The free and open source firmware project LinuxBIOS was recently renamed - it is now called coreboot. The name LinuxBIOS strictly suffered the New Mexico problem ("It's not New, and it's not Mexico") as people confused it with a Linux only piece of software or the 20+ years old IBM invention. This was gracefully fixed now. It's the core of the boot process, hence the new name. Read the full story at: http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2008-January/029133.html

Stefan Reinauer from coresystems GmbH announced in his posting to the Google Code Blog that Google is sponsoring LinuxBIOS development.

The sponsoring includes the creation of an automated distributed firmware testing environment for LinuxBIOS.

Thanks to the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), LinuxBIOS developers expect the project to break the barrier of 10 million users out there in 2007, said Stefan Reinauer.

The first European LinuxBIOS symposium will take place on October 1st to 3rd 2006 in Hamburgs Speicherstadt, an ancient brick-built warehouse complex, the historical center of the port of Hamburg. The free LinuxBIOS is gaining more and more momentum as a fast, flexible and cost effective alternative to established BIOS variants.

Be it the famous One-Laptop-Per-Child project (OLPC) or big computer clusters of the US government: LinuxBIOS is on the advance! The importance of LinuxBIOS will be increasing in a world of Trusted Computing, presenting the community's answer to customers' decreasing control on their very own hardware.

"The cooperation of LinuxBIOS and the One-Laptop-Per-Child project of the MIT shows that LinuxBIOS is far more than a niche product or hacker's delight" illustrates Stefan Reinauer, CEO of coresystems GmbH, Germany, and organizer of the event.

At the symposium decision-makers and developers of internationally renowned corporations and the LinuxBIOS community get together, to engage in upcoming projects and the promising future of LinuxBIOS.

Main areas of LinuxBIOS application are amongst large computer clusters, embedded systems, car PCs and appliances where the unique features, but also the total costs of ownership are crucial. LinuxBIOS combines these two aspects.

The symposium offers corporations as well as developers of the Open Source community a chance to participate in the further development and innovation or LinuxBIOS, or to get a first impression of the project.

Registration for the event is possible via the website http://www.linuxbios.eu/
Information on LinuxBIOS is available at http://www.linuxbios.org/

Join the firmware revolution! This year's LinuxBIOS symposium will take place on October 1-3 in Hamburg, Germany. We cordially invite you to participate.

Expect to meet interesting people from all over the world, thrilling topics and exciting talks and discussion about LinuxBIOS.

Among the topics you will find:

• Breaking news since the LinuxBIOS summit 2005
• The future: LinuxBIOS v3
• Development Guidelines and Quality Assurance
• LinuxBIOS feat. MIT's One Laptop Per Child

If you are interested in additional topics or want to talk on the symposium, please send us an email to symposium at coresystems.de.

Registration is possible until September 10th using the registration form at http://linuxbios.eu/. The website also provides details on the event. We are looking forward to meeting all of you.

Read the official announcement for more information.