Cliff’s List Filter June 16 – 22

Welcome back to another installment of fresh ground tidbits and information from the Linux Kernel, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla circles. This week: Linux makes the final jump to 2.6.7, along with the first release candidate of 2.4.27; changes that will hopefully improve CUPS support in GNOME; amaroK, the KDE audio player, marks its premier release version; Mozilla makes it to the 1.7 mark; and the usual assortment of patches, tips and useful miscellany.

Linux Kernel

• Linus lets Linux 2.6.7 launch out of the hangar, this week on June 16. A minor problem managed to slip through the cracks, but a quick tweak to the JFS code should put you well on your way to obtaining the latest and greatest. If you have occasion to use the ‘stty’ command to change your console size, you’ll need to apply a few code updates to get it to work with the latest kernel. Following closely on the heels of the announcement were the following kernel-dependent projects:
  a formal update for the Staircase scheduler; kdb; the single priority array (SPA) scheduler; and Mariusz Mazur’s updated kernel-headers for better libc compatibility.

• Vladislav Bolkovitin announced the release of the Generic SCSI Target Middle Level layer subsystem on June 16. Its purpose is to provide a consistent interface between SCSI drivers and the Linux kernel in the hopes of simplifying driver development, as well as providing other functionality such as full SMP support. Currently the only hardware to support this framework are the Qlogic 2200/2300 based cards.
• Linux 2.6.6 users who were using the Auto-GEometry Resizing support (CONFIG_IDEDISK_STROKE) may have noticed that the option has disappeared in the just-released 2.6.7 kernels. To re-enable this functionality for any drives that were configured with this option, you will need to add “hdX=stroke” to your kernel’s boot parameters (replace “hdX” with the appropriate name of your drive’s device node).
• 3Com 3C59X/3C90X network card owners who have been experiencing problems with their network card, when trying to use basic services like DHCP, may want to apply these subtle improvements to their network card driver and see if it resolves the problems.
• If you own a motherboard with a KT600 AGP chipset, and boot into Linux, don’t fret if you see it identified as a VIA CLE266. It appears that agpgart has a bug in it that is causing this misidentification. Apply the patch, and the problem should be corrected.
• A note for ext3 users: The ext3 filesystem had an odd race condition in it, which was recently fixed by Chas Mason.
• Vulnerabilities were recently found in Linux’s EQL load balancing module. Herbert Xu has a hotfix for the EQL code that should close them.
• There were problems reported with compiling the ‘iptables’ tool under the recent Linux 2.6.7 kernel. It appears there were some problems with the linux kernel headers that needed some adjustment. If you are trying to compile ‘iptables’ with 2.6.7, try the patch mentioned in the last link and see if that gets you up and running.
• Linux 2.4.27-rc1 was released on June 19. If you plan on compiling this kernel with GCC v3.4.0, you’ll need to adjust a few things, and if you must have a clean compile, you can quiet the warnings with these careful corrections.
• A new version of the SGI Altix console driver has been ported to 2.6 using the new serial core functions. If you’ve got one of these devices, try out the new driver and see how well it works. I’m sure the maintainers will enjoy seeing whatever bug reports you can find.

GNOME

• Some usability improvements for gnome-nettool hit the gnome-network mailing list, this week. Changes were submitted that adds tooltips and status bar messages to the interface. Every little bit helps.

• Colin Winters has been working on the internals for libgnomecups and has come up with an update that allows
  asynchronous updates for print requests. Even though it’s still in the early stages, try it out and see if you notice any improvement in your GNOME printing subsystem.

• While Gnumeric doesn’t support VB compatible macros at this point, it does support Python. Jonathan Drews passed along this helpful hint for anyone who wishes to Python+Gnumeric to add a bit more intelligence to their spreadsheets.

• Freshly brewed from the programming vats, this week:
• gamin marked its first ever release with v0.0.1 on June 18. gamin is a filesystem monitoring application that is being designed as a drop-in replacement for FAM, with a minimal security model and a simplified code base. Currently, gnome-vfs and Nautilus are working using gamin on SELinux enabled machines. If you are interested in following this project, you can get more info from the gamin homepage
• Liferea moved to version 0.5.0 on June 20.

Hydrogen reached its landmark v1.0 release on June 21. Hydrogen is a connector that allows Evolution v1.4 to connect to Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Servers.

KDE

• amaroK, the KDE audio player, hit the magic version 1.0 on June 18. The improvements are numerous, read the announcement for a taste, then download it and see for yourself.
• KDE Developers that have been having problems creating shared libraries might want to try using a shared library template for use in KDevelop, and see if that makes things easier.

Mozilla

• Mozilla 1.7 was released on June 17.
• Firefox users who have been experiencing hangs while trying to install extensions, even after reinstalling the program, should try loading Firefox in Safe Mode, and try and install it from there. If that doesn’t work, more drastic potential solutions exist like completely removing all Mozilla program files, and profile data.

• A tip for fans of the tab-browsing features, particularly those of you who use tab groups. If you would like to open tab groups without replacing any tabs that are already open, try setting the browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace option to false.

• Mozilla developers that are currently working on XPIs which they plan to make available for public consumption may want to read this thread on signing XPI files as it may help avoid a stumbling block that might otherwise keep you busy for hours. Another thread which might be of interest is this thread on building plugins for Win32.