The Genode project has released a bootable live CD showcasing the capabilities of their OS-construction framework. It boots in less than 10 seconds (on VirtualBox) to a fully functional graphical user interface featuring a selection of five subsystems (screenshot). Each subsystem demonstrates different aspects of the framework. One of the highlights is a web browser that is executed natively on the microkernel and is able to run a sandboxed Linux kernel as browser plugin. Among the other demos are the famous Gears OpenGL demo showing Gallium3D in action, and a user-level Linux seamlessly integrated into the system.

Today Oracle released its latest version of Solaris technology, the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 release. It includes a large number of new features not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified. The release is available under a variety of licenses including a supported commercial license on a wide variety of x86 and SPARC platforms.

"Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that 'isn't just e-mail', but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread." Will not succeed. Email/Facebook is free, SMS isn't, especially not when those tiny 160-character messages are getting body-scanned or violated when crossing borders. I'd hate to use this technology only to end up with a massive phone bill.

MeeGo! Nokia's hope for the future is developing at a quick pace, and considering the rather lukewarm reception of Nokia's Symbian^3 devices, that quick pace is more than justified. MeeGo got a big boost today with AMD announcing support for the platform. The company puts its money where its mouth is, too.

About time! Google has responded to Oracle's amended complaint in the big Oracle v Google patent and copyright hoedown, and it's a contradictory grab bag of various defences, basically throwing everything and seeing what sticks - a normal and common course of events in cases like this. There are some juicy claims in there.

InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues views Red Hat's notable marketing shift from low cost to high value as an "important shift in the ongoing evolution of open source software vendors' business models". Long left in the low-cost ghetto of enterprise IT mind share, RHEL is being pushed for its technical innovations, performance enhancements, and customer-requested improvements, rather than as a solution for cash-strapped shops. This shift, and the underlying improvements to RHEL 6.0, give Red Hat a legitimate shot against Microsoft, and open source a new model for competing with proprietary products. After all, focusing on low cost unnecessary limits the growth of open source business, creating a 'low-cost ceiling' that indirectly dissuades many IT shops from considering open source products.

"CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports."

Well, what do we have here? It turns out that Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distribution who took a left turn off the X.org highway, now driving on a road that will eventually lead to replacing X.org with Wayland. Fedora's 'graphics cabal', as they call themselves, have explained themselves on Fedora's devel mailing list. They also explain how network transparency can be added to Wayland in a number of different ways, making the mailing list thread intriguing reading material. Also, everybody happy with the headline? No panties in twists this time around...?

"Microsoft has updated the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to include Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. As has been the case with previous service packs, soon after SP1 hits the RTM milestone, it will first go out on Windows Update, and then eventually Microsoft will push it out via Automatic Updates."

The jokes about two evils joining up are easily made, but I'll try to refrain. Apple recently marked its Java implementation as deprecated. Well, we now know why: Apple and Oracle have announced that Apple will contribute to the OpenJDK project, effectively meaning that Java for Mac OS X will be developed by the OpenJDK community. Why do I have this image in my head?

"With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7, Mozilla returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings. According to tests run by Computerworld, the new browser is about three times faster than the current production version of Firefox in rendering JavaScript, and lags behind only Opera among the top five browser makers."

"The Boxee Box is now making its way into consumers' hands, ready to take on the likes of Apple TV, Roku, and Google TV with wide source compatibility and coming support for Netflix and Hulu Plus." WANT.

The gloves are off in the ARM vs. Intel battle, now that Marvell has announced a full-blown ARM server chip for cloud datacenters. The 40nm, 1.6GHz, quad-core ARMADA XP is aimed squarely at a market segment that Intel has seen strong performance from in the past few quarters, and Marvell's co-founder, Weili Dai, is clear about that, saying, "Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution."

"Red Hat, Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments. Designed to support today's flexible and varied enterprise architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers the comprehensive foundation customers need for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments."