OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Microsoft Clears up Windows 7 RTM “Confusion”

Submitted by Adam Scheinberg 2009-07-14 Windows 26 Comments

You might have missed while being in shock and awe over our excellent review of the sam440ep and AmigaOS 4.1 (I'm joking, people), but there's a bit of a riot going on in Microsoft blogging circles about the "RTM" date for Windows 7. A classic case of 'air, meet heater'.

Microsoft’s Kevin Dallas on Windows Embedded

Submitted by caffeine deprived 2009-07-14 Windows 6 Comments

Microsoft plans to use Windows Embedded to combat rival operating systems in smartbooks and a number of other devices meant to always be connected to the Internet that Microsoft calls CIDs, or consumer Internet devices. In this interview Kevin Dallas, the general manager of Microsoft's Windows Embedded business, discussed Microsoft's strategies for smartbooks and other devices, such as the company's Haiku concept device.

YouTube Phases Out Support for IE6

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-14 Internet Explorer 8 Comments

YouTube will be phasing out support for Internet Explorer version 6. "Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly."

Guest post by Hakime 2009-07-14 Internet 11 Comments

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

Submitted by Moulinneuf 2009-07-14 Humor 19 Comments

That was my first reaction when I saw the headline. Should Hannah Montana and Linux even be allowed to be in the same sentence? Someone apparently thinks so. According to IT Knowledge Exchange, Hannah Montana Linux, obviously designed with Hannah Montana fans in mind, emerged recently on Twitter, being tweeted and re-tweeted so many times. It's been hosted at SourceForge and is currently available for download, but you had probably get your copy quickly because I'm sure the long, iron arm of Disney will find out about this project and quickly shut it down. Big companies are often touchy about their trademarks.

sam440ep, AmigaOS 4.1

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-14 Amiga & AROS 67 Comments

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.

Episode 17: Milk, Two Sugars

Kroc 2009-07-13 Podcasts 23 Comments

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.

Interview: Mark Shuttleworth

Submitted by suka 2009-07-13 Ubuntu 52 Comments

Mark Shutttleworh, the head honcho over at Canonical and Ubuntu, has given an interview to derStandard.at during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. He talks about GNOME 3.0, the struggle to improve the user experience on the Linux desktop, as well as various other things.

Bing Sees 8% Rise in Unique Users in June

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-13 Microsoft 15 Comments

"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 Creates Division for iPhone Games

weildish 2009-07-13 Games 8 Comments

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.

Haiku WiFi Stack Prototype Connects, Surfs, Downloads

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-13 Haiku 29 Comments

It seems like only yesterday when Haiku was nothing more than a mere promise. Oh how the times have changed, as evidenced by yesterday's news: Colin Guenther has ported the FreeBSD WiFi stack to Haiku, and managed to get a connection, browse the internet, and download a large file.

Microsoft Releases Office 2010 Details, Test Code

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-13 Microsoft 11 Comments

"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 Now Has 64-Bit Support, Boots Faster

weildish 2009-07-13 Linux 7 Comments

"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."

DisplaySearch: Netbook Sales To Double in 2009

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-13 Hardware 4 Comments

Analyst firm DisplaySearch has done a study into the notebook market, and from that study they conclude that in 2009, netbook shipments will grow to 20% of total notebook shipments. At the same time, sales of "normal" notebooks will remain flat year-over-year.

Google, Mono, RMS

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-12 OS News 56 Comments

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.

Schmidt: Chrome OS Netbooks As Early As this Year

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-12 Google 55 Comments

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.

A Quick Look at the Nokia E75

Eugenia Loli 2009-07-11 Wireless 14 Comments

PureMobile sent over the Nokia E75, one of Nokia's latest business phones. Let's see how the phone stacks up compared to the rest of Symbian S60 3.x phones we have around.

‘Early Linux 2.6.31 Benchmarks’

weildish 2009-07-10 Linux 27 Comments

"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."

Submitted by poundsmack 2009-07-10 OS News 15 Comments

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."

Intel Works with Google on Chrome OS

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-10 Google 20 Comments

We're having a very slow newsday today, since basically everyone and their cow is compulsively pushing out articles on ~~a product that doesn't even exist beyond an announcement~~ Google's Chrome OS, with none of them being particularly interesting. What is interesting is the news that Intel has been aware of Chrome OS for a while now - in fact, Intel is working with Google on this new operating system.