"People who think SD was 'perfect' were simply ignoring reality," Linus Torvalds began in a succinct explanation as to why he chose the CFS scheduler written by Ingo Molnar instead of the SD scheduler written by Con Kolivas. He continued, "sadly, that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I never the notion of merging SD for very long at all: Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than trying to work with them." He went on to stress the importance of working toward a solution that is good for everyone, "that was where the SD patches fell down. They didn't have a maintainer that I could trust to actually care about any other issues than his own." Update: OSNews user superstoned pointed us to the other side of the story.

SkyOS has received an update to the Viewer application (system file browser). Many changes have been implemented, including a tabbed interface, universal drag-and-drop, and many others. Head on over to the SkyOS website to see a video of the new Viewer features in action. Thanks to the recently implemented Profiler, an interesting system bottleneck has been identified and fixed in SkyOS. This has allowed for increased performance across many functions within SkyOS.

Oracle's TechCast crew interviewed Chris Mason on Btrfs. A kind-of transcript is available here. Btrfs is a new filesystem for Linux developed by Oracle. It features: "extent based file storage (264 max file size); space efficient packing of small files; space efficient indexed directories; dynamic inode allocation; writable snapshots; subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots); object level mirroring and striping; checksums on data and metadata (multiple algorithms available); strong integration with device mapper for multiple device support; online filesystem check; very fast offline filesystem check; efficient incremental backup and FS mirroring."

Rafael J. Wysocki (a suspend maintainer) has written an article speaking about the current status of suspend and hibernation support in Linux, its design, know problems, and future development. "Below is a document describing the current state of development of the suspend and hibernation infrastructure: how it works, what known problems there are in it and what the future development plans are (at least as far as I am concerned)."

"On her weblog, Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a "new, separate organizational setting" as the Mozilla Foundation continues to focus ever more closely on Firefox. While the Mozilla Foundation supports a number of projects, its taxable subsidiary the Mozilla Corp. is responsible for only Firefox and Thunderbird. However, it has become increasingly clear that Firefox is the priority. The resources allocated to Firefox dwarf those allocated to Thunderbird and recent projects such as the initiative to improve Mozilla support exclude Thunderbird."

"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

"Yesterday the OpenBSD Foundation announced its inception as a legal entity in charge of donations of money and equipment for the OpenBSD operating system and its associated projects. Today we have an interview with Ken Westerback, one of the foundation's founding members."

"This article briefly goes over six mini systems that you don't have to build yourself. They are an ideal platform for a project or for a silent system for simple tasks like checking your email. The intention was to find systems that are small, Linux-ready, and customizable, but price was factored in as well."

No fewer than five major announcements in the development field are being issued by Microsoft this afternoon, the timing of which is by no means coincidental: On the top of the list, Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 - which is quickly losing touch with its old code-name 'Orcas' - will be made generally available for download by this Friday, along with Beta 2 of .NET Framework 3.5.

Sun's latest Niagara and Rock details have reached El Reg, and they confirm that the hardware maker is up to some very ambitious stuff. First off, Sun looks set for the imminent release of its first Niagara II-based servers - the T5120 and T5220 systems. Customers will see 1U and 2U boxes, respectively, each with one of the 'Niagara II' or (more formally) UltraSPARC T2 chips. It looks like the eight-core, 64-thread chip will arrive at 1.5GHz.

"Dell knows it won't happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211n support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers."

"The news of Con Kolivas, a Linux kernel developer, quitting that role, along with an interview in which he explains why, could and should make loud noises around the Free Software community which is often touting GNU/Linux as the best operating system one could use, and not just because of freedom you have with it. In the interview he says certain things which should cause tectonic shifts in the mindset that we have all been having. Why didn't we realize these things before? As you can see, the article intrigued me quite a bit, and got me thinking about a better way forward for the Free Software OS. I'll go through some of the basic points that he makes and lay out one possible solution and its implications. However, take this article as just a discussion starter." My take: I have been advocating splitting the Linux kernel up (desktop, server, embedded) for years now.

After years of being relegated to server racks and the desktops of ultrageeks, Linux is finally making some headway as a viable alternative to Windows on the consumer desktop. That's the optimistic message delivered by a newly energized contingent of Linux proponents. By employing the same consumer-friendly marketing techniques practiced by Microsoft, and by taking advantage of the rising popularity of web-based applications, Linux vendors are getting ready for what they say will be a wave of consumer interest in the free operating system.

PureMobile sent us in for a review one of Nokia's newest and most powerful handsets: the E90. The E90 is a Communicator-class device and very popular among businessmen, but also among system administrators too (one of our friends, sysadmin at Google, is using Nokia's qwerty/wifi devices specifically for SSH access). Read on for our review of the impressive E90.