"Last night we had a geek outing with our favorite hacker, Brian Jepson, who you may remember from our feature on Hacking the XO laptop. This time around Brian got a hold of a development G1 and hacked around with cupcake. Included in the video is a demonstration of the on-screen keyboard, prettier transitions, some fun in the Linux shell, and more. We also have some photos (the video was a little blurry) of the skateboarding androids–which come up as you hack–and the obligatory Snake game on the Android OS."

We may have reported earlier that Apple might finally face the headwind from the economic downturn, but that's not everything there's to this story. Recent data suggests - once again - that Apple customers are very, very satisfied with their Apple purchases. In other words, most current Apple customers are very likely to buy Apple again. Interestingly, ASUS and Acer did very well in the survey as well.

Intel has filed suit against NVIDIA seeking a declaratory judgment over rights associated with two agreements between the companies. The suit seeks to have the court declare that NVIDIA is not licensed to produce chipsets that are compatible with any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller functionality, such as Intel’s Nehalem microprocessors and that NVIDIA has breached the agreement with Intel by falsely claiming that it is licensed. Intel claims that it has been in discussions with NVIDIA for more than a year attempting to resolve the matter but were unsuccessful. As a result Intel is asking the court to resolve this dispute. Shall we rename OSNews to CourtNews?

If you have ever been interested in awk and sed Unix utilities, then you probably know about the awk1line.txt and sed1line.txt files that are floating around the Internet. Each file contains around 80 idiomatic sed and awk one-liners for performing various text modification tasks.

Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.

Palm has released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform. "You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you'd use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context." Ars has more.

We already knew netbooks were popular, but according to new data by research firm IDC, they are even more popular in Europe than we anticipated. The firm says that in 2008, netbooks sales accounted for 30% of total consumer portable sales in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa. A big contributing factor are the telecommunication providers in Europe who subsidise netbooks.

Th DragonFly BSD team has released DragonFly BSD 2.2. The biggest improvement in this release is that the HAMMER filesystem is considered production ready, but there is a whole boatload of other improvements as well.

A new phone based on Google's operating system Android has been unveiled by Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The touchscreen HTC Magic will feature a 3.2 Megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS, but no slide-out keyboard. The first "Google phone", called the G1, was launched in September by HTC and is exclusive to T-mobile. The Magic will feature new Android firmware, known as "Cupcake", with changes based on G1 user suggestions.

The ArchLinux Release Engineering Team announced the official release of the 2009.02 ISO after a long period of intense development. This distribution is among the first to officially support the new Ext4 filesystem. I've always noticed that Arch seems to be quite popular among OSNews readers, and I'm interested to know from our Arch users: why? What makes Arch such a good Linux distribution?

Earlier this year, Freescale announced it would enter the netbook market with its own set of chips based on the ARM architecture, claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today. The company gave a little more info today, and among other things, they want to support Google's Android on their netbooks.

Nvidia has said it is working with Google to build support for Linux applications on smartphones with its upcoming Tegra mobile chips. The support for the Android platform is an attempt to drive up Tegra's adoption among smartphone makers. Nvidia is displaying an Android-based phone with a Tegra chip at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Andrew Doran and Jared D. McNeill have announced in a mailing list post that they are starting a NetBSD Desktop Project with the goal of: "Given a NetBSD CD and a reasonably modern x86 computer, make it possible to install a useful desktop system in under 15 minutes, responding to only a few prompts in the process." Initial plans are being formulated on the project wiki page.

For years, Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge that its patent portfolio is a precursor to interoperability discussions. Monday, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. Red Hat has long argued that patent discussions only cloud true interoperability, which is best managed through open source and open standards. Now it has got what it wanted; unlike the Novell-Microsoft agreements, there is no exclusionary patent deals or cross payments.