ZDNet writes about Andrew Morton's talk at LinuxTag conference. Morton addressed the problem of many new bugs introduced in 2.6 release and still unfixed. According to him, mostly because lack of testing on older hardware.
He also talked about the correct way to submit patches. A nice quote:
I wish people would send me code that compiles - probably about 75 percent do
Klik is a way to run programs under Linux without installing them. You don't compile anything, just download binaries (with dependencies handled).
Klik works using cramfs images (what means that you don't have to be root to download and install programs, root is needed only to allow mounting). It's a nice way to try experimental software or to run something when installation is not an option.
Unix and Unix-like systems support a large number of filesystems. Recently new solutions have started to appear. They allow a filesystem written in user mode. For user it means no need to compile a new kernel, for programmers -- easier debugging and development.
Examples of such filesystems? Imagine a FTP directory mounted just like a local one. It's possible. Midnight Commander has it. The thing is that the interface was non-standard.
An example of a multi-purpose interface allowing to write a new filesystem easily is FUSE. Sumit Singh from IBM has written an introductionary paper about it.
FUSE is used for: GMailFS, gphoto2-fuse-fs (digital camera filesystem), Cvs-FS, SshFS and many more. You can see the whole list at the project's page.
KOffice is close to 1.5 release. A very interesting program (present in 1.4, but version from 1.5 will have many updates) is Krita. A big plus is rapid development (may result in bugs, but that's the price...). Krita is a program that may, in the future, be a competition to Gimp. Worth looking into.
Newsforge has an article about new features and changes in KDE 4. An interesting read, but too much marketing hype at certain places.
Qt4 brings a number of interesting features, but is not a revolution. I don't think KDE4 will be, either. Looking back at the development of KDE 3 series, however, I expect the new features will make it even nicer. I hope it wouldn't result in performance problems (it shouldn't, looking at the changes and Qt 4).
There was a test at Umea University (Sweden). Ubuntu and Debian released were mirrored with 2Gbit/s limit. A number of interesting points were made. Example: it caused a number of DoS alarms...
Firefox 1.5.0.1 has been released today. It fixes a number of quite serious security problems. What is also important, the annoying grey bar is gone.
Quite old news... New Debian version, Etch, will be released for eigth architectures, droppring support for ARM, Motorola 68k, S/390 and Sun SPARC. On the other hand, both IA64 and AMD64 are supported.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the topic I wrote about from time to time. After a number of discussions in the real life and online I started searching for studies showing benefits of DRM. Yes, benefits. And detailed studies, what means real research, not wishful thinking or marketing. And you know what? I couldn't find any... Still searching, however. If you know one, share a link to it with me.
New version of Blender, 3D modelling tool is out and ready for download. From the features list it looks interesting.
Iain Ferguson writes at ZDNet:
Ideologues have to fade into the background and keep their philosophical debates within the the community.
The author clearly states that he wants the Linux and FLOSS community to finish all idealogical debates and just do business. The thing is that it's hard to find the borders of the community and, more important, no way to control it. It's not a company where the management can agree on the way to go. No. It's community, with hundreds of people with their own ideas.
There are people who use Linux and FLOSS to make money. Nothing wrong with that. There are also people who deal with it for different reasons and like the debates, in fact. I don't want them to go and I don't think I'll see that in the near future. That's good.
New Firefox can be downlaoded from its mirrors. Firts thing that you notice is the automatic update that starts first, just after you unpack a and run FF. And then... well, it's working nicely, but I have a big, fat grey bar below the status bar. It was reported in the RC series, but should be gone before final version. Tried all suggestions and nothing, probably need to dig more..
Is MS Windows ready for the desktop? is one of those parody texts about Linux user moving to a differnet world.
Some quotes are simply great, some not that good :) Still a good read for a November evening.
Open Office.org version 2 is ready for download. Mirrors seem to work correctly, so it's possible to get it and test.
Big warning for users of Debian and Debian-based distros: the archive has a big number of RPMs. One .deb only (menus). It means you need to convert RPMs to DEBs and it requires effort and time. That's why I don't have it installed yet.
I have written recently about Oracle security problems. Paches are now released.
The thing is that one Bugtraq post suggests that the patches may not fix what they should. It requires some time to make sure.
As a sidenote: there's no clear link to the paches on the Oracle site.