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"So I tried to hold people to the merge window," Linus Torvalds began in announcing the 2.6.23-rc2 kernel, "and said no to a few pull requests, but this whole '-rc2 is the new -rc1' thing is a disease, and not only is -rc2 late, it's bigger than it should be. Oh, well."

Rather fast Brainf*ck esoteric programming language interpreter written in JavaScript. Available under terms of the GNU GPL license.

Could the Linux powered Googlephone be an iPhone killer come 2008?

Black Hat USA 2007 was fast-paced, fun, and informative. It demonstrated that security is big business. The halls were lined with vendors, some new, some old, and the smell of money was everywhere. Still, I'm left thinking this year's show had a different tone to it than last year's.

It has been almost two years since LWN covered the swap prefetch patch. This work, done by Con Kolivas, is based on the idea that if a system is idle, and it has pushed user data out to swap, perhaps it should spend a little time speculatively fetching that swapped data back into any free memory that might be sitting around. Then, when some application wants that memory in the future, it will already be available and the time-consuming process of fetching it from disk can be avoided.

In recent comments to my review of Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO keyfitter wrote: There is a reason why they are using Win 98 in 2007. I think it’s called, being cheap!. I wonder if these people realize they can buy a brand new computer for $139. Granted the hardware is a bit dated by today’s standards but it’s probably light years ahead of what they are running Windows ‘98 on. Of course these computers come preloaded with Linux: Vector Linux 5.8 Standard to be precise. That’s fine. Without having to worry about installation or hardware compatibility someone who buys this system gets a nice, ready to go, user friendly Linux system with a warranty. The return policy is listed as “no matter what” short of physical abuse. What they don’t get are Windows virii and malware. They do, of course, have to learn a new OS.

In an unusual move, Dell is asking its users what they want Dell CTO Kevin Kettler to talk about at next week's LinuxWorld trade show at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Matt Domsch, Dell's Linux technology strategist, announced the invitation in a blog (Crowd-Sourcing the Discussion@LinuxWorld) posting on Dell's Direct2Dell Wiki. Domsch wrote, "As part of our activities there, Kevin Kettler, our Chief Technology Officer will deliver a keynote on Wednesday, Aug. 8 [actually Kettler will be making his keynote on Tuesday, Aug. 7 between 1:30-2:30 p.m.] To augment his keynote, we are asking the Linux community to vote on five potential topics over on the Lightning Rod section of IdeaStorm.

A recent patch posted to the lkml aimed to make it possible to use both kdb and kdump at the same time, and instead led to an interesting discussion about RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) tools. Vivek Goyal compared the two main philosophies, "so basically there are two kind of users. One who believes that despite the kernel [having] crashed something meaningful can be done," versus, "exec on panic, which thinks that once [the] kernel is crashed nothing meaningful can be done".

Poky is an embedded Linux build system, distribution and developer environment which builds upon OpenEmbedded technologies. Poky's focus is purely on building stable optimised GNOME Embedded type platforms (X11/Matchbox/GTK+) together with a streamlined system layer and cross development environment.

I really wanted to install ZenWalk 4.6.1, but it was not to be. Add it to the list of distros that won't boot on my test machine, the VIA C3 1 GHz thin client. I don't quite understand it, because Slackware 12 boots (with the huge.s kernel), as does Vector Linux 5.8. So I shrunk my Slackware partition just enough to squeeze Vector Standard on there again.

Two years ago, Bob Frankston wrote Why Settle for Just 1%? while in the midst of his ramp-up as a Verizon FiOS customer. The question is still on the table. I'd like us to help answer it by re-phrasing the question: What could we, as Linux developers and users, do with fiber to our homes and businesses? The answer should look like good business for the Verizons, RCNs, Comcasts and other fiber-deployers to be in. Let's help them imagine benefits to carrier incumbency other than doing the same old thing, only faster.

A new conversation window interface and a revamped formatting toolbar make Pidgin 2.1.0 a compelling upgrade for existing users, but if you want or need a multi-protocol client that supports voice or video chat, you'll still need to look elsewhere.

A few quickies again this week: the 4th Trophées du Libre (International Free Software Awards) contest is open. Please consider submitting your favourite KDE applications since the award is some €3000 in each category. Also new this week: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen has announced that he is being hired full time to work on Amarok, courtesy of the Magnatune music store. (Don't worry, this doesn't exclude support for other music stores). PyQt released a new version of their bindings. And every once in a while, we stumble upon an old piece of KDE history that just needs to be shared. Check out this 1998 Interview with KDE's grand-daddy: Matthias Ettrich.

The People Behind KDE series takes a temporary break, as we talk to students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - in the first of four interview articles, meet Aleix Pol Gonzàlez, Piyush Verma, Mike Arthur and Nick Shaforostoff!

Another beautiful creation of SimplyMEPIS from MEPIS LLC is on the way. Here is the screenshots of this SimplyMEPIS 7.0 prebeta.

It appears that Vector Linux is moving to a faster release schedule. Vector Linux SOHO 5.8 is only a few months old but the first release candidate of Vector Linux SOHO 5.8.6 has been announced:

RPM's install procedure suggested in http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/19338.html still causes SLES 10 GUI procedure creating Xen Windows XP VM to crash.Workaround for this issue follows bellow

Axion Racing was the first team to autonomously drive up to the top of Colorado's Pike Peak and now leads the way by finding cutting edge uses for the beleaguered Sony PS3. This two time DARPA Grand Challenge qualifier is the first racing team to implement Yellow Dog Linux and a Sony PlayStation game console to manage one of seven autonomous vehicle cameras.

In this review several IM clients (including the open source Jabber) are compared by protocol, security, and licensing.

If there's one thing the world doesn't lack for, besides bad movie sequels and dishonest politicians, it's collaboration software. Good collaboration software that's open source, on the other hand, is a rare thing indeed -- so I was pleased to discover that the Mindquarry GO beta service and the Mindquarry tools are well-done, if a bit limited in scope.