Cliff’s List Filter – Aug 31-Sept 6

Welcome and tune in to more updates from the various Open Source User and Developers mailing lists covering the Linux Kernel, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla projects. Up this week: questions (and answers) about Embedded Linux; schedulers; the extent of Linux 2.6 support; lots of new GNOME releases in the run-up to GNOME 2.8; a subtitle editor for KDE and the usual assortment of helpful miscellany.

Linux Kernel

• The LKML summary starts off with an interesting question and answer session on Embedded Linux. How different is this creature and what exactly are you entitled to if you purchase a product that uses it?

• A warning to the wise, there is some talk on the Kernel lists that USB harddrive enclosures based on the Prolific PL3507 chipset don’t work well and aren’t worth buying. They have trouble dealing with heavy write traffic under Linux, and also are troublesome to work with under Windows.

• Alan Cox put together an experimental patch that attempts to handle misrouted IRQs in a sensible fashion. The code is activated by the “irqfixup” kernel boot parameter and is intended to be used on machines that resist attempts at properly loading the Linux kernel.

• Geoff Levand has ported George Anzinger’s high rez timers to Linux 2.6.8-1.

• While discussing the fixes to the wrapper-code for NVIDIA’s binary driver for Linux, a list member asked a good question: what graphics card should I buy for Linux? The key issue here was the availability of fully open sourced drivers for the cards in question. Intel and VIA were mentioned, but the ATI R1xx/R2xx graphics cards got a resounding recommendation. Unfortunately, there is currently a bug in the R200 driver that is causing deadlocks in the kernel. It appears that this problem may be fixed in later DRI releases, however it may be a while before many of the larger distributions catch up and incorporate that code.

• Once again, Ingo Molnar makes more progress with his voluntary preempt patch, now up to version -R8 (on top of a Bitkeeper release of 2.6.9-rc1).

• With the variety of schedulers available for Linux 2.6.x, a few of you might appreciate some experiences using the different schedulers. Many of the participants preferred the performance of the “staircase” scheduler for a general desktop system. Other schedulers may be better for different purposes, however.

• Interested in seeing how many platforms Linux 2.6 supports? There was a discussion on the kernel list on this very subject that some of you may find interesting.

• To round out the activity on the kernel lists, this week, Ray Bryant has done some testing of the effect of the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness knob, which affects the behavior of how the virtual memory system handles the swapping, and has started a discussion on his surprising results.

GNOME

• Due to delays in startup times, Balsa has removed a check for unread messages in mbox-trees. Users who preferred this check, at the expense of longer start-up times, can use these changes to reactivate the old behavior. Another piece of unexpected behavior that may plague unaware users is that of the Fcc field in later versions of Balsa. If this field is not set, then any mail sent by that client may not be copied to the “sent mail” folder. Older versions may interpret the blank field differently, but newer versions will not copy mail to that folder if this field is blank.

• Notable releases in the GNOME world, this week:

• Gnopernicus, a screen reader for the GNOME desktop, has reached version 0.9.10.

• Gnumeric v1.3.2 marks the transition from “development” to “beta” as that team begins the run up to v1.4.0. This latest version includes loads of changes and improvements and should be on par with the functionality of 1.2.0.
• The GStreamer team has released v0.8.4 of their plugins for GStreamer. These plugins are not binary-compatible with v0.6 but can be installed alongside a 0.6 setup.

• Marlin 0.6, a sample editor for GNOME that uses the GStreamer core, was released on September 1.
• The GNOME project announces the first release candidate of GNOME 2.8 (version 2.7.92), and it looks like a final release of GNOME 2.8 can be expected by early October.

• GNOME Ghostview moves closer to its 2.8.0 release with the christening of version 2.7.99, which includes more language fonts than you can shake a stick at.

KDE

• KSubtile v1.01, a subtitle editor for the KDE desktop, is released on September 1.

Mozilla

• For those who run into the situation of needing to move their browser work from one machine to the other, especially in the case of encryption keys that may be in your Mozilla profile, try using the hints found in this discussion.

• New XPIs for the Mozilla Calendar are available for Mac OS X.