As part of our on-going bash tutorial series, we discussed about bash positional parameters in our previous article. In this article let us discuss about the bash special parameters with few practical shell script examples.

Read the full thing at http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/05/bash-shell-special-parameters/

Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

If there's one Linux company that has seen lots of ups and downs it's the Paris-based Mandriva S.A. They have a great distribution, but as a company, they've always been on shaky grounds. First a rumour, now confirmed: the company has put itself up for sale - which, as the community points out, isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Read the full thing at http://www.osnews.com/story/23276/Mandriva_S_A_For_Sale

Almost two months after the technical preview was released, the development of version 4.7 of the cross-platform Qt C++ framework for GUI applications is beginning to take shape, as Nokia has now presented a beta version. A beta of the Qt Creator 2.0 development environment, which is part of the framework, has also been released. The developers highlight the integration of Qt Quick (Qt UI Creation Kit) as the prominent feature of the next version of Qt. Qt Quick is a tool collection for creating animated, touch-enabled Qt interfaces and applications for mobile and embedded devices.

Read the full thing at http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Touch-support-in-Qt-4-7-995793.html

We've spent some time talking with Dave Burke. Dave is the originating author of Osmos. As we announced albeit a bit late Osmos is now ported to Linux and it's quite an entertaining game. Dave speaks with us about some of his history in gaming and why he ported it to Linux.

Read the full thing at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-games-dont-get-ported-to-linuxa.html

We are now very near from final release. Here comes the second beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. As usual you will be able to test it as it’s available on your favorite public mirror:

Read the full thing at http://blog.mandriva.com/2010/04/30/mandriva-linux-2010-spring-beta2-is-available-for-tests/

Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What is an IOP? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

Read the full thing at http://www.cmdln.org/2010/04/22/analyzing-io-performance-in-linux/

n the last couple of years I have tested many Linux distros. I was never a diehard fan of any of them, kept an open mind and was willing to simply use the one that best fit my needs. Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and others have been put to the test at some point or another. PCLinuxOS was one of the few popular ones I had not tested. Being based off Mandriva, I was assuming it would be similar to the Linux Mint - Ubuntu case, so no surprises expected. After all, I had tested several Mandriva releases, so what could be that interesting about PCLinuxOS? Now, let me tell you... boy, was I wrong!

Read the full thing at http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2010/04/pclinuxos-2010-review.html

The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3OA

After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16.

We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments.

Read the full thing at the longest URL known to mankind....