Cliff’s List Filter – May 19 – 25

Welcome once again to this week’s filtering of news, announcements, tips and patches from the Linux, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla circles. There was lots to cover this week, including a new Megaraid driver, a Voodoo3 TV-IN driver for Linux 2.6, and progress on the Win32 port for GnomeMeeting. Speaking of GnomeMeeting, it looks like a name change may be in its future. Read on for the news, and if you feel there are other areas of interest we could be covering, please drop us a line and let us know.

Linux Kernel

• Intel Ethernet Pro users who find themselves confused as to which driver to use, may find better results with the “e100” driver as opposed to the “eepro100” driver, at least according to various recommendations from LKML readers.
• Those of you on 64-bit architectures, who are having problems sending files greater than 2Gb in size over protocols like FTP, might want to look into this discussion on the sys_sendfile() call. There are two patches in this thread which you can apply and see if you are then allowed to successfully transfer large files.
• Another supplemental patch for the Linux 2.4 megaraid driver was released on May 19, bringing its version up to 2.10.6. Note that some of the protections of the 2.4 driver had vanished from the latest stable kernel series, so Alan Cox has provided the necessary corrections for Linux 2.6 that should whip that driver back into shape.
• Work on the Linux 2.4 kernel proceeds with Marcelo Tosatti releasing the third candidate for 2.4.27 on May 19. Before you start compiling this latest release, make sure you apply this trivial fix for interrupt.h.
• If you’ve been experiencing periodic Kernel panics while using IPsec with the built-in kernel encryption modules, and don’t mind doing a bit of fiddling with a BitKeeper repository, you can try and revert this BK changeset and recompile your kernel to see if the problem goes away. Additionally, this fix for crypto.c should also correct a small error.
• Visor owners who have been experiencing the periodic Kernel Oopses while using their handhelds (typically when disconnecting it), might want to investigate Joe Nardelli’s patch for such Visor issues that may correct the problem. You can find more information, including the final version of this patch in the bugzilla entry for this problem.
• SWap SUSPend user should be aware that there was a rather nasty bug in that particular code that could be triggered by certain memory mapping operations within the kernel. A patch has been crafted to fix the memory mapping problem, and PMDISK and SWSUSP users might want to consider applying it. While on the topic of SWSUSP, there was another fix for bad interactions between it and DevFS that hit the list this week, whose application should also be considered.
• Squashfs released an alpha version of version 2.0 May 21. In case you haven’t heard of it before, Squashfs is a compressed read-only filesystem for Linux.
• The V3TV driver is now running under Linux 2.6. The driver, which was released on May 21, should enable users of Voodoo3 3500 cards to access the TV-IN capabilities on that card. This should make another option for those looking to turn a Linux box into a cheap PVR.
• Have you been experiencing high loads or CPU utilization under Linux 2.6 while using multimedia applications (using top or another monitoring application)? If so, this might just be an artifact of a specific timing variable and lowering it may get those utilization numbers down to more reasonable values. A discussion on tvtime performance illustrates how such CPU utilization might affect multimedia applications and Ingo Molnar provides the value changes necessary to bring the utilization down in a nice, bytesized package.
• Linux2.6.7-rc1 is released on May 23.
• Mariusz Mazur announces the second release of his Linux libc-headers package for Linux 2.6.5. He also mentioned that the release for Linux 2.6.6 kernels is forthcoming, but will be delayed due to time issues.
• kerneltop version 0.8 is released on May 24. It is a program similar to “top” except that it only shows kernel activity.
• kdv version 4.4 is released, also on May 24. Versions exist for i386 and ia64 based kernels.
• Akiyama Nobuyuki unleashed a veritable patch storm when he posted his initial patch on adding an NMI trigger switch for producing debugging information, which could even potentially work when the kernel is in a unusable state. When the dust finally clears, this may turn into a valuable addition for users with crashed systems, who need support from kernel hackers to solve their problem.
• User Mode Linux has moved to version 2.6.6-1 with these latest UML updates. User-Mode Linux is essentially a way to run many virtual Linux machines inside of a main host. Check out the User-mode Linux Home Page for more information.
• Olaf Hering wins the weird-bug-of-the-month award with this bit of fine debugging. It turns out that having a /dev node on a tmpfs filesystem gives a bit of a performance hit. After a bit of head scratching, Andrew Morton provides this small fix for that bizarre problem.
• Finally, let’s close this week’s LKML summary with a discussion that I’m sure has come across your minds at some point or another: Can Linux users live without a swap partition?

GNOME

• Balsa users who would rather not wait for an official release or their distributions might want to apply these GPG fixes that will appear in the upcoming 2.0.18 release. Additional fixes for gpgme and Gmime may also be worth rolling in.
• It looks like new codecs and enhancements will be coming to GnomeMeeting, as well as a potential name change, from this recent discussion on latest GnomeMeeting roadmap.
• The Win32 port of GnomeMeeting is shaping up, as well and developers have hinted at a possible alpha release, this summer.
• Martin Wehner has posted a fix for icon dragging in Nautilus which didn’t work properly when the zoom level was not set at 100%, which also spawned another patch to fix rubberband selection. Martin also came up with a patch that allows apps to run in the currently viewed directory rather than the directory where Nautilus was executed from. Another three more Nautilus bugs, dead.
• Another patch was posted which allows you to close all of Nautilus’ spatial windows, with one single keystroke.
• New to the GNOME world, this week:
• Balsa v2.1.3 was born as a stable, incremental release on May 22.
• GNOME War Pad v0.3.0 was released on May 24 and brings this turn based (you can even play over email) space strategy game to the GNU/Linux platform.

KDE

• aKregator 1.0-beta1 is released on May 21. aKregator is an RSS aggregation tool for KDE.
• KDbg v1.2.10(stable) and v1.9.5(devel) is released also on May 21. KDbg is a KDE-based frontend to gdb, the GNU debugger.

Mozilla

• Mozilla 1.8 alpha-1 was released on May 20. Even though its an alpha release, the changelog boasts over 500 fixed bugs.
• If you would prefer Thunderbird to display the full usergroup names, then try editing the proper lines in the user.js file. Another useful tip from that message is the use of Chromedit, if you would prefer a UI to edit these options as opposed to a text editor.
• Has Mozilla or Thunderbird suddenly forgotten all of your user settings, and is now treating you like a new user. Chances are your profile just needs a rescue.