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GNU Coreutils Epoch Date Support

GNU coreutils 5.3.0 added the very useful @ operator to the date command to enable users to easily convert seconds since the Unix Epoch into date strings. $ date Mon Mar 17 21:31:15 EDT 2014 $ date +%s 1395106277 $ date -d’@1395106277′ Mon Mar 17 21:31:17 EDT 2014 $ date –date=’@1395106277′ Mon Mar 17 21:31:17 EDT 2014 $

Does Your Fedora ESP Have to be Located At /boot/efi?

Since converting to UEFI firmware some years ago, I have always mounted my ESP (EFI System Partition) at /boot/efi. Why? Because that is where Fedora and the other Linux distributions put it. But does the ESP need to be actually mounted there? Well, it turns out that the answer depends on how you are booting your UEFI Linux kernel. If you are using GRUB, the answer is yes; your ESP must be mounted at /boot/efi due to dependencies in GRUB code. If you are booting your kernel using the EFI Boot Stub mechanism, available in Linux kernel 3.3 and later,

OSv – Designed for the Cloud

This blog is mostly about Linux-related topics but from time to time covers interesting other OS-related technology. One such interesting new technology is OSv, which was designed from the ground up to execute a single application on top of a hypervisor, resulting in superior performance and effortless management. Developed by a number of the initial developers of KVM, including Avi Kivity, OSv was designed to give near-hardware level access efficiency for Java VMs. OSv also reduces the memory and CPU overhead imposed by traditional OSes. Evidently ZFS is the default filesystem. Interestingly, OSv is implemented in C++, using templates, which

We don’t need no stinkin bootloaders!

I have been saying for a number of years now that bootloaders such as GRUB2, rEFit, Clover and others have no place in modern EFI-based Linux systems and that the only reason to use such a bootloader is if you are on older system where you wish to be able to boot into one of a number of operating systems. The Linux Foundation is now a member of Unified EFI Forum (about time!) and has now got full access to the resources of that forum. As a result, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on the procedures for how

Artistic Programming Language

Ignoring the question about whether software is an artistic or an engineering endeavor, another interesting question is whether source code should be visually appealing? Ramsey Nasser, a computer scientist and fellow at the Eyebeam Art+Technology Center in New York City, has developed a programming language based on Arabic script instead of English. The language is a Scheme-like functional programming language that has its roots in Lisp. It is called قلب – (pronounced Qalb) which is the Arabic word for heart. Interestingly, the new language is also designed to support artistic code, i.e. visually pleasing code. To create such artistic code,