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.

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) ...

If you usually work with non-trivial C sources, you may have wondered which execution path (that is, which sequence of function calls) brought you to a certain point in your program. Also, it would be ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Many market sectors, such as financial trading, defense, industry automation and gaming, long have had a need for low latencies and deterministic response time. Traditionally, custom-built hardware ...

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 ...