Kernel release: 2.6.16.52, May 30, 2007

2.6.16.52 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 49
Files changed: 728
Files removed: 4

Singapore Airlines is offering access to Sun's StarOffice 8 office productivity suite free of charge to passengers on its new Boeing 777-300ER aircraft. StarOffice, Sun's proprietary version of OpenOffice.org, runs on the aircraft's Linux server and is accessed via a seat-back terminal at each passenger's seat, according to Sun.

"Touch one member of the Linux community and you will have to deal with all of us," Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin warned Microsoft in a column that appeared 25 May on the BusinessWeek "Viewpoint" slot of its Web site.

The text of the clone product definition subsections is very cumbersome to read, but it specifically mentions OpenOffice, Wine, and OpenXchange by name without asserting that they are necessarily clone products. It leaves the door open for possible suits.

In my followup article on using Etch as a desktop OS, I pondered converting my primary desktop from SUSE to Debian. I've done it.

Yoggie Security Systems has squeezed a complete hardware firewall for Windows systems into a USB key sized form-factor. The "Yoggie Pico" runs Linux 2.6 along with 13 security applications on a 520MHz PXA270, a powerful Intel processor popular in smartphones and other high-end consumer devices.

PJ at Groklaw has uncovered this little gem from an exhibit filed in SCO v. Novell. Fascinating stuff. It's always interesting when you can finally read things that were intended to be private.

Adobe has released a new version of its Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) toolkit, and for the first time it is under an open source license that allows the code to be incorporated into free software. XMP is Adobe's XML-based specification for metadata geared toward digital images and multimedia.

Linux fans didn't exactly get the publicity they were hoping for at the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, when the so-called "Linux car" they had sponsored proved to be the first in the race to crash, ultimately causing it to finish dead last.

Mozilla chief Mitchell Baker prefers to call herself the company's "chief lizard wrangler", a reference to the organisation's original dinosaur logo and to the difficulties of managing a company that has 90 official staff but a volunteer workforce of 200,000.

Designed as an add-on “EDU-CD” to accompany the upcoming 10.3 release of openSUSE, the so-called “SLEducator” is designed to “[ease] the installation and configuration of an educational network and student desktop.”

The Lina virtual Linux machine will run more or less normal Linux applications under Windows, Mac, or Linux, using the native look and feel of each system.

Given the reality of Microsoft’s patent threat, it was only a matter of time before Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin laid the smackdown.

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