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More details below in tonight's Slashback on the sale of Corel's Linux division, the public posting of the encryption scheme some bright young Irish whippersnapper has come up with, fun details on those toys you can roll around with your computer, and winners of another contest.

That's a lot of Molsen. Bigger R writes contributes this link to a story in the Calgary Herald with more detail on the sale of Corel's Linux division which was mentioned in vague terms the other day. It's going to a company called Xandros, in exchange for cash and equity, so Corel will still have at least some interest in the continued success of Linux, or at least its distro. A snippet: "Xandros Corp. president Michael Bego, who started the Ottawa company recently in preparation for the deal announced Wednesday, is also a shareowner in Linux Global Partners, a privately held New York venture firm that put up $10 million US to start Xandros."

Small, cheap and fun are all good words. An Anonymous Coward writes "There's an announcement of the winners of the embedded linux journal's design contest over at linuxdevices.com. Cool projects -- voting system, digital audio workstation, solar racing vehicle, GizmoCopter Project, and Hacking BigMouth Billy Bass. Follow the urls for the projects which are given in the announcement to learn about each project. Oh, and the prize for winning each category? An all expense paid trip to Costa Rica. Dang, why didn't I enter?"

Stuff that's hard to read. John Sokol writes with an update on the Cayley-Purser Algorithm mentioned here before.

"This story went through some time back about a 16-year-old girl outdoing RSA, but it lacked any discussion of the actual algorithm. This link is her paper that she now has posted on the net. It seems reasonable. Maybe someone here can find a flaw in it?"

Roll 'em. Slide100 writes: "It seems that there is more to the desktop rover that was posted about on Tuesday.

The marketing manager sent me a PDF file that explains some more - apparently, they just don't have the time to update the website.

Each rover comes with a cable that plugs into the transmitter and software to allow control of the rover from your computer (or through TCP/IP).

Additionally, each rover has 'Laser Tag' as an integral part of the vehicle. 10 hits (including sound effects) and your rover is disabled 'till the next match See it here. BTW - I have nothing to do with the company, I just think its very cool."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Embedded linux vendor Lineo has apparently caved in to Victor Yodaiken, and become the first software company to publicly announce the licensing of Yodaiken's patented process for running a general purpose operating system (such as Linux) as a task under a real-time kernel(such as RTLinux or RTAI)."

There's a special report at LinuxDevices which includes . . .

• text of the Lineo press release
• comments from Victor Yodaiken
• news of a non-patented open source alternative ("Adeos")
• a reference list about RTLinux and the RTLinux patent
• a whitepaper about Adeos

There's an interesting quote where Yodaiken claims his patent will help open source."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looking for small pre-built systems for custom Linux-based projects or products? Look no further. LinuxDevices.com has assembled a handy reference list of small systems that can serve as ready-made platforms for prototyping applications, or as the basis of application-specific Linux-based systems and devices. The style, performance, and costs of these systems vary greatly."

Anonymous Coward writes "Axis, maker of the ETRAX system-on-chip, has just announced a multi-chip module that has the same pinout as their ETRAX SOC but which contains over 50 components. According to this article at linuxdevices.com, all you need to add is an external 20MHz crystal and power, to end up with a fully functional networked Linux system. It contains 8 megs sdram & 2 megs flash. Now you can really put Linux anywhere! The estimated price (when it hits production) to buy these little goodies is $75 (qty 1) down to $50 (qty 10K). "

An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about an article describing the CerfCube. 192Mhz StrongArm, 32MB RAM, 16MB flash, ethernet, CompactFlash, 3 serial ports and a USB port. Not impressed? Well how about that it's only a 3 inch cube? The box runs Linux and Apache. We did a previous story about it, but this is much more informative about the internals.

An anonymous reader noted this article running over at Linux Devices talking about an alliance of companies working together to standardize Linux Set Top Boxes. Bigger names include ATI and Tivo. There are also a bunch of more or less irrelevant companies on the list too so the hype about 24 companies isn't really worth noting. But in the end, I'll believe it when I see products actually taken to market.

