From Debian Planet: “The installer is the heart of any Operating System — Debian is no different. The mature but ageing boot-floppies installer will rear its head for the last time in woody. In this interview with Adam Di Carlo, one of the lead developers of the system, we investigate the past, present and future of the Debian installation system ready for the upcoming release of woody: The next generation of Debian.”

From Wired: “The number of women networking engineers in Western Europe is expected to double within the next five years. But women will still be massively underrepresented in the field, despite a major skills shortage.”

Daemon News reports that the next BSDCon will be run by USENIX and will take place in February, 2002.

Kermit Woodall writes “Amiga Expo is a new show growing out of the Amiga’s growing inclusion of other alternative platforms. From the Un*x based Universal Amiga Emulator (UAE), Linux based Amithlon, and QNX based AmigaXL packages – the Amiga scene is becoming more and more platform agnostic and this is reflected in this show. While the usual Amiga celebrities and exhibitors are confirmed, QNX has also signed up to exhibit and many others including Robot builders, Retro gamers, Palm developers and more will be there as well.
Check out the site at www.amigaexpo.com”

MSNBC reports that @home has begun cutting off customers as the company enters bankruptcy. 850,000 AT&T cable customers’ services has been stopped.

C’est la vie writes: “Don’t know: is this humor? Is this security? It is funny. http://www.infowarrior.org/articles/2001-12.html.

Anonymous Reader writes: “A thread on the linux-kernel mailing list started innocently enough about proper spacing in source code, then grew and grew into a somewhat philosophical debate about evolution and code design. However, before long a debate was sparked, leading to some interesting comments by Linus and some others, perhaps best summarized by Alan Cox’s comment: “Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works.”

From CRN: “If you are fed up with the changes being made by Microsoft and want another alternative, a Linux-based network may be just what you are looking for.”

CBS reports: “Mars is now dry, dust and cold, but a new study confirms that the Red Planet once was covered by vast oceans and had more water per square mile than Earth.”

Dave reports that Linux kernel 2.4.17-pre2 has been released. Read more for the Changelog…
– Remove userland header from bonding driver (David S. Miller)

– Create a SLAB for page tables on i386 (Christoph Hellwig)

– Unregister devices at shaper unload time (David S. Miller)

– Remove several unused variables from various places in the kernel (David S. Miller)

– Fix slab code to not blindly trust cc_data(): it may be not valid on some platforms (David S. Miller)

– Fix RTC driver bug (David S. Miller)

– SPARC 32/64 update (David S. Miller)

– W9966 V4L driver update (Jakob Jemi)

– ad1848 driver fixes (Alan Cox/Daniel T. Cobra)

– PCMCIA update (David Hinds)

– Fix PCMCIA problem with multiple PCI busses (Paul Mackerras)

– Correctly free per-process signal struct (Dave McCracken)

– IA64 PAL/signal headers cleanup (Nathan Myers)

– ymfpci driver cleanup (Pete Zaitcev)

– Change NLS “licenses” to be “GPL/BSD” instead only BSD. (Robert Love)

– Fix serial module use count (Russell King)

– Update sg to 3.1.22 (Douglas Gilbert)

– ieee1394 update (Ben Collins)

– ReiserFS fixes (Nikita Danilov)

– Update ACPI documentantion (Patrick Mochel)

– Smarter atime update (Andrew Morton)

– Correctly mark ext2 sb as dirty and sync it (Andrew Morton)

– IrDA update (Jean Tourrilhes)

– Count locked buffers at balance_dirty_state(): Helps interactivity under heavy IO workloads (Andrew Morton)

– USB update (Greg KH)

– ide-scsi locking fix (Christoph Hellwig)Download: http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/