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Chumby is a wireless Linux-based stuffed plush box that can do pretty much anything you can hack it to do. That was the promise when wewrote about it in theSeptember issue of Linux Journal. Now it's also reality: Chumby is shipping.read more

In nearly 10 years of experimenting with, and, later, using Linux, I have never been presented with a situation where someone actually asked me to preside over their initial foray into the use of the open source operating system on a regular basis.

This is part 6 of Ulrich Drepper's "What every programmer should know about memory"; this part contains the second half of section 6, covering the optimization of multi-threaded code. The first half of this section was published in part 5.

The Economist asks,Will Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites transform advertising? Good question, but it's the wrong one. The right question is,Can we equip customers to become independent of sellers and their controlling intentions— Including the unwanted crap that constitutes far too much of the world's advertising? For the good of both sellersand buyers?read more

Many people still question whether Linux will ever make it fully into mainstream computer acceptance. A $199 computer now available on a major superstore's shelves just in time for Christmas might change all that. Anyone who wants a computer to just to send email and instant messages and watch YouTube videos should like the Everex gPC, which is powered by a nifty Linux distribution called gOS.

Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.

Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source.

Right after Halloween, Wal-Mart introduced Everex's Ubuntu Linux-powered TC2502 gPC for a list price of $198. Two weeks later, they're sold out. Everex tells DesktopLinux that more will be coming though. Wal-Mart only bought an initial run of approximately 10,000 units. For once, Wal-Mart's vaunted supply chain management system failed to predict just how popular an item would be. Wal-Mart offers a similar Everex model with more base memory and Windows Vista Home Basic called the Everex Impact GC3502 Desktop, for $100 more. Wal-Mart still has plenty of those.

This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change. During his OpenWorld keynote this year, the Oracle CEO said the company means business next year. Oracle VM server virtualization, launched this week, will "differentiate ourselves from Red Hat", he proclaimed. And "going into the second year we will have sales with support and engineering, and we will grow faster."

WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. "We've been extremely happy," Hoefner says.

As hordes of European Java programmers descend on the JavaPolis conference in Belgium in mid-december, the developers of XWiki hope to turn heads with their "second-generation" wiki software that includes experimental integration with the Google Docs spreadsheet module. XWiki faces formidable competition, though. JavaPolis's own site runs on the competing Confluence platform, said by its developer to be in use by more than 4,000 organizations; XWiki's clients number in the hundreds. Confluence has its own spreadsheet plugin that interfaces with EditGrid rather than the ubiquitous Google Docs. XWiki hopes Google integration will be the killer plugin that raises its profile as an enterprise wiki.

I’ve been demoing this little green laptop for months. Everywhere I go, it’s a star, and everyone who sees it always asks me the same question: when can I get one? Finally, I have an answer: right now. But you’d better hurry, because they are only available for another 12 days. And here’s a little secret: it’s a really good deal. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is ambitious: to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.

Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get. Though of no use against actual insects, Mantis is great for the other variety, since it lets end users report bugs or suggestions, and gives developers a full workflow solution so bugs can be assigned and progress on them checked until eventually the problems are fixed.

Red Hat and systems management specialist Hyperic have formalized their ties. The companies now plan to create an open source systems management package that will run across Red Hat's portfolio. Up until now, Red Hat's JBoss unit showed Hyperic the most love. It developed code on top of Hyperic's base software as part of the JBoss Operations Network. That work will continue and should benefit from more communications between Red Hat and Hyperic. The two companies plan to discuss roadmaps and work to share core more liberally. In fact, Red Hat will contribute its code to the open source Hyperic project.

Ubuntu is extremely popular on the desktop, but it's made comparatively little progress on servers. That's about to change. Dell is expected to announce in the first quarter of 2008 that it has certified Ubuntu Linux for its server lines. In an interview with Rick Becker, Dell Product Group's vice president of solutions, Becker said that Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. "But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I'd say it'll be announced in Q1 next year."

You can think of Kile as an IDE for the LaTeX document layout system. Instead of requiring you to learn a considerable amount of markup language, as LaTeX itself does, or providing you with a graphical interface that hides you from the complexity, as Lyx does, Kile automates the process of working with LaTeX while keeping the markup visible. This arrangement makes Kile an ideal way for beginners to learn LaTeX, as well as a convenient and efficient way for more advanced users to work with LaTeX.

Today we're going to create menu icons for launching our backups whenever we darned well feel like it, set up a simple network backup scheme, and create automatic scheduled backups.

Sun yesterday announced its new open virtualisation and management platform, xVM.

Logitech's Harmony series of programmable universal remote controls ship with Windows and Mac OS X configuration programs. That wasn't enough for Phil Dibowitz, though -- he set out to build his own Linux support. Remotes from the Harmony line feature fully programmable buttons, an infrared (IR) receiver that can learn commands from other remotes, LCD screens (some in color) with reprogrammable labels, and user-defined macros with which you can script multiple-command sequences involving multiple devices. All of these advanced features are configured through a GUI application that accesses Logitech's remote database of home theater devices and uploads your settings to the remote over a USB cable.