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Linux Software

Linux Kernel 2.4.6 Released 202

Posted by timothy from the happy-fourth-starting-now dept.
If the prospect of fireworks wasn't enough to make you happy today, there's a new Linux kernel in town. (Note: be patient; some of the mirrors aren't yet updated.) sheol writes of the new 2.4.6 release: "Yep, it's out there. Run, jump, dance in the streets. Drink and be merry. Prepare yourself for a full kernel recompile." Reader dschl says: "Looks like fixes to the Reiserfs bugs in 2.4.5 are included." Here's the changelog as well.
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2.4.6 More

2.4.6

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  • Re:Fireworks? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually they are celebrating their independence AFAIK. They are obviously not aware of the fact that her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II has revoked it during the election-fiasco last year as this document proves:

    NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

    To the citizens of the United States of America, In the light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

    Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (The rt. hon. Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

    To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

    1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed".

    2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf.

    3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard.

    4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys.

    5. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.

    6. You should stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football.
    Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US rugby sevens side by 2005.

    7. You should declare war on Quebec and France, using nuclear weapons if they give you any merde. The 97.85% of you who were not aware that there is a world outside your borders should count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the bad guys. "Merde" is French for "shit".

    8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 8th will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day".

    9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

    10. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy.

    Thank you for your cooperation.

  • Re:Fireworks? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, we noticed. Maybe you didn't see the reply:

    November 8, 2000

    To the Subjects of Her Majesty, the Queen of England,

    In the light of your failure to prevent us from kicking you out in the 18th century and doing as we damn well please, we hereby notify you that you can keep it down over there before we take notice.

    Sure, historically America really doesn't pay much attention to the rest of the world. But when someone does catch our eye, we tend to carpet bomb them to a pre-industrial state. It may not be right, or fair, but it is a trend. I suggest you keep it in mind.

    To aid in your realization that you should pipe down, the following facts are listed:

    1. American English is distinct from British English. Our aluminum is a lovely silver color, and we do not 'armour' our tanks, thank you.

    2. When you can tell the difference between an Alabama and Louisiana accent, I'll pay attention to the difference between a Londoner's and a Yorkshireman's accents.

    3. Rather than "God save the Queen"; you should learn "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". After all, if it weren't for American soldiers you'd speak German today, twice over. And if it weren't for American bread, butter, etc., you would have been starving while we saved your little old island from the Hun.

    4. If I were to throw an American football block on a football player, he'd be out ofthe game and I'd be ejected. If I were to throw a real tackle on a rugby player, he'd be maimed. The pads in American football are to keep you from being crippled or killed. Just because rugby players tear their ears in a group hug called a 'scrum'doesn't make them tough. You want tough? You put YOUR arms in theair while a 322 pound (46 stone) man slams into you at a dead sprint and still catch the ball. That's tough.

    5. If you can't settle the French's hash, find someone else. After all, they have lost to everyone *but* the British this century.

    6. The irony of a Brit complaining about American cars is too much. I've driven British cars and they're like a Hyundai, but poorly made. When someone else comes up with an idea as good as the muscle car, we'll think about it.

    To sum it all up, we really aren't interested in your opinion.

  • Re:Who *doesn't * use Linux here? :) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I prefer Linux over Windows for a workstation for a number of reasons.

    1) Virtual desktops
    2) Multiple workspaces
    3) Decent window manager: icewm.
    4) Looks great, unlike Windows' ugliness.
    5) Decent terminal emulators
  • Get the patch, and/or try the mirrors (it's on linux.nssl.noaa.gov for instance).

  • I thought that patch-int-2.4.3.1 was breaking before 2.4.5 for me, so I'm surprised you were OK with that version.

    The only problem I've had is that something's changed in the toplevel Makefile and patch rejects some of the changes to that file. Check in Makefile.rej. Notably, 'crypto' has to be added to the end of the SUBDIRS variable and CRYPTO has to be defined as well. Just pull those lines out of the reject file. It's pretty simple.

  • *not* run Linux? What's the point of that?
    What's the point of having a computer environment that you own, yet don't have complete control of? ;)

    Anyway, to give this post at least some substance I'll describe my comfy little computer setup:

    • Athlon workstation: 750Mhz, 192MB, 46G disk, G400 Max, 19" monitor, SB Live, DVD drive.
    • K6-III server: 400Mhz, 128MB, 14.4G disk, Ricoh CD/CD-R/RW drive, OnStream 30G tape drive.
    • Sun SparcStation LX: 50Mhz(!), 96MB, 4G disk.

    Ok, it's not 31337, but it keeps me happy and lets me play around with all sorts of fun things. Yes, even the SparcStation runs Linux :) Debian [GNU/]Linux to be exact. Makes everything nice and uniform. Just use apt-get everywhere!

    Oh, and it's all in my bedroom here. So I guess I get extra geek points for that...

  • At least that I've seen in the change logs, ugh. WILL SOMEONE PLEASE FIX THIS - LINUX IS UNUSABLE ON MY SYSTEM UNTIL THIS IS FIXED
  • Won't the backing out of the page_launder changes cause problems for servers with heavy IO loads ?
  • That's interesting; I have a VIA686-based chipset, but not the VIA onboard sound (C-Media CM8738 onboard sound), actually an Iwill KK266 motherboard (rev. 1.2), and I've not seen any lockups at all. DMA mode with the CDROM causes some random hardware lockups, but they go away briefly. I've never had a lockup due to my HDD; then again all I have is an ATA33 and an ATA66-based HD, and the ATA66-based HD sits in standy mode a good portion of the time (it's my media/swap disk drive and this machine has 256MB RAM in it, so swapping doesn't occur too often)
  • FreeBSD All the Way ....

    Except for my DECstation 5000/33 ... NetBSD/pmax has to do there :-))
  • Ctrl-Alt-[+|-] (on the numeric key pad) do the trick without having to shut the X server down :)
  • It's good to see the America Sense of Humour in full effect.

    With a sense of humor like yours, it's understandable that someone would mistake it for Whiney Europeanese.

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.



  • As usual, the Norway mirrors are carrying the new kernel.

    2.4.6 is NOW on ftp://ftp.no.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/

    Come and get it !

  • Linux threads are implemented as processes which share memory, filehandles, etc.

    Unless people start to integrate the new Next Generation Posix Threading Project [ibm.com] and, unless they hacked around *all* the blocking system calls .. well at least the slow ones that can return EINTR.. the entire process will block.

    Reading the manual from the 1.0.0 src rpm, it looks like they wrapped read(2)/write(2) among others, but send*(2)/recv*(2) (off the top of my head) aren't wrapped yet. It is on their TODO list to get this integrated with glibc at some future point. Hopefully those issues will be worked out by then.

  • What I want to know is: why don't we British have an independence day?

    Well, Guy Fawkes Day isn't quite the same thing, but there are a lot of people out there who celebrate it as if they should work to make it an Independence Day by following through on Fawkes' failed plan...

    (For the non-Brits, Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up the houses of Parliament with a keg of gunpowder, only to get turned in by one of his co-conspirators. On November the fifth every year, Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy.)

    Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
    The gunpowder treason and plot.
    I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot.

    -- Bryan Feir
  • Check out the comments section when gcc 3.0 was released here on Slashdot. Apparently, some people had some problems with kernel oopses when compiling the kernel with gcc 3.0. Also, from what I understand, the linux kernel is not completely ANSI compliant (which is why predecessor of gcc 3.0 (egcs?) couldn't compile the kernel). Think most of the problems got fixed though (haven't had problems compiling with gcc 2.95.x).
  • Which gcc? Make sure it's not 3.0. Would think that one will give problems, since it just came out (do a gcc --version).
  • My main computer runs AmigaOS 3.9.

    My second machine has Linux and FreeBSD
    at the moment, and will probably gain
    BeOS, OpenBSD, Solaris and Plan9 sooner
    or later.
  • Well, Win2K and occasionally various flavors of Linux. Id argue about "use" though. I forced myself through a 28.8 kbps download and install of Slackware a few years back, and have had a certain amount of respect for it since. While I still have not to this day built a linux box and used it for more than a month straight, I find myself keeping up with the latest, and occasionally installing the latest distributions just for grins. 2.4.6 is a good thing.
  • I use Win2000, cuz i haven't bothered to learn how to install linux/*bsd on my computers. If anyone in the RPI (i.e. Troy, NY) area is willing to help me out, drop me a mail! (I know, I could use how-to's, but I just don't want to deal with them.)
    ~jawad
  • I should be counted in on that one - havn't had a windows partition in years - for gaming I have a playstation.

