The patent war between Microsoft and TomTom may be resolved in court, but it hasn't ended. At least that's what the lawyers at the Software Freedom Law Center think, and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is further considering the implications.

Linus Torvalds, Ted Ts'o, Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Andrew Morton and other Linux kernel developers are embroiled in a contentious discussion over the sense -- or nonsense -- of journaling and delayed allocation before a commit in the ext3 and ext4 filesystems. Heavy words are flying.

The Ubuntu User Forum reports users with data loss after installing applications on the ext4 filesystem. Kernel developer Ted Ts'o is already on top of it.

Tired of copying and recopying files from your laptop to the office file server? Maybe you need an automated offline filesystem, such as OFS.

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.

Wietse Venema, the developer of Postfix, points in an advisory to a security problem in connection with the Linux and Solaris filesystems. As more recent versions of these operating systems no longer comply with the POSIX standard for links, local attackers may be able to attach files to other users' Postfix mailboxes.

Modern filesystems make forensic file recovery much more difficult. Tools like Foremost and Scalpel identify data structures and carve files from a hard disk image.