The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) announced a new initiative today aimed at raising awareness about how the Linux kernel is developed. With the highly-anticipated release of the final Linux 2.6 production kernel due shortly, OSDL is taking a series of steps to increase customer confidence in using Linux, the group said. (more…)

Jim Gettys has released a roadmap for the open source desktop and palmtop. The roadmap is an attempt to create a “sketch of the names and relationships of these technologies and projects, and a glimpse into their status and development,” according to Gettys. (more…)

IBM has published the following fifteen technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its developerWorks and alphaWorks Websites. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics. Some require free registration. (more…)

LinuxDevices.com editor Henry Kingman receives quite a few Microsoft files, even from Linux companies. To end run around the data, Kingman suggests Sun's StarOffice 7 as an option. The best thing about StarOffice, says Kingman, is “that it's virtually a clone of Microsoft Office, the defacto standard business software today. (more…)

The Eclipse consortium celebrates its second anniversary this month, and is releasing milestone builds of the third version of its universal platform for tools integration. The Eclipse platform has been downloaded over 18,000 times, and in two short years has spawned an entire “ecosystem” of users and vendors. (more…)

Eben Moglen, General Counselor for the Free Software Foundation, has issued his second statement concerning the recent SCO lawsuits. The statement comprises an entertaining and accessible (for a legal document) summary of SCO's failure to provide either factual or legal support for its lawsuit against IBM alleging copyright infringements. (more…)

Lineo Solutions (Japan) has joined the ARM Connected Community (ACC) and will market its embedded Linux development tools and board support packages (BSPs) to manufacturers that develop products based on ARM cores. The ACC now counts over 250 members. (more…)

MontaVista Software has joined the Super-SH Consortium and will work with Renesas on OEM reference designs that use Renesas's SH-Mobile-V processors and run MontaVista's Consumer Electronics Edition (CEE) embedded Linux distribution. (more…)

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. unveiled a vision and roadmap for a next generation of system BIOS firmware that the company calls “core system software” today, at its Strategy 2004 conference. As defined by Phoenix, CSS is a new category of core system firmware that transcends the boundaries of traditional BIOSes and delivers “extensible firmware that provides the critical foundation of trust, manageability,… (more…)

The Khronos Group announced that LSI Logic, Toshiba, and XCE have joined as Contributing Members, bringing its membership tally to 40 companies. The group, founded in Jan. 2000, focuses on developing and deploying standard APIs for authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. (more…)

Eben Moglen, General Counselor for the Free Software Foundation, has issued his second statement concerning the recent SCO lawsuits. The statement comprises an entertaining and accessible (for a legal document) summary of SCO's failure to provide either factual or legal support for its lawsuit against IBM alleging copyright infringements. (more…)

The Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) will be combined with the electronicaUSA system design show and several other industry conferences in 2004. It will take place Mar. 29 – Apr. 1, 2004 in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Organizers expect 18,000 attendees, 300 sessions, 500 exhibitors, and international pavilions for China, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Germany. (more…)

A new debugging tool for users of the Java Native Interface (JNI) on x86 Linux or Sun Solaris enables concurrent debugging of mixed Java and C/C++ code. The tool comes with its own C/C++ debugger and integrates with the Java debuggers in several popular Java development tools. (more…)

MapuSoft Technologies has added support for embedded Linux to its “OS Changer” line of compatibility wrappers for running legacy RTOS applications on targets other than that for which they were written. The new release also brings the option of purchasing OS Changer with an “abstraction” API that enables programmers to write new code that can be compiled to run on several different RTOSes. (more…)

Linux is being used as the embedded operating system platform for lottery terminals located at thousands of sporting arenas throughout Korea. The devices, called “Toto,” leverage commodity hardware, open source technology such as X and Java, and, in recent models, Sangoma WAN cards to produce unobtrusive,… (more…)