Geeks.com, home of cheap netbooks, sent us in the HP 1120NR netbook, running a modified version of Ubuntu Linux. Check inside to read our experience with it.

As it turns out, the relationship between Apple and Palm is even less amicable than we already thought it to be. Bloomberg got their hands on communications between Ed Colligan, then-CEO of Palm, and Steve Jobs in which Jobs made a proposal in which the two companies would promise to refrain from hiring each other's employees. Colligan, however, rejected the proposal, calling it wrong and "likely illegal".

"According to Logitech, the Performance and Anywhere use dark field microscopy to detect microscopic particles and micro-scratches on high-gloss surfaces, rather than tracking the surface itself. The mouse sensor 'sees' the clean areas of glass as a dark background with bright dots and then interprets the movement of the dots to precisely track where the device has been moved. The Logitech Performance Mouse will be available in the US and Europe in August for $100, while the mobile-friendly Anywhere Mouse is expected to retail at $80." I don't know how many times I've cursed shiny new desks and wished that someone would finally utilize that dark field microscopy technique (end bad humor). Thank heaven for Logitec finally breaking through.

On August 4 we discussed the possibility of openSUSE defaulting to KDE during the installation routine. This was raised as a feature request within the openSUSE community, and quickly gained the favour of many, become the most popular request. The openSUSE board and variousother leader within the project have discussed the issue, and have decided that yes, from now on, openSUSE will default to KDE during the installation process.

The big thing in notebooks right now are netbooks. They're cheap, more than powerful enough for day-to-day tasks, and small enough to actually carry around without anyone even noticing you're carrying one (not a bad thing in some parts of the world). However, they also receive a lot of criticism, such as cramped keyboards and displays that are too small. So, at Kaiwai's suggestion, here's a question for you all: how do you use your netbook?

"Apple today released Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0, addressing issues with certain hard drives on the latest MacBook Pros models. Apple had been reported last week to be working on the issue, which involves intermittent 'beeping' noises and occasional brief system freezes on machines using 500 GB, 7200 rpm hard drives."

The Intel Atom platform, on which most netbooks are based, lacks the graphical grunt for things like 3D games and HD video playback, because Intel insisted on paring the Atom processor with an outdated graphical chip by Intel. Several efforts are underway to resolve this issue, and one of them, NVIDIA's Ion, might already be in trouble before it has even arrived.

The Linux Foundation has made some analyzation the past two years into just how much code is being added to the project and who is doing that contribution. This year's report is out, and the results are actually quite smile-worthy if you're a Linux advocate: the increase in code contributions is phenomenal, the rate at which these contributions are being submitted is faster, and there are more individual developers than previously.

Remember the very detailed proposal Microsoft submitted to the European Commission not too long ago about the browser ballot? This was quite the detailed proposal, covering just about every possible aspect of such a ballot screen. Responses were positive from within the EC, but now it seems that according to the Mozilla Foundation, the proposal is not good enough.

"The PySide project provides LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. PySide Qt bindings allow both free open source and proprietary software development and ultimately aim to support all of the platforms as Qt itself." Previously, the PyQt bindings were not licensed LGPL. If one wished to make a commercial application, then one previously had to purchase a commercial license for PyQt. Now it is possible to dynamically link to the LGPL-licensed PySide bindings instead. The PySide bindings are API compatible with PyQt.

MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk to GoodGearGuide about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of the OS and future plans for it.

Following the three-months release schedule, version 9.08 of the Genode Operating-System Framework has been released, bringing improvements all over the code base and introducing new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode's synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.

As everybody had been more or less anticipating for months now, Sony has released the Playstation 3 Slim, a much smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient variant of the regular Playstation 3. There's good news for people who held out on the PS3 because it was too expensive, and there's bad news for those of us who liked the idea of running Linux on the PS3.

It's been a long time, but Palm has finally announced it is accepting submissions for its App Catalog. It's still in beta, and the applications will be only available for US customers. The details are on Palm's developer network.