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Kernel development

The current development kernel release is 2.1.128. Linus is up to the sixth prepatch for 2.1.129. This prepatch is almost 900kb, and includes a lot of Sparc and PPC fixes, and a new frame buffer card for a number of Matrox video cards. There is also a 2.1.128ac3 patch available from Alan Cox.

Version 0.99H of the 3c59x ethernet driver is out. This release contains fixes for the notorious 3c905B adaptor, and a number of other fixes; see the announcement for more. Donald Becker hopes that this version will be the one that gets turned into V1.0.

Is your Linux system Euro-ready? Probably not. Guylhem Aznar has put together a set of files which may be used to make a Linux system ready for the European Union's new currency. It consists mostly of keymap and font files to allow for entry and display of the new Euro symbol. See his README file for more information. You may also download his package (a 53K gzipped tarball) if you wish to experiment with it.

Why is the PCMCIA subsystem not a part of the standard kernel? That question came up a couple weeks ago, after some changes in the 2.1 series broke PCMCIA (again). This week David Hinds, creator and maintainer of the PCMCIA system, posted the answer. It turns out that there are a couple of reasons:

The PCMCIA subsystem is intended to work with all kernel versions, presumably so that support for new cards is easily added to older kernels. If PCMCIA gets tied directly into the development kernel that version independence could be lost.
The PCMCIA code is applicable beyond just Linux: it is also the BeOS PCMCIA subsystem. An HPUX port exists, and a Solaris port may yet be done.

The end result is that PCMCIA will almost certainly remain outside of the standard kernel tree.

OpenBIOS 0.0.1 has been released. The OpenBIOS project, remember, is an effort to create an open source BIOS for PC-class machines. It can't yet do anything interesting like boot an operating system, but it's on its way. See the announcement for more information on this release and how to get it (or how to help with this project).

November 19, 1998

Since we're a weekly publication, chances are we'll be behind a rev or two on the kernel release by the time you read this page. Up-to-the-second information can always be found at LinuxHQ.

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