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  • Samsung unveils Android tablet with 3G telephony
    Linux Devices: " Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera..."

LWN.net

  • Embedded Linux Conference videos available
    Michael Opdenacker has announced the availability of videos from this year's Embedded Linux Conference, which was held in San Francisco in April. The slides and Theora video are available for most, if not all, of the talks. Opdenacker and the Free Electrons team do the community a great service by doing the work to record and transcode the videos. "If you are interested in such talks, what about joining the European edition of the conference? It will take place in Cambridge (UK), on October 27-28, and will be colocated with the GStreamer conference (October 26). See http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe10/ and http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/conference/ for details."
  • Thursday's security updates

    Mandriva has updated thunderbird (multiple vulnerabilities).

    Ubuntu has updated wget (arbitrary code execution).

  • Vignatti: X Census (for 1.9)
    Tiago Vignatti has put together a report on the development X.org 1.9. In the tradition of the kernel statistics reported on LWN, and the more recent GNOME census, he ranks developers and employers based on the number of changes made to various pieces of the X.org tree during the development of 1.9 (April 2 to August 20). The statistics are broken up along functional lines into several categories: X implementation, X input drivers, user space video drivers, Pixman, X11 conformance testing, and X documentation. "Of course lines of code and changeset are far from being a good metric to see actually how the development happened. But still, it does represents something."
  • [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 2, 2010
    The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 2, 2010 is available.
  • Welte: More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case
    On his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. "Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either." If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.
  • GNOME Journal Issue 21 released
    Issue 21 of the GNOME Journal is out; topics covered include simple real-time games, Grilo, and an interview with Bradley Kuhn.
  • Security advisories for Wednesday
    CentOS has updated C5: httpd (multiple vulnerabilities) and C5: kernel (privilege escalation).

    Debian has updated wireshark (arbitrary code execution).

    Fedora has updated socat (F13, F12: arbitrary code execution).

    Mandriva has updated libgdiplus (arbitrary code execution), perl-libwww-perl (unexpected download filename), and openssl (denial of service).

    openSUSE has updated acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).

    SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities) and acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).

  • Duffy: A story about updates and people
    On her blog, Máirín Duffy describes four archetypes of Fedora users (Caroline Casual-User, Pamela Packager, Connie Community, and Nancy Ninja) and how they relate to updates of the distribution. Fedora has been discussing its update policy for a bit and Duffy uses the user stories to present her thoughts on how to proceed. "Pamela wants updates to be constant throughout a release, no holds barred — she wants the latest Gimp and she wants it yesterday. Caroline just wants her computer to work — "please don't change a thing — it worked yesterday — if it breaks before my presentation I'm screwed!" Can both their needs be met? I think so! But itÂ’s easy to completely miss where interests and needs can both be met when the language is so easily interpreted to mean the problem is untenable."
  • [$] LinuxCon Brazil: Q&A with Linus and Andrew
    [Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds] Linus Torvalds rarely makes appearances at conferences, and it's even less common for him to get up in front of the crowd and speak. He made an exception for LinuxCon Brazil, though, where he and Andrew Morton appeared in a question and answer session led by Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin. The resulting conversation covered many aspects of kernel development, its processes, and its history. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from São Paulo.
  • Debian Project mourns the loss of Frans Pop
    The Debian Project has put up a brief notice on the passing of longtime contributor Frans Pop. "Frans was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian Listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator."