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Dell today announced it has chosen AT&T as its exclusive U.S. carrier for its upcoming lineup of Android-based smartphones, known as the Mini 3. Dell has already chosen China Mobile, Vodafone and Claro Brazil as partners outside the U.S. But Dell still has not given out much information on the Mini 3, other than saying that it is an Android phone designed around power efficiency and platform customization. A spokesperson for the company said that with carriers falling into place, it would eventually start to disclose more information on the hardware.

In order for real communication to happen, especially among people from different regions and dialects (let alone people from different countries and languages altogether), terms have to be clearly defined so that everyone is starting from the same point. The problem with such definitions is that the devil really is in the details. A leaked version of the EIF version 2 has raised serious alarm among open source and open standard advocates. ComputerWorld UK writer Glyn Moody describes one aspect of the changes: "But it gets worse: not content with totally eliminating the concrete definitions of open standards in Version 1, Version 2 then goes on to re-define 'closed' as just another shade of openness, but without any of the openness." There is strong concern across the EU that software industry lobbyists have managed to water down the language so that the initial dedication to open standards and open source is completely neutralized.

First branded as a communist plot, then derided as a form of cancer, before being upgraded to merely a 'grey spectre', free and open source software (FOSS) has had a pretty rough ride from Microsoft over the years. For many in the open source community, the company represents all that is troubling about closed source software development. Recently, though, there have been developments that at least one leading open source developer has labelled a 'sea change' following last year's announcement that Microsoft was to become sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

I just found a new toy. It’s a Linux distro running a complete desktop, Firefox browser, multimedia utilities, FTP/SSH/IM/torrent/email clients, and a custom package manager… in a 30MB ISO. That’s right, it’s even smaller than Damn Small Linux. It can be run from CD or USB, and once booted it runs entirely from RAM, so it’s VERY quick and you can remove the CD or USB device while the system is running. You can pop it out and free up that spot to read/play/burn something else. Combined with tools to generate your own customized live CD/USB remix, this makes for a very versatile little package. This is SliTaz, and so far it’s a lot of fun.

If you follow open source news at all, it's been pretty hard to ignore MySQL the last few months. With a desperate campaign to stop Oracle gobbling up MySQL, the FLOSS poster database has been front and center. As usual, the PostgreSQL community has been quietly coding away and working on the 8.5 release scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.

ITTIA, a global supplier of embedded lightweight relational database software, has appointed Trident Infosol as its representative in the Indian software market

As a person who uses Linux regularly, often I am asked about my opinions about other operating systems, especially those coming from large companies located in Redmond, Washington. Here's the deal. Operating systems are tools. We use them to do jobs. It is always a good idea to think critically about what tools you are using, and verify if other tools can do the same job in a more efficient or flexible manner.

Intel used an early-morning conference at today's Consumer Electronics Show to roll out 27 new processors, including 12 specifically aimed at embedded devices. Additions to the chipmaker's Core i3, i5, i7, and Xeon families, the CPUs have two or four cores, include on-chip graphics, and incorporate "Turbo Boost" technology, according to the company.

It is not enough to be a real Linux Geek, if you really want to impress then you must have a Linux mascot in your apartment.. This image tells how to make tux Linux penguin in less than 15 minutes.All you have to do is print this image, cut it out and then glue according to the numbers printed on it.

Google wasn't the only company announcing new Android-based devices this week. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, several handset and mobile device manufacturers also announced new models and partnerships with mobile carriers for their Android devices, ranging from various mobile phones and tablets, to eBook readers.

Microsoft is set to launch Office 2010 Starter -- a stripped down and ad-supported (but totally free) version of Office 2010. Is this Microsoft's response to OpenOffice and Google Apps? Or is this an opportunity to get PC buyers to "try then buy" complete Office suites? Here are some thoughts.

AT&T announced plans to launch five Android devices from Dell, HTC, and Motorola in the first half of the year, as well as two Palm WebOS phones, say reports. In separate announcements, AT&T and T-Mobile said they had completed upgrades to provide HSPA 7.2 service across their 3G networks, says eWEEK.

One of the big advantages of The GIMP is the fact that it can be easily extended with new functionality. So with sufficient addons (particularly plugins), you can achieve a lot of functionality found in other editors. Here are 5 usefull plugins for Gimp, 1- Watermark : A hidden watermark to protect your photos. and last 2- autosave : Periodically saves any open files in the current GIMP instance.

The $20 Centon Craze 4 GB "MP3 player" I picked up a month or so ago is billed as only playing MP3 and WMA files. Well, I neither have any WMAs nor want to have them, but I decided to test which other audio formats, freedom-loving and otherwise, this cheap little device can handle.

RawTherapee is undisputedly the number one Linux program for reworking digital images into RAW format. With the license change the program becomes free software.

Contributors to the WebKitGTK+ project recently gathered for a hackfest to improve the open source HTML renderer's integration with the GTK+ toolkit. They added some cache control APIs, improved support for HTML5 video, form persistence, and other features.

The LISP (LISt Processing) programming language is relevant to OLPC's XO laptop because, like an iPhone or smart phone, it has very limited resources and is not a full sized computer. The LISP community came up with software for biology called BioBike. It is 3 things..

There was a long time that I was looking for a way to put away my old CRM server! But why? Because I had installed a virtualization environment with Xen and all my servers are turned to small VPS on a nice pretty infrastructure. The base point was that the CRM had a USB/Lock and there was no way to take the lock under a virtualized VPS. This tutorial shows how you can set up a USB-over-IP server.

HP announced three netbooks using Intel's N450 "Pineview" processor that support SUSE Linux: the Mini 210, Mini 2102, both with 10.1-inch screens, and the Mini 5102, which offers 10-hour claimed battery life. Meanwhile, at CES the company unveiled a prototype Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android "smartbook," says Engadget.

How does any manufacturer justify the price tag they attach to their hardware? As a result of my experience, I now expect to pay no more than $600 for a fully loaded notebook computer. My expectation of what I can get for that kind of money has gone up dramatically. In truth, the single most valuable thing on my notebook is first and foremost the data, quickly followed by the free and open source software tools that let me get my job done.