The Open Graphics Project has started accepting preorders for their OGD1, a graphics card with a completely open source design. This initial release is billed as a high-end FPGA prototyping kit specifically designed to test computer graphics architectures. The card has two DVI connectors, S-Video, 256MB RAM, and a 64bit PCI-X connector. The core of the system is a Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA.

"The OpenTaal project (Dutch for "OpenLanguage") has published the first open source word list to be certified by the Dutch Language Union as corresponding to official spelling. Simon Brouwer, project leader of OpenTaal, says, "This is a milestone. Users of open source software can trust their Dutch spell checker now.

The Bandit® Project today hit another key milestone in the development of open source identity services with the availability of an open source, cross-platform information card selector that helps users manage “digital identity cards” used in Web transactions.

Smart cards and digital signatures are presented as among the most important components of e-government in Europe, but they are still far from being an effective, Linux-friendly solution to reduce administrative and business costs. But the same tools may become a way to make the general public use or support Free Software.

Since I was home schooled, I never had homework (homework and classwork were one and the same). And since I never had homework, I… never really had to learn how to study until high school. But when I did learn how to study, I found flash cards to be extremely effective. So I fell in love with KWordQuiz, a KDE Education project for flash card lovers just like me.

By making its Symbian OS smart phone software open-source, Symbian is essentially forgoing $300 million in annual revenue, but if it doesn’t it could risk losing chunks of the smart phone pie it now dominates. What’s a vendor to do?

The Ubuntu Eee project has just announced they will be selling SD cards pre-loaded with the latest version of Eee Ubuntu. This SD card can then be inserted into the Eee PC and you can run Eee Ubuntu right off of it. This is a great idea, but it would be even better if the cards were sold in stores along with the Eee PC.

In the swarming Indian metropolis Mumbai, it can be a gymnastic exercise just to fish in your pocket on the packed city buses and stretch out your paying hand to the conductor. Many commuters have opted instead for a 'smart' and cashless way to pay, provided, in part, by Linux. Named Go Mumbai, it is a prepaid smart card for BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport) bus journeys.

The company Microsoft Rus together with Intel and Volnoye Delo Fund intends to double the number of school PC in Russia in the near future. The software installed on computers within the charity project launched by the fund will cost four-fold less than within the existing education projects, i.e. MS Office + Windows XP will be supplied for $3.