Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux
and free software world for the year.
2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free
software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of
many of the tools and
underlying
infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. There were also lawsuits over
software patents, arguments over licensing, and various security flaws
found and fixed. Distributions were packaged up and released, more phones
and other devices with Linux and free software were sold, and so forth.
All part of the march to "world domination". We look forward to
2010—and beyond.
This is version 0.95 of the 2009 timeline. There are almost certainly some
errors or omissions; if you find any, please send them to timeline@lwn.net.
LWN subscribers have paid for the development of this timeline, along with
previous timelines and the weekly editions. If you like what you see here,
or elsewhere on the site, please consider subscribing to LWN.
For those with a nostalgic bent, our timeline index page has links
to the previous eleven timelines and some other retrospective articles
going all the way back to 1998.
- January: OLPC restructures, Qt goes LGPL, GCC
plugin exception, ...
- February: Debian 5.0 ("Lenny), Microsoft sues
TomTom, X server 1.6, ...
- March: Linux.com acquired by Linux Foundation,
Linux 2.6.29, SUSE 11, TomTom settles, ...
- April: Linux Foundation gets Moblin, Openmoko
downsizes, Oracle buys Sun, ...
- May: Slackware64, Cisco settles GPL compliance
suit, KOffice 2.0, ...
- June: Linux 2.6.30, Fedora 11, Firefox 3.5...
|
- July: PostgreSQL 8.4, ChromeOS announced,
Launchpad code
released, Emacs 23.1, ...
- August: KDE 4.3, SCO gets a reprieve, Unix is
40, openSUSE defaults to KDE, ...
- September: Linux 2.6.31, Debian adopts Upstart,
First LinuxCon, ...
- October: N900 released, Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic
Koala"), GDB 7.0, ...
- November: Mandriva 2010.0, Go language, Fedora
12, ...
- December: Linux 2.6.32, Thunderbird 3.0,
Twisted 9.0, Shuttleworth steps down as Canonical CEO, ...
|
Acknowledgments: "American Dave" Kline, LWN user "xav", and
A.M. Kuchling all made suggestions or corrections to help make this timeline
better.
I will just note wryly that it used to be that I could compile 0.9x
kernels on a 40 MHz 386 machine in 10 minutes. Some 15 years later, it
still takes roughly the same amount of time to compile a kernel, even
though computers have gotten vastly faster since then. Something seems
wrong with that....
-- Ted Ts'o
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) restructures, laying off half the
staff and "refocusing" in various ways. (OLPC
blog)
Valgrind releases version 3.4.0 of the popular program analysis tool
for finding memory and other errors.
(review).
Nokia announces the release of Qt under LGPLv2.1 for the upcoming
4.5 release. (announcement).
linux.conf.au is held in Hobart, Tasmania. (LWN coverage, 2, 3, 4, and 5)
The word "Python" was also catchy, a bit edgy, and at the same time, it
fit in the tradition of naming languages after famous people, like Pascal,
Ada, and Eiffel. The Monty Python team may not be famous for their
advancement of science or technology, but they are certainly a geek
favorite.
-- Guido
van Rossum on how Python got its name
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is released. (announcement)
Moonlight developers work overtime to make President Obama's
inauguration viewable on
Linux, because the streams were only made available in Silverlight form. (article)
GCC and FSF announce a GPLv3 exception to allow for GCC plugins; the
exception is for the GCC runtime library and will allow free software
plugins, while preventing proprietary plugins. This particular incarnation
of the exception is not adopted. (announcement)
The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source
reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software,
lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open
software.
-- Scott McNealy
KNOPPIX 6.0 is released. (announcement,
review)
KDE 4.2 is released. (announcement)
AMD releases 3D register reference guide for R6xx/R7xx chips, which
will help with the development of free software drivers for devices using
those chips. (announcement)
The Linux Foundation kicks off the "We're Linux" video contest. (press release)
Zope 3.4 is released after two years of development on the
Python-based web application server.(announcement)
Open source is not a lawless frontier at all. There are clear license terms
that have to be followed, even though open source generally offers more
freedoms than proprietary software. It's true, that many organisations are
still struggling to understand open source and its license terms.
