Santa Clara, Calif. — (press release) — The Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Linux Internationalization Initiative (LI18NUX) announced today that they have incorporated under the name Free Standards Group. The newly formed Free Standards Group was organized to accelerate the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the application, development and promotion of interoperability standards for… (more…)

Sam Williams, writing at UpsideToday, provides an interesting and insightful perspective on Lineo's business strategies, as well as on other recent news in the embedded Linux market. Williams writes . . . (more…)

Sunnyvale, Calif. — AMD introduced the PCnet-PRO (Am79C976) Fast Ethernet controller, a high-performance 10/100 Mbps PCI bus Ethernet controller with support for oversize packets. The device boasts enhanced packet processing capabilities, for reduced system resource overhead and improved performance in throughput intensive applications like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and streaming video. (more…)

Las Vegas, Networld + Interop — (press release) — Eicon Technology, a provider of wide area network (WAN) connectivity products, today announced the forthcoming release of its EiconCard Connections for Linux software. This complete WAN communications software program for use with Eicon's family of WAN cards provides total WAN connectivity for a wide range of Linux-based system applications, including web… (more…)

Lindon, UTAH — Lineo Inc., a leading developer of embedded Linux system software, today announced “Lineo Partner Connect”, a partnership program that tests and certifies third-party software applications on Lineo's Embedix embedded Linux products. (more…)

Six months ago, Lynx Real-Time Systems — well known for its LynxOS proprietary real-time operating system (RTOS) — unveiled a courageous strategy to embrace Linux, rather than face it in armed combat on the embedded battlefield (see: Lynx+Linux — a Dual OS Strategy). (more…)

Will Knight, of ZDNet UK, reports that a growing number of companies are recognizing that a big potential benefit of Linux is that it it's inherent resistance, architecturally, to the viruses that commonly attack Microsoft Windows based systems. Reduced susceptability to viruses would obviously be desirable for users of PCs in homes and offices. (more…)

Charles Babcock of [email protected] week offers a perspective on MontaVista's newly released open-source real-time scheduler for Linux embedded systems . . . (more…)

Edinburgh, Scotland — (press release) — Spider Software, a UK-based developer of networking protocol software, announced today that it has ported SpiderSTREAMS to Linux to provide a platform for the deployment of wide area communications protocols. (more…)

San Diego, Calif. — (press release) — IBM today announced the immediate availability of a Java based software tool kit that allows developers to create applications and services for a variety of web-enabled devices. The new tool kit, called the Service Management Framework, is one of the few available today that is designed to be fully compliant with the OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative)… (more…)

Gregory Haerr, Chief Maintainer of the Microwindows Project, has written an excellent article about the Microwindows GUI for embedded Linux systems. Basically, Microwindows is a low-calorie GUI that offers a choice of two graphics APIs — X-like; and Win32-like. Best of all, it's released as open-source code, so you can perform the kinds of customization that enable optimized and efficient embedded… (more…)

EndRun Technologies, a Santa Rosa, Calif. startup, says they have lowered the cost of delivering precision time to networks and embedded systems. The company's Præcis family of time and frequency products accomplishes this by extracting time information that is accurate to within 10 microseconds from signals transmitted by CDMA cellular wireless network base stations. (more…)

AMIRIX Systems (Halifax, Nova Scotia) has launched “the Embedded Debian Project” — an effort to create a completely open, multi-vendor embedded Linux software resource based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The project has its own website at www.emdebian.org. (more…)

Although Linux on the desktop still faces the challenge of overcoming the timidity of end users, the internals of a handheld device tend to be completely hidden. In a marketplace where Handspring produced a lower-cost device and immediately began outselling Palm, it's only a matter of time before a large manufacturer goes with the lower cost — and higher reliability — of Linux. (more…)

Red Herring's Tom Davey reports on remarks by IBM technology and strategy vice president, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, at the Venture 2000 conference held recently in Squaw Valley, California. Wladawsky-Berger's comments apparently reflect a growing sense within IBM that Linux is destined for wide scale adoption in a broad variety of embedded devices and appliances. (more…)