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Occasionally, your editor will be struck by a series of topics all associated with a common theme. The recent fuss about Android's presence (or the lack thereof) in the mainline kernel ties in well with a couple of other items of notice: the Nexus One phone and the role of free software on the Android platform in general. Click below (subscribers only) for a discussion of Android from three different points of view.

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From one point of view, Samba is open source high drama at its finest: an early adopter of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, and the recipient of an unprecedented release of formerly proprietary Microsoft documentation, thanks to a high-profile anti-trust case. Meanwhile, though, it's the low-profile software that implements the Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing protocol, sometimes known as CIFS. Samba powers every inexpensive NAS device in the computer store—without even a mention on the box—and comes with all the common Linux distributions and with Apple's Mac OS X Server. Today, as Samba comes closer to implementing a key Microsoft directory protocol, the two aspects are being forced together. Click below, subscribers only, for a look at Samba's status from guest author Don Marti.

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Recently, Google announced that its operations in China (and beyond) had been subject to sophisticated attacks, some of which were successful; a number of other companies have been attacked as well. The source of these attacks may never be proved, but it is widely assumed that they were carried out by government agencies. There are also allegations that the East Anglia email leak was a government-sponsored operation. Incidents like these demonstrate that the security game has changed in significant ways, with implications that the community can ignore only at its peril.

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The 2010 edition of linux.conf.au was held on January 18 to 22 in Wellington, New Zealand. A number of the talks from this event have been covered elsewhere on LWN, with more to come; this article will talk about several other sessions and your editor's impressions of the conference as a whole. In brief: it was a highly successful event which easily lived up to the high standards set by LCA.

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Taras Glek works for Mozilla, but he is not a browser hacker; instead, he works on GCC and other tools aimed at making the browser development process better. It is, he says, a good job. While carrying out his duties, Taras has been able to put a new GCC feature to work in ways which may prove to be useful well beyond Mozilla. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from linux.conf.au 2010.

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Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping. Click below (subscribers only) for this report from LCA.

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Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh's energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the "business of open source" miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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Gábor Horváth has been developing the raw photo converter RawTherapee single-handedly, on Linux and Windows, since 2006. The application has been freeware the entire time, with Horváth accepting Paypal donations through the project's web site. Consequently, although there are significant changes in the 3.0 alpha release announced on January 4th, it was arguably bigger news that the project was switching to the GPLv3. Click below (subscribers only) for the full story.

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Improving the performance of the kernel is generally a good thing to do; that is why many of our best developers have put considerable amounts of time into optimization work. One area which has recently seen some attention is in the handling of soft page faults. As the course of this work shows, though, performance problems are not always where one thinks they might be; sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, possibly dumping a lot of code in the process. Click below (subscribers only) for a technical article from this week's Kernel Page.

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Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in particular. Read on (subscribers only) for your editor's impressions of this impressive bit of (mostly) free software.

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Current news

The openSUSE Build Service team released version 1.7 of the openSUSE Build Service. "The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create packages, software stacks or even a whole distribution as well as use and integrate them with other open source components." Click below for a list of key features in this release.

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The KDE project has announced the availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4. "Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented."

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CentOS has updated C5: kvm (multiple vulnerabilities), and C4: helixplayer (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated gnome-screensaver (F12: lock bypass), and bugzilla (F11: information leak).

Red Hat has updated kvm (multiple vulnerabilities), and helixplayer (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated lighttpd, net-snmp/libsnmp15/perl-SNMP, fuse, xpdf (various issues).

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Web Host Industry Review takes a look at CloudLinux. "The proprietary isolation technology provides a range of benefits for shared hosts, including increasing the number of accounts per server, as well as reducing hardware, electricity, data center space and management costs. As for data centers, it provides customers with a well tested, commercially supported and maintained OS, better security reduces churn and the costs associated with security support issues, and drives extra revenue via upsell to commercially supported distribution that was optimized for Web."

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Stable kernel 2.6.32.8 has been released. It is fairly large set of patches, with changes all over the tree, along with at least one security fix. Users of 2.6.32 are, as usual, very strongly encouraged to upgrade.

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openSUSE is looking for information from its users about the distribution by way of a survey, which runs through the end of February. The survey is meant to "give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general. Let us know where things are in good shape and areas where improvement is needed." Click below for the full announcement.

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James Bottomley has announced this year's Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit, which will be held just prior to LinuxCon in Boston on August 8 and 9. It will be held in conjunction with the Virtual Memory (VM) summit, so there will be three tracks (storage, filesystems, VM) as well as joint meetings for all participants. Proposals for discussion topics and requests for invitations are being solicited; click below for the full announcement. "Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years."

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Fedora has updated chrony (F11, F12: denial of service) and ocsinventory (F11, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated squid (denial of service) and kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

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There are concerns in the GNOME accessibility development community about what the Oracle takeover of Sun means for the efforts led by Sun's Accessibility Project Office (APO). Orca project lead Willie Walker has been laid off and is looking for work, possibly in areas that will not allow him to continue contributing to Orca. In addition, assistive technology specialist Joanmarie Diggs has published an open letter to Oracle concerning the future of the APO and its work. "Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail."

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ComputerWorld reports on the outcome of the charity auction at linux.conf.au. "A $12,750 donation from Linux Australia on the night brought the total funds raised for the air rescue service to more than $33,000. [...] 'Free open source software is founded on generosity and these supporters have certainly taken that value to heart,' Life Flight Trust CEO David Irving said in a statement. 'The funds raised will enable 13 people to receive emergency flights, which is a great outcome for the community.'"

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