February 2002

PHP Security Update Posted Thursday, February 28, 2002 @ 9:30 PM by mayhem
Due to a security issue found in all versions of PHP (including 3.x and 4.x), a new version of PHP has been released. Details about the security issue are available here. All users of PHP are strongly encouraged to either upgrade to PHP 4.1.2, or install the patch (available for PHP 3.0.18, 4.0.6 and 4.1.0/4.1.1).
 
Slashdot: Notes On The Future of Video on Linux Posted Thursday, February 28, 2002 @ 10:51 AM by mayhem
The first article is a really good summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart.
 
Slashdot: Windows Media Player in Linux Posted Thursday, February 28, 2002 @ 10:51 AM by mayhem
Today CodeWeavers released CrossOver plugin 1.1 which now supports Windows Media Player 6.4 under Linux. As much I would not like to see or support sites that use Windows Media shite, its still really nice to have this option. Not too mention kick ass QuickTime playing. Update: 02/27 18:30 GMT by H: I've actually been using this - it's done really really well. I'm planning on doing a fuller review soon, but it's very well done.
 
NewsForge: Opera launches Opera 6.0 for Linux Beta 1 Posted Thursday, February 28, 2002 @ 12:06 AM by mayhem
Opera Software ASA today unleashed Opera 6.0 for Linux Beta 1 with a wide range of speed-boosting functions and exclusive features only available to Linux users. The earlier version of the Opera for Linux browser, Opera 5 for Linux, has already been downloaded and installed a record one million times.

More information available here.
 
Redhatbox.org Down ? Posted Thursday, February 28, 2002 @ 12:00 AM by mayhem
Well it seems that www.redhatbox.org is down, most likely due to technical difficulties, hope Dave can get it all sorted and get the site back up and running. With so many techinical Computer/IT related sites closing down resently we hope that this is not the case for RedHatBox.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.6-pre1 Patch Now Available Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2002 @ 12:51 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.6-pre1 Linux Kernel patch from here, changelog is available here.
 
Lycoris Linux at ExtremeTech Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2002 @ 2:49 AM by mayhem
Most of you probably remember Redmond Linux, the user-friendly distro that tried to duplicate the familiar WindowsXP UI feel under Linux. Well, there is no more Redmond Linux. The company recently renamed the product "Lycoris Desktop/LX". ExtremeTech features today a very favorable review of the distro, includes screenshots and information on the installation, network setup, desktop environment etc.
 
Linux Kernel 2.2.21-pre3 Patch Now Available Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2002 @ 11:54 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.2.21-pre3 Kernel patch from here, changelog:
2.2.21pre3
o Fix a case where a non blocking tty write could (Peter Benie)
get stuck
o Fix non blocking midi close on es1370, es1371 (me)
sonicvibes right this time
o Fix menu/xconfig warnings (Ren・Scharfe)
o Fix non blocking midi close on cmpci, cs4281, (me)
esssolo, trident.
o Add eepro100VE ident (Hanno Boeck)
o Fix DRM oops case (Herbert Xu)
o Fix an oops causing datagram AF_UNIX race (Paul Menage)
o Support newer geodes using new CPUID properly (Hiroshi Miura)
o Fix up RTC build for non pmac ppc boxes (Tom Rini)
o Fix MCE address reporting (Pete Wyckoff)
o Vibra16 docs update (Neale Banks)
o Eicon include file fix (Herbert Xu)
o ISDN loop and header fixes (Kai Germaschewski)
o Fix eepro100 out of memory during init path (Neale Banks)
o Fix BSD partition table handling breakage (Andries Brouwer)
o Add WD XD signature to xd driver (Paul)
o 3Ware driver update (Adam Radford)
o S/390 debugging updates (Carsten Otte)
o S/390 DASD updates (Carsten Otte)
o S/390 CIO updates (Carsten Otte)
o Update USB serial, belkin, digi_acceleport, (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
empeg, ftdsio, edgeport, keyspan, mctu232,
omninet, prolific, visor
o Cyberjack USB driver (Matthias Bruestle)
o USB ir dongle driver (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Support very large FAT file systems (Vijay Kumar)
o Backport 2.4 modversions build fix (Mikael Pettersson)
o Backport 2.4 es1371 init for new revs (Julian Anastasov)
o 3c507 driver fixes (Mark Mackenzie)
o ext2 obscure group descriptor corruption fix (Daniel Phillips,
Al Viro)
o Correct a problem where rpciod didnt give up (Andreas Haumer)
its current dir
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.19-pre1 Patch Now Available Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2002 @ 11:51 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.4.19-pre1 Kernel patch from here, changelog:
pre1:

