Cliff’s List Filter April 28 – May 5

Spring is in the air, the sun is shining and Open Source, as always, is moving forward. While browsing the GNOME, KDE, Mozilla and Linux Kernel list, we’ve been squirreling away the choice bits of information for your leisurely digestion. New this week: Linux 2.6.6 comes closer to release with its 3rd candidate, Class-based Resource allocation for the kernel, GNOME developer tools, a whole load of GNOME and KDE software, and as usual, loads of tips and fixes for your favorite Open Source software.

Linux Kernel

• Linux
  2.6.6-rc3 released on April 27.

• For those of you who missed the brouhaha over binary modules from last week, Nigel Cunningham asks “What
  does tainting actually mean?“. If you have been wondering exactly what tainting is, this discussion is for you.

• If you have been noticing decreased performance on a network share and your “pdflush” process seems to be working harder than it should, try these corrections from Andrew Morton and see if they fix the problem.
• Having problems with IPSec and NAT on a Linux 2.6 kernel? If so, you can try a
  couple of solutions from Aidas Kasparas.

• Sean Young contributes a new driver for Linux 2.6 (with minor
  corrections) to control the USB servo controllers from Phidgets.

• Touchscreen enthusiasts will be glad to know that Linux now tentatively supports eGalax Touchscreens, thanks to a new USB HID driver from Daniel Ritz. This is only the second version of the driver, so if you do decide to use it, please be sure to report any bugs to Daniel.
• Those of you curious about XFS may appreciate this timeline which was mentioned during a discussion on journaling filesystem reliability. Since the question wasn’t answered, it would be interesting to note what you readers have found in your experiences. Which is more reliable: JFS, ReiserFS or XFS?
• Linux Watchdog users may want to consider applying the latest watchdog patches from Wim Van Sebroeck.
• 2.6 users who have been comparing their filesystem performance to 2.4 and noticing some degradation in performance, might want to consider applying these fixes
  from Andrew Morton and a few /proc enhancements from Ram Pai to see if they bring your performance closer to the 2.4 numbers (or at least drastic improvements). If you’re running a database on 2.6, you should definitely look into these changes.

• Linux 2.6 I2C users who have noticed a memory leak while using the W83781D driver can try this
  fix from Jean Delvare.

• Mariusz Mazur updates his replacement LibC headers for Linux on May 2.
• For those of you looking to boot Linux from a USB device, these
  changes to later 2.4 kernels may help you in your quest. The patch adds a boot-time
  parameter that delays loading of the root filesystem, giving your external devices
  time to power up and become available. Also, here
  is a tip for those of you who may make small changes to kernel code but not the kernel
  configuration parameters, which allows you to only compile the subdirs in which you have made changes. Thanks to Willy Tarreau for the tip and the patches.

• Linux
  2.4.27-pre2 is released by Marcelo Tosatti on May 3. You might need this
  small patch to compile it, however.

• RAID users may want to update their kernel documentation with some information which they may find useful.
• James Ketrenos announces that Intel has started work on “an open source project to
  support the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection miniPCI adapter (IPW2200)”.
  You can find their SourceForge pages here.

• Shailabh Nagur announces the release of a test package for the Class-based
  Kernel Resource Management feature. Which attempts to give sysadmins more control over system resource allocation. This is accomplished by organizing processes into a class,
  and then specifying what shares of system resources are allowed for each class.

GNOME

• Developers looking to try their hand at writing document/view programs under GNOME
  might want to try cooking in the bakery,
  as recommended by Eric Lemings.

• Folks who follow GnomeMeeting may want to take a peek at the current roadmap (feel free to use “WikiWord” as the user ID with no password to view the document), which details the major directions in which the development team plans to head within this year. Thanks to Damien Sandras for the directions.
• Data miners discovered these new gems:
• Epiphany 1.2.5 was released on May 4. Epiphany is a Mozilla-based web browser for GNOME.
• Metacity v2.8.1 was released on May 5.
• And since they did a double release, this week, we may as well mention the v2.6.1 and the 1.0.3 releases of libxml++, which were both released, also on May 5. For those who haven’t been exposed to it yet, libxml++ is a C++ wrapper for libxml, an XML parsing library.
• Gnumetric releases v1.2.12 as a high priority release on May 5. In this release are several key bugfixes, among them being changes that will enable MS Excel to load and read
  Gnumetric-created XLS files without crashing.

• libgsf v1.9.0 was released, and is a requirement for the previously mentioned Gnumetric release if you plan on running Gnumetric with gnome-vfs.

KDE

• KolorPaint
  1.0.2 is released on May 1. New icons and a new user manual are among some of
  the new improvements.

• KOffice-1.3.1 is released on May 5.
• KIOSK
  Admin Tool v0.3 is released, also on May 5. This may interest those of you
  who wish to deploy KDE as a demo, a stripped down version for novice users or … a kiosk!

• It looks like KSpell2
  is coming together, nicely. It’s not quite done, yet but much of the basic functionality
  is there and ready to be tested. If you are interested in seeing how spell-checking under
  KDE is developing, give it a whirl (after applying a
  few minor fixes if it refuses to compile for you)!

• For those of you who can’t seem to debug KDE code effectively, because of a bug in
  GDB that doesn’t allow you to use breakpoints in a constructor, try following
  these debugging
  tips from Bernd Pol and see if you can use that as a workaround.

Mozilla

• If you are having problems downloading files from a webpage with Netscape 7.1 (reports
  “resource not found” for any file link), then try deleting the compreg.dat file from your Netscape Components folder.

• Looking to modify existing keyboard shortcuts to Thundirbird? How about adding new ones?
  Gert-Paul has a solution for you if you’ve been looking for this functionality.

• Michiel van Leeuwen is looking for testers who have a Palm Pilot, Linux and use Mozilla Calendar and wouldn’t mind helping him test his syncing utility. If interested, pop the previous link in your browser and join the mailing list.
• Mozilla users on Windows who would like a utility to verify there bookmarks may want
  to try these suggestions from James Devney.