Bash has had multi-processing for a long time, via job control, the $! environment variable, and the "wait" command. Judicious use of parentheses for sub-processes, and pipes where necessary, can put comparatively long-term procedures into the background. Bash 4 now provides a new multi-processing paradigm for shell scripting, via the "coproc" statement.

The OpenSAF Foundation has released version 4.0 of the Open Service Availability Framework (OpenSAF), its open source middleware platform for high availability (HA) environments

The only IRC client I ever used was XChat. I decided to try something different and Irssi client was a great find. Irssi is a terminal based IRC client for Unix systems and is probably the best I have used till now.

The Khronos Group announced the finalized specs for OpenGL 4.1 and unsurprisingly, the focus was primarily on improving graphical performance on mobile devices. OpenGL 4.1 is completely cross compatible with OpenCL, the mobile 3D graphics API and features new tools that allow for the easy porting of code from one platform to another.

In our last tutorial, we met the concept of functions. It turns out that functions (and another concept called classes, which we haven't got to yet) are the workhorse of Python. Almost everything you will end up doing with Python will involve the use of functions.

Rob Gravelle explores the MySQL UPDATE statement, which is used to modify existing records in a table. Among its many features, he looks at how to update multiple tables, avoiding mistakes, and how to limit how many rows are updated.

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs.

Recently, a Red Hat developer got rid of a flaw in an Intel graphics driver, probably for a special corporate customer. For years, the flaw had been a thorn in the side of numerous users of systems with the 945GM chip-set. Now, Theodore 'tytso' Tso has stated in a discussion on LKML that users have to accept more responsibility for troubleshooting and quality assurance.