Some Linux News

i-fe8440d1191572828af7326b0abd6a6f-reiser_note.jpg

Hans Reiser asks for a new lawyer (see below)
This first item is not exclusively Linux at all...

Remember the effort by Firefox to break a downloading record? They did it. Guinness has given Firefox the record, officially. Over eight million hamburgers sold...

The de facto registrar of superlative achievements has credited Mozilla for officially setting a record for downloads in a 24-hour period: 8,002,530 copies of Firefox.

Mozilla's Download Day on June 17, whose server-crippling success delayed its official start, sought to popularize the open-source Web browser. Mozilla, which oversees the Firefox project, projected at the time that it cleared 8 million, but the number is now official.

"As the arbiter and recorder of the world's amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla's achievement to our archives," Gareth Deaves, Guinness' records manager, said in a statement. cnet

Much more news below the fold.

---- fold here -----

A school in St. Louis, Missouri is taking the plunge!

Lenovo has supplied about 600 laptops to the Whitfield School, it says, including systems that run both Linux and Windows. Whitfield started its PC program in 2005, and this year achieved its goal of supplying each student in grades six through 12 with their own laptop, it says.

Citing a study done by the Whitfield School, Lenovo says that by the end of 2006, "students using ThinkPads spent 50 percent of their time on the PC in the Linux environment." That figure reportedly increased to 75 percent by the end of 2007, and 86 percent by the end of 2008.

more here...

Funny, that. When given the choice, people do not always make the choice that Microsoft and their dickless corporate and institutional drones are forcing down their throats every day.

More on the Reiser File System.
Oh, no wait, this is actually about the Hans Reiser murder case.

Convicted murderer Hans Reiser has asked his trial judge to appoint him a new lawyer, ahead of a July 9 sentencing hearing.

In a handwritten note (.pdf) to the court, and made public Wednesday, Reiser asked that his former divorce lawyer be appointed in place of criminal defense attorney William DuBois, who represented him at trial.

"I believe that Mr. DuBois has a deep bias against me," Reiser wrote. "I have not had good judgment in life about who I trust ... I request a continuance in regard to the motion for a new trial so that the new attorney can supplement it."

from wired

These days, may electronic devices that seem even a little smart have computers embedded in them. What operating systems run those computers? Actually, there are one or two operating systems designed just for this purpose that run most of them, and you've never heard of these systems. But often, it's Linux, and it is always fun to find out when that is the case. You would think that there would be a list out there of what OS's run which devices, but this is all secret proprietary stuff. So the only way we know what OS is in a machine is by wacking it with a hammer and seeing what OS pops out. (That was an analogy.)

Anyway, it turns out that Garmin Navigation devices run Linux.

Garmin has posted Linux source code for its Nuvi 8xx and Nuvi 5xxx-series GPS navigation devices. The Nuvi 8xx offers a 4.3-inch, 480x272 display, and appears to be based on a Marvell PXA-3xx processor, Gnome Mobile Linux, and GeoClue location technology.

It had been rumored since the Nuvi 880 and Nuvi 860 shipped several months ago that the devices were equipped with embedded Linux, but when LinuxDevices asked Garmin for source code in March, the company replied: "Unfortunately, the information about the operating system of Garmin devices is considered proprietary." The Garmin Linux source code page, however, now lists source code for version 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 of the Nuvi 8xx software, as well as versions 3.7 and 3.8 for the Nuvi 5xxx.

source

More like this

The Boy's daughter KaylaFace ran two years ago as a sophomore for president of her student body. Her platform revolved around working with the school board and the administration to update the school's technology, and to begin preparing to make the move to laptops for students rather than armloads of textbooks.

She covered the tech angle, the student health angle, and everything in between.

She was soundly defeated by a girl who's platform was, "I'm going to make prom great this year" (I shit you not, that was her entire platform), despite the fact that she'd have nothing whatever to do with the prom or its planning.

Schools don't seem to be engendering much in the way of imagination, I guess.