  • Well seen as it's the 4th I'll allow myself to go off on this tangent...
    Yeah, that's when we kicked the English's butt. :)
    • It wasn't the English the American Colonials were fighting, it was the British.
    • In many ways it was a British Cival War, the Americans were holding to the ideals which were fought over in the English Civil War (Cromwell and all that).
  • I use Mac OS X on my Mac
  • It usually comes free with a new PC anyways!

    Oh, believe me, you're paying for it all right :)
  • I'm just wondering... what percent of the slashdotters have switched over to 2.4.x from 2.2.x

    I haven't because I don't want to bother upgrading my whole installation.... or worry about any potential conflicts
  • I dunno - St. Patrick's Day seems to be celebrated worldwide for some reason, which I've never seen happen with any other national holiday...
    Here in Brazil we never celebrated it. St. Patrick is almost unknown here. As a largely catholic country, we do celebrate other saints, like St. John, St. Peter... But I never saw any St. Patrick celebration.
  • Or alternatively if you don't want to mess about with patches which will inevatively screw up, rsync your old tarball with the new one :)
    --
    mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
  • Did you ever try software RAID on a 2.2 kernel?

    If the performance and scalability were better on 2.2 than 2.4 then there may be a bug or missing feature in 2.4 that should be looked into.

    If the performance is comperable for 2.2 and 2.4 then the problem is most likely a bottleneck in your hardware (like the IDE bus contention mentioned by another poster).

  • FreeBSD 4.3 standing up to be counted.

    But seriously, with the charged nature of things, isnt a question like this loaded and bound to evolve into a religious war ? So most folk here use linux, but then others pick FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD. To each his own, eh ?

  • From the Changelog
    -pre9:
    - Chris Mason: reiserfs PF_MEMALLOC handling
    -pre4:
    - Chris Mason: ReiserFS pre-allocation locking bugfix
    -pre3:
    - Chris Mason: reiserfs mark_journal_new and bh leak fix
    - Neil Brown: knfsd updates, including ability to export ReiserFS filesys

    Also, there is a patch available for 2.4.5 at the Namesys website [namesys.com], where they stated on June 21:
    Quota and KNFSD patch for 2.4.5 is renamed ( linux-2.4.5-reiserfs-quota+knfsd+umount-fix.patch. bz2) to indicate explicitly that it also contains umount-fix patch.

  • July second, I think (maybe the first). If I had to guess it was probably a celebration. It celebrates the establishment of the Canadian government.
  • Sept 15, 1810: Mexican Independance Day (When Mexico left Spain).

    May 5, 1862: Forces from France, England, Spain and a large rival Mexican army (But mostly France) were defeated near Mexico City; after attempting to re-occupy Mexico.
  • I'm getting really poor performance (30% slower!) out of the 2.4.5's RAID-0 (up to 2.4.6-pre5). Back when I was using software RAID with the 2.2 kernels, I was actually getting a performance increase (whoa!) with RAID-0 of 50% or so, across my two 20Gb 7200rpm Seagate UDMA drives (hda and hdc).

    Anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

    hda and hdc of course, with hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66 /dev/hda and hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66 /dev/hdc set after boot.

    hdparm -t /dev/hda6 and hdparm -t /dev/hdc6 shows the same transfer rate, yet the benchmark of the corresponding stripe of those (hdparm -t /dev/md0) is about 30% slower! Timing dd bs=128k if=/dev/??? of=/dev/null for hda6, hdc6 and md0 gives the same results across the whole partitions.

    PII-300, top is not showing greater than 30% CPU usage from hdparm or dd during the tests so CPU is not the problem (and it was flying under 2.2). I have tried plenty of chunk sizes up to 128k.

    Hopefully 2.4.6 will fix it, but the md updates in (pre5?) did not.

  • I would suggest April 21 myself.

    The day (in 1653) that Oliver Cromwell cleared the "Rump" (the then corrupt parliment that was essentially still loyal to the defeated monarchy) and replaced it with the "Parliament of Puritan saints" (which proved equally innept). Although it was finnaly a failed overthrough of the monarchy (the monarchy was returned to power in about 1660, two years after his death).

