mpawlo writes, “As reported by Gnuheter, it seems like Swedish is becoming the official open source language. Here are some recent developments on this matter.
One Gnome 2.0 desktop alpha was called Mr Nilsson Sheds a tear (sw: Mr Nilsson was a character (a monkey) in the Pippi children book series written by recently deceased Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren), another Gnome 2.0 desktop alpha was called Rolig Liten Hattgubbe (sw: Funny little hat man), the Garnome preview number one was called Grym liten hattgubbe (sw: Mean little hat man) and now the new version of the free newsreader Pan is called Ansluter till den svenska konspirationen (sw: Joining the Swedish conspiracy). What do you make of this?”

From Help Net Security: “To keep it short and simple, here are some good pointers to enhancing your system’s security. But remember, there’s no absolute security, so keep your eyes open, subscribe yourself to good sec-related mailing lists, and keep your software up-to-date.”

Dave Jones: “Back in sync with Linus, and another bunch of pending items.
Several janitor style patches also pending, which will go in -dj6.
Quite a bit of stuff from -dj went into pre4 & pre5, with more set
to appear in pre6. Network driver updates have also gone to Jeff,
(A few remaining bits to send), so in all, diffsize against 2.5.4 final
should hopefully shrink quite a bit.”

Patch against 2.5.3 vanilla is available from:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davej/patches/2.5/

 -- Davej.

2.5.3-dj5
o   Merge 2.5.4pre5
o   Add some missing MODULE_LICENSE tags        (Hubert Mantel)
o   Fix ptrace PEEKUSR oops.                    (Manfred Spraul,
others)
o   Drop some bogus bits from USB & netdrivers. (Me)
o   sbpcd bio fixes.                            (Paul Gortmaker)
o   pci id trigraph warning fixes.              (Steven J. Hill)
o   Tridentfb resource management fixes.        (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o   53c700 locking cleanup.                     (James Bottomley)
o   Workaround ext2 trying to free block -1     (Andreas Dilger)
o   Fix up deviceio Docbook generation.         (Jason Ferguson)
o   removal of isa_read/writes from ibmtr.      (Mike Phillips)
o   kthread abstraction.                        (Christoph Hellwig)

Anonymous Reader writes “As we approach the end of the year, my thoughts always turn to the future. Just what unforeseen forces will shape the way we work? What new (or old) software and hardware will change the way we work tomorrow, just as email and the Internet changed the way we work today?
Read the complete story at Linux Box Security Portal ”

PC World compares a variety of free, open, and non-free costing software to identify which one is best for a variety of applications.

Anonymous Reader writes “Robert Love’s preemptible kernel patch has made it into the main 2.5 development tree. Read the details on the Linux Kernel BitKeeper page. KernelTrap has more information.”

Drug Discovery Online: “Linux clusters, which network multiple processors together to form a unified and more powerful computing system, are becoming a major technology in the bioinformatics industry. Universities, government labs and commercial entities now boast Linux clusters of dozens, if not hundreds of these processors or “nodes” for the explicit purpose of gene sequencing, proteomic research, or drug discovery and development.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Jerry Epplin trys out at a collection of commercial mini-apps for Sharp’s Linux-based Zaurus PDA which have recently been released by theKompany.com. Story at LinuxDevices.com.“

I don’t have a swimming pool myself, but Slashdot has a link to the Truetex.com project that uses Linux to monitor swimming pools. Here’s the non-Slashdotted link, which describes exactly how the swimming pool monitoring was set up and the advantages of using Linux.

OTA Board writes, “The Open Technology Assembly (OTA) has the pleasure to announce a conference on February 18, 2002. Richard Stallman, the controversial Free Software Movement founder will talk about The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System.
Read more and register on the Conference page (it’s free!).”