"W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. The group operates entirely in public with nearly five hundred participants, including representatives from W3C Members ACCESS, AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera. Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively. Authors write HTML 5 using either a 'classic' HTML syntax or an XML syntax, according to application demands. See a list of changes from HTML 4."

Does anyone remember GoBE Productive? The BeOS boys and girls among us will certainly do. Well, with money from India, they're back. "Backed by new investors, a new team and deeper pockets, GoBe Productive is now back with a vengeance promising to shake up the Office space. Blue Lotus Software Solutions, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India." They will initially offer a Windows version, but a Mac and Linux version (using Java) are on the horizon. There is a more interesting bit at the end of the article, though: "Blue Lotus is already planning for its next foray and is negotiating to buy out the BEOS operating system from the promoters of BE Inc, which was the original owner of GoBe Productive, but were driven to bankruptcy as they were unable to compete with Microsoft." In fact: "We are in discussions to acquire the BEOS and hope to close the deal soon." Since I ate eggs this morning for breakfast, my jar of salt is still on the kitchen top, and most likely for the better: someone should call these guys and tell them that most likely, no one will answer the phone in Menlo Park. Instant update: More on the re-launch of GoBE Productive. The GoBE website sees no updates. Update II: My remark concerning phone answering in Menlo Park may be off the mark: welcome the corporate promoter, which, in this case, could refer to Access.

Ubuntu 6.06.2 has been released. "This is the second maintenance release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which continues to be supported with maintenance updates and security fixes until June 2009 on desktops and June 2011 on servers. This maintenance release focuses on improving hardware support for popular server platforms, including updated server installation media. Over 600 post-release updates have been integrated, so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation, and a number of bugs in the installation system have been corrected."

Ars reviews KDE 4.0.0: "KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series." They were also at the KDE 4.0 release event.

At Google's offices in Mountain View, California, KDE 4.0's release event has ended. Various KDE people have given presentations, and a set of them has been posted online. Among them is Aaron Seigo's keynote presentation, which is very interesting to watch, and gives you a very good idea of what the KDE project is trying to achieve with KDE 4 (I just finished watching). Other presentations have also been put online.

One of the three authors of Sun's DTrace, Adam Leventhal, has discovered something very interesting using DTrace on Mac OS X. "As has been thoroughly recorded, Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X. I've been using it as often as I have the opportunity, and it's a joy to be able to use the fruits of our labor on another operating system. But I hit a rather surprising case recently which led me to discover a serious problem with Apple's implementation." So, what is this problem? "Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I'm sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they've certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let's convince them to go one step further and port it properly."

Breaking from the KDE 4.0 release event right now is word that Trolltech will be releasing Qt under the GPLv3 license. An official announcement will be made by Trolltech regarding this GPLv2 to GPLv3 license update on Monday, January 21, 2008. Additionally, KDE 4.1 is now planned for a July 2008 release.

Two interesting newsbits from the Amiga Forever camp. First, they got Amiga Forever running on the OLPC, and secondly, they also got it running on the Eee PC. The next version of Amiga Forever will support both these platforms. The release is scheduled for somewhere in 2008.

The first alpha of OpenSUSE 11.0 has been released. "With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing. Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not suitable for production systems."

"The Axiotron ModBook has been called a lot of things since we first saw it at Macworld 2007, from an amazing product that Apple should have made to vaporware. Why the latter? Because an entire year later, customers who preordered the third-party Mac tablet are still waiting for their orders to arrive. The device's ship date has been pushed back multiple times without much explanation, but on December 31, the company announced that it would finally ship the darn thing, and with new specs. Now that the MacBook Air is out, some wonder whether the ModBook is once again behind on its technology. We took the opportunity to catch up with Axiotron CEO Andreas Haas at Macworld 2008 to see what the holdup was really about, and whether the company plans to turn the MacBook Air into a ModBook Air."

You guessed it from the headline (bravo!): FreeBSD 6.3 has been released to the public (that's us). From the release notes: "Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 6.2-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements."

"There is no ideal software, it always has bugs. Minor, major or security issues will always exist and modern operating systems need to deal with this fact. What if any software which user installs had a capability to rollback to previously known successful point and operation itself would take no time? What if developer or user has a tool which could checkpoint operating system and capability to revert changes in no time? This is possible if we will marry two great technologies: ZFS and Debian APT. Both technologies now part of Nexenta Operating System which is core foundation for its derivative distributions. Meet apt-clone. The tool which integrates with the NexentaCP system, keeps track of upgrade checkpoints and allows to create/destroy/edit checkpoints by request."

"Curtis Knight, Isak Savo, and Taj Morton are the lead maintainers and developers of autopackage, a set of tools designed to let developers build and distribute distribution-neutral installation packages. In this interview, they share their vision of the project and where Linux packaging in general is going."

El Reg has an in-depth review of the XO laptop. They conclude: "There's a lot to like about the XO laptop. It's tough, it's great as an eBook reader, it has a big (for its category), high resolution screen. It runs silent and cool, has good battery life, and the clean design of the Sugar interface is easy to use. But several areas need work. The browser should be replaced by Firefox, and the Journal needs to support folders to match how people actually organise their work and play. Multimedia performance needs to be improved, which can hopefully be done through software. The XO needs a unified media player that supports all media types, along with playlists, and should be integrated with the UI. Most of these changes come down to the OLPC organisation placing more emphasis on real-world usability and less on their ideals of a perfect interface. If they can manage to do this, the XO laptop could be a great tool for learning and play."