-- Martin
Michlmayr
Red Hat hires former Mandriva community manager Adam Williamson to
drive community involvement in Fedora QA. (introduction)
Miro internet TV version 2.0 is released. (announcement)
RPM version 4.6.0 released; the package manager used by Red Hat,
Mandriva, SUSE, and others. (announcement)
Debian 5.0 ("Lenny") is released after "22 months of constant
development". (announcement) The
release is dedicated to
Thiemo Seufer, a community member who died in a car accident.
DragonFly BSD 2.2 is released—now with a production-ready
HAMMER filesystem. (announcement)
At this point, DRM seems intended to
accomplish a very different purpose: giving some industry
leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and
nature of innovation and upsetting the traditional balance
between the interests of copyright owners and the interests
of the public.
-- EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry
Kurt Roeckx is appointed as Debian project secretary, after the
previous secretary resigned in late 2008. (announcement)
Red Hat moves from Xen to KVM for virtualization in future releases,
as expected by many after its
acquisition of Qumranet. (press
release)
Microsoft launches patent suit against TomTom, for patents on the
VFAT filesystem among other things. (LWN coverage)
BASH 4.0 is released.; BASH is the Bourne-Again SHell (announcement)
X server 1.6.0 released. (announcement)
There's no easy fix for this - you need to be aware of what is right and
what is wrong, but you cannot look at existing code to determine this.
-- Andrew
Morton on kernel code
The Linux Foundation acquires the Linux.com domain, which they will
turn into a community news and collaboration site. (announcement)
MontaVista starts Meld community site for embedded Linux
developers. (announcement)
The "ext4 data loss" controversy heats up. (first LWN article)
Firefox 3.1 renamed to 3.5 to better reflect the scope of the
changes. (announcement)
The Linux kernel gets a new logo for one release; "Tuz" is a reminder
of the plight of the Tasmanian devil. (LWN coverage)
Linux leaders have a problem. Ever since Microsoft adopted the 'let's get
along' strategy of licensing and interoperating, it has been hard to get
people to volunteer their time for the platform, and interest seems to be
waning.
-- Rob
Enderle grasping at straws
GNOME 2.26 released. (announcement)
Parrot 1.0.0 released; Parrot is a "virtual machine aimed at
running all dynamic languages". (announcement, LWN article)
Linux 2.6.29 is released with an experimental Btrfs, squashfs,
kernel mode setting
for Intel graphics hardware, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is released in both desktop (SLED) and
server (SLES) varieties. (press
release)
Rails 2.3 released—aka Ruby on Rails, the Ruby-based web
framework. (announcement)
In Europe we had the habit of reading Slashdot, and reading about all the
crazy patents in the USA, and we all had a good laugh. Then, very suddenly,
we were faced with our own software patent problem.
-- Ciarán
O'Riordan of End Software
Patents
GNOME switches to Git, from Subversion, for version control. (announcement)
Microsoft vs. TomTom comes to an end, via a settlement, but, before
that, TomTom joins the
Open Invention Network and countersues
Microsoft. (Groklaw
settlement article)
Fedora issues report on August 2008 intrusion, seven months after it
occurs. (report)
Python starts switch to Mercurial for distributed version control. (Guido van Rossum's announcement)
When I joined in 2001, Debian was The Distribution that a lot of users were
using and all my friends knowing Free Software were dreaming of
contributing to. Things have changed since then: newbies now use Ubuntu or
Fedora, and contributors can easily join their communities. Debian is too
often seen as the old distro that some old timers still use, having a
process to join which is not worth trying. The Debian value that needs to
be improved the most is changing that: putting Debian back into its place.
-- Debian project leader candidate Stefano
"Zack" Zacchiroli
CentOS 5.3 released. (announcement)
Ardour, the multi-track audio editor, releases version 2.8. (announcement)
Intel turns over stewardship of Moblin to the Linux Foundation. (press
release)
SGI acquired by Rackable Systems for $25 million. (press
release)
Openmoko downsizes and stops work on the GTA03 to focus on
the then-mysterious "Project B" (Steve Mosher email, PDF
slides from Sean Moss-Pultz's presentation)
BIOS writers tend to have been on pain medication for so long
that they can hardly remember their own name, much less actually make sure
they follow all the documentation.
-- Linus
Torvalds
The Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop takes place in San Francisco, April 7-8
(LWN coverage: day 1 and day 2)
Steve McIntyre is re-elected as Debian project leader. (announcement)
Oracle buys Sun, though surely they didn't think it would be held up
in the EU regulatory process until at least December. (announcement)
GCC 4.4.0 is released. (announcement, LWN coverage)
Because I care about folks who don't make computing their life blood, I
think the consumer story is a really interesting one. So for that reason, I
think netbooks are really fascinating.
