A tiny, Linux-based gateway has won an award for hardware innovation at the 2007 Embedded World conference in Nuremberg this week. SSV Embedded Systems's 'Tux/Stick' interfaces between USB-enabled PCs and various industrial and embedded networks, including LANs, WiFi networks, wireless sensor networks, and in-car networks. The Tux/Stick looks like a typical USB memory stick. And, one end does plug into a USB port, just like a memory stick, drawing power from the host PC and booting a tiny ARM9-powered processor running Linux.

This is a response to the first part of the word processor review recently featured on donationcoder.com. I have WordPerfect Office X3, OpenOffice.org 2.1, and MS Office 2003 all installed on my computer, and the article stirred up some of the opinions that have gradually come to settle in the depths of my mind. So here are my thoughts.

IBM has announced an open-source desktop, running Lotus apps and Firefox on top of Red Hat or SUSE Linux. It's based on an internal project which has deployed Linux desktops to several thousand IBM staff, in what IBM said was one of the largest corporate Linux roll-outs to date. It added that its Open Client Solution can also take in Windows and Mac users, as there's Lotus software for those as well - although it admits that the Mac version of Notes 8 isn't due until later this year.

This week FSF Europe announced the release of its Fiduciary License Agreement, a form of copyright assignment in which a free software project can place its collective copyright under the control of a single organization or trustee. The agreement is designed to reduce the problems in managing copyrights in large projects, and to reconcile differences in copyright worldwide. However, exactly how important, useful, or necessary the FLA is depends upon whom you talk to in the free software community. To some extent, FSFE even seems to be operating contrary to the advice of the original Free Software Foundation in the US.

The Southern California Linux Exposition's fifth year has been its best yet, with record attendance, vendor participation, and excellent presentations and talks. There were few new things to announce or showcase at the event, but if you wanted to measure the pulse of the open source software community, this was undeniably the place to be this past weekend. More on SCALE 2007 at Linux.com.

"Almost a month ago InnoTek, the co-developer of VirtualPC, released their Virtual Machine as Open Source. The software was formerly not targetted at desktop users, but that changed when it was released under the GPL. This review tries to shed some light on the question if VirtualBox can get some market share between Vmware and Qemu."

14 months ago, the Autopackage project was small and active, and members sounded optimistic about its success. Now, although the alternative installer project continues, progress has almost come to a halt. The #autopackage channel on irc.oftc.net sits vacant most days, the developer blogs cover almost anything except the project, and commits to the source code repository have become rare. Formally, the project is still alive, but the major contributors all agree that it is faltering. So what happened?

The 3GSM convention was kicked off in Barcelona this year with some pretty cool products: the HP iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger (review), Toshiba's G900 and E01 with WinMob 6, Nokia's E61i and E65, Nokia's N77 with DVB-H mobile TV, Nokia's 6110 quad-band HSDPA GPS navigator, Motorola's MotoRIZR Z8 (video) that uses a non-touchscreen version of UIQ 3.0 and the L9 among others, the Neonode N2, the RIM BlackBerry 8800 (with possibly WiFi in it, unannounced feature), Samsung's 10 new cellphones including the touchscreen ones (specs) and a Symbian-based one, a Windows Mobile 6 video and lastly, a review of the highest-end Nokia Pro handset, the E90.

"In the first head-to-head comparison of trying to accomplish a task with Mac OS and Vista in this series, the new Windows operating system fell flat on its face. Migrating from an XP installation was halted by repeated failures of the Windows Easy Transfer application when used with a network connection and a so-called Easy Transfer Cable. I finally gave up and used Lenovo's System Migration Assistant."

If you've got Solaris with telnet running, you could be in for a big surprise. There is a fairly trivial Solaris telnet 0-day exploit in the wild . "This was posted to Full-Disclosure. Remote root exploit in the Solaris 10/11 telnet daemon. It doesn't require any skill, any exploit knowledge, and can be scripted for mass attacks. Basically if you pass a '-fusername' as an argument to the –l option you get full access to the OS as the user specified. In my example I do it as bin but it worked for regular users, just not for root. This combined with a reliable local privilege escalation exploit would be devastating. Expect mass scanning and possibly the widespread exploitation of this vulnerability."

"There's a new way to enhance your cache in Vista - simply plug in your Flash memory stick. But how much performance gain can you really expect? TG Daily ran an average PC through a benchmark parcours and discovered that the old rules still apply: There is no substitute for an adequate amount of system memory. Period."

LWN has a writeup sumarizing a talk from Keith Packard. RandR 1.2 with much improved handling of multiple input devices, improved EXA, libX11 with XCB support, OpenGL 2.0 support in Mesa, are some of the topics touched.

Novell and Intel Corporation today announced the availability of paravirtualized network and block device drivers that will allow Windows 2000/2003/XP to run unmodified in Xen on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell, operating on Intel-based server platforms featuring Intel Virtualization Technology.

"Ten years ago to this very week, Steve Jobs killed Apple. Or he began to take apart many of the projects and organization that many inside and outside the company thought of as Apple's value to the computing industry. This event was the announcement of the company's infamous spring 1997 reorganization, which continued step-by-step throughout the spring. For the company's long-suffering developers and ISVs, push came to shove at the annual WWDC, where Steve Jobs revealed his plans for Apple's future direction. Today, with the iPod-influenced haze over of recent Apple history as well as the success of Apple's retail strategy and the Intel-Macintosh transition, we forget that some of that 'future' talked up in 1997 never happened."