- Add tape support to cciss driver (Stephen Cameron)
- Add Permedia3 fb driver (Romain Dolbeau)
- meye driver update (Stelian Pop)
- opl3sa2 update (Zwane Mwaikambo)
- JFFS2 update (David Woodhouse)
- NBD deadlock fix (Steven Whitehouse)
- Correct sys_shmdt() return value on failure (Adam Bottchen)
- Apply the SET_PERSONALITY patch missing from 2.4.18 (me)
- Alpha update (Jay Estabrook)
- SPARC64 update (David S. Miller)
- Fix potential blk freelist corruption (Jens Axboe)
- Fix potential hpfs oops (Chris Mason)
- get_request() starvation fix (Andrew Morton)
- cramfs update (Daniel Quinlan)
- Allow binfmt_elf as module (Paul Gortmaker)
- ymfpci Configure.help update (Pete Zaitcev)
- Backout one eepro100 change made in 2.4.18: it
was causing slowdowns on some cards (Jeff Garzik)
- Tridentfb compilation fix (Jani Monoses)
- Fix refcounting of directories on renames in tmpfs (Christoph Rohland)
- Add Fujitsu notebook to broken APM implementation
blacklist (Arjan Van de Ven)
- "do { ... } while(0)" cleanups on some fb drivers (Geert Uytterhoeven)
- Fix natsemi's ETHTOOL_GLINK ioctl (Tim Hockin)
- Fix clik! drive detection code in ide-floppy (Paul Bristow)
- Add additional support for the 82801 I/O controller (Wim Van Sebroeck)
- Remove duplicates in pci_ids.h (Wim Van Sebroeck)
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18 Released Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2002 @ 11:50 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.4.18 Linux Kernel from here, changelog:
Update: The SET_PERSONALITY fix in rc4 has _not_
been included in the final 2.4.18 by mistake.

final:

- No changes have been made between -final
and -rc4.
 
APC Media Event Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2002 @ 7:27 PM by mayhem
Well we just got back from attending an APC media event entitled "APC, the bridge between nature and technology" where we saw some of the new products they have for offer (from the large scale Symmetra UPS solution down to the new line of the Backup UPS ES series).

It was interesting to note that APC was started by three people in a garage in 1981 and has grown to a world wide UPS solution provider to companies such as Novell, Sun, DELL, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, IBM etc. They have even provided UPS products to both Disney and Paramount Studios for their animation workstations and network.

With the increased importance of networks (especially with the introduction of Voice Over IP telephones) the role of APC's products in todays networks (and workplaces) is quite large and they are scaling their business to suit this growth. Recently APC acquired an Air Conditioning company, a DC Power company and a Cabling company which is now enabling them to provide total product solutions to suit the modern IT industry (since most server rooms are required to be at a monitored temperature and also require large amounts of cabling).

We look forward to seeing these new APC products in action and also in the market place. A special thanks goes out to the APC Team (Jason Rylands) and TEXT100 Team (Grazia Pecoraro and Trisha Grahn King) for allowing us to attend todays media event.
 
Linux Security Week - February 25th 2002 Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2002 @ 12:05 AM by mayhem
This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "Decentralise Linux security with Sudo," "Network Intrusion Detection Signatures," and "UnderLinux Interview with Core Netfilter Member." Also this week, a cdrom bootable distribution for performing various types of forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and pen-testing was released. More information about this is available in the Vendors/Products section of this newsletter.

