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This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, December 19, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 40. In today's stories, we get a breath of fresh Air from Adobe, montrously huge losses at Palm, the sudden dematerialization of Novell's Brainshare, a disturbing shot of reality from Good OS, and some fantastic Linux toys for the geek on your shopping list.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, December 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 38. Today's stories feature a whole mess of speculation. Does Windows need a package manager a la Linux? Can Apple do small? Will USB 3.0 do Linux first? Wherefore art thou, Palm new-ness? Who stole my Linux netbook? Will you believe the truth if you heard the lie first? It's all speculation.

The next version of the Access Linux Platform has been unveiled, alongside a lightweight version of the mobile operating system for low-cost handsets. Access Linux Platform (ALP) is the mobile platform used by Access, the Japanese firm that bought PalmSource and the Palm OS--which was subsequently renamed 'Garnet'--in 2005. On Monday, Access chief technology officer Tomihisa Kamada showed off ALP 3.0 at the company's annual showcase event.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. -Mitch Ratcliffe

We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0. --Andy Pierson

After the glut of netbooks on the market, Imovio, an offshoot of U.S. company Comsciences, presents the iKit Multimedia Messenger, a palm-sized netbook with Linux. The device is equipped with Bluetooth and WLAN and is perfect for chats and email, although it brings along other applications.

Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler has adapted his Enlightenment window manager to low-powered, small-screen devices like mobile phones. The Linux desktop graphics pioneer has released a pared-down widget set, along with ports and video demonstrations of E17 on OpenMoko's NeoFreerunner phone and Palm's Treo650 (booted into Linux, naturally).

In today’s world the Palm does not produce the same level of excitement in developers that it used to. One of most important reasons for this is that the Palm OS itself has too many limitations, and, frankly, Windows Mobile is not exciting. Palm, the company, has been aware of this fact for years and has been promising a new Linux based OS for just as long. However, the mythical Linux based Palm has never come ... But, now there is Android.

A company called Moderro Technologies this week unveiled the Xpack Web 2.0 Cloud Computer, a palm-sized appliance dedicated to cloud computing. The US$395 computer was being demonstrated at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, and is set to begin shipping in late October.

The phone rings. You pick it up, and it is the recruiter for your dream job. Your palms begin to sweat as the technical interview starts. “You want to know the run-levels for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® or Fedora®?” You pause, thinking. “Well, I use Linux every day, and I know single user mode is level 1…”. You stammer a bit, and say you’re drawing a blank for the rest. The recruiter thanks you in that “sorry” tone-of-voice, and hangs up the phone.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan said the company's long-awaited operating system of the future will center around the Internet, and be distinct from the familiar Palm OS that's currently available. Palm has been somewhat tight-lipped about the future of its operating system development, but Colligan gave an interview to APC in which he described the "Nova" OS as a "next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications." Nova will be based on a Linux core and is scheduled to arrive next year.

It's a bit surreal to watch ibm come off as the plucky, self-deprecating maverick. That was the specter May 1 as CEO Sam Palmisano took the stage in Los Angeles with Google chief Eric Schmidt, both their heads squarely in the cloud.

The US smartphone market may continue to be dominated by mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, and RIM, but Linux has been creeping into ever more mobile devices in the last few years. Some Motorola RAZR 2 models have donned a Tux, Palm is looking to Linux to drive its next-generation consumer smartphones, and Android's backers hope to spread it to an even wider array of handsets. Linux is also driving many avant garde connected consumer electronics devices such as the Chumby, Nokia N810, Amazon Kindle, Dash Express, and whatever the fertile minds tinkering with Bug Labs' modules are envisioning,. Even the remote control that houses the user interface of Logitech's Squeezebox Duet is a Linux computer.

A pint-sized, multi-functional Linux server small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, was released this week into the North American market by Japan-based Plat'Home.

Orange and Access have become the latest companies to join the LiMo Foundation, a consortium aimed at promoting mobile Linux. The companies announced their LiMo memberships here on Monday at the Mobile World Congress. Both companies come bearing gifts. The European operator Orange plans to launch a "fully open, Linux-powered handset" in partnership with Access and fellow LiMo member Samsung Electronics. Japanese Linux company Access brings with it an established developer network that was acquired when it bought PalmSource and its Palm OS (which became Garnet) in 2005.

Back in the day, Microsoft was the new kid on the block when it came to mobile devices like PDAs, munching up Palm's market share and tweaking the interest of application providers already familiar with Windows and Microsoft's applications. Today, the descendants of Microsoft's Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Smartphone, are the ones getting left behind as Apple's iPhone proves one of the main catalysts for action in the mobile sector.

John Palmieri of Red Hat is developing a new D-Bus debugging tool called D-Feet. D-Bus is an interprocess communication protocol for the Linux platform that is used extensively in the GNOME desktop environment and KDE 4. D-Bus allows users to call methods and trap signals from other applications and services that are running on the computer. D-Feet is very useful for Linux desktop application developers who are attempting to write programs that integrate with existing software through D-Bus.

LXer Feature: 6-Jan-2008

Happy New Year and Welcome to the first LXer Weekly Roundup of 2008. This week we have a petition for the free use of codecs, our own Carla Schroder talks about how some people should not use computers, the Top 10 Open Source applications on the desktop, 355.6 million reasons the Novell-Microsoft deal is working, Hans Kwint tells us why Open Source is the way to go, who is the most hated company in the PC industry and how to destroy the GPL from the inside.

Who in the hell is Asustek, and why does Microsoft hate them more than any other company in the industry? Why does Apple, Dell and Palm Computing hate them? And why does Intel love them?

I decided that I needed the Palm back in my life. I can maybe steal a minute or two hear and there to write, and if I use pen and paper, chances are whatever it is will never make it into print/online because things change and what I wrote is no longer up to the minute. My Palm Tungsten E had gone totally dead. I had to restore everything with a sync, and by some kind of magic, my Palm infrared keyboard suddenly started working again. So it was time to get the Palm and Linux talking to each other.

Some days ago, I posted about Foleo a Linux based Palm equipment, which was intended to be a palm companion so users, could have access to the content in their palms, using a QWERTY keyboard and a big screen. Yesterday at Palm's official blog, appeared this announcement where they say they are going to "cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration"