Freescale Semiconductor announced a & smartbook& tablet reference design that runs Linux or Android. The smartbook design is equipped with a Freescale i.MX515 SoC clocked at 1GHz, a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 touchscreen, plus WiFi, GPS, a three megapixel camera, optional 3G, and & all-day battery life.& ...

Palm has released a new version of its Linux-based WebOS operating system for its Palm Pre and Palm Pixi phones, with a variety of improvements including App Catalog downloads. Meanwhile, eWEEK reports on rumors that Verizon Wireless will soon offer modified versions of the phones called the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus....

Mozilla has released the first release candidate of the Linux version of its & Fennec& mobile Firefox technology, called Firefox for Maemo. Available for Maemo devices like Nokia's N900 phone and older N810 Internet Tablet, the latest version of the mobile browser offers improved text rendering and adds hooks for add-on developers....

Chinese portable media player (PMP) vendor SmartDevices announced an ARM11-based MID (mobile internet device) that comes with Android, Ubuntu Linux, or Windows CE 6.0. The V5 features a 4.3-inch display with 800 x 480 resolution, 1080p video playback, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a mini-HDMI port, according to the company....

Syabas Technology has posted specs for an upcoming IP STB (set-top box) that supports streaming Netflix downloads. The UPnP-ready & Popbox& offers Ethernet, WiFi, Component video, and HDMI connections, runs embedded Linux on a MIPS-based Sigma Designs SMP8643 processor, and will ship in March for only $129, according to DeviceGuru....

Samsung announced four netbooks using Intel's new N450 & Pineview& Atom. The N210, N220, N150, and NB30 include 10.1-inch & anti-reflective& displays and up to 12 hours of battery life, and two models run the Linux-based Phoenix HyperSpace fast-boot environment, the company says....

Marvell announced a faster, wirelessly connected version of its tiny, Linux-based networking computer reference design, which plugs directly into a wall adapter. The Plug Computer 3.0 design adds WiFi, Bluetooth, and a built-in hard drive, and moves up to a new 2GHz Armada 300 version of its ARM-based Armada processors....

Skiff LLC announced a Linux-based e-book reader optimized for newspaper and magazine content, delivered via Sprint's 3G network. The Skiff Reader's display is claimed to be the largest (11.5 inches) and highest-resolution (UXGA) among e-readers, and the first to offer LG Displays' stainless-steel foil display technology, touted for greater durability....

Google shipped its first branded phone, the HTC-manufactured, Android 2.1-ready Nexus One, and announced a mobile web store. Initially available unlocked at $530 from Google or with a T-Mobile plan at $180, the Nexus One boasts a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen, five-megapixel camera, and voice activated controls....

Google asked the Federal Communications Commission to let it help administer & white space& networking, tapping into unused TV spectrum to deliver broadband services. Yesterday, Google proposed that it be allowed to create a geolocation database that will protect licensed TV and wireless microphone signals from harmful interference, says the company....

While it's not too difficult to get your own package within Ubuntu's universe repository, it's more difficult to get a Debian package promoted to be within Ubuntu main, or the main repository that is officially supported by Canonical. However, the Ubuntu development community has decided to make that process a bit easier by eliminating some of the hurdles imposed when a package is initially rejected from being pushed into the main repository...

Via Technologies announced a fanless, Pico-ITX board featuring 64-bit processing and & ruthless hardware acceleration& of 1080p HD video. The Epia-P820 includes a 1.2GHz Nano U2500 CPU, a HDMI port, SATA and IDE interfaces, plus an optional Amos-3000 chassis, the company says....

Lenovo announced two & smartbooks& that run Linux on an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. The Skylight is a 10.1-inch netbook, while the IdeaPad U1 is hybrid mini-notebook that runs Windows 7 on an Intel Core 2 Duo and -- when its tablet/display is detached -- Linux on a Qualcomm Snapdragon....

Broadcom announced that it has ported Android and Windows CE to a ARM-based CPU described as & a PND [personal navigation device] on a chip.& The BCM4760 includes a GPS receiver and baseband, an ARM11 processor, a touchscreen controller, and an OpenGL ES 1.1/OpenVG 2.0-compliant graphics processor, the company says....

