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Palm's Linux-powered Foleo has potential, but only if Palm can stop denying that the device is actually laptop, reckons Sascha Segan of Gearlog. Palm has positioned the Foleo as a "mobile companion" for itinerant workers needing only email, document prep, and PowerPoint capabilities.

The OLPC got a major boost today with the announcement that Intel has joined the organization and will serve on its board of directors. No doubt, Intel wouldn't mind seeing the OLPC's low-cost Linux laptop's AMD Geode processor replaced by one of its own chips. More specifically, Intel said it expects to "explore collaborations involving technology and educational content."

Knowledge of a secondary language has long been a coveted skill, whether it be for academics, business, or travel, but learning another language can be a challenging task. While many Western languages at least offer a level of familiarity by sharing the Roman alphabet, Japanese and other Eastern languages offer no such comfort. Here are three applications that can help you overcome some learning roadblocks.

There is always myths that surround the Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA Electronic Health Record. I have not found a compendium of these myths and the facts so I wrote this list. As well I was partially inspired by Fred Trotter's recent 'Antiquated or Proven?'response to a detractor of VistA. Please feel free to add to this list by replying below.

The second annual "Open Source in Mobile" (OSiM) conference has announced its sponsors and program of events. Set for Sep. 18-19 in Madrid, Spain, the event features keynotes from representatives of Nokia, Access, Red Hat, Motorola, Telecom Italia, and HP.

A group of developers from free software digital video recorder (DVR) related projects announced the first step towards a solution for obtaining free television listing information this week. The search for such a free guide data source has been on since June, when Zap2it Labs announced it would shut down its free, XML-based service as of September 1.

Japan has adopted a policy under which government ministries and agencies will solicit bids from software vendors whose products support internationally recognized open standards and thus becomes the first country in Asia to embrace the open software Standards.

XForms is a standardized technology that offers many simplification and optimizations that are complimentary to Ajax. In this article you will see some of the benefits of using Ajax and XForms together by implementing an autosuggest-form field, widely used today in web applications.

Jeroen van der Zijp, the author of Fox Toolkit, gives kerkythea.net an interview. The Fox Toolkit is a platform independent GUI that has become one of the fastest and well structured APIs.

You can stop computer-based slacking -- like the compulsive reloading of Digg or Reddit at the expense of productivity -- with a few changes to your computer's DNS profile, and enforce the changes using Lockout, a tool designed to enforce discipline and increase productivity.

After a short break, we return to the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, travelling back to Germany to talk to a developer who wants to make things as simple as possible - for both users and developers. The recent winner of an aKademy Award for Best Non-Application for his work on Phonon - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Matthias Kretz.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 was released on Thursday 14th June. This update to the Mozilla Corporation's mail client includes bug fixes but no new features. For the first time, this release of Thunderbird is available in Korean.

Offering a potential alternative to the existing suspend and restore implementations in the Linux Kernel, Ying Huang posted a patch utilizing kexec, "kexec based hibernation has some potential advantages over uswsusp and suspend2. " He listed two such potential advantages, "the hibernation image size can exceed half of memory size easily," and, "the hibernation image can be written to and read from almost anywhere, such as a USB disk [or] NFS."

We are currently reviewing the debian.org account database and checking a list of developer accounts that *appear* to be inactive. The purpose of this review is simply to minimize the number of live but unused debian.org accounts since they (in sufficient numbers) are an active security concern. It's _not_ intended as a judgment or criticism of contributions to Debian made by those who may end up on our radar.

Following up to a bug report against the 2.6.22 kernel, Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds offered some tips on how to debug kernel problems. Andrew first pointed to netconsole.txt for instructions on setting up a netconsole, "when the machine has stalled, see if you can get a task trace with ALT-SYSRQ-t. This will require CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ=y and possibly setting ignore_loglevel on the kernel boot command line."

As you may know, a brief comment period (expiring July 20) has been announced by the Mass. ITD during which anyone can agree or disagree with it's decision to add Microsoft's OOXML format to its list of approved "open standards." If this sounds like the right decision to you, then just stand by. If not...

It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets as well as fixing a horde of bugs and adding PCI IDs for the 945GME, 965GME, and 965GLE chips. As our last Intel graphics performance article was looking at the Q965 back in May, in this article we have enclosed some benchmarks from Intel's GMA 950 IGP using the new xf86-video-intel 2.1.0 driver.

Zabbix is a solution for monitoring applications, networks, and servers. With Zabbix, you can monitor multiple servers at a time, using a Zabbix server that comes with a web interface (that is used to configure Zabbix and holds the graphs of your systems) and Zabbix agents that are installed on the systems to be monitored. The Zabbix agents deliver the desired data to the Zabbix server. This tutorial shows how you can install the Zabbix server and agent on a Debian Etch system.

So I'm having a conversation on the phone with Scrap [another IT Toolbox member — Sander] this morning and he relayed this little story from his adventures as a professor of information security studies at a local school. I'm going to share this story with you and include my usual warning and disclaimer: Put your beverage down. Do not attempt to drink beverage while reading this. I am not responsible for liquids spilled in your keyboard or all over your screen! Scrap tells the story...

If you maintain a portal, ecommerce site, or heavily trafficked Web site, you might appreciate the ability to identify the geographical location of your site visitors. Geolocation information can help you localize content, serve relevant local advertisements, offer a download mirror close to visitors, and detect online fraud. Techniques like whois lookup of IP addresses are of some help, but they don't always find accurate locations. A better approach is a database that maps each IP address to a location -- such as MaxMind's GeoIP.