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Linux Kernel 2.6.29 Released
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.29. The new features include the inclusion of kernel graphic modesetting, WiMAX, access point Wi-Fi support, inclusion of squashfs and a preliminary version of btrfs, a more scalable version of RCU, eCryptfs filename encryption, ext4 no journal mode, OCFS2 metadata checksums, improvements to the memory controller, support for filesystem freeze, and other features. Here is the full list of changes."
I totally misread that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Geez, Windows has supported using access points on a Wi-Fi network for quite a long time.
Lunix playing catch up yet again!
Will the driver problem be fixed? I am tired of having to search for stuff if I buy a new printer or scanner etc. Oh but I guess the vendors should provide it, true...
I can't believe this wasn't mentioned..
Here's what the new linux logo looks like for this release.
I just want the government to leave me alone. I feel like the police watch me. I pay all my taxes, I've never been violent, I try to be good, I help others, and I feel the lasers eyes. I feel like I'm being hunted. I feel watched. I feel like the government is coming for me. I think of this song:
Filesystems in the kernel, savages!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
AKA ext2, but better/fatter?
Further investigation into the cause of dataloss under the Ext4 Filesystem has revealed that it is not the fault of Application Developers, Ext4, nor even the evil POSIX manual of Doom. Its turns out that it Obama is so corrupt that he has caused major dataloss all around the nation. There! At least I'm an *on topic* Troll. Was that so hard?
The most important feature is the new mascot, Tuz. FTFA:
As everybody knows, only important fixes will be merged into the mainline kernel at this late stage of the development cycle. One of the fixes merged by Linus on March 17 was a high-resolution SVG image of "Tuz," the mascot of the 2009 linux.conf.au conference. Tuz, in his new home at Documentation/logo.svg, serves to remind the world of the difficulties faced by the Tasmanian devil and how the linux.conf.au attendees supported the effort to save this species from extinction.
eCryptfs filename encryption
Here's the eCryptfs home page for more information on this nifty addition.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Did you dress him up like this??
Tuz the Tasmanian devil has replaced Tux as the kernel mascot (for this release) to raise awareness of this endangered species (which is threatened with extinction due to a scientifically interesting but horrific transmissible facial cancer.).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...that the cohesion that is characteristic of the Linux kernel as a "final product" gets to visit its desktop environment as well.
This is not to suggest that it's all a bed of roses within the Linux kernel development process. I have been to the kernel mailing list and I know what goes on there. What I see in the kernel as a final product is manifestation of strong leadership and the ability to see beyond the time in which we live.
My hope is that we get to merge efforts to produce a desktop product that is not only beautiful to look at, but also a joy to work with. Sadly, we have the manpower and the tools to do just that but we fail because of politics and egos.
Let's recognize that these two "poisons" do nothing in advancing the ideology of "world domination."
Linux need to adopt Batdz Maru as the mascot.
http://www.decalsusa.com/images/badtz maru colors.GIF
We herd you like graphic modesetting, so we included the inclusion in your kernel so you can set modes while you include.
:)
Sorry - "include the inclusion" just screamed out for this.
Even in Linux, most distro's don't have full filesystems built into the kernel. Instead they only build in a tiny in-memory fs that allows them to read an initrd. This means that they can have virtually any filesystem as a root filesystem without having to compile every conceivable filesystem into their general purpose kernel.
It is also possible to avoid ever booting in the way Linux machines boot. Instead, the boot process could act like the hibernate/resume functionality of Linux. So instead of loading programs into the address space from a filesystem, we simply read the resulting address space from disk. After all, some embedded devices don't need to ever use a filesystem, so in these cases loading a fs would be a waste of resources.
Obama Policies Will Bankrupt the USA Tsarkon Reports
Tsarkon? Wasn't he the pointy-eared blue villain from Voltron?
No, a wizard king from Cartahena. GOSH-ND style.
Interesting. If Ron Paul is "this bad," its Amazing to think that most of the rest of congress, the senate and most of the fellows in the Cabinet and the President himself are actually dumber that Ron. Scary thought. Because to them Negative $11 Trillion plus negative $10 Trillion = better off ??!? (no no sure it works).
Pronounce: Butterface.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Someone- please tell me what usb wifi adapter product can be used to make this happen? I have searched and found some related docs that mention support being limited to a couple chipsets. Which always confused my too-much-but-too-little networking knowledge. The git commit message here mentions nothing about hardware support limits. My prior test, perhaps invalid, was to take a fedora-9 box, buy several usb adapters, and type "iwconfig bla mode master" hoping for success, but never seeing success. I always thought this was because the prism2 or whatever supported chipsets were rare, but now maybe I'm thinking the code wasn't in the kernel yet??? Please someone, give me a link to a newegg or amazon usb product, and the essence of the quick howto.
I've added a cross reference for the new kernel source to my site here. Also included is a .patch generator, just click the "modify" link next to files (the $modify text next to directories is a bug) and you can generate a .patch for sending upstream based on your edits. Just thought I'd contribute somehow.
The Linux wireless drivers page lists which drivers support master/access point mode (see the AP column). The list isn't perfect (the hostap driver definitely supports AP mode :-) but it seems to be a case of omissions. The table also says what form factor the supported chipsets come in (so you can tell which ones you will be able to get in USB form). I'd guess the rt2500usb or p54usb drivers would be your best bet.
Another useful page is the Linux wireless chipset directory which tries to list which cards have which chipsets (there's even a single page table with all the added chipsets but I won't link to it from here). This lets you build a list of boxes with the desired chipsets inside them (finding out whether this is true in reality can in itself can be a fraught process though). The chipset is really the important part in all of this.
