The kernel 2.4 source code, the product of countless hours of coding, testing, and re-coding, by dogged kernel hackers, is being upgraded with patches and bug fixes.
Among the new kernel's features are: support for the IBM S/390, the Logical Volume Manager, NFS Version 3 servers, PCMCIA CardBus devices, USB peripherals, the Device File System, 64 GB of RAM (yes, that's memory, not disk space), Itanium and MMX processors, drivers for many additional hardware devices, greater maximum file sizes, and vastly improved Symmetric Multiprocessing capabilities, at least for certain processors.
The changes are more significant for non-i386 platforms, although developers on i386 platforms can make use of the improvements— and stumble over the incompatibilities—of the new kernel as well.
If there's a compelling reason to upgrade, the source code is available, in the tar archive: linux-2.4.x.tar.gz, in all of the usual places. (Refer to: ``Where Can I Get the Latest Kernel Version?,'' below.) It will likely be several months at least before the commercial vendors upgrade their distributions to the new kernel.
Red Hat Linux 7.0 ships with two compilers, GCC 2.96, and KGCC, a.k.a, EGCS 1.1.2, a.k.a GCC 2.91.66. Confusing? You bet it is. It's probably better to use one of the standard GCC releases. The Free Software Foundation says that GCC 2.96, contains extensions that produce object code which is not compatible with previous versions of GCC, in addition to the normal bugs found in development software. The FSF changed the version number of their current development compiler to 2.97 to distinguish them. The FSF's statement is at http://www.fsf.org/software/gcc/gcc-2.96.html.
You can determine the compiler version numbers by typing ``gcc --version'' and ``kgcc --version.'' The latest stable GCC release is 2.95.2.
Any recent, officially released GNU C compiler from versions 2.7.2 onward should compile the generic kernel source code, unless it's the Version 2.4 kernel, in which case you'll need GCC 2.91.66 (EGCS 1.1.2). Don't expect any support from the kernel developers if you're using an earlier compiler.
Does that clarify everything?
You can download source code distributions from one of the kernel.org mirror sites. (Refer to: ``Where Can I Get the Latest Kernel Version?,'' below.) The kernel source code included with Red Hat 7.0 is kernel version 2.2.16, and is archived generically as linux-2.2.16.tar.gz.
There is a DeCSS Resource Site at http://www.pzcommunications.com/main.htm. For information about the legal action to bar distributing DeCSS, refer also to 2600's Web site: http://www.2600.com, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has issued a report to Congress that recommends regulations to guarantee privacy for customers of Internet Service Providers. The text of the report is at http://www.ftc.gov/acoas/papers/finalreport.htm. The FTC E-commerce site is at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/menu-internet.htm/
The New York Times on the Web has a page of electronic privacy information resources at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/index-privacy.html Access is free but requires registration.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center maintains a Web page at http://www.epic.org/. The site also has pointers to information about international laws that affect cryptographic software.
At present, the Linux FAQ uses the OASIS DocBook SGML DTD. HTML output is produced using James Clark's Jade DSSSL parser with modified versions of Norman Walsh's modular style sheets. The segmented version is produced from Jade output using a Perl program called faqinator. Question numbers in the SGML markup are generated with Perl. The text version is formatted from HTML with lynx, and split into segments using the standard GNU text utilities, and the segments are posted to Usenet. The DocBook utilities are located at ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/sourceware/docbook-tools/. In addition, the Linux Documentation Project maintains DocBook utilities. Refer to: ``Where Can I Get the HOWTO's and Other Documentation?''