For FOSS fans, there's no better place to be this week than Hobart, state capitol of the Australian state Tasmania. That's where Linux.conf.au 2009 is being held through Saturday, January 24.

Novell kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released statistics on his personal email activity.

Evgeniy Polyakov has released a patch to the kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) killer function, which was designed to prevent a system freeze in an OOM condition by sacrificing one or more processes. The patch "tames" the function by defining the specific process to kill.

Since its addition to Kernel 2.6.28, the ext4 filesystem can be manually installed in the upcoming Ubuntu release.

Linux kernel developer Jonathan Corbet has just previewed the features of the upcoming Linux Kernel 2.6.29 that includes Btrfs, which he claims is the filesystem of the future.

Chris Mason, lead developer of the copy-on-write BtrFS filesystem, has appealed for its inclusion in the Linux kernel.

A few server admins had reported Linux crashes right at the New Year's Eve countdown. Linux developers are currently investigating if they had anything to do with the leap second phenomenon.