The Tcl developer community was abuzz with news of several new TIPs, including a new standard Tk option, a documentation generator for Tcl scripts, and a paned window Tk widget; Joe Decoster posts a tutorial on creating new widgets with BWidgets, and a discussion on that burning question: When is abs(-1) 1.0 instead of the integer value 1? Posted at LinuxProgramming.com.

Hot topics in this summary/recap of Debian Hurd mailing list traffic include 16 posts regarding the OS CD label, and 10 posts on new XFree86 packages. Posted at kt.zork.net.

Linus Torvalds releases the latest version of the 2.4.7-pre kernel. Grab your copy from a mirror site; read the changelog below:-pre6:
– me: fix more buffer head SMP races (non-x86 only – weak memory ordering)
– Andrea Arkangeli: some bh cleanups from the buffer race condition fix
– Tim Waugh: parport drievr documentation, init sanity
– Ion Badulescu: starfire net driver update
– David Miller: sparc and networking updates
– Ivan Kokshaysky: alpha version of the inlined rw-semaphores
– NIIBE Yutaka: SuperH update

The latest edition of SGI’s journaled filesystem for Linux is now available. Version 1.0.1 includes a host of bugfixes and other goodies. Get the details at SGI’s Linux XFS project home page.

How do you start a new application? How can you contribute to KDE? What is CVS? Most importantly, how do you avoid Dr. Kongi? Everything you wanted to know about developing for KDE is now answered in a handy list of frequently-asked questions on the developer.kde.org site.

The Globe and Mail: “During a speech at the Comdex computer show in Toronto on
Wednesday, Research In Motion president Mike Laziridis talked
about RIM’s plans to embrace Java – which isn’t surprising, since it
is a key part of the handheld device maker’s strategy, particularly in
Europe. The problem in many European markets is that people are
accustomed to using their phones to send messages and e-mail,
which means they may not want a Blackberry. One way around
that, RIM has decided, is to put its software on a phone – but
unfortunately everyone from Microsoft to Palm wants to do the same
thing.”

Apparently, Apple’s G4 Cube is more popular now that the Cupertino, Calif. computer company has discontinued the product. Since the demise of Kleenex box-sized computer was announced on July 3, users have been snatching remaning inventory as fast as they can, and not for sentimental reasons, either: One user said his mad dash to buy a Cube was prompted by the fact that it was “really the cheapest system with a G4 processor, bottom line.” Full story at ZDNet News.

ZDNet has initial coverage of two wildly different security-related computer conferences taking place this week in Las Vegas. Over at Ceasar’s Palace, the Black Hat Briefings security conference will host network admins and IT managers who want to learn more about how to protect mission-critical systems. On the other end of the spectrum (and, we assume, in a different hotel) there’s Def Con, the celebrated annual ‘hacker’ convention

In a keynote speech to kick off the Flashforward 2001 developer conference taking place this week in New York, Macromedia president of products Kevin Lynch said that his company had served up over one billion downloads of its popular Flash player in the last eighteen months. We’re sure that includes a healthy dose of downloads for browsers on Linux desktops. Full coverage at eWEEK.

Beta 4 of theKompany.com’s Aethera Messaging and Groupware client for KDE is now available, and here’s what the press release on LinuxPR has to say about it: “Aethera now has support for plug in components using our Korelib technology. As a consequence the new engine will also support Kparts plug ins as well. A plug in directory is now configured during the setup wizard.”