ZDNet Asia reports that Microsoft seems to be losing traction in Asia because of its products’ security problems, becuase of cost, and because of solid competitors like Linux and StarOffice.

Slashdot readers discuss an article at EET.com saying the U.S. Patent Office is hiring 500 electrical engineers this year to assess technical patents.

Bernhard Suttner writes, “On Tuximus.org is a interview with the KDE3 release coordinator Dirk Mueller. We have asked him about the future and the common features in KDE3 and more things. You can read the interview here.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Cox writes, “Radeonfb seems to have the odd problem but the rest now
looks solid.”

2.4.13-ac5
o Fix non ISA build failure (Pete Zaitcev)
o Fix i2o queue buggy [one bit escaped] (Manik Raina)
o Fix harmless typo in trident driver (Stuart Young)
o Further buddha IDE updates (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o Further VIA audio updates (Jeff Garzik)
o Tune the Lindent script (Ingo Molnar)
o Avoid various warnings from modules tables (Keith Owens)
o Further minor UFS cleanups (Andreas Dilger)
o Fix mod warning (Manik Raina)
o LDM partition sorting (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Symlink length fix for tmpfs (Christoph Rohland, Herbert Xu)
o Kill bogus exit signal check (Andrew Morton)
o Fix build problem with x86 and no VT (Robert Love)
o Dquot race fix (Jan Kara)
o Fix minor documentation errors (Andreas Dilger)
o Fix IRQ assignment on miata USB (Peter De Schrijver)
o Fix serverworks crash on AGP suspend/resume (me)
o Clean up random driver a bit, fix entropy (René Scharfe,
Robert Love)
o Handle probes of disconnected USB storage (Jan Niehusmann)
o Add CTL_CPU sysctl id (Russell King)
o Remove unneeded prototype from scsi.c (Robert Love)
o Revert nm256_audio change (Jeff Garzik)

2.4.13-ac4
o Fix undefined pci symbols on some build setups (Paval Roskin)
o Fix some of the license tag bits left to sort (Keith Owens)
o Fix mtrr compile problem (Andrew Morton)
o Fix hang on boot with PIV and apic enabled (Mikael Pettersson)
o Remove duplicate Pete Zaitcev entry (Pete Zaitcev)
o ARM updates (ARM926.1020, camelot, etc) (Russell King)
o Use BIOS floppy reset (non legacy PC’s may
otherwise get very unhappy) (Mikael Pettersson)
o Add rtc_lock to the get_cmos_time call (me)
o Make the Zoran configuration easier (Terry Mathews)
o Handle chipsets that dont get 8254 latches
right and trigger the VIA warning in error (Roberto Biancardi)
o Fix recording on trident cards (Alex Larsson)
o Fix an i2c config error (J A Magallon)
o Handle IBM T-23 with apparently wrong eeprom
eepro100 data (Alex Bligh)
o Make apic pm unconditional (Mikael Pettersson)
o Switch msdos file systems to use private
event counting not global “event” (Manfred Spraul)
o Genelink GL620-USB drivers (Jiun-Jie Huang,
Stanislav Brabec)

2.4.13-ac3
o Swap locking updates (Hugh Dickins)
o ACPI serial console/debug support (ia64)
(Khalid Aziz)
o Netlink device locking fixes (Christoph Hellwig)
o Faster sys5 directory lookups (Christoph Hellwig)
o Hopefully fix sparc64 -ac build (Mike Warren)
o Fix hang trying to report fatal error on
aha152x (me)
o Fix SMP deadlock in i60uscsi.c (me)
o Fix error path in cmpci that forget to unlock (me)
o Fix error path in saa7110 that forgot to unlock (me)
o Fix error path in ibmtr that forgot to unlock (me)
| These lock fixes are from Jeff Fosters analysis
| the others I still need to look at.
o If the BIOS turns off PCI ordering on the
AMD762, turn it back on again (me)
o Tidy rep nop uses in x86 asm files (Manfred Spraul)
o Further hat fix for hid input devices (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Fix USB + highmem problems (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Remove dead option from USB config (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add aiptek tablet support (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o PCI hotplug documentation updates (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Alpha build fix (Jurriaan)

2.4.13-ac2
o Cast fixes for warnings (Jeff Garzik)
o Parse MP OEM data for NUMA nodes (Martin Bligh)
o Possible fix for the X/screenblank hang on
console switching (Chris Ahna)
o Fix cycle detection on PC164/LX164 Alpha boxes (Richard Henderson,
Ivan Kokshaysky)
o Small parport update (Tim Waugh)
o Remove now unneeded PAE export (Hugh Dickins)
o PnPBIOS driver update (Thomas Hood)
o Update AGP tables and idents for SiS devices (Can-Ru Yeou)
o Merge newer SiS frame buffer drivers (Can-Ru Yeou)
| Clean up is my fault so if it broke tell me
o Fix ac97 unknown codec oops (Tachino Nobuhiro)
o Acenic + highmem patch (Dave Miller)
o Add pci tables to zoran drivers (Andrey Panin)
o Switch neomagic 256 to ac97_codec (Jeff Garzik)
o VIA audio pause fix (Thomas Sailer)
o SYS5 changelog update (Jeff Garzik)

