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Atmel has launched an interesting new chip line aimed at reducing NRE (non-recurring engineering) expenses associated with ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) development. The CAP ("customizable Atmel processor") integrates a Linux-friendly ARM9 core together with a metal-programmable function block where users can implement cores, DSPs (digital signal processors), or custom peripherals.

Company releases Linux version of desktop search software, which simultaneously scans the Web and computer-stored data for results.

The second annual LinuxWorld Korea took place in Seoul's Coex Convention and Exhibition Center June 20 through June 23. It was held in conjunction with the annual SEK show, the"representative IT exhibition in Korea." Some of the companies that routinely exhibit at North American and European Linux-oriented events were there -- and so were some you probably never heard of unless you live in or follow IT news from China, Japan, or Korea.

The Simple Linux Backup project announced the release of version 0.3.2 today. Simple Linux Backup is an easy-to-use program for backing up a desktop Linux system, with a friendly user interface, originator Steven J. Rosen said.

The non-profit, member-supported Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of its"largest-ever" release. The release includes 21 projects by 310 developers in 19 countries, and more than 17 million lines of code -- more than double the size of last year's release.

Trolltech will provide free phones and SDKs (software development kits) to developers willing to target its Qtopia application development framework for mobile phones. The Qtopia Greenphone Grant Program will provide an unspecified number of awardees with Qtopia SDKs, along with Trolltech's open, Linux-based Greenphone target device.

For better or worse, DRM is everywhere. In the past six months, letters have zinged across the web and provided fodder for newspaper headlines. The issue balances the rights of the consumer to use purchased works against the rights of the artist

Officially released Monday, Scientific Linux 4.5 can now be installed as a Xen paravirtual guest which, according to the developers"gives a significant speed increase over fully virtualized guests."

The sad tale of how the hope and excitement of a promising distro turned to fear and loathing in Linux land. Puppy Linux Most distro reviews focus on installing and using one release of a recent distro. But when people decide to stick with a distro, or abandon it after a longer period of use, the reasons are more to do with the entire distro experience, which includes the distro technology, its package management, the size and reliability of its package repositories, the ease and speed with which bugs are reported and fixed, the quality of the documentation, and the social experience of being part of the distro's community, as exemplified by its forum and IRC channels. Here I relate my personal experiences with Puppy Linux over the course of approximately one year.

Can a commercial graphics program find a market for professionals in GNU/Linux? A company called e frontier is experimenting to see if one can with Anime Studio Pro 5, an editor not only for anime, but also Flash animations, webtoons, and other forms of 2-D graphics. Compiled from much the same code as the Windows and Mac versions, the GNU/Linux version includes the same functionality, with a complex but highly organized interface and three different forms of animation.

Many directories in the UNIX file system serve a special purpose, and certain directories are named per long-standing convention. In this installment of the "Speaking UNIX" series, discover where UNIX stores important files.

Earlier this year, The VAR Guy spent considerable time blogging about Zimbra’s open source email platform. He suspected that the collaboration suite would gain momentum with colleges. Boy was he right. In recent months, Zimbra deployments have more than doubled in higher education. For Exchange and Lotus Domino/Notes VARs serving higher education, it might be time to give Zimbra a look.

Fluxbuntu is back, says project leader Joe Jaxx at Fluxbuntu.org of the fledgling Ubuntu variant that installs with a Fluxbox window manager (fast, light -- a great alternative to GNOME, KDE or Xfce.

On Friday, June 29, at 12 noon (EDT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3. Please join us in celebration as we bring to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world's most popular free software license.

[I received this information just a little while ago. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems has announced new functionality for Solaris Express Developer Edition. The OpenSolaris-based distribution targets developers for the Solaris OS, Java, and Web 2.0 with a set of products that are optimized for multi-core processor architectures and includes new compilers and development tools designed to assist developers in creating better applications more rapidly.

Standalone backup solutions are always a great alternative to effortlessly backing up necessary files in case disaster strikes, and it usually strikes at the worst possible time when you forgot to update your backups over the last weekend. However, things aren’t so bad these days. With the rise of online backup services and terabytes worth of storage space in third party devices with complimentary applications, there’s no reason to lose any data now.

While podcasting and video blogging are all the rage, many people still prefer the simplicity of the typed word for expressing themselves online -- that is, a blog. However, popular blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type can be tough to configure and maintain. On the other hand, you might not want to use an online service like Blogger or TypePad because you want complete control over your blog. If you're not afraid of the command line, take a peek at Bash Blogger. As its name implies, this application is a bash script that automates all of your blogging tasks (aside from writing, of course).

What defines an online operating system? In my neck of the woods, it would have to be the applications it comes with. The biggest problem I see at this point with online operating systems is that they have you emulating what you already have access to, thus canceling out any shot of providing added value.

We would like to ask our readers for input and collect some of our readers’ questions. Our intent is to focus on exclusionary deals and the integrity of Free software although any ‘lighter’ questions would be very suitable as well.

What used to be created by a team of open source programmers is now being done by one or two programmers. I have seen this trend happening with a few different projects recently and found myself wondering if this is what is needed to get more, viable applications in the market - faster.