Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents

darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"

Re:I for one...

[TeknoHog]

...welcome our old Unicode-challenged Slashdot. BÃrk bÃrk bÃrk!

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard they were going to include RieserFS but they killed that idea because it would be murder to include it. The developers said they would have to butcher the kernel in order to get it to work.

Barely on v.2.6.28? Sheesh, Windows way past that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck Bill Gates has his OS way past Windows version 2000! The Linux will never catch up.

Re:demographics

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking religious fanatic.

Re:To clear somethings up

[cp.tar]

This does not sound like a bad idea, though: moving a part of the graphics into the kernel only makes the kernel a little more complex (as it has already had parts of the code in order to use the screen while booting), and at the same time, X can become less complex and thus both faster and less error-prone.

Re:It's Christmas!

[Hal_Porter]

Santa provided this kernel. If you install it and if kills your box you must have been naughty, if it works well you must have been nice.

Re:To clear somethings up

[cyber-vandal]

making Linux useable, maintainable, and fixable by average Joe's with as little fuss as possible

I'm still waiting for Windows to get to that point never mind Linux.

Re:2009

[Anonymous Coward]

The moderators are drunk on Christmas spirits.

Which is only proven by the fact that they modded you insightful for that very comment.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

5th unique AC in a row -

Third AC again.
Looks like you're an AK not an AC. But you are correct the right answer is - funny... funny for three points.

Re:Linus just released it

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, my... The man is insane.

Re:For me, it's something else

[pizpot]

KDE is cutting-edge.

Re:To clear somethings up

[radish]

That page is a hoot. In general I groan whenever a software homepage has a "Philosophy" section, but the installation instructions more than make up for it...

Installation for Non-Programmers (emphasis mine)
      1. FBUI resides inside the 2.6.9 kernel, so the first thing you must do is to get the kernel, un-tar FBUI in its directory, select the necessary options mentioned in the README, then make the kernel and update your loader to let you boot the new kernel. (I will offer a precompiled x86 kernel later.)
      2. You also need to tell your boot loader to switch to the VESA console during booting. In LILO use the expression vga=792 for a 1024x768 display or vga=789 for 800x600.
      3. Then you boot with the kernel. Next you need to set up the PCF font directory, populating it with fonts from the X distribution, making sure to uncompress them. The PCF font reader is really just a temporary chunk of code so I'm not going to update it to perform automatic decompression. Note, if you aren't sure where the fonts are, type (as root) find / -name "*.pcf*". To make sure libfbui knows where they are, you can use the PCFFONTDIR environment variable (as in export PCFFONTDIR=/path...).
      4. Once you've done these things, just compile the sample programs in /usr/src/linux-2.6.9/libfbui and run them from there. You may find it helps to run a program in a different virtual console using the -c switch.

See how easy? I am a programmer and that's... well... yeah.

Re:Linus just released it

[Anonymous Coward]

Insane in the mainframe!

Re:For me, it's something else

[JamesTRexx]

I think you mean Kutting-edge. :-)

Re:Nice start...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, OS X is flicker-free smooth at resizing live video, minimising/maxing apps in 3D, moving windows around. Linux and Windows are very jerky in comparison. I'd say they are the ones that need to catch up, especially the shoe-horned crap in Vista.
OS X is smooth on 600 MHz hardware because of using GPU correctly, Windows and Linux are very jerky on all hardware even new ones.

Re:ext4 is stable enough -- for others

[Anonymous Coward]

How's Sarge running for you Mr. Luddite?