    Anyone got a Brittish independance day suggestion?

    "I'll take the red pill, no, blue. AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH........"

  • 1) Virtual desktops
    2) Multiple workspaces
    3) Decent window manager: icewm.
    4) Looks great, unlike Windows' ugliness.
    5) Decent terminal emulators

    1) I find them a pain in the arse, therefore they're a subjective "benefit"
    2) Isn't that the same as 1) ?
    3) Subjective
    4) Very subjective
    5) You haven't used many Windows terminal emulators have you

    My point: Everything's subjective. Some think Windows is "ugly". I personally like it.

    Xx Stuii!

  • I haven't upgraded yet, because I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 which has a funky PCMCIA chipset (or maybe it's the BIOS; I never have gotten the damn thing to work right.) and you have to compile PCMCIA with "PnP BIOS Resource Checking" which does not work with 2.4 (and the documentation says this "shouldn't be a problem for anyone", but hey. ).
    My desktop computer has a Geforce2 and I was pretty sure that the older drivers from nVidia only had kernel modules for 2.2.x so I played it safe, but now I'm just too lazy.
  • Suprisingly I'm getting 60k. I wasn't going to say anything, so now I've probably jinxed it. DAMN! lol...
    Enjoy
  • Depends on how much you like mopping...

  • Ooh ooh! Don't forget us danes (4th of may).
  • Damn Straight! I have people bagging me out for using 2K on my desktop at home. I am a firm believer in using Linux on the server, but until some drastic improvements are made on the desktop side I will continue using M$ software. It usually comes free with a new PC anyways!
  • Do you really update your servers on EVERY kernel release? That sounds like a fair amount of work and potential downtime..

    Mike Roberto
    - GAIM: MicroBerto
  • I run Linux on my Alphas, because it's a bit more mature than FreeBSD, but my laptop and ix86 machines are all FreeBSD.
  • I gave up on software raid under linux during the .2.4-test phase.

    I couldnt even get someone to admit there is a problem.

    They all say they are getting linear performance increases, i used to be able to get 80& performance increas with 2 drives, but adding any more drives (i had 4 way raid 0) made no difference to performance.

  • Another mirror (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The mirrors usually get borked for a few days, so.. I'll put up one as well. :)

    ftp://ftp.stenstad.net/mirrors/linux-2.4.6.tar.b z2
    http://ftp.stenstad.net/mirrors/linux-2.4.6.tar. bz 2

  • Re:2.4.6.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    stop praising linus

    so many more people work on Linux than he does.

    Praise the men and women who did their work to make Linux what it is today.
  • This patch is pretty small and has some cool USB fixes for the desktop.

    I'll be updating my desktop later today (is it tomorrow now? I don't know)

    My servers will sit tight at 2.4.5 though, there's really no reason to upgrade.

    -davidu

  • I've been running 2.4.6pre2+CVS XFS on a server for 19 days now. No problems. I probably will upgrade to the final 2.4.6 once the official XFS 1.0.1 comes out.

    I upgraded to this "beta" version after I had minor FS corruption using the kernel supplied by SGI's Red hat installer. Happened after only about 2 days of uptime.

    System has an Abit VP6 MB (some kind of VIA chipset) and a SCSI drive.

    ---
  • Yep, it's out there. Run, jump, dance in the streets. Drink and be merry.

    Thank you that you took Caution and haven't asked for wild sex in the streets. You know, geeks and sex? This could have caused serious depression on the readership of slashdot...


  • Just out of curiousity... how many other Slashdot readers beside myself don't use some flavour Linux on one of their principal computers?

    I consider my Commodore 64s some of my principal computers. I haven't yet seen Linux running on those, just some "lightweight" UNIXes [sourceforge.net]...

    I also use Win98SE for games, sound and digital video editing and such for which Linux is not yet the best solution. Aside of that, it's all Linux.

  • Or, in Debian's case, apt-get install pppd; apt-get install modutils :)
    --

  • When Microsoft stops being evil, I'll consider their products on their merits. Until then, I'll treat it like a fish _should_ treat a baited hook because that's exactly what it is.

  • I've asked this question once on lkml. It seems 3.0 will come when usermode applications have to be relinked (eg. not likely anytime soon).

    kernel traffic link [zork.net].