An anonymous reader noted a story running at LinuxDevices about a vaporous device called Hi-Muse. It's got its problems (not being available, ugly design) but it's got a lot of potential (a 15 gig hard drive in such a small form factor, built in FM tuner, ethernet port). Personally I'd rather see a standard stereo component sized box, a UI that operates through your television and normal remote, and 30+ gigs, but this one is looking like a great start.

A reader writes "This is Rick Lehrbaum's "traditional" report on "all things Linux" at the Embedded Systems Conference which took place during the week of April 9, 2001 in San Francisco, California. Lehrbaum briefly describes many of the Embedded Linux oriented exhibits, takes us on a photo tour of some cool Embedded Linux based devices that were being shown off, and offers his assessment of the current state of the Embedded Linux industry. There's even a "best of show award" for the "geekiest demo" at ESC! Full report is on Linuxdevices.com"

yuggoth writes: "LinuxDevices.com features a whitepaper about the upcoming GTK+2.0 support for the Linux framebuffer, which was mentioned on /. some weeks ago. Thewhitepaper describes architecture, benefits and limitations of GtkFB and also compares GtkFB with X based GTK+." Only one word for this: Sweet!

yuggoth writes: "LinuxDevices.com features a whitepaper about the upcoming GTK+2.0 support for the Linux framebuffer, which was mentioned on /. some weeks ago. Thewhitepaper describes architecture, benefits and limitations of GtkFB and also compares GtkFB with X based GTK+." Only one word for this: Sweet!

Stealth Dave writes "ZDNet has an article about a new television from Sylvania which is basically a Linux box with a 27" monitor and TV tuner (800x600 resolution, even)! It runs a Geode single-chip solution and is broadband capable. Lots of cool features, and is designed to support a hard drive as well. The ZDNet article has a surprising amount of details without being too technical to lose their broader audience." This "news story" reads a lot more like an advertisement, but take it for what it's worth.

tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"

tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"

SEWilco writes "Linux Devices has an overview of Linux-Friendly Embeddable Computers. It's a nice introduction to commercially available computers the size of a disk drive (biscuit) or smaller (PC/104). This is the type of thing to use for wearable or special-purpose devices." Excellent article.

mirko writes "After some time with almost no news about it, Doctor Dobb's journal finally choosed to break the silence and to deliver quite a comprehensive article (also available here) about the forthcoming Debian Hurd ^[?] operating system."

Justin Davies writes: "TrollTech will be making the embedded Qt environment for PDA systems on Monday available under a commercial and GPL license on monday. The environment will contain an application launcher, window manager and input methods including a virtual keyboard. This provides the first common Linux enironment for PDA systems allowing an easy porting system from the desktop to the PDA."

Here it is again. Back atcha with stuff on ... the actual sex of Tjisana M. Lewis and other foul-ups; Richard Stallman's back-in-proportion response to the out-of-same brouhaha over licensing of KDE; and a reaction to the announcment last week of a fully-preemptive kernel. Not to mention a few followups to the piece Rob posted last week about Amazon's interesting pricing policies.

Shouldn't this be one of those fields marked "required" on e-mail? Tjisana M. Lewis wrote: "Just one minor issue though in case we meet again - I (Product Manager with titles ad nauseaum) am male." (I had written -- with the famous line about 'what happens when you assume' nowhere in mind -- that "she sent the following response ..." regarding the new HP printserver which as of now does not support printing from Linux clients.) With apologies and thanks for the correction, I await the beating with wet noodles. declan points out another goof for which I must shoulder the blame: the judge in question in the DeCSS case is Lewis Kaplan, not Chaplain, as rendered in this story of last week.