More information available here.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-rc4 Now Available Posted Saturday, February 23, 2002 @ 1:54 PM by mayhem
You can now download the Release Candiate 4 version of the Linux 2.4.18 Kernel from here, changelog:
rc4:

- Load code did not set personality for
binaries without an interpreter: This was
breaking static apps on several archs (Tom Gall)
 
Slashdot: Red Flag Linux: Real, and Reviewed Posted Friday, February 22, 2002 @ 6:35 PM by mayhem
Over at NewsForge (NewsForge is part of OSDN, as is Slashdot), Roblimo has posted his impressions of the long-awaited, much-ridiculed Red Flag Linux (English version). It may not be a big seller outside of the Chinese-speaking world (despite the available English-language install), but it's not a hoax, and it's available as an ISO for download.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-rc3 Now Available Posted Friday, February 22, 2002 @ 6:32 PM by mayhem
You can now download the Release Candiate 3 version of the Linux 2.4.18 Kernel from here, changelog:
rc3: 

- Fix reiserfs endianess problems (Chris Mason)
- Fix PowerMac compilation problem (Pmac team)
- Fix some eepro100 ID's which had problems
in -ac merge (Jeff Garzik)
- Rename some internal pcnet32 definitions to
not clash with ethtool.h - the clash caused
the driver not work correctly (William Lee Irwin)
- Add missing netif_carrier_{on,off} to
eepro100 (Andrew Morton)
- Fix netfilter race (Rusty Russell)
- Correct error handling on tcp_recvmsg (Alexey Kuznetsov)
- Revert tulip changes which were apparently
causing slowdowns (Jeff Garzik)
- Fix ptrace behaviour (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
 
Slashdot: GNOME 2.0 Beta Posted Friday, February 22, 2002 @ 8:49 AM by mayhem
The first public beta release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.5 Released Posted Thursday, February 21, 2002 @ 1:06 AM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.5 Linux Kernel from here, changelog is available from here.
 
SecurityFocus: Linux Kernel Hardening Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002 @ 11:16 PM by mayhem
Is Linux secure? The question is much less useful, than 'Is Linux "securable"?' The answer to the latter is a definite yes. Being securable means that Linux can be made more secure (to whatever degree necessary) by applying a clearly defined sequence of steps that always produces the same result, and that can be automated and applied to systems that have been in operation for a long time. It would be ideal to be able to make securing systems understandable by regular system administrators who don’t have formal security training. However, the last requirement might be pushing it a bit, since security will likely always require expertise.

Article continues here.
 
NewsForge: Lindows moves to head off Microsoft Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002 @ 11:12 PM by mayhem
Lindows, a start-up developing software that would let many Windows programs run on Linux computers, this week released legal papers designed to head off Microsoft's efforts to thwart the product.

More information and full story is avialable here.
 
Slashdot: HP Selling Systems With Linux Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002 @ 11:09 PM by mayhem
We were all very upset last August when Dell discontinued selling Linux on their machines. Good news - HP's picking up the slack. They're shipping machines pre-installed with Red Hat 7.1. Unfortunately, checking their website shows that only business machines will have a Linux option; home machines are still WinXP only.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-rc2 Now Available Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002 @ 9:58 AM by mayhem
The Release Candidate 2 of the 2.4.18 Linux Kernel is now available for download from here, changelog:
rc2: 

- Make get_user_pages handle VM_IO areas
gracefully (Manfred Spraul)
- Fix SMP race on PID allocation (Erik A. Hendriks)
- Fix SMP race on dnotify scheme (Alexander Viro)
- Add missing checks to shmem_file_write (Alan Cox)
 
Slashdot: How to Fix the Unix Configuration Nightmare Posted Monday, February 18, 2002 @ 10:38 PM by mayhem
There's an interesting article on freshmeat talking how sorting out some kind of standard for configuration could really help Unix systems could be more user friendly. The article points out that since Apple has managed to build a quite usable system on top of NetBSD, it should be doable to do the same for open-source interfaces.
 
