The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn’t already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model. How significant is this move?
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Two highly vocal — though not particularly successful — U.S.-based desktop Linux vendors have become one. The formal announcement that Xandros has acquired Linspire came today, following several days of static on the blogosphere.
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Having recently been bit by the Netflix STB bug, I couldn’t resist checking out Roku’s latest SoundBridge “network music player.” In less than 10 minutes of fooling around with the device after its arrival, I was ensnared!
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Netflix and Roku have jointly announced a tiny set-top box (STB) said to offer unlimited streaming of DVDs and TV episodes on Netflix members’ TVs. The $100 “Netflix Player by Roku” is confirmed to run a customized version of Linux, along with robust DRM (digital rights management) technology.
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Call me old fashioned, but one complaint I have about Kubuntu 8.04 — aka Hardy Heron — is the lack of a traditional desktop trash icon on its KDE desktop. Fortunately, this is easy to fix!
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Last time I wrote about the “Black Tower,” I had just installed Vista and Kubuntu 7.10 in a dual-boot setup. When version 8.04 of Kubuntu (”Hardy Heron”) hit the Web last week, I wasted no time upgrading to it.
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The Linux Foundation will hold its second annual Collaboration Summit this week in Austin, Texas. The invitation-only Summit, which brings together many of the foremost minds in Linux server, desktop, and mobile software development, aims to “determine how to advance the operating system in the year ahead.”
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Developers thinking of using Linux as an embedded operating system won’t want to miss the annual Embedded Linux Conference in Silicon Valley next month. The event features keynotes and technical sessions on topics such as Maemo, real-time performance, power management, embedded graphics and multimedia, mobile phone technologies, fast boot, and much more.
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NXP Semiconductor and Purple Labs have announced a reference design aimed at enabling the manufacture of 3G Linux feature phones that could be sold to mobile operators at under $100. Touted features of the “Purple Magic” phone include video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing, and video streaming.
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Flash filesystem (FFS) specialist Datalight Inc. will soon release a commercial Linux FFS claimed to provide 400 percent faster write performance and 500 percent faster mount speed compared to JFFS2. The new FFS will target Linux-based mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices.
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DeviceVM demonstrated a Linux-powered PC preboot application environment that lets users instantly run several Internet-based applications — including Web browsing and Skype messaging — at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
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Here’s an Open letter from DeviceGuru to Ubuntu Linux project founder Mark Shuttleworth:
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The KDE project released version 4.0.0 of the KDE Linux desktop environment on Jan. 11. It’s available as upgrades to several major distributions, and on a special live CD version of Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu.
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A team of electrical and computer engineering students at Calvin College is developing an electronic stethoscope based on an embedded Freescale system-on-chip (SoC) running Linux.
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The SCO Group — infamous for its attacks on Linux over alleged Unix copyright infringements — slipped further toward an abyss from which it is unlikely to emerge, with the announcement that it was delisted by the Nasdaq stock exchange effective December 27, 2007.
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After constructing the Black Tower and verifying that it began to boot — not burn up — I powered it up, and set about loading it up with software.
As mentioned in the earlier post about this system’s hardware, my intention was to share the system between both my consulting activities and a wide range of hobbies and multimedia projects, so I decided to make it dual-boot between Vista and some version of Linux.
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