So here is my ramble – it’s got a fabulous 5 megapixel camera with a dual led flash (I loved the camera and features),  32 gigs of internal storage. 1 gig of application memory, up to 16 GB of additional storage with a microSD card, a slide out keyboard (you can use an onscreen one in lieu of or in addition to) , a huge touch screen interface, all the bells and whistles of an iPhone, and it runs Linux. LINUX. Maemo 5 to be exact. This is the phone for the hackers and geeks.

Want to add whatever applications and functionality that you want? You can. Want to use an app style store? You can (Ovi Store). Want to SSH in or out of your phone? Yeah, you can. Want to dual boot your phone with Android? Go right ahead! Want to compile code? Not a problem.  Want to hack your phone without violating a terms of service or add functionality without being sneaky about it? You can (maybe not on AT&T, I hear that they like to force phones to comply with approved install sources for apps).

The downfall is that the product needs more developers. Everyone seems to be forgetting about the platform and going gaga over Android and iPhone. It’s a shame really because this is just so much better. This is freedom. Are you a Linux developer? Get a crackin’ and push some of your eye candy this way!

What else can I say about this little gem? It’s from Nokia – which holds a lot of weight for me. I do love Nokia – I like the ability (even on my little candy bar XpressMusic) to add jar file apps. The platform is stable and the hardware is tough and reliable.

Other things I loved about the hardware:

• TV out
• Non-proprietary headphone jack
• Easy peasy setup of Exchange, Gmail and Flickr
• No tears for lost address books – popped in my SIM and off I went
• Ability to add icons for not just apps but contacts right on the home screen
• FM transmitter – played my tunes & podcasts through my radio with no additional hardware
• Bluetooth
• GPS
• Wifi and 3G
• Widgets (and anything else you want) on the home screen (four of them!!)
• Dashboard interface to see what you have running on all your screens
• System notifications are superb.
• “Lens cap” for the camera – the sliding cap activates and deactivates the camera without needing to push any buttons.
• Skype works amazingly well
• Ogg support

Get one. You’ll fall in love with it. Want to read more? Check out the review at Engadget.

“In what may well be one of the most unusual computing tasks performed by the Linux operating system, Terra Soft Solutions integrated its Yellow Dog Linux distribution and the Sony (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3 to guide a specially designed driverless car competing in the qualifying rounds for the DARPA  (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) autonomous vehicle challenge in Victorville, Calif.“Integral to the on-board, real-time image processing system, the YDL PS3 rode atop a set of 1U rackmount servers inside the experimental car, dubbed the “Spirit.” The team used the Linux equipment to navigate the vehicle through simulated city traffic and obstacles during the qualifying rounds the last week of October.”

Read more at LinuxInsider

• mintAssistant – a first run wizard which allows you to fine-tune your system.
• mintUpload – allows you to upload any file smaller than 10mb to the Internet.
• Print to PDF- print any document to PDF that is auto-saved to your Home/Documents folder.

Also included are new artwork, improved stability and performance, new tools, and upgrades. Visit LinuxMint.com to get the full feature list.

A free GNOME-based Linux distribution for mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs has achieved a major release. OpenedHand’s Poky Linux 3.0 (“Blinky”) is based on X11, GTK+, and the Matchbox window manager, and includes an impressive-looking new application framework and theme called “Sato 0.1.”

The new “Blinky” release of Poky is based on X11/GTK+/Matchbox, much like the Nokia-sponsored Maemo.org project. However, in place of the proprietary Hildon GUI layer, it includes a new “Sato 0.1″ component described by OpenedHand as, “a simple fast GTK+ based PDA/Smartfone fully featured theme and application framework.” The screenshots below show Sato 0.1 in action.

Visit the post to see the rest of the screenshots. They are very fancy…

Google’s first mobile phone will run a Linux operating system on a Texas Instruments “Edge” chipset, and will likely ship to T-Mobile and Orange customers in the Spring of 2008, according to unconfirmed reports. “GPhone” call minutes and text messages reportedly will be funded by mobile advertising.

News of the so-called “GPhone” or “G-Phone” broke quietly about two weeks ago in the island nation of Singapore, where Jennifer Tan of Reuters subsidiary Anian Research filed a report on July 12.

