need someone to point out the most important news and articles in the Perl World.

Let me try to be your guide.

Headlines

Nice progress in the development of MetaCPAN

Olaf Alders provided his weekly report that was full of new items. You can now +1 Perl modules, use the public API of MetaCPAN and compete with other CPAN authors for fame.

Rakudo Star 2011.07 released with 10%-30% improvement in compile and execution speed

This edition of the quarterly release marks the end of era. The next release will be already using the New Object Model'.

Happy Birthday, Linux!

This past week has been quite turbulent for Debian wheezy. Mostly because of the great Perl upgrade from 5.10 to 5.12. This included rebuilding of hundreds of Perl modules to play well with new version of Perl. Most of the time I had all this stuff put on hold, and only yesterday have I found guts to digest all 300 of new packages. For one day I was without trusty pidgin, but today even that popular messenger has been recompiled to work with Perl 5.12. There's still a small number of perl modules (like libembperl-perl, libgimp-perl, libgstreamer-perl, libjifty-perl, etc...) not yet adapted, but I'm sure we won't wait long until each and every perl module has been upgraded to fit Perl 5.12.

X server is now brand new 1.10, and also Nvidia blob set of packages have been upgraded to work with the new server (from 260.19.44-1 to 270.41.06-1). This Debian packaging of Nvidia driver has been working exceptionaly well.

Ye good old glibc went from 2.11 to 2.13, a small step for humanity, but great step for Debian users. :) Although potentially dangerous, all glibc upgrades I rememeber in last few years went absolutely flawless. The package restarts services that need to be restarted, although I prefer to reboot the whole machine after the glibc upgrade, seems cleaner to me.

You blame Firefox 4 to be a memory hog? Check it out first by typing about:memory in the address bar. You'll get a nice detailed report of your browsers memory usage. While it's not guaranteed you'll understand every statistic available in the report, you can at least peek at the overall memory use, and see how much it's fragmented by comparing "memory mapped" and "memory in use" numbers.

I definitely see memory usage of my browser only go up during regular use, but it's not really problematic, considering there are gobs of RAM in today's computers. And there has also been a steady improvement in memory usage efficiency, 3.0 has been the biggest hog for me, 3.5 was quite an improvement, and now 4.0 is absolutely the best of them all. Alive and kicking (though, much of the responsiveness improvement comes from better javascript engine, I suspect). It's good to know that Mozilla plans even more improvements on that front with Firefox 5, 6, 7... which they advertise will be released this year!

This last week has been fun. Lots of stuff has been fixed. Let's start with the packaging system...

The packaging system

dpkg/dselect is now at version 1.16.0. Except the ability to show new packages (which is still missing), it has been working very well. Apt has also been fixed and it now doesn't pull all package files all the time. One other thing started to really bother me, those pesky "Hash Sum Mismatch" errors. From what I understand, it happens if the mirror site uses old software to sync stuff. So I decided to switch mirrors, and configured back the good old ftp.debian.org. Now it works well, although slightly slower than before, but I can live with that.

One other thing, if after upgrading dpkg you start getting warnings like this:

dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 15307 package 'sortmail':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 40773 package 'loadwatch':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 52116 package 'libdbix-profile-perl':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 83356 package 'cthumb':
missing architecture

just apt-get install --reinstall all those packages (I got the warning only for those four), and the warnings will go away.

Slackware server hosting is one of the newest trends in domain hosting that is allowing many users to move from a Windows hosting platform. There are a lot of clients that are accustomed to Windows hosting, but loads of clients are seeking new hosting environments.

Slackware isn't exactly a new environment, but it has maintained a widespread use since its inception in 1993. It never quite gained the same popularity as Windows, but it has managed to be popular enough to move from one version to the next.

There's definitely not much of a comparison between a and a Windows hosting server or with it's environment. Users that are interested in the graphical user interfaces that Windows is known for should stick to Windows. However, users that are interested in tweaking their systems and getting more familiar with command line prompts will enjoy Slackware. This is the major difference between the two.

There's a sharp learning curve between domain hosting in a Windows environment versus that of a Slackware server hosting platform. Fortunately, there are a great number of guides online for those that are interested in learning more. New users are even able to obtain 64-bit versions of the Slackware applications. The latest Slackware version is 13.1, and this has equated to major changes and improvements from prior versions. Windows Server 2008 also offers a 64-bit operating system, but this is where much of the comparison ends.

Hello world!

I've decided to start this blog and share my experience with Debian sid/unstable, the development version of Debian GNU/Linux. It's the leading edge, but sometimes also the bleeding edge of Debian development. The stuff that enters this fast developing repository spends anywhere from 6 months up to 2 years in it before average Linux user sees it in form of a polished stable release (Debian, Ubuntu or some other Debian Pure Blend).

So, with Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" released exactly 7 days ago, there has been an avalanche of new software in sid, all the stuff that has been patiently waiting for the stable release to happen before it's pushed to the new unstable branch that will become Debian wheezy in about 2 years. Ubuntu users will no doubt see the software slightly sooner, but for the adventurous of us, even that would be too late. ;)

Most notable additions in sid at the time of this writing are LibreOffice 3.3.1~rc1, Ghostscript 9.01, Xorg 7.6, but also many other applications and libraries got upgraded to newer versions. Right now, I have no outright broken/uninstallable packages (of about 5200 installed on this desktop system). But, of course, there are some bugs that lurk in this heavy developmental distribution, which is the exact reason that prompted me to start this blog. To share my experience with others, and sometimes even ask for help from fellow Debian unstable users.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

Debian 6.0 includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments as well as all kinds of server applications. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.

Debian runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported by Debian GNU/Linux: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (s390), and ARM EABI (armel).

Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" introduces technical previews of two new ports to the kernel of the FreeBSD project using the known Debian/GNU userland: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for the 32-bit PC (kfreebsd-i386) and the 64-bit PC (kfreebsd-amd64). These ports are the first ones ever to be included in a Debian release which are not based on the Linux kernel. The support of common server software is strong and combines the existing features of Linux-based Debian versions with the unique features known from the BSD world. However, for this release these new ports are limited; for example, some advanced desktop features are not yet supported.