ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is the de facto standard to replace APM. As such, it's becoming increasingly important for full support on newer machines, as legacy support for APM is waning and ACPI-only machines become more common. Recently there was a flurry of commits related to ACPI, which got the attention of some people running -current with ACPI enabled kernels. In this interview we get a peek at what's been happening with ACPI and where it's headed.

"The leading question most of you are likely wondering is why there hasn't been anymore ATI GPU specifications released in over two months. Well, as we have shared in earlier articles, AMD has had limited staff devoted to sanitizing the documentation and getting it cleared by their legal department for release. However, that is about to change. AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that they are in the process of hiring new people to do all of the planned documentation and support work that will help the open-source community. Within a couple weeks, these new AMD employees will begin this crusade."

EDE 1.2 is a new version of EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) which brings mostly bugfixes. Also it comes with full German and French localization. The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small desktop environment, built to be simple, to have a familiar look and feel and to be reasonably fast.

"This in-depth, hands-on article introduces Android, Google's Linux/Java mobile phone SDK. After a tour of Android's tools, documentation, and code samples, it suggests a path for further exploration and concludes with a simple applet showing the power and simplicity of the Android environment."

"Apple on Thursday released Mac OS X 10.5.1 Update, its first maintenance and security update to the new Leopard operating system which is recommended for all users. Mac OS X 10.5.1 is available as a 110MB download and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac, Apple says."

"iXsystems announced today a distribution agreement with Fry's Electronics whereby all Fry's stores nationwide will carry PC-BSD Version 1.4, Da Vinci Edition. The agreement marks the first time that the PC-BSD operating system is made available for purchase at Fry's Electronics. PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world. It is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system."

"'What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away'. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000). But despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call 'The Great Moore's Law Compensator'. In fact, the hard numbers below represent what is perhaps the first ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption."

"Lately we've been talking about a lot of great new features in the latest development trunk of WebKit - features like web fonts, client-side database storage, CSS transforms and CSS animation. These features will likely make it to an official release someday. But I'd like to take a step back and talk about some older features, namely all the great stuff in our recent stable release. Apple recently released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, including Safari 3. The latest Safari is also included in Mac OS X 10.4.11, the latest update to Tiger. A corresponding version is available as the latest Safari for Windows Beta, including the new features and lots of stability and usability improvements. Apple's site can tell you a lot about the new end-user features of Safari 3. But a lot of the goodness is on the inside, in the WebKit engine that powers Safari. Here's a list of ten of the most exciting engine enhancements since the Safari 2 version of WebKit, with lots of details and demos. These features are all included in the WebKit that comes with Safari 3 - you don't have to download nightlies or anything else to get them."

"The management of video hardware has long been an area of weakness in the Linux system (and free operating systems in general). The X Window System tends to get a lot of the blame for problems in this area, but the truth of the matter is that the problems are more widespread and the kernel has never made it easy for X to do this job properly. Graphics processors have gotten steadily more powerful, to the point that, by some measures, they are the fastest processor on most systems, but kernel support for the programming of GPUs has lagged behind. A lot of work is being done to remedy this situation, though, and an important component of that work has just been put forward for inclusion into the mainline kernel."

The 10.4.11 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Tiger and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac. This update also includes Safari 3, the latest version of Apple's web browser. Intel and PPC versions.

Access, owners of the Palm OS now known as Garnet, have released a version of that platform for the Nokia Internet tablets N810, N800 and N770, providing access to the thousands of Palm applications still out there. The release is a free download, and prominently labelled 'beta', but can be installed alongside the pre-installed Linux-based OS and run when needed. Users are invited to report applications which work, and any that don't, but Access is promoting the software as being able to run 30000+ Palm OS apps.

Microsoft has released the first public beta of Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, a server operating system for the high-performance computing market. The company has also announced the Parallel Computing Initiative, a programme aimed at creating a set of common development tools across multi-core desktops and clusters. The beta is available for download here and the final version is scheduled for launch in the second half of 2008.

Perhaps huffing at your computer might get you somewhere if research at the Georgia Institute of Technology comes to fruition. Shwetak Patel and Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech have published a paper that describes how to use a computer microphone to determine where on a screen a person is blowing. The technique, which they call BLUI for Blowable and Localized User Interaction, can distinguish between the different sounds air makes depending on where the breath is directed. Note: This won't be part of Grow. Just so you know.

The opensource Windows-compatible operating system ReactOS released a status update today. The highlights are the ability to run OpenOffice.org 2 applications (screenshots), kernel bugfixes, a restructured win32 subsystem, and plans about the next release (December 2007).