Taiwan's Quanta Computer has been selected to produce $100 Linux laptops developed at MIT, for eventual distribution to children in developing countries. Between five and 15 million units are expected to be provided to children in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, and other countries, the Lab said. (more…)

The largest annual embedded industry tradeshow in the US will feature a technical design seminar on Linux, along with seminars on analog and power, DSP performance, consumer video, and wireless networking. The eighteenth Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) is set for Apr. 2-7, in San Jose, Calif.

ESC 2006's Linux seminar is… (more…)

McObject says it has integrated its in-memory embedded database with a model-driven development (MDD) environment from I-Logix. McObject says its mil/aero, telecom, and automotive customers can now model applications and systems visually in I-Logix's Rhapsody tools, which can then generate code that interacts with the eXtremeDB database. (more…)

A subset of Perl/Tk has been ported to Trolltech's Qt and Qt/Embedded frameworks, and released under a BSD license by a software company in Hamburg, Germany. FrogLogic says Perl/Tk-over-Qt (“Pq”) can give Perl/Tk applications a more native look and improved performance, while retaining a familiar API. (more…)

Taiwan Commate Computer Inc. (Commell) has added another model to its growing line of mini-ITX embedded motherboards. The company claims that the LV-675 is the first mini-ITX board to support Pentium M and Celeron M processors with a 533 MHz front side bus (FSB). (more…)

Israeli single-board computer vendor CompuLab is shipping a Via Eden-powered CPU module available with a PC/104+ baseboard and Linux 2.6.10 kernel, filesystem, and documentation. (more…)

The Nokia 770 web pad lacks a “killer app” to make it useful on a daily basis, writes blogger Russell Beattie. However, the device is much more open than previously available mobile devices, and as a result could serve as the development platform for mobile innovation, Beattie suggests. (more…)

Sharp's Zaurus SL-5600 pioneered embedded Linux techniques worth emulating, and others worth improving upon, writes Peter Seebach in a DeveloperWorks article examining one of the first Linux PDAs. (more…)

[Updated Dec. 21] — A pair of Palm OS based consumer electronic devices are well on the way toward running Linux. Matthew Mastracci's “Treo Linux” project has achieved a BusyBox prompt on a Palm Treo 650 smartphone, while Alex Osborne's LD Progress project has a GPE-based Linux environment running on a Palm… (more…)

A free software project maintaining a utility used in virtually every embedded Linux device has launched a new development branch aimed at providing more standards compliance, and lots of new features and functionalities. A “pre-release” of Busybox 1.1.0 is available now for download, and is stable enough for wider testing, the project says. (more…)

The embedded Linux market will top $100 million this year, and grow “significantly” by 2007, says Venture Development Corp. (VDC). Embedded Linux is best-established in America, but will grow most quickly in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Asia), with especially high growth in consumer electronics and telecom, according to VDC. (more…)

A group of venture capitalists (VCs) has formed an investment advisory board to serve Power.org, a community organization devoted to IBM's Power architecture. The Power.org Venture Capitalist Advisory Board says it aims to drive increased investments in Power-focused companies. (more…)

[Updated Dec. 19] — A free software project based in Instanbul has released a portable, embedded client-server windowing system. The Xynth Windowing System, released under the LGPL, offers a lightweight GUI-capable windowing system usable in Linux-based embedded systems and devices, such as handhelds and set-top… (more…)

Korean device manufacturer IUbi has used Linux as the embedded OS in a portable media player (PMP) with an optional broadcast TV receiver. The IUbi PMP2010 has a 4.3-inch screen, a 40GB or 100GB hard drive, and will be priced around 400,000 Korean won (about $400). (more…)

A major Linux tradeshow may add a pavilion showcasing embedded Linux devices and technologies. LinuxWorld Boston 2006 organizers say the “Invisible Linux” pavilion, currently at the “concept” stage, could help surface the use of Linux and open source in devices and embedded applications, given sufficient exhibitor interest. (more…)