InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy has been using a converted Windows Server 2008 as his primary OS since hitting a wall using Vista as a Visual Studio development platform four weeks ago. According to Kennedy, the guerrilla 'Workstation' 2008 OS has turned his Dell notebook into a well-oiled machine that never gets sluggish and rarely needs to reboot. Those interested in making the switch should check out win2008workstation.com, a clearinghouse for 'Workstation' 2008 tips and techniques. Kennedy also offers a link to a Windows 2008 Workstation Converter utility for quick conversion.

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

Gustav Duarte has written a three part article about the computer boot up process. The series starts with the Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map of an Intel computer and then he covers the processes that take place from the BIOS initialization to the boot loader. The final part is the coverage of the Kernel Boot Process.

This preview of the upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 release highlights aspects that should be of interest to systems and storage administrators who have to deal with large storage environments. ZFS is a big component that is referred to often, but there are new storage services and capabilities in addition to ZFS that might be overlooked and are quite compelling.
Editor's Note: We ran an article yesterday that covered the surface level (eye-candy) improvements of the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris.

The ext3undel utility can recover accidently removed data on ext3 filesystems. Users can recover a specific file by name, or they can restore all files marked as deleted. ext3undel is a wrapper for other recovery programs such as Photorec, Foremost and SleuthKit.

While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho.

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS.

On January 7, 2008, gOS released the beta version of Space - their latest iteration of gOS. It's different for sure. It's like OS X with an added bit of fun. gOS Space is truly a social network fan's dream come true. But what exactly makes this operating system special? Let's take a look at some of the bits that cause Space to stand out.

The #1 supercomputer in the world, the IBM Roadrunner, produced at a cost of nearly $100 million dollars, runs Fedora. IBM has been working on and contributing to Fedora, using it as a prototype for the new cell architecture that leads to this supercomputer.

As if to further prove the ultra-flexibility of Linux, Echoes takes a brief look at 9 file managers for Linux, both well-known and obscure. Accompanied by comments on strengths, screenshots and homepage links, the article provides a quick guide for Linux users looking for a better file management interface.

"Linux kernel hacker Greg Kroah Hartman's June 5, 2008 talk at Google titled "The Linux Kernel" was chock-full of details about kernel development". This is a collection of some statistics about the Linux kernel development from that talk. Juicy Bit:"Supports more processors and devices than any other OS in history".

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel after a lengthy three-month development stretch since the 2.6.25 release involving nine release candidates. In announcing the release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds said the 87 days since 2.6.25 makes 2.6.26 a longer-than-usual release cycle. Torvalds said the changes from release candidate (RC) 9 are small, with the bulk (80 percent) being documentation updates.

VirtualBox is an open-source virtualization alternative to Parallels and VMWare in the MacOS X arena. Here is a step-by-step screenshot tutorial to installing Windows XP using VirtualBox in MacOS X.

Bart Trojanowski has given an in-depth 2-hour Git tutorial titled "Git the basics" for the Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts and this is the screencast of that presentation.