When KDE 4.0 was first released, it was met with quite some criticism. Even though people saw the huge potential, the lack of functionality and stability, as well as quite a few bugs detracted from the experience. The KDE developers continued to work on implementing their relatively radical vision, and with the release of KDE 4.2 creeping ever closer, it seems they're well on their way.

Versin 0.17 of the Linux filesystem btrfs has been released. The main news on this release is that it has been included in the Linus' tree. The changes include support of transparent compression, seed devices, improved block sharing while moving extents, improved block allocation and many bug fixes and performance improvements. Also, the disk format is not expected to change unless a critical bug is found.

"In essence, CoreUI is a low-level framework that - ultimately - will be responsible for drawing all the user interface widgets in OS X. Among other things, CoreUI will define the look and feel of the Aqua interface. I say 'will' and 'ultimately' because at the time of writing CoreUI is still something of a work in progress. Some folks have reported that CoreUI isn't used at all in Leopard, unless you change the scale factor from its default value of 1.0, but this is simplistic. By default, CoreUI is used for drawing a number of user interface elements in Leopard."

While Sun continues to push OpenSolaris as an alternative to Linux and *BSD, hobbyists around the net are making their own spin-offs from the Unix flavour. Linux Format looks at some of the most notable, including MilaX, Belenix and Nexenta.

This week, we start with a new regular occurence on OSNews: the imaginatively named Week in Review, where we do a quick rundown of the preceding week's most important news, and maybe add in a few new items that didn't make the cut earlier in the week. We will close off each of them with My Take, a short random musing about whatever subject we please. This week, the news was dominated by MacWorld, Windows 7, and Palm.

Arstechnica reports that Mono, an open source implementation of .NET runtime, is bringing Microsoft's development technologies to some unexpected places, including the iPhone, Android, and the Wii.

Late last year, Creative launched a website and teaser campaign for a new product called Zii, with the only clue being its tagline: "Stemcell computing". While you can argue whether or not it's smart to focus attention on such a sensitive subject, the product that has rolled out of this campaign today is quite tantalising.

As promised, Microsoft has released the beta to Windows 7 to the general public a few hours ago. Don't get your hopes up yet, though, as Microsoft's servers are completely hammered right now - which isn't too hard to imagine, seeing the 2.5 million download limit Microsoft imposed. This probably led to everyone rushing to Microsoft's servers to get their hands on the beta, clogging the servers (2.5m times a 3GB image file, do the math). You will have to be patient, and hope for the best if you want the beta and its product key. The beta will expire August 1st, 2009.

Google has barely released Chrome 1.0, but the company is already hard at work on version 2.0 of its web browser. They released a pre-beta for Chrome 2.0, which comes with a lot of new features, including ones that should've already been in Chrome 1.0. In addition, it seems as if the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are getting closer.

A recent YouTube video by Sun's Fishworks Lab's Brendan Gregg proves that vibrations (including shouting) will cause hard drives' latency to spike. But then, he only shouted at it angrily. Who's to say that perhaps blasting Mozart in your server room will cause the latency to drop? Perhaps telling each hard drive that he or she is special may even make their capacities grow!

To supplement storage space with the initial purchase of the Aspire One (8 GB SSD version), I bought a 16 GB Transcend TS16GBSDHC6 card that integrates nicely into the left card slot. The pre-installed Linux Linpus just wasn't what I needed since I use many networking tools at work and at home. I initially ran Ubuntu 8.041 with the /home partition on the 16 GB SDHC card. I discovered Eeebuntu while searching for information on how to boot and run Linux off a SDHC card. The goal was of multi-boot installations of Ubuntu, with one install specifically loaded with the tools I use at work. The Acer Aspire One BIOS does not 'see' the card, so you can't boot from it using the startup key (More on the SDHC boot up further in this article).

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), often called parallel SCSI, is almost 30 years old and can hardly keep up with the demands of today's IT environment. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was developed to address the limitations inherent in SCSI. This article highlights the differences between these two interfaces and points out the attributes that account for the increasing popularity of SAS.

Thanks to SGI, a potential disaster for Free software purists has been averted. Back in January 2008, it was discovered by the OpenBSD guys that some of the contributions to X.org and the Mesa 3D Graphics Library made by SGI were covered under permissive open source licenses that didn't fall within FSF's definition of Free software. The FSF Compliance Lab worked with SGI to resolve the issue, and they succeeded.

The One Laptop Per Child project announced Wednesday that it plans to downsize half of its staff and reduce the salary of the remaining employees. OLPC will also halt its development of the open source Sugar environment and focus on building its next-generation hardware device. These plans are part of a major restructuring effort that has been necessitated by the financial downturn and the organization's dwindling resources.