An Anonymous Reader writes “Are you looking for small pre-built systems for implementing your Linux-based projects or products? Look no further. LinuxDevices.com has assembled a reference list of small systems that can serve as ready-made platforms for prototyping applications, or as the basis of application-specific Linux-based systems and devices. The style, performance, and costs of these systems vary greatly. . . . Nice pictures of the little Linux systems!”

Red Herring Magazine reports on solar energy’s growing market caused by the latest conventional energy shortage. Photovoltaic (PV) energy may be on the virge of being in the mainstream.

ZDNet reports that GoAmerica, one of the providers currently using Ricochet, has announced its alternate plans with Ricochet’s end.

It’s at ApacheWeek, of course. “Apache Week talked to a large number of the attendees of the conference and the overall impression was very positive.
One attendee said that ‘the keynotes alone were worth the trip’. “

Readers of KDE Dot News discuss the Sondra project, “an on-the-fly MP3 playlist
generator that is really quite original in its concept.”

TheStandard reports: “A new generation of free digital music
networks is expected to boast as many as 1
million simultaneous users by September,
posing serious competition for legal
subscription services scheduled to debut
around the same time.”

From CNet: “Federal lawmakers have introduced a bill that would set ground rules for music distribution
in the online world.

The Music Online Competition Act, or MOCA, would update copyright law to make it easier for
online music services to conduct business without worrying about running afoul of the major
music labels.”

From the Globe and Mail: “One of the biggest fall guys in the international hacking war has been
Dmitry Sklyarov, who many say has done nothing wrong. In a closely
watched case in various on-line circles, Adobe Systems Inc. last month
tipped off the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Sklyarov – who
developed a program that undermines Adobe’s e-book security
software – was in Las Vegas, attending this year’s ninth annual DefCon
hacker convention.

Hackers congregate at DefCon every year to flout authority and flaunt
their hacking skills. A common game among hackers at DefCon is to
spot undercover federal agents.”

Salon.com suggests new ways of applying pressure to get Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov released from a U.S. jail. Among the suggestions: “Threaten to unleash a virus even more successful than Sircam,
and with a payload so devastating as to threaten civilization itself:
The ‘Free Dmitry’ virus will force any infected computer to play
an unending loop of Richard Stallman’s rendition of the ‘Free
Software Song.’ ”

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

2.4.7ac5
o Resolve ext3 and superblock change incompat (me, Al Viro)
| Fixes hang on journal recovery
o Fix freevxfs leak (Andries Brouwer)
o Add another eepro100 ident (Matt Wilson)
o Further tweakes to make rpm based on
suggestions by Keith Owens (Keith Owens, me)
o Fix ISA dma range check bug in cs89x0 (Paul)
o Fix ISA dma range check on 3c505 (Paul)
o Switch md driver to use completions (Neil Brown)
o Add more sanity checks to the dmi scanner (me)
o Fix hash sign assumptions in reiserfs (Jeff Mahoney)
| IMPORTANT: this makes things consistent, it also means
| that if you have chars > 127 in file names _and_ you are
| running unsigned char little endian default (probably a tiny tiny
| number of mips users only)
you will need to archive and recreate
| those files. X86 users are _NOT_ affected.
o Add the infrastructure for ac97_ops ready for
digital audio etc (me)

2.4.7ac4
o Fix inode cache shrinkage problems in 2.4.7 (Al Viro)
| This should cure the problem where it gets
| really slow over time. Its not the final fix
o Make aironet compile again (Arjan van de Ven)
o Fix an incredibly stupid i2o_scsi bug causing (me)
crashes with the adaptec 2100 and other stuff
o Fix memory corruption if using gcc 3 and serial
probing fails (Thomas Hood)
o Fix out of memory handling with raid (Neil Brown)
o Fix a raid mishandling bug on errors (Neil Brown)
o Add promise 20268 software raid card idents (me)
o Fix leaktek winview601 problems (Leandro Lucarella)
o Merge ntfs 1.1.16 (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Avoid panic when reiserfs attempts to mount
invalid superblock (Nikita Danilov)
(Chris Mason)
error in reiserfs
o Error rather than panic on journal replay I/O
o Update atp870u driver (Wittman Lee)
o First batch of superblock handling cleanup (Al Viro)
o Restore module oops dumping (Kai Germaschewski)
o NFSD update (Neil Brown)
o Fix ieee1394 sleep with spinlock held (Andi Kleen)
o Add AMD 760-MP to the Agp table (me)
o Rip out zillions of duplicated -ESPIPE (Christoph Hellwig)
llseek methods for a common one
o Fix qlogic direction flag handling in 2.4 (Jeff Andre)
o Clear inode->i-blocks on deletion in reisefs (Nikita Danilov)
o Merge rest of S/390 tty driver fixes (Ulrich Weigand)
o Finish adapting S/390 to new softirq code (Ulrich Weigand)
o Remove accidental duplicate block in Makefile (Ulrich Weigand)
o Update DASD drivers (Ulrich Weigand)
o Further pnpbios fixes (Andrey Panin)
o Switch pnp to use slab not malloc.h (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o Switch parport_cs to slab not malloc.h (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o Further config cleanups (Steven Cole)
o Fix make spec with no .version (Keith Owens)
o Further ipchains fixes (Rusty Russell)
o Add procfs info option for reiserfs stats (Nikita Danilov)
o Remove dead code from the reiserfs tree (Jeff Mahoney)
o Quota updates (Jan Kara)
o FreeVxFS leak fixes, allow block sizes != 1024 (Christoph Hellwig)
o Improve serial_cs reporting (Jonathan Corbet)
o Add v7 fs sanity checks to the sys5 fs code (Linus Torvalds,
Christoph Hellwig, Al Viro, Andries Brouwer)