Archive for kernel
I recently watched the entirety of the Revolution OS documentary. While it definitely is not a video that can be enjoyed by most people, nor even most computer users, it is a very intersting watch for a number of reasons.
Visiting the documentary’s site, you quickly gain a sense of what this documentary is aimed to be: “… the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.” However, that’s not what this video is about.
When I first started watching the documentary, I thought I would get this intimate insight into how people made calculated movements against the growing monopoly of Microsoft’s operating systems. In fact, this isn’t anything near what actually happened.
Continue reading “A Good Video on the History of the Open Source Movement”
Without the Linux kernel, Ubuntu (and all the other Linux distros) would not exist. Despite this, most Linux users don’t know what a kernel is nor understand that the reason that Ubuntu is a Linux distro is because the kernel is Linux. All most users of any Linux distro is likely to know is that they will eventually have a large number of kernels installed on their system cluttering up their boot menu.
Describing what a kernel is and what it does is beyond the scope of this post. I do highly recommend that you first read the Wikipedia article on computer kernels followed by the article on the Linux kernel itself. I’d really like to do a post explaining what a kernel is in simple terms so that readers can gain a better appreciation for it and what it does for your distro. Please leave a comment letting me know if you are interested in this writeup.
Anyways, back to the topic at hand. What do we do with all these kernels that litter our boot menu? How do we remove them not just from our boot menu but from our file system as well?
A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.
I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:
Continue reading “Dell Studio 17, Headphones, and Linux Mint”