-- Mark
Shuttleworth
Ubuntu 9.04, "Jaunty Jackalope", is released. (announcement)
NetBSD 5.0 is released. (announcement,
LWN review)
Mandriva 2009 Spring (2009.1) released. (announcement)
We believe that you can't make software that pleases everyone. You can make
software that pleases experts, but most of the time non-experts hate that
software.
-- GNOME Foundation board member Luis Villa
A patch to avoid Microsoft's VFAT patent claim, which was asserted in the
TomTom lawsuit, is proposed on
linux-kernel. (LWN article)
OpenBSD 4.5 is released. (announcement)
Debian announces a switch to EGLIBC, instead of glibc for its C
runtime library. (announcement,
LWN article)
The GNOME volume control exposed a lot of low-level hardware-specific
features that only a tiny minority of people actually really understood,
and the PA volume control exposed a lot of low-level software features that
a slightly larger minority of people only actually really understood.
-- PulseAudio (PA) developer Lennart Poettering
OpenOffice.org 3.1 is released. (announcement)
AMD releases 3D programming guide for R6xx/R7xx chips. (announcement)
Slackware64 is released—based on Slackware 13.0, it is the
first official 64-bit Slackware release. (announcement)
Cisco and the Free Software Foundation settle a GPL compliance
lawsuit; Cisco will appoint a Free Software Director for its Linksys
subsidiary. (announcement)
Linux Mint 7 ("Gloria") distribution is released (announcement, LWN review)
A few months ago, I had to dive into the configuration of sendmail to make
a very small change. It turns out I spent almost an hour trying to make
sense out of a maze of files that were plain unreadable.
-- OpenSMTPD developer Gilles Chehade
Wikipedia switches from the GNU Free Documentation License to the
Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. (announcement, LWN coverage)
TurboGears 2.0 is released; it is a Python-based web application
framework. (announcement)
KOffice 2.0.0 is released. (announcement)
That's like saying that a squirrel is 48% juicier than an orange - maybe
it's true, but anybody who puts the two in a blender to compare them is
kind of sick.
-- Linus Torvalds
The US Supreme Court agrees to hear the Bilski case, which
could change the software patent landscape. (SCOTUS
Blog report)
The 2.6.30 kernel is released with the TOMOYO security module, nilfs
filesystem, reliable datagram sockets, FS-Cache, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)
Fedora 11 ("Leonidas") is released. (announcement)
Here, we find the quadruped
leaping to action in a flash with its 20-second startup -- and do
observe the animal's graceful form, achieved through kernel mode
setting and Plymouth. We discovered, upon further examination, that
the Leonidas maintains his sleek figure through the help of his new
Presto feature, which allows him to keep his bandwidth trim while
digesting updates that keep him healthy and content.
-- Paul
Frields announces Fedora 11
Intel acquires embedded Linux vendor Wind River Systems. (press
release)
KDE audio player Amarok 2.1 is released. (announcement, LWN review)
Ubuntu announces switch to the GRUB2 bootloader for 9.10 ("Karmic
Koala"). (announcement,
LWN coverage)
Sugar Labs announces Sugar on a Stick "Strawberry" featuring Fedora 11
and Sugar learning environment version 0.84. (announcement)
We've always said that the talent and creativity of those outside the
company is superior to that inside the company. We have stuck to these
principles. We've have opened up more than any other phone, from any
other company, in the history of this industry.
-- Openmoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz
Richard Stallman warns about dependence on Mono and C#,which
stirs up a lot of controversy. (RMS's warning, LWN coverage)
Firefox 3.5 is released with private browsing, HTML5 video and audio
support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis, a faster JavaScript engine, and
more. (announcement)
PHP 5.3 is released. (announcement)
Python 3.1 is released, focusing on the "stabilization and
optimization of the features and
changes that Python 3.0 introduced". (announcement)
The Ogg codecs (Vorbis and Theora) are dropped from HTML5, which
means there will be no standard codecs for <video> and
<audio> in HTML5. (announcement)
Perhaps we should require that the kernel developers and mainstream
distribution maintainers all run Ardour for three weeks and attempt at
least two multitrack/multichannel recordings. At least by then they'd maybe
have a better notion of what defines a system for serious recording.