Calling Tim Theisen, calling Tim Theisen to the white courtesy telephone ... Richard M. Stallman can't win. At least, that's the impression one gets sometimes from hearing the reactions he draws for saying nearly anything. Critical or glowing, the man says what's on his mind, and there's plenty on it. Including, of late, plenty about GNOME and KDE. As usual, the whole story is both more complex and more satisfying when you know more about it. Several readers pointed at Stallman's response at LinuxToday to the criticism he recieved (both official and unofficial) after he said "Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt." As a happy user of both KDE and GNOME, I must say RMS sounds pretty reasonable to me.

And a special deal for our guests from AOL -- Two bridges! Amazon says: don't worry! It's just an accident! jeko writes "Amazon.com just sent me an email claiming that their different prices for different customers are merely a mistake."

He cites email from a customer rep at Amazon:

"Finally, at any given time, despite our best efforts, a small number of the more than 4.7 million items on our site may be mispriced.

Kristine Jorgensen, Amazon.com"

"So, there you go. This latest PR row is all just a 'mispricing.' I wish my customers would let me get away with that."

Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently not the only company to play cookie-based pricing games ... An unnamed correspondent writes: "[...] Similar to your story on Amazon.com regarding price differences, I think I've found a similar ploy on flyfrontier.com. I've been checking flights from Washington, DC to Denver, CO. When I first checked prices, the flight came back at $400. Several minutes later, the same flight was priced at over $500. When I switched computers, the same thing happened again: The price on the same flight was $400 in the first instance, and over $500 on the second. Then, I switched browsers ... it happened again. When I cleared my history and disabled cookies, I was able to recreate the price difference again. Try it and see for yourself. So, what's up with this? What is the advantage of switching prices around? Has this practice become widespread on the web?"

You have exactly 15ms to complete your response ... Go. Rick Lehrbaum writes "Victor Yodaiken, creator of RTLinux, has provided a brief statement about MontaVista Software's recent announcement of a hard real-time Linux (MontaVista, it should be noted, supports both RTLinux and the new kernel preemption technology.) In his response, Yodaiken draws significant distinctions between the architectural approaches taken by each (RTLinux; kernel preemptability), provides a technical perspective on the usefulness of each, and mentions some issues that need to be considered in proceeding along a kernel preemption path (which he does *not* summarily dismiss). Yodaiken claims that under RTLinux, "real-time software can communicate with Linux through fifos, shared memory, or signals but still gets hardware speed interrupt latencies, RTLinux worst case interrupt latencies are 15 microseconds on a generic x86 and better on PowerPC and Alphas." Additional detailed background on RTLinux appears in this interesting interview with Yodaiken (including info about "the infamous RTLinux patent")."

Here it is again. Back atcha with stuff on ... the actual sex of Tjisana M. Lewis and other foul-ups; Richard Stallman's back-in-proportion response to the out-of-same brouhaha over licensing of KDE; and a reaction to the announcment last week of a fully-preemptive kernel. Not to mention a few followups to the piece Rob posted last week about Amazon's interesting pricing policies.

Shouldn't this be one of those fields marked "required" on e-mail? Tjisana M. Lewis wrote: "Just one minor issue though in case we meet again - I (Product Manager with titles ad nauseaum) am male." (I had written -- with the famous line about 'what happens when you assume' nowhere in mind -- that "she sent the following response ..." regarding the new HP printserver which as of now does not support printing from Linux clients.) With apologies and thanks for the correction, I await the beating with wet noodles. declan points out another goof for which I must shoulder the blame: the judge in question in the DeCSS case is Lewis Kaplan, not Chaplain, as rendered in this story of last week.

Calling Tim Theisen, calling Tim Theisen to the white courtesy telephone ... Richard M. Stallman can't win. At least, that's the impression one gets sometimes from hearing the reactions he draws for saying nearly anything. Critical or glowing, the man says what's on his mind, and there's plenty on it. Including, of late, plenty about GNOME and KDE. As usual, the whole story is both more complex and more satisfying when you know more about it. Several readers pointed at Stallman's response at LinuxToday to the criticism he recieved (both official and unofficial) after he said "Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt." As a happy user of both KDE and GNOME, I must say RMS sounds pretty reasonable to me.

