Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."

The Firefox guys at Mozilla have released the 2nd beta for Firefox 3.1. "The public beta of Mozilla's first Web browser to incorporate a private browsing mode, is being made available to the general public today, although as before, the organization has yet to make it official." This build also includes the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, and for web content, it's enabled by default. If you want to enable it for XUL/chrome as well, go to about:config, search for 'jit' and set the XUL/chrome option to 'true'.

Always wanted to try out RISC OS, but were you set back by the fact that you had to buy a new computer? RISCOS Ltd. has released a very cheap ROM image of RISC OS 4.02 which you can use in a free emulator like RPCemu. At only 5 GBP, this image, dubbed "Virtually Free" by the company, is the easiest way of trying out RISC OS. "RISC OS "Virtually Free" is a fully licensed complete package. It consists of a single 4 MB zip file containing a RISC OS 4.02 ROM image with the !Boot structure and other necessary applications and utilities. It is designed to be unzipped and installed in the emulator itself with most of the work being done from within the host environment." It will be available from RISCOS Ltd.'s sales page starting December 8.

Opera 10 has been released as an alpha preview. It showcases a new rendering engine, Presto 2.2, which the company states will improve browsing performance over the previous version by 30 percent, and notably passes Acid3 standards compatibility with a 100 out of 100 score. This article runs it through some benchmarks, checks memory usage, and general browsing experience.

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax – and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."

Controversy in the Mandriva world this afternoon. Vincent Danen is all doom and gloom, citing declining numbers of posts to mailing lists as evidence of a shrinking community. However, Javier Villacampa points out in the comments that the community is spreading out to different places, and Adam Williamson responds to Vincent, citing fast-growing numbers of users and posts on the official forums.

"Python 3.0 (a.k.a. 'Python 3000' or 'Py3k') is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places." See what's new in Python 3.0 for differences between 2.x and 3.x.

Anand Lal Shimpi, founder of Anandtech.com, had the opportunity to sit down with Carrell Killebrew, Eric Demers, Mike Schmit and Mark Leather, collectivley known as the designers behind the current crop of AMD graphics chips, and quiz them about how the RV770 graphics chip came about. In the article, Anand recounts the history that influenced the chip's design and the obstacles that were overcome from his two hours meeting with the design team.

This blog post on Qt Labs shows how to easily embed regular desktop widgets in a three dimensional Wolfenstein-like maze. The example includes web browser views, a mediaplayer with sound and video, OpenGL integration, and even a soldier scriptable in QtScript. All done in relatively simple code using Qt's QGraphicsView API. The example might not be directly usable by itself, but it demonstrates how easy it is to map 2D widgets to 3D scenes in Qt and could act as inspiration for future user interfaces.

Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0. Songbird is described as a "web player"- a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer- a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.

The month of December has already been unkind to Microsoft. The software giant's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser saw significant market share drops reported on back-to-back days. Not only was the November percentage drop for Windows the biggest in two years, but Windows market share dipped below a number where it has historically held tight: 90 percent. According to Web metrics company, Net Applications, Windows market share as of Dec. 1 is 89.6 percent. Meanwhile, Mac OS X posted its largest gain in two years, with 8.9 percent market share at the end of November.

The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4.

In late October, Microsoft announced the beta of the second service pack for Windows Vista and Server 2008. This beta was limited in audience, and today Microsoft has fixed that: it opened up the beta for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and coming Thursday, it will be opened to the general public. The releases will be distributed via TechNet.

The legal back-and-forth between Apple and clone-maker PsyStar continues to develop, with the latest news being a move by Apple - the Cupertino company has invoked something with many already predicted Apple would call upon: the DMCA, or the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This was done in an amendment to the original suit, filed in July this year.