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Alan Cox [interview] provided astatus update on his PATA driver efforts with libata [story]. He offered a qualified call for testers, "some initial patches are now ready for wider testing although strictly suicide squad material at this point." His status document currently lists 11 drivers about which he notes, "a lot of hardware isn't yet covered - I'm working on adding more support but I wanted to start with weirder devices first to better understand what was needed in libata."

In the brief thread, error handling was brought into question. Alan noted, "basic error handling in the libata code seems to work as well when I tested it, if not better because the old PATA code hangs the box on SMP or pre-empt if you get a DMA timeout and cable changedown due to locking flaws and also issues an immediate idle in error recovery which seems to crash some drives for good." He went on to point out that failed cable detect currently isn't supported by libata, "the speed change down support simply isn't in libata yet and that turns a downspeed change for poor cables or cable misdetect into a hang."

Read about a unique and powerful open source groupware server that's been around for years, but you might not have known about it.

After learning of Scott's participation in FireFox, we took a look at a link on the article, "Why Former IE Developer Switched To Firefox". We feel it's definitely worth its own publication space at Lxer. Enjoy! -ED

ApacheCon announced today the opening of registration for ApacheCon US 2005, taking place December 10-14 at the Sheraton Hotel and Marina San Diego, California.

In Linux Format issue 72, we chat to Gnome and OpenOffice.org coder Michael Meeks about all things Linux. Here's a few of the questions we asked the Novell employee...

At a members' conference in Shanghai, China today, Power.org -- an organization dedicated to accelerating collaborative innovation on Power Architecture™ technology -- said that new membership and product development by member companies had exceeded first year expectations. Organization officials credited the growth to the collaborative innovation approach Power.org fosters among members, in addition to advances made in Power Architecture technology itself.

Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ:RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, is participating at the 25th Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX) with Dubai-based distributor Opennet to look for more channel partners in the Middle East.

I'm pleased to announce the permanent availability of an archive in which D ebian can preserve materials (video, audio, slides, example code used, etc.) gathered, used at or derived from real life meetings.

We had a very productive QA Team Meeting in Darmstadt from the 9th to the 11th of September[1]. The participants had a lot of fruitful discussions during the weekend. Besides minor bits that "just happened", the following major issues progressed significantly:

Peru has passed its law encouraging procurement of Free Software by the government. Please note that the law is about Free Software, not Open Source, as opposed to proprietary software, distinguished by license. Here's an English translation published by the Asociación Peruana de Software Libre, and here is the law itself [PDF]. Technically, it's not official until it is published in the official Peruvian daily newspaper, but that is pretty much certain at this point. Note that the version Slashdot links to on OSI is not, I don't think, the final version. It's a useful translation, but be aware that certain articles in that beta version are not in the final version.

Trusted Computer Solutions, Inc. (TCS), a leading supplier of information sharing technologies to the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and commercial industry, together with Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is in Common Criteria evaluation on a broad range of IBM eServer systems.

SSH Communications Security claims that its new Secure Shell program is far superior to open-source alternatives draws free-software developers'ire.

Auction firm Bonhams is embracing open source, the company's global CIO, Roland Whitehead, told the Triple i Convention. It is phasing out Microsoft Exchange and has no plans to migrate to Windows 2003. The auctioneer is planning to stop using Microsoft Word. In future all documents will go through Bonhams' core system using...

Students Run StarOffice on Campus' Solaris, Linux and Windows Platforms

I'm writing this column on my trusty IBM Thinkpad, which has been running the newly released Gnome 2.12 for about a week now. This is thanks to Ubuntu Linux, which has gotten so much praise in my recent reports, a colleague suggested I should change the name of this column to "Ubuntu Agent." Ahem.

Although it is still a year away from being released, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is already on the path toward EAL4 certification.

Whenever a lawsuit is in the offing — from patent litigation to prosecuting a sexual harassment suit — email is the best source of a “smoking gun,” or evidence that almost ensures a victory or lucrative settlement for one side. After all, email is very informal: email is worded much differently than a printed letter, and things are often said in email that might never be said in a face-to-face conversation. Moreover, most employees think of email as ephemeral, like so much water-cooler conversation.

The kind of hardware you buy can have a profound effect on the success of your business, but choosing among the available options is now tougher than ever. The advent of inexpensive, binary-compatible 64-bit processors has introduced a new facet to the decision-making process. The "early adoption" phase is over, and affordable 64-bit computers are stampeding toward businesses of all kinds. Should you stay 32-bit or go 64-bit? In as non-technical a manner as possible, here is a crash course on 64-bit hardware, the software that runs on it, and how it affects performance.

Google has improved its Google Video service by eliminating the need for users to download software to play back videos, the California-based company announced Monday.