ucdot writes "Here is the announcement for a port of uClinux to the Apple iPod, checkout the project page for extra details. Currently the frame buffer, audio and IDE devices are working. Still plenty of work to do."

I've just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I've had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I've been to since ALS was still operating. I've got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what's the plan for next year (It'll be in Adelaide, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie's write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne's excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well. Update: 02/04 02:42 GMT by T : ilovestuff points out ZDNet Australia's coverage as well.

Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly. Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format. Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager. Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."

Fred Nowicki asks: "If you have ever used the P2P client Direct Connect (or DC++) to find media on the Internet, you know that the best hubs have ridiculous sharing requirements, i.e., over 100GB. It isn't too difficult to amass a collection of 100GB of illegal movies and MP3s with all the crap that's out there, but I'd like to play it straight: I want to collect 150GB of pure legal stuff. So here's my million dollar question: What is the best and fastest way for me achieve this? I want to offer interesting, neat stuff (movies, music, programs, etc.), not just Linux distros, mind you. One thing I've found so far is a mirror of the Prelinger Archives on archive.org, which offers over 37GB of wacky, interesting stuff on divx format (in MPEG-2, it's over 350GB, but that seems like cheating if I take that route). One downside of this site is that it's not a very fast connection (about 50KB/sec through their FTP via my cable modem -- I'd like a throughput of at least 100KB/sec). I've considered mirroring the Gutenberg project, but there are all sorts of redistribution issues with a bunch of their files, and I don't want to go through all that hassle. Come on, Slashdot. Give me some URLs!"

someguyintoronto writes "This article from the Globe and Mail states that an Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled 3-0 that infrared surveillance is subject to the same laws that exist for obtaining warrants. The ruling came under a case where RCMP conducted aerial surveillance on a suspect's personal residence for production and trafficking of marijuana. The court commented: 'The nature of the intrusiveness is subtle, but almost Orwellian in its theoretical capacity.'" The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling has held much the same thing.

Lours writes "OzXChip, an Australian company, has a new Xbox chip which comes preinstalled with the new (Cromwell Linux BIOS. Previous chips came without (or simplistic) BIOS for obvious legal and hardware-related (HD-key) reasons you had to go through a lot of manipulations in order to install a patched version of the original Microsoft BIOS or ask the vendor to do it which obviously he was not willing to do for free (when he was willing to). Since the new Cromwell BIOS is fully open source it can be shipped with the chip without any legal risks, gaining you a lot of time, sweat and money. Plus the chip has a very useful feature: by using software based on Andy Green's -- one of the maintainers of the XBox Linux project -- Raincoat, it lets you flash a new BIOS very easily: burn the BIOS file onto a blank CD, put it in the Xbox, boot and you are done. With such beasts there is not much left in the way of want-to-be Linux Xbox hackers who might have been affraid until now to have to deal with delicate hardware intricacies or reluctant to run the whole town for a vendor willing to mod their Xbox at the smallest fee. With important linux distributions also incoming (Debian and Mandrake are underway if not completed) it won't be long before everyone can write code for (and on!) the machine only a few minutes after receiving the chip in his mailbox. Hopefully we are going to see a zillion things running on the machine that Microsoft would only have dreamt of making (and selling)." Update: 01/23 16:07 GMT by T : The company's name is actually OzXChip, rather than OzChip (as originally rendered); thanks to reader Michael Muir for pointing this out.

Dr.Ruud asks: "What would be good ways to build a multichannel VCR? Think of a cluster of 4 PCs, each having 4 TV-cards (with MPEG-hardware on each) and (if necessary) a separate harddisk per TV-card, and maybe a 5th PC that controls the others, holds a DVD-writer and any other necessary hardware. Could it be done in a simpler and cheaper way? See also linuxtv.org, linuxmedialabs.com and of course SouceForge-vcr-projects like Freevo." What would be the best way to go about cutting down the number of machines such a cluster would need? Could this be done by building an all-in-one-wonderbox without it getting really expensive?

An anonymous reader writes "The new stable version of Umbrello UML Modeller 1.1 was released on 20 January. Currently only source and SuSE packages are available. Is there a better UML modeller for Linux?"

