LinuxWorld recently posted an article by Richard Stallman (RMS) titled, Linux, GNU, and freedom. It begins as a reply to an earlier article by Joe Barr (The Stallman factor), explaining an incident with the SIGLINUX user group. RMS continues on to talk about the reason why the name 'GNU/Linux' is important, the influence Linus has, and his decision to utilize the BitKeeper tool.

Read on for more information, including a full mirror of the article.

Alan Cox released the final Linux 2.2.21 stable kernel today. This release added only one patch to the earlier 2.2.21-rc4 [earlier story] with the comment, "Add 32/64bit ioctl handling for random driver".

Linus released the Linux development kernel 2.5.17 last night. He summarized the changes in two sentences, "Various FS updates (including merges of quota and iget_locked), and Makefile cleanups from Kai. And yet more TLB shootdown stuff."

This release includes the new and improved changelog format []earlier story]. It combines some of the verbosity of BitKeeper changelogs with the readability of the old style kernel changelogs. Those watching the development kernel evolve will notice that Linus has been good to his word, releasing new kernels with increasing rapidity. Browse the latest development kernels on kernel.org.

The fourth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium will be happening on June 26th-29th in Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Stephen Tweedie of ext3 fame will be a keynote speaker. The website offers an impressive list of speakers, as well as numerous 'Bird of a Feather Sessions'.

Larry McVoy, the creator of BitKeeper, has also been invited, and offered to lead a discussion on the reason for BitKeeper's unique licensing. Richard Gooch, also speaking at the 2002 OLS, has urged him to speak, as Larry says, "I explained our reasons for why it is the way it is and he urged me to show up and explain it to a wider audience, I apparently explained things that weren't well known. I'm happy to do that, you can bring tomatoes :)".

I have spoken with Larry myself, and found his reasons to be quite sound. You can show up in Ottawa next month and decide for yourself.

We all know that KernelTrap offers the best place for in-depth technical interviews. However there is more to life than page-tables. Slashdot has run a more general interview of Alan.

OpenBSD 3.1 is out of the door! Many on the OpenBSD mailing lists have already reported receiving the new CDs. From Todd Miller's announcement email:

"It is our pleasure to officially announce the release of OpenBSD 3.1. This year OpenBSD turns 7 years old. In celebration of this milestone, we invite you to enjoy our 11th release on CD-ROM (and 12th via FTP)."

With this release, the OpenBSD home page has increased its security claim to, "Five years without a remote hole in the default install!"

FreeBSD 4.6 has entered the release candidate stage, destined for final release around June 1st. The complete FreeBSD release schedule can be found here. The quality assurance testing guide highlights three significant changes in this release: there is a major update for DHCP client support, the i4b SyncPPP driver has been merged with the main sppp driver, and XFree86 has been upgraded from version 3.3.6 to version 4.2.0. Check the release notes for the most up to date information. Though currently only available for i386, the Alpha version is also on its way.

Murray Stokely's 4.6-RC1 announcement email follows.

Update: (5/19/2) RC2 has been released to fix a sysinstall buffer truncation issue that affected the installtion of GNOME. Announcement below.

Keith Owens recently announced for the third time that kbuild 2.5 is ready for inclusion into the Linux 2.5 development kernel tree [earlier story]. Keith says, "Third and final attempt. Original sent on May 2, second mail sent on May 14, still no response from Linus." He goes on to explain, "I would like kbuild 2.5 to go in in the near future. Keeping up to date with kernel changes is a significant effort, Makefiles change all the time, especially when major subsystems like sound and usb are reorganised."

Many have offered support of the new build system. In the most recent thread, Robert Love said, "Fwiw, I like kbuild-2.5 and want it in." Dave Jones summarized his own support saying, "If kbuild2.5 is faster, and produces the same end result (or better still, more accurate builds), there's no valid reason to ignore it that I can see."

However, so far its seems that Linus has chosen to ignore Keith's emails. Perhaps there's something behind the scenes prompting this silence. Or perhaps it's just a matter of time.

GCC 3.1 has been officially released. Mark Mitchell sent out the announcement, in which he says,

"In this release, we focused more on quality than new features; many bugs were fixed. We worked very hard to fix bugs that were introduced in GCC 3.0, but that were not present in previous releases of the compiler. We also worked hard to eliminate new bugs."

Find a mirror to download the release from here. A summary of changes, new features, and fixes and can be found here. The full announcement email follows.

When Linux creator Linus Torvalds began using the BitKeeper (BK) source control tool for managing the 2.5 Linux development kernel [earlier story], one of the big fears people put forward was that all Linux kernel developers would eventually be forced to use this tool. (The BK license is a major source of contention.

In late February we noted that the stable Linux kernel 2.2.21 could be expected around March 10th, 2002 [earlier story]. As it turns out, 2.2.21-rc4 was released today, about which Alan Cox says, "Unless something bad turns up this will be the final 2.2.21." There have been numerous fixes applied since late February. Details follow in Alan's changelog.

The question was asked recently on a FreeBSD mailing list, "What will be new in FreeBSD 5.0?" The thread discussed several ways a person could obtain such information, one good source being the latest release notes. The first developer preview of 5.0 was released on April 8th [earlier story]. The final release is targeted for the end of this year.

Robert Watson offered an interesting summary of items to look forward to in FreeBSD 5.0, including: SMPng ("next generation" symmetric multiprocessing), KSE (improved scheduling), devfs (automatic /dev management), Firewire support, and much more. Read on for more details.

When Linus made his switch to BitKeeper for maintaining the kernel source tree, the format of his changelogs also changed. Linus himself at one point commented that simplifying the changelog was on his todo list, however many spoke out in support of the newer, more verbose logs. They have since been the standard. Find an example of the old style here, and the new style here.

The question of readability came up on the lkml recently, Ian Molton saying, "I dont know who to write to about this, but the changelogs for 2.4.19-pre on kernel.org are COMPLETELY illegible." He went on to suggest that the logs be tweaked a little. Linus agreed that the logs could be improved, and put out a call to Perl scripters to help with the change. Some of the discussion follows, as well as a link to the thread in online archives.

Robert Millan recently made available an image [link temporarily removed] allowing a person to run the GNU/Hurd under the Bochs x86 emulator [earlier story about Bochs]. With very minimal effort, I launched the GNU/Hurd image with Bochs v0.4 and was then able to use the Hurd from within my Linux server. [screenshot]

As Bochs compiles on many platforms, this even allows non-x86 users to run the Hurd. Of course, the emulation is slow...

Update: (5/13/2) The link to the Hurd image for Bochs has been removed at this time. This was done at Robert's request, as the images are a work in progress, and not yet fully stable. Once ready, the image should be found here.

Peter Chubb posted a patch to the lkml, with which he's now managed to mount a 15 terabyte file (using JFS and the loopback device). Without the patch, Peter explains, "Linux is limited to 2TB filesystems even on 64-bit systems, because there are various places where the block offset on disc are assigned to unsigned or int 32-bit variables."

Peter works on the Gelato project in Australia. His efforts include cleaning up Linux's large filesystem support, removing 32-bit filesystem limitations. When I asked him about the new 64-bit filesystem limits, he offered a comprehensive answer and this interesting link. The full thread follows.

Reaching beyond terabytes, beyond petabytes, on into exabytes. I feel this sudden discontent with my meager 60 gigabyte hard drive...