[Updated Aug. 1, 2006] — A spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program revealed July 31 that the countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each committed to buy 1 million Linux laptops through the U.S.-based program. (more…)

Acrosser has released a mini-ITX motherboard based on Pentium M and Celeron M processors up to 2.26 GHz. The AR-B1890 single-board computer (SBC) features high bandwidth gigabit Ethernet and PCI-Express X1 interfaces, which enable it to target high performance multimedia and gaming, among other applications, according to… (more…)

Wind River has shifted its tools strategy toward closer integration with its OS products. Additionally, it has brought out a new version of its Eclipse-based Workbench toolsuite, and made a “strategic” 300,000-line code donation to Eclipse, much of it aimed at making the framework more extensible for commercial add-on providers. (more…)

Smartphones may replace PDAs and even laptops for some consumers, but not until significant improvements are made, an In-Stat survey report suggests. Needed improvements include familiar application look-and-feel, better screens and keyboards, and more automated synchronization. (more…)

Mercury Computer is sampling a PCI-Express add-in card powered by a Cell processor running Yellow Dog Linux. The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) targets rendering, ray tracing, video/image processing, and signal processing applications, and is said to deliver 180 GFLOPS (billion floating-point… (more…)

The mobile phone joint venture formed by NEC and Matsushita/Panasonic reportedly will include Texas Instruments (TI), and will be known as “Adcore-Tech Co. Ltd.” TI will have a 12 percent share, and the venture will be capitalized at $103.8M, about 17 percent more than reported earlier, EE Times-Asia is reporting. (more…)

Wind River has updated its commercial embedded Linux distribution, along with three vertical-market “Platforms” based on it. Many of the new features in Wind River Linux 1.3 target telecommunications, traditionally an area of Wind River strength. The company additionally updated its Eclipse-based development tools, and contributed some 300,000 lines of code to the open-source Eclipse project. (more…)

Two flash memory pioneers and technology innovators will soon merge, with the acquisition of M-Systems of Kfar Saba, Israel, by SanDisk of Milpitas, Calif. (more…)

IBM has published the following new technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks website. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Some require free registration. Enjoy . . . ! (more…)

Eurotech has released a a low power, RoHS-compliant PC/104-Plus single-board computer (SBC) that runs Linux and other popular embedded operating systems. The CPU-1421 is based on an AMD Elan processor and targets high-reliability, low-power applications in transportation, industrial, medical, and military… (more…)

Forty-one percent of embedded developers surveyed have heard of “DSO,” but only 12 percent say they know what it is, according to Venture Development Corp. (VDC), whose latest study assesses DSO acceptance in light of “significant time and resources” spent by vendors to define and execute their DSO strategies. (more…)

American Arium says it will offer a Linux development kit for Motorola's i.MX21 mobile applications processor. The LC-500MX21 kit, to ship at an unspecified date, will include Arium's LC-500 JTAG emulator, Linux-hosted SourcePoint debugger software, GNU tools, and an i.MX21 application… (more…)

On July 27, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) released the next discussion draft of the GNU GPL (General Public License) version 3. (more…)

FSMLabs has updated its real-time Linux overlay and toolsuite, adding real-time networking improvements, A/D drivers, an Eclipse-based IDE, and support for 2.6.16 kernels on x86, among other improvements. The RTLinuxPro Development Kit 2.2.3 targets hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation, telecom and network equipment, enterprise/factory real-time, and mobile devices, according to the company. (more…)

[Updated Jan. 12, 2007] — Motorola will “abandon” its proprietary P2K mobile phone OS — currently used in the Razr and other featurephones — in favor of a Linux/Java environment, reports PC Magazine. (more…)