Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works."I went and asked every single hardware manufacturer, the big guys that ship the boxes, Dell, IBM, HP--what do you ship that isn't supported by Linux? They came back with nothing. Everything is supported by Linux. If you have a device that isn't supported by Linux that's being shipped today, let me know.".If you would like to take up Greg KH on his claim, his email address is greg AT kroah.com

Earlier, we reported that Apple had rejected Opera Mini from the App Store. A New York Times blog entry claimed that Opera's CEO and co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said that Apple wouldn't let them release Opera Mini for the iPhone because it competed with Mobile Safari. John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, did some researching of his own, and found out via anonymous sources who do not wish to be identified, that the situation is a little bit different.

And yet some more information about Windows 7 has found its way to users. Ars Technica is present at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, and they dove into the new Device Stage feature, as well as the new Libraries feature in the Windows Explorer file manager.

The OpenBSD team has released OpenBSD 4.4. "As in our previous releases, 4.4 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system." Information on how you can obtain OpenBSD can be found on the OpenBSD website.

Earlier this week Phoronix published a set of comparative benchmarks regarding Ubuntu, testing various recent releases to compare their performance figures on all sorts of different tasks. They've now done the same thing for Fedora, so we can compare Fedora and Ubuntu in terms of performance.

InternetNews talks to developers and vendors about the rise of Btrfs as a successor to Ext4. Though Ext4 adds extents, Chris Mason, Btrfs developer noted that BTRFS adds a number of other features beyond that. Among those features are items like snapshotting, online file consistency checks and the ability to perform fast incremental backups. BTRFS (pronounced better FS) is currently under development in an effort led by Oracle engineer Chris Mason. With the support of Intel, Red Hat, HP, IBM, BTRFS could become the engine that brings next generation filesystem capabilities to Linux.

Real World Technologies has posted a code level dissection of the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 and an AMD Athlon FX-62. While rather dated, the two processors were state of the art in 2006, the article does an excellent job of detailing why the processors behave the way they do. Many publications will say, "Game X runs better on processor Z, so processor Z wins", but that does not tell the reader why. This Real World Technologies article, on the other hand, explains why. For instance, they used the game Prey to test the CPUs and found "Prey tends to favor more complex x86 instructions that likely either use 3 inputs, or have 2 output."

Yes, we're still on the subject of Windows 7's user interface overhaul. We know what's going to change, we know what it looks like, but there's one important question that has not really been given much stage time: why? At PDC, one session was dedicated to just that question. Speaking is Chaitanya Sareen , part of the windows user interface team. He'll place the changes in Windows 7 into context, talk about Windows' user interface history, and he'll explain why certain changes were made. An interesting insight into the goals of the Windows 7 interface.

When Office 2007 came out with its new ribbon-based interface, a lot of people were up in arms because Microsoft deliberately left out a legacy switch - you couldn't go back to the old-fashioned Office user interface. Now that Windows 7 is getting a major UI overhaul, many wondered if Microsoft would build a legacy switch into its new operating system. Ars talked to Steven Sinofsky about this one, and got an answer. They also discussed the new jump list feature.

OLPC Project uses a derivative of Fedora as the operating system for it's XO laptops. One of the unique features of these laptops, is an environment called Sugar developed as a collaboration between Red Hat and other developers and now being maintained by Sugarlabs, an independent non-profit organization. The Fedora Project has released a new spin, a live CD with the Sugar environment by default and a number of additional activities including sugar-browse based on XULRunner and sugar-write based on Abiword. Furthermore, the Fedora liveusb-creator software has been updated to include support for this spin. For people developing the Sugar environment or those curious about it but don't have an OLPC system, this live cd can be a handy way to dive in.

With the success of the iPod, the subsequent resurgence in popularity of the Macintosh platform, and the recent iPhone smash hit, it's hard to imagine that Apple was once a company that tried to enter every market possible, leaving a trail of flopped products in its wake. Forbes lists ten of them, and we take a look at some of them, and add one of our own.

Bang on target, the new version of Ubuntu Linux is available for our downloading pleasure. Amongst various changes it sports updates to the installer, improved networking, and a new 'Mobile USB' version geared towards the blossoming netbook market. Grab a copy from the Ubuntu website, and check out Linux Format's hands-on look. Or the one at Simple Thoughts. Or the one at PolishLinux. And probably a few other websites as well.

The proposed new standard for the C++ programming language, C++0x, has reached feature completeness. "This is 'it', feature-complete C++0x, including the major feature of 'concepts' which had its own extensive set of papers for language and library extensions (if you get the impression that concepts is a big feature, well, it is indeed easily the biggest addition we made in C++0x)."

Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux? "Absolutely not", says Rich Menga. "Where Linux shines the most is in its server applications".In the 1990's "There were thousands of Mom n' Pop ISPs that operated out of a garage and the vast majority of them were all running Linux. Windows couldn't do it back then and neither could MacOS. What would you have used that you could afford? Netware? Lotus Domino? HP-UX (that requires those refrigerator-sized HP servers)? Linux was literally the only OS out there that had the right price (free), ran similar to a Unix and could use existing computers of the time to connect customers.The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There's an extremely high probability that the internet connection you're using right now is connected through a Linux server - and routed through many other Linux servers along the way."