-- Linux audio maven Dave Phillips
PostgreSQL 8.4 is released. (announcement)
Google announces Chrome OS, a Linux-based, web-centric OS for ARM
and x86. (announcement,
LWN coverage)
VLC media player 1.0 is released. (announcement,
LWN review)
You can't optimize a distributed file system for every use case, so find a
distributed file system that is optimized for something like your workload
– and use it only for that workload.
-- Filesystems hacker Valerie Aurora
Mercurial releases
version 1.3 of the Python-based distributed version control system. (announcement)
The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is held in the Canary
Islands—it is the first time that GNOME and KDE co-located their
annual conferences. (KDE.News
coverage)
Maemo announces a switch from GTK/Hildon to Qt, something that
doesn't come
as a complete surprise after Nokia acquired Qt provider Trolltech. (LWN coverage)
The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review is
launched. (announcement)
Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and
Launchpad supports one of the key strengths of free software compared with
the traditional proprietary development process. Projects that are hosted
on Launchpad are immediately connected to every other project hosted there
in a way that makes it easy to collaborate on code, translations, bug fixes
and feature design across project boundaries.
-- Mark
Shuttleworth
A local user privilege escalation vulnerability in the kernel, which
(ab)uses NULL pointer dereferences is announced with a proof-of-concept exploit. (LWN coverage part 1 and part 2)
The Nmap security scanner releases version 5.0. (announcement)
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released its Launchpad source code
under a free software license. (announcement)
Django 1.1 is released; Django is a Python-based web framework. (announcement)
Amazon fails in its irony detection and deletes George Orwell's
1984 (and Animal Farm) from users' Kindle e-book
readers. (New
York Times coverage)
Emacs 23.1 is released. (announcement)
Botnet simulation boots one million
virtualized Linux kernels at Sandia National Laboratories. (LinuxInsider article)
Our experience on Windows is that, in order for Flash to do all the things
that various sites expect it to be able to do, the sandbox has to be so
full of holes that it's rather useless.
-- Chrome/Chromium hacker Adam Langley
KDE 4.3 is released. (announcement)
Novell devotes ten engineers to the openSUSE project, rather than
have them work as time is available. (announcement)
openSUSE reduces maintenance period for new distribution releases to 18 months, down from 24
months. (announcement)
Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different
companies have contributed to the
kernel. The Linux kernel, thus, has become a common resource developed on a
massive scale by companies
which are fierce competitors in other areas.
-- Linux
Foundation white paper [PDF]
An injunction against the OpenBTS cellular base station project is
lifted, allowing discussion of the project by certain members once
again. (announcement, LWN injunction article)
Ubuntu removes the controversial "multisearch" feature from Karmic Koala
(9.10), because of privacy and usability concerns. (LWN coverage)
Arch Linux 2009.08 is released. (announcement)
KMyMoney 1.0 is released, after two years of development on the
personal finance management application. (announcement, LWN review)
We recognize that Novell has powerful arguments to support its version of
the transaction, and that, as the district court suggested, there may be
reasons to discount the credibility, relevance, or persuasiveness of the
extrinsic evidence that SCO presents.
-- appeals court in SCO v. Novell softens the blow
[PDF]
Yet another kernel NULL pointer vulnerability is reported, in what
is becoming a steady stream of such reports. (linux-kernel posting, more LWN coverage)
Desktop publisher Scribus releases version 1.3.5 (release notes, LWN review)
O'Reilly publishes The Art of Community by Ubuntu community
manager Jono Bacon. (announcement)
The Linux Foundation updates its kernel development statistics white paper,
authored by Jonathan Corbet, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Amanda McPherson. (announcement,
white
paper [PDF])
If freedom is your concern then you don't need to "unlock" or "jailbreak"
Maemo 5. From installing an application to getting root access, it's you
who decide. We trust you, and at the end it's your device.
Nokia's Quim
Gil
An appeals court rules that SCO's claims about Unix copyrights should go
to trial, overturning the summary judgment that Novell "won" in 2007
and breathing new life into the SCO litigation circus. (LWN coverage)
openSUSE defaults desktop choice to KDE, though GNOME and others
still remain as supported choices. (announcement, LWN coverage)
Unix celebrates its 40th birthday. (BBC article)
Slackware 13.0 is released, with support for 64-bit processors. (announcement, LWN review)
Linux is a 18+ years old kernel, there's not that many easy projects left
in it anymore :-/ Core kernel features that look basic and which are not in
Linux yet often turn out to be not that simple.
