From IDG via PC World: “Imagine transferring a list of contacts from your mobile telephone to your desktop–without cables. Or accessing a corporate network without an ethernet card; or using your mobile phone to buy food from a vending machine or a store. That is the promise of Bluetooth.”

Oreillynet picks apart init, the FreeBSD system startup daemon. “When you boot your computer, you have probably noticed that the kernel does a hardware probe and prints its results to your terminal. Once this probe is finished, the kernel starts two processes: process 0 (swapper) and process 1 (init). The daemon responsible for process control initialization is init; without it, no other processes would be able to start.”

The date and place for the 2001 edition of the Colorado Linux Info Quest have been announced. CLIQ 2001 will take place on Thursday March 29 and Friday March 30 at the Denver Marriott Tech Center hotel. Further details can be found at the CLIQ Web site.

LinuxDevices.com has posted an interview with Gregg Haerr, CEO of Century Software and founder of the Microwindows project on the past, present, and future of embedded Linux GUIs.

LinuxNovice.org has posted a cheat sheet for the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam.

From a press release at LinuxPR: “The LinuxUser 2000 Conference, which is to be held next week (5/6th December) at Chelsea Village, London, will include a free exhibition. IT professionals and managers who want an appreciation of the role Linux can play in their organisation are expected to benefit greatly from the event.” Registration is also free.

According to this press release, Digital Networks is the first OEM in the world to ship Pentium 4 computers with Linux (Red Hat) installed.

ParaSoft announced the availability of Jtest for Linux, their unit-testing tool for Java. The tool can perform static analysis, white-box testing, black box testing, and regression testing on any Java class. Read the press release at Linux PR.

Archaeopteryx Software today released version 1.0 final of the Wing Integrated Development Environment for Python. Wing IDE is a Linux-only product featuring a full graphical debugger, source code analyzer and browser, source code editor, and project manager. Get the demo at the developer’s Web site.

Conectiva Linux 6.0 is now available directly from the developer’s Web site; shrink-wrapped editions should show up sometime next month at a computer store near you. The latest version sports a rewritten Modular Installer, USB support, and introduces Grub as a replacement for lilo. Read the press release at Linux PR for more information.