OStatic

Today, both Ubuntu and openSUSE are releasing beta versions of their upcoming releases.

Ubuntu's 8.10 is in its first beta version, and openSUSE 11.1 plans on issuing its second beta release shortly.

A bug surfaced recently in the pre-release versions of the 2.6.27 Linux kernel (up to 2.6.27rc7). The bug affected the e1000e driver module, which supports a number of onboard Intel ethernet adapters. The driver would corrupt the EEPROM/NVM of adapters with ICH8 and ICH9 chipsets, rendering them useless.

The silver lining was that since the kernel is a pre-release, only distributions with releases in the alpha or beta stages, or custom compiled testing kernels, were affected. The Intel team released a patch Wednesday to prevent further damage.