And a special deal for our guests from AOL -- Two bridges! Amazon says: don't worry! It's just an accident! jeko writes "Amazon.com just sent me an email claiming that their different prices for different customers are merely a mistake."

He cites email from a customer rep at Amazon:

"Finally, at any given time, despite our best efforts, a small number of the more than 4.7 million items on our site may be mispriced.

Kristine Jorgensen, Amazon.com"

"So, there you go. This latest PR row is all just a 'mispricing.' I wish my customers would let me get away with that."

Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently not the only company to play cookie-based pricing games ... An unnamed correspondent writes: "[...] Similar to your story on Amazon.com regarding price differences, I think I've found a similar ploy on flyfrontier.com. I've been checking flights from Washington, DC to Denver, CO. When I first checked prices, the flight came back at $400. Several minutes later, the same flight was priced at over $500. When I switched computers, the same thing happened again: The price on the same flight was $400 in the first instance, and over $500 on the second. Then, I switched browsers ... it happened again. When I cleared my history and disabled cookies, I was able to recreate the price difference again. Try it and see for yourself. So, what's up with this? What is the advantage of switching prices around? Has this practice become widespread on the web?"

You have exactly 15ms to complete your response ... Go. Rick Lehrbaum writes "Victor Yodaiken, creator of RTLinux, has provided a brief statement about MontaVista Software's recent announcement of a hard real-time Linux (MontaVista, it should be noted, supports both RTLinux and the new kernel preemption technology.) In his response, Yodaiken draws significant distinctions between the architectural approaches taken by each (RTLinux; kernel preemptability), provides a technical perspective on the usefulness of each, and mentions some issues that need to be considered in proceeding along a kernel preemption path (which he does *not* summarily dismiss). Yodaiken claims that under RTLinux, "real-time software can communicate with Linux through fifos, shared memory, or signals but still gets hardware speed interrupt latencies, RTLinux worst case interrupt latencies are 15 microseconds on a generic x86 and better on PowerPC and Alphas." Additional detailed background on RTLinux appears in this interesting interview with Yodaiken (including info about "the infamous RTLinux patent")."

Here it is again. Back atcha with stuff on ... the actual sex of Tjisana M. Lewis and other foul-ups; Richard Stallman's back-in-proportion response to the out-of-same brouhaha over licensing of KDE; and a reaction to the announcment last week of a fully-preemptive kernel. Not to mention a few followups to the piece Rob posted last week about Amazon's interesting pricing policies.

Shouldn't this be one of those fields marked "required" on e-mail? Tjisana M. Lewis wrote: "Just one minor issue though in case we meet again - I (Product Manager with titles ad nauseaum) am male." (I had written -- with the famous line about 'what happens when you assume' nowhere in mind -- that "she sent the following response ..." regarding the new HP printserver which as of now does not support printing from Linux clients.) With apologies and thanks for the correction, I await the beating with wet noodles. declan points out another goof for which I must shoulder the blame: the judge in question in the DeCSS case is Lewis Kaplan, not Chaplain, as rendered in this story of last week.

Calling Tim Theisen, calling Tim Theisen to the white courtesy telephone ... Richard M. Stallman can't win. At least, that's the impression one gets sometimes from hearing the reactions he draws for saying nearly anything. Critical or glowing, the man says what's on his mind, and there's plenty on it. Including, of late, plenty about GNOME and KDE. As usual, the whole story is both more complex and more satisfying when you know more about it. Several readers pointed at Stallman's response at LinuxToday to the criticism he recieved (both official and unofficial) after he said "Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt." As a happy user of both KDE and GNOME, I must say RMS sounds pretty reasonable to me.