-- Ingo
Molnar
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is released, with x86_64 KVM support,
FUSE, the XFS filesystem, and more. (release
notes)
Linux 2.6.31 is released with performance counter support, kernel
mode setting for ATI Radeon chipsets, kmemleak, USB 3.0 support, and
more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)
It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution,
the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly
was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution
helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it
all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.
-- UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on
Alan Turing
Debian announces a switch to Upstart for boot-time
initialization. (announcement)
Microsoft forms the CodePlex foundation to foster cooperation
between software companies and open source communities. (announcement, LWN coverage)
Alan Turing gets a long-belated apology from the UK government for
his treatment for being gay. (Prime Minister Gordon Brown's
apology)
The first-ever LinuxCon is held in Portland, Oregon co-located with
the second-ever Linux Plumbers Conference. (LinuxCon
event site)
The "Anti-Malware" industry is just snake oil anyway. I think the proper
approach to support it is just to add various no-op exports claim to do
something and all the people requiring anti-virus on Linux will be just as
happy with it.
-- Christoph
Hellwig
Puppy Linux 4.3 is released. (announcement, LWN review)
LWN finally makes T-shirts and other branded items
available for sale. (LWN.net
CafePress store)
GNOME 2.28 is released. (announcement)
libtheora 1.1 "Thusnelda" is released bringing faster decoding and
better quality to the Theora video codec. (announcement)
X.org releases xorg-server 1.7 (announcement,
LWN coverage)
Though the use of cookies and respective protocols in computer science are
well documented we will not cover security aspects, notably related to
excessive accumulative effects of consuming large amounts of cookies,
rather we will focus on their creation, deployment, assessment and finally
their consumption and the positive impact on the real-time Linux community
we were able to observe.
-- M. Gleixner,
M. McGuire [PDF] from the Real Time Linux Workshop
Gentoo celebrates its tenth birthday by releasing a Gentoo Linux 10.0
LiveDVD. (announcement)
OpenSSH also celebrates its tenth anniversary with the release of
OpenSSH 5.3. (announcement)
TurboGears releases version 1.1 of the Python-based web
framework. (announcement)
The Real Time Linux Workshop is held in Dresden, Germany. (LWN coverage)
Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer" is released. (KDE.News report)
Nokia releases the N900 based on Maemo 5 and quite hackable. (LWN report from the Maemo Summit)
The problem? They are KILLING us. I'm not talking about market share, I'm
talking about my recent converts from Fedora to Ubuntu. I haven't had to do
a single thing to my wife's computer since I put Ubuntu on there except
setup my printer. With Fedora I was on it almost daily.
-- Mike
McGrath of Fedora/Red Hat
GDB 7.0 is released with reverse debugging, Python scripting, and
more. (announcement)
CentOS 5.4 is released. (announcement)
OpenBSD 4.6 is released. (announcement)
Darl McBride is terminated as SCO CEO and as the longtime "face"
of SCO's litigation strategy. (Groklaw
coverage)
The Linux Kernel Summit is held in Asia, specifically Tokyo, for the
first time. It is co-located with the Japan Linux Symposium. (LWN Kernel Summit coverage)
X11R7.5 is released with multi-pointer X, RANDR enhancements, and
more. (announcement, Peter
Hutterer's disambiguation)
SeaMonkey 2.0 is released—the heir to Netscape Communicator as
an all-in-one internet suite. (announcement)
Version 2.6 of the LLVM compiler is released with the first release
of the Clang C/Objective-C compiler, better code generation, and more. (announcement)
But I'm going to want a strand of hair from the engineer responsible for
that design, for my voodoo doll.
-- David
Woodhouse
Word processor AbiWord releases version 2.8 with collaboration
support, "true" SVG support, and more. (announcement,
LWN review)
Ubuntu "Karmic Koala" (9.10) is released. (announcement, LWN review)
Mandriva 2010.0 is released. (release notes, LWN review)
A moratorium turns Python's conservativeness up to 11. If Python already
has a reputation for being conservative in the features it accepts — and I
think it does — then a moratorium risks giving the impression that Python
has become the language of choice for old guys sitting on their porch
yelling at the damn kids to get off the lawn.
