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Envizions Computer Entertainment announced recently that the Linux-based EVO gaming console will be available for sale November 18. There have been dedicated gaming consoles that are able to run Linux, namely the PS3. In these cases, Linux made the console function more as a home computer than a gaming rig. The EVO system uses Linux to power the games.

Here on OStatic, we've made the point many times that open source software often outdoes proprietary competitors. That said, if I see a good piece of freeware, or a fee-based commercial product, I'll still get it if it's best-of-breed. In this post, I'll flesh out a complete suite of software applications that can compete with and work seamlessly with the Microsoft Office suite, where a combination of open source titles, and one single $39.95 application will keep you totally competitive with--and compatible with--the Office suite.

Now here is a dissenting opinion if I've ever seen one. Andrew Keen is arguing that the economic crisis will "give open source a good thumping." That flies directly in the face of our prediction that open source will flourish in the downturn, and we're not alone in predicting that. There are several reasons why I don't agree with Keen's view of things.

Buzz is going around about a new report from the Linux Foundation, which finds that "it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs." You can get the complete findings here. Here are some of the highlights from the report, and what's missing.

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

Have you ever heard of Arduino? It's billed as an open source electronics prototyping platform, and proponents claim that it could lead to devices capable of interaction not seen on today's computers. I'd say it's not entirely open source for several reasons, but it does leverage open source software components and an inexpensive starter hardware platform following many of the principles that open source projects follow. O'Reilly has just announced a $12.99 new book called Getting Started with Arduino, intended to kick-start new Arduino projects.

Plat'Home, a Japanese Linux company, is announcing today the winners of its "Will Linux Work?" contest. Launched a month ago, the contest challenged users to come up with interesting, challenging technology solutions leveraging Linux. Full results of the contest including quotes from the winning contestants are found here. Here, below the fold, are some of the more imaginative winning solutions.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the "community feel and involvement" that draws many to open source projects. One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.

Last week, the Linux Foundation held its first Linux Foundation End User Summit in New York. Representatives from many companies were in attendance, including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, Dreamworks, the NYSE, and folks from the U.S. Navy were there, too. The folks at the Linux Foundation sent over some highlights of the summit, which you'll find here.

A press release issued by Mandriva and Turbolinux today announced they are joining the Moblin project and continuing their collaboration through Manbo Labs. Manbo Labs employs Mandriva and Turbolinux engineers to develop the core components of a Linux distribution tailored for Atom processors.

The 451 Group is reporting that venture capital funding for open source vendors was down 12.2% last quarter, compared to Q3 2007. They say that while this is a larger drop than seen in the overall market, it's not quite as dire as it may seem at first glance.

This week, the Linux kernel and Intel developer teams announced they had discovered the probable cause of the e1000e driver bug. This bug was particularly destructive, as it would corrupt the EEPROM/NVM of certain Intel ethernet adapter chipsets, completely disabling them.

KDE users have a new online spot to get together and talk about their favorite desktop environment. The KDE Forum re-launched this week and is already over 17,000 members strong.

We've reported a few times on efforts to apply open source concepts to the world of music, where many people perceive the music industry to be in need of change and improvement. For example, we wrote about Radiohead's successful effort to open source a music video and Bojam's effort to get musicians around the world to collaborate in open source fashion. So I was interested in this post from Matt Asay about Severed Fifth, an effort to explore new music distribution approaches, headed up by Jono Bacon, who is Ubuntu's community lead.

Periodically, Linux media outlets go on list frenzies -- Ten Linux Distros for New Users, Five Great Distributions You've Never Heard Of. These are interesting lists but always seem to feature the same distributions. Some distributions are consistently left off these lists, seemingly regardless of whether they are a better fit than the usual candidates. I always read these lists, and wonder why Zenwalk is rarely mentioned. Perhaps it isn't for brand new users, but it's a great distribution that is overlooked far too often.

Since acquiring the Koders.com code search engine earlier this year, Black Duck Software has added more than 200 million lines of code to the Koders.com search repository. Black Duck says that an analysis of search requests reveals, "Ruby is now the fourth most requested language on Koders.com, after Java, C/C+ and C#." That's interesting information, to be sure, but what does it mean?

The report concludes that open source is less of a business model than a business tactic. Within the post about the report, there is an executive summary (PDF) which points to some interesting trends for open source, outside the constraints of the question The 451 Group was trying to answer.

Though TiVO's software is open source, any "unsigned" modified code is blocked from running on these devices. Home-brew DVRs act like TiVOs, with a few side benefits. The article mentions, incidentally, that this is not a project for the faint of heart. My MythTV box has been humming in my living room just shy of a year. It's not a project for a new user, but it's a better application, and less complicated to install and maintain than you've been led to believe.

Sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is a software framework able to take advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries and more by breaking them into parts. Yahoo makes extensive use of Haddop for its search features. Now, as Valleywag is reporting, a veteran of Bear Stearns and Facebook is one of the folks behind Cloudera, a business focusing on supporting Hadoop deployments.

Free Software Magazine recently took a closer look at the "Linux legacy." The "legacy" -- Linux's reputation precedes it, even in the realm of the "average user." This reputation is, of course, that Linux is (pick one of your choice): hard, incompatible with most hardware, command line only -- the list goes on.