From LinuxWorld: “The shell is gone, and that’s good. Load times
are much improved. That’s good, too. But my
gtop system monitor shows that memory consumption is still high, ranging from 55 megabytes with only the word
processor loaded to 73 megabytes with the word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, presentation tool, and HTML
editor running. Those numbers are higher than I noted in SO 5.2. Sun is making progress, but it looks like two steps
forward, one step back.”

Catch up on the all the latest news from the Debian Hurd mailing list in this report, posted by Paul Emsley at kt.zork.net. This week: Richard Stallman drops by to remind everyone that “GNU/” are the first four characters in the name of any Linux distribution, boot problems with an AMD 400MHz K6 system, and a discussion about replacing serverboot pager legacy interface.

Commentary from scotfinnie.com: “What about Linux? Some hail open-source software development as the answer. But I have some doubts about that. It’s essentially software by committee, and there’s no incentive for
participants to react quickly to changing market demands. The Linux open-source movement seems to be something of a contradiction, but “react quickly” is still the operative phrase. I’m hopeful
the Linux community can create a truly Windows-competitive desktop OS. It has made some strides but isn’t there yet. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Linus announced kernel prepatch 2.4.11-pre4; download from your favorite mirror site. Changelog:

Continued merging from various sources..

                                   Linus

                   ----

                   pre4:
                    - Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c father=
                   s
                      fs/namespace.c
                    - David Woodhouse: large MTD and JFFS[2] update
                    - Marcelo Tosatti: resurrect oom handling
                    - Hugh Dickins: add_to_swap_cache racefix cleanup
                    - Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update
                    - Martin Bligh: support clustered logical APIC for >8 CPU x86 boxes
                    - Richard Henderson: alpha update

Reported at The Register :”Senior IBM server executives were horrified to learn yesterday that W3C standards
may not in the future be royalty-free. Internet standards and Linux have helped IBM
widen its appeal in recent years, and the company has pledged $1 billion on
developing and marketing Linux. But its continued investment depends on good will
from the Linux developer community, and that may well be imperilled by its
preference of RAND to royalty-free for the most fundamental WWW standards.

IBM holds over 34,000 patents and gains over $1 billion in royalties annually from
its patent portfolio.”

National Post: “Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP software has yet to provide an expected boost to
personal-computer sales, and demand may continue to lag for several months in light of last month’s
terrorist attacks in the United States, investors and executives said yesterday.

“It certainly hasn’t had a huge pop in PC sales,” Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co.,
said this week. “Before Sept. 11, we had been talking about a more subdued back-to-school season and
I think that’s clearly the case now.””

“The lights are going out all over the Internet,” said one person quoted in this San Francisco Chronicle story about Internet sites removing information that might be of potential use to terrorists, in the wake of the Sept. 11 air attacks. Government sites have yanked down information ranging from office maps to contingency plans for chemical attacks, news that hardly comes as a surprise. But even independent government watchdog sites like the Project on Government Secrecy have removed information, including their own maps of CIA facilities and pictures of foreign nuclear power plants. Most of this information is still freely available in libraries and government reading rooms, by the way, and some find the Internet data-removal obsession to be lacking in common sense. Said another subject: “It didn’t take a supersecret map for terrorists to find the World Trade Center.”

Help Net Security offers a review of Marcel Gagne’s new book Linux system administration – A user’s guide. Bottom line: “A fine book on system administration, with more information than you’ll
likely ever need, serves also as a great pointer and reference guide. However, don’t
expect that it will guide you by your hand for every single problem you may encounter.
No such book exists. But, it will provide you with some clues on what to do.”

Reported at BBC News: “A national day of action is being held on 6 October to raise
awareness about the copy-protected CDs that are starting to
appear in record shops across the UK.

The CDs are just one method that record companies are
experimenting with in their ongoing attempts to stamp out piracy.

The protests are being organised because activists say that not
enough is being done to warn consumers about the restrictions the
CDs place on their ability to enjoy music.”

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

* Next chunk of patches
*
* Email warning: It's possible my static ip range will evaporate
* about monday. If so that may cause some disruption to the
* ukuu.org.uk, bc.nu, cabal.tm domains and to my email while I shuffle
* stuff around.