A user asks: " Like some folks, I like to take my mini-dv camera to make films. First, I was using Premiere, then Avid Xpress on Windows. But now I want to make [a movie] on my Debian box. Everybody says that video under Linux is not possible but I want to do it! I want to write the scenario on Linux (maybe with a set of Latex commands or SGML?). When all is in the box, I want to put it on my computer. Dvgrab does a perfect job! Now I'm looking for a video editor. Cinelerra is nice but it doesn't read files from dvgrab. When it's time to have fun with FX, I was using Adobe After Effect, but [are there similar programs for Linux]? Film Gimp? Jahshaka?"

bigcitymike writes "Well it might be vaporware, but it appears Dreamix is trying to turn the Xbox into a PVR with a TV guide like scheduler. They also state PC as well as Mac/Linux support down the road. " Project Dreamix will turn the Microsoft Xbox into the ultimate home entertainment center." I presume it requires a mod-chip installed." The xbox media player really goes a long way towards this goal already. MSFT may not be the friendliest of companies, but for $200, the x-box makes a helluva stereo component.

A semi-anonymous reader writes with this account: "Kyley and I drove up to Austin for the Linux top gun hacker challenge event. We weren't sure what to expect, but looked forward to seeing a theatre with wireless internet, meeting security geeks, and learning new tricks at this hackfest. In the end, most people left early and unhappy, but I'm still glad we went." Read on for more on what was worthwhile about this event, and what left some of the audience disappointed.

cavac writes "At the 19th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin/Germany developers showed their newest developments for the closed-down Blinkenlights-Project. One of the projects was the Blinkenlights Fileserver Project. Members of this team developed a protocol and some tools similar to ftp, which you can use to share Blinkenlights-Movies. Today, a first Beta-Version was released. You might want to check it out. (It also includes the famous Telnet-Blinkenlights-Player). We are still searching people willing to help us developing this software even more or to work with us on "Phase II": Implementing Soft- and Hardware for a Hardware-Based Blinkenlights Player. This will most likely based on one of Zilog's new Development Kits - the "Z8 Encore!"."

Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible. The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."

Kai writes "PCWorld.com recently posted an article on how Lindows CEO Michael Robertson is funding the 'Linux on XBox Hacking Challenge'. He was previously annonymous donor who donated $200,000 to the project. His donation will be split in to two prizes, one to who completes part A of the challenge, and the other to the who completes part B. Part A, running Linux on the XBox, has already been completed, but Part B, running Linux on XBox with no hardware modifications has yet to be completed. Part A of the challenge can be downloaded from Sourceforge." Without a bios change, it seems like part B might be a bit tricky. T. adds: Tricky, but not hopeless. Eric C. writes "The Neo Project recently updated its client so users can use free processor cycles to try and crack the private key that Microsoft uses to sign Xbox software."

phyxeld writes "RubyCocoa 0.4.0 is out. From the sf.net page: 'RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script. In Cocoa application, mixture of program written by both Ruby and Objective-C is possible.' It's always nice to see more GPL software in the Mac OS X world."

elohim writes "The kind souls at QT Components have released an ogg vorbis component that allows playback of oggs in quicktime 6.0.2 and itunes. Hopefully we'll see ogg encoding integrated in itunes soon. This is a big step forward for vorbis fans! I can hardly wait to pick up a shiny, new powerbook and start blasting my oggs!" CT Yeah, this is a dupe. Whatever. It's the holidays- nothing else is happening ;)

rael9real writes "Jeff Raskin, developer of the MacOS and author of The Humane Interface [ed.: which was reviewed last year], has been hard at work with several others coding The Humane Environment. They have a developers edition out for Christmas. It runs on Mac OS 9/X. Reading the manual, it is basically a text editor/Python IDE, but it does seem to incorporate some neat ideas in the field. I can't wait to get home and try it out!"

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

Jas Sandys-Lumsdaine writes "Bochs 2.0 has just been released - project lead Bryce Denney writes: "It's been a busy 6 months since our previous release! Bochs is now about twice as fast as version 1.4.1. Also, we can now emulate MMX instructions, SSE/SSE2, and even AMD x86-64 instructions if you turn on the appropriate configure options. The emulation improvements have paid off; several people have been able to install Windows XP recently." Excellent stuff."

AsparagusChallenge asks: "Let's say that I do have an open source project. I've setup a CVS on SourceForge, made release announcements on freshmeat, placed a nice webpage and a message board to discuss CVS commits. That said, what's the best way to attract talented people to help with development? I'd like to hear comments from people that have started their own projects and have got more people to work with them. What are the best channels to find volunteers, how to ask for testers, forming a team and so on. Note that I'm not advertising my project; what I'm asking for are general hints."