"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the publicly available beta of eComStation 1.2R German. The eComStation 1.2 Media Refresh resolves known issues and provides the latest codebase. This version does not significantly change functionality. This release includes fixes to many reported problems, as well as significant enhancements migration and installation."

Parallels launched the beta program for Workstation 2.1, an upgraded version of their desktop virtualization solution. This version adds new features like USB support, PAE-mode support, wireless networking support, and a new tools package. The program runs Solaris virtual machines too. The beta is fully functional for 45 days.

"Linus Torvalds doesn't want to change the Linux kernel's software license, and he said so again last week. For good measure this time, he threw in some inflammatory remarks. "I literally feel," wrote Torvalds, "that we do not, as software developers, have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God." Since the crusades were a foreign adventure responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, that's not the most diplomatic response, and FSF counsel Eben Moglen refused to be drawn into retaliation when we contacted him for comment."

Fighting for icon space on the desktop is so 2001. The new frontier on a virgin PC is the browser, and Internet companies like Google are jostling for space on the browsers of new PCs. Dell and Google are evaluating a partnership in which the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search and a Google-designed Dell home page are included on new Dell PCs, a Dell representative confirmed.

LowEndMac has an in-depth article on the origins of one of Apple's most elusive products: the Newton. "Sakoman's end goal for Newton was to create a tablet computer priced about the same as a desktop computer. It would be the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper and would have cursive handwriting recognition and a special user interface. To run the enormously demanding handwriting recognition software, the tablet would have three AT&T Hobbit processors." By the way, as most BeOS fans like myself know, AT&T's Hobbit processor has been part of another elusive product.

IBM has carved out a renegade path for the upcoming Power6 processor, opting to crank the chip's GHz much higher while rivals shy away from major clock speed boosts with their products. The Power6 chip will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and has been shown to hum away at 6GHz in the lab. IBM reckons that some process technology breakthroughs have allowed it to kick GHz higher while still keeping heat and power consumption issues under control. All told, IBM claims that Power6 will be twice as fast as competing server processors from Intel, AMD and Sun.

"A firm is showing off a full colour active matrix OLED display prototype at a show today. Universal Display Corporation, which has had part funding from the US Department of Defence, will talk at the Fifth Annual Flexible Displays and Microelectronics conference in Phoenix today. The firm will show off a four inch diagonal display and demo it running full motion video. The display is .1mm thick, and weighs only six grams, compared to a glass LCD which would weigh about 20-30 grams. The firm said that using a metal foil helps thermal and mechanical durability."

"Novell is announcing its contribution of the Xgl graphics subsystem and the 'Compiz' compositing manager to the X.org project. These enhancements open up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animation, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more. As a result, Linux desktops will become more usable, end-user productivity will increase, and Linux is firmly positioned at the forefront of client computing technology." Videos and screenshots are included in the press release. And on a related note, Dan Winship of Novell has explained on gnome-desktop-devel why Novell worked on all this behind closed doors-- and this also applies to the striking similarity between Novell's mockups from December and Nat Friedman's videos. The changes made to GNOME will all be released back.

Intel and AMD once again are angling for leadership in virtualization, technology that increases a computer's efficiency by letting it run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Intel is expected to declare this week that its Virtualization Technology is mature enough for testing and about three months away from prime time. But AMD, whose rival "Pacifica" technology won't debut in processors until midway through this year, is trying to set its own technology as a standard for virtualization of computer communications, an element not present in Intel's VT.

As said yesterday, Opera Software today released the second preview of Opera 9. New features include a widget engine, web page thumbnails, syntax highlighting in the source viewer, a content blocker, and much more. Download it for Windows, UNIX, and Mac OS X.

Motorola first announced its intention to migrate its mobile "smart" phones to embedded Linux in 2003. The first such phone to reach the market was the A760 in the fourth quarter of that year. Today there are a dozen or so models (differing product numbers in different markets and minor hardware variations lead to different counts), but there are still no significant ecosystems for third-party applications or developers. Is Motorola's switch to Linux a hit for the company but a miss for end users?

"Apple wants to make their switch to Intel chips seem like a no-brainer, but the reality of it was a lot more complicated than just faster chips for Macs. Apple's claims of their Intel systems being '4-5x faster' than their PowerPC systems is a little much to swallow, especially with Intel Macs landing in users' hands and failing to live up to the hype. So if these Intel chips aren't really that much faster than the G5, why did Apple make the switch? The answer to this question is a lot more interesting than what Apple's telling you."

"New real-time Linux enhancements open a whole new world of possibilities for Linux, ranging across the latest 3G technologies and as near as the mobile handset in your pocket. The purpose of modifying the Linux kernel with real-time functionality: to dramatically reduce interrupt and task preemption latency, thus enabling the 2.6 kernel for use in high-performance multimedia applications and those requiring extremely fast, task level reliable control functions. Real-time Linux has come a long way - where is it now and where is it heading?"

"Windows Vista will eventually sport what has been called a 'sidebar' - a kind of taskbar-like user interface element designed to sit on the right or left side of a display and offer 'heads-up' information on a customizable basis. When we last checked in on the Vista Sidebar at CES, we saw a number of widgets (or gadgets) running on the sidebar, including a small picture frame, an RSS list/interface, weather information, and more. The idea, generally speaking, is to give prominent spacing to tasks and information services that are, in theory, so frequently referenced that it makes sense to prominently display them on your desktop, alongside or on top of your other application windows."