Sylpheed-Claws: We finally released, officialy, the 1.9.6 version which is gtk2 ! Yay :-) Comments on the mailing-list are quite encouraging.
Wifi & the kernel: After another kernel upgrade, Linux works flawlessly with sleep on my iBook. I needed only two USB-related patches so that the USB subsystem survives sleeps ok: one by Paul Mackerras, that fixes Oopses if you plug or unplug USB stuff while the laptop sleeps, and one by me, that repowers the USB ports unconditionnaly on wakeup – I noticed that the registers weren’t in a correct state on wakeup, thinking the ports were powered, but they’re not (and hence you can plug anything you want, nothing happens.
I also installed HAL from freedesktop, so that usb-storage works flawlessly (automatically creating mount points, mounting, and so on), but this broke (once more!) linux-wlan-ng, the driver for my prism2-based USB wifi stick. This driver sucks, it works whenever it wants (sometimes you have to re-plug the stick 5 times before it manages to upload the firmware), and gets broken with every kernel upgrade. It’s an external driver full of hacks (/sbin/hotplug is hardcoded in!). I got tired of this, and seeing that there has been an USB Zydas zd1201 driver integrated in 2.6.12-rc1, I bought a stick with this chipset (Peabird PEAB-WL-USB) and gave the driver a shot (I needed this micro-patch to get the driver to build). It works flawlessly ! Instant on, configuration via the standard iwconfig instead of idiot hotplug scripts like linux-wlan-ng, scanning works without oopsing, etc.
Only one little inconvenience with this driver, the link quality bits don’t work – some comments in the driver hint at a chip bug.