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A happy Linus Torvalds is offering to build a guitar pedal for one lucky Linux dev

Tux celebrating Xmas
Tux enjoying the Xmas | Image via Depositphotos

Linus Torvalds, the Linux boss-man, often draws eyes due to his interesting and often very expressive takes whether it is regarding hardware or software.

This holiday season though Torvalds is in a pretty content mood as the Linux development team managed to wrap up Linux kernel version 6.13 release candidate 7 (rc7) and thus the final stable release should be out next week.

In his weekly announcement post addressing the state of Linux kernel development, Torvalds wrote:

Well, it looked a bit quiet at the start of the week, but then things picked up, and we're definitely back to speed after the two quiet holiday weeks.

This rc7 is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out. The diffstat looks fine, and the appended shortlog doesn't look strange either.

So unless something odd happens the upcoming week, I expect to release a final 6.13 next week as per the normal schedule.

Torvalds had a warm tone in his mail as he described his favorite holiday hobby of building LEGOs, but also added that he has been enjoying DIYing some guitar pedal kit builds which is something that has grown on him this year.

As such he is even offering to build a lucky Linux kernel developer a guitar pedal so that Torvalds can justify fueling his own newfound hobby forward. He writes:

For _me_ a traditional holiday activity tends to be a LEGO build or two, since that's often part of the presents both for Xmas and birthday, which pretty much coincide for me.

But in addition to the LEGO builds, this year I also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds ("LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron"). Not because I play guitar, but because I enjoy the tinkering

...

I've done quite a few, but the kits I really enjoyed doing were from Aion FX. And since I want to have the excuse to continue to do them, and since I don't actually have any _use_ for the resulting pedals (I've already foisted off a few only unsuspecting victims^Hfriends), I decided that I'm going to see if some hapless kernel developer would want one.

So here's the deal: as an admittedly pretty weak excuse to keep buying and building kits, and still consider it "work", if any kernel developer (as defined as "has a commit authorship from the year 2024 in my kernel git tree") feels they really need a guitar pedal in their
life, hand-built by yours truly, please send me an email (*from* that email address that is in the git tree) with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL".

... next week, I'll pick one person at random - assuming anybody wants one - and will buy that kit with my own money ... build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.

And it's may be worth noting that while I've had good success so far,
I'm a software person with a soldering iron. You have been warned.

..

You can find the full message here on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) website.

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