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The Overo Fire COM is the top of the line in the Overo series from Gumstix.com , at least at the moment. It contains not only built-in Wifi 802.11b/g capabilities but also BlueTooth capabilities on board. Coupled with the TI OMAP-3530 processor it is a powerhouse machine for both embedded applications and for personal general purpose linux computing!

Reports surfaced late this evening that computing giant IBM — which has been in talks for some time to buy Sun Microsystems — has pulled its $7 billion offer to buy the struggling company. According to reports, IBM withdrew the offer after Sun's Board of Directors made "onerous" requests following IBM's decision to lower its offer for the firm. IBM initially offered $9.55 per share, but dropped that offer to $9.40 — less than a $1.00 premium on Sun's current stock price — due in part, it says, to the discovery that far more senior employees than originally expected are covered by "change of control" contracts. Such agreements cover senior executives — who often face replacement on acquisition — should the company be bought or otherwise come under the control of someone other than its Board.

Picture a world where your social interactions don't require a conscious effort on your part to open an app, but one where the computing power is ubiquitous and device interaction happens effortlessly. That's a world that Andrew Lippman of the MIT Media Lab described last week at at the Wednesday keynote at AIIM.

SUSE studio is a web front-end to customize and build your own personal distribution in as many ways you could possibly think off. There are other similar services and applications that helps you make custom distribution but none of them are as extensive in customization options as SUSEstudio or as easy.

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

7 interesting applications which you may find cool to use while in command-line.

This short guide shows how you can pass through USB devices (such as a USB flash drive) to VirtualBox guests on an Ubuntu 8.10 VirtualBox 2 host. USB support is available only in the VirtualBox PUEL (closed-source) edition, not in the OSE edition, so make sure you have the PUEL edition installed.

The Fedora project has announced the availability of the Fedora 11 beta release. Fedora 11 includes several compelling new features such as support for kernel modesetting, Ext4 by default, and faster boot time.

It happens at some point whether you are a sysadmin, server programmer or even the generic application developer: you will have to connect to another system somewhere and pass data. On the off chance that one has to really get into the dirty details of network connections there is a way out; connect and select. In this text a look at getting the action of connection testing off the ground to a solid host/port connect check .

1. There are no linux viruses This is a myth, there are linux viruses. Not many, not as harmful but they do exist. 2. A virus scanner uses to much resources. You don't need to run a virus scanner all the time, if this is what bothers you. Having one at hand couldn't hurt. 3. Viruses in Linux are harmless, as they can't access root.

Economic downturn weighs heavily on Linux--but should it?

Ask a network administrator in any large organisation to compare Linux with network operating systems like Windows NT or Novell Open Enterprise Server, and chances are he'll admit that Linux is an inherently more stable and scalable solution. Chances are he'll also admit that when it comes to securing the system from outside attack, Linux is possibly the most difficult of the three to work with.

The maintainer of the Linux stable series has released kernel version 2.6.29.1. It contains nearly 50 fixes and minor enhancements for the ten day old Linux 2.6.29 which saw Tuz the Tasmanian devil stand in temporarily as mascot. In the release mail, kernel hacker Chris Wright specifically points to fixes in the network subsystem which some users of 2.6.29 had problems with.

Today a friend of mine wanted to know how he can check the status and or speed of multiple Network Interfaces/Ports on a device ( Switch, Router, Server, etcc ) using SNMP. Specifically he wanted to know if the Interfaces/Ports are Operationally Up or Down and also if it is Administratively. Then he also wanted to know the speed of the Interfaces/Ports that were Up or Down. Now you can easily get this information through SNMP or if you have a monitoring tool like Zenoss. But he wanted a command line script that would run fairly quickly and either print the results to STDOUT or that he can pipe the ouput in an email. So I decided, ok I'll wite you a quick script in Python that will get you that information. FYI, I'm thinking of making this script compatible with the Nagios API. If you want this feature please let me know...

Here are 5 add-ons which should be essential for any Firefox user.

This posting follows up recent discussion at xen-users mailing list regarding functionality of virt-install and virt-manager after Gitco’s Xen 3.3.1 Hypervisor Upgrade on CentOS 5.3(2). Via the posting bellow i try to demonstrate that Gitco’s upgrade of libvirt-python, python-virtinst,qemu packages and Xen Hypervisor itself seems to be a nice job with no serious issues keeping libvirt and virt-install (virt-manager) utility pretty stable at runtime. I also state that suggestion of use xen-tools & rinse on Xen Systems with libvirt abilities doesn’t look to me right way to manage vs utilizing debootstrap on Debian and Ubuntu Xen hosts, providing libvirt for the KVM only.

Microsoft may view its legal settlement with TomTom as a patent victory of sorts but it’s a hollow and meaningless win in the eyes of some in the open source community. Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt said the settlement announced yesterday was anticipated and expected and he is “nonplussed” with the result. He said Microsoft’s effort to build a series of tiny “totem” patent cases to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about using Linux is futile. "This [settlement] says nothing about the validity of the patent ..... the community provided support in the best way possible and that support facilitated an interim settlement," he said, adding that the commercial success of mobile Linux will not be derailed by legal posturing. - Paula Rooney, ZDNet

The Gnome Foundation has laid out a roadmap saying it's time to depart from incremental updates. The team said it's realized it's not enough to simply organize a collection of individual sub-projects and that a project-wide roadmap is needed. Gnome is the default environment of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, and initially the goal was for a version 2.30.0 - that will now become 3.0 due next March. Responding to growing criticism of Gnome's "lack of vision," the team said its 3.0 release will focus not only on streamlining the platform, but "revamping the user experience."

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren't cool enough, it's portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive. Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn't bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

The "Quiet Revolution" continues. While the main media and mainstream tech entities slumber, GNU/Linux is gaining ground. This decade-long struggle is not far from being proclaimed "an overnight success." Here is exactly how it is doing so.