LinuxHQ is a truly excellent site
devoted to the Linux 2.X.X kernel. This is your one stop site for speed
enhancing patches, and unofficial bug fixes on 2.X.X, as well as a complete
log of all changes made in 2.X.
The Programming Section of this site
has the information you need on hacking your kernel, if you are that advanced.
The change to GLIBC 2 (Libc6)
will be the most drastic and benificial Linux System upgrade since the
transtion to ELF. Don't be left behind! Vist the page for info on the benifits
and upgrade directions.
The Linux
Kernel-HOWTO is an excellent place for a new user to learn everything
he needs to know about the kernel, including how to set it up and compile
it
Compiling libc can be quite the difficult task. I wrote a little plaintext
libc pamphlet to help my crypt users with
the installation. You may find it helpful.
Linux Hardware Compatibility
LinuxHardware.net provides a large database of user evalutations
of support under Linux for various pieces of hardware.
A List of Hardware that Redhat 5.2 supports out of the box can be found here.
Linux System Hardware
Monitoring provides drivers for using those hardware
"health" chips for monitoring the status of your
system's hardware
The Linux Kernel PNP Driver
is a kernel level approach to PnP, as opposed to isapnpconf. It's still in development,
so you might want to stick with isapnptools for now.
ALSA or Advanced Linux Sound
Architecture, is a GPL'ed set of sound drivers meant to replace OSS
That annoying mouse
wheel
Microsoft thought it necessary
to put in thier new mice is now supported in most X apps with this package
The OSS provides commercial
sound support, and even includes the new AWE64's in PnP mode.
A new version of OSS Free, the
free version of OSS's kernel sound drivers, was just released December 23.
We are evenly split on the importance of the
GGI
Project to Linux. Some are worried that it will turn Linux into a gamer's
OS. It promises to give video programmers a kernel level driver interface
to the video hardware, eliminating the need for risky SUID X-servers and
SVGAlib programs.
AccelX provides great commercial X support
for high end, obscure, or far obsolete video cards.
XSuSE has
AccelX beat in my mind. These guys have AGP support already! And it's FREE!
XBF X Servers are provided by RedHat. Redhat
has decided to sign NDA's with paranoid video card developers in order to
provide binary only X servers.
3dfx's GLIDE
is a hyperoptimized subroutine library for their 3D acceleration cards that
can be used with Mesa
SANE stands for Scanner Access
Now Easy. It is a free scanner interface and scanner driver set designed to
replace TWAIN. It claims to be superior to TWAIN due to the fact that you
only need to have one scanner driver for use in all apllications, and
because its network transparent. It even can work as a GIMP plugin. Just:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/xscanimage /usr/local/lib/gimp/0.99/plugins/
The Linux USB Project
is working toward support for the massive Universal Serial Bus. The code
is still very incomplete, but at least someone's working on it.
Have some sort of Parrallel Port Zip drive, CDROM, etc (God knows what else
they put on those ECP's these days) Then look into this listen of Parrallel
Port Linux Drivers
Video/Radio for Linux
is described here. The drivers are already in the 2.1.x kernels, but you need one
of these "tuner" programs to actually watch TV or listen to the
radio on your box.
uClinux is a project
to port the Linux kernel and a basic system to the Palm pilot. Things are running
smoothly, and the system boots to a usable state with little trouble
Joy2Key is a utility to allow you to use a joystick for X and console
programs that otherwise lack native joystick support.
Although simple, it is very useful for applications such as games which
benefit greatly from the convenience and ease of use
that a joystick offers over the keyboard. Joy2key uses the /dev/js device
interface provided by the
Linux Joystick Driver
For some reason, I had this link buried in Linfo.
Linux runs on PowerPC's
very nicely. In fact, some
PowerPC's are even faster than Alpha chips per Mhz (hehe, not for long, now
that the 21264 is a-coming :)
JaZip is a nice program
that helps you manage Parallel and SCSI Zip and Jaz drives under Linux
XVScan is some good scanning software,
it's commercial though ($50)
Misc. Linux Drivers
IRQtune is an irq priority
optimizer. If you ever notice that when there is lots of activity on your
Linux box, data transmissions begin to fall, then IRQtune is for you. It
sets the priority of your serial (or ethernet) device high, so the kernel
spends more time handling its requests rather than other devices.
Sunsite's
FileSystem Site houses all sorts of utilities for the Ext2 fs (namely
a disk defragmenter), plus support for other file systems (Amiga, MacOS,
SGI, MSDOS doublespace, etc)
Zlibc compressed filesystems
are a tad easier and safer than the ext2comp patch, which won't be included
here. I will not provide a link to the ext2comp patch suite, as I feel
it is very dangerous.
BLEEDING EDGE Kernels
The Linux Kernel Patches Que is the official place for patches
to be queued, catagorized, and eventually included in the kernel proper
Linux Mama makes
a big compilation patch of all the little patches floating around.
DevFs is a
kernel patch to provide for a /proc like /dev :) Basically it's a new, faster,
leaner way of managing /dev.
MergeMem is a wicked
tool+kernel patch that merges identical memory pages between multiple instances of
the same program, thus increasing total available system memory. Excellent
for web and shell servers, where many copies of Apache, bash, and ftpd may be
running at once.
NTFS drivers to mount WindowsNT filesystems. Sure, the file system that
NT uses sucks. But some of us have to access NT filesystems from our hotrod
linux boxes due to circumstances beyond their control. Plus, if you have
physical access to an NT machine, you'd be surprised what a Linux+NTFS
boot disk can do... :) Here are the patches.