  • As a Sys Admin who is in a group that runs alot of 6 way 4 gig systems, Linux 2.4.x sucks.

    Yes, it has all the cool stuff we want; support for alot of devices, better SMP, and larger memory handling, however, its just not stable under high load.
    I just hope that the Linux Kernel people can get their stuff together and make a stable kernel.


    --
  • Tell you what. I'll throw some tea into the river in remembrance of you, my British friend.

    --
  • Even though it only applies to them, they seem to want to ram it down everyone else's throats.

    Excuse me, you pretentious asshole - I live in America and am very aware of British holidays that we don't celebrate like Boxing Day and May Day. I am very aware of when the Magna Carta was signed (June 15th, 1215 at Runnymede).

    Other free countries have their days of independance - July 14th for France, September 16th for Mexico (although I'll admit I had to look that one up), and July 4th for the United States of America.

    Get over yourself - either you would prefer that the Slashdot crew censor themselves of all human comments (which would turn this into a stock rumor site), or you want to impress your own set of values and references upon the site. Either is a bloody narrow-minded point of view. There is a reason it's called the World Wide Web, and I'm not going to bitch if the Register mentions a British holiday in a story.

    --
    Evan

  • For the heck of it, I'm uploading the .tar.bz2 to Freenet right now. It's a copy I grabbed from one of the mirrors, PGP signature verifies, too.

    If you're running a Freenet [sf.net] node, you can grab the kernel source using the following key:

    freenet:SSK@sUOkGXJDjktWahCNZmvg0sDkEKgQAgE/foldr. org/linux-2.4.6.tar.bz2 [localhost]

  • since when.. i've been using 2.4.5 for ages - with reiserfs - and have had no problems...

    There were problems with exporting a reiserfs partition over NFS, which was quite annoying... this may have been fixed in 2.4.5, though. If so, I'm not quite sure what the problems fixed in 2.4.6 are, but probably other wierd interactions that most people don't encounter.
    --

  • Me! (Score:2)

    by DarkMan ( 32280 )
    There is only one linux machine in my group, an old 486 that does print sharing protocol conversion (Samba to lpr).

    We have Windows (98 / 2k depending) on the desktop, AIX and Solaris on our number crunchers, HP-UX on the cluster, and an Alpha on Dec Unix in reserve (Old alpha, not that fast). There's an SGI Indy doing print serving and visulisation software in the corner. Oh, and UNICOS is what we use on the CSAR.

    We do scienfic computing (Solid state physics), and reliabiltiy is important - particularly when your talking runtimes over around a month. PC hardware doesn't cut it, until you get into the range where UNIX boxes are similar prices. Hence the range of Unixs, and very little linux.
    --
  • Don't feel so bad. There are a lot of Video4Linux drivers left out. The sony one is under heavy development and probably won't be included until it's done. There is no reason for including something that is under so much development in the kernel now. You can always patch, so what exactly is the problem.
  • It's called 'hate of superiority'. Our country is superior both economically and militarily over the rest of the world, thus we are seen as the Bad Guys and those who push things on others. It's probably true, to a large extent, but that's why we're hated. Even if actual superiority doesn't exist.

    -------
    Caimlas

  • ...I just upgraded the home server from 2.4.3 to 2.4.5 last night while trying to figure out what the hell was going on with masquerading (turned out to be an error in the script that enables/disables masquerading). Oh well, the uptime isn't even to 24 hours yet...

    (Yes, I checked for a newer version first, as I downloaded the 2.4.[45] patches a while back. This probably would've happened around 2200 PDT, and it was ftp.us.kernel.org that I checked.)

  • It's good to see the America Sense of Humour in full effect.

    With a sense of humor like yours, it's understandable that someone would mistake it for Whiney Europeanese.

    Maybe that's the real difference between "humor" and "humour."

  • Linus starting the 2.5 branch officially is a good sign that he considers the current revision of 2.4 to be stable enough not to be the main focus of work.

  • 2.4 is faster than 2.2 but is not that stable.
    I tried it on all the machines i have but on some (some p1 desktops and laptops) i had to revert to 2.2 because 2.4 crashed WAY too much and too often. (ranging from system freezes to scads of oopses an panics). The problem is that 2.4 uses the hardware at 110% potential but if the hardware is flakey (as those pentiums were) - it will bomb.
    So: stay with 2.2 on "Production"-grade machines and on machines whose hardware you don't trust 100%
    --
  • ...had been going into the 2.4.5-ac kernels (at least the sonypi one, not sure about the motioneye patch for the C1 camera), but are nowhere to be seen in the release kernel :( I thought that Alan Cox had merged all of his patches in for this release, or has Linus decided they aren't worthwhile?

