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Google is planning to release version 2.0 (code-named Donut) of its open source Android mobile operating system this year. While presenting the latest stage of development at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced that Android 2.0 should be ready in approximately three to six months.

Saying it will improve the netbook user experience on Linux, RealNetworks Inc. is licensing its RealPlayer for Mobile for the popular Ubuntu Linux distro running on x86 and coming ARM-based netbooks, as well as three up-and-coming "instant-on" Linux operating systems. Besides Canonical Inc.'s Ubuntu, RealNetworks has signed deals with Xandros Inc. for its Presto instant-on Linux desktop, DeviceVM for its similar Splashtop product, and Phoenix Technologies Inc. for its also similar HyperSpace Linux environment.

In a message to the community, OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz explained how things with the open source mobile phone are to go from this point on.

We have seen a lot of action at Computex around the Snapdragon based android eeepc and all the shenanigans around it. Despite this there are so many manufacturers preparing Android and Snapdragon Based devices that Asus can't afford to miss the boat. I also think that the new Android smartbooks will not only be cheap, but that eventually they will be free and I'll explain why below.

The sleeping giant has awakened. It looks like Cisco Systems is addressing the Asterisk open source IP PBX threat — and opportunity. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Anyone who doesn't know the economy is unwell has obviously been off the planet or in a cave for the last nine months. Despite the government's attempt to stop the bleeding, one company after another has collapsed — the latest to join the list is General Motors, a fixture in American automotive culture. GM's situation, which included filing for bankruptcy this week, comes with an additional blow to the company, if not fiscally then to its corporate pride: the company's bankruptcy filing has disqualified it from inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an honor it has held for eighty-three years, a record second only to General Electric's 102 years.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Debian Lenny. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

What's better than helping to fund Linux kernel development? Getting additional benefits, that's what.

Christian Schaller's Transmageddon and Daniel Taylor's Arista are both easy-to-use video file conversion tools for GNOME, but they share more than just a vision for simple file transcoding. Rather than competing head-on (or attempting a merge), the two developers are collaborating in the middle; sharing information and utilizing the similar aims of their projects to strengthen the underlying GStreamer multimedia framework on which both code bases depend.

It is bad enough that the bad guys constantly try and phish your financial data via email and fake websites, now cash machines are getting in on the act - thanks to Windows XP.

As they make software and hardware purchases, governments are creatures of habit. They form long relationships with IT vendors and stick with them so they can keep their IT systems running with minimal interruptions. And while new technologies might be intriguing, governments often shy away from major IT changes because they have little willingness to take even the slightest risks of introducing a glitch into their infrastructures. So they stay with the companies and technologies they know as they undergo their traditional Request for Proposal (RFP) contract bidding and acquisition procedures.

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T subsidiary Bell Laboratories, saw the month-long departure of his wife and young son as an opportunity to put his ideas for a new operating system into practice. He wrote the first version of Unix in assembly language for a wimpy Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler.

Data storage specialist SanDisk announced at Computex the redesign of its solid state drives. The flash memory is intended to be quicker and more precise than the first generation.

KDE 4 creator Matthias Ettrich, envisaged a Unix desktop with a common look and feel. KDE 4 has been released for over a year now, has it met this goal?

Security specialist Jacques Copeau has analysed a number of well-known PHP applications for susceptibility to the MIME sniffing issue in Internet Explorer. This "protective" feature, originally introduced as a security measure in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, can in fact cause the browser to treat an image as HTML and execute embedded scripts.

The Hymera desktop team has announced the release of Hymera 20090601, a new Italian desktop Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux: "Hymera Open 20090601 has been released for download. The most important changes and improvements are as follows: new Linux kernel 2.6.29.3; new modules for identifying graphics cards and wireless network cards; fixed bug in Hymera video switch; fixed bug GNOME settings daemon; latest ATI and NVIDIA drivers; update of open-source ATI drivers; update of open-source NVIDIA drivers; default file system - ext4; improved system's boot speed."

Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha both aim to organize the chaos of information, but go about it in very different ways.

IPplan is a free opensource IP Address management application. IPPlan is a web based IP address management software and tracking tool simplifying the administration of your IP address space. IPplan goes beyond IP address management including DNS administration, configuration file management, circuit management and storing of hardware information.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am heartily encouraged by this small snippet of news I picked up via Twitter this afternoon (thanks Roy)

After 5 months of hard work the Amarok team is proud to announce the next major release, Amarok 2.1, codenamed "Let There Be Light". Since the release of 2.0 we have gotten a lot of feedback and have already integrated some of it in 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. This new release includes a new look, many improvements, new features and brings back old favorites.