One Laptop Per Child has refreshed its XO-1 laptop hardware, dumping chips from AMD in favour of processors from Via Technologies, the VIA C7-M. "In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC is refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component technologies," OLPC officials wrote. Note that we are talking about the current OLPC laptop, and not any upcoming models.

Thus far it seems that netbooks with Windows XP and Intel Atom processors have been the most successful, leaving little room for other players. There have been those who doubt ARM's longevity in this particular market, so we decided to interview some of the folks at ARM. They told OSNews that the company is confident about its current and future mobile markets, and Linux, which will soon be on various ARM-powered netbooks, is one of the reasons why.

The Xfce team has released the first bugfix release in the 4.6.x tree of the Gtk+ desktop environment, Xfce 4.6.1. "The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. Thanks to all the people who have been using xfce 4.6 and took the time and effort to submit bugreports for stuff that wasn't quite working the way it is supposed to. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks."

We already knew the Windows 7 Release Candidate would arrive somewhere in May, but we now also have a release date thanks to a "slip-up" (you're not fooling anyone, Microsoft) on the Microsoft Partner Program website: Windows 7 RC will be released on May 5. Just so you know.

Ulrich Dreeper, the glibc maintainer, details on his blog the main features of version 2.10 of the library: POSIX 2008, C++ compliance, C++ 201x support, DNS NSS improvement, use NSS in libcrypt, printf hooks and, perhaps more interesting, better malloc scalability.

Remember the Mac trojan that we reported about earlier this year? A trojan was found piggybacking on the back of copies of iWork and Photoshop CS4 found on warez sites and networks, and it would install itself after the user had entered his or her administrator password during the software's installation. This trojan didn't seem like much of a threat back then, but as it turns out, it's now in use in the first Macintosh botnet.

It's Friday, and a little sooner than normal (because Kroc will be away for the weekend) we bring you the 5th instalment of the OSNews podcast. We will discuss the Windows Conficker situation, the chances of nettops in the current market, and, of course, the outcome of the Pirate Bay trial which made a splash today.

It's a bit of a mobile day on OSNews today, with news about Cinder and Symbian. Next up is Google's Android. While Android is designed for smartphones, there has been increasing chatter about netbook manufacturers using Android on netbooks. Google has always remained fairly mum on the possibility of Android on netbooks, but during yesterday's earnings call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about this subject.

Many of the major mobile operating systems today are derived from desktop variants, leaving them with excess bagage that only hinders their functioning in a mobile environment. A group of researchers at Stanford University are building a mobile operating system from the ground up, taking various things into account that others do not. The biggest focus of the project is power management, and it's got some pretty interesting ideas in that area.

KenSmith announced the immediate availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RC1 in the FreeBSD-stable mailing list. "The first of two planned Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be particularly appreciated." The release schedule states that the final release is to be expected early May, at which point we'll cover FreeBSD 7.2 in much more detail.

About a year ago, OSNews reported on Grape, a new way to manage your desktop. Back then, Grape was only a concept, a set of ideas without an implementation. This is different now: Grape has been turned into an actual piece of working software, and the people behind the project, Yann Le Coroller and Dockland Software's Stephane, gave us early access by means of a beta release. We are also giving away beta access, se be sure to read on to the end of the article to find out how you can get beta access (hint: post a comment). Update: The response has been more substantial than I anticipated, so the cut-off point is 50 comments. Twelve comments left, guys and girls, so hurry up! Update II: Sorry guys, we're full already (that was quick)! Thanks for the enormous interest from everyone. I'll send the invites out today! Update III: All invites have been sent out. Enjoy testing Grape, and be sure to post your findings here on OSNews. Also, report any bugs here.

The Ubuntu team has released the release candidate for Ubuntu 9.04; we already covered the various changes and additions when the beta was announced. "The Ubuntu team is happy to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. This is their latest result, the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features." The various other Ubuntu-derived distributions, like Kubuntu, have also had their RCs released.

Even though the old-world UNIX operating systems, like IRIX and HP-UX, have been steadily losing ground to Linux for a long time now, they do still get updated and improved. HP-UX 11i v3 is supposed to get update 4 tomorrow, with a host of new features that won't excite you if you're used to Linux, but they're still pretty useful for HP-UX users.

For some inexplicable reason, people treat Apple differently from other PC manufacturers, and as such, it's common to look at the company's well-being separately from others. Yesterday, we reported on the overall state of the PC market, and Apple didn't really make an appearance there. Thanks to the various Apple rumour websites digging through the IDC and Gartner figures, we can still give you all the latest figures on Apple.