    *sobs*

    Ah well, I'll just have to patch it myself again then, as us Vaio users aren't important enough for Linus (even though he has a C1 himself...)
  • Windows 95 at home, Windows 2000 at work.
  • ...any thread (at least under pthreads) that performs disc IO may block the entire process and prevent other threads from running.

    Well, I thought threads were implemented as Light Weight Processes (this is why Java and other programs such as realplayer show up in the process table more than once) so I don't see how this is possible.

  • I'm not sure why you would guess this. Linus jumped from 1.2.x to 2.0.0 for the "Linux 2.0" release. So I think that it is likely that we will see a "Linux 3.0" sooner rather than later.

    Cryptnotic

  • I'm using the ReiserFS implementation in 2.4.3, and have had no problems at all with it. Am I missing something here?

    ---
    DOOR!!
  • July 1st. It celebrates the confederation of Canada into one single Dominion (The Dominion of Canada) into on single entity consisting of 5 provinces instead of 5 separate colonies. Canada was established by the British North America Act (BNA Act), passed by the British Parliament on July first, 1867. The BNA act served as our constitution until 1982, 50 years after we were finally granted full autonomy and the ability to set our own constitution and foreign policy (Statute of Westminister, 1932). Canada now consists of 10 provinces and three territories: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island were the originals, British Colombia joined in 1870 (IIRC), Manitoba (1872, IIRC), Alberta and Saskatchewan were 1905, and Newfoundland was in 1949. It used to be called "Dominion Day" until the 60s when we stopped being officaly named "The Dominion of Canada", which IMHO is far more cool than simply "Canada" :) The Government as it stands today was established as a constitutional monarchy with a democratically elected Parliament (House of Commons), and appointed senate actually running the country on behalf of the reining monarch. A person entitles the Governor General is our head of State, the Queen's representative in Canada, she has more or less the same powers as the President of the US but she is appointed by OUR Parliament.

    Not a bad guess though. Much better than the man on "The Weakest Link" who thought Canada used to be part of Spain, and declared independance in 1812 :)

  • Actually, AFAIK, GCC 3.0 compiles the kernel just fine...

  • A fair question, if slightly off-topic-- I use Red Hat Linux 7.1 in a dual-boot config with Windows 2000 Server. On my server system (dual Pentium III 800's, with 1.25GB PC133) I run Windows 2000 Server exclusivly. I usually find myself more in Windows than in Linux, but I use Linux to develop apps/etc.

  • I was about to bitch about this because I just barely went to -pre9 on several machines, but from the ChangeLog it looks like '-pre9' became 'final' so I can just let those stay in place.

    Or is the ChangeLog not yet complete? (Say, ChangeLog-pre1?)
  • Okay, I'm going to guess that Linus isn't going to make the jump from 2.4 to 3.0, but will instead go to 2.6 and then 2.8, and then 3.0. Now, assuming that it's about 18 minor increments between versions, at the rate of around 1 per month, that'll mean 18 months + 18 months + 12 months, for a grand total of 48 months. So, that'll be June, 2005!

    By that point, Linux will be powering all our flying cars, I bet!

  • here in california, i know people with medicinal marijuana perscriptions who are "underage". Thats right, they can legally get high, but arn't allowed to drink. Though I personally prefer pot over liquor any day, I think it should all be legal in the first place. The laws arn't working; they're just making it cooler because there's a societal taboo being broken.

    Moderators: Yes, this is WAY offtopic from the new linux kernel. Do your bussiness. My +1 Bonus will protect me at first, but I know I'm in the wrong and can only last so long.

