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Linux Software

Linux 2.3.40 released 146

Posted by emmett from the orville-redenbacher dept.
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk writes "Linux kernel 2.3.40 has just been released. You can find a description on what's new in it on kernelnotes.org. It's available on one of the ftp.kernel.org and on most mirrors." Remember, this is a development kernel.
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Linux 2.3.40 released More

Linux 2.3.40 released

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  • I'm not sure about previous relesaes...but I got 2.3.40 earlier this morning, and it seems to have a slightly major bug. Every 15 or so minutes it decides to hose my networking, and requires a reboot to get it going again...for another 15 minutes. Has anyone else noticed this?
  • Yet Another Minor Kernel Revision

    Either that or there are some serious bug patches here.

    I'm still waiting for 2.4, at which time I will build my second computer that's exclusively for Linux.

    That and XF86 4.0 so i'll be able to play some games on it with relative ease (hopefully)

  • 1) This is old news -- I've been running 2.3.40 for 3 or 4 days now.

    2) Some kernel.org sites don't seem to have 2.3.40 or even 2.3.39 (I ran across one the other day that only had kernels up to 2.3.28.) How do we know what the latest kernel REALLY is in these circumstances?

  • When is 2.4.0 comming? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm glad to see rapid progress in the Linux kernel.
    Does anyone know when 2.4 will be out for those of us who aren't on the kernel mailing list?
  • The soundblaster 128 was revised on Jan 4, 2000 such that either the PCM recording or playback won't work in any of the 3 sound drivers. Also the gain on the PCM output itself is set too high, resulting in clipping at all levels. No control on the mixer has any effect on this.
  • Where do you get your kernels ?
    I've been checking twice a day, and just found 2.3.40 today. I check ftp.uk.kernel.org, ftp.us.kernel.org, ftp.sa.kernel.org, and ftp.cc.gatech.edu.
  • Sometimes this has happened to me but I was able to just restart networking by:
    /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart

    The Great AIP [sourceforge.net] (Artificial Intelligence Project) has started!
    It is open source under the GPL and for Linux

  • Don't base progress on the frequency of releases. If that was your base, than NT4 is being developed at a fairly nice speed, because all of the service packs coming out (sigh)

    Did you read the changelog? There were mainly bug fixes and other "updates" with only a couple new features being added.

    This was just a minor patch, mainly making up for mistakes in the past.

  • Re:Buggy networking... (Score:5)

    by ActionListener ( 104252 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @09:01AM (#1347467)
    Hmm... I think you probably clicked "y" for "emulate NT network reliability" in the Networking Options. The new kernel can also emulate AOL 5.0 networking behavior by choosing "n" for "TCP/IP networking."

  • Re:Two things: (Score:4)

    by terjegj ( 29900 ) <terjegj@@@hotmail...com> on Saturday January 22, 2000 @09:05AM (#1347468)
    >How do we know what the latest kernel REALLY is in these circumstances?

    Try finger:

    $ finger @ftp.kernel.org
    [zeus.kernel.org]
    The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.14
    The latest beta version of the Linux kernel is: 2.3.40
    The latest prepatch (alpha) version *appears* to be: 2.3.41-1

  • http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ ubb/Forum22/HTML/000159.html [linuxnewbie.org] I had initially suggested that entrants ante their /etc/passwd, winner take all, but Sensei had a better idea: the person who guesses the correct date wins a Linuxnewbie t-shirt.
  • Can you say (or scream) redundant? I mean, yes, linux is nice. I run it too. But is that a reason for posting the devel versions on slashdot. Hell no!
  • http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ ubb/Forum22/HTML/000166.html [linuxnewbie.org]

    That thread shows what dates are still available. Most of February and March are booked.

  • KFC is going to sue... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Kentucky Fried Chicken is going to sue Linus and everyone associated with linux for using the word Kernel...It is too close to the word Colonel which is their mascot.

  • Re:huh? (Score:4)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @09:15AM (#1347473) Homepage Journal
    When there was a story for every kernel release, it was, indeed, too much. Now /. only reports every once in a while on minor releases. In this case, I think it gives us a good forum to discuss how stable the 2.3 branch is getting and what we might expect to run into if we switch over.

