"I'm writing a chapter on how to use Emacs to manage your tasks. I find it hard to explain why Emacs is so compelling..."

The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux® as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.

Linux has so many tools, settings, parameters, and configuration files to learn that administering your box can be a challenge. Webmin, a Web-based comprehensive administration tool for Linux, can help you get on your way.

"...In preparation for our big push, and to help ensure the good children all the world-over get the best Songbird 0.4 that could be built, we've cut our RC1 release today. So please pretty please download 0.4RC1 and start hammering on it to see what issues we might be missing..."

"On this 20th birthday of Perl, I'd like to express my appreciation to Larry Wall (and his family) for the many years of leadership, dedication, wit, wisdom, and sacrifice that he has put into Perl. Of course, there are many more people who deserve our thanks for Perl, too many to list here, but Larry has always been a fixture of the community and I'm so thankful for his efforts..."

"GNU Arch (Arch) is a software version control system that was created by programmer TomLord to meet his version control needs. It’s changeset-oriented, supports distributed development and branching, and has sophisticated merge functionality..."

Guile is a library designed to help programmers create flexible applications. Using Guile in an application allows programmers to write plug-ins, or modules (there are many names, but the concept is essentially the same) and users to use them to have an application fit their needs.

There is a long list of proven applications that employ extension languages. Successful and long-lived examples in the free software world are GNU Emacs and The GIMP.

A Virginia-based company offering radio protocol conversion products for telecom infrastructure has reportedly licensed Enea's soup-to-nuts carrier-grade Linux and high-availability middleware suite. Enea says 4DK will use the "Enea Accelerator Platform" with its "SuperConnectivity" product, apparently aimed at enabling telecom infrastructure to support multiple cellular protocols.