Sure, the low-cost computers developed by OLPC and Intel may look cute, but actually using one reveals a host of shortcomings. In the OLPC XO, software was complicated and buggy. For weeks neither my brilliant niece, nor her well educated parents, could figure out how to get it to connect online. The Intel Classmate was no miracle of modern design, either.

KolibriOS is is an operating system that fits on a single 1.44MB Floppy (many applications are compressed) and runs with 8MB of Ram !!! The surprise is that the system come with a graphical environment complete with text editors, system utilities, games, browser, media players and lots of other stuff.

What if I told you that I was recently running a modern operating system that requires about 5 MB of disk space and about 10 MB of RAM? That sounds like a stretch, doesn't it, even for Tiny Core Linux?

Chumby, a Linux-based device that streams widgets, is cute -- there's little doubt about that. In order to gain traction in the consumer market, however, it's going to take a lot more than the cute factor, analysts say. The device's maker is banking on its widget network to underpin its business model.

I am a tinkerer. It is my nature. This is no doubt what accounts for my interest in Linux and computers. For tinkerers, one of the coolest and slickest distros out there is probably Slax.

Kontron has announced a cute little 3U, five-slot MicroTCA system that will ship pre-installed with Wind River Linux. The OM6040 boasts "single-star" PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) backplanes, and support for either PowerPC- or IA-based AMC (advanced mezzanine card) processor modules.

I read with interest today when Linux Weekly News linked to Greg DeKoenigsberg's response to Mark Guzdial's ACM Blog post, The Impact of Open Source on Computing Education. I must sadly admit that I was not terribly surprised to read such a post from an ACM-affiliated academic that speaks so negatively of FLOSS's contribution to Computer Science education.

Imagine a world without Linux. There'd be no cute Tux penguin or any notion of software freedom day. Netbooks would not have come about. But more strikingly, there wouldn't be the modern powerful tools that Windows systems administrators have come to love.

An education supplies company has announced a portable science education computer that runs embedded Debian Linux. Pasco says it designed its sensor-equipped Spark Science Learning System for collaborative science experiments by students, for example measuring conductivity or tracking temperature changes.