Slashdot: Andrew Morton And The Low-Latency Kernel Patch Posted Sunday, February 17, 2002 @ 7:38 PM by mayhem
KernelTrap has interviewed Linux kernel hacker Andrew Morton, author of the low-latency patch. Though his patch has received less attention than Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch (recently merged into the 2.5 kernel), it results in quite significantly lower latencies. The interview is quite interesting, delving into the low-latency patch, explaining how it works and the differences between it and the preempt patch. He also talks about his ext3 work, porting that journaling filesystem from the older stable 2.2 kernel to the current stable 2.4 kernel.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.5-pre1 Patch Now Available Posted Friday, February 15, 2002 @ 11:44 AM by mayhem
You can now download the Linux Kernel 2.5.5-pre1 Patch from here, the changelog can be found here.
 
Slashdot: KDE 3.0 Beta 2 is out Posted Thursday, February 14, 2002 @ 12:28 PM by mayhem
Subject says all - the next beta of KDE 3.0 is out, after a short delay. You can find the downloads at this announcement. Click below to read more details about this version.
One of the most important things that the Konqueror teams wants from people are test cases of your regulary visited pages, where Konqueror either fails to render or render things incorrectly, and submit it using KDE's Bug Tracking system. URL's will not be helpful as it takes lots of time to strip a page from all the HTML code in order to find the actual problematic part of the web page.

Just to save the search for some people: Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware and Tru-64 binary packages are available now. Others will be available soon. Source code is of course available also.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-rc1 Now Available Posted Thursday, February 14, 2002 @ 12:25 PM by mayhem
The Release Candidate 1 of the 2.4.18 Linux Kernel is now available for download from here, changelog:
rc1: 
- PPC MPC8260 update (Tom Rini)
- eepro100 fixes (Jeff Garzik)
- Make natsemi hardware workaround a config
option (Jeff Garzik)
- Add serial board PCI ID (Jeff Garzik)
- Add support for another tulip clone (Jeff Garzik)
- Fix typo in winbond driver (Jeff Garzik)
- Move initialization of tridentfb before
the generic drivers (Geert Uytterhoeven)
- Reiserfs bugfixes (Oleg Drokin)
- More __devexit_p assorted fixes (Andrew Morton)
- Merge some -ac bugfixes (Alan Cox)
 
Slashdot: SuSE 7.3 vs XP Posted Thursday, February 14, 2002 @ 1:27 AM by mayhem
This should be good for some flame wars. A story on HPWorld that I read about on NewsForge gives an interesting comparison between XP and Linux. I personally think the story wanders a little and wouldn't call it comprehensive, but it is interesting. It does point out a particular bottleneck in how the 2.4.x kernels handle asynchronous IO. Apparently this is being addressed in the 2.5 kernels... It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.
 
Poll Results Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2002 @ 2:06 AM by mayhem
Well the previous poll results are now in:

Previous Poll Topic: What kernel are you using?
2.4.x: 54.4% - (234 Votes)
The default for my distro: 19.7% - (85 Votes)
2.2.x: 18.3% - (79 Votes)
2.5.x: 3.2% - (14 Votes)
An AC version: 2.3% - (10 Votes)
A pre patch version: 1.8% - (8 Votes)
Total Votes: 430

The new poll "What Internet connection do you have?" is now up and ready for voting to take place.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4 Released Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2002 @ 1:54 AM by mayhem
You can download the 2.5.4 Linux Kernel from here or from any of the mirror sites, changelog:
Summary of changes from v2.5.4-pre6 to v2.5.4
============================================

(02/02/09 1.248.1.10)
Sparc64 thread_info implementation.

(02/02/09 1.248.1.11)
Build fixes for sparc64 outside of sparc64 specific files.

(02/02/10 1.248.4.1)
Update alpha defconfig to the options available in 2.5.4-pre5.

(02/02/10 1.248.1.12)
Sparc64 preemption support.

(02/02/10 1.248.1.13)
Add CONFIG_PREEMPTION.

(02/02/10 1.248.1.14)
Clean up sparc64 build

(02/02/10 1.257.1.1)
[PATCH] preempt-kernel on UP compile fix

A recent scheduler change looks to of affected this, and I missed it
since I did my last testing on SMP only. Please, apply.

Robert Love

(02/02/10 1.259)
[PATCH] check copy_from_user return codes in serial drivers.

forward-ported from 2.4

(02/02/10 1.262)
update version
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4-pre6 Patch Now Available Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2002 @ 12:06 AM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.4-pre6 Linux Kernel patch from here, the changelog can be found here.
 
