ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about ...

All the big film studios primarily use Linux for animation and visual effects. Perhaps no commercial Linux installation is larger than DreamWorks Animation, with more than 1,000 Linux desktops and ...

Although the differences are sometimes made opaque in casual conversation, there is in fact a complete difference between archiving files and compressing them. Archiving means that you take 10 files ...

In the early twentieth century, Heinrich Schenker developed a method of analyzing tonal music that ties a piece's melody, harmony and form to a simple underlying musical idea. To illustrate his theory ...

Embedded developers working on kernels or bare-metal programs often go through several development cycles. Each time the developer modifies the code, the code has to be compiled, the ELF (Executable ...

Looks simple enough; you would think there is not much overhead with only those two system calls. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. Behind those two calls, the data has been copied ...

The Linux command line is a text interface to your computer. Also known as shell, terminal, console, command prompts and many others, is a computer program intended to interpret commands. Allows users ...

NETLINK is a facility in the Linux operating system for user-space applications to communicate with the kernel. NETLINK is an extension of the standard socket implementation. Using NETLINK, an ...

Tripwire is an intrusion detection system (IDS), which, constantly and automatically, keeps your critical system files and reports under control if they have been destroyed or modified by a cracker ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...