“This column and show will pick up from last week, and looks at
some of the features appearing in new Linux distributions.”
“First, KDE 1.1.2 is available in most of the new distributions.
KDE, the K Desktop Environment, is one of the two popular GUIs for
Linux. KDE-specific applications are growing rapidly in number. KDE
1.1.2 brings bug fixes as well as new applications.”
“Another geekly feature which appears first in SuSE 6.3 is a
journaling file system. HP and SGI have offered such a system for
years, but this is the first time it has appeared in a Linux
distribution. Journaling file systems are based on transactions
against the file system. They are very crash-safe, but while disk
sizes continue to grow, they have another very important feature.
Because of their transaction-based architecture, there is no need
to conduct a check of the entire file system for consistency. In
other words, you don’t have to run fsck after a crash. Depending on
the size of your disks, this could save minutes to hours on system
startup after a crash.”