Turned out we shipped a beta (Phoebe) with broken USB, but I think I fixed it, thanks to Bill Nottingham's help. Good thing it was a beta, and not a product! Now crossing fingers and barring gates against 11th hour vital features required by product management.

I did some other USB work, sent a patch to Vojtech. Hit CapsLock on PS/2 keyboard, then plug a USB keyboard into a box. The light on USB keyboard won't lit. Hit NumLock. Now both will come on! Trivial, but apparently annoys the hell of KVM users.

Meanwhile, sparc languishes. I wish I had Alan's productivity. Or DaveM's.

I remember that some time ago I posted a diary entry "Jerks from Gentoo", where I vented against an article at "Gentoo Linux News", which took a dim view of my work, berating me for not submitting patches up to Marcelo fast enough. At that time I thought that "Gentoo" was an online rag. Turned out that they were a distro maker! Now it all falls into place.

Daniel Robbins recently proposed a new kernel development strategy for Gentoo Linux, with the main goals being to improve hardware support and stability of the kernels used in the Gentoo project. As part of this strategy, Gentoo would leverage many of the hardware patches that make their way into the Red Hat kernel tree since most hardware vendors seek out Red Hat as their primary/only Linux partner. In addition to taking advantage of the improved hardware support in the Red Hat kernel source tree, Gentoo users would also benefit from additional features and functionality not normally found in the Red Hat kernel, including XFS, EVMS and Win4Lin, as well as others.

So, no volunteering to help me to split patches and merge with Marcelo, or is there? How quaint. They just realized that they do not have to pretend to be working for the community benefit. Why help to merge upstream when you can take the whole thing? Not that many believed them, anyway.

BTW, the idea to ship EVMS when its creators decided to switch to LVM2 smacks of an attempt to "diffirentiate" at any cost, without an attempt to help users at all. Apparently, nobody thought what is going to happen to RAID arrays of Gentoo users in EVMS on-disk format in about a year, when kernel 2.6 rolls out.

Dunno what made me wound up so much about this. I guess I care a lot about my and Red Hat's community role.