Last week, we reviewed the Aspire One, Acer's entry into the netbook market. The small but powerful device comes preloaded with either Linux or Windows XP, and we reviewed the Linux version. Even though most people will never need to go beyond the default Linpus Linux offering on the One, more advanced users will quickly hit the wall Acer set up: it has more or less completely locked down the Xfce 4.2.2 installation on the One. This bothered me - this is a powerful machine, so I want a powerful operating system. I went for Ubuntu 8.04.1 - read on for a few thoughts on how well GNOME's user interface fares on a small-screen device such as the One.

"Intel offered a sneak peek of the next-generation of its Classmate PC design at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco today. The new design features a tablet, touchscreen, and motion-sensing user interface, and is powered by - you guessed it - an Atom processor."

As an experiment, Kaj de Vos ported the recently released Genode OS framework to Syllable Server. It does not run on Syllable Desktop yet, as this requires some more deep porting work to the Syllable kernel. Genode is a modular operating system framework with several components that are largely complementary to Syllable. The Syllable project wants to explore the opportunities to integrate these into Syllable.

Steven Sinofsky, who oversees Windows 7 development, has really committed to keeping us in the loop on the new Engineering Windows 7 blog. In today's post, "Measuring the Scale of a Release," he discusses whether or not Windows 7 will be a "major" or "minor" release. It's a pretty good piece that really makes some good points. Read on for our perspective.

Intel unveiled a power gate feature incorporating a "turbo" mode for its upcoming Nehalem family of processors. With the turbo mode, in a situation where not all the cores are necessary for a particular workload, the ones that are idle will be turned off and power is channeled to the cores that are active, making them more efficient. Intel also showcased the Nehalem-EX for the expandable server market, which consists of eight-core processors on a single die.

Last week we reported on the Engineering 7 weblog, a weblog headed by Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky on which they promised to chronicle the development process of Windows 7, while allowing us normal folk to give feedback. They are keeping their promise, as the latest post by Sinofsky offers some interesting insights into the various development teams working on Windows 7.

How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences to a typical Linux distro.

GoboLinux is a distribution which sports a different file system structure than 'ordinary' Linux distributions. In order to remain compatible with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, symbolic links are used to map the GoboLinux tree to standard UNIX directories. A post in the GoboLinux forums suggested that it might be better to turn the concept around: retain the FHS, and then use symbolic links to map the GoboLinux tree on top of it. This sparked some interesting discussion. Read on for more details.

We've covered Windows 7 quite often already - on the desktop side of the fence, that is. Continuing tradition, there will also be a Windows 7 Server release, but until now, Microsoft has remained fairly tight-lipped about the server counterpart of Windows 7. Until now, because Microsoft has stated that Windows 7 Server will be a "minor release" - and named accordingly: Windows Server 2008 R2.

With the SIGGRAPH OpenGL BOF now past, Nick Haemel from AMD has written a blog post about OpenGL 3 and the reasoning behind the choices made. "After testing an approach that would have a drastic effect on the API, requiring complete OpenGL application rewrites and not introducing any of the long awaited features modern GPUs are capable of GL 3.0 takes two important steps to moving open standard graphics forward in a major way. The first is to provide core and ARB extension access to the new capabilities of hardware. The second is to create a roadmap that allows developers to see what parts of core specifications will be going away in the future, also providing the OpenGL ARB with a way to introduce new features faster."

"In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework."

InformationWeek is speculating on how Linux will change in the next four years. "By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models. Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze, and command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past."

Windows 7 has been making waves around the net for a while now, and we already know some of the more encompassing goals of Microsoft's next operating system release. It's going to be built on top of the foundations laid out by Vista and Server 2008, but it will not increase hardware requirements. There's going to be a multitouch framework, and a new mystery taskbar. That's more or less all we know. Microsoft also said they were going to be more tight-lipped during the development process, something they will continue to do, but they did open a blog today: Engineering Windows 7. The E7 blog is written by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product.

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.