Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.18 Linux kernel, following the previous stable kernel release by three months [story]. He exclaimed, "she's good to go, hoist anchor!", the second year in a row that a kernel release has coincided with 'Talk Like A Pirate Day' [story]. "Here's some real booty for all you land-lubbers," Linus continued, "there's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here email describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs." In keeping with the theme, he signed the announcement, "Linus 'but you can call me Cap'n'".

The latest kernel source can be downloaded from your nearest Linux Kernel archive mirror [story]. You can browse through all the changes using the gitweb interface, complete with a 2.6.18 tag playfully declaring, "Raise the Jolly Roger!".

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.17 Linux kernel this past weekend, following the previous stable kernel release by three months [story]. He noted, "not a lot of changes since the last -rc, the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. Have fun with it". The latest kernel source can be downloaded from your nearest Linux Kernel Archive mirror [story]. You can browse through all the changes using the gitweb interface.

Dave Korn announced GCC 3.4.6:

"This release is a minor release, containing fixes for regressions relative to earlier releases, but no new features. It is the final release from the 3.4.x series and the branch is now closed. It is thus also the final release from GCC series 3 overall."

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 3.4.6 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.1.1 saying, "this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC [4.1.0]. GCC 4.1.1 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features." GCC 4.1.0 [story] was released 2 and a half months ago in March of 2006.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.1.0 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.16 Linux kernel. He noted, "not a lot of changes since -rc6, but there's various random one-liners here and there (a number of Coverity bugs found, for example), and there are small MIPS and PowerPC updates." You can download the latest kernel from your nearest Linux Kernel Archive mirror [story], and browse through all the changes using the 2.6 kernel's gitweb interface.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.3. He explains, "this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC 4.0.2. GCC 4.0.3 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features." GCC 4.0.2 [story] was released nearly 6 months ago in September of 2005. GCC 4.1.0 [story] was released in early March of 2006.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.0.3 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.1.0 saying, "this release is a major release, containing substantial new functionality relative to previous releases." Among the changes, new features and fixes listed for this new release series are a number of general optimizer improvements, language specific improvements, and some protection from stack-smashing attacks by providing buffer overflow detection and reordering of stack variables.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.1.0 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.2. He explains, "this release is a minor release, containing primarily fixes for regressions in GCC 4.0.1 relative to previous releases." GCC 4.0.1 was release two and a half months ago on July 7th [story]. A list of bug fixes in 4.0.2 can be found here.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.0.2 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.1, officially released on July 7'th. He explains, "this release is a minor release, containing primarily fixes for regressions in GCC 4.0.0 relative to previous releases." GCC 4.0.0 was released two and a half months ago on April 20th, as seen on the official release timeline. A list of bug fixes in 4.0.1 can be found here.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.0.1 from a gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Nearly three and a half months since the last stable release, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of version 2.6.12 of the Linux Kernel. He notes that the changes since -rc6 are minimal, "as you can see from the appended diffstat, most of the things are pretty small (ie it looks like a long list, and then you look at the diffstat and realize that most of the changes end up being just a line or two)." He adds, "one of the least important changes is still worth pointing out," talking about the recent update to the Developer's Certificate of Origin [story]. "The sign-off procedure was clarified to make it clear that the person signing off understands that the project - and thus the patch and the sign-off itself, of course - is public and will be archived."

This is the first stable release of the Linux kernel since the source code was moved out of BitKeeper in early April of 2005 [story]. 2.6.12-rc3, released in late April, was the first release candidate kernel managed by Git [story], thus Linus' git repository only holds changes since 2.6.12-rc2. Due to this fact, Linus did not release a complete changelog between 2.6.11 [story] and 2.6.12. He explains, "the full ChangeLog ended up missing, because I only have the history from 2.6.12-rc2 in my git archives, but if you want to, you can puzzle it together by taking the 2.6.12 changelog and merging it with the -rc1 and -rc2 logs in the testing directory." The latest version of the Linux kernel can be obtained directly from the kernel.org archive [story], or your nearest kernel archives mirror.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the much anticipated 2.6.11 Linux kernel declaring, "so it's now _officially_ all bug-free." Though bugs are certain to still remain, quite a bit of effort was made to stabalize this release. On February 12'th, Linus uploaded 2.6.11-rc4 [story] containing only fixes, planning to follow it with the official 2.6.11 release. However, instead it was followed on February 23'rd by 2.6.11-rc5 [story] to deal with "some laptop resource conflicts, various ppc TLB flush issues, some possible stack overflows in networking and a number of other details". Today's release contained minimal changes, "mostly some fixes from various code checkers".

The 2.6.11 patch to the 2.6.10 kernel is about 4MB compressed, and it or the entire 2.6.11 kernel can be obtained from your nearest kernel.org mirror. The kernel makefile still contains the name Woozy Numbat, as given for the 2.6.10 release last Christmas eve [story]. Read on for the relatively short changelog since 2.6.11-rc5.

Following two months after the release of the 2.6.9 Zonked Quokka Linux kernel [story], Linux creator Linus Torvalds released Woozy Numbat, the 2.6.10 kernel. He summarizes:

"Ok, with a lot of people taking an xmas break, here's something to play with over the holidays (not to mention an excuse for me to get into the Glögg for real ;)

"Mostly a lot of small fixes since 2.6.10-rc3, with the biggest thing being probably the CIFS update and the switch-over to the new DVB frontend driver world order. Some MMC and USB work too, and ARM updates as usual."

Further information can be found in the release announcements for 2.6.10-rc1 [story], 2.6.10-rc2 [story], and 2.6.10-rc3 [story], as well as in the complete changelog. The latest version of the kernel can be downloaded from your nearest kernel.org mirror. Read on for the list of changes since 2.6.10-rc3.

Mark Mitchell announced the release of GCC 3.4.3 saying, "there are no new features in this release, but there are a lot of improvements for various languages and architectures."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the official 2.6.9 kernel today, following what he referred to as "naming confusion" in which a test release named "-final" was first uploaded to kernel.org. Linus went on to add, "excuses aside, not a lot of changes since -rc4 [story] (which was the last announced test-kernel), mainly some UML updates that don't affect anybody else. And a number of one-liners or compiler fixes. Full list appended." Official releases and test kernels can be found at a kernel.org mirror.

Regarding the compiler fixes, a handful of problems were reported on the lkml with some versions of GCC [forum]. Linus replied, "Heh. Clearly there's a gcc bug.. What compiler version? I've got gcc-3.2 and gcc-3.3, and neither seems to have any trouble, but hey, I'm cursed by having fairly up-to-date systems. That said, I know what's up, but it would be good to know what compilers have this problem." Linus provided a fix for older versions of gcc which can be found within.