2.4.10-ac6
o Fix nfs symlink breakage (Trond Myklebust)
o Fix SCpnt->pid value (Dario Ballabio)
o LDM partition merge fix (Al Viro)
o Namespace fixes from 2.4.11pre* (Al Viro)
o pipe.c cleanup (Al Viro)
o Fix the iobuf oops (Anwar Payyoorayil)
o Fix bootp image loader on Alpha (Jay Estabrook)
o scsi tape module locking fixes (Kai Mäkisara)
o opl3sa2 dual DMA fix (Jerome Auge)
o Quota fixes for -ac using S_NOQUOTA flags (Jan Kara)
o Fix pci64 broken irq mask hack and an SRM fix (Jay Estabrook)
o Fix DRM procfs oops (Abraham vd Merwe)
o Toshiba SMM driver check laptop is a Toshiba (Jonathan Buzzard)
o Clean up rep_nop stuff in init/main.c for (Paul Mackerras)
portability
o Update EV6/EV67 cpu selection (Jay Estabrook)
o Small alpha fixups (Jay Estabrook)
o Remove ASSEMBLY bits (Keith Owens)
o Change PPC64 contact person (Dave Engebretsen)
o Update cyberpro frame buffer driver (Bradley LaRonde,
Russell King)
o Add sysrq-M memory zone free info (Marcelo Tosatti)
o Fix mtd export oddments (David Woodhouse)
o Export handling cleanup/doc update (Keith Owens)
o Irda cleanups (Jean Tourrilhes)
o Irda discovery in passive mode fixes (Jean Tourrilhes)
o Irda usb updates (Jean Tourrilhes)
o VLSI irda updates (Martin Diehl)
o PPP over ATM support (Mitchell Blank,
Jens Axboe)
2.4.10-ac5
o Initial fix for the ELF loader bug (Linus Torvalds)
o Revert 2.4.10 sys_personality ABI change bug (Paul Larson)
o Add support for 16 byte commands to scsi (Khalid)
(only some controllers handle this)
o Small updates to the ide raid drivers (Arjan van de Ven)
o Update the hermes drivers (David Gibson)
o Airo driver update (Javier Achirica)
o NCR 53c700 update (James Bottomley)
o Next set of pnpbios work (Thomas Hood)
o Update ARM includes (Russell King)
o Update nwflash driver (Russell King)
o ARM alignment fix (Russell King)
o More pci.ids (Russell King)
o Add another SB variant (Jerome Cornet)
o SMBfs updates (Urban Widmark)
o Further mtd driver updates (David Woodhouse)
o Update ibmcam idents (Dmitri)

2.4.10-ac4
o Switch to Linus behaviour for kmap (Trond Myklebust)
in generic_file_write - should fix NFS oopses
| I dont have any highmem boxes so you get to test 8)

o ext3 deadlock versus truncate fix (Tachino Nobuhiro)
o Small reiserfs transaction fix (Nikita Danilov)
o Fix a fencepost error in the vm decision making (Rik van Riel)
o Shmem accounting fix (Christoph Rohland)
o BH async flag changes from 2.4.10 (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Remove wbinvd macro the acpi people re-added (Dave Jones)
o Make the kiobuf init code only clean needed (Andrew Bond)
fields (noticably speeds up Oracle)
o Move DMI scanning earlier in the kernel boot (Stelian Pop)
| This is needed to detect the vaio early enough

o Try and fix 21041 problems with tulip, better (Herbert Xu)
o Tulip rx dropped calculation
o Add further PCI idents (Jeff Garzik)
o Add another ident to the clgen fb (Jeff Garzik)
o Add intel i830 to the agp code idents (Christof Efkemann)
o pl2303 usb serial fixes (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o ipconfig typo fix (Ralf Baechle)
o Fix user mode linux build with new ptrace (Jeff Dike)
o JFFS tags update (David Woodhouse)
o Kill of remaining old style video4linux inits (Ladis Michl)
o Update i2c to rev 2.6.1 (Christoph Hellwig)

2.4.10-ac3
o Fix page_kills_ppro call (Peter Blomgren)
o mtd jffs and jffs2 updates (David Woodhouse)
o Partition handling updates (Al Viro)
o S/390 documentation updates (Martin Schwidefsky)
o S/390 code updates (Martin Schwidefsky)
o Add clean config for bust_spinlock generics (Martin Schwidefsky)
o Correct EXPORT_MODULE_GPL (Keith Owens)
o NFSv3 mkdir fix (Glen Serre)
o Clean up NFS yielding (Trond Myklebust)

2.4.10-ac2
o Merge Configure.help changes from 2.4.10
o Fix the spin_unlock oostore to maybe work (me)
o Fix for pentium pro errata #50 (me)
o initio driver type cleanups (Arjan van de Ven)
o rpc_queue_lock needs to be non static (Frank Davies)
o Fix a potential crash in ldm partition code (Al Viro)
o Acenic updates (Jes Sorensen)
o Fix scsi tur direction info (James Bottomley)
o Further natsemi updates (Manfred Spraul)
o Add license tags to jffs/jffs2 (Frank Davies)
o Console driver optimisations (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o Add belkin F5U120 serial to belkin_sa (Amy Fong)
o Big endian fixes for console drivers (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o Add module tags to the mwave driver (Thomas Hood)
o i2o header file cleanups (Russell King)
o Fix C2 power state in ACPI (Martin Röder)
o Deadlock and error handling fixes for 8139too (Manfred Spraul)
o Update NR_DEAD in keyboard driver (Arnaldo Carvalho
de Melo)
o Fix race in processor init sequence (Martin Bligh)
o Check procfs returns in acpi (Pavel Machek)
o Add DMI handles for problem K7V-RM and (Pavel Machek)
Tosh 4030cdt
o Fix analog joystick breakage from 2.4.10 (Vojtech Pavlik)
o Work around vaio weird pnpbios happenings (Thomas Hood)
o Update ninja scsi driver (YOKOTA Hiroshi)
o Adbmouse typo fix (Paul Mackerras)

2.4.10-ac1
o Merge with Linux 2.4.10 tree
- Drop VM changes
- Drop raw/block I/O changes
- Drop out O_DIRECT
- Basically remove the seriously unsafe stuff and
  keep the -ac VM
- I've not applied the obvious fixes so ACPI and joysticks
  are still icky - that is for ac2
o Fix the noncompile of SMP OOSTORE kernels (me)