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.

Is it possible to send an email from a host that has no email client software installed? As long as you have netcat, of course it is! Netcat (/usr/bin/nc on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems) is a ...

Linking is the process of combining various pieces of code and data together to form a single executable that can be loaded in memory. Linking can be done at compile time, at load time (by loaders) ...

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 ...

Since the 2.0 kernel release, Linux has supported a large number of SMP systems based on a variety of CPUs. Linux has done an excellent job of abstracting differences among these CPUs, even in kernel ...

Many Linux administrators and support technicians regularly use the top utility for real-time monitoring of their system state. In some shops, it is very typical to check top first when there is any ...

Whether you are creating a small Internet appliance, some hardware instrumentation, data loggers or an army of autonomous robots to do your bidding, in numerous situations you need the flexibility of ...

In this article, we explore the optimization levels provided by the GCC compiler toolchain, including the specific optimizations provided in each. We also identify optimizations that require explicit ...

Have you ever wondered how system calls can be intercepted? Have you ever tried fooling the kernel by changing system call arguments? Have you ever wondered how debuggers stop a running process and ...

Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Service sell virtual machines. EC2 revenue is expected to surpass $1B in revenue this year. That's a lot of VMs. It's not hard to see why there is such ...

The "Argument list too long" error, which occurs anytime a user feeds too many arguments to a single command, leaves the user to fend for oneself, since all regular system commands (ls *, cp *, rm *, ...

In last month's article, we saw how the Linux input subsystem worked inside the kernel, ending with a quick mention of the event handlers. Each handler essentially provides a different user-space API, ...