Facebook made its first acquisition, picking up Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, a pair who created Mozilla's Firefox browser. Although specifics about what exactly Parakey is are few, it is described as a way to bridge the gap between desktop applications and Web functions.

A vendor of high-end test and measurement equipment for the semiconductor fabrication market has switched to Linux. Keithley Instruments said its S600 Series Parametric Test Systems are more stable and have a longer service life, now that their embedded control computer runs Linux instead of Solaris.

If you need a compact, streamlined distro capable of running on an aging machine, take a look at Puppy Linux 2.17, a fresh release containing a number of new features, including seriously upgraded printing capabilities and enhanced modem detection and configuration.

A nice short and sweet command line tip today and it’s to do with finding out information about the version of the kernel you’re running. You might be asked for this information if you are asking for help somewhere or you might be messing around with your kernel.

Aptly-named Slackintosh version 12, just released, updates this unofficial version of Slackware Linux that targets PowerPC-based Macintosh computers, such as the iBook. Based on a 2.6.21.5 kernel, the distribution's brief release statement noted that version 12 includes KDE 3.5.7 and glibc 2.5.

Wal-Mart will sell a sub-$300 "back-to-school" PC this fall pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows Vista and OpenOffice.org productivity software. The Everex GC3502 PC, is based on a 1.7GHz Via C7-D processor, and will be available later this year preloaded with Ubuntu Linux.

For quite a few pundits out there, the fact that there are so many Linux distributions is a bit troubling to them. I am not sure why this argument keeps coming up, but it goes something like this: there are X Linux distros out there, which is too many to choose from for users, and creates a strain on developer resources.