ZiiLabs announced an HD-ready media hub reference design incorporating its 1GHZ, ARM Cortex-A8-based ZMS-08 system-on-chip (SoC). The Zii SiVo Digital Home Platform provides 1080p Blu-ray quality HDTV and 3D graphics UI for low-power connected home devices, and offers a development kit for Android or ZiiLabs' Plaszma Linux stack....

HP announced three netbooks using Intel's N450 & Pineview& processor that support SUSE Linux: the Mini 210, Mini 2102, both with 10.1-inch screens, and the Mini 5102, which offers 10-hour claimed battery life and an optional touchscreen. Meanwhile, at CES the company unveiled a prototype Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android & smartbook,& says Engadget....

AT T announced plans to launch five Android devices from Dell, HTC, and Motorola in the first half of the year, as well as two Palm WebOS phones, say reports. In separate announcements, AT T and T-Mobile said they had completed upgrades to provide HSPA 7.2 service across their 3G networks, says eWEEK....

MSI and Novell will soon ship MSI's new Intel Atom N450-based MSI U135 netbook with SUSE Moblin Linux v2.1. Loaded with netbook-focused distro, the U135 offers up to 2GB RAM, a 10.1-inch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 160GB or 250GB hard disk drives, say the companies....

Back in October of 2007 we were the first to tell the world about SplashTop, an instant-on Linux environment that was embedded into ASUS motherboards and since then has appeared on various other motherboards, netbooks, and notebooks. We later shared more details about SplashTop, new features, and other details...

AMD's Alex Deucher has just committed initial support for Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) connectors/monitors to the xf86-video-ati DDX display driver. Traditional DisplayPort monitors are already supported by this open-source ATI driver, but now Embedded DisplayPort connectors should begin to work as well...

Intel used an early-morning conference at today's Consumer Electronics Show to roll out 27 new processors, including 12 specifically aimed at embedded devices. Additions to the chipmaker's Core i3, i5, i7, and Xeon families, the CPUs have two or four cores, include on-chip graphics, and incorporate & Turbo Boost& technology, according to the company....

Back in 2008, Novell's David Reveman published his own branch of the Distributed Multi-head X (DMX) server which he called dmx-2 as it was close to a complete rewrite of the original DMX implementation. David's DMX-2 branch was less complex but provided a greater set of features, including X-Video, RandR 1.2, and Composite support in a DMX environment, D-Bus configuration, and many other changes...

Motorola announced its third Android phone, featuring a reverse-flip QWERTY keyboard and Mot's MotoBlur UI. The Backflip is equipped with a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, and offers 2GB of memory, a 3.1-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, aGPS, five-megapixel camera, and a & Backtrack& touchpanel on the back of the device....

Texas Instruments (TI) announced an e-book reader development platform for Linux and Android, based on its OMAP3621 system-on-chip. The eBook Development Platform is equipped with an E Ink electrophoretic EPD display, TI's new TPS6518x EPD power management IC, plus an integrated WiLink chip (WiFi, Bluetooth, and FM) and 3G support....

While wireless chipsets are not as complicated as graphics processors, under Linux they can cause just as many headaches when it comes to getting them working reliably. More hardware vendors have opened up to supporting their wireless chipsets under Linux, but still it can be a pain having to hunt down the firmware for a wireless adapter, needing to build an out-of-tree driver, having issues with the driver such as with WEP/WPA authentication, or if all else fails trying to get the Windows driver working under Linux through ndiswrapper. However, for those looking for a PCI-based 802.11g/n wireless adapter that will work "out of the box" with modern distributions like Ubuntu 9.10, one that we have found to do the job is the Encore ENLWI-N.

Version 1.7.4 of the X.Org Server has been released this morning. This point release continues to bring new bug-fixes to the X Server 1.7 series branch since its release last year...

My sabbatical with Windows is coming to an end next week, but during the past three weeks I have been using the brand-new ASUS Eee PC 1201N exclusively. This ASUS netbook that packs an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor, NVIDIA ION graphics, a nice 12" display that runs at 1366 x 768, and 2GB of RAM has been working out quite well...

There's only a few weeks left until KDE 4.4 will be released, but being released this morning is the first release candidate of the KDE 4.4 Software Compilation. KDE 4.4 is set to deliver new applications, improvements to the Plasma desktop, Nepomuk search advancements, and many other improvements...