And a special deal for our guests from AOL -- Two bridges! Amazon says: don't worry! It's just an accident! jeko writes "Amazon.com just sent me an email claiming that their different prices for different customers are merely a mistake."

He cites email from a customer rep at Amazon:

"Finally, at any given time, despite our best efforts, a small number of the more than 4.7 million items on our site may be mispriced.

Kristine Jorgensen, Amazon.com"

"So, there you go. This latest PR row is all just a 'mispricing.' I wish my customers would let me get away with that."

Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently not the only company to play cookie-based pricing games ... An unnamed correspondent writes: "[...] Similar to your story on Amazon.com regarding price differences, I think I've found a similar ploy on flyfrontier.com. I've been checking flights from Washington, DC to Denver, CO. When I first checked prices, the flight came back at $400. Several minutes later, the same flight was priced at over $500. When I switched computers, the same thing happened again: The price on the same flight was $400 in the first instance, and over $500 on the second. Then, I switched browsers ... it happened again. When I cleared my history and disabled cookies, I was able to recreate the price difference again. Try it and see for yourself. So, what's up with this? What is the advantage of switching prices around? Has this practice become widespread on the web?"

You have exactly 15ms to complete your response ... Go. Rick Lehrbaum writes "Victor Yodaiken, creator of RTLinux, has provided a brief statement about MontaVista Software's recent announcement of a hard real-time Linux (MontaVista, it should be noted, supports both RTLinux and the new kernel preemption technology.) In his response, Yodaiken draws significant distinctions between the architectural approaches taken by each (RTLinux; kernel preemptability), provides a technical perspective on the usefulness of each, and mentions some issues that need to be considered in proceeding along a kernel preemption path (which he does *not* summarily dismiss). Yodaiken claims that under RTLinux, "real-time software can communicate with Linux through fifos, shared memory, or signals but still gets hardware speed interrupt latencies, RTLinux worst case interrupt latencies are 15 microseconds on a generic x86 and better on PowerPC and Alphas." Additional detailed background on RTLinux appears in this interesting interview with Yodaiken (including info about "the infamous RTLinux patent")."

An anonymous reader pointed us to an article running on LinuxDevices.com talking about Supporting WAP in Linux and why this should be a priority. WAP has taken a lot of (deserved) heat, but this is a good argument on the other side.

A couple people wrote with a link to an article about MontaVista. They've introduced "a fully preempetable Linux". It's based on kernel 2.4, but the timing is interesting, considering 2.4 isn't completed yet - and if this had come out earlier, perhaps some of this could have been included. The article's a bit press releasely, but has some good info.

An unnamed correspondent writes:"Transvirtual has released PocketLinux for the iPaq. It features Video4Linux, mp3 playing ability, web synchronization, Kaffe OpenVM, GUI Themes, and displaying in standard or portrait mode. PocketLinux runs on VTech's Helio, iPaq's, and various other platforms." PocketLinux V.P. of Engineering Peter Mehlitz took some time off from the LWCE booth the other day to tell me about Pocketlinux -- read on for some details.

With the buzz that screenshots of X and other windowing systems running on svelte handhelds have generated lately, it's not surprising that the aisle by the PocketLinux booth was swamped with rubberneckers who actually wanted to play with the demos, not just grab t-shirts. If there's a prize for "oohs" and "ahhs" per square foot, Transvirtual may have swept the show with their demo machines, which use an integrated framebuffer device rather than coax on X. The Pocketlinux system consists of an XML framework running on Java -- using Kaffee means no Sun license required -- running on Linux. It's themeable, extensible, and slick.

"Java makes sense for this [because] it makes sense to have a machine that gives you access to distributed apps," said Peter. He anticipates applications equally at home on cell-phones, kiosks and PDAs -- and provides proof in the form of running systems, with handwriting recognition, games, audio players, and (quite nice to see) streaming video."Kaffee and XML let us do just about anything," he says. "With Kaffee, we really learned from the Linux example," he says, adding that Kaffee is now under the GPL.

