Author: Ian Palmer
Welcome again to the usual helping of news, tips and patches from the open source mailing lists. This week: 2 penguins are better than one…Linux 2.6.8-rc3 is released as well as the final version of 2.4.27; several patches that will hopefully improve Nautilus stability for GNOME desktops; a few new software releases for KDE; and a reminder to update your Mozilla software due to a critical security bug that was found this week.
Linux Kernel
- Recently, a problem was discovered in the 2.6.x implementation of NFS. If an NFS server exports its /dev directory read-only, a client running Linux 2.6 can’t write to devices (like /dev/console). Clients running Linux 2.4 won’t run into this problem. Neil Brown wrote up a small correction to the NFS code to address this issue.
- Quickly following the release of Linux 2.6.8-rc3, earlier in the week, Linus christens 2.6.8-rc4 on August 9. GCC 2.95 users may need to deploy some minor kernel code changes to get a clean compile. Of course Linux 2.6 wasn’t the only kernel released this week: Marcelo Tosatti has declared that Linux 2.4.27 is ready to go! Can 2.4.28 be far behind?
- With the release of Linux 2.6.8-rc3 (and beyond), Matt Mackall releases his Linux patchset made expressly for embedded and lower-powered machines.
- Developers with an advanced grasp of POSIX, mutexes and futexes may have some interest in a patch and proposal that recently appeared on the kernel mailing list. It attempts to address some shortcomings in POSIX support by providing programming primitives that add features like priority inheritance, robust mutexes and deadlock checking.
- Roger Luethi posted an update of the Muilticast Driver Testing HOWTO on August 5. Those of you deploying multicast networks with Linux, or developing mutlicast drivers may find this of some use.
- An informative discussion crossed the list regarding the intricacies of ext3’s journaling, primarily focusing on how the journal is affected by the different mount options which you can pass to the filesystem. If you are trying to tune your ext3 filesystem and need a little more understanding of the specific journaling options, then you may find some useful information, here.
GNOME
- If you have recently been having unexpected crashes with Nautilus, a few patches have flown across the Nautilus mailing lists that you may want to apply to see if they solve the problem. First off, there was an issue with the nautilus progress dialog that could cause a division-by-zero error, next there was a patch which solves problems with renaming files while in the list view, and finally developers closed an issue that dealt with improper handling of the Open Location window.
- A small tip for GnomeMeeting users that may not be in the FAQ, yet. If you wish to change the listen port on Gnome Meeting you need to use the Gconf-editor to manipulate this value.
- Balsa 2.2.2 was released on August 8, and if you deal with PGP signed messages, you may want to apply an extra patch to enable that feature, otherwise signatures show up as attachments.
KDE
- amaroK v1.0.2, an audio player for the KDE desktop, was released on August 6. New in this version is support for the XINE audio engine.
- KNetworkConf v0.6 was released on August 7. It is a module for the KDE control center which is used to configure network devices and settings.
- KDE users who have compiled Akode with a version of libltdl installed may be experiencing problem playing Ogg files. Recompiling Akode with libltdl disabled should solve this problem.
Mozilla
- The libpng vulnerability, that was recently announced this past week, has been fixed in Firefox 0.9.3, Mozilla 1.7.2 and Thunderbird 0.7.3. If you haven’t already, please upgrade at your soonest opportunity.
