Laptop with a Mission Widens Its Audience

  Submitted by Rahul Hardware 49 Comments
"In November, you'll be able to buy a new laptop that's spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It's fanless, it's silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration. And this laptop will cost USD 200."
Read More

OpenSUSE 10.3 Released

  Submitted by te_lanus SuSE, openSUSE 124 Comments
OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released today. "This version contains new beautiful green artwork, KDE 3.5.7 and parts of KDE 4, SUSE-polished GNOME 2.20, a GTK version of YaST, a new 1-click-install technology, MP3 support out-of-the-box, new and redesigned YaST modules, compiz and compiz fusion advances, virtualisation improvements, OpenOffice.org 2.3, Xfce 4.4.1, and much more!"
Read More

Fedora 8 Test 3 Released

  Submitted by Rahul Fedora Core 17 Comments
Fedora 8 Test 3 has been released. "Fedora 8 Test 3 is here! This is the last test release before the development freeze and a great time to test all those packages that you know and love. Test 3 is for beta users. This is the time when we must have full community participation. Without this participation both hardware and software functionality suffers."
Read More

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, Part 1

  Submitted by diegocg General Development 25 Comments
"Ulrich Drepper recently approached us asking if we would be interested in publishing a lengthy document he had written on how memory and software interact. Memory usage is often the determining factor in how software performs, but good information on how to avoid memory bottlenecks is hard to find. This article is the first in a serie of articles (the original has over 100 pages) that will get published on LWN weekly. Once the entire series is out, Ulrich will be releasing the full text."
Read More

Palm Admits New OS 18 Months Away

Wireless 34 Comments
Palm CEO Ed Colligan has confirmed the new Palm OS won't be finished until the end of 2008. Originally scheduled for release by the end of this year, the operating system's launch date has continued to be pushed back, despite the added attention of the engineers freed up by the scrapping of Foleo last month. The new OS will allow Palm to release a whole range of products, including something similar to the ill-fated Foleo. Development is, apparently, progressing 'as well as possibly could be expected'.
Read More

Trolltech Ports Qt to Windows CE

  Submitted by anonymous Qt 11 Comments
Trolltech has unleashed a Windows CE version of Qt, its cross-platform application development framework. Qt/WinCE, made available today as a downloadable technology preview, is scheduled to see its final release 'late in Q1 2008', the company said. Qt is an application development framework aimed at enabling developers to compile binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes from a single code base. Qt's API (application programming interface) comprises some 400 C++ class libraries, Trolltech says.
Read More

MS To Release Source Code to .NET Framework Libraries

  Submitted by gonzo .NET 121 Comments
"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML, and WPF. We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License."
Read More

A Review of Online Photo Services

Graphics 12 Comments
"Some time ago, I switched to Google's Picasa Web Albums online photo management software. Although it's simple to use, Picasa Web has been missing too many features for too long, and after Google locked me out of their software for a few days due to a bug of some sort, and their iPhoto plug-in stopped working, I decided it was time to start checking out the alternatives. I have played with a few services, and judged them based on a number of criteria. I've tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results."
Read More

AROS Gets New Installer

  Submitted by novaburst Amiga & AROS 10 Comments
AROS developer Neil Cafferkey has released the first beta version of AROS' new installer/partitioner tool, and The AROS Show takes a look at it. "So there are some bugs, but compared to how it used to be to try and install AROS natively this was a breeze! It is awesome to finally have a native version running. I have been running the hosted version of AROS for years now."
Read More

Review: Linux Mint Celena

  Submitted by abhaysahai Ubuntu 24 Comments
A review of Linux Mint Celena. "I think Celena is a breath of fresh air. It is the best GNOME distribution I have ever used. The artwork is simply amazing, I think PCLinuxOS must take a hint or two from Celena. Strong emphasis is given to integrating the theme with applications. I can see the hard work Mint developers have put behind custom applications like Mint Menu, MintUpload, MintAssitant and Mint Control Center. They have done a commendable job and made our lives easy. They have not followed the trend and have included KDE applications, wherever they felt the need."
Read More

