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Could this be the badly needed 'fix' that we need in the wireless world with regard to Linux? While it does present a new world of simplicity with getting innovation underway, I do not think this alone is going to help get more wireless vendors on board with the Linux movement anytime soon.

If you have a point-and-click digital camera made by Canon, you may be able to turn on all sorts of features usually reserved for more expensive SLRs. That includes live histograms, depth-of-field calculation, under and overexposure highlighting, and -- best of all -- shooting your pictures in RAW. The secret is CHDK, an enhanced, free software replacement firmware.

Is PC maker Lenovo looking for a Linux distribution to ship with their product range? A blog by a senior Lenovo staffer calling for users to vote for their favourite distribution suggest the company may be doing exactly this.

ZoneMinder is the top Linux video camera security and surveillance solution. In this document I will cover how to get ZoneMinder up and running on Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS or Dapper Drake with the recent updates included. The surveillance system I am covering here utilizes 4 Dome CCTV cameras hooked up to a single Kodicom kmc-8800 capture card, in addition I also used infra red LEDs so my cameras could see in the dark (Honestly I am abit scared to look). ZoneMinder also does a good job with IP Cameras, unfortunatly they are considerably expensive in my part of the world, hence 4 cameras would blow my budget.

Sidux 2007-03 is a Sid-based Live CD. For those who need a "more-friendly" and more stable Debian sid, then Sidux is for you. I think Sidux would also appeal to those users who prefer a rolling-release type of Linux distro, so that they don't have to reinstall the resident Linux distro whenever the "hot cake" arrives every 4 to 6 months. Other Linux distros taking such approach are Debian Etch, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, etc. By the way, MEPIS LLC is going to to implement the same rolling-release approach in its much awaited SimplyMEPIS 7.0 too.

IBM will join the OpenOffice.org community and contribute code and resources, the company announced today. IBM has been a major supporter of the Open Document Format (ODF) which originated at OpenOffice.org, but hadn't yet taken the plunge to help out with the development.

Sliverlight for Linux? Not so fast. You’ll need to pay some ‘Microsoft tax’ first, for protection from Novell — a ‘protection’ that expires within about 4 years. How do we know this? Thanks to our reader, Victor Soliz, we have it right from the horse’s mouth. To paraphrase Victor and quote Miguel de Icaza, he says that in order to legally use Moonlight you will have to “download it from novell.”

The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.

Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Enthusiasm for Linux and open source software is clearly growing; with last week's announcements about Lenovo's preferred Linux distro poll and AMD's opening up its ATI video drivers, things have never looked this exciting on the Linux-supporting hardware front! But some questions remain: do we really want every major PC manufacturer to support Ubuntu only? And will other distributions be able to catch with the increasing dominance of Canonical's operating system? Read more in our editorial. In the news section, openSUSE shows faith in KDE 4.0, Puppy Linux launches a major upgrade, and StartCom announces a new release of its workstation for audio enthusiasts. Finally, if you live in or near Toronto, don't miss the upcoming Linux conference called Ontario Linux Fest. Happy reading!

Regional Linux users received a boost today as open source leader Red Hat announced the opening of a regional support centre for the Middle East. The Red Hat Certified Support Centre is set to open in Dubai on December 1. Red Hat's local partner Opennet will operate the facility, which will be only the fourth partner-operated centre in the EMEA region.

Recently on this blog, I wrote You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser. In this, I argued that any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I specifically mentioned some breathalyzer software that people were fighting to see the source code of. Though the Florida legislature and many regional prosecutors obviously feel that the breathalyzer company’s rights were more important the individual rights, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered that source code to a popular breathalyzer be revealed. The results, if you’ll pardon the pun, are breathtaking.

Just some more images of the work done so far on the extensions for the plasma clock, that i have been working on with Riccardo Iaconelli. Right now i´m working on a time zone extension. The one you can see here is the date extension... Basically, what you get when clicking the date area ;)

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #56 for the week September 2nd - September 8th, 2007. In this issue we cover new Ubuntu and MOTU members, the Tribe 6 milestone, an Ubuntu get-together, the one year anniversary of French UWN translations, and, as always, much much more!

You finally got your Linux environment to crash. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace does nothing, nor do the F-keys. You know you shouldn’t have installed that bad driver, but you did it anyway. So you reach for the power button. Stop. Mashing in the power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC should it ever stop doing its job.

You've got to hand it to Microsoft. It hates ANYTHING and ANYONE that gets in its way of selling its software. Including, apparently, itself. In a very funny turn of events, Microsoft is out preaching to the industry that XP is a bloated expense hog, while svelte Vista will cure world hunger (or, at least, cost less). Anyway, Microsoft must really be hurting if it has to resort to beating up on its most stable product in years.

This past week the Phase 2 "Mass Market" schedule for the OpenMoko Neo1973 was revised. OpenMoko now expects the GTA02v3 design to be finalized by September 20 while on December 10 it will begin production in "moderate volumes". On December 20 the OpenMoko Neo1973 GTA02v3 will go on sale, and with "Santa's Sleigh Package Service", the OpenMoko Neo1973 will arrive on December 25 for those celebrating Christmas.

"I've just released Linux 2.4.36-pre1," announced 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau. He described a new feature found in the first pre-release: "In private discussions, Solar Designer proposed to restrict the ability to map the NULL address to CAP_RAW_IO capable processes only. The idea behind this was to prevent 'normal' users from trying to exploit NULL dereferences in the kernel which have not been discovered yet. This is purely a preventive measure."

As noted in the update to our review of Paterva Evolution, a personal data mining tool, Roelof Temmingh has removed the binaries for the application after having received legal threats over its use. In an email on the Paterva announcement's mailing list over the weekend, Temmingh revealed more about why the binaries had to be removed and unveiled his plans for future work on the project.

Nick Piggin posted an efficient algorithm for converting a data structure, "this is my 'data structure switch' algorithm that can convert one data structure into another, with just a single unlikely branch in fastpaths and no locking or atomic operations (the branch is only triggered when the data structure is in the process of being converted). A pointer indirection is generally also needed when converting a global data structure."

Ever wanted to run RISC OS apps on a Linux powered PC? Simon Willcocks has, and he's done something about it.