I'm not going to point to an Amazon page because I have not bought a USB wifi card with the capabilities you describe from Amazon. I'm in no position to tell you that XYZ USB device on Amazon definitely works as I haven't done it myself. I have used hostapd on Linux and OpenBSD before now on a creaky old Prism 2.5 card and that worked for me but again that's not what you asked.
Finally here's a guide to using hostapd to set a card up in access point mode (just using iwconfig to set master mode is not enough). Googling for hostapd linux will turn up plenty more guides which may be easier to follow.
Good luck!
Au contraire... the politics of the Linux kernel are part of what drives the project forward. Saying it does 'nothing in advancing' and calling it a 'poison' is short-sighted and, frankly, wrong. (The same is true for ego, but The Skyhooks have covered that adequately.)
Politics is not inherently bad. No, politics is human nature. Politics is part and parcel of working in a team. Politics is the process of managing and even leveraging tension, conflict, and disagreement in order to create an environment in which progress can occur.
Sure, it can become destructive - but that's not due to the existence of politics, merely due to its not being managed correctly. I don't think this is the case here. The rate of progress of the Linux kernel suggests to me that the people contributing to its development have formed a comparatively highly performing team.
Once politics is accepted as a fact of life, it becomes much easier to look at the psychological dynamics involved and find ways of working with it. That's immeasurably better than claiming people are stupid and yelling about it without offering anything constructive.
Politics is the dynamics of human interaction. It is, therefore, rather difficult to hate politics without also hating people.
I was slightly disappointed when looking for the amount of drivers added for desktop users. Looking through the release log, I can only find one driver added for the home desktop user. It's for a new 3G modem, which is nice. I'd expected lots of other devices to be added, actually. One of the things that disappoints people when moving to Linux, is that it doesn't support their hardware.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
When upgrading from .28 to one of the latest .29 rc's, one of my ext4 filesystems got corrupted. Something to do with resize inode. Had to reboot my old .28 kernel to be able to fix it with fsck. No data loss that I'm aware of (lost+found was empty).
I think this was originally an ext4dev fs from the .26 era. I have been staying with .28 since. This is a 322 GB fs which is not critical for boot, but obviously I don't want to lose data.
Perhaps I ought to backup and recreate the fs under .29.
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
So the fake beak is to hide the horrific facial deformities, not to pretend to be a penguin?
every time someone in china assembles the hardware of your gizmo, the software that goes with it has to be created as well. now, that software will be for windows, because thats >90% of the market. you have to pay people to make that software, and if you want linux drivers, you have to pay people more, because it takes time to do work like write software. so... ask your average business owner if they want to pay a lot more money to cover a tiny tiny percentage of the market?
now throw in the fact that certain companies are worried about politics, like their 'good relationship' with microsoft, which gives them early access to microsoft development releases, etc, which helps them get to market quicker, blah blah blah etc.
most of the time you throw all this together, and the decision is 'no we arent doing a linux driver'. . . .so it is left up to volunteer hackers to either reverse engineer the software using their l33t skillz, or company insiders to do some of their own work, to release various drivers and such on the internets.
but basically, you are never going to have a situation where 'hot new gadget' has linux drivers out of the box, unless, somehow, linux becomes some huge part of the market for that gadget.
maybe in europe it might happen, or china... who knows. in some markets linux is much stronger than others... but in America, which is still a huge market, if not the biggest market, windows rules the day.
Windowmaker? IceWM? enlightenment?
These are available, but apparently the ONLY thing keeping "Linux from the Desktop" is that KDE and GNOME exist.
Nah, I don't buy it.
When they are merged, you'll be complaining that there's KNOMDE and WindowMaker and that you won't get "Linux on the Desktop" until they are merged.
Then WMKNOMDE and XFCE will stop there being "Linux on the Desktop".
And when there is only one desktop, it will be that it's the wrong one.
And when it's the right one, it'll be that GIMP is a stupid name for a program.
And when it's named something else...
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
What I find really weird is that on Windows, the default paper size is always "letter", when most people use A4.
Not in the U.S.
Given that the rest of the world is over 5.5 billion people, and the US is about 320 million, I would consider that to mean "most people".
Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) is only for Intel hardware in this release. Other graphics hardware will have to wait for a later release.
The most important feature is the new mascot, Tuz.
And here I was thinking we were going to get a new, faster, slimmed-down penguin.
PS3 access to full 512MB of memory via PS3FB driver.. Now in mainline kernel...
Sweet...
You must have eaten some free (as in freedom, not free as in beer) corn.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Now, this feature is the one M$ has had for ages. About time it filesystem freezes were implemented in the Linux Kernel!
reimplement it, poorly.
"Most people" don't live in the US.
Most people living in English-speaking industrialized countries live in the United States. Add up the population of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the two-thirds of Canada that isn't Quebec, and you still have less than half the U.S. population. (This might change somewhat once India industrializes further.) Besides, Canada uses US Letter paper too. So if you publish one edition of a desktop environment for the English language, and not separate editions for North America and the Commonwealth, it might be fair to default to North American settings.
run Windows?
Scroll down to the 'Drivers' section of the kernel newbies page. Tons of audio drivers, tv card drivers, and other stuff, as well as wifi drivers....
Back off, dude!
If this was a discussion on say, 'Linux on the Desktop', or '*nix-the New Distro',your comment would be cogent, insightful, and on topic. But the discussion has nothing to do with that topic, so your reply is just a troll.
Hint: We were discussing the release of the 2.6.29 Linux Kernal, not another release of a Linux distro. Get some perspective.
How many "normal computer users" would care, much less know what this means?
Those of us that do know what this means are excited...this is just "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters'...this has nothing to do with your "normal computer users" you are babbling about, this time.
Save your vitriol for the appropriate discussion to avoid looking like a n00b/troll/flamebait maroon.
Gahh! I've fallen to feeding confused trolls! *shoots self in face with BFG 9000*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti