Linux.com

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.

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.

Ian Palmer is a freelance writer based near Toronto, Canada, who focuses on technology and business issues.

Share    Print    Comments