Off you go… into the purple yonder!

Xsane works quite well, even if you want to scan a multipage document into a PDF. Just select ‘multipage’ as the target:

and then this window will pop up, where you can select an output format; the default is PDF.

I had a 17 page document to scan, which I (foolishly, perhaps) did at 150dpi. That resulted [...]

Today is Software Freedom Day! Events are being held in 90 countries, organized by 330 local teams. I’m looking forward to the Boston event this afternoon.

LWN and Christopher Blizzard broke the news that AMD is planning to release full documentation for their graphics chips, R500 and newer. This is awesome. With specs, I imagine it will take the community 6 months or so to write a functional accelerated 3D driver…
This is particularly nice because it means that the ultimate [...]

My laptop died a couple weeks ago - an almost 4 years old Inspiron 5150 which despite all its overheating problems was quite reliable. Of course it came with Windows XP, but I only ever ran Debian and Ubuntu on it,
Fast-forward to 2007, and now laptops with GNU/Linux preloaded are available.
Of course the perfect [...]

After the T1, Sun has now also pledged to release the core design files and test suites for the UltraSPARC T2 chip under the GPL. Way to go Sun! The T2 specs are quite impressive - 8 cores with 8 threads each; dual 10Gb embedded NICs; PCI-E embedded; etc - and a power consumption of [...]

I got a Soekris 4801-60 for use as a firewall/gateway at one of my (very) remote setups. These things are reliable, very low power, and they have no moving parts if you boot off compact flash. They are Geode-based, so it’s x86. You can run the various flavors of BSD on them, or your favorite [...]

Anders F Björklund’s “I am…” mashup is hilarious:

Intel has released powerTOP, a tool to help analyze which applications are using (too much) power. Particularly helpful if you have a laptop and want to extend battery life. Very nice.

Ars technica published a story that exposes the reports by Reuters and AP earlier in the week about OLPC ’supporting’ Microsoft Windows as, well, a load of nonsense.
Says Walter Bender of OLPC:
“We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. [...]

So it’s official, Dell is going to start shipping machines with Ubuntu Feisty preloaded by the end of May. This is great news. Check out the vlog by Mark Shuttleworth (in Ogg Theora format!) for more background information.
The most important part of this announcement is this, in my opinion:
Dell updated its policy on driver support [...]