    To be more specific, I'm considering playing with 2.3, and reading the responses to this story tells me that there are some networking problems that I would prefer to avoid and there might be some sound problems. Consequently, I'll hold off for a while longer.
  • I know, all these posts are out of hand.
    I have posted many very good articles that were dropped in favour of other things. Some which I posted were "Learning from Y2K" in humour, "Sexual Reproduction of Computer Viruses", about the new e-books, about the Great AIP [greataip.sourceforgenet](Artificial Intelligence Project), "Automounting in Linux", and several others
  • Have you tried ALSA [alsa-project.org]?

    On my buddies Rev 7 Creative 128 board, installing ALSA seemed to get sound working great.

  • reverse thresholding on comments (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i would like to see only those comments with a score LESS than 3 is this possible? im tired of all the ass kissing 5-rated posts.. and the -1 are hilarious.
  • this appears to be the first kernel to support ieee1394/firewire... someone try it out and let us know how it works.

    later,
    ian
  • Shouldnt we get a freeze on this soon and move on?
    .40+ is starting to sound stupid :)

    Just installed 2.2.14 on my pIII and I have no need for anything more, but still......... have to try ;)
  • The only things I know of with a firewire interface is digital cameras and some storage solutions.. I guess there are no Linux drivers for the utilities, even if the kernel supports firewire..

    still, going the right direction...

  • Why the fsck do you post a devel kernel??? (Score:4)

    by Le douanier ( 24646 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @09:32AM (#1347481) Homepage

    I thought there was a consensus that it was far better to let other sites post news about new kernel, especially for development kernels.

    Does this kernel have some exceptional new thing integrated beside his number (Oh yes, we have reached the 40th release of 2.3 WHAT A NEWS) to justify to be posted??? Is it the first kernel of a new serie (like 2.2.0 or 2.3.0?)??? Does it fix a big bug??? No, then don't post it.

    Those that are interested by cutting edge kernels know where to find them, those that are not able to find it by themselves probably aren't able to cope with the possible problems that may arise from a development kernel.

    (this is not meant as a flamebait but /. isn't the place for this kind of news, otherwise they may want to post the news that my cat is dead yesterday at 4PM due to an EVIL DVD player that felt upon him).
  • Try 2.3.35 I did and I think that sound and networking were solid, on my 1 Linx box anyway. Using Intel EtherExpress 100B and Creative SB awe64 cards. I do want to find out more about the new packet filtering dealie that's "replacing" ipchains. Does that mean ipchains will not work right anymore? Must study up on this question before I move 2.3 to active duty.
  • Yes. ALSA produces the same clipping quite nicely.
  • They fixed it. the emu10k1 (sblive) driver works with the newer experimental kernels again.

  • I really have to agree. If anyone needs to know what the latest kernel is there is a kernelnotes.org version slashbox you can add to your settings.

  • 2.3.40 is rock solid, I guess I should turn on some alien features then :)

  • PCMCIA is now built-in in the 2.3 series (Score:4)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @09:54AM (#1347492)
    For anybody running laptops, the big deal with the more recent 2.3 kernels is the built-in PCMCIA support. In the 2.2 series if you want to configure your kernel at all you have to get not only the kernel source but the (big) PCMCIA patch and compile it separately, and there's a somewhat intimidating series of questions you have to answer in the config. It's anything but seamless, and you have to mess around with it every time you upgrade the kernel. In 2.3 it's just one more checkbox item in make xconfig. :-) Progress marches on.
  • In the 2.1 developmental series, there were 128 kernels.
  • Here is the Changelog [kernelnotes.org]. (Why didn't they link to it directly?)

    It doesn't look like anything really major; just a driver update here, a driver update there. Progress as usual...


    David E. Weekly (dew, Think)

  • It doesn't list the pre patches with authority because frankly nobody can be sure. There have been cases of as many as 3 official patches in a single day but pre patches are much more frequent ( usually 3 to 7 per official patch ).

