Author: Ian Palmer
Welcome to this week’s highlights from the mailing lists of important Linux-related projects. If there are other mailing lists
that you don’t see here which you think we and our readers will find interesting, feel
free to mail us your suggestions! Let’s see
what’s been going on around the Open Source world this week…Linux
that you don’t see here which you think we and our readers will find interesting, feel
free to mail us your suggestions! Let’s see
what’s been going on around the Open Source world this week…
Linux
Kernel
- Linux 2.6.5-rc1
is released on March 16. - Luis R. Rodregues announces the
completion
of the Prism54 driver project. Drivers exist for Linux 2.4 at
their website. Drivers also exist for Linux 2.6,
but these drivers are now incorporated into the 2.6 kernel source tree. The Prism54
driver supports all Prism GT, Duette and Indigo based wireless adaptors, with support
for the Javelin/Xbow cards planned. For a complete list of supported adaptors, you
can check against the
list of supported cards. - If you’ve been noticing hard
freezes when using external FireWire drives with Linux 2.6.3/4, then take heart. It seems fixes
are on the way.
If there are any forthcoming patches for this problem, we’ll let you know in these notes. - For those who are having a problem with USB storage devices not being detected on bootup,
you might be interested in this small
tip from Plaz McMan. - Having problems with weird margin colors in Linux 2.6? You might want to
try this
small fix, from Jakub Bogusz, and see if it clears up the problem. - Linux 2.6 users who are noticing a slowdown in their compiles,
like
Marinos J. Yannikos did, might want to consider some advice
from Andrea Arcangeli and consider turning
off CONFIG_PREEMT. For those of you interested in the guts and details of PREEMT,
the entire thread might be of interest. - If you have been trying to set up a network test using one machine with multiple NICs,
and not getting the results you’re expecting, you might want to check out
this thread,
for some helpful tips and pointers. - For those of you having problems with libata based applications and/or the IDE drivers
using an x86-64 system, Jeff Garzik offers some
parameters and tips for you to try that may clear up the problem. - Linux 2.6.5-rc2
is released on March 19. Optimizations to reduce disk and memory footprint
were released, as well. - Linux 2.4.26-pre5
is released on March 20. - A patch enabling small enhancements
for Linux 2.6’s O(1) scheduler for Linux 2.6.4 was posted by John Lee.
GNOME
- Luis Villa announces the return of
Gnome Bugzilla and needs some help with
stress testing. If you’ve used Gnome Bugzilla in the past and have some time, please
help with the stress testing and report bugs as you find them. March 25 is reserved as the “abnormal bug day” for this stress testing, so
if you can pound on it and give it a good work out to help iron out the kinks, please
do. - Jeff Waugh mentions that, due to a recent break-in on the GNOME Webserver, the
GNOME 2.6 release announcement has been delayed until March 31. More information
can be found as it is released, here. - Those of you who are having difficulty with Nautilus “Spatial Mode” might want to take a
look at these comments
for some insight into the nature of the change, as well as a few tips for those of you
who prefer the old behavior. - New releases in the GNOME world. For brevity, we’re only going to highlight stable releases (if the project uses a stable/development release cycle, like the Linux Kernel) and milestone releases (ie non-beta releases ending in “.0”, “.0.0” or “.5.0”). If you would like to see the full release list for GNOME applications in its entirety, you can take a look at the full list,
in the archives:- libxklavier
breaks the 1.00 barrier on March 16. - GtkSourceView hits
its milestone 1.0.0 release on March 22. - The
GNOME User Documentation hits version v2.6.0. The 2.6 series is a stable
release series and includes the GNOME User’s Guide, the GNOME System Administrators Guide
and the GNOME Accessibility Guide.
- libxklavier
KDE
- Having problem printing using CUPS under KDE? If so, you may want to make sure you have
the proper Fontmap file. - For those users still using XFS, please note that it has been replaced by FontConfig.
If you have fonts in XFS
that aren’t showing up in KDE, then please make sure you have
FontConfig configured properly.
Mozilla
- Simon Paquet has placed
pages for Sunbird,
Mozilla’s Calendaring project, on Mozilla’s Web Site. If you haven’t tried Sunbird
yet, you might want to give it a try. If you are interested in seeing your Outlook
calendar data in Sunbird, point your browser at this
message, for some installation instructions. If you run into any problems, please
remember to report whatever bugs you may run into. - For those of you looking to open PDFs in an external Acrobat window, you might be
interested in these
tips from Stan Brown. - Looking to control Firefox behavior, but the options you want just aren’t in the
options dialogs? You may want to check out the various
hints found in these messages, and these other tips and tricks may well be worth your while.
