Asus' small Eee PC was a rather unexpected success for the hardware vendor - an expansion of the Eee brand was only natural. The Eee Pc 901 followed, with a bigger screen and the option of having Windows XP pre-installed. Now, Asus is moving into the desktop PC market with their Eee Box, an Intel Atom-powered mini-desktop PC, showed off at Computex.

Back in the day when PCs were first moving into households, they came in big, clunky desktop form factor machines, with a beige colour, built like a brick. Later on, for some inexplicable reason, the world decided to move to tower configurations - more stuff could be stuffed inside, yes, but I considered them to be impractical and always in the way. These days, people just buy laptops and be done with it. This has a few disadvantages, one of them being the lack of graphical grunt in many laptops, combined with the inability to upgrade the graphics hardware. AMD believes it has a solution.

"Google has announced the official release of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the open-source Apache software license. Although there are still bugs and the implementation is not yet entirely complete, it works well enough for day-to-day use."

For year now, the x86 microprocessor market has been dominated by Intel and AMD, and the rivalry between the two companies forced both to be innovative in order to gain a competitive advantage over the other - benefiting customers. With the rise of 'mobile internet devices' and low-power budget notebooks, this new market will be enriched by not only Via, but also nVIDIA.

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks. The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops. Acer has already started selling Linux in its Media PC business but this should now spread, according to Gianpiero Morbello, vice president of marketing and brand at Acer. "We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," he said. "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market."

Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, may only be six months old, but rumours are already abound as to the next update to Apple's operating system. According to several sources, it's going to be called Snow Leopard, it won't contain any major new features, and is planned to go gold master December 2008, available a month later. The big rumour: it's going to be available for 64bit Intel machines only.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously they have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. In this article, they chat with S. Tucker Taft, Chairman and CTO of SofCheck. Taft has been heavily involved in the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, and still works with the language today as both a designer and user. Computerworld spoke to Taft to learn more about the development and maintenance of Ada.

Let's take a closer look at OpenSolaris, particularly its use of ZFS, network problems that people have reported, the use of bash, and differences between OpenSolaris and Solaris and Solaris Express. Note: This is the latest article in our OSNews Article Contest.

Comic: "Perk".

It's an ever-continuing debate: what is better, a graphical user interface, or a command-line interface? Graphical user interfaces may be easier to learn, but complicated operations may require a lot more user input than with a command line interface, which can perform several complicated operations by using a short sequence of words and characters. However, a CLI has a much steeper learning curve than a GUI. Google has always had a certain CLI-quality to it, and Stefan Grothkopp decided to take this a few steps further: say hello to Goosh.

Recently we've seen the releases of both Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' as well as Fedora 9 'Sulphur', to mostly positive reviews. PCWorld Australia decided to pitch these two popular Linux distributions against one another.

Last week, IBM unveiled the first version of their OpenOffice.org offshoot, Lotus Symphony. Symphony is aimed at professional users in a corporate environment, but brings to OpenOffice.org many UI enhancements in an attractive, single tabbed interface. Symphony 1.0 runs on Windows and Linux; while the site used to suggest a Mac version was forthcoming, there is currently no reference to a Mac native version of Symphony. The Lotus Symphony website has been updated to reflect the recent release, however, downloads are very slow at the moment "due to high demand."

OSNews is looking for editors and writers to help with posting daily news, writing feature articles, research and investigative journalism, doing interviews, covering events and conferences, writing product and book reviews, doing editorials, and all around increasing the amount of original content published at OSNews. If you are an OS enthusiast and have experience in journalism, blogging, editing, or other writing, please contact David Adams.

KDE 4.1, which is supposed to become the KDE4 version usable by 'normal' people, is coming at the end of July. When Ars reviewed the beta release, they were positive in that it was moving forward at an "extraordinary pace". Despite the positive notions in the news, many seem to have problems actually seeing all the new stuff being done in KDE4 - just like how people fail to see the massive amount of work put into Vista. KDE developer Rafael Fernandez Lopez (I'm sorry for the lack of diacritical marks, an OSNews bug we're working on) decided to put together a screencast showing off all the new stuff coming in KDE 4.1.