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Former Vice President Al Gore told Embedded Systems Conference keynote attendees in San Jose, Calif. today that energy-efficient IT systems of the future -- many containing embedded processors -- will be a major factor in helping overcome the major climate problems the Earth is now facing.

This technical briefing will take a deep dive into some of the most important, feature rich projects that the Eclipse community is developing.

The Defense Department has launched a new program to encourage the use of open- source encryption software within DOD systems. The Open Source Software Institute of Hattiesburg, Miss., will support the OpenCrypto Management Program, which is part of DOD’s Open Technology Development road map initiative. The goal of that program is to provide DOD with greater system development and acquisition flexibility through collaborative software development.

The last two years, Google and O'Reilly have presented a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON. For the first time, we're opening the nominations up to the entire open source community. The award will recognize individual contributors that have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, collaboration, in the development of Open Source Software.

Bangalore-based Mistral Software is shipping a Linux-based development kit for TI's ARM11-based SoC (system-on-chip). The OMAP2430 Starter Kit (OSK) targets wireless application development, and includes a 2.6.19 kernel, open-source bootloader, JFFS2 filesystem, and NFS-mounted root filesystem.

Lotus Software on Wednesday extended its Linux support to the desktop with the introduction of a Web-based client for its Domino messaging and collaboration server.

A senior software engineer and a marketing manager, both from IBM Rational, talk about open standards system development with the James Webb Telescope project.

Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu. Now, I’m all for the reuse of old hardware wherever possible. It’s damaging to the environment to improperly dispose of such systems, for instance. In business settings, we can often repurpose older PCs and servers in a number of ways. Older PCs often make excellent firewalls and web proxies. By installing an OS like OpenBSD or NetBSD on such hardware, one can get a secure, affordable and yet powerful system. But I’m not sure this holds true for the home data server suggestions.

Intel has been creating a mobile PC specifically aimed at developing countries. The device had to be lightweight, mobile, and rugged, while offering sufficient power for standard desktop applications to be run. That PC is known as the Intel Classmate PC and is set to go on sale commercially in the second half of 2007.

Like clockwork, the GNOME project released GNOME 2.18 six months after the release of GNOME 2.16. The new version carries a number of improvements over the 2.16 release, but doesn't bring many "must have" features that would compel users to upgrade right away.

Linux will ship in more than 200 million phones in 2012, up from 8.1 million in 2007, forecasts a new report from ABI. "The industry as a whole is rallying behind Linux," even while acknowledging that significant barriers to widespread Linux adoption still exist, the market research firm suggests.

I recently returned from a whirlwind trip to Singapore and China. In China, I spoke at the 2007 Software Innovation Summit - Open Source Software and Trends in Internationalization event organized by Stephen Walli and Anne Stevenson-Yang. Stephen blogged about the event and has posted the slides from the talks.

Open source virtualisation expert has announced the availability of its latest commercial server project

One of the first things I happened to notice was how much Firefox-like this browser seemed. It's true, and after looking further into it, the only real similarity is that it’s build upon the Gecko engine. Everything else is pure GNOME design.

Five schools in the Western Cape are beginning the development phase of the platform independent INGOTs (International Grades in Office Technology) certification. Using the outcome based model of education, it aims to teach learners skills that can be applied in any number of applications.

The POWER5 processor is a 64-bit workhorse used in a variety of settings. Starting with this introduction to assembly language concepts and the PowerPC instruction set, this series of articles introduces assembly language in general and specifically for the POWER5.

While there are several different distributions of Linux specifically aimed at educators and students, they are not all created equal. Most, however, bear striking similarities -- both in the basic code and in the assortment of software offerings bundled into the distribution. Though each flavor of Linux has its own pros and cons, that variety may actually work to a user's advantage.

One of the core problems for open source has always been that as a radical force outside the mainstream it is hard for its supporters to influence conventional players there. In part, this was what made Dell'sIdeastorm so important: it gave a voice to those hitherto unable to communicate usefully with the company. The effects have been dramatic, with Dell nowpromising to sell systems with pre-installed GNU/Linux. The question then must be, how can we build on that success to achieve maximum impact?

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on Debian Etch and Ubuntu servers. Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

The $489 Acer Aspire AST180-UD400B desktop box looked like a good, moderately priced desktop to provide the computing power for my Linux ham station. I had to wipe Windows from its drive before I began, and Ubuntu failed to recognize some of its hardware components, but it proved a solid performer.