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By the end of December 2005, I had been blogging on ODF developments in Massachusetts for about four months, providing interviews, legal analyses and news as it happened. At that time, not many bloggers were covering the story, and email began to come my way from people that I had never met before, from as far away as Australia, and as near as the State House in Boston.

Thousands of Polish high school students now have a chance to learn about GNU/Linux and the benefits of using free software as Polish FLOSS foundation together with school headmasters, supported by local authorities organize a series of lectures on free software in education. PolishLinux.org has a report — summary of the first 3 months of the campaign.

Even we at TG Daily sometimes question points he makes and we occasionally get into heated discussions. But we are very well aware of his background and experience and realize that he is one most knowledgeable general analysts in Silicon Valley today and we learned over the years that there's always a good reason why he has certain opinion.

[Some holiday chuckle from our favorite analyst -J.]

In the almost five years since SCO launched its attack on Linux and IBM, open-source and legal experts have predicted that SCO would fail and the company would collapse with its lawsuits. That day is one day closer at hand. On Dec. 27, SCO was delisted from the Nasdaq.

The XO laptop I received last week as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project's "Give One Get One" (G1G1) promotion is unlike any other laptop I've ever used, both in appearance and functionality. It's smaller, for one thing. The XO weighs only 3.13 pounds, is 9 inches wide, and approximately an inch thick when closed. But there's a lot more difference between the XO and a normal laptop computer than size. It has strangely marked keys, unusual buttons, external wi-fi antennas, a unique UI, and an original reason for being. Most people, myself included, will compare the XO to normal laptops, but that's not a good comparison. The XO is not designed to do the things that most notebooks are called upon to do, and no other notebook in the world can do the things the XO can do. There is some overlap, of course, but in the main it's apples to oranges.

The Debian development team yesterday announced the second update for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, or Etch. Stability enhancements and an updated installer top the list of updates in this release.

A low-cost laptop for children based on Intel's Classmate PC design is now shipping in computer stores in Vietnam. Hacao's Classmate PC is pre-installed with Hacao Linux 2.16 Professional, a Vietnamese-language distribution based on Puppy Linux. The Hacao Classmate PC is equipped with an ultra-low power 900MHz Celeron processor with a 400MHz FSB (front-side bus), teamed with 256MB of RAM and 1GB of Flash-based local storage. The 2.9-pound device measures 9.6 x 7.7 x 1.7 inches (245 x 196 x 44mm), and features a 7-inch WVGA (800 x 480) LCD display.

LXer Feature: 29-Dec-2007

Thanks to a friend who knew a friend who knew someone else, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Chumby for a few days even though it is only available as a limited preview and not outside the Unites States. It's probably one of the first Chumbies in Europe. I only had it a few days as it was only lent to me by the owner, but this gave me ample opportunity to play with the device, give a thorough review and hack it a little. And what fun I have had!

When I was very young, I used to fight with my younger brother. One day, after being made to give in, he went to my mother and complained about the fact that I had been in a fight with him, and mom told him that if he didn't want to fight, he didn't have to. He could just walk away. She also told me the same thing. I drove my brother nuts by doing exactly what my mom said. I quit competing. I started working on my inner geek, while he was off trying to figure out why I didn't engage anymore. This is why Linux makes MS nuts.

Two weeks I wrote about how the XO laptop endowed a 9 year old boy with seemingly magical powers (of intellectual curoisity and competence), and I wondered aloud whether my 9 year old daughter would fare as well. On the one hand, she does like gadget gifts such as The Littlest Petshop. On the other hand, many such gadgets wind up as nothing more than a surface waiting to be decorated with stickers or glitter glue. Would her reaction to the XO validate or repudiate Negroponte's hypothesis that his project is an education project, not a laptop project? It seemed to work pretty well for Rufus...

There are a total of 21,652 packages installed on my home workstation, an AMD64 single core processor box which has been in use since March 2006. It runs the testing stream of Debian. That's a lot of code, all of it free as in beer. A vast army of developers has given decades of precious time to make it possible for people in every corner of the globe to use a computer and not have to depend on expensive software which, in more cases than not, results in more problems than solutions...

As 2007 winds to a close, the editors of LinuxDevices.com have assembled a retrospective aimed at highlighting major trends and events in the world of embedded Linux. Of the approximately 1,200 stories we published this year, these were the most important, in our opinion.

Congratulations to all the new Christmas owners of the year's hottest subnotebook, the ASUS Eee, putting Linux square in the mainstream and right in the hands of the masses. Here's a collection of tiny – but dead useful – hints and tips to help you get the most out of it.

Jeff Campbell (aka "Mr. Zonbu") has reviewed the Linux-based Zonbu Notebook. His final review score -- 8.5 out of 10 -- balances praise for thorough features, sharp display, and excellent support, with some questions over performance and design. Following up on his generally positive review of the Zonbu Desktop Mini desktop system, previously known as the Zonbox, Mr. Zonbu now takes on the laptop model, which offers the same Gentoo Linux distribution and software offerings.

The most important thing that make youngsters so attached to Windows and reject Linux distributions is running games. To solve this problem we propose these links. containing explicit tutorials on how to run games on Linux.

When the Everex gPC ($199 direct, without monitor) was announced, it received some fanfare as a bargain-subbasement "green" Linux-based PC, or the (quite unofficial) "Google PC," available at your local Wal-Mart. Everex, a firm known for producing cheap laptops for big-box stores, supposedly designed it for nontechnical yet Web-savvy users who like to go on the Web to see their friends' pages on social-networking sites or YouTube videos. Google and Google Apps are a central part of the gPC's raison d'être, but thus far the gPC is not a Google-licensed product. "G" also stands for green, since the gPC uses a low-powered VIA C7 processor. But as with the Google aspect, gPC's energy-efficient status is to some extent smoke and mirrors, as I'll explain later. The gPC does have a green-colored theme and start-up screen, so it has that much going for it. But the good news ends there.

My blogging colleague Robin Harris on Storage Bits poses an interesting question “How should Microsoft respond to very-low-cost Linux systems?” Here’s how - by trying to make cheap systems irrelevant. That’s easier that you think you know. You see, take a look at either Vista or Leopard (it doesn’t matter which) and what do you see? That’s right, a rich, media intensive platform that’s stuffed full of eye candy. It attempts to make low-end systems that can’t handle all the glitz and glamor obsolete.

[ZDNet has some pretty clueless articles at times, but this one is particularly bad. - Sander]

So called mainstream technology shows love to bash Linux.

Internationally renowned security guru, Bruce Schneier, will be encouraging technologists at linux.conf.au to take a lesson from Luke Skywalker, and "feel the force" a little more when it comes to security. Schneier, who is CTO of BT Counterpane, is one of the three keynote speakers at the 2008 Linux.conf.au. He joins Python release manager, Anthony Baxter and founding member of HP's Linux division, Stormy Peters. Dahna McConnachie speaks with Schneier about his talk, "Reconceptualising Security" and how technologists need to remember the importance of the human element. He also discusses cyber-war, what Linux has done for security, and the likelihood of another edition of Applied Cryptography.

This is a how-to use aptoncd, a great tool, to use when you have no, or limited Internet Access, take all the installed packages on your tuned Debian / Ubuntu machine with you, for new installations. You can create CD or DVD or just use it as an ISO image on your USB memory.