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Next Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I am hosting a Q&A panel about contributing to X.Org and open-source projects, where the panel participants are largely comprised of well known X.Org and Mesa developers that began contributing while at university. In hopes of sparking new contributors to these key open-source projects, computer science students from the major Chicago universities have been invited to attend this panel discussion and anyone else wishing to learn more about open-source development. In preparation for this panel, I have been collecting some new development statistics on Mesa and X.Org.

Microsoft has created some customized Windows VHDs with the purpose of allowing web designers to test websites in Internet Explorer 9, 8 and 7, for free. To make it easier to set up, xdissent has created a Mac OSX / Linux script that will download the required files, extract them, install the latest VirtualBox guest additions and so on.

Huawei is launching a 3.8-inch Impulse 4G smartphone on AT T, offering Android 2.2, 4G service, and a five-megapixel camera for a record-breaking $30 plus contract. Meanwhile, Kyocera teamed with Sprint to announce a three-inch, Kyocera Milano smartphone with Android 2.3 and a 3.2-inch camera for $50 plus contract....

Wine 1.3.27 brought Direct3D multi-sampling support and other features just two weeks ago, but it's been replaced today by Wine 1.3.28. There's some exciting changes in this release too with DirectDraw now defaulting to the OpenGL renderer, an initial version of the VBScript parser, and other changes...

Advantech announced a single board computer (SBC) that runs Windows CE 6.0, Linux, or Android on a Texas Instruments OMAP35x processor. The PCM-C3500 has either 128MB or 256MB of RAM, can include 2GB of flash storage, has four serial ports and four USB 2.0 ports, and features an Ethernet port with RJ45 connector, according to the company....

Aaeon announced an 18.5-inch panel PC that looks and works like an overgrown tablet. The ACP-5815 has a capacitive touchscreen with two-point multitouch, a choice of Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, CompactFlash and hard disk storage, a Mini PCI expansion slot, plus an optional camera and RFID reader, according to the company....

Chumby is readying a Linux-based IPTV set-top-box that can be remotely controlled by a Wi-Fi connected Android device. Soon to be offered as an open development platform, NeTV is equipped with an 800MHz Marvell processor, and it will include both a Webkit browser that can overlay content on video and a personalized news crawler....

iPhone and iPad users still wide open Apple has finally purged the imprimatur of disgraced web authentication authority DigiNotar from its Mac operating system.…

Sencha is encouraging interactive designers to switch to its new Sencha Animator v.1, "the industry's first purpose-built tool for creating CSS3-based animations that deliver plug-in-free rich-media experiences".

Alias are a great tool to help increment your productivity on the terminal with bash (or any shell program you’re using), but usually we are too lazy to think at what are the most common, or long commands that we use frequently and prepare an alias for them.

And so someone has done a small piece of software to do this job: aliaser

Aliaser helps you identify frequently typed commands and creates bash aliases for them. Aliaser analyses your bash history and helps you identify commands that you use frequently.

What a wacky week for tech news this has been! I couldn’t make much of this stuff up if I tried – and if I did, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s one of the nice things about the Internet, I can provide you with links so you can see for yourself that these stories really happened… Apple Loses Another iPhone Prototype in Bar. Less than a year and a half after an Apple employee lost a top secret prototype of an iPhone 4 in a bar, it’s happened again. This time the prototype of an iPhone 5 was lost at Cava 22, a bar located in San Francisco’s mission district. Although every tech site on the planet is covering this story, I think it’s only fitting to turn to Gizmodo for a quote, given their connection with the first lost prototype:

Google has built a brand-new programming language for "structured web programming", one that appears to be suited to browser-based apps. Two of the search giant's engineers will discuss Dart, Google's new language, at the Goto international software development conference next month.

4PSA, a technology leader in Cloud Communication Software will be presenting the latest enhancements to their VoipNow Unified Communications Platform at ITEXPO West 2011, held at the Austin Convention Center, September 12th-15th.

I know many of you cringe at the mere mention of GNOME Shell or Unity. I don't have any reservations like that. As a matter of fact, I really like Unity a lot. But what about GNOME foundation's official GNOME Shell? I have never really used it except for once when I reviewed an early release of GNOME Shell in Fedora 15. But not with Ubuntu yet, not until now.

Tametick has release Cardinal Quest an arcade style dungeon crawler for Linux on Gameolith!

Intelligent systems -- embedded devices featuring connectivity, high-performance CPUs, and high-level operating systems -- already outnumber PCs, servers, and mobile phones combined, IDC says. Moreover, the market for these products will double in units and revenue by 2015, the research firm adds....

I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).

Searches for the word "linux" have been trending downward since early 2004, according to Google. Searches in mid-2011 are about a quarter of what they were in early 2004. On the other hand, searches for "android" more than doubled those for "linux" by mid-2011. So, what should we make of that?

Gratis and libre can both be interpreted as free. However, there is a difference. Gratis is free as in beer and libre is free as in freedom, to quote the common explanation. Usually a piece of open source software fits both words, but should it?

This week, we explore why WEP2 rules for WiFi security, how to control software licensing costs and why Google is in trouble again in its patent-infringement battle with Oracle.