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Two fabless networking chip vendors will collaborate on Linux-based reference designs for managed enterprise switches and SOHO/SMB routers. The designs will combine Cavium's multi-core MIP64-based Octeon processors with Broadcom's StrataXGS and RoboSwitch Gigabit Ethernet switches, and run Linux along with LVL7's Fastpath TCP/IP stack.

Standing next to your laptop to control the slides during a presentation is not cool. Nowadays everyone uses a presentation device or their laptop's remote controller, but a presentation device can be expensive, few laptops come with a remote controller, and for those that do, Linux compatibility may be an issue. The Amora project turns your Symbian mobile phone into a Linux presentation device using Bluetooth.

It's no secret that Asus has some big expectations for its low-cost Eee PC, but it looks like the company is now getting a bit more specific on the matter, with it saying it expects to ship some 3.8 million of the laptops in the next fiscal year. What's more, as Daily Tech reports, at least some of those 3.8 million laptops will be shipping with Windows -- specifically, a stripped-down version of XP that's been designed for "emerging markets."

[Would that be the nutered XP version that can only run three applications at the same time? Like, AV software, a firewall and Windows Explorer? - Sander]

Like Dracula, the old myth that free software can't innovate keeps returning. Its latest incarnation is in the form of a column by Jaron Lanier in the December issue of Discover Magazine. But this accusation is one that's overdue for a stake through the heart. Those who have experienced free software projects firsthand know that they depend on innovation and generally foster it. In fact, the very idea of free software is one of the most innovative ideas in the history of computing.

As an electrical engineer with an automotive background, when I think of Linux, I think of servers, PCs, supercomputers, and so forth. Embedded applications don't really come to mind when I consider Linux. However, Linux is used as an operating system for many phones, games, and other devices with embedded software. Even though Linux is open source (free), certain companies could have patents that could be infringed by people using Linux in embedded applications.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog. The award program will involve the OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org communities.

If you create a piece of open source software and discover that it has been put to use in a way you find personally distasteful or immoral, what would you do about it? That's a question that was raised, albeit in a somewhat oddball form, just recently. Not long ago the Motion Picture Association of America released what it calls the "University Toolkit", a custom edition of Xubuntu that comes with a number of network analysis tools, allegedly for detecting copyright-infringing network activity.

India may have been a late starter in adopting the powerful computer-based education program One Laptop Per Child (popularly known as OLPC), a brainchild of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte to bridge the technology divide between rich and the poor children in the developing world. But with the formation of an Indian edition -- called OLPC India -- the program, which aims to equip millions of world's school children with cheap laptops, is not only set to make an entry into India but also promises to do it with a bang.

Back in May I spent some time with Linutop’s fanless, Xubuntu-based micro-PC, framing my review from the perspective of a Linux-naive home user, to see if the compact device would make a decent alternative to a low-end Windows PC. At the time I criticised how tricky, for a fledgling user, it was to add functionality beyond what was preinstalled; since then, Linutop have released v1.2 of their software package, and asked if we’d like to check out the changes.

The brouhaha surrounding Sun Microsystems and ex-employee Neil Wilson over governance of the OpenDS project - first reported in The Register - continued to bubble this week, not least among Reg Dev's readers. Many of you took the harsh, but arguably fair, point of view that Sun was in the right as work done during the employer's time belongs to, guess who, the employer. Others adopted the slightly provocative stance that open source developers are "chumps" because what they are really doing is unpaid open source development for companies like Sun that have the money to pay.

Red Hat has launched a"real-time" addition to its Linux operating system, which it claims will make some features run 100 times faster than rival technologies. Red Hat's Messaging Real-time Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta on Tuesday with a full release in the first half of 2008. MRG is an addition to the open-source specialist's Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, and is designed for businesses such as banks that need to carry out transactions on their IT systems as instantaneously as possible, or "real-time".

CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System), the free Linux distribution based on the commercial Red Hat Enterprise distribution, has been released in version 5.1 for i386 and x86_64 architectures.

Welcome to the sixth issue of OpenLDAP Weekly News (OWN), the unofficial weekly newsletter for the OpenLDAP community.

Hands Across America, Live AID, the Concert for Bangladesh, and so on. The American (and world) public has witnessed one feel-good event (and the ensuing scandals) after another. Each one manages to assuage our guilt about the world's problems, at least a little. Now these folks think that any sort of participation in these events, or even their good thoughts about world poverty and starvation, actually help. Now they can sleep at night. It doesn't matter that nothing has really changed.

Recently, Gmail added IMAP support, giving the powerhouse email host the ability to interact better with third-party clients. And Google, being the friendly neighborhood do-gooder that it is, provided instructions on how to use IMAP with a variety of third-party clients. However, it forgot one popular client: KMail, the email portion of the KDE Kontact personal information management suite. Google also neglected to mention that several of its other services, such as Google Calendar and Google Reader, can work well with Kontact. Here's how you can integrate them.

Nokia recently announced its Linux-based N810 tablet, and although the device is not yet widely available, the accompanying software is. The new operating system, designated Internet Tablet OS2008, is available as a free download for owners of the previous N800 model. In that rarest of all outcomes, the new release actually improves the older tablet -- it is faster, improves battery life, and should make it easier for developers to port applications over from desktop Linux.

First North American kernel developer, Ted Ts’o, will work full-time with the LF

A couple of months ago, I discovered a tool called rpmrebuild while searching for a way to reverse engineer the files installed on an older Fedora system back into its original RPM package. Rpmrebuild is able to reconstruct an RPM by looking up the information about it on the RPM database that is part of every RPM-based distribution like Fedora.

On Dec. 4, Red Hat announced the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Messaging, Real-time, Grid. The company claims that MRG will offer new capabilities for financial services and government agencies that need exceptional performance through reliable enterprise messaging, real-time capabilities and advanced grid and high-throughput computing technologies for deployment on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and other operating systems.

One of the biggest arguments for windows that everybody uses and indeed in my last rant I actually had a few comments specifically mentioning it. The basic argument is that you can do everything in windows via the GUI and you have to use the command line in Linux. I was informed in an earlier article that windows 2008 is able to be installed without the GUI so I wondered. If the GUI is so good. If all programs and system configuration can be done through the point and click interface. Then why is Microsoft giving the option of installing windows 2008 without the GUI interface? Further why are windows aficionado's touting this as a "Good Thing (TM)"?