    At that rate it's theoretically possible to have over a dozen pre patches in a day. Worse yet there are people other than Linus putting pre patches out, then there are the AC patches.
  • Also, the last time I remember seeing a dev kernel announced on Slashdot, the linux-kernel mailing list went ballistic with nasty comments about clueless "slapdash" idiots running experimental stuff and hosing their systems. Since that time, I haven't seen any dev kernel news on /. I thought perhaps there was a tacit blackout on that subject... Maybe not, or maybe Emmett hasn't read his Slashdot-editor-FAQ :)
  • 2.3.39 won't boot a software RAID. It just says "Got md request. Not good." and stops there. Does anyone know if .40 fixes this? I see some changes to drivers/block/md.c but they don't look relevant.

    -jwb

  • or ... 132? Check kernel.org [kernel.org] Roy
  • According to Linus, the 2.4 was intentionally scheduled for November...
    I think someone missed that...
    Roy
  • emu10k.o
    I got the latest CVS and it didn't work. Jan 15th worked (lots of warnings).
  • whoever said development kernels were perfect?

  • 1) Me too :)

    2) Either use directly ftp.kernel.org (which has moved and has a bigger internet pipe and it works very well) or go to www.kernel.org [kernel.org] and look at the bottom of the page to see which is the latest kernel. The good old finger @linux.kernel.org method does not seem to work any more since the recent move.

  • Isn't happening here, and I've even used 2.3.40 in a high-load, high-preformance networking benchmark (comparison with Windows 2000 - we won for both static and dynamic web content) and it never crashed.
    I'd call 2.3.40 stable on x86 - it's not very reliable on alpha though.
    Maybe this is a problem with the driver for your network card. Which one are you using?
  • Real Soon Now (tm). I expect an alpha release within the next week, but this is not 2.3/4 material.
  • > According to Linus, the 2.4 was intentionally scheduled for November...


    Intentionally?? Do you mean initially??


    Anyway, if you pay attention to what Linus says, it's more like "it will be released when it's ready", not "this is when it will be released". There are no deadlines, nothing that says "you much ship by this date or ..."

    I don't think they really aim for a date to move the development kernel to the stable tree. They might say "we will try to get it done by this time", but I don't think you can find anywhere that says "this is our release date". It happens when it happens.
  • A friend is running a bunch of firewire hard drives on his mac -- he does a lot of video capture and is constantly filling up his drives. He just yanks one out and puts another in, and they're more than fast enough for his purposes. I'd mention the company names if I could remember them.

  • and that they won't do it again, because this can only cause confusion to newbies and loss of time to the kernel developers.
  • works fine here. I can send you a binary if you email me. make sure you do a make dep in your kernel tree before you try to build this module.

  • I thought that was Linux 2.2.0. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How long did it take before 2.2.1 came out, less than two days? LOL
  • I've occasionally wanted that feature when moderating; I wanted to see if any of the low-rated posts were worth being moderated up.
    -----------
  • Linux hype is what attracts investors' billions these days, so it's important for everyone to pretend their business is "all about Linux".

  • Re:Yet another kernel (Score:4)

    by Cid Highwind ( 9258 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @12:17PM (#1347524) Homepage
    Thats's precisely why I love windows so much! None of that pesky kernel updating. It's nice to know that if a bug is here today, it will be here tomorrow, and next week, and next year. It's good to know that FreeBSD has taken that step in the right direction. Maybe it will be as good as windows someday.

    Since whan is lack of active development a feature?
  • boot a software RAID meaning boot a kernel on a s/w raid partition? If so, it'll only work with the 0.90 RAID (not the 0.4x that ships in kernels, at least AFAIK) and it will only work with the lilo with RH 6.1 (unless you add a disk= section for md0 geometry).

    kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/r aid/alpha/ [kernel.org] has the 0.90 raidtools and patches for 2.2.11 (works on .11, .12, .13) and www.redhat.com/~mingo/ [redhat.com] has patches for 2.2.14 (raid-2.2.14-B1) and 2.3.40 (ibc-ext2-raid-2.3.40-N1)

  • Re:Yet another kernel (Score:3)

    by HoserHead ( 599 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @12:35PM (#1347526)
    Perhaps some background on the situation, in case people aren't entirely sure what's going on:

    FreeBSD is a kernel /and/ a distribution of software. It has two general branches - Stable and Current (I think). Current is where the bleeding-edge changes go; people who know what they're doing and/or need features only in current track it. Otherwise, you use Stable.