The LWCE display featured the OS on both a Compaq iPaq and the exotic Itsy, as well as on a V-Tech Helio. While the Compaq machines can also run Windows (for those so inclined), PocketLinux is primed to become the default OS for the Helio, which currently comes with V-Tech's VTOS. Though the grayscale screen isn't as sexy as the Itsy's, the $150 Helio has both more RAM (10MB, including 2MB of flash) and a more powerful processor than my Visor. Helios running PocketLinux were available for sale, too -- not just vaporware -- though the PocketLinux Web site cautions that buyers who want a standard PDA should stick to V-Tech's OS until more PDA features are implemented.

(Interestingly, rather than the obligatory note that only Red Hat-based distros are supported, the installation instructions for the Helio software says instead "our development effort has standardized on a Debian Linux hosted environment and our documentation and operation under Debian is better supported. If anyone wants to write documentation for RedHat installation and submit it, we would be happy to include it.")

Despite their tendency to wolf down batteries, the color machines showed off few things the Helio couldn't, such as a small selection of colorful themes. "They're just XML files -- everything is XML files," said Peter, a point he emphasizes as important for keeping information portable. Streaming video, too -- slightly jerky, but very watchable -- had more than a few onlookers drooling. The important thing, according to Peter, is to rely on hardware to do as much of the tough work of decompression as possible. The video is transmitted with the aid of triggers embedded in Javascript. Viewing compressed movie files is "no problem, he says, "as long as we're not forced to use streaming in user space." Despite Peter's assertion that people will rely on collections of small, nearly disposable appliances rather than an "anything box," some aggregation and assimilation looks inevitable, not to mention fun. All work and no play would probably make for slow sales.

While the software inside the user's machine is free, Transvirtual intends to make money by selling server-based translation software to convert external data types for viewing and listening, as well as by providing businesses (and content providers) with specialized apps.

With the Embedded Linux Consortium, LinuxDevices.com, handhelds.org, and a gaggle of others, Free software for handheld devices has a woven a comfortable net of support for tiny systems. Welcome to the fray.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Indrema (the Linux gaming console guys) and Red Hat have announced that they have formed an alliance to "jointly manage branding and distribution" of DV Linux, a Linux distribution for gaming consoles."

Rick Lehrbaum writes: "This [LinuxDevices.com] article describes a new class of Linux-friendly system-on-chip (SOC) ICs that are taking over the 1-chip microcontroller mantle from simpler architectures like the 8051 and 68HC11. And they're going to vastly accelerate the use of embedded Linux in thousands of new designs for intelligent devices, Internet appliances, and embedded systems. Devices covered in the article include include: Intel StrongARM SA-1110, NEC VR4181, STMicro STPC, Mot MPC823e, IBM PPC 405GP, NETsilicon NET+ARM, Aplio/TRIO, Axis ETRAX, LinkUp L7205, Alchemy Au1000, and Cirrus Maverick EP9312." I'd like a walkman-size computer based on that IBM 405GP that runs on AAs for a week ... sort of neat how open source OSes can seep into things like this.

Rick Lehrbaum writes: "This [LinuxDevices.com] article describes a new class of Linux-friendly system-on-chip (SOC) ICs that are taking over the 1-chip microcontroller mantle from simpler architectures like the 8051 and 68HC11. And they're going to vastly accelerate the use of embedded Linux in thousands of new designs for intelligent devices, Internet appliances, and embedded systems. Devices covered in the article include include: Intel StrongARM SA-1110, NEC VR4181, STMicro STPC, Mot MPC823e, IBM PPC 405GP, NETsilicon NET+ARM, Aplio/TRIO, Axis ETRAX, LinkUp L7205, Alchemy Au1000, and Cirrus Maverick EP9312." I'd like a walkman-size computer based on that IBM 405GP that runs on AAs for a week ... sort of neat how open source OSes can seep into things like this.

