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.

I've been covering the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design campaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies since its planning stages. Starting from scratch, in less than three ...

I love discovering new UNIX commands, especially those with a system administration flavor. When I learned Red Hat distributed the chkconfig utility, it brought back fond memories of chkconfig under ...

Software radio is the technique of getting code as close to the antenna as possible. It turns radio hardware problems into software problems. The fundamental characteristic of software radio is that ...

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 ...

For ease of management, it can be useful to keep related but different sets of files in separate locations. Users, however, often prefer to see these related files together. In this situation, ...

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 ...

Asymmetric TCP/IP routing causes a common performance problem on servers that have more than one network connection. The atypical network flows created by asymmetric routes occur most often in server ...

The first word that came to mind when I heard about introducing Garbage Collection techniques into a C or C++ program was “nonsense”. As with any other decent C programmer who loves this language, the ...

iptables is the user-space tool for configuring firewall rules in the Linux kernel. It is actually a part of the larger netfilter framework. Perhaps because iptables is the most visible part of the ...

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 ...