When talking about the webOS, one of the main complaints is often that the operating system feels sluggish, especially considering the Pre has the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS. At a webOS Developer Event in London, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (the Mozilla guys who joined Palm) talked about why this is the case, and hinted that it will be fixed sooner rather than later. They also addressed The One Question: will Palm ever open source the webOS?

We reported on the lack of Atom support in development builds of Mac OS X 10.6.2, but a more recent build re-enables support for Intel's Atom line, popular in netbooks. "In the latest development build Atom appears to have resurrected itself zombie style in 10C535. The Atom lives another day, but nothing is concrete until the final version of 10.6.2 is out."

"Google makes its Google Wave Federation Protocol available to let would-be Wave providers build their own Wave servers and get them communicating with other Wave servers, similar to the way e-mail servers talk to one another. This federation would ideally pave the way to making Wave ubiquitous, making it more available for future users. But given the learning curve stumping early users of Wave, how many programmers will want to build their own Wave servers? That remains to be seen."

KDE 4.3.3 has been released. "KDE 4.3.3 has a number of improvements that will make your life just a little bit better. Some of KWin's effects have been smoothed and freed of visual glitches, JuK should now be more stable, KDE PIM has seen its share of improvements while in the back-rooms of KDE, the developers are working hard on porting all applications to the new Akonadi storage and cache."

Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring.

Litl LLC launched today a Linux-based laptop design, named "Webbook". The device comes with a custom simplified interface, it can run third party web apps, and it can operate both in a laptop mode, or by bending backwards the screen, in the "easel TV-like mode". The Webbook can also connect through HDMI to an HDTV, and a remote control is sold separately. The Webbook goes in auto-maintainance mode, when in sleep. The Atom 1.6 Ghz/1 GB RAM device sells for $699. More info here and here. Videos of the UI here.

We waited a little while with this news, because we wanted official confirmation from Skype before jumping on the internet bandwagon. It's official now, so here we go: Skype has announced that it will release its Linux client as open source. A little late, but welcome nonetheless.

"VIA has introduced out its latest Nano CPUs, pitching the new 3000 family of low-power processors at makers of thin'n'light laptops and of all-in-one desktops. The Nano 3000 series runs to six processors, clock at between 1GHz and 2GHz. They all sit on an 800MHz system bus. Four U3x00 models consume just 100mW of power when idling - the two L3xx0 Nanos consume 500mW at idle. VIA touted the new parts' support for 64-bit computing, virtualisation and the SSE 4 media processing instructions. Like past VIA processors, the new ones have on-board AES and SHA encryption engine."

While the Apple v. Psystar case is currently on hold until the hearing regarding the motions for a summary judgement takes place (November 12) the Psystar v. Apple case (still with me?) is only just beginning. Psystar has amended its original complaint in this second lawsuit, asking the judge to order Apple to cease calling Psystar's business "illegal", claiming it hurts the clone maker financially.

Windows 7 has been out and about for little over a week now, and as it turns out, Microsoft's new baby is doing relatively well. That is, according to the figures by NetApplications: Windows 7 already reached the 3% mark this weekend, and is already closing in on the 4% mark.

"Type designers and Web designers have reached a consensus on a format specification for embedding fonts on the Web. Mozilla is already including support for the font format in Firefox 3.6, and wide adoption could come sooner than many expected."

One of the advantages of ZFS is that it doesn't need a fsck. Replication, self-healing and scrubbing are a much better alternative. After a few years of ZFS life, can we say it was the correct decision? The reports in the mailing list are a good indicator of what happens in the real world, and it appears that once again, reality beats theory. The author of the article analyzes the implications of not having a fsck tool and tries to explain why he thinks Sun will add one at some point.

"Sheepdog is a new third party open source project around kvm providing distributed storage management features. Sheepdog provides high availability to kvm guests by providing block level storage volumes to virtual machines similar to Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). In fact one of the items on the sheepdog project todo list is to support the Amazon EBS API. Sheepdog is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes. You can think of this technique as striping your virtual disk data across multiple nodes similar to what raid does. The project is still very early in its development cycle but already provides basic functionality."

"Adobe is pushing hard to get Flash, PDF, and other technologies used to realize recent open government initiatives. The problem is that the technologies fall short of the goal of full accessibility, and cause problems for those seeking to use government-supplied data in any meaningful way."