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Stephane Eranian posted an overview of theperfmon2 interface, highlighting key features. He begins, "the goal of the perfmon2 interface is to provide access to the hardware performance counters present in all modern processors." He goes on to explain, "the interface is designed to be builtin, very generic, flexible and extensible. It is not designed to support a single application or a small class of monitoring tools. The goal is to avoid fragmentation where you have one tool using one interface. Because we want the interface to be an integral part of the kernel, special care is taken to make it robust and secure. The interface is uniform across all hardware platforms, i.e., it offers the same level of software functionalities on each platform." The full document can be found below.

2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton reviewed the document commenting, "thanks for putting this together. It helps." He included comments throughout, then noted in summary, "overall: I worry about excessive configurability, excessive features." Stephane acknoweldged these comment explaining, "in general I am not a big fan of putting stuff in the kernel just because it's cool to be kernel developer. Quite to the contrary, if I could get out of the kernel development, it would certainly make my work easier. Every feature that is supported by perfmon was put in there because of user needs and because there was no better way to implement them in user space and yet provide the same level of efficiency or simplicity."

Q&A: OSDL spokesperson Bill Weinberg shares insight on the organization's new MLI (Mobile Linux Initiative).

Although most liveCD Linux distros are generally meant to be used for evaluation or demo purposes, such as trying the particular distro before installing it on your hard drive, some can be used quite successfully as a Linux desktop, without ever installing them to your hard drive. Why do this? Which ones are best for this purpose?

To find out the answer to these and other interesting questions, read this informative DesktopLinux.com article by guest columnist Frank Richards:

A good Web browser can interpret all kinds of coding and deliver to your computer screen a page that looks pretty much the way its creator envisioned. Choose the wrong browser, and you'll find yourself stuck or unwittingly vulnerable to strangers with bad intentions.

Our choice: Mozilla's just-updated Firefox 1.5, which looks and feels a lot like the original Firefox that made its debut in November 2004. It suppresses pop-up ads, thwarts spyware and loads pages faster than Internet Explorer, the browser used by about 85 percent of Web surfers.

There is little disagreement about the opportunities for Linux on mobile phones, but it will take some work to give Linux its legs. While Linux today is one player among the many operating systems in the mobile handset market, finding its stride will be a matter of operating system enhancements, the formation of standards by the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), and use of the open source platform by a major manufacturer with a winning product, analysts said.

KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006, and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation!

Mozilla Corp. has rolled out the second Release Candidate (RC2) of Thunderbird 1.5, the e-mail client intended to complement the popular Firefox browser.

When Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli agreed to deliver a seminar on "Open Source in Government" to parliamentary staff members and representatives of local government in the United Kingdom earlier this month, he planned to introduce his audience to some basic concepts. However, when he got there, he found that most of the audience was already familiar with the concepts. As a result, instead of educating people in public life, he may have done more than he hoped -- he may have helped to create an ongoing forum in which the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, political lobbyists, and members of the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservative Party can work together to promote the use of FOSS in the governments of the United Kingdom.

Dozens of patches have been released for Debian/GNU Linux in the first major update to Version 3.1 of the free operating system since it was released in June.

North America's Largest Electronic Systems Design Event to Feature Comprehensive Training Program, Return of Microprocessor Summit and Co-Location of the D2M Conference 2006

Easy-to-Use 'Progression Desktop' Allows Users to Transfer E-mail, Files and Settings From Windows to Linux

Network and system administrators are well-versed in using the ping utility for troubleshooting purposes, but where do you turn when ping doesn't do the trick?

It hasn't all been bad news for Novell this month. While it was too late to be included in the fourth-quarter results we talked about last week, the company did get a big win from the middle of Europe. As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, the Swiss government has contracted Novell to replace 3,000 servers with SuSE Enterprise Linux. That is a major gain for Novell and should help improve the bottom line significantly in the current fiscal year's first quarter.

Not all image files are created equal. Most of us know this from working with the everyday formats like PNG, JPEG, and TIFF, each of which has its own pros and cons. But cutting-edge applications from cinematography to computer vision demand more range, color depth, and accuracy than these formats can deliver. That demand drove the development of what are called High Dynamic Range file formats. Luckily for us, Linux is a first-class citizen in the HDR image world.

Winsystems has released Blue Collar Linux for its -40 to +85C EPIC, PC/104, PC/104-Plus and EBX single board computers (SBCs). 'Blue Collar' Linux is Winsystems' implementation of Gnu/Linux that provides customers a way to quickly embed Linux for industrial-based applications. Integrated with Winsystems' rugged x86-based products, it provides an excellent starting point for developing applications in machine control, instrumentation, COTS/military, machine-to-machine communications (M2M), transportation, pipeline, and homeland security.

'Linux is a fast, low-cost, and widely accepted operating system well suited for robust embedded applications', said Robert A Burckle, Vice-President of Winsystems.

Brendan Eich has posted a draft plan for Gecko 1.9 Trunk and 1.8 Branch Management, including a FAQ at the mozilla wiki. Comments should be directed as followups to the newsgroup post.

In an inheritance hierarchy, permit each parent class's method to extend its child class's method so it can act as a decorator for its child class's behavior.

PowerStream 6100 Triples Signals Intelligence and Radar System Antenna Channels and Improves Bisection Bandwidth by 10x in Military Contractor Applications

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) opened the Patents Commons Reference Library in November, providing an overview of patents that have been pledged towards open source. OSDL's chief was quoted as saying that the open source patent was hereby diffused.

During the past year corporate Linux supporters from IBM to Philips have scrambled to support Linux, pledging that they will not enforce their patents against the open source operating system and, in some cases, to open source in general.

But others claim that neither OSDL nor the commercial pledges offer any help. Linux advocate Bruce Perens lashed out against both at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco in August.

The minutes of the mozilla.org staff meeting held on Monday 5th December 2005 are now online. Issues discussed include Firefox Summit and Engineering.