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Following its recent Mainz, Germany meeting, the Portland project has now decided on its next moves. Portland, an ad hoc group of commercial and community Linux desktop developers, aims to create a common set of interfaces and tools to allow all applications to easily integrate with the Linux desktop.

ATI has just released a new proprietary Linux driver for both x86 and x86-64 architectures. Interesting features and fixes? Support for X.org 7.0+, toggling between console and X no longer hangs, and you can run more than one X server at a time.

The software world is becoming more distributed every day. The rise of multi-core processors, clusters, and grids means thinking about parallel program execution. Before you plan world domination though parallel computing, you may want to learn some of the basics rules of the game.

I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another piece of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc. [Ugliest blog evar, but makes some interesting points]

Learn to efficiently initialize memory on Power Architecture systems. Software Developer Carlos Cavanna compares simple loops clearing one bit at a time to more elaborate algorithms, including the dcbz instruction to zero whole cache lines at a time. The article concludes with some rough performance numbers to help you tune your own applications.

As Microsoft developers gathered in Seattle to hear Bill Gates's keynote speech on the future of Microsoft and the coming release of its updated operating system Vista, protesters wearing bright yellow Hazmat suits swarmed the entrance of the city's convention center, delivering an unsettling message to the corporation: your product is defective and hazardous to users.

Our community has been abuzz with the rumor that Sun has made its implementation Java free software (or "open source"). Community leaders even publicly thanked Sun for its contribution. What is Sun's new contribution to the FLOSS community?

Further educating event attendees, CP-TA, OSDL and SA Forum are joining PICMG and SCOPE Alliance on Monday, June 5 at 2 p.m. for an industry panel discussion. Held in the CP-TA / OSDL / SA Forum booth #13048, leaders from these organizations will explain how delivering on the promise of interoperable open standards-based building blocks will change the telecom industry.

This Week, From LWN - 25-May-06

One of the comments posted on last week's article about the Java license change asked: how can Debian distribute Sun's Java under the new license?
[...]
Since Debian does very few things without enduring a public brawl first, the addition of Java without discussion raised some eyebrows.

[LXer presents this access to LWN's normally subscriber-only content in full cooperation with Jonathan Corbet, Executive editor, LWN.net. This new feature is offered on a weekly basis. LXer hopes you enjoy this free peek at LWN's excellent community magazine and thanks Mr. Corbet for his cooperation.]

US Linux operating systems integrator Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) is expanding its presence in the Southern Cone by launching two operations in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, the company said in a statement.

In a bid to encourage the mobile phone industry to standardize on a single Web browser, Nokia on Wednesday released the source code for the mobile phone Web browser it developed last year.

If "all politics is local", as Tip O'Niell famously said, can't we say the same about all business? If so, maybe we should start walking our Net Neutrality talk on our own main streets.

As chilly Seattle rain drifted down, the "DRM Elimination Crew" marched back and forth in their suits, handing out brochures like "Microsoft Vista - DRM'd and Defective By Design," "DRM IS Digital Restrictions Management," and "Restricting you the User," to curious passers-by.

Chilling Effects is a resource site for online freedom of expression in the United States. Founded by Wendy Seltzer, currently a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, the site is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more than half a dozen law schools, including Harvard, Stanford, and Bolt. The site exists to document attempts to stifle free speech online, and to provide general legal advice for those faced with such attempts. During its five years of operation, Chilling Effects has become one of the major Web resources on its subject.

KDE is happy to announce the selection of 24 student applications for the Google Summer of Code 2006.

U.S. soldiers in Iraq are forming emotional ties to Linux-powered robots, according to Reuters. iRobot's robots -- used for tasks such as explosives defusing and cave exploration -- are being given nicknames and winning loyalty, to the extent that soldiers request repairs for their favorites, Reuters says.

  LXer Feature: 25-May-06

Steven Titch responded to yesterday's article with a single question: "If this is simply an issue of Microsoft's willingness to commit to open standards, what is your take on Open XML?" Thus, I find myself dealing with yet another missed point.

If you think Linux is not on anyone's radar at Wall Street than you need to Ctl-Alt-Del.

IBM will expand its Brazilian Linux Technology Center (LTC), in order to advance several projects of interest to embedded Linux developers. The $2.2M investment will further projects devoted to Linux-on-Cell and Linux-on-Power, Linux ease-of-use, virtualization, and government security certifications for Linux.

Freescale and Axentra say their collaborative design targets an emerging class of CPE (customer premises equipment) that lets users manage digital content from networked equipment through the home, and access it from anywhere.