"Minimig stands for Mini Amiga. Minimig is an FPGA-based re-implementation of the original Amiga 500 hardware. In it's current form, Minimig is a single PCB measuring only 12*12cm which makes it the smallest 'Amiga' ever made and the first new 'Amiga' in almost 14 years! Minimig is available for download as an open-source/open-hardware design under the GNU public license. This page describes the architecture and the inner working of the Minimig. All design files can be downloaded from the download section."

Red Hat confirmed on Aug. 3 that it would be delaying the release of the newest member of its desktop Linux family, Red Hat Global Desktop, because the company is seeking to provide certain multimedia codecs. Sources close to Red Hat said obtaining some of these codecs was dependent on Red Hat coming to an agreement with Microsoft.

"Google's first mobile phone reportedly 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. "GPhone" call minutes and text messages will apparently be funded by mobile advertising, according to reports." The report found at the popular embedded systems Linux news site LinuxDevices.

"In the past, we've speculated on an early 2008 launch, and according to a recent Redmond Channel Partner Online article, Microsoft could be planning just that. "We're currently planning to deliver SP3 for Windows XP in the first half of CY2008. This date is preliminary, and we don't have any more details to share at this time." Service Pack 2 was released in August of 2004 and added various features like the Internet Explorer Pop-up blocker, Windows Security Center, firewall updates and improved wireless and Bluetooth support."

Continuing their historical series looking at the early Linux kernels, KernelTrap is discussing the 0.02 and 0.03 kernels released in late 1991. Though the actual source code has been lost to time, the article offers an interesting collection of emails by Linux creator Linus Torvalds about his new operating system, 'for hackers by a hacker.' Version 0.02 was the first usable release, gaining the ability to run programs such as gcc if compiled on Minix. Version 0.03 fixed buffer-cache issues that made it possible to compile gcc from Linux. Interestingly enough, at this point Linus thought of Linux as a short-lived project saying, "wait for Hurd if you want something real. It's fun hacking it, though (but I'm biased)."

A new operating system for the Cambridge Computer Z88 (Sinclair latest portable computer) is available. This version runs from an external flash eprom slot and thus is easily upgradeable. It uses a code hook present in the original ROM. This version is now international and handles ISO characters and lots of keyboards. All details are on the wiki.

"At the Blackhat conference, Window Snyder and Mike Shaver of Mozilla released new tools for testing their browser - Firefox - and other popular browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Opera. The tools include a protocol fuzzer by Michael Eddington and a Javascript fuzzer by Jesse Ruderman. Fuzzing is a method by which researchers randomly simulate common conditions under which most browsers fail.

"Last week at OSCON someone set up a whiteboard with the heading 'Tools We Wish We Had'. People added entries (wiki-style); this one in particular caught my eye: 'dtrace for Linux, or something similar'. So what exactly were they asking for? "

"In all the excitement about Vista Service Pack 1 betas that were imminent and then not so imminent, the company continues to release patches to select groups of testers. Most recently a group of patches appeared on Windows Connect, the online downloading service Microsoft provides for a select group of beta testers. Only testers of Windows Server 2008 beta were allowed to download the patches, but they are aimed at Vista as well."

OpenSUSE 10.3 alpha 7 is released. "Alpha7 is ready, after 5 rebuilds we're happy to say it looks good enough for the public. Important Changes Since Alpha6: Linux 2.6.22.1; gcc 4.2.1; libzypp 3.12.1; the package set of the CDs are heavily reshuffled and with it the patterns also affecting the DVD."

Acer is planning to sell Linux-based PCs to the UK market, the company told ZDNet.co.uk. On Thursday Acer contacted ZDNet.co.uk with the following statement: "At this moment in time Acer UK does not have a PC available with Linux pre-loaded, but we are looking at introducing one in the future." This appears to represent a reversal of Acer's previous statements on the matter, which suggested that the manufacturer had no plans to sell PCs here with a pre-installed open-source operating system.

"Since the last post, a lot of people have asked me 'why are you doing this? What advantage does it actually give?' In this post, I'll try to explain."

Five weeks later than planned, the KDE project has released KDE 4.0 Beta 1. "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications." Update: Screenshots.

GNOME 2.19.6 has been released yesterday. "This is our sixth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. New features are still arriving, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."