End of last week ARM Ltd and Canonical Ltd announced that they would port Linux to the ARMv7 processor architecture. If all goes well, the two collaborating firms should provide further hardware manufacturers with the basis to develop new, energy-efficient mobile devices, especially for the popular netbooks and so-called hybrid computers.

Chipmaker Intel has reworked its proprietary Linux compilers. The Intel C/C++ compiler version 11.0 now supports the mobile processor Atom. The same version of the Fortran compiler now supports the Fortran 2003 language standard.

Russia may not be the only place spam hosts lay in wait. Tuesday of this week San Jose webhoster McColo went offline. The result is that the world's spam rate is now down by three-quarters, at least according to the Washington Post's online service.

The opening keynote Thursday of the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego was by author and security expert Bruce Schneier. In his opinion "perceived security" should be an aspect of all security implementation.

An article from the Debian-Administration.org community describes how to boot up Debian much faster on an Asus Eee 901. Its author, Phil Endecott, claims to do it within 14 seconds using his method.

In one fell swoop and with an automatically distributed patch, Google and T-Mobile fixed a problem with the G1 mobile phone whereby users could access root privileges and possibly raise all kinds of havoc.

Open source developer Tobias Oetiker, in his presentation at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego, described how he could help one thousand Windows users at Swisscom.com speed up their computers.

Computer vendor Transtec has actualized its Calleo 330 server series on the new 45-nonometer Opterons from AMD. All Calleos now come with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10.

Israeli security firm Yoggie has released its Linux-based USB Stick Firewall Gatekeeper product in an Open Source version. The open firewall products also include a developer kit.

Linux kernel developer Ted T'so shared his know-how in a number of tutorials at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego. One theme was getting first help for system crashes, and in the process, he took the opportunity to present SystemTap.