French transport and cleanliness robot specialist RoboSoft has used real-time Linux in a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous vehicle aimed at reducing human risks in reconnaissance, monitoring, and safety operations. (more…)

ARM plans to ship in September a graphical tool aimed at allowing customers to create and modify their own “instruction-accurate virtual prototypes” of ARM-based chip designs. The ARM RealView System Generator will support ARM9 and ARM11 cores, and other ARM IP (intellectual property), enabling parallel hardware and software development, ARM says. (more…)

Responding to tough competition from mobile-phone powerhouses Nokia and Motorola, Matsushita (Panasonic) and NEC may form a joint venture around Linux-based mobile phones, according to several news sources in Japan, as reported by Reuters. The venture may focus on Linux OSes and applications, mobile phone hardware, and/or mobile phone chips, and may include Texas Instruments (TI), the news… (more…)

French transport and cleanliness robot specialist RoboSoft has used real-time Linux in a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous vehicle aimed at reducing human risks in reconnaissance, monitoring, and safety operations. (more…)

Macraigor says its value-priced USB-2 debugger now supports 32-bit Freescale ColdFire processors. The ColdFire usb2Demon is available with source and binary GNU tools, makefiles, gdbinit, and sample configurations for “most standard ColdFire evaluation boards,” the company says. (more…)

Wizzard Software is shipping speaker-independent voice recognition software aimed at adding large-vocabulary, offline voice-recognition capabilities to server-based Linux applications. The company says WizzScribe SI can convert large volumes of audio data into searchable text, for data-mining, storage, analysis, and information archiving. (more…)

Developers interested in porting applications to PalmSource's Linux implementation for mobile phones are invited to a special “PalmSource Developer Day” at this year's LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. Attendees will receive early access to the Access Linux Platform (ALP), and get hands-on experience building applications for the platform, PalmSource says. (more…)

IBM, Freescale, and other Power Architecture Advisory Council (PAAC) members plan to release a new “unified” Power instruction set architecture (ISA) this quarter. Meanwhile, Power.org has released a new branding program, and plans to ship a new “platform architecture specification” aimed at simpler Linux-based reference designs. (more…)

Linux phone stack provider a la Mobile has joined the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs), in order to work with the Lab's Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI). The MLI aims to improve and promote Linux for phones and other mobile devices. It now has 15 members. (more…)

[Updated Jul. 25] — Gizmo softphone provider SIPphone is offering free calls to the landlines and mobile phones of other active Gizmo users, in 60 countries. The standards-based Gizmo softphone is… (more…)

TimeSys's subscription-based online service offering for embedded developers has gained a Linux 2.6.17 reference distribution for Atmel's AT91SAM9261 SoC (system-on-chip), new 2.6.11 patches for Freescale's MPC8272-ADS PowerQUICC II development board, and documentation related to static device nodes, cross-compiling drivers, and subversion. (more…)

Enea will demonstrate the Linux port of its “Linx” interprocess communication (IPC) technology at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF), next week in Orlando, Fla. The company touts Linx as a more performant, scalable alternative to TIPC (transparent IPC) in heterogeneous, distributed computing environments such as those found in telecommunications. (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…)

The fourth book by embedded designer and manager Lewin Edwards is now available for purchase. So, You Wanna Be an Embedded Engineer aims to help engineers transition effectively from academic to commercial settings, or from non-embedded to embedded fields. (more…)

A unique daughter-card approach, developed by Liantec, now allows the addition of 16x and 1x PCI-Express, AGP, and PCI expansion function cards to mini-ITX motherboards. It allows the mini-mobos to be used in I/O-intensive graphics, storage, and networking applications. (more…)