Motorola Implodes; Insider Tells All

Motorola split into two groups today in order to save their falling mobile business, but the real kicker is an insider's email that Engadget published. It has it all, from suicides to golf scores and how all that brought a giant down. Good afternoon reading, albeit sad. Update: My personal rant/editorial on the situation, describing the failure of Motorola to understand the importance of their EZX Linux-based phones and how this drove their business down.

Preview: Fedora 9 Beta

"It's been almost two months since Fedora 9 Alpha was released, which we subsequently previewed. Now with the release of Fedora 9 just being 35 days out, Red Hat has pushed out the beta release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) with many more features implemented and ready to be tested. We have taken the time to explore the features of Fedora 9 and the progress that has been made."

Whitix 0.03 Released

"Whitix is a 32-bit operating system for the Intel and AMD range of processors, licensed under the GNU GPL. It features a C compiler (tcc), Python, assembler (nasm), text editor, shell and filesystem formatter. See the Introduction to Whitix for more information." Version 0.03 was released a month ago. My, aren't we sharp today.

Preview: Ubuntu 8.04 Beta

It is that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release is upon us. The beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 was released a few days ago, so I decided to give it a try and see what new features and improvements they have shoved into this one. As always, this is as much a preview of the latest GNOME release (2.22) as it is of Ubuntu itself. Read on for the preview.

Red Hat Must Lead Wider Development Effort, Whitehurst Says

New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company must be a defining technology company of the 21st century and provide more leadership to companies that are willing to co-develop software with open source projects and with other companies. "Ninety-five percent of software is developed by enterprises each year and is not for resale," involving a lot of re-inventing of the wheel by different firms. "There's hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted software assets each year," he said in an address to the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Tuesday.

BeBook, Be Newsletters Available Online

I have no idea how I missed it (seriously) but read this: "It's been almost one year since we announced our conversations with ACCESS Co. Ltd. targeted at releasing legacy BeOS related documents, and today last week we were happy to inform the community that this project has finally arrived to a happy conclusion: the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters are now available online. As an emerging open source project, documentation for Haiku is still hard to come by; and while our Documentation Team works on creating Haiku-specific material, the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will provide valuable reference material for all developers, new and experienced alike."

Fedora 9 Beta Released

The beta version of Fedora 9 has been released. It comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.2, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, PackageKit, Kernel 2.6.25-rc5, and much more. "The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community's help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora's development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve usability, performance, and stability."

‘Safari 3.1 on Windows: a True Competitor Arrives (Seriously)’

"While pundits have been lamenting the fact that Apple's 'software update' program on Windows is now pushing Safari 3.1 to users, we thought we'd check out Safari 3.1 to find out if Apple has made any real progress on the Windows version of this browser. After all, it's about the software, right? We put the Safari 3 beta on Windows through the wringer last summer, and we weren't too terribly impressed. The problems were significant, such that we'd have a hard time recommending the browser to any Windows user. As of last summer, Firefox was still the Windows browser of choice here at Ars. Have things improved for Safari? Wow, have they."

Sun Researching Super Fast Laser Processors

As computers chip continue to decrease in fabrication size, manufacturers such as AMD and Intel are researching new ways to overcome physical barriers. Die size, performance, operating frequency and heat are all major obstacles in the semiconductor industry. Sun Microsystems announced that in partnership with Luxtera, Kotura and Stanford University, it is working on an ambitions project to move data transmissions from electrical signals over copper wires to pulses of light using lasers.

Click Right on with RISC OS

"When asked what they most like about RISC OS, many enthusiasts are likely to mention the fluid, slick and intuitive manner with which user and computer interact. In other words, the graphical user interface, or the GUI as the geeks would have us call it. With RISC OS, the GUI encourages all applications to work in a similar way, and to have the same feel. Faced with new RISC OS software, a user already has a good idea of how to drive it and explore."

Tracking Linux Prereleases: OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora

"We often hear from readers who want to track the development process of their favorite Linux distribution but don't know where to start. Budding Linux enthusiasts frequently ask how the release cycles work, what the version numbers mean, and what options are available for end-user testing prior to official releases. The answers to those questions differ depending on the distribution, but we are going to attempt to address those questions for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE - three of the most prominent desktop Linux distributions. We will also provide a brief visual comparison of upcoming versions with screenshots of the prereleases."

First Look at Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ Beta

"I like Ubuntu. With each incarnation I'm seeing improvements and betterments that make the OS better, more robust, more user friendly and more fully-featured. In fact, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first Linux distro that I've come across that I would consider loading onto my notebook to replace Windows. Throughout my testing Ubuntu 8.04 beta has been reliable and performed flawlessly. Bottom line, Hardy Heron is, for me at least, the best Linux distro ever," writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.

‘Evidence Mounting: Windows 7 Going Modular, Subscription’

"When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most 'modular' yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customized for deployment but developed monolithically. One modular OS to rule them all, let's say."

Awesome 2.2 Released

Awesome 2.2 has been released. "Awesome is a floating and tiling window manager initialy based on a dwm code rewriting. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome. Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating... Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose. If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager."

Haiku Alpha 1 Status Update

"This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason - in my opinion - is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what's the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update."