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Linux-powered robots are flocking to Atlanta this week to compete in the Robocup scientific competition. The eleventh annual event has attracted at least two Linux-based designs aiming to replace Sony's Aibo as the de facto hardware platform for standard Robocup league play.

Alan Cox posted an updated LibATA PATA (IDE) status report on the lkml. Improved from a previous status report [story] he noted, "current kernels now support HPA (Host Protected Area) but default to honouring it. Probably a wrong default for PATA but we need to decide the right way to expose it nicely." He went on to note, "no PATA hotplug support yet. Need warmplug helpers for some chipsets (eg some intel ICH) to avoid risk of hangs."

Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution. Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

A small company near Torino, Italy is shipping a tiny ARM9-based processor module designed for use with low-cost carrier boards. Elpa's RD129 comes pre-installed with the latest Linux kernel (currently 2.6.21.5), and is available with a handy development board.

There's probably more open source in your organization than you think, which makes it critical to put some governance standards in place.

After interviewing Axel Dorfler yesterday, in this second installment of Five Questions, we interview Robert Szeleney, the main driving force behind SkyOS. SkyOS has been in development since the late '90s, but for the past few years, it has seen rapid development.

Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing butopen source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.

OpenOffice.org suffers from a wildly inconsistent user interface (UI) that combines unique elements with borrowings from Microsoft Office. Now, in the upcoming version 2.3, it is finally having some of the cosmetic procedures it so badly needs -- at least in the charts subsystem. The changes include a new default color scheme and a heavily revamped wizard, but only small changes in functionality, making this revision a case study in UI design for both better and worse.

For many seasoned Linux developers, device drivers still remain a bit of a mysterious black art practiced by a select few. While no single article could possibly attempt to covered everything there is to know about writing drivers, Valerie Henson gives us a brief taste of what's involved, by implementing a device to return "Hello World" using all the major driver frameworks.

This article shows how you can install the Linux version of Google Desktop on a PCLinuxOS 2007 desktop and an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) desktop. Although the program is still marked as beta, Linux users can already search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts.

The Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has offered a prize for the best campaign against Microsoft's attempt to gain international standardisation for its Office format.

I run a small but fairly active Web site from a home server, as was commonly done back in the early days of the World Wide Web. What started as a learning project soon grew to be my primary hobby. It takes a bit of knowledge of Linux systems, various open sourced applications, and how the Internet works to start a Web site from scratch. Here are some of the applications and tools that help me stay on top of things.

A spoof cartoon of ever increasing war of OS between Microsoft and Linux.

Neuros Technology has rolled out pre-release firmware for its Linux-based OSD networkable set-top box that allows the gadget to suck down and show YouTube content. The firmware allows the OSD to be used to browse and play the entire YouTube video collection on any standard-definition or HD TV.

David Kline left a comment regarding my blog on Intellectual Dishonesty. There are a few points that David makes to which I’ll respond and then I’ll touch on his invitation to show “…any evidence at all…” that supports the view that the patent system is being used to stifle innovation.

Nora Denzel says open-source software is changing the landscape of an industry led by Hewlett-Packard and IBM. You might dismiss her as just another fan of open source, the freely available software best known by Linux. But Denzel is the former head of HP's software group. She resigned last year. Denzel recently spoke with IBD about open-source management software.

Look at how to create scripts that are able to record their output, trap and identify errors, and recover from errors and problems so that they either run correctly or fail with a suitable error message and report. Building scripts and running them automatically is a task that every good administrator has to handle, but how do you handle the error output and make intelligent decisions about how the script should handle these errors?

The KDE e.V. and KDAB are happy to announce continued collaboration on the Free Desktop, with KDAB becoming the latest new Patron of KDE. KDAB is known for its high-quality software services.

Last January, Host Europe, a company that runs the Web sites for 120,000 businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, secured an unlikely supplier for the open-source software it uses to run almost all of its computer servers.

At the second day of aKademy 2007, the contributors conference closed with the aKademy Awards Ceremony. Two of last years winners, Boudewijn Rempt and Laurent Montel awarded no less than four awards to Sebastian Trueg, Mathias Kretz, Danny Allen and Kenny Duffus.