    ___
  • VIA Chipsets (KT133A) are also causing problems on *gasp* windows machines. Check out Real World Tech's latest industry update (found here [realworldtech.com]). Its on the second page in the first paragraph. Basically if you stick an SB Live soundcard on some of the KT133A based mobos you get, you guessed, data corruption.
    I guess this just adds to the cannon fodder


  • you just need to know the barman...

    thanks Todd (barman at my local, and flatmate too... lifes good :)

    buuuuuuuuuuurp...
  • I have been using the ac-series until prepatch 18 and experienced problems with the 8139too modules.
    Nice that these problems seem to be away now with 2.4.6.
    Also I noticed the presence of an option for the MIDI-part of my via82cxx onboard-soundcard.
    Havent't tried it yet though...
  • Dunno about that - if the site has been slashdotted, a 1.7MB file may take several hours :)
  • Just out of curiousity... how many other Slashdot readers beside myself don't use some flavour Linux on one of their principal computers?

  • Fireworks? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @12:15AM (#109600)
    What fireworks? Is something happening today?

  • 2.4.6.... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @12:16AM (#109601)
    2.4.6.8
    Who do we appreciate?

    ... Linus

    :-)

  • Re:2.4.6.... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @04:27AM (#109602)
    No, don't stop praising Linus... start praising everyone!

    Why do people have the attitude that there isn't enough thanks to go around?

  • Re:2.4.6 dies horribly (Score:3)

    by cdipierr ( 4045 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @09:46AM (#109603) Homepage
    This is one of the Via bugs. Don't compile with Athlon optimizations, use the K6 series instead and you'll be ok.

  • Re:Poor RAID performance in 2.4.5? (Score:3)

    by RelliK ( 4466 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @07:11AM (#109604)
    Maybe that's because you are using IDE drives. Although you can plug in 2 IDE drives per channel (giving you a total of 4 for 2 channels), only *one* of them can work at a time. While one is working the other one is waiting. Unlike SCSI, the two drives *cannot* share the bandwidth of the IDE channel and work simultaneously. So the only way you can get a linear increase from IDE is if you use two drives on two *different* IDE channels. I suspect that's your problem.
    ___

  • Re:Reasons to upgrade? (Score:3)

    by jgarzik ( 11218 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @04:50AM (#109605) Homepage
    Won't the backing out of the page_launder changes cause problems for servers with heavy IO loads ?

    The page_launder changes were backed out and then Linus wrote his own fix for the problem. So, no.

    Jeff

  • Re:great (Score:3)

    by xcene ( 31785 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @12:13AM (#109606) Homepage
    60 minutes? The patch is only about 1.4mb (bz2).

  • Drink and be merry! (Score:3)

    by sheol ( 153979 ) <recluce@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:05AM (#109607)
    So where is all this free beer everyone is always talking about?

  • Re:Fireworks? (Score:3)

    by Jodrell ( 191685 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:23AM (#109608) Homepage

    Apparently the Americans are celebrating some kind of holiday. Even though it only applies to them, they seem to want to ram it down everyone else's throats.

    Maybe I'm biased, though, being British ;)

    Mind you, there is a certain poetry to the release of the latest Linux kernel on a day people celebrate Freedom.


  • AFAIK, the problem was related to the unmounting of ReiserFS partitions - in which case you'd rarely notice it as you'd normally only unmount during shutdown. Dunno, might cause the box to hang while running rc.S.

    Slackware 8.0 - which ships with 2.4.5 - comes with a small patch to fix that particular problem.

  • Re:Why Bother? (Score:3)

    by Richard Bannister ( 464181 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @12:32AM (#109610) Homepage
    Of course it will. Just wait - you'll be running Windows XP on your washing machine within ten years. You'll know that the system crashed when your laundry comes out bright blue and covered in silly numbers!

  • Re:2.2.x ? (Score:4)

    by WWWWolf ( 2428 ) <wwwwolf@iki.fi> on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @03:09AM (#109611) Homepage
    I haven't because I don't want to bother upgrading my whole installation.... or worry about any potential conflicts

    The change from 2.2.x to 2.4.x is surprisingly painless (much less painful than any "user-level" major change, like back when the day when going from libc5 to glibc2 practically needed reinstallation of the whole dist). No recompilation or reinstallation of stuff was necessary.

    Personally, the only thing that needed special attention was the firewall thing, and even that wasn't top priority (because the kernel has an ipchains comparibility mode). Ultimately, the conversion of my firewall script from ipchains to iptables was rather easy.

