Two years after his 2005 Kernel Report, Colorado-based Linux developer Jonathan Corbet returned to Australia's linux.conf.au conference in Sydney this week to discuss recent enhancements to the open source operating system.

Corbet said the next release, kernel 2.6.20, will include a whole lot of new drivers, including a USB vision driver which will bring support for USB Web cams.

"Linux hardware support is better than ever and it supports more hardware natively out-of-the-box than any other operating system," he said. "The biggest problem is vendors that won't release drivers or specifications."

Corbet said traditionally wireless networking has been poorly supported but is getting better and the current implementation is being replaced with a networking stack with "proper 802.11 which is slowly making its way into mainline."

There are also people working on porting the BSD Atheros Wi-Fi drivers to Linux.