    Linux is a kernel, only. There are many distributions based around it. It is developed in two branches; a stable and development branch. You can tell which branch a kernel is in by the minor version number (Linux kernels are numbered major.minor.patchlevel - Major is iterated very infrequently, after major changes; minor is iterated not so often, when going from development to stable; and patchlevel is the development on the minor version). If the minor version is odd - 1, 3, 5, etc - it is a development kernel, and if it is even - 2, 4, 6 - it is a stable kernel. Development kernels should not be used on production boxes, unless you're willing to support it yourself and deal with problems that may occur. Things can and will break in development kernels. Stable kernels should be used pretty much everywhere, particularly if you are new to Linux.

    Remember: You don't ever need to update a kernel unless it fixes something that's broken, adds support for something you have, or adds a feature you require. Otherwise, stick with what you've got - it's not a prerequisite to update when new versions are released.

  • If you find an out-of-date mirror, please send a message to ftpadmin@kernel.org [mailto] with the IP number (not the DNS name) of the failing mirror, thanks...
  • Check out http://www.uwsg .indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9912.1/1397.ht ml [indiana.edu]. This was Linus' announcement on December 14 that they were aiming to ship 2.4 by the end of the first quarter this year.

  • Thats NOT the changelog! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Learn to read; that stupid page hasn't been updated in ages. Thats the changelog for .36
  • I am very intersted in AI and I think that your progect is probly a good thing, BUT if you keep addvertising it like this you will put a lot of people off of joining.
  • What i mean is using a RAID 0 for the root partition. This works fine with raidtool 0.40, kernel 2.2.14, and the stock lilo. However, it doesn't work with kernel 2.3.39. From what I gather on Linux kernel mailing list, this is due to md.c needing update to the new block driver interface. -jwb
  • : korell 1 ; finger @linux.kernel.org
    [linux.kernel.org]

    The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.14
    The latest beta version of the Linux kernel is: 2.3.40
    The latest prepatch (alpha) version *appears* to be: 2.3.41-2



    What does seem to be the problem?

    However, I have just added a "finger.kernel.org" CNAME to avoid confusion on this subject.

  • "Linux hype is what attracts investors' billions these days, so it's important for everyone to pretend their business is "all about Linux"."

    This would be false to pretend that /. is "all about Linux" but /. is definitely biased in favor of posting a lot of Linux news and is frequented by a lot of Linux/Free Software fans, both making /. a Linux related site.

  • They will promise anything if you are going if you have a large enough install-base. You want the sun, well they will give it to you if you buy 100 site license.


    Well, being fair it should pointed out that a open source software usually does not come if any warranty or promise of reliability. My window manager (sawmill) says that it is intended to be useful but has no warranty or implied warranty. I could find other examples but I am lazy.

  • When is 2.4 due to be released? Is it true that 2.3 is still highly unstable?
  • The company that makes FireWire HDs for Macs is VST Technologies [vsttech.com]. They make a variety of FireWire drives colored bright red and yellow, and a FireWire Zip. The drives are as big as 37 gigs, but they come at a steep premium as I believe VST one of a limited amount of FW drive makers, along with LaCie, and maybe Sony (I know they have a FireWire CD-R). VST is also making this very cool product that is like a little tower that you can plug a bunch of drives in, and a bottom slot that can hold a PowerBook battery to power them all portably. I think FireWire is just beginning to bloom and will become quite standard soon enough, Linux support for FireWire will only strengthen FireWire's future.
  • That's what I was wondering when I saw it. I don't remember the release of 2.3.32, or 2.3.38, or 2.3.39, or any other development kernel being posted as news here, so I figured there must be something special about 2.3.40. Apparently not.
  • I can't believe this flame has been moderated up as "insightful." Let's go down the list of reasons, shall we?

