Hi-Mobile.net was very kind to send us over a Symbian/UIQ 3G smartphone for the purposes of this article, the Motorola M1000 (currently $290). This specific model originally was only sold in Japan as a "world phone" since last July, meaning that it can work both in Japan and in the rest of the GSM world. We tested the operating system, its usability and the phone itself with the Cingular network in the Bay Area. Many screenshots and pictures included.

News reports out of LinuxTag late last week have Andrew Morton, the second highest ranking Linux kernel developer, calling for a bug-fixing cycle to cut down on the growing number of bugs found in the latest kernel release. NewsForge contacted the number one man on the Linux project, Linus Torvalds, who acknowledged it might be the right time for a "bug cycle".

"Thin is in again. After years of false starts, so-called thin clients are gaining traction as IT departments look to cut costs and boost security. Dell, Intel and AMD are eyeing the space." eWeek takes a closer look at Thin Clients, including a set of pictures.

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

Version 7 of the editor VIM has been released. New features include spell checking, completion, tabs, intelligent undo, and much more. "Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is often called a 'programmer's editor,' and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files." Get it here.

"Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC."

"When you are using SMP you might want to override the kernel’s process scheduling and bind a certain process to a specific CPU(s). CPU affinity is nothing but a scheduler property that “bonds” a process to a given set of CPUs on the SMP system. With the help of Linux scheduler utilities you can set up processor affinity for a certain task or process." On a related note, here's a short guide on kernel compilation.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the Flight 7 release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support). With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Flight 7 comes many bug fixes, general fixes all around, new version of some key applications and much more. Note: This is still a development release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in June of 2006." Kubuntu and Xubuntu versions have been released as well.

Sometimes, the smallest of things can amaze me. I'm a sucker for details, which probably lies at the base of my slightly obsessive-compulsive traits of keeping things organized, tidy, aligned, and neat. It's great to see some companies are suckers for details too. Unless the details just become too insignificant. Note: Sunday Eve Column. Short, this week, though.

Intel has decided to borrow the sequential naming scheme it used for its famous Pentium brand and apply it to the new Core line of chips, the company is expected to announce Sunday. Earlier this year, Intel released the Core Duo processor, and in a few months it will unveil Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duo name will be used for desktop chips based on the Conroe chip, as well as for notebook chips based on the Merom chip. Merom processors consume less power than Conroe chips, but they're otherwise very similar.

Jasjeet Sekhon benchmarked Linux and MacOS X on the MacBook Pro using his statistical software, and finds that "Linux is found to be much faster than Apple's OS X for statistical computing. For example, in one benchmark Linux is more than twice as fast." Earlier, he ran tests on a G5 and an Opteron, and conlcuded: "Those results were terrible for OS X and not particularly good for the G5 (970) chip. For example, my 2.7 pound Pentium-M Linux laptop is faster than my 44 pound G5 running OS X. The floating point performance of the 970 chip leaves much to be desired, but OS X makes the performance problem significantly worse."

"In this article I will describe how to monitor your server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected."

The A9home is officially on sale to the public with the first orders expected to ship by next month. The published specification says the A9home is just 168mm by 103mm by53mm (roughly 6" x 4" x 2") in size. Inside its blue aluminum case is a 400MHz Samsung ARM9 processor with a Silicon Motion chipset, a 40GB hard disc, 128MB of SDRAM and 8MB of video RAM. The operating system is 32bit RISC OS Adjust, and the box runs off a 5 volt 20W power supply. It features four USB 1.1 ports, 2 PS/2 sockets, an ethernet network port, and an audio out socket.

"KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release."