Despite having been on the market only a few months, ultramobile PCs, the keyboard-less handheld computers capable of running Windows XP, have already been panned by analysts and many reviewers. Now they're being targeted by the likes of Sony and startup OQO, who are offering their own diminutive computers for businesses. But Microsoft and partners - the UMPC has been backed by Intel and VIA Technologies - expect to see more diversity in the UMPC space in the near term.

After several months of work, research, and a massive platform change, The Gnu-HALO Project (formerly BSD-HALO) has finally released a proof-of-concept alpha bootable ISO to the public. It is now based very closely on SLAX Linux for the time being, and there are plans to keep software binary compatability as the project matures.

Linux Format has a short interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the well-known Linux kernel hacker behind many drivers and the USB subsystem. Greg explains why drivers aren't a popular area of kernel development, how the kernel is stabilising in 2.6, and the impact of the SCO lawsuits.

The Linux kernel version 2.6.17 has been released. Not a lot of changes since the last -rc; the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, while the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. The changes are listed at KernelNewbies (don't look at me for the name).

Putting VMware and Virtual PC to the challenge, John Tränkenschuh learns that both products have some specialties - and some drawbacks.

A new paper from a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing" , explores the performance of IBM's Cell processor on some specific types of code commonly found in high-performance computing applications. The paper compare Cell's performance on these kernels to the performance of the Cray X1E, AMD Opteron, and Intel's Itanium2. The idea here is that Cell will be a commodity processor (at least that's what the authors and IBM hope), so it'll be a viable HPC alternative for the cost-sensitive academic research market. This paper represents the first formal academic attempt to decide if Cell hardware is something that researchers will want to invest in. So how does Cell stack up in comparison to these three competitors? In a word, it screams.