The Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS), held November 16-20 in Dallas, while kicking off the development cycle for the next Ubuntu release, "Lucid Lynx", had a surprising amount to interest a kernel hacker with embedded tendencies. The Summit covered a wide range of topics from low level kernel details, to best community practices, but the ARM netbook support sessions were particularly interesting.

An explanation of how to test an OpenRisc architecture with a hardware/software co-simulation; all the used tools are open source.

One of the biggest arguments that windows advocates use against Linux is that it is hard to use. That is why, they state, windows is so popular and a default standard in the enterprise world. Windows advocates believe that Linux is confusing and often cryptic with hard to understand, little or no documentation.

Linus Torvalds has merged the kernel code for the GeForce-compatible nouveau open source graphics driver as a staging driver into the Linux main development tree – from which kernel version 2.6.33 will emerge in around two and a half months.

I wish more pundits, bloggers, analysts, and tech reporters would comment more on the astonishing generosity that is the basis of Linux and FOSS. We need to take a break from arguing with each other to thank and honor all the thousands of hardworking talented contributors who give away their work.

qBittorrent is a multi-platform lightweight but fully featured BitTorrent client. It's authors claim it's the closest open source (GNU GPL v2 license) equivalent to µTorrent.

David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in the latest DRM patches for inclusion into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. The Direct Rendering Manager improvements in this next kernel release will be particularly interesting.

If I said Google's been getting a lot of press lately, that wouldn't mean much. Google always seems to get a lot of press. It could be my imagination, of course, but it really feels like there's been an uptick of chatter about Google these days.