    1) Whining and moaning about how much cooler your version of slashdot would be takes no intelligence or insight of any type. If you want to whine about the quality of /. news, go the route of advogato [advogato.org] and have the balls to do it yourself. That would be insightful.
    2) This issue has been re-hashed on slashdot for a long, long time. This is nothing that hasn't been posted literally a thousand times- it's not creative or new. It probably ranks right up near "first post" in the length of time and amount of times it's been said.
    3) Are you contributing anything? Are you saying anything? No, you are whining that nothing insightful has been said instead of going to the source and finding out for yourself whether there are new features or fixed bugs. If someone posts the answers to those questions, then it should merit an insightful. But it doesn't.
    Sometimes I think moderation is a good thing. But then I see moderations like this and say "thank god for M2!"
    ~luge
  • before closing on 2.4, lets first release 2.3 as stable, and then rock. i'm still using 2.2.13 that came with slackware. it takes kinda long to compile a kernel on my machine which is a P133, so i dont get to try all kernels, just the stable ones.
  • Hell, I'm still on 2.2.10 on my old p100 server...

    I have no intentions on upgrading until something happens that forces me to..
    Got over 120 days uptime and counting, not a single problem.

    But... on my pIII box, I play around with all kinds of OS:es and things, so it will run the latest kernel as much as I can :P
  • 2.3 is still extremely buggy for me with ATA66 and Abit BP6.
    We still have a ways to go. But maybe things will get locked down fast.......
  • Now this just doesn't make any sense to me. The development kernel must be as stable as it can possibly be made before it becomes a stable kernel. I take pride in that when a Linux kernel is released as stable, it really is stable. If the kernel were to be released before it were ready just so we could "move on" Linux would end up being just like any number of commercial products: released before it's fully ready.

    Chris Hagar
  • Minor development versions are released almost weekly... Is there anything special about 2.3.40, or will /. from now on announce every minor development release? Let's hope so, at least for the sake of consistancy and integrity (which would be a welcome new feature of slashdots ;).
  • Are you using IP MASQ?

  • I like occasional updates about the kernel! (Score:3)

    by EthanW ( 25261 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @03:10PM (#1347553)
    Not everybody follows every latest release of the kernel, but some people like to follow the general progress. When Slashdot posts a story about a new kernel version once in a while it helps people (like me!) keep up with the general progress of the project without being obsessed by it.

    As to complaints of "Go To Freshmeat!" my point is that some people don't want to rabidly follow every release of software, they just want a general feeling for the situation.

    After all, does your life end when Slashdot posts a story about something you already know or is not relvent to you personally?

    Maybe Slashdot needs a filter for kernel release posts, similar to the ones for filtering various authors.
  • I agree that "insightful" is not the correct classification, but otherwise I strongly disagree the rest of your reply and even more with its inflammatory nature.

    Worst, however, is that you didn't check that "No Score +1 Bonus" box.

    Sometimes I think the +1 bonus is a good thing. But then I see posts like this and say "thank god for moderation!"

    --

  • The author specifically discusses questions he asks that he could easily have answered himself, and posted as a constructive addition to the discussion. Instead of doing so, he whines that no one else did it for him. That is one of the many things wrong with his post. Sorry to have to clarify, but I thought it was clear enough.
    ~luge
  • hurraah! That is some of the best news ive heard today. well. it has been a slow and crappy day.. but still.

    pcmcia was a bitch to setup on my vaio. basically because it never said anywhere and when i upgraded the kernel ppp stopped workin! aag! but hten i noticed.. heh..

    but strangly the ppp in linux on the laptop doesnt seem as fast as in windows. ibet theres prolly a resonable explanation for this (such as.. it is the same speed, but windows is lieing or other such type of answer in a similar vein).