2.4.13-ac1
o Merge with Linus 2.4.13

2.4.12-ac7
o Fix i2o_proc locking thinko (me)
o Aiptek tablet driver (Chris Atenasio)
o Update ARM920T support (Russell King)
o Add some additional PCI idents (Tim Hockin)
o Further SA1100/CERF ARM updates (Russell King)
o Reduce printk noise in amd flash driver (David Woodhouse)
o Add missing schedule()
to jffs2 gc thread (David Woodhouse)
o Add license tag to NTFS (Richard Russon)
o PCMCIA suspend fix for SA1100 ARM (Russell King)
o Increase close wait tracking for ip_conntrack (Darrell Escola)
o PCI hot plug support (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Compaq FC driver update (Steve Cameron)
o Fix UP APIC without IOAPIC build fail (Mikael Pettersson)
o Intel 82092 PCI/PCMCIA bridge support (Arjan van de Ven)
| Based heavily on the pcmcia package
o Include buffer size extension in dhcp frames (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix u14f/u34f build problem (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix trident.c build on Alpha (me)
o Various other Alpha build fixes (Jeff Garzik)
o Simplify serverworks mtrr check (Dave Jones)
o ARM configuration updates (Russell King)
o Update natsemi driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Computone ip2 update (Michael Warfield)
o Fix CONFIG_SIMNOW (Andi Kleen)
o Update 8139too docs (Jeff Garzik)
o Make autofs4 return symlink lengths

2.4.12-ac6
o Fix more preprocessor oddments (Jean-Luc Leger)
o Fix ipconfig build (Mauricio Zambrano)
o Radeonfb updates (7500, 8500, fp support)
(Ani Joshi)
o Excalibur ARM support (Altera)
o Enable SA1110 clock scaling on Cerf (Russell King)
o ARM config updates (Russell King)
o Fix ulong->unsigned long in videodev.h (Felix von Leitner)
o Miscellaneous ARM bits (Russell King)
o Support the Promise SX6000 better (Vojtech Pavlik)
o Fix a problem with ymfpci and civctp (Pete Zaitcev)
o Update the ARM shark maintainer contact info (Alexander Schulz)
o PF_MEMALLOC kswapd death fix (Manfred Spraul)
o Remove now surplus quota ifdefs from ext3 (Andrew Morton)
o USB locking fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o UHCI fixes (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add more pegasus driver idents (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Scanner unload race fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o ARM assabet updates (Russell King)
o Add additional APIC message retransmit handling (Stephen Tweedie)
o Add excalibur ARM include files (Altera)
o RTL8139CP driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Sun network driver license tags (Jeff Garzik)
o Add some new pci idents (Jeff Garzik)
o Sundance alta driver updates
o Airo driver update (Javier Achirica, Jean Tourhilles,
Jeff Garzik, Ben Reed)
o Add license tags to various sound drivers (Frank Davis)

Anonymous Reader writes, Hi. My latest column over at Byte.com is out. This month I talk about the new VM in 2.4.10+ and other kernel issues. You can find my column at http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1436/byt20011024s0 002/1029_moshe.html

kind regards,

Moshe Bar

Zack Brown posts the 139th edition of Kernel Traffic. Hot topics include a lively discussion on “License Tainting,” and an exchange on VM subsystems.

“Red Hat, Inc. today announced that the Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer Suite is now available. The Developer Suite is a packaged solution for creating embedded applications and devices. It accelerates development cycles and improves product quality by using Red Hat Linux 7.2 as the common base for the host and target platforms.” Read the press release at All Linux Devices.

eWeek: “The 2.2.2 update, which became available earlier this month, includes a new component called winbind that provides real-time directory integration between a Unix workstation and a Windows NT or Windows 2000 domain controller. “All of a sudden, you get single sign-on, with no maintenance of users,” said Jeremy Allison, a Samba lead developer.”

Microsoft’s MSDN has a few articles designed to compare Microsoft’s .NET with Sun Microsystem’s J2EE tecchnology. I’ll bet you’re on the edge of your chair, wondering what product Microsoft found to be superior.

Network Computing posts an interesting, but rather error-prone, essay on Open Source, Free Software, and copyright law: “Licenses that are mass-produced for the open-source community, however, may not fare well under state commercial codes. For example, the GPL grants a direct license from the copyright holder to each developer or user with each software transfer. As software passes through the hands of users, offer and acceptance becomes diluted, and courts may find this unenforceable. Also, any license amended by one party without agreement on the terms of sale by the other party amounts to a nonbinding “shrink-wrap” license.”