Tosatti: “Hi, I’ve just copied 2.4.17-rc1 to ftp.kernel.org… Its mirroring yet, probably. Well, I want people with the “unfreeable” buffer/cache problem to confirm with me that 2.4.17-rc1 is working ok. The same change which should fix that problem also should make 2.4 a bit less ‘swap happy.'”http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.17-rc1.gz

rc1: 

- Finish MODULE_LICENSE fixups for fs/nls       (Mark Hymers)
- Console race fix                              (Andrew Morton/Robert Love)
- Configure.help update                         (Eric S. Raymond)
- Correctly fix Direct IO bug                   (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
- Turn off aacraid debugging                    (Alan Cox)
- Added missing spinlocking in do_loopback()    (Alexander Viro)
- Added missing __devexit_p() in i82092 
  pcmcia driver                                 (Keith Owens)
- ns83820 zerocopy bugfix                       (Benjamin LaHaise)
- Fix VM problems where cache/buffers didn't get
  freed                                         (me)

That’s what NWFusion.com is reporting, saying Microsoft has proposed a set of remedies that could
potentially bring its antitrust case to a close on
terms similar to those agreed to in a settlement
last month with the Department of
Justice and nine states. The Register puts it this way: “The beast of Redmond rants at rebel states.”

From LWN.net: “The default pam files for the passwd program did not include support
for md5 passwords, thus any password changes or post-install added
users would not have md5 passwords.”

Posted at Gnome.org: “The GStreamer team is happy to announce another release of the GStreamer
streaming-media framework. GStreamer now contains close to 100 plugins for
reading, writing and manipulating audio and video files. However many of these
functions are under heavy development and your mileage may vary from time to
time. This means this release of GStreamer is still mostly aimed at developers, but
users wanting to experiment can test gstreamer using its commandline interface
documented in the gstreamer-launch man page and in the wiki. We also bundle a
sample media player, but we can make no promises as to whether this will actually
work for you or not. The next release will include our new rewritten mediaplayer.”

Netscape 6.2.1 is here! Download links and Release Notes on MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com) reports: “Netscape 6.2.1, a maintenance upgrade from Netscape 6.2, quietly was made available for public download last week. Nestscape 6.2.1 information on the Netscape Web site is pretty much intermingled with Netscape 6.2. The NS 6.2.1 release notes are piggybacked onto the NS 6.2 release notes. The only item added to the What’s New section of the release notes is Enhanced security . Chances are that if Netscape released a maintenance upgrade to Netscape 6.2 to enhance security, it would be a good idea to stop using Netscape 6.2 and replace it with Netscape 6.2.1 — if you are at all concerned about security.”

From Businesswire.com: Dimensional Insight (DI) announced today the availability of
its entire suite of business intelligence (BI) products for the Linux operating system on IBM’s eServer, iSeries and zSeries.
Dimensional Insight, an IBM Business Partner, provides iSeries, Linux, Unix, and Windows versions of its software solutions to
organizations worldwide. With its latest release of Linux version products, DI enables robust BI applications on the world’s leading Linux
servers from IBM. DI’s support of Linux on the IBM eServer pSeries and xSeries were available previously.

Digitalmass.boston.com has a column about Jordan Hubbard of the FreeBSD team joining Apple as an employee. “Meanwhile, there’s Apple, with its closed, secretive software design
and its relatively toylike point-and-click interface. No self-respecting
open-source geek would touch these products with a barge pole. So
seeing Hubbard with an Apple employee ID clipped to his jeans was
something of a shock, like seeing Ken Starr in a Victoria’s Secret
commercial.”

From LinuxPlanet: “The public comment period in U.S. v. Microsoft has begun.

The proposed final settlement has been published in the Federal Register, so the clock is ticking. Those of us
who wish to be heard have until January 26 to let our views be known … We can’t count on Linux
companies to save us.”

NWFusion.com reports that the Internet
Engineering Task Force
is concerned that its participants could be
subject to criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits under the
U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they
develop security protocols that can be used to
protect copyrighted materials on the Internet.

From ZDNet UK:

“Linux companies are incensed by a recently published Microsoft document that compares
Windows XP Embedded to embedded Linux, calling some of its claims misleading or factually
wrong. The document outlines what it calls the shortcomings of Linux for embedded devices,
calling it convoluted, difficult to develop for, expensive and insecure.”