Spotted at Amiga's Pepcom booth, the GP2X handheld, from Korea's Gamepark holdings, made for a whiplash double-take: the best computer of the 1980s emulated on a portable? Alas, no, but it was nice to see this thing in the flesh, after it being out for ages but all-too-rare on these shores.

Pidgin is almost perfect, it doesn't support Video and audio conversations. Actually it's planned by pidgin authors. We can imagine how difficult this task to accomplish with all messaging protocols but still as dark point of this software. It's also criticized for saving password in readable text files which could put the user privacy at risk but the authors are convinced that "they won't give a false illusion of security" by doing encrypted files ( because they can be broken too).

"Welcome to the new year and another monthly installment of news about the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. This month we have news from the FSF Europe, the latest numbers on GPLv3 conversions, the annual Gfortran report from the GCC folks, a GLib development release, Stallman commenting on the GNOME's alleged support of OOXML, GNU Hurd news, and more..."

Let’s get right to it: considering the popularity of open source applications and utilities, why hasn’t the open source flagship - the Linux operating system - caught on with mainstream PC users?

As Christian Einfeldt of Digital Tipping Point recently noted, when Amazon published its Christmas wish lists, Linux devices figured prominently.

The Elvis of PC software has left the building. Bill Gates’ announcement he will no longer do CES keynotes overshadowed anything else he said, and for good reason.

Apparently, the only thing that stopped developers from creating useful OpenOffice.org extensions was the lack of a place to publish them. With the launch of the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository, the number of extensions listed there has shot up, and there are no signs of a slowdown. Although quantity doesn't always mean quality, the repository already offers a few nifty extensions that can expand the functionality of OpenOffice.org and make your work more efficient.

One of the potentially biggest announcements at CES will probably go unnoticed by most, a Linux box from Shuttle. Get ready for a low priced machine from a big name, a first that I am aware of.