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Venture Development Corp. (VDC) recently attended the 2007 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Calif. This guest column from VDC's "Embedded Systems Bulletin -- April 2007" presents a summary of the event.

The programme for aKademy's conference is now available. With KDE 4 technologies now moving into place the talks give a superb overview of the state of the art on the free desktop. Themes include KDE 4 pillars, language bindings, applications, quality control, libraries, operating systems & distributions and community. The conference closes with the most important event in the KDE calendar, the annual aKademy Awards given to the most dedicated of KDE developers.

With the release of the next Ubuntu -- version 7.04, aka "Feisty Fawn" -- only days away, Mark Shuttleworth, the distribution's leader, announced plans for the next version: "Gutsy Gibbon." In a note to the Ubuntu developers, millionaire Linux visionary Shuttleworth said that Gutsy Gibbon would be released in October 2007.

Open source is all the rage but, interestingly, neither Red Hat nor Novell's Linux certifications were among the top 20 professional certifications in ZDNet Asia's IT Salary Benchmark 2006 survey.

Earlier this year, we asked our readers why people thinking of Linux aren't also thinking of OpenSolaris (or vice versa), now that both are pukka OSS operating systems.

For much of its history, Debian has been the major noncommercial, philosophically free distribution. Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu, does Debian have a purpose any more? Debian 4.0, which was released this week, represents a collective effort to answer that question. The philosophy behind the release is best summarized on the home page for the Debian on the Desktop subproject, which states, "We will do everything we can to make things very easy for the novice, while allowing the expert to tweak things."

Trickle is a lightweight userspace bandwidth shaper for users with low-speed Internet connections that lets you limit the bandwidth that a specific protocol is using so that you can maintain multiple simultaneous connections and not end up in a traffic jam.

CentOS 5, touted as a "100 percent compatible" rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was released today, featuring the GNOME desktop and a 2.6.18 kernel. CentOS targets those who need enterprise-class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support, chief maintainer Karanbir Singh said.

OpenSUSE announced today the release of the third public alpha of OpenSUSE 10.3, which boasts a 2.6.21-RC5 kernel, a choice of GNOME or KDE desktops, and its usual complete roster of application packages.

Attendee registration opened today for LinuxWorld Conference & Expo San Francisco, scheduled for Aug. 6 through 9 at the Moscone Center. More than 100 technical sessions will focus on key themes and technologies that include applications, virtualization, system troubleshooting, Linux/Windows interoperability, and more.

FreeBSD is very much a source-based system. The operating assumptionof the architects of FreeBSD is that you will compile most things fromthe source code. The system is designed to work that way, and does itexceptionally well.

Mule is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) -- the "glue" between different enterprise applications in different company departments that allows IT managers to move information back and forth seamlessly. Think of disparate enterprise applications as ribs, with the ESB as a backbone that connects everything. Mulesource founder Ross Mason says open source is the best way to make an ESB that is customizable and affordable.

Norway's Opera Software yesterday released Opera 9.2, an update to its popular, freely-available web browser. The new version supports 31 languages and introduces a new "speed dial" function plus a set of alpha-level developer tools, according to the company.

If you thought old releases of Linux were just going to passively lie and wait for the end of their maintenance cycle, think again. Canonical Ltd., the commercial driving force behind the Ubuntu distribution, is planning to announce April 13 that users of its 6.06 LTS release will be able to download and deploy IBM's DB2 version 9.

The VectorLinux team on April 9 released VectorLinux 5.8 SOHO RC2, built on the base of VL 5.8 standard GOLD. This edition addresses all the bugs reported and suggestions given since the RC1 release, and features a custom 2.6.20 kernel and the KDE 3.5.6 desktop with Kmyfirewall, the team said.

aKademy 2007 is now open for registration. aKademy is KDE's World Summit, a week long event for all KDE contributors, industry partners and users. The week starts with a two day conference, and is set to include a tutorial day and a schools and education day. As always, attendance to aKademy is free of charge, but you must register. Registration must be in by the end of the month if you want the aKademy Team to book your accommodation for you. See you in Glasgow!

There's a very positivearticle in the Washington Post on the Veterans Affairs VistA software:'...Since 1999, the VA's 155 hospitals, 881 clinics, 135 nursing homes and 45 rehabilitation centers have been linked by a universal medical records network. It allows any authorized person to look at 5.3 million patients' records -- everything from a nurse's note written during a hospital stay, to the result of a blood test drawn at a clinic visit, to the moving-picture film of a coronary angiogram done in a cardiology lab. Even though President Bush has set a goal of 2014 for when most Americans should have their medical information stored electronically, the Department of Veterans Affairs is today one of the few health systems -- and by far the largest -- that is virtually paperless...'

With its upcoming "Feisty Fawn" version of Ubuntu Linux due April 19, Canonical hopes to shed light on what happens when things go wrong.

Probably their first use with Linux not least their first look at a real computer. While these young African children will be interfacing with the computer using Sugar (pictured above) and applications such as Etoys, the underlying OS is Linux. Jessica Dolcourt posted a great article on the One Laptop Per Child initiative in Nigeria on CNET news. We are finally seeing the beginning of the first deployments of the laptop.

Foreword: In this guest column, Doug Gaff gives his take on last week's Embedded Systems Conference and ponders the future of the industry. What does "embedded" mean? As processors become more powerful and embedded devices are increasingly interconnected, Gaff contends that the distinction between "embedded" and "application" development is blurring.