Avocent DSR2161 Rack Mount KVM Review Posted Sunday, February 10, 2002 @ 1:02 AM by mayhem
If your looking for a large scale KVM then the Avocent DSR Series is definately worth a look, recently we have had a DSR2161 available for review and we put it throught its paces in order to judge its performance, you can find our detailed review here.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4-pre5 Patch Now Available Posted Saturday, February 9, 2002 @ 4:44 PM by mayhem
You can now dowanload the 2.5.4-pre5 Kernel patch from here, changelog:
pre5: 

davej@suse.de
[PATCH] remove duplicate zconf.h
[PATCH] Extra config.help for x86
[PATCH] remove ancient workaround.
[PATCH] Config.in updates
[PATCH] Power management support for opl3sa2 driver
[PATCH] fix serial close hang
[PATCH] AGPGart update
[PATCH] text.lock -> subsection changes.
[PATCH] handle out of spec SMP athlons.

greg@soap.kroah.net
typo fix for the name of the pci hotplug filesystem caused by the superblock changes.

mochel@segfault.osdlab.org
Doh! Fix pcmcia device handling

viro@math.psu.edu
[PATCH] fix for drivers/input/input.c
[PATCH] knfsd cleanups
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4-pre3 Patch Now Available Posted Saturday, February 9, 2002 @ 11:50 AM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.4-pre3 Kernel patch from here, changelog can be found here.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-pre9 Patch Now Available Posted Friday, February 8, 2002 @ 8:15 AM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.4.18-pre Kernel patch from here, changelog:
pre9:

- Cris update (Bjorn Wesen)
- SPARC update (David S. Miller)
- Remove duplicate CONFIG_SUNLANCE entry in
Config.in (David S. Miller)
- Change Netfilter maintainer (David S. Miller)
- More SunGEM bugfixes (David S. Miller)
- Update md5sums in ISDN's md5sums.asc (Kai Germaschewski)
- 3ware driver update (Adam Radford)
- Fix cosa compile problem (Adrian Bunk)
- Change VIA "disabling write queue" message (Oliver Feiler)
- Remove buggy Elan-specific handling code (Robert Schwebel)
- Reiserfs bugfixes (Oleg Drokin)
- Fix ppp memory leak (Andrew Morton)
- Really add devfs fix for removable devices:
its on pre8 changelog but not on pre8 patch (me)
- Add framebuffer support for trident graphics
card (James Simmons)
- SCSI tape driver bugfixes (Kai Makisara)
- Add support to Ovislink card on 8139too
driver (Jeff Garzik)
- Add SIOCxMIIxxxx ioctls for better binary
compatibility on au1000_eth driver (Jeff Garzik)
- Fix initialization of phy on epic100 driver (Jeff Garzik)
- Add MODULE_* info to mii.c (Jeff Garzik)
- Add new PCI ID to sundance driver (Jeff Garzik)
- Merge some -ac3 patches (Alan Cox)
- Unify simple_strtol symbol export (Russell King)
- Add amount of cached memory to sysreq-m
output (Martin Knoblauch)
- Do not use SCSI device type to change
IO clustering (Jens Axboe)
- IRC conntrack update (Harald Welte)
- sonypi driver update (Stelian Pop)
- Fix one of the PPP deadlocks (Manfred Spraul)
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4-pre2 Patch Now Available Posted Thursday, February 7, 2002 @ 11:51 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.4-pre2 Linux kernel patch from here, the changelog (in a strange new layout) is available here.
 
Linux Kernel 2.5.4-pre1 Kernel Patch Now Available Posted Wednesday, February 6, 2002 @ 3:56 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.5.4-pre1 Kernel patch from here, changelog:
pre1:
- vojtech@suse.cz: split up and move drivers/char/joystick into drivers/input
- kai@tp1.ruhr-uni-bochum.de: ISDN update
- nkbj@image.dk: Two fixes for linux-2.5.3.
- vandrove@vc.cvut.cz: nbd problems
- trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no: Drop reliance on file->f_dentry in NFS reads/writes
- trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no: Fix spurious ETXTBSY errors due to late release of struct file
- trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no: NFS lookup code rewrite w/o open(".") fix...
- greg@kroah.com: USB updates
- Reiserfs team: reiserfs updates
- mochel@osdl.org: driver model updates
- twaugh@redhat.com: parport updates
- davem@redhat.com: Sparc updates, UFS build etc
 
Slashdot: Byte Benchmarks Various Linux Trees Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 8:11 PM by mayhem
Moshe Bar has an interesting article, essentially benchmarking the standard kernel (with aa VM) against the -ac kernel (with Rik's VM). He also raises some very interesting points about how patches (and entire development trees) interact.
 
