if you're not technically capable, why be an early adopter?
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Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't
By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20091102#released
An overview of Ubuntu 9.10 variants
The much-awaited Ubuntu 9.10 was released as scheduled last week. For the benefit of those readers who are new to the Linux world and who might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of available options, here is a brief recap of the official release line-up.
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just found a new toy today.
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http://kcheck.sourceforge.net/about.html
KernelCheck is a graphical user interface program designed to make the kernel-compiling process as easy as the click of a button. A kernel is the base of any operating system – in our case, the Linux operating system. KernelCheck will fetch the latest information from http://www.kernel.org, which hosts the source packages for the Linux kernel, and ask the user which one they would like to compile into a .deb package (with the option of installing the kernel after the compilation). This automated process is a fork of AutoKernel by Robert Wolterman (xtacocorex), Timothy Janssen (mentok), and Kristof Verbeken (PingunZ). KernelCheck is currently licensed under the GNU Public License version 3.
Current Features
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Originally posted by Crowley"The latest bug is mitigated by default on most Linux distributions, thanks to their correct implementation of the mmap_min_addr feature. But to make RHEL compatible with a larger body of applications, that distribution is vulnerable to attack even when the OS shows the feature is enabled, Spengler said.
Another bug.
Linux kernel bug, that can give malicious users root access:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/linux_kernel_vulnerability/
"They're putting their users at risk," he said. "They're basically the only distribution that's still vulnerable to this class of attack."
A Red Hat spokeswoman said patches for the versions 4 and 5 of RHEL and MRG are available <here>. An update for RHEL 3 is in testing and should be released soon."
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_30#head-c89f5ad8938e128ce3d9bd9a2e68af07333b6bc5
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Linux 2 6 30
Linux 2.6.30 was released on the 9th of June, 2009.
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1.4. Fastboot
Recommended LWN article: An asynchronous function call infrastructure
Contributor: Intel
Some parts of the kernel boot process can delay the whole process too many time (by kernel's standards): scanning in search of storage devices for a given controller, and searching for partitions, for example, can be slow, because the scanning is synchronous, only one device is scanned at a time, and the kernel has to wait for the devices. With this feature, those steps are done asynchronously, so the kernel can keep booting the rest of the kernel while the storage devices are scanned in parallel. This feature speeds up the total kernel boot time significantly