For the average user, a new kernel release usually makes no difference. If everything is already working fine, there there typically only 2 major reasons anyone should update their kernel. The first is for necessary or critical security problems (most people aren’t affected by every vulnerability). The second is the need for new features or hardware support, which is probably my primary reason to test a new kernel. The release of 2.

The most current version of Flash for Linux is version 7.0 while Windows users are already on 8.0. However Macromedia has officially stated that there will be an upcoming version 8.5 for Linux. However it will be shipped after the Windows version becomes available. Even though that post states that no 64bit version is being planned, another engineer has stated that there is some work being done towards a 64bit version.

Nvidia recently released an update (1.0-8174) to their high performance Linux video card drivers. Usually driver releases are done to support new hardware. In this case SLI series video cards and others such as the GeForce 6100, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 7800 GTX 512. Other than the driver itself, there were some significant changes made. There is finally an HTML Readme. Previously the text based file was very hard to navigate.

About 2 years ago I purchased a Linux based PDA: the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. The PDA was intended to be used on Windows and (later) Linux. The initial driver for Windows setup the device as a USB network device, however the latest driver set it up as a normal USB PDA. I found that using the older driver, I can assign an IP address to the device and configure it as a mini server.

Users of Fedora Core 4, SuSE 10.0 and other distributions with GCC v4 may have found some open source softwares may not compile properly. Using alternate compilers may resolve the problem. FC4 also ships with GCC v3.2. There are many ways to specify alternate compilers during the build process, below are some ways. Environment Variables Most softwares support the CC and CXX environment variables. First assign them, then run configure or make.