Gobe Productive v2.0.1 now works in Haiku. "I've played with GoBE Productive for half an hour now, and it seems remarkedly stable. Gobe Productive is a unique piece of software, and one of the darlings of BeOS software. This will surely fill a much needed gap in the office suite department, despite the software's age! It's also testament to the vision of enabling backwards compatibility to BeOS application, and how good Haiku is at it."

Neuros Technology did it again: one more of their interesting media products hits the market, and this time it uses Linux. We used the Neuros OSD this past week and here's what we think about it.

"Experts say that migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down because all the low-hanging fruit has now been picked. Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole." More here.

This is the first article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. We start off with spatial memory - my personal favourite.

A thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list began by discussing whether or not XEN had been ported to OpenBSD, "is it planned at some point to release a paravirtualized xen kernel for OpenBSD 4.3 or 4.4?" Later in the discussion it was suggested that virtualization should be a priority for security reasons, "virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits." OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt strongly disagreed with this assertion, "you've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it."

Three reviews of Mac OS X Leopard, to be released coming Friday. David Pogue writes: "Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots - and most of them are bright ones." Walt Mossberg concludes: "Leopard isn't a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value. For new Mac buyers, it makes switching even more attractive." Edward C. Baig of USA Today writes: "With Leopard, Apple's operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically. Whether the sixth major release of OS X in as many years puts a dent in Microsoft's dominant market share is another matter entirely." Thanks to MacWereld.nl for pointing these reviews out.

The Completely Fair Scheduler was merged for the 2.6.23 kernel. One CFS feature which did not get in, though, was the group scheduling facility. Group scheduling makes the CFS fairness algorithm operate in a hierarchical fashion: processes are divided into groups, and, within each group, processes are scheduled fairly against one another. At the higher level, each group as a whole is given a fair share of the processor. The grouping of processes is done in user space in a highly flexible manner; the control groups (formerly 'process containers') mechanism allows a management daemon to classify processes according to almost any policy.

"The purpose of this article is not to emphasize the strengths and merits of Ubuntu user experience, but instead to shed a brighter light on areas that have been neglected due to shortage of time and resources, usability testing, and various software and artwork defects. I hope those who are sometimes overprotective of open-source software will take my recommendations with a pinch of salt and see this article for what it really tries to be: a vocal user experience report and constructive criticism."

In a blog post, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun will counter-sue Net App, after negotiations proved to be fruitless. "So now it looks like we can't avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we're headed. First, the basics. Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this. Second, Sun protects the communities using our technologies under free software licenses. Third, we file patents defensively."

Microsoft has released its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. "Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1." Red Hat and SUSE are the obvious supported guests.

Helios Labs sent us in their H4000 Upscaling DVD/DivX player for an introduction. While at OSNews we are mostly focused on system software, it is interesting to check out such devices from time to time, because of their added video features over the stock products usually found in the market.

At the last minute, Apple has changed the appearance of the Dock in Mac OS X Leopard when it is placed on the sides of the screen. If so, the dock will lose its much-criticised 3D appearance in favour of a more traditional 2D look. When placed at the bottom, the dock does retain its 3D appearance; however, a smart hacker has already found out that via a single command in the terminal, you can give the bottom dock the same 2D appearance. In other words, everybody who criticised the new dock (including yours truly): rejoice!

Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner. The F# language has received the company's official blessing.

Ati AMD has released a new version of its graphics drivers that fix some long overdue bugs. "Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL!"