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BLAKE ROSS, one of the key people behind the Firefox browser, says that he is losing faith in the antics of the search engine Google.

A tip sent to SlashGear has noted that porting Linux to the Zune is very much alive in the Zune community. “Yes, I’ve been working on it for quite awhile,” says Mys Videl, on ZuneBoards.com. “[It] has a lot of bugs to work out and a lot of features to work out.”

For many in the world, it's the time of year for wrapping up the old and moving ahead with the new. That's not necessarily the case for Linux, though. For the Linux kernel, what's old is new again with the new releases of the 2.6.16.37 and 2.4.34 kernels.

At the start of 2006, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was largely inward-looking, focused on the GNU Project and high-level strategic concerns such as licensing. Now, without abandoning these issues, the FSF had transformed into an openly activist organization, reaching out to its supporters and encouraging their participation in civic campaigns often designed to enlist non-hackers in their causes. Yet what happened seems to bemuse even FSF employees.

After several days of effort, Linus Torvalds tracked down and posted a patch for a low level data corruption bug [story]. In a series of emails, Linus thoroughly explained the thought process involved in isolating the exact problem.

Welcome to another Fool Fight. Grab your ringside seat, please. Our last bout, which featured Amazon and eBay, resulted in a knockout for eBay, thanks to several passionate Motley Fool CAPS players. Today, we're back on the Left Coast for a ka-powie in Silicon Valley.

I usually write about chemistry, often mixed in with various technical topics, including Open Source. But this particular problem had haunted me for some time and I never found a really good article outlining how to solve it. So, after finally figuring it out I thought I'd write it down for anyone else having the same problem.

The latest reports say that a dude who goes under the name, "MysVidel" has managed to get the Linux operating system up and alive on Microsoft's Zune.

Fantastic article by Jem Matzan provides the background and specifics on why support for Wi-Fi in open-source, GPL, and free operating systems is so problematic:

In a couple of fascinating threads on thelkml, Linus Torvalds has been working with several other kernel developers to try and track down a difficult data corruption bug [story]. Linus posted a test-program that's capable of consistently triggering the data corruption, so it's a matter of time before the bug is found and fixed. "I think the page-writeout is implicated," Linus explains, "because I do seem to need it, but the page-cache flush does seem to make corruption _easier_ to see. I now seem about to trigger it with a 100MB file on a 256MB machine in a minute or so, with this slight modification. I still don't see _why_, though. But maybe smarter people than me can see it." Earlier it was thought that new page balancing code added in the 2.6.19 kernel was to blame, but using Linus' test-program the data corruption has been reported as far back as the 2.6.5 kernel. "It's not actually a new bug at all," suggested Linus, "it's just that the dirty page balancing causes writeback to happen _earlier_, and thus is better able to _show_ a bug that we've likely had for a long long time." Before heading out to dinner to celebrate his birthday, Linus sent out a patch for tracing the areas of the kernel where the corruption bug is happening, "in the hope that somebody else is working on this corruption issue and is interested." He went on summarize the current status of the debugging effort:"What we need now is actually looking at the source code, and people who understand the VM, I'm afraid. I'm gathering traces now that I have a good test-case. I'll post my trace tools once I've tested that they work, in case others want to help."(And hey, you don't have to be a VM expert to help: this could be a learning experience. However, I'll warn you: this is _the_ most grotty part of the whole kernel. It's not even ugly, it's just damn hard and complex)."

A problem with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service that has users increasingly reporting that their data and accounts are being irretrievably deleted is an isolated one, the internet search giant says.

New AP chief says company is targeting customers with mixed-source IT infrastructures; insists it is committed to open source developers.

Linux users have much to look forward to in 2007, beginning with the end of the SCO saga, which has raged on since 2003. The year will also mark the birth of a new GPL and a new flagship enterprise Linux distribution from the current enterprise Linux leader, Red Hat.

What do you get when you combine a Wii, a Linux nerd, and some free time? A method for using the Wiimote as a music controller.

An open source advocacy group has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a Microsoft Corp. case asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate all software patents.

Firefox the open source browser from Mozilla is gaining ground on Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the UK according to the latest findings from Nielsen//NetRatings. They have increased their market share by 768 percent since September 2004. Firefox is the browser of choice for 12 percent of the UK.

LXer Feature: 29-Dec-2006

You know, I hate to give spam any credence whatsoever, but some of it just too funny to pass up.

Brazil-based Hoplon Infotainment is a startup game developer and an open source shop. Its upcoming first product, Taikodom, is a "massively multiplayer online game (MMOG)" that includes elements of science fiction and magic. Hundreds of thousands of online users can play an MMOG at the same time, but that requires a lot of server power. Hoplon called on open source tools for its software development needs, and IBM to help it provide the bandwidth and CPU strength it requires.

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in PHP-Update, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and conduct SQL injection attacks and by malicious users to compromise a vulnerable system.

Google Notebook users are apparently making personal information, such as Social Security numbers and e-mail passwords, available through the online bookmark service.