-- Steven
D'Aprano
One Laptop Per Child cancels the XO-2, opting instead for an ARM-based
XO-1.75 in the near term and an XO-3 in 2012. (OLPC
News report)
Python declares a moratorium on syntax and grammar changes through
the 2.7 and 3.2 releases and possibly longer. (LWN coverage)
GNOME plans for a 3.0 release in September 2010 and 2.30 in
March. (announcement)
Google announces a new systems programming language:
Go—released under a BSD license. (web site, language tutorial)
Cavium Networks acquires MontaVista Software one of the first commercial
embedded Linux vendors. (press
release)
That spanned 5 files, 6 indirections and all that to open and fgets the
contents of a file. And we still are doing an indirect call. All this work
and jumping around when all I wanted is to have a function that can
translate a PEM (NOT in a file!!!) cert into a X509 structure. But between
the million or so functions nothing handy like that exists; or so I suspect
but since there are no docs I really have to guess.
-- OpenSSL is written by
monkeys
A fundamental flaw is found in the Transport Layer Security (TLS)
protocol, which allows man-in-the-middle plaintext injection attacks. (LWN coverage)
openSUSE 11.2 is released with KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, OpenOffice.org
3.1, and more. (announcement, LWN review)
Fedora 12 is released with rpmdelta support, virtualization
improvements, and more. (announcement, LWN conversation with Paul Frields)
Knoppix 6.2 is released with kernel 2.6.31.6, X.org 7.4, and
more. (The H article)
The Linux kernel doesn't have all caps structures, we don't like to shout
at our programmers, it makes them grumpy. Instead, we like to soothe them
with small, rounded letters, which puts them in a nice, compliant mood, and
makes them more productive and happier, allowing them more fulfilling lives
overall.
-- Greg
Kroah-Hartman
Google releases the Chromium OS source under a BSD license. (announcement)
Fedora 12 initially ships with a security hole by default
allowing unprivileged users to install signed packages from signed
repositories without requiring a password. (LWN coverage)
KDE repositions its "brand" by separating the KDE software into
different groups: KDE Plasma Desktop, KDE Platform, KDE Applications, and
KDE Software Compilation. (KDE.News report)
Vector drawing program Inkscape releases version 0.47, which has
been massively overhauled from previous versions. (release notes)
FreeBSD 8.0 is released. (announcement,
LWN review)
Linux Mint 8 "Helena" is released. (announcement)
People expect intelligent beings, whether organic or inorganic, to have
some degree of common sense. Despite the decades of research sacrificed at
the altar of artificial intelligence, computers remain almost completely
devoid of common sense.
-- Paul
McKenney
Qt 4.6 is released with multi-touch and gesture support, new
graphical capabilities, more platforms supported, and more. (announcement,
LWN coverage)
Linux 2.6.32 is released with devtmpfs, HWPOISON, more perf events
features, kernel shared memory, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)
Twisted 9.0.0 is released; Twisted is a Python-based event-driven
networking engine. (announcement, LWN review)
If you didn't have an nvidia box you wouldn't care about this either.
If I send you
an LIRC remote will you bitch about LIRC not being upstream and
Fedora/Ubuntu/everyone
else shipping it?
-- Dave Airlie
before he delivers Linus's pony
OpenInkpot releases version 0.2 of the free firmware for e-book
readers. (announcement, LWN coverage)
Email client Thunderbird 3.0 is released (release
notes)
Sugar on a Stick v2 "Blueberry" is released. (announcement)
Various efforts are made to get MySQL out from under the control of
Oracle, either by license or ownership change. (LWN coverage)
So when I see another virtualization interface, I want the virtualization
people to just argue it out amongst themselves. Thanks to the virtue of me
personally not caring one whit about virtualization, I can stand back and
just watch the fireworks.
-- Linus
Torvalds
The Software Freedom Law Center sues Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse,
and others for GPL violations on behalf of the BusyBox project (announcement)
Malware disguised as a screensaver is made available at GNOME-Look.org,
which serves as a reminder to be careful where you get your bits. (LWN coverage)
Fedora 10 reaches end of life. (announcement)
digiKam 1.0 is released. (announcement, LWN review)
Moonlight 2 is released. (announcement)
Mark Shuttleworth announces that he is stepping down as Canonical
CEO effective March 2010, in favor of Jane Silber; Shuttleworth will
focus on design and
quality for Canonical. (announcement)
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