Slashdot: mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8 Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 8:10 PM by mayhem
Today mozilla.org released the Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on winXP and OS X, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements, and much, much more. www.mozilla.org and www.mozillazine.org have the full scoop.
 
Linux Kernel 2.4.18-pre8 Patch Now Available Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 7:37 PM by mayhem
You can now download the 2.4.18-pre8 Linux Kernel patch from here, changelog:
pre8: 

- Add missing netfilter files in pre7 (David S. Miller)
- SunGEM driver update (David S. Miller)
- Kill get_fast_time (David S. Miller)
- Update APIC LVTERR fix to work correctly on
old 486/586 APICs (Mikael Pettersson)
- Check the return code of copy_{from,to}_user
on serial code (Rasmus Andersen)
- Mark 2.5 extended attributes system calls as
reserved to avoid potential conflicts (Nathan Scott)
- Change Christoph Hellwig's email address (Christoph Hellwig)
- Make BLKGETSIZE64 return size in bytes not
sectors (Eric Sandeen)
- Coda dentry revalidation fix (Jan Harkes)
- hisax_fcpcipnp driver update (Kai Germaschewski)
- i810 sound driver update (Doug Ledford)
- Early personality setting in binfmt_elf (Christoph Hellwig)
- Fix rename bug in reiserfs (Oleg Drokin)
- SCSI documentation update (Douglas Gilbert)
- Fix silly typo in megaraid driver (Arjan Van de Ven)
- PPC update (Benjamin Herrenschmidt)
- USB bug fixes (Greg KH)
- Fix devfs problems with removable devices (Richard Gooch)
- Merge -ac1 fixes (Alan Cox)
- VXFS update (Christoph Hellwig)
- Add Compaq FC array to the LUN whitelist (Arjan Van de Ven)
 
LinuxToday: Samba 2.2.3 released Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 2:21 AM by mayhem
The Samba Team is proud to announce the release of Samba 2.2.3.

This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes.

There are several important scaling bugs that have been fixed in this release for large server systems so an upgrade is recommended.

Binary packages will be released shortly for major platforms. The source code can be downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/samba-2.2.3.tar.gz/

Full information is available here.
 
KernelTrap: FreeBSD 4.5 Released Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 2:16 AM by mayhem
I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE branch of development. Since FreeBSD 4.4 was released in September 2001, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide variety of security issues.

"In particular, there have been significant enhancements in the areas of network communications and filesystems. FreeBSD 4.5 contains improvements to the TCP stack to provide better throughput. In addition, TCP performance is aided by larger default buffer sizes. Finally, FreeBSD 4.5 contains new mechanisms to mitigate the effects of TCP Denial of Service attacks.

More information is available here.
 
NewsForge: Securing a default Linux installation Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 2:14 AM by mayhem
This article is written for a linux newbie or anybody who cares, at least a bit about the data stored on his hard drive. You'll notice that it's aimed mainly for home-users, not for large network administrators or similar. All procedures have been done and checked on an installed SuSE 6.4 linux distribution.
 
Slashdot: PSION Resurrected By Linux Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 2:02 AM by mayhem
The PsiLinux.org team have worked magic with getting Linux to squeeze into its new home of portable computers. Thanks to the falling prices in hardware the PSION 5mx is the most powerful, cheapest and smallest way to carry your best friend Tux in your pocket. Something no geek should leave home without. But now its gone one step further, check out http://thomas.de-ruiter.cx/projects/psion which is Tader's site. You really need to see these PicoGUI ( http://www.picogui.org/ ) screenshots. The best one has got to be this one which shows the oustandingly attractive aqua theme.
 
