Is it Getting Too Warm for Penguins?, Feb 20, 2008

King penguins are supposed to be a wildlife success story. The flightless Antarctic bird — the second-biggest penguin after its movie-star emperor cousin — was hunted into near-extinction by sailors in the 19th century, who used their fat as cooking oil. When the slaughter ended — penguin fat no longer being the preferred way to simmer your cruise dinner — the penguin bounced back, and today numbers about 2 million. This is a healthy, robust species that sits near the top of the complex Antarctic food web.

Bologna, Italy-based TBE has announced a Linux-based panel PC aimed at HMI (human-machine interface) applications. Available with an integrated 6.4-inch touchscreen display or as a processor module, the GNU-Linux-based Terminale Grafico ARM-Linux is based on a 200MHz Cirrus Logic EP9315 SoC.

Usually, the North American computer giants introduce their latest and greatest products to the U.S. market first, with Europe an afterthought. Not this time. Dell is bringing its latest Ubuntu-powered laptop, the Inspiron 1525, to the Europeans first. Americans will need to wait until later in February for Dell's newest Ubuntu Linux computer.

Yes, I was quick to jump on the SCO gets $100 million lifeline story. And yes there is always more story to tell.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it.

Alpine already offers a number of products, including global positioning systems, that run atop a version of Microsoft's Windows operating system designed for vehicular use.

Google software engineer Dan Kegel posted a message to the Wine mailing list last week describing some of the improvements to Wine that Google has sponsored in the past year. These improvements, says Kegel, have substantially improved the Linux compatibility of several popular commercial software applications, including Adobe Photoshop and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Linux Warehouse has been appointed as official local distributor for the popular MySQL database in Southern Africa.

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