Welcome to the April 11th edition of the "Linux Product Insider", our weekly round-up of new products and services in Linux and open source.
Here are some significant announcements made this week:
Olive Media's OPUS No4 & MELODY No2
Olive Media makes some of the sweetest audio devices around, and all are powered (smartly) by Linux. Olive's latest offering is a new whole-home audio solution that combines OPUS No4 digital music server with the MELODY No2 device that allows users to access music wirelessly and in up to ten different rooms simultaneously. Olive prides itself on combining pristine quality audio with convenience. The OPUS No4 servers can store up to 3000 CDs in original CD quality. Both the OPUS and MELODY come with a high-resolution color touch-screen and an "innovative new interface to allow users to quickly and conveniently find the right music." The interface is dubbed "MusicAware", a patent-pending solution that allows for "unprecedented depth and ease to music listening." The MELODY No2 also plays music off other home audio sources such as media servers or computers that support the common UPnP standard.
Mandriva Linux Spring 2008
The French tend to go in style, and such is clearly the case with France's Mandriva, which just released the major upgrade Mandriva Linux Spring 2008. The company says that Mandriva Linux Spring 2008 is "endowed with a new, simplified user interface designed to be more intuitive and accessible" and introduces new and updated applications, including a major new OpenOffice.org release, and many improvements to the Mandriva configuration utilities. Other additions include a parental-control utility, the Elisa multimedia center for photos, music and videos, support for synchronizing many mobile devices with the GNOME and KDE environments, better software installation tools and a dynamic KDE background that changes according to the hour of the day. In addition, the Codeina framework provides automatic installation of uninstalled media codecs. Mandriva Linux Spring 2008 is available in free and "Powerpack" Editions, the latter with commercial applications. This version also runs flawlessly on the ASUS Eee PC.
eCosCentric's eCosPro Developer's Kit
Just in from the Embedded Systems Conference, eCosCentric has announced that it is extending its eCosPro Developer's Kit to include a royalty-free version of the eXtremeDB in-memory embedded database system from McObject, helping developers break the 'homegrown' database habit. The goal is for users to "move beyond coding their own data management and gain the reliability, scalability, and development ease of a full-featured, tiny-footprint embedded database." The combination, says the firm, "results in a complete and highly cost-effective toolset for developing embedded database enabled products." The first version of eCosPro Developer's Kit to include eXtreme DB will be for the ARM9 processor. The bundled eXtreme DB database system is limited only by the number of classes (tables) that it supports. If data management needs expand, an upgrade is available to an eXtremeDB system with unlimited classes, and specialized editions such as eXtremeDB High Availability and eXtreme DB Fusion.
http://www.ecoscentric.com
Jungo's USBHost Tester
Not to be out-announced at Embedded Systems, Jungo unvieled its new USBHost Tester product line, a complete embedded USB host testing solution which enables automated and efficient embedded USB host testing. USBHost Tester provides developers with "a powerful tool to quickly test embedded USB host stacks, delivering superior quality and compliance with USB-IF certification standards." The solution works by testing the USB host stack against thousands of commonly used USB devices in its database. Jungo also claims the product to be "unique in its ability to simulate entire class descriptors." It also features an extensive reporting facility, a valuable feature for product developers and testers.
http://www.jungo.com
Tripwire Enterprise 7.1
The idea behind Tripwire Enterprise 7.1 is to keep your IT expertise from walking out the door. The solution maximizes the use of IT expertise throughout an organization by capturing and replicating this knowledge across all IT systems. It ensures IT configuration integrity across the entire IT infrastructure and manages internal and external policies. Two key features include Golden Policies and Remediation Advisor. Golden Policies capture and replicate 'gold' configurations and act like a "consultant in a box" that maximize the value of IT experts by replicating their IP (optimal configuration settings) across the IT infrastructure. In addition, Golden Policies help ensure IT personnel are proactively made aware of any configuration 'drift'. The Remediation Advisor functionality provides step-by-step remediation, based on a wide variety of external IT resources, keeping staff from hours of research, reducing the time and effort needed to remediate problems.
http://www.tripwire.com
To send feedback on this article, or to send product news, please contact Products Editor, James Gray at jgray@linuxjournal.com.
