OStatic

You never know where you're going to see Linux crop up. As Reuven Lerner from this blog noted a while back, he was amused when Tux the penguin showed up on his seat-back, in-flight entertainment system. Now, it appears that Australian Research group NICTA and University of New South Wales have developed a clarinet-playing robot that runs Linux. LinuxDevices reports that the Robo-Clarinet won first prize at the Artemis Music Orchestra competition for autonomous, embedded musical instrument performances. It apparenlty dealt out torrid renditions of Flight of the Bumblebee and Bolero. Take a gander.

I was very interested in this piece from Computerworld U.K., titled Can we give every school child in the U.K. a Linux notebook and still save money? It provides a cost breakdown of what it would take to give every student a Linux notebook, compared to the costs schools in the U.K. currently face for software licenses, other technology fees, and printing and photocopying. According to the author of this story, the fees for printing and photocopying alone at schools are staggering--to the point where if electronic materials replaced much of the printed materials, there would be enough money to give each student a low-cost Linux notebook--and lots left over. Would this work in the U.S.?

I've seen a certain amount of gloating recently in the open source press about a memo from Bill Gates that the Seattle PI recently dug up. You know the one, probably: Bill tries to install some software from the net, and ends up flaming his people for a couple of pages with choice bits like The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. But so what?

There's no stopping the virtualization race. Microsoft has just released to manufacturing WIndows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The Release Candidate of its? virtualization application is found here.? Hyper-V is hypervisor-based virtualization software that allows you to run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux, on one installation of Windows Server.

In what it calls a move to support and to unify the growing momentum of Linux platforms in the global mobile market, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced that it is foliding itself into the LiMo Foundation starting in July. After nearly three years of existence, and having delivered version 1.0 of its specification for Linux-based mobile phones the LiPS Forum has not gained a great deal of traction, but LiMo does have momentum, and will gain resources from the deal. Here's what the LiPS Forum can provide LiMo.

As we posted yesterday, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT Docomo announced today that they will unite the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) into one open source mobile software platform. In conjunction, a number of members have announced the Symbian Foundation, to oversee the new platform. Now, the LiMo Foundation--which has a Linux-based mobile platform that will arrive on many phones later this year--has issued a statement welcoming the Symbian Foundation. Will we in fact see fierce competition between these two entities?

There's an uneasy relationship between Linux and some of the bits that make it work on many computers - closed-source kernel modules. These modules - NVidia video card drivers are the most notorious example - add substantial, and sometimes critical, functionality to Linux without themselves being open source. Now a group of kernel developers are on the record with their opposition to these modules.

Information Week has an interesting piece up about open source disaster recovery tools. It covers a lot of the good applications that can come to the rescue when you need to recover data or revive a computer. They include SystemRescueCD, BackTrack, Partedmagic, TestDisk and more. In addition to these open source tools, there are also a number of great freeware products in this general category, especially for preventative maintenance. Here are five of them, with a couple of open source gems thrown in, that can help you avoid disaster.

There's more momentum on the mobile open source front. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT Docomo announced today that they will unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) into one open mobile software platform. In addition, the Symbian Foundation is now formed, with many prominent early members, including AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. Nokia will also buy out the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that it doesn't already own, for $410 million. Is Nokia only aiming to stop paying hefty Symbian license fees, or does this point to a promising new open source mobile platform? What does this mean for Linux phones?