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Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.

The history, status, and future of audio for Linux systems was the topic of two talks—coming at the theme from two different directions—at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Ardour and JACK developer Paul Davis looked at audio from mostly the professional audio perspective, while PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering, unsurprisingly, discussed desktop audio. Davis's talk ranged over the full history of Linux audio and gave a look at where he'd like to see things go, while Poettering focused on the changes since last year's conference and "action items" for the coming year.

There is just one week left until Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be released, but is it worth the upgrade if you are running a netbook? From our testing of the development releases, it is most certainly worth the upgrade, especially when compared to Ubuntu 9.04 with its buggy Intel driver stack that caused many problems for Atom netbook users. Ubuntu 9.10 brings many usability improvements to the Linux desktop, various new packages, and the overall system performance has improved too. We have ran a set of benchmarks on both a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Samsung NC10 under Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 to illustrate the performance gains along with a few regressions.

Suddenly I was surveying the market again for a good buy on a netbook preloaded with Linux. I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.

Due for a November release, Fedora 12 is already shaping up as an exciting, jam-packed release that targets netbook users, virtualization, improved networking, and much more.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. To celebrate the past five years of brown, we decided to have a look at five ways that Ubuntu has helped make the open source Linux operating system more human.

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop edition improves on the work of 9.04 to get you going faster, with improved start-up times and a streamlined boot experience.

As Canonical delivers the first Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate to users, ZaReason is preparing to offer Ubuntu 9.10 on desktops, notebooks, netbooks -- and a new server. ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose and CTO Earl Malmrose describe their strategy to WorksWithU.

He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister. He was recruited by Adobe as Director of open source and standards with a specific mission: "I was hired to, a) start an open source process and, b) get PDF approved as an ISO standard." So: mission accomplished?

Japanese software firm Access and Israeli mobile design firm Emblaze Mobile today demonstrated a smartphone prototype and device stack based on the LiMo-compatible Access Linux Platform (ALP) 3.0. The Else phone incorporates a Texas Instruments OMAP3430, 16GB internal flash, 3G, WiFi, GPS, and jointly developed "Else Intuition" software.

If you'd like to play with Asterisk and need a cheap SIP phone, the VanAccess IP0020 can be obtained on eBay for as little as $20. But with no included manual and a SIP registration bug in the firmware, this phone can be tricky to configure. This article reviews the IP0020 and shows how to get it working with Asterisk.

Mozilla has confirmed that the release of Firefox 3.0.15 and 3.5.4 have both been delayed until Tuesday the 27th of October. The minor security and performance updates were originally scheduled to be released on the 21st of October, but are being delayed for further beta testing. Details of the planned changes in each update, however, have yet to be confirmed.

What if you didn't need the Internet or a telephone system to communicate electronically with your friends? Imagine you could independently share electronic information with friends through wireless devices without external hardware or software. Think of how excited people get about checking in with friends using Twitter and Facebook. Now, with the right software and your current hardware, people could do those same kinds of activities in their local community--without any need for the Internet or the restrictions of Internet service providers. People could use their wireless devices for personal communications where there is no Internet or when there is no Internet, such as in a disaster situation, or when public networks are banned, such as in places like Iran. We believe that having independent control of our communications networks can be a valuable resource that opens new possibilities for communities.

If you are a Facebook fan then you must have used the official Facebook desktop application.The app is good but it’s not detailed and offers only limited features. You can’t see live notifications of new stories, can’t post a comment and if you need to upload a photo you have to open Facebook in the browser all the way. If you are not quite satisfied with the official Facebook desktop application or other desktop clients have a look at Facebook –Photo uploader. It is a new desktop client for Facebook, released by Adobe with really useful features.

After a few months of development, AWN (Avant Window Navigator) 0.4 is available for beta testing. In case you don't know, Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (or at least it used to, read on!). It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets. Version 0.4 brings a lot of new features and improvements, such as 3 new styles, extended mode, you are now able to place it on any side of the screen, new auto-hide modes and lots more.

Gimplabels is a set of scripts for the Gimp image editor that make creating labels and business cards a snap. It works part of its magic by depending on the GUI label designer gLabels

If personal computing is moving to the web, then where are all the lightweight Cloud focused distributions? Meet xPUD, a brilliant little distro that boots straight to a fullscreen browser. It uses a simple, unique interface, and includes everyday software such as a media player and more! We talk with the lead developer about what makes this operating system unique.

Today I installed digiKam and the 62 other KDE packages that go with it in a GNOME-based Ubuntu box. I never like to add 63 packages for a single app. But I did it. Thus far digiKam is most unlike any image editor I've ever used before. Mostly because it's not really an image editor but can do most of the tasks one would associate with just such an application.

This episode includes interviews from Ohio Linuxfest 2009: "40 Years of Unix". Shawn Powers, Doug McIlroy and many more.

In the first two parts of this series we learned how to build a custom Linux kernel. But there are so many options it's easy to get lost. Today we'll clarify some of the more important places where it's easy to go wrong.