  • Re:Troubles (Score:4)

    by jgarzik ( 11218 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:52AM (#109612) Homepage
    What I gathered from the kernel mailing list, the problem seems to be that VIA has shipped a whole series of different chipsets with bugs using the same version number. The problem is that there is no way one could make a nice workaround.

    Well, not exactly wrong :)

    The bigger problem is finding out what exactly is wrong. The only information available so far has been reverse engineered (AFAIK) and posted on the 3rd party site viahardware.com [viahardware.com]. So far all the information we have is "before BIOS update X" and "after BIOS update X" snapshots of the system setup.

    It's pretty easy to figure out real quick which systems are broken. It's tougher to figure out what is broken, and what the right fix is.

    Jeff

  • Reasons to upgrade? (Score:4)

    by jgarzik ( 11218 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:45AM (#109613) Homepage
    My servers will sit tight at 2.4.5 though, there's really no reason to upgrade.

    No doubt I am biased, but I disagree.

    There are noteworthy VM fixes, buffer I/O deadlock fixes, and vfs fixes.

    Plus the usual raft of driver fixes and merges from Alan Cox's tree. See Alan Cox's changelog as a supplement to the official changelog from Linus. Linus compresses many changes from Alan into a single word in the changelog, "merges."

    Jeff

  • Re:Does Disc IO Still Block Pthreads? (Score:4)

    by Erik Hensema ( 12898 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:39AM (#109614) Homepage

    LWP's are Solaris-specific. Linux threads are implemented as processes which share memory, filehandles, etc.

    Linux threads can't block other threads since there is no difference to a process. And offcource, a process can't block all other processes ;-)

    You may want to switch to another pthreads implementation. Quite a few (at least three) implementations exist and you're probably using the all-userspace implementation. This one simulates threads in userspace and doesn't use native threads.

    AFAIK the later glibc 2.x implementations use native threads.

  • Re:Troubles (Score:4)

    by Gorgonzola ( 24839 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:04AM (#109615) Homepage
    Well, not exactly wrong. What I gathered from the kernel mailing list, the problem seems to be that VIA has shipped a whole series of different chipsets with bugs using the same version number. The problem is that there is no way one could make a nice workaround. As the owner of a motherboard with a VIA 686 chipset I can assure you that is a real PITA. I encountered the most horrible lockups. Luckily enough I had a Promise ATA100 PCI controller and ever since I put my HD on that one my system has been rock solid.

  • Troubles (Score:4)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:26AM (#109616)
    I have been reading Kernel Traffic [zork.net] regularly (looks like there's a new one tonight incedentally). Seems like there are some problems they've been having trouble sorting out. To my knowledge (again, limited to KT), they are still pending and in fact the latest kernels would be considered rather unstable for a stable series. In particular, the Virtual Memory subsystem has problems. I don't understand the details but higher memory systems >256MB can run into FS corruption. And last I heard they've written off VIA as an incompetent chipset manufacturer meaning they haven't a clue why VIA machines lock up. Someone *please* flame me for being wrong!

  • Does Disc IO Still Block Pthreads? (Score:4)

    by ralphbecket ( 225429 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @12:38AM (#109617)
    [Sorry if this is the wrong forum; maybe someone could point me at the right place to ask this question if so.]

    I believe that despite what the documentation says, any thread (at least under pthreads) that performs disc IO may block the entire process and prevent other threads from running. This is a problem the Flash high-performance web server had to get around by using multiple processes just for disc IO. Can anyone tell me categorically that this bug has been fixed or give me some idea of when it will be fixed?

  • Save bandwidth... use patches. (Score:5)

    by simpleguy ( 5686 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:23AM (#109618) Homepage
    Allow me to remind you not to download the WHOLE kernel tarball over and over again.

    Use the kernel patches and patch your kernel source as described in the Kernel HOWTO.

    This will save you precious time, bandwidth and will cause less load on the servers.

  • Re:Who *doesn't * use Linux here? :) (Score:5)

    by innit ( 79854 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:17AM (#109619) Homepage
    I've always used Windows NT based OSs on the desktop and Slackware Linux on the server.

    People seem to think they have to choose between the two operating systems. I used them both at the same time. They both have advantages and disadvantages. Windows is a well rounded, stable workstation OS, Linux is a stable, powerful server OS.

    In reverse, I would consider them both to be useless. Why sacrifice one set of advantages? Use them both!

    xx Stuii!

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