Amiga Inc., an Open Letter to the Amiga Community

Amiga & AROS 100 Comments
Bill McEwen of Amiga, Inc. writes in a public letter: "Over the last several months and in fact couple of years, Amiga has continued our software and business development and generally kept quiet. This path of quietness was chosen so that we communicated only when there was a development that culminated in a product that could be purchased. In recent weeks, our being quiet has been interpreted as weakness or an open invitation to attempt harming our business relationships and opportunities with partners and customers."
Read More

Reviews: PC-BSD 1.4

  Submitted by Flatland_Spider PC-BSD 42 Comments
Two reviews of PC-BSD 1.4. The first one concludes: " If you are a new user, there is everything here for you; equally so if you are an experienced techie you can get into the FreeBSD ports tree and compile to your hearts content. Something for everyone here, no matter their level of knowledge or expertise." The second one: "PC-BSD is an extremely user friendly and secure BSD, based on the rock solid FreeBSD 6.2 stable core, with a easy to use package management system, a friendly installation GUI and great hardware recognition. It is easy enough for average users and interesting enough for advanced users."
Read More

WindowBlinds 6 Released

  Submitted by draginol Graphics 44 Comments
Developer Stardock has released WindowBlinds 6 today. It is a utility that allows users to customize the look and feel of Windows by applying "skins" to change the user interface of the OS. WindowBlinds 6 can make Windows XP look virtually identical to Windows Vista (including blurred glass). Thanks to hardware acceleration, a typical XP system dressed to look like Vista will perform faster than Vista still. WindowBlinds 6 also adds full skinning support to Windows Vista, making it the first and only program to support full Windows Vista customization. CNet takes a quick look at this new release.
Read More

RISC OS and Java; New Source Release Close

  Submitted by teigetje RISC OS 9 Comments
A flurry of RISC OS news today all crammed up into one item. There is a story on Java and RISC OS, a semi-announcement to a new source code release of RISC OS 5 by ROOL, and the Faraday medal for the man who designed the BBC Micro and ARM architecture - Professor Steve Furber. In addition, there is a piece on last week's news about the think tank Globalisation Institute's advice. The head of the organisation (who is a former RISC OS magazine journalist) seems to think unbundling RISC OS from the Iyonix is a possibility. Interestingly, the reports excludes Macintosh computers from unbundling. Update: The Intel Mac VirtualRiscPC beta has gone on sale.
Read More

A Day on the Surface: a Hands-on Look at Microsoft’s New Platform

Microsoft 62 Comments
Ars has taken a look at Microsoft's Surface. They conclude: "Although I already knew approximately what to expect when I was invited to the Microsoft campus to play with Surface, the experience of actually touching and using the unit exceeded my expectations. For a device still very much in development, it was remarkably smooth to use. Some people will look at Surface and claim that it does nothing that hasn't been tried before: computers with touch screens have been around for years and have already found niches in ATMs, ticket ordering machines, and restaurant point-of-sale devices. This view largely misses the point of the product. Like most projects, Surface takes existing technology and presents it in a new way. It isn't simply a touch screen, but more of a touch-grab-move-slide-resize-and-place-objects-on-top-of-screen, and this opens up new possibilities that weren't there before."
Read More

Inside Windows Vista Service Pack 1

  Submitted by flanque Windows 69 Comments
"After several months of silence, Microsoft last month finally revealed some concrete information about Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which I translated into my Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Revealed showcase. If you haven't read that article, please do so now: This preview, which is based off of more recent beta code and an in-depth discussion with various people working on SP1 at Microsoft, builds off of that article, but provides more information and detail. Windows Vista SP1, finally, is a known quantity."
Read More

‘RISC OS on Linux’ Releases Alpha Live CD

  Submitted by zizban RISC OS 11 Comments
The RISC OS On Linux project has released the first alpha-quality version of their live CD. "A first attempt at a Live CD has been uploaded here (169MB download, a bzipped iso), the space has been kindly donated by Ned Abell. This CD should boot into a desktop with Tux on the right and disc icons for /home/rolf and /tmp, on the left of the Iconbar. In /home/rolf are three apps that should work immediately, !Terminal, !Viewer and !Vim. !NetSurf needs a little help to run, as does Inkscape, which has no application directory yet." ROLF is a user space layer above the Linux Kernel, providing a superset of the RISC OS look and feel on Linux.
Read More