There's just one month left until the Free and Open-source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) takes place once again in Brussels, Belgium. Like in past years, there will be an X.Org development room where various talks about X will be held, but this year it has turned into a one-day affair...

Lenovo unveiled a Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android smartphone aimed for a 1H 2010 release in China, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Dell officially announced a version of the Mini 3 Android smartphone aimed at AT T's U.S. network, and showed off a MID-like Android & slate& prototype....

EMC subsidiary Iomega is readying a WiFi-enabled, Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device that costs $100. The Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station has no storage of its own, but acts as a wireless hub that shares data stored on devices hooked up to its four USB 2.0 ports....

Nvidia announced the latest in its family of ARM-based SoCs (system on chips), claiming up to four times the performance of the previous generation. The Tegra 250 includes eight processors including a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, streams 1080p HD video, and offers & days& of battery life, the company says....

Eurotech is readying a COM Express (Type 2) computer-on-module (COM) that incorporates Intel's new Core i7 processor and Mobile Intel QM57 Express chipset. The Linux-ready Adbc8031 module supports Intel hyperthreading technology and ECC memory, and offers interfaces including SATA, gigabit Ethernet, and PCI Express, says the company....

Version 1.1.36 of Wine has been released to provide in a released version all of the development work done to this major free software project over the past two weeks. Wine 1.1.36 does carry some interesting changes, including better Shader Model 4.0 support, completion of 16-bit separation, fixes for many memory leaks, improved debugging for MinGW, MSHTML fixes, and various other bug-fixes. The Wine 1.1.36 release announcement can be read at WineHQ.org...

A few weeks back we reviewed the Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB. This 32GB flash drive was very nice just like Corsair's other flash memory products and it boasted an impressive capacity with great read/write speeds, but its price at over $100 USD is not for everyone. For those that can make do with a smaller capacity and are looking to just spend a few dollars in comparison, there is the OCZ Zee. The Zee flash drive is available in capacities up to 16GB, has a more conventional housing, and is backed by a two year warranty (in comparison to Corsair's ten-year backing), but the prices for the Zee USB 2.0 drivers are much more affordable.

Back in 2008 the developers behind the Nouveau reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver dropped support for their classic Mesa driver even before there was ever a stable release of it. Instead the developers working on the 3D support for all generations of NVIDIA hardware turned their focus to their Gallium3D driver, which still remains heavily experimental to this day...

For those of you attending the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) next month in Los Angeles, Matthew Tippett and I will be hosting a talk. This talk is entitled "5 Stages of Benchmark Loss: PTS and You" and, of course, covers the Phoronix Test Suite software and its capabilities and more for autonomously testing Linux and other operating systems. For those that cannot make this event, slides shall be posted on Phoronix afterwards and likely a video recording of it too...

While the Nouveau driver is now beginning to be trimmed down a bit as non-KMS support is being dropped, this free software NVIDIA driver will be gaining some new code in the form of power management support. Power management for NVIDIA hardware in the Nouveau driver stack is still early on, but a patch is being prepared and a discussion has been initiated how to handle the power management controls for this driver...

Verizon Wireless announced Jan. 25 availability of two modified versions of Palm's WebOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre Plus and the newly WiFi-enabled Palm Pixi Plus. Meanwhile, Palm announced that its WebOS developer program is now open to all developers, and plans to launch a WebOS plugin development kit, says eWEEK....

Atmel announced a version of its ARM926EJ-based & SAM9& line of industrial-focused system-on-chips, this time integrating a video decoder and graphics acceleration. The SAM9M10 ships with a Linux evaluation board and BSP, and supports video at up to 720 x 576 pixels and 30 frames per second, says the company....

At CES, MIPS Technologies and its partners demonstrated Android- and MIPS processor-driven IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) and related products. Western Mediabridge and KDDI both demo'd IP STBs incorporating Sigma Designs processors, Home Jinni, KatDC, and AllGo Systems showed related IPTV firmware, and Lemote demo'd Android running on its YeeLoong netbook....

Quartics Inc. used last week's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) to show off a VPU (video processing unit) claimed to improve video quality on the fly and do real-time conversion to 3D. The Windows-ready QV1721 targets netbooks, laptops, and other PCs, and includes an on-chip ARM926EJ processor, the company says....