Way back, when we were recovering from our hangovers from the millennium parties, Apple introduced, for the first time, Mac OS X and the Aqua user interface. This was still a preview, so it wasn't quite as polished and finished, of course. It also contained a feature that never made it into the final releases: single-window mode. Or did it...?

"Imad Sousou is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, which is behind the Moblin project aimed at providing optimized Linux technology for netbooks and mobile Internet devices. ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK caught up with Sousou at the Open Source In Mobile 09 event in Amsterdam last month to discuss the nature of Moblin and the hardware on which it will run." The interview also covers Intel's views on the netbook and MID market, Windows 7, ARM as a competitor, and Google's Chrome OS and how Intel is working with Google.

Not that we haven't known that this would one day happen, but it's still an exciting development nonetheless. Some folks over at the University of Missouri have whipped up nuclear batteries small enough to run the typical mobile device of today. They don't quite specify if has enough voltage to power something like a phone or a laptop as the batteries are being designed with MEMS and NEMS technology in mind, but they claim that these penny-sized batteries hold one million times the charge of "regular batteries." Whether a "regular battery" by their definition is the standard AA, the typical laptop battery, or a watch battery is unbeknownst to us peasants. It's being designed for MEMS and NEMS technology, but why not have it power my lappy if it's got the voltage? Imagine running one's computer for seven hundred years, and imagine all of that delicious space saved from the curse of conventional laptop batteries. Perhaps we don't need wireless electricity after all.

"The Technology Preview of the Flash 10 Plugin wrapper for eComStation is intended to show the progress of this product and to give you an early experience of being able to use websites implementing the latest Flash content. The development team is working hard to resolve the last outstanding bugs before we release a real test version. With this new release of Flash 10 we have up-to-date Flash support for eComStation. The release also supports proper rendering of Flash 10 text elements and Flash keyboard input works." It's only available for subscription members.

Hulu has finally released a Linux client, in both .rpm and .deb, 32bit and 64bit. "Hulu Desktop for Linux is currently built on Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. The packages should also work on any Linux distribution with glib2.16 (such as Ubuntu 8.04+ and Fedora 9+). Other configurations have not been tested." Only useful inside the US, us peasants in the rest of the world will have to resort to torrents.

The future of integrated graphics processors lies somewhere on the dies of future processors, that much is a certainty. However, this creates a big problem for NVIDIA, whose chipset business will be out, of well, business. Beating everybody to the punch, the company announced yesterday that it is ceasing all development on future chipsets, citing unfair business practices from Intel.

Are you familiar with Microsoft Works? It's sort of a My First Office Suite kind of thing which includes support for Microsoft Word and Excel documents. It is usually not sold separately, but instead comes pre-installed on new OEM machines. Well, Microsoft has announced today that it will kill Microsoft Works, and replace it with Microsoft Office 2010 Starter - an ad-supported version of Office 2010.

"Speaking at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment in San Diego today, FCC head Julius Genachowski has said that he wants to 'close the spectrum gap' -- the difference between the spectrum it's making available for wireless data versus enormous usage projections (400 petabytes a month by 2013, he says) that'll be brought about by smarter, easier-to-use devices and ubiquitous high-speed data through a handful of initiatives including the promotion of the smart use of existing spectrum through the use of femotcells, WiFi, and smart antennas, and -- more importantly -- reallocation of existing spectrum. Genachowski says there are 'no easy pickings' for reallocation, but the Commission is aggressively pursuing additional airspace that can help keep 4G rollouts on track. He's gone on to say that they'll be adopting the widely-discussed 'shot clock' policy for placement of new towers, giving locales a limited window to protest placement of cell sites that'll help spread 4G services over wider footprints. The guy seems genuinely concerned about keeping 4G rollouts rolling, so let's see just how far the guys in Washington are willing to go to do that."

The popularity of the blessed curse of the PC industry, the netbooks, just keeps on rising. DisplaySearch has published it latest quarterly report on the state of the notebook market, and conclude that netbook popularity is rising, but at the cost of revenues.

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and a familiar look and feel. This is the second test release for the upcoming major 2.0 version. Notable changes are a new panel and XDG Desktop Menu support, a new bug report tool, and improved existing code. Release notes, download link and installation instructions can be found on the EDE homepage.

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Here on OSNews I've already talked about various copyright related issues here in The Netherlands - obviously because I'm Dutch and live there. As a small nation, the copyright issues we face here serve as nice, comprehensible discussion starters that we can all grok. Well, we've got another one. Our own RIAA equivalent has caused quite the stir by announcing that they will start charging bloggers and social website users for embedding YouTube videos with copyrighted content. Say what?

Mind your manners, now. We're not saying that they do in general. There's just a good chap who has come up with a list in two parts of varied Linux distributions that he deems use-worthy. He also gives a short description about them and a link to their project websites. Some are the obvious Ubuntu, Gentoo, and other major players, but others you may or may not have heard of and may find useful. Enjoy reading part one from May of this year and part two that was published just recently in October. What are some of the perhaps more obscure Linux distributions that you've found useful and noteworthy?