news.debuntu.org

When you say "log-structured file system," most storage developers
will immediately think of Ousterhout and Rosenblum's classic paper,
The
Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System - and
the nearly two decades of subsequent work attempting to solve the
nasty segment cleaner problem (see below) that came with it. Linux
developers might think of JFFS2, NILFS, or LogFS, three of several
modern log-structured file systems specialized for use with solid
state devices (SSDs).

Sugar Labs and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have announced joint
efforts to collaborate and promote Sugar on the occasion of Software
Freedom Day, September 19th. "The FSF will host an event in Boston
featuring Sugar Labs Executive Director Walter Bender, FSF president
Richard Stallman, and other speakers. Peter Brown, FSF's executive
director, said, "The Sugar Learning Platform is fast becoming an essential
route to computer user freedom for children around the world.

Ubuntu has updated kdelibs
(man-in-the-middle attack).

The LiMo Foundation has published an
interesting white paper [PDF] on the economic value of working with the
development community. "The cost of forking and losing connection
with upstream development is twofold: i) the corresponding cost of presumed
beneficial unleveraged potential, ii) the further cost of having to
re-engineer modified forked code in the future to accommodate the
inevitable eventual re-sync with upstream.

It took a while, but we have finally managed to get our act together and
put a set of LWN-logo T-shirts at the Cafe Press LWN.net store.
There are also sites in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. An LWN
shirt marks the wearer as one of the LWN-reading elite, and sales help to
support the site as well.

KOffice will be used in Nokia's Maemo 5 mobile computer/phone platform.
"Today Thomas Zander from Nokia announced in a
blog
that Nokia will be using KOffice as the core of the office viewer of
Maemo 5.
"The KOffice community is very happy to see this development", says
Inge Wallin, marketing coordinator of KOffice. "It shows that our long
and persistent work on compatibility and adaptibility within KOffice
has paid off and is visible to outside viewers.""

Debian has updated
icu (security mechanism bypass).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has updated
freeradius (denial of service).

Ubuntu has updated
freeradius (denial of service).

Red Hat SELinux hacker Dan Walsh has a weblog posting about a new feature added to his SELinux sandbox. sandbox -X essentially combines the sandbox with the idea behind the "xguest" user to create a sandbox for arbitrary desktop applications.

Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python has been updated for Python 3; the result is Dive into Python 3. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license and downloadable as HTML, PDF, or straight from the Mercurial repository.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 17, 2009 is available.