Slashdot: Looking Closely at the Restrictions of Linux on the PS2 Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2002 @ 1:59 AM by mayhem
Hal-kun writes: "I wrote an interesting article about Sony's upcoming Linux distro for the PS2 and some intellectual property concerns I have with it. It's an intresting look at how Sony limits the ability to have full access to the system, yet being able to keep it under GPL."
 
Slashdot: Linux Kernel to be on Radio Posted Monday, February 4, 2002 @ 2:03 AM by mayhem
The Linux Kernel is to have a (spoken) reading on Radio Free Linux and some other regular radio station throughout the world. http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/ I guess this makes Linux offically 'free as in speech.' 'The Linux kernel contains 4,141,432 lines of code. Reading the entire kernel will take an estimated 14253.43 hours, or 593.89 days. Free Radio Linux begins transmission on February 3, 2002, the fourth anniversary of the term "Open Source."'" If only the mysterious numbers stations would open their source as well.
 
Slashdot: LinuxWorld Summary Posted Sunday, February 3, 2002 @ 12:51 PM by mayhem
Figured I'd take a moment now that I've caught up on most of my post-LWCE email buildup to mention a few things that caught my eye at the Javitz Center this year. Hit the link below to get bits on PS/2 Linux, the Sharp Zaurus, and whatever else I remember before I click 'save.'

By far the thing that impressed me the most was Sony's PS/2 Linux booth. I've been the gaming console running Linux several times in the past at other shows (most notably LinuxWorld in Tokyo) and it always struck me as a fascinating thing. And it looks like they may have it as close to right as reasonably possible. They plan on it being just $200... for a 40 gig hard drive, and ethernet. Basically $200 turns your $300 into a full featured Linux Box. The APIs are accessible to the prospective game developer. Ethernet is right there. The thing has USB ports. If you're looking for a way to get a decent PC connected to your TV and Stereo, this is a nifty way to do it. And since the video out will be able to support HDTV res like 720p and perhaps 1080i, it might even be a non-sucky display for certain applications. I'm not saying throw away your desktop, but there is a lot there to love: get a wireless USB compatible keyboard/mouse, and you have a nifty setup. Of course the CPU speeds aren't exactly P3 or P4 speeds, but for web browsing, MP3 playing and so forth, it'll do. Especially when the true nature of the X-Box is revealed.

Continues here.
 
LinuxSecurity: Linux Advisory Watch - February 1st 2002 Posted Sunday, February 3, 2002 @ 5:13 AM by mayhem
This week, advisories were released for rsync, k5su, enscript, gzip, ptrace, sudo, x-chat, sane-backends, pine, at, uucp, mutt, openldap, squid, and xinetd. The vendors include Caldera, Conectiva, Debian, EnGarde, FreeBSD, Mandrake, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, TurboLinux, and YellowDog.

Full information can be found here.
 
LinuxFreak: Oracle Switching To Linux Posted Sunday, February 3, 2002 @ 5:11 AM by mayhem
Oracle finally came to their senses and said "We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux." pretty cool eh? more here..
 
LinuxFreak: Animate Your LILO Posted Sunday, February 3, 2002 @ 5:08 AM by mayhem
Still using LILO? those boring 4 letters... how about animate them? check out this method to animate LILO. You can even play a game..
 
Slashdot: Libranet GNU/Linux 2.0 Coming Soon Posted Friday, February 1, 2002 @ 12:01 AM by mayhem
As a proud employee of Libranet, I'm pleased to announce that Libranet has started taking pre-orders for Libranet GNU/Linux 2.0. I feel I should note, of all the vaunted Debian based commercial distributions (Stormix, Corel, Progeny) Libranet is the only one left. We got started before they did and here we still are. Libranet has proven that to stay in the race what you need is a good product rather than millions of dollars behind you; but that's what the world of Free/Open software is all about, isn't it? - Tal" I love Debian, but have never tried Libranet. (The machine I'm typing on was installed with a Stormix CD; my laptop started as a Progeny machine...) Since we seem to be running out of other Debian-based distros, looks like Libranet is my next choice. :)