With the recent announcement of systemd, I’ve noticed some increased confusion around Upstart and what it means to be an event-based init daemon. Now seems as good a time as any to try and clear that up by describing what I mean by that.
Dependency-based init
Before Upstart came along, the state of the art of init [...]
UDS is over! And in the customary wrap-up I stood up and told the audience what the Foundations team have been discussing all week. One of the items is almost certainly going to get a little bit of publicity.
We are going to be doing the work to have btrfs as an installation option, [...]
I’m sure you’ve all by now read the announcement of systemd, and have probably come running to my blog to see what the reaction of Ubuntu and the Upstart author is!
As you know, improvements to the boot process has been something that Ubuntu have been working on for a few years now and this led [...]
Graphics cards from different manufacturers are very different beasts, in fact, often different generations of graphics cards from the same manufacturer can be pretty different too. While there’s a great deal of standardisation for things such as resolutions, colour depths and talking to monitors; the software side has almost no standardisation whatsoever.
In fact, one [...]
One of those unusual tests you sometimes need to do is to determine whether a given directory on the filesystem is a mount point for another filesystem.
A good approach to do this is to compare the directory with its parent directory, specifically the device ID as returned by the stat() system call.
The following code would [...]
Today is National Coming Out Day in the UK, I understand that National Coming Out Day was actually yesterday in the US; apparently an International Coming Out Day is hard or something.
I am gay.
That doesn’t really count as coming out though, if I am anything it’s openly gay. In fact a friend once joked [...]
The ongoing debate about Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at the Linux Plumber’s Conference has been bothering me for a little while now, but I’ve been avoiding posting until now.
Before I do, let me make one thing clear (as if it wasn’t already), I am a gay man.
Mark is a heterosexual man. In his LPC keynote [...]
As you probably know by now, even if you’re not following the karmic development closely, Ubuntu has gained new splash screen software called xsplash. This is the hard work of Cody Russell and Ken VanDine of the Ubuntu Desktop Experience team.
There’s been some press coverage of this already, and various comments from different people raising [...]
There’s been a meme going around the open source community for a while now. That programming in C is somehow dirty, distasteful and worst-of-all inefficient compared to programming in a high-level language such as C# or Python.
Its detractors will tell you how it takes much longer it takes to program anything in C. They’ll point [...]
I’d like to propose a new meme for the Planets, something a little more interesting than the third paragraph in your nearest bowl of Alphabet Soup. Something, in fact, a little creative.
I wonder if you’ve heard of a Drabble?
A drabble, simply put, is a story, normally science fiction or fantasy that is exactly one hundred [...]