    Still.. this is very good news. i am looking forward to 2.4.0... maybe isdn in 2.4 will be better (noticed quite a few changes over the 2.3.x changelogs..).

    just my late night drunken ramblings.. and my £0.1/minute (of course) =]

  • Visor USB syncs on Linux 2.3.40 (Score:5)

    by doomy ( 7461 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @04:30PM (#1347560) Homepage Journal
    Hello Dudes,

    The hackers at Linux USB Visor [sourceforge.net] has managed to get Visor to sync over USB in Linux 2.3.40. They managed to do this with a few extra patches (Which you can get from that site) and help from a freebsd dude. Freebsd dudes hop over there to find out how they did it as well..


    Enjoy syncing the Visor on USB!

    Long live the kernel!
    --
  • What I would really like to have is the ability to tailor my reading of each score level independently. That way I could say, see the -1 trolls and the ACs, as well as stuff that got moderated to 2 through 4, while skipping all the posts rated at 1 or 5. That way I can read the stuff I find funny, and yet get the better opinions all in one swell foop. I don't know how big of a pain this would be to implement, though.
  • ... then search for "Score:3", or just use page down.
  • where can you get fbset I've been trying to find it.
  • >[...] debian's method where you have no clue what's happening ...

    I've never found that to be a problem. Either you set your system to track "stable", in which case you get a major upgrade about once a year, or you set it to track "unstable" or "frozen", in which case everything updates very often but might be broken once in a while.

    If they make the proposed changes to de-emphasise the importance of "releases", then it'll be more like FreeBSD's method.
  • Linux 2.4, XFree 4.0, ext3fs, KDE2.

    Kind of like brownies right out of the oven- they need to cool off but I want it now! With the release of these four software packages Linux is going to have a great showdown with Windows 2000 on the desktop.

    Well I guess I should stop typing and start downloading/compiling ...
  • What dynamic content would that be? Vbscript ASP vs. mod_perl or jserv?
  • err I would think a DEVELOPMENT kernel is more news for Nerds? Oh well.. :-)
  • FreeBSD also allows you to upgrade daily from current.freebsd.org builds without doing make buildworld and make installword after cvsup.

  • Re:replacing ipchains??? for real? (Score:3)

    by mick2275 ( 86608 ) on Saturday January 22, 2000 @07:17PM (#1347580) Homepage Journal
    Why:

    there is now no method of sending packets from kernel to user space. Transparent proxying isn't exactly "right". Masquerading is bolted on top of packet filtering, which is what makes building a firewall so complicated.

    The rest of the story:

    The new protocol (iptools (?)) is 'podabe backwards compatible with upchains and ipfwadm.
  • The subject says it all.
    I seem to recall about ... 1-2 years back when
    a lot of peeps were complaining about slashdot telling everybody about a devel. linux-kernel.
    Sure, ok .. stable ones are OK .. but let's face it.
    Development Kernels aren't for the faint@heart.
  • Agreed. The dev kernels are works in progress. Commercial software places spend months debugging their stuff. Their final releases still have bugs in them. At least the Linux people let you try out the works in progress...
  • [root@sambaserver cdr]# /sbin/modprobe ide-cd

    DON'T load the ide-cd driver, otherwise the ide driver steals the CD-ROM and doesn't allow ide-scsi to convert it to a scsi device. If you don't load ide-cd support, it should work
  • perl CGI vs. perl CGI (no mod_perl allowed).

  • Re:3dfx fb problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/

    of course debian has it, like everything else on the globe...
  • The only things I know of with a firewire interface is digital cameras and some storage solutions.. I guess there are no Linux drivers for the utilities, even if the kernel supports firewire..

    The 1394 subsystem includes a raw1394 driver and there is the libraw1394. This is enough to control digital cameras and to receive the data with a user space program without additional kernel drivers. This has already been done successfully (but there are no finished apps yet).

    Storage solutions usually use the SBP-2 protocol. This has to be done in the kernel, mainly because it's a service to the kernel in form of block devices. That is already worked on, but there is no working code yet.


  • I can't believe this flame has been moderated up as "insightful"

    Well, first I didn't moderate myself as insightful so I won't discuss that point (there should be a moderation like "constructive criticism" i think) but i don't think that it is flame. Is it flame to tell them that I think they were wrong to post this news and try to find valid reason why they would have posted this news (reason that don't seem to have applied to this kernel release).

