From PC World: “A production version of the free GNU operating system is likely to be available by the end of this year, according to the
president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF).

“We actually have the GNU kernel working, and we can now produce the GNU system, as opposed to the GNU/Linux system that people have been using so
far,” said Richard Stallman, who is in India this week to attend a GNU/Linux Day in Pune.”

NewsFactor Network writes “Imagine what would happen if the United Nations supported development of Linux, both in industrialized nations and in the developing world. Linux would benefit by bringing more developers to the table and by becoming the backbone of developing economies. Developing countries would benefit from an inexpensive infrastructure and the growth of a technology industry that could communicate with the industrialized world.”

LinuxSecurity Contributors writes: This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Snort-Setup for Statistics HOWTO,” “Ad
Zapping With Squid,” “Modular Authentication for Linux,” and “Implementing a Bridging Firewall.”
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/forums_artic le-4579.html

Andrew Stegmaier writes, “Mozilla 0.9.9 was released today. New features include SOAP support, a new ‘Page Info’ dialogue, TrueType fonts under most Unixes, and new a way to disable unrequested pop-up windows. According to the development roadmap, this is the last planned release before 1.0. Check out the release notes or go strait to downoad it.”

Brian Lane writes: “First a disclaimer, I am lead programmer for Shine Micro, maker of the SM2496 Handspring Visor DSP module. So what I say may all be an undisguised marketing ploy (it is!)”

Last Friday I released v1.11 of the SM2496 Software Development Kit under the GPL v2.0 License. The SM2496 is a DSP module (essentially a soundcard) for the Handspring Visor PalmOS devices. This SDK includes complete source code for a couple of PalmOS Amateur Radio packet and APRS applications, and the full source for the TI DSP 1200bps and 9600bps modems.

An interesting tie-in to Linux is that the modem code is based on the Linux Kernel Soundmodem driver software by Thomas Sailer. The usefulness of his work inspired us to release all of our software as GPL in the hopes to attract more developers to use the SM2496 platform.

With a sufficiently motivated programmer the SM2496-16 (160MHz DSP with a MMC card slot) could be made to play and possibly record using the Ogg Vorbis format. The only reason that I haven’t done this myself is the lack of time. We are current beta testing MP3 play and record on this platform and plan to release a MP3 player/recorder later this year.

The SDK is available from the Shine Micro Software Page

There is also a press release for the SM2496 here at the SM2496 Press Release Page

Brian Lane
Lead Programmer
Shine Micro, Inc.

Anonymous Reader writes, “According to this article at LinuxDevices.com, Empower Technologies has just begun shipping the PowerPlay V, a new $149 Linux-based PDA with the look and feel of a Palm Vx.”

Internet.com reports that “Palo Alto, Calif.’s Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP) Monday said it has put the finishing touches on the forging of a worldwide consortium whose focus is on the formation of Linux-based Intel Itanium applications for academic, government and industrial research. Called the Gelato Federation, the group will develop commodity software to help scientists conduct technology research in life and physical sciences.”

Slashdot: “Things look mighty bad for Loki employees. From this article it appears that some of them haven’t seen a paycheck since late 2000. Perhaps the most telling part of the article is contained in a parenthetical near the bottom of the page: ‘A single employee is listed in creditor filings as being owed almost $350,000 in unpaid salary and in expenses the company incurred using the employee’s credit card.'” Read the story here, or join the discussion in Slahsdot.

Debian Planet: “Eduard Bloch, maintainer of the bf2.4 kernel-image, has done some magic and cooked up XFS install disks and some Net install ISOs.You can get them here.” Read the full discussion here.

osOpinion: “While OS X may have ease-of-use advantages over Linux, for the most part the two operating systems do not compete in the same sector, Aberdeen Group platform and servers analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.” Read the story here.