Today in Open Source: A broken SSD halts Linux changes. Plus: LinuxQuestions.org milestones, and see startup services in Linux A Broken SSD Halts Linux Development Uh oh! It looks like Linus’ SSD died and stopped Linux development in its tracks temporarily. It’s a bit scary that a dead SSD could put the brakes on Linux like this. Is Linux still too dependent on Linus for its own good? The timing absolutely sucks, but it looks like the SSD in my main workstation just died on me. I had pushed out _most_ of my pulls today, so realistically I didn’t lose a lot of work. However, any people having outstanding pull requests or patches that they expected me to merge that are not in the current tree on git.kernel.org, you may want to re-send the email, because I had archived emails as I merged them, and I may not have found all the ones that never made it out.. I know a few involved, but…. That said, wait until tomorrow. I’ll try to see if I can recover the disk, but right now my machine refuses to even see the boot sector on it, and tries to boot from the network instead. So I’m not all that hopeful. If worst comes to worst, I’ll just do the last next days of the merge window on the laptop that I was planning on finishing it off with anyway, since I have travel coming up. At least this didn’t happen at the very beginning of the merge window… Linus More at Linux Kernel Mailing List I’m now waiting for the conspiracy theories to emerge stating that the NSA sabotaged Linus’ SSD just to be mean or something. Wait and see, it’ll happen. Heh. LinuxQuestions.org Hits Two Big Milestones LinuxQuestions.org hit two very big milestones recently. The popular Linux site has blown past one million discussion threads, and more than five million posts. Wow! That’s a lot of Linux talk! I’m proud to announce that we just we crossed the 1,000,000 thread threshold here at LQ (we just recently hit five million posts as well). As mentioned in the linked thread while it’s a completely arbitrary milestone, it’s a reminder that LQ has grown far beyond my initial expectations. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member; the site wouldn’t exist without you. I’d also like to give a special thanks to all mods, both past and present; it would have been absolutely impossible for the site to grow as it has without the dedication of the mod team. More at LinuxQuestions.org LinuxQuestions.org can be a very helpful resource if you need to find out something about Linux. The forum sections are broken down into appropriate categories. There’s even a section for Linux Newbies that you should check out if you’re new to Linux or if you’re thinking about using it. See What Services Are Enabled on Boot in Linux Xmodulo has a tutorial that will teach you how to check what startup services are enabled in Linux on boot. The article covers Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora and RHEL. There are so-called startup services in Linux which are set to launch automatically when a Linux system boots up. Such startup services include basic system configurations (e.g., networking, security modules, hardware peripherals), as well as various add-on services (e.g., NFS, MySQL, VPN, rsync), which all are needed for a particular Linux system to operate as expected. In this post, I will describe how to check what startup services are enabled on boot in Linux. More at Xmodulo Open Source