From: torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi (Linus Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Subject: Linux 0.99.15 released: Codefreeze for 1.0 Date: 4 Feb 1994 22:31:37 GMT Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Lars Wirzenius) Message-ID: <2iuic9$1um@hydra.Helsinki.FI> [ Moderator's note: cjs@netcom.com (Christopher Shaulis) reports (long before Linus actually gets this announcement written :-) that he will have this version up for ftp at netcom.nom in /pub/cjs until the end of the month. It will of course migrate to other sites as well. --liw ] People who look into my directory on ftp.funet.fi will already have noticed that the latest version of linux (0.99.15) is available, and I assume it will be available on most other linux sites soon. As explained in a previous announcement, 0.99.15 is "it", in that this will be the base for 1.0 after about a month of testing. No further patches are accepted until the 1.0 release, unless they obviously fix a serious bug. **** NOTE 1 **** For this code-freeze to be effective yet still potential bugs be found, testing is needed, along with good reports of errors and problems. Thus, nobody should think "hey, the *real* release will be out in a month, let's wait for that", but instead think: "hey, I'd better test this one, so that the *real* release won't result in any ugly surprises for me". In short: test it out, preferably even more than you usually do. Run "crashme" for the whole month if you have the CPU-power to spare, and/or just misuse your machine as badly as you can. And if there are problems, report them to me (and the better the report, the more likely I am to be able to do something about it). **** NOTE 2 **** Bumping the linux version number to 1.0 doesn't mean anything more than that: it's only a version number change. More explicitly, it does *NOT* mean that linux will become commercial (the copyright will remain as-is), nor does it mean that development stops here, and that 1.0 will be anything special in that respect. I'm also afraid that just changing the version number will not make potential bugs magically disappear: this has been amply proven by various software houses over the years. This code-freeze is there in order to avoid most of the problems that people sometimes associate with "X.0 releases", and I hope that it will mean that we have a reasonably stable release that we can call 1.0 and one that I won't have to be ashamed of. Ok, enough said, I hope. The pl15 release is hopefully good, but I'll continue to make ALPHA patches against it along the whole month as problems crop up. The networking code has been much maligned, and is not perfect by far yet, but it's getting its act together thanks to various developers and testers. And as wiser men than I have said (or if they haven't, they should have): "There is life after 1.0" Any rumors that the world is coming to an end just because I'm about to release a 1.0-version are greatly exaggerated. I think. Linus ---------- Things that remained the same between 0.99.14 and 0.99.15: - I again forgot to update the README before uploading the release. In pl14, I talked about pl13, while the all new and improved README has now caught up with pl14. Remind me to buy a new brain one of these days. Changes between versions 0.99.14 and 0.99.15: - improved Pentium detection. Some of you may have had linux report your 4086DX2 as a pentium machine, but the new kernel will tell you the sad truth. Whee. - Network driver updates by Donald Becker. New drivers added, old ones updated. - FPU emulation updates by Bill Metzenthen. Various minor errors and misfeatures fixed (mostly error handling). - Support for the SoubdBlaster Pro CD-ROM driver added by Eberhard Moenkeberg. - extended support for keyboard re-definition, along with font re-programming (Eugene Crosser, Andries Brouwer et al). - tty handling fixes: true canonical mode with most features supported by Julian Cowley. This may make your canonical mode behave funnily if you happen to use old and broken programs that happened to work with the old and broken behaviour (this includes at least some 'getty' programs). - serial driver changes and tty fixes by Theodore Ts'o. - SCSI fixes by Drew Eckhardt, Eric Youngdale, Rik Faith, Kai Mdkisara et al. - Updated sound card driver to version 2.4 (Hannu Savolainen) - COFF binary loading support (but you will still need the experimental iBCS2 patches to run non-linux i386 COFF binaries) by Al Longyear. - Upgraded ext2fs filesystem routines (0.4a -> 0.4b), with new features. Read the fs/ext2/CHANGES file for details. Remy Card and Stephen Tweedie. Get a new fsck that knows about the new features. - pipe behaviour fixed in the presense of multiple writers (now actually conforms to POSIX specs about atomic writes). Much of the code by Florian Coosmann. - minix filesystem extended to support the clean flag: get a new fsck that knows about it. - System V filesystem (support for Xenix, Coherent and SysV filesystems) by Doug Evans, Paul Monday, Pascal Haible and Bruno Haible. - loadable modules (various authors, don't remember original author of the "modules" code). - Lots of networking fixes by various people: Alan Cox, Charles Hedrick, me and various other people. Non-byte-aligned networks work, and the networking code should be much stabler in general. + various bugfixes and enhacements here and there (mcd driver update by Jon Tombs, atixlmouse fix by Chris Colohan, /dev/full by XXX etc etc) All in all, the patches come out to 1.5MB uncompressed (about 400kB gzip-9'd), so there is little or no idea to make patches to plain pl14 available. Incremental patches and ALPHA-releases can be found on ftp.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/ALPHA-pl14. -- Mail submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu PLEASE remember Keywords: and a short description of the software.