    1) Whining and moaning about how much cooler your version of slashdot would be takes no intelligence or insight of any type. If you want to whine about the quality of /. news, go the route of advogato and have the balls to do it yourself. That would be insightful.

    This is not only a coolness factor, but development kernels aren't to put in every hand (otherwise they wouldn't be labeled as such, note also that I don't claim to be in the group savvy enough to use them, far from it) and put in some hands (newbies that have heard about "this Linux thing" and about "this Linux site called slashdot") this can be a problem. If they were posting a new stable kernel this probably would be more useful since there are fewer of them (13 or 14 against 40) and they generally are issued to fix an existing problem with the old one, so i think that there are good reason to whine here, not for me (I can easily ignore these news) but for the newbie (well, not 100% newbie if he is able to compile his kernel and use Lilo) that may be confused and for the kernel-dev mailing list that may have clueless questions from the aforementioned newbies.

    2) This issue has been re-hashed on slashdot for a long, long time. This is nothing that hasn't been posted literally a thousand times- it's not creative or new. It probably ranks right up near "first post" in the length of time and amount of times it's been said.

    This is precisely the problem with this news. Each time this come up people are complaining that /. isn't the place for such announcement, if they kept only stable kernels and new branches (like 2.2, 2.3 or 2.4-pre when it comes) this would be far enough, but each time they post a development kernel people complain about it, they should know by now that this isn't the place to post them, so we do like we do with kids when they don't learn their lesson, we repeat it until they remember it.

    3) Are you contributing anything? Are you saying anything? No, you are whining that nothing insightful has been said instead of going to the source and finding out for yourself whether there are new features or fixed bugs.

    I followed the link provided but couldn't find a good summary of the changes, furthermore i don't care if they fixed a bug in linux/arch/i386/kernel/smp.c, this doesn't qualify to be posted on /., what would qualify would be the addition of a new feature that is extremely useful (e.g. a journaling fs has been added to the kernel maybe) or symbolic (e.g. John Carmack began to rewrite the Linux IP stack and his code has been included as alpha code), other less important changes (not to downplay the work of those that made them) are expected in a development kernel and are not newsworthy.

    So I complained, yes, but their where valid reason to do so (IMHO) and reason known by the /. crew.

    I sincerly hope this was a mistake and they won't do it again, all this can do is bring confusion.
  • I dont see what the big deal is. If you dont like what is posted, dont read it. Scroll past the news that doesnt interest you or you deem stupid. Do you get pissed off when CNN reports something you personally dont care about (or dont think it was their place to report)? no, you change the channel, or wait for the next news item to come up. I happen to find it interesting, i skim slashdot daily for interesting tidbits, i dont avidly check every site which could possibly have geek news, so i wouldnt have known about this release.
  • Every once in a while it is good to get some idea of the state of progress.
    You also get a bunch of semi-clueless newbies (like me) who need some kind of feel for what's going on.
  • Just because 2.3.40 is stable on YOUR platform says nothing for anybody else's. Your machine
    1. Won't test all the code in the kernel
    2. Probably isn't using the most experimental stuff
    3. etc.

    John
  • Linus said that he didn't want as long a development cycle as last time...
    John
  • Well, the PCMCIA drivers are indeed in the new 2.3 kernels, but have you actually them? There are more questions related to PCMCIA in the kernel config menus, than there were in the PCMCIA package. And you still need to get the separate PCMCIA package, and answer those pesky questions anyway, because the kernel doesn't include any of the user PCMCIA tools.

  • The problem is that /. is read by a lot of newbie that may want to try it ("it has been posted on /., it must be coll, hey") and may post themselves in an unstable system because of bugs in the development kernel and/or bad configuration from there part. Furthermore these same people may afterward look for help on the kernel development mailing list, which can be VERY annoying.

    If you are really interested in having this kind of news without leaving slashdot there is a slashbox that does exactly this (see http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=preview&bid=linuxh q), but putting it on the main page is an error that can cause confusion.

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