Author: Ian Palmer
This week we’re introducing a new feature on Linux.com. We plan to monitor the mailing lists of key open source projects and excerpt highlights that should help our readers stay informed. Consider this week’s posting version 1.0 — we hope you’ll suggest ways we can make this feature work even better for you. For instance, are there other mailing lists
that you don’t see here but whose content you find interesting?Linux Kernel
that you don’t see here but whose content you find interesting?Linux Kernel
- If you are running a 2.6 kernel and are having problems with your USB printer, you
might be interested in trying this
patch, from Barry K. Nathan. - For those laptop owners who have upgraded from 2.6.1 to a later kernel revision,
if you are having problems with your laptop freezing after a suspend, consider
reverting back to 2.6.1 for the time being and see if that helps. You can find more
information in this
message from Antony Dovgal. - Interested in filesystem benchmarks under 2.6.3? You may want to read
Peter
Nelson’s writeup. For the full skinny on the results and the test
methodology used, you can visit his 2.6
benchmarking page. - It looks like Linux has now been ported to the M32R processor, a 32-bit RISC
processor from Renesas Technology! Feel free to read the
announcement from Hirokazu Takata. Currently this port only exists for 2.4
kernels, with hope for a 2.6.0 release, in the near future. - Having problems with the I2O subsystem under Linux 2.6.3? If so, you may want to look
into this
patch, from Markus Lidel. For those interested, you can find the patch
details, here. - If you are using kernel 2.6 and do a lot of CD ripping, you might want to
try this
performance enhancing patch from Jens Axboe, which is supposed to enable cdda
ripping from DMA, as opposed to PIO. cdparanoia users should definitely notice the
improvements. - Using Large Block Devices under Linux 2.6? If so, you might want to apply
thesepatches
for Linux 2.6.3, from Eric Sandeen, as well as
this patch,
from Andrew Morton. - If your Samba shares are not respecting the “uid” or “gid” mount parameters, you
may want to see if this
patch, from Søren Hansen, will fix the problem. Those interested in this patch
may also be interested in this
thread on a UID/GID mapping system. Please be aware of the potential security
concerns that may impinge on your network before applying this patch. - Interested in limiting process tree depth? Try this
patch from Marco Molinaro. It uses the rlimit framework to set the maximum depth of
a process tree, impeding a process’s ability to fork depending on its depth from the process
parent. - For those of you interested in benchmarks, Mark Wong recently posted some
LVM2 perform
numbers. Check out the details
here. - If you are running a SiS900 based networking card (ala an RTL8201) and are having
problems with low transfer rates, you might want to try this
patch from Grischa Jacobs, and see if your transfer rates improve. - James Ketrenos announces the launch of an open source driver for the Intel
Pro/Wireless 2100 miniPCI network adapter. The driver is in “early beta” and is
in active development. Support for the 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernel’s is available.
If you are interested in taking part in development, you can visit the
the website, or you can sign up for the
mailing list. - According to James Smart, Emulex is also starting on an initiative to open
source the driver for their LightPulse Fibre Channel Adapter family. Their
SourceForge page is open and
there is a currently-in-progress FAQ there. If you are interested in helping
development, drop by and sign-on. - Those of you interested in a better tracing tool than ‘strace’ might be interested in
LTT, as mentioned in
this
message from Karim Yagmour. - Greg Kroah-Hartman recently announced the release
of udev 022. For those of you unfamiliar with udev, it’s a devfs replacement that
runs outside of the kernel, which attempts to address many of the devfs drawbacks. - It was only a matter of time. Valdis Kletnieks points out that rootkits
have now made their way to the 2.6 kernel. So here comes the obligatory warning:
keep those systems patched!
- Andrew Sobala is calling for
dynamic and exciting screenshots that show off GNOME 2.6 in action. If you think
you have such a desktop, feel free to snap off a few and send them on. - While on the topic of screenshots, Arafat Medini was gracious enough to
show off a
few of his own displaying Gnome 2.6 in Arabic! - Did you miss out on Gnome related news during the last week of Feb?
Don’t fret! Sri Ramkrishna has the GNOME
Summary for February 22nd-28th ready for your perusal! - Tim Janik announces
the release of BEAST v0.6.1, the Bedevilled Audio SysTem. BEAST is a music
composition and modular synthesis application. This should make a fine addition to the
toolbox of musicians who are looking to add more free-software to their music making
arsenal, along with other free sound software like
Audacity,
Ardour and
other fine utilities.
- Would you like new sound fonts for KDE? If so, you might be interested in
this
announcement by Artemio. His experience as a sound designer and a music
composer have brought forth KDEvibes.
Give them a try!
- For those of you who would like the ability to hover over a link
and have a tooltip displayed with the link’s URL, you might be
interested in this
thread, between Fred Holmes and Ed Mullen. Another good tip from
this thread are the pointers to the
Mozilla and
Foxfire extensions. Take
a look, and see the other ways in which you can extend the functionality of your
browser. - Trying to un-install the Quicktime Plug-in, and are having problems? The information in
this
thread, might be useful to you. - Want to include your IE bookmarks into another browser (like Mozilla)?
Try this
thread for a helpful tip. - If you are using Mozilla 1.6+ and are having problems accessing webservers on
nonstandard ports, you might be interested in the second paragraph on
this
page, as noted by Jerry Talkington in this
thread. - Windows XP or 98 users who would prefer to keep their Mozilla
profiles off of the C-Drive, might be interested in this
thread. - Interested in backing up your Mozilla Profile, like
this
fellow? You might be interested in Mozilla
Backup.