Tan cited “industry sources,” “U.S. sources,” and “manufacturing and component supply chain sources” in backing her assertion that after year-long delays finding a manufacturer, Google contracted Taiwan-based smartphone maker High Tech Computer (HTC) to design its phone hardware. HTC is best-known for its Windows Mobile smartphones, however, and Tan offered no conjecture about who might supply the phone’s Linux-based operating system. 

Read the rest of the details at LinuxDevices.com

Click here to get it or click here to read about it at FOSSwire.

Google’s Linux software repositories make it easier to download and stay up-to-date with current releases of Google Linux applications. Please choose one of the guides below to help configure your system to use these repositories. 

Get the Howto at Debian Admin. It is a short and sweet, “just the facts, ma’am”, kind of howto.  =)

This article describes how to build your own silent, fast, eco-friendly Linux-based PC for use in a digital music listening system. The PC is based on a high-end Via mini-ITX board, passively cooled case with heatpipe technology, Debian Linux, and a little creative embedded elbow grease.

(Click for larger view of final installation)

This system is the fourth dedicated Linux-based music server that I’ve built over the past eight years. For the first time, though, I tried to do the job right, rather than just making do with spare parts. After all, digital music is no longer an interesting experiment, but the primary focus of my listening setup, despite all of that vinyl gathering dust in the basement.

Sonos Digital Music System

Vendors of Linux-based music equipment (Sonos comes to mind) often poke fun at amateurs like me who still roll their own — arguably for good reason. Commercial systems like the Sonos Digital Music System (pictured at right) have slick features like synchronized multi-room playback that are light years beyond my crude hacking capabilities.

Yet, a real Linux computer is a toolbox that can do anything the user is capable of doing with it. For about the cost of an entry-level Sonos setup, the system described here can also serve as a LAMP server and development host, a digital video recorder with high-definition component video capabilities, or as a silent livingroom Web and email kiosk, to name a few possibilities. So, there are tradeoffs on both sides of the build/buy equation.

Read the rest of the article at LinuxDevices.com 

Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.

Wubi claims there is no partition modifications or bootloader changes to Windows and that is easily uninstallable. While I haven’t tried it yet (perhaps because it will require me to install Windows) , Tom Merrit (the linux hippy) was tweeting about Wubi last week.  If you have used it, please let me know in the comments what you think of it!

Scheduled for October 2007 Launch

TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 7, 2007 – Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced more details on Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition at Computex 2007 in Taipei.

Following discussions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Seville Spain and a great response from the developer community generally, the target specifications and technical milestones for the project have been agreed.

Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition will provide a rich Internet experience for users of Intel’s 2008 Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform. To achieve this, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded will run video, sound and offer fast and rich browsing experiences to the MID target user. Optimized for MIDs based on Intel’s low power processors and chipsets, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded edition is expected to deliver fast boot and resume times, and reside in a small memory and disk footprint.

“We are delighted with the progress of the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition” commented Jane Silber, Director of Operations at Canonical. “we have had a great response to our first announcement with many developers showing interest in the project. With a clear roadmap, an active developer community and a date for release – we look forward to bringing Ubuntu to Mobile Internet Devices.”

The first full release of the software will be available in October 2007 corresponding with the normal release cycle of the Ubuntu operating system. Working collaboratively with Intel, Canonical is working to deliver software on actual devices from system manufacturers in 2008.

Read the entire press release…

The Linux kernel and the distributions that package it typically provide very conservative defaults to certain network settings that affect networking parameters. These settings can be tuned via the /proc filesystem or using the sysctl program. The latter is often better, as it reads the contents of /etc/sysctl.conf, which allows you to keep settings across reboots.

The following is a snippet from /etc/sysctl.conf that may improve network performance:

net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1
net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216

Read more

Technorati Tags: Linux

At first blush, the new offering, with a proposed release this fall, appears to have the makings of a serious competitor. Designed as an add-on “EDU-CD” to accompany the upcoming 10.3 release of openSUSE, the so-called “SLEducator” is designed to “[ease] the installation and configuration of an educational network and student desktop.”

Read more at ZDNet Education Blog

Technorati Tags: Linux, Open Source, Education

There’s no denying that Linux is a popular operating system and is genuinely seen by many as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s market domination.

However, once having decided to go with Linux, the next question is which Linux distribution to use? Fans wax lyrical about their favourite “distro”. Understandably, this can cause further anxiety to newcomers keen to make the right choice.At heart, what we mean by “Linux” is two fundamental items: the kernel and the non-kernel parts. The kernel is the central component of most operating systems which manages resources and communications with hardware. It typically makes the lowest-level computer components available to software applications. This is the heart of any operating system. When people speak of Linux being created by Linus Torvalds, it is specifically the kernel that is meant; it was this which provided the basis and framework for all other applications.

