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MontaVista has announced Meld, a new community for developers of embedded Linux devices. Meld provides a forum for developers of all skill levels to connect and share information, ideas, and software around embedded Linux designs, accelerating their development efforts and delivery of commercial products. Developing embedded Linux systems is a complex process. Meld addresses these challenges by bringing embedded Linux developers together in an online community.

Project Gutenberg is a real treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning etext files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works.

It took a little longer than we had expected, but we can finally announce that Sacred Gold has been sent to the production company, and we expect it to be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks. We expected to have had it ready weeks ago, but some last minute issues caused some unexpected delays. But that is all past us now, and the game is in production!

It's been a decade since Linux proponents first argued their OS was ready for mainstream adoption. Yet for all intents and purposes, Linux remains nonexistent on "regular" people's desks. Sure, developers and other tech experts use Linux, but that's about it. So when my colleague Neil McAllister, author of InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog, made the case for desktop Linux, I snorted, "Give me a break! Desktop Linux is nowhere." He challenged me to try it myself. He had a point: It had been a decade since I fired up any desktop Linux distro. So I accepted his challenge. My verdict: Desktop Linux is a great choice for many regular Joes with basic computer needs. And not just on netbooks.

Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t appear to pursue its rights against companies that supported FAT32 in their Linux thumb drives and consumer electronics. Until the TomTom case. At which point Jeremy Allison of Samba says Microsoft had secret cross-licensing deals with all those other guys which violate the GPL. So the question becomes, who should Software Freedom sue?

While Linux is widely used in servers and is growing slowly on the desktop side, the embedded market for Linux is one that continues to have momentum. One such proof point for came this week from the year end financial results for embedded operating system vendor Wind River. For its fiscal 2009 year, which ended on January 31, 2009, Wind River reported $359.8 million in revenue, a 9 percent increase in year over year increase. The companies net income hit $10.8 million, which is a turnaround from the net loss of $2.4 million for the prior year.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced additions to the speaker lineup for its March 21st-22nd LibrePlanet 2009 conference. The conference, to be attended by GNU/Linux users, free software activists, and programmers from around the world, stresses three themes: strengthening global free software activism, addressing the threats posed to free software users by moves toward "cloud computing" and "software as a service," and advancing the projects on the FSF's High Priority Projects list. Jeremy Allison, lead developer of Samba, will be giving a talk entitled, "The Elephant in the Room. Free Software and Microsoft." Evan Prodromou, member of the autonomo.us working group and founder of the identi.ca free software microblogging service, will be sharing lessons learned from his experience bringing free software concepts to web services.

Microsoft's dismissive attitude of VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure, calls to mind Red Hat's stance toward the desktop as a viable Linux commercial offering. Red Hat has said it has yet to figure out how to monetize the Linux desktop as a product, but now seems to be figuring out a way to make the desktop pay while continuing to give it away via the Fedora distribution. With its recent desktop virtualization agreement with Microsoft and other work it's done, Red Hat may soon be offering VDI capabilities.

If there was one thing Linux Format magazine learned from the Readers' Round Table event it organised, it was that us Linux folk like to get out and have a good chat. Over the several hours we were all together, we covered dozens of subjects, and the conversation was lively and opinionated. And that was with only nine of us. Imagine what such a meeting could be like if there were more attendees, more of a schedule and a little better organisation? This is the realm of the Linux User Group – a network of Linux enthusiasts that weave a web of community across the UK, and across almost every country in the world.

With deteriorating global economic conditions making their impact felt in the wireless industry, handset OEMs and mobile network operators are looking to Linux-based operating systems to cut costs and diversify their handset portfolios, reports IMS Research. While Linux-based operating systems have had a presence in the mobile handset market for years, growth has been slow and steady until recently. However, recent announcements from Motorola, Vodafone, HTC, and Huawei, among others, all stating that Linux-based operating systems will figure in to their upcoming handset releases, clearly demonstrate that OEMs and operators are ready to embrace Linux software on a larger scale, according to IMS Research.

Last September, LWN pointed out the OpenBTS project, which is working toward the creation of a free GSM base station using GNU Radio and Asterisk. OpenBTS had just been demonstrated through the creation of a cellular network at Burning Man. More recently your editor, who had been looking in other directions, was surprised to learn that the OpenBTS developers are not allowed to tell anybody where to get the source from, despite the fact that it is available as free software. Intrigued, your editor decided to look into what is happening with OpenBTS.

Small, efficient devices such as the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC are taking the battle for free software to a different front, bringing Linux to hordes of computer users who don't know or care about Linux. They just want something that works, and when they try it, they like it. This isn't just empty rhetoric: our neighbours across the road at Vista Mansions frequently pop over to ask questions about their Linux-powered Aspire One and borrow a cup of sugar. But the Aspire One's interface is aimed at newbies, and you're not a newbie: you're a Linux guru in the making, so let's see what we can fiddle with…

This guide explains how you can set up fully-virtualized guests (HVM) with Xen 3.2 on a Debian Lenny x86_64 host system. HVM stands for HardwareVirtualMachine; to set up such guests, you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V). Hardware virtualization allows you to install unmodified guest systems (in contrast to paravirtualization where the guest kernel needs to be modified); that way you cannot only virtualize OpenSource operating systems like Linux and BSD, but also closed-source operating systems like Windows where you cannot modify the kernel.

Fedora 11 Alpha came out a month ago, 2 days later than the initial schedule, and it has recently entered its “Feature Freeze” state. Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 is due to be released on May 25th and it includes a large number of new features (most of them have already been approved). I’ve been using Fedora for more than 5 years and I often run Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch) to preview some of the future improvements. I couldn’t have missed this Alpha release, so I installed it for testing (first, as a guest OS in VirtualBox and then on my laptop).

A mixed bag of jokes today. Both hilarious... unless you don't like them ;)

!whatever:p, sudo !!, ^foo^bar ... if they whet your appetite and set your pulse racing do I have a web site for you! It’s the Digg or Reddit of the Linux command-line world.

When Eric Raymond posted the first of the Halloween Documents in 1998, it marked the end of the beginning for open source. That is to say those documents demonstrated that the logical superiority of the open source development model had penetrated the most headstrong corporate skull in the proprietary software universe: Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft could judge major open source projects to be equal or possibly superior to their own efforts more than 10 years ago, and the fact that they recognized

It's not very surprising as we've all speculated a full-fledged Google OS for years, then Google's mobile OS hit the phone market, and now we've seen it (Android, of course) already installed and working dutifully on netbooks. It's not rock-solid, but Google's CEO has hinted that there'll be subsidized, Android-powered netbooks backed by Google or its partners arriving to the netbook scene soon.

Thinking of buying a BMW, a Peugeot or a Citroen in the near future? If you are then the chances are pretty good that you'll be buying an automobile with a small Linux computer behind the middle console

PekWM offers an additional solution: window grouping. It allows a variety of different applications to be grouped together in a single window. Most everyone is familiar with tabbed browsing by now. Window grouping takes this one step further. When window grouping is used in PekWM the title bar in the window manager is segmented with each section effectively acting like a tab.