So we finally meet! You can't imagine how hard I've tried to get my hands on a machine that could run AmigaOS 4 in all its glory. I've never used the Amiga before - not during its heydays, and not during its afterglow - so it meant an unexplored world for me. You can imagine my excitement when ACube Systems, makers of the sam440ep board that runs AmigaOS 4.1, offered a review machine to me, built around their own PowerPC sam440ep flex motherboard.

We keep this week's podcast simple. Just two topics: Mono (finally some movement from Microsoft!) and Google's vapid Chrome OS announcement. However, to top this up with a full bodied flavour, we cover your feedback on last week's show.

"After just over one month in market, we wanted to take the opportunity to THANK YOU for all your feedback and support of Bing and provide an update on our early results. We’ve been really pleased to hear so much positive feedback, and we appreciate all you who’ve taken the time to pass along your ideas on how we can continue to improve."

EA has already redesigned a group of its games specifically for the iPhone, and the company's been pretty successful in its plight thus far. However, they're changing their focus to design entirely new games specifically for the iPhone platform, and they've made an entire (small) studio, called 8lb Gorilla, to design and deploy said games. The first iPhone title coming from the group is, of course, all about zombies and the splattering thereof.

"The next version of Office moved a step closer to reality on Monday as Microsoft released an invitation-only technical preview of Office 2010. However, the release of the software will be limited. Attendees of this week's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, as well as the recent TechEd show, will gain access to the desktop versions of Office 2010." More here.

"CrunchBang Linux, a lightweight, Ubuntu-based, thumb-drive-friendly operating system... is now available in 64-bit editions for version 9.04.01, which also adds support for the ext4 hard drive format and more wireless networking support. CrunchBang already booted pretty darned fast in our initial tests, but long-time users are reporting noticeable improvements with the newest version. On the look and feel side, there are more themes included, and support for more theming standards in general. Transmission becomes the default BitTorrent client, and a host of usability improvements were tossed in as well."

Even though news has been slow the entire week due to the fact that it's summer and people are more interested in vacation than in technology news, we still had a lot of interesting stuff this week. Google obviously captured the headlines with its Chrome OS, but we also talked about Mono, Richard Stallman, and many other things.

Even though everyone's talking about it, fact of the matter is that Google's Chrome OS is currently nothing more than an internet announcement, with a supposed release date of somewhere in 2010. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has now stated that netbooks running Chrome OS could appear as early as this year. In addition, Schmidt also talked about his position at Apple's board of directors.

"The Linux 2.6.31 kernel is still under active development until it is released later this quarter, but the merge window is closed and most of the work going on is to address bugs and other regressions within this massive code-base. Some of the key additions to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel include many graphics-related advancements (merging of the TTM memory manager, Radeon kernel mode-setting, Intel DisplayPort, etc), an ALSA driver for the Creative X-Fi, initial USB 3.0 support, file-system improvements, and much more. To see how the general system performance has been impacted by the new Linux kernel that is in development, we have a few benchmarks today."

Captain, we've encountered another one. FreeNOS is a microkernel-based operating system written for learning purposes. "The system is very experimental, yet it currently supports virtual memory, simple task scheduling, and interprocess communication (IPC). It currently contains support for a few devices, including VGA, keyboard, i8250 serial, and PCI host controllers. FreeNOS has an experimental implementation of several filesystems, such as the virtual file system, procfs, tmpfs, and ext2fs. Current application libraries include libposix, libc, libteken (terminal emulation), and libexec (executable formats). All source code has been documented with Doxygen tags."

We already more or less confirmed that Microsoft would offer a Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade family pack, with the only missing piece being a more definitive idea on the price. Thanks to a few overeager retailers, we now know that the suggested retail price for the 3-license upgrade pack will be 149 USD, a savings of 210 USD. The family pack is currently not yet available.

"Apple has touted new HTTP Live Streaming features of the iPhone OS 3.0 and the upcoming Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X - and it has submitted the spec to the IETF. Will it be enough to supplant Flash as the de facto standard for delivering live or on-demand streaming online?"

Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" was released a little while ago, so before it became too old of news, I thought I'd take a whack at experimenting with it for the sake of netbookers everywhere (and for myself, naturally). As I type this on gedit after about two weeks' use, let's just say that the system on my EeePC 1000 HE is, for the most part, rather glorious-- pun intended. As a bonus, I also got Google's Chromium browser to run on it, so keep on reading to find the section on that.

The number of Mac clone makers is growing by the week, so it seems. We have Psystar in the United States, a clone maker in Russia, another one in the UK, and PearC who now cover Germany, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. We can add a new one to the list, one that I personally thought was a fake, but is apparently very real. One that has a retail store. In California. Quo Computer (in case you're wondering, you use that thing on the right to navigate - it's weird).