The “non-kernel” therefore is everything else. This is software like the raft of networking tools for which Linux is well-known – web servers like Apache, programming language compilers and interpreters like Java, GNU C++, Perl and Python – and more.

The reason why Linux distributions are called “distributions” in the first place is because each distro is a collection of the kernel plus any of a number of software packages, distributed together. These packages are largely drawn from the GNU free software project. All distros provide facilities for managing the installation, removal and upgrading of discrete software packages.

Read the full four page article at ITWire

Technorati Tags: Open Source, Linux

Reinstalling your operating system is never a fun or welcome task, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Restoring settings and downloaded applications after installing an operating system can take quite a bit of time, so I’ve come up with a shell script to make things a bit easier.

This technique does not take the place of a good external backup. I recommend backing up your important files to a place other than your computer, such as a CD or DVD disc, because with a powerful enough shell script, you could accidentally wipe out hours of work in just a few seconds.

When I installed Ubuntu on my computer, I created a separate partition for the home directory, which is where personal files are typically stored. If you do this, you can reinstall Ubuntu without losing your files, as long as you don’t overwrite the home partition. Since I have the configuration files that reside on my root partition backed up inside my home directory, the files should still be there after I reinstall, so all I have to do is copy them to the correct place.

In addition, I have several programs downloaded from the Internet saved in my home directory as well. After restoring Ubuntu, all I have to do is execute a command to install the programs again. My script can take care of that for me as well.

Learn how…

~ WatchMouse research shows Linux/Apache has less downtime and yields faster websites than Microsoft/IIS ~London, June 20, 2007 – Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. Research by WatchMouse, a website monitoring company, also shows that web server platform Apache outperforms the Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore, having a Linux website and an Apache webserver platform offers the best choice for professional web pages.

Read the Press Release or the data behind the claims

The Ultimate Linux Reference Guide for Newbies

and

The Ultimate Linux NETWORK Reference Guide for Newbies

I really don’t need to say anymore about it. Read it. Bookmark it. Print it and paper your cube with it. =)

Microsoft’s promised patent indemnification to paying SUSE users specifically excludes open source software like Wine, OpenExchange, StarOffice and OpenOffice by name.

It also excludes:

• “office productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software etc.)…that are hosted by or running on a computer acting as a server for a connected client device” (think Google);

• “business application designed, marketed and used to meet the data processing requirements of particular business functions, financial forecasting, financial reporting, customer relationship management and supply chain management” (think salesforce.com);

• “mail transfer agents (a k a e-mail servers)”;

• “unified communications”;

• and video games consoles, console games, video game applications designed to run on a computer and online video gaming services like Xbox Live.

The implication is you can run SUSE free of patent concerns but you’d better be darn careful what you run on top of it. Otherwise you’re good for six years after the last of the covered patents expires.

Um…yeah. Go read the entire article Ajax World Magazine….

Shuttleworth was responding to a recent Fortune magazine interview in which senior Microsoft figures sent shockwaves through the software industry by declaring that Linux and other open source software violates 235 Microsoft patents.

But while Microsoft is using familiar tactics to put the fear into Linux users, Shuttleworth argued open source and Microsoft are ultimately on the same side of the software patent issue.

“I’m pretty certain that, within a few years, Microsoft themselves will be strong advocates against software patents,” Shuttleworth wrote. “Microsoft is irrevocably committed to shipping new software every year, and software patents represent landmines in their roadmap which they are going to step on, like it or not, with increasing regularity.”

Microsoft makes the “perfect target” for software patent lawsuits, and the company will pay more for such suits every year until they finally threaten its business, Shuttleworth said.

More at ComputerWorld UK… 

The VII-C is funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), along with AASHTO, ten State Departments of Transportation, and seven vehicle manufacturers already involved in the U.S. DOT’s Intelligent Vehicle Initiative: BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota.

The VII-C says that 21,000 of the 43,000 traffic fatalities in 2003 were caused by vehicles leaving the road or entering intersections when they should not have. It hopes a massive network connecting cars to each other and to roadsides can help.

More at LinuxDevices.com

Read the rest of the article at Ars Technica…