The Palm Pre and its webOS aren't even out yet, and there's already news of another Palm device that will ship in the second half of the year, also running the webOS. First it was just a rumour, but now we have pictures and hardware specifications - and now it's still just a rumour, but with pretty pictures and a spec list. Sadly, there's still no word on exactly when the Pre will arrive, but some evidence points towards June 7 - the day before Apple's WWDC starts.

I moved into the realm of digital SLR photography back in 2003 when when I got myself a Canon 10D. The 10D served me very well for 7 years and 14 000 pictures. Then I decided it was time for an upgrade so, I got myself a full frame 21 Megapixel monster, the EOS 5D MkII. It's quite an upgrade, it even does video. These are my impressions after having it for a few weeks.

DragonFlyBSD 2.2.1 has been released. It's an intermediary release with no important new features, but it does have a number of bugfixes. Get it from the download page.

The guys and girls behind the NetBSD project have released version 5.0 of their BSD operating system. NetBSD is a highly-portable operating system, the second open-source BSD implementation (after 386BSD). Naturally, version 5.0 comes packed with a whole boatload of improvements.

Mandriva has announced the launch of the final version of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (codename Pauillac). This new version comes with a host of improvements and changes, as always. Fun fact: this is the first release reported to us by Anne Nicolas instead of Adam Williamson. For those that keep score.

Acer has stated that it has lowered its expectations for netbook sales for this year. Instead of selling between 12-15 million netbooks, the company now believes it will ship 10-12 million netbooks.

Over at Wired Gadget Lab, they're taking a look back at several people who've gone to a bunch of trouble to hack up and deal with the pitfalls of netbooks running OSX. As the story's title states, it ain't pretty. In a nutshell, they found that even if you load a nice OS onto a cheap, tiny computer, you still have to deal with the inherent downsides of a cheap, tiny computer, and when you run an Apple OS on a non-Apple machine, you'll have some software problems. I read this article with great interest, because a few months ago I bought an MSI Wind (the same netbook that this guy used) with thoughts of putting OSX on it. But this article set me to thinking about netbooks, the mythical Apple netbook, and Apple's Newton legacy.

Microsoft released the second service pack for Office 2007, with ODF and PDF support. "Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today's distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise -- contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe -- upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don't have to "Save As" and export to ODF if you don't ever want to use Microsoft's OOXML or Office 2003 "compatibility mode;" you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice."

Drobe has scored evidence that Jeffrey Lee, with help from Uwe Kall and ROOL staff, have managed to port RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard, a board with a 600Mhz Cortex A8 ARM processor and 256MB of RAM. Drobe has a photo of RISC OS 5 booting into a command prompt.

According to NeoWin, the second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has gone gold, or RTM in Microsoft Land. "Microsoft has finally finished and compiled the RTM version of Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008. The full version string being 6.0.6006.18005, which company officials have confirmed is the final RTM version of SP2."

"Operating system vendors face this problem once or twice a decade: They need to migrate their user base from their old operating system to their very different new one, or they need to switch from one CPU architecture to another one, and they want to enable users to run old applications unmodified, and help developers port their applications to the new OS. Let us look at how this has been done in the last 3 decades, looking at DOS/Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Palm."

The Open Innovation Network has found a few of Microsoft's patents in dealing with the past TomTom/FAT case a bit fishy and have therefore submitted them for review of prior-art to the Linux community at large.

Engadget reports that "just two weeks after the last revision went up, Apple's released iPhone OS 3.0 beta 4 to the developer community alongside an iTunes 8.2 pre-release. No word yet on what has / hasn't been updated, but we do know the new iTunes is required to activate beta 4."

Fedora 11 Preview Release has been announced with a large number of new features, even more so than previous general releases. This includes Presto (delta RPM updates reducing bandwidth usage over 80% typically), automatic font and mime installer via PackageKit, Nouveau as the default driver for Nvidia cards (3D support is not mature and disabled however), simplified Anaconda text mode installation and minimal installation support, automatic Bug Reporting tool, native access to Microsoft Exchange using OpenChange, Firefox 3.1 and ThunderBird 3.0, Windows Cross Compiler (MinGW and a comprehensive set of cross compiled libraries), Ext4 as the default filesystem, experimental support for the next generation Btrfs filesystem, improved I18N with the switch to IBus input system by default, much improved Kernel Mode Support, many virtualization and security improvements, RPM 4.7, GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, Xfce 4.6, Linux Kernel 2.6.29, Python 2.6. GCC 4.4 and several other changes.