Rick Lehrbaum writes: "This [LinuxDevices.com] article describes a new class of Linux-friendly system-on-chip (SOC) ICs that are taking over the 1-chip microcontroller mantle from simpler architectures like the 8051 and 68HC11. And they're going to vastly accelerate the use of embedded Linux in thousands of new designs for intelligent devices, Internet appliances, and embedded systems. Devices covered in the article include include: Intel StrongARM SA-1110, NEC VR4181, STMicro STPC, Mot MPC823e, IBM PPC 405GP, NETsilicon NET+ARM, Aplio/TRIO, Axis ETRAX, LinkUp L7205, Alchemy Au1000, and Cirrus Maverick EP9312." I'd like a walkman-size computer based on that IBM 405GP that runs on AAs for a week ... sort of neat how open source OSes can seep into things like this.

FnH writes "Swiss startup Smartdata unveiled a credit-card sized embedded Linux computer called -computer Chipslice. The tiny device, which runs uClinux, is intended to be used in a wide range of mobile, portable, and wearable computing applications. Read more about it here " I can already dream of several possibilities of one of these combined with wireless internet access.

LordNimon asks: "I'm interested in learning embedded systems programming, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on hardware and software to get that experience. I already know device drivers and BIOS, and I know about LinuxDevices.com, but I don't know Linux programming (yet). I was hoping someone experienced in this field could tell me what the cheapest way to get started is. I assume I should use Embedded Linux, but what about the hardware?"

Thrakkerzog writes: "Here is an article about Qt/Embedded, a version of Qt which is source-compatable with Qt/X11 and Qt/Windows. It doesn't use X11, and just uses the Linux framebuffer. This is very ideal for embedded systems. Check the link for more info."

According to Trolltech's release, "Qt/Embedded will also provide functionality not found in the X Window System, such as anti-aliased text rendering and alpha-blending of images. For increased performance, Qt/Embedded can utilize hardware graphics acceleration and it is well suited for multimedia and Web applications."

Flashy graphics without the overhead of X looks like a winner for all the companies providing embedded Linux devices and sofware.

Joshua Lamorie writes: "Rick Lehrbaum, the guy behind www.linuxdevices.com, and involved with the PC/104 Consortium has put together a group of heavy hitters from both the embedded world and the Linux world. The press release came out today, and lists the committee members. Also, on the Web site, there are archives of discussions about the creation of the ELC. This adds to the growing excitement about Linux in embedded systems over the past couple of months."

Joshua Lamorie writes: "Rick Lehrbaum, the guy behind www.linuxdevices.com, and involved with the PC/104 Consortium has put together a group of heavy hitters from both the embedded world and the Linux world. The press release came out today, and lists the committee members. Also, on the Web site, there are archives of discussions about the creation of the ELC. This adds to the growing excitement about Linux in embedded systems over the past couple of months."

Joshua Lamorie writes: "Rick Lehrbaum, the guy behind www.linuxdevices.com, and involved with the PC/104 Consortium has put together a group of heavy hitters from both the embedded world and the Linux world. The press release came out today, and lists the committee members. Also, on the Web site, there are archives of discussions about the creation of the ELC. This adds to the growing excitement about Linux in embedded systems over the past couple of months."

An anonymous reader writes "An article at LinuxDevices.com describes an effort underway to create an open source Linux 2.6 kernel for Motorola's Linux-based mobile phones. The project, called OpenEZX and founded by core netfilter/iptables developer Harald Welte, aims to allow users to install and run native Linux applications on their Motorola Linux phones."

An anonymous reader writes "An article at LinuxDevices.com describes an effort underway to create an open source Linux 2.6 kernel for Motorola's Linux-based mobile phones. The project, called OpenEZX and founded by core netfilter/iptables developer Harald Welte, aims to allow users to install and run native Linux applications on their Motorola Linux phones."