Genesi has posted a whole batch of screenshots of the upcoming MorphOS 2.0 release on their weblog. "MorphOS 2.0 brings not only a new OS release, but a host of applications developed by a motivated group of Developers all over the world. These applications have been tested and work with the EFIKA."

Mandriva has sent out a press release to highlight NEPOMUK, the semantic framework (think metadata) being developed by Mandriva and several partners and will be integrated in the upcoming KDE 4. It includes a link to a video demonstrating NEPOMUK integration into Dolphin, the KDE 4 file manager. In addition, "aKademy 2007 has kicked off! The first weekend hosted our user conference, which brought many talks about various topics, ranging from very technical to more practically oriented, which were spread over two tracks. The tracks were interweaved with keynote talks. Read on for the report of the aKademy 2007 keynotes."

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in the Sony Ericsson P990i for our monthly phone review. This popular smartphone was released last summer, but a new firmware of Symbian's UIQ 3.0 was released just 15 days ago and this is with what we mainly tested. The P990i sells for just $340 these days, fully unlocked, and it has a barrage of high-end features.

Both the stable and unstable GNOME branches have been updated today; both GNOME 2.18.3 ("This is the final release in a series of point releases for the stable 2.18 branch.") as well as GNOME 2.19.4 ("This is our fourth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007.") have been released.

The ReactOS project has released a new newsletter. "The past few weeks have seen quite a lot of activity. At least six major blocker bugs were dealt with, ranging from the network issue to various bugs in the command line console." On top of that: "Some people aren't aware that ReactOS was one of several projects that received hardware to test on from One Laptop Per Child. Aleksey has been playing around with it, slowly coaxing ReactOS to boot."

"The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place. For the bravehearts who want to try KDE 4.0 Alpha2, please refer to the alpha 2 info page to find ways to have a peek at the current status yourself."

"Sometimes, a service pack comes along that really makes a big difference. Take NT. Before SP3, it was garbage; afterwards Microsoft had its first server operating system that was worth anything. XP before SP2 was so-so, but after SP2, it became Microsoft's best desktop operating system ever (sorry, Vista). And, now, with its SP1 for SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), Novell has given an already excellent business desktop a real kick in the pants."

Apple posted on their developer website guidelines with instructions on optimising web-applications for the iPhone. "Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security."

You might have noticed some user icons next to some comments today, this is because we enabled Gravatar support. Gravatar acts as a centralized identity pool where blogs, news sites (and recently Revver.com) can use their service and offer a universal icon for each unique email address. As long as you register on Gravatar with the same email address registered on OSNews, your personalized icon will be shown on OSNews (and on all other sites that support Gravatar) automatically. This is a testing period for Gravatar here at OSNews, and there are no guarantees whatsoever that the v4 version of OSNews will use that icon system or its own. It all depends on the kind of quality, stability and responsiveness we get from Gravatar's servers. So, upload your own icon at Gravatar.com and test away! Ability to turn off user icons will be built-in on v4.

Though we rely on them as a mainstay of modern computing, hard drives are really a mixed bag: part storage blessing and part performance albatross. The ongoing digital media revolution could never have gotten off the ground without plentiful, cheap storage, but even so, modern operating systems and programs are typically designed to rely on the hard drive as little as possible. Hard drive access times haven't kept pace with processor clockspeed increases, so computers increasingly employ sophisticated caching mechanisms (e.g. Intel's Turbo Memory tech) to minimize the need for a hard drive-based transfer. Now, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands believe they've taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system.

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday. In the latest kernel release, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago, the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said.

Palm admitted that a Linux-based version of its operating system will not be available until 2008, while Symbian said "Enterprises will not adopt mobile Linux because it is too fragmented and "completely unfeasible". "You would have to have a rock-solid business case to do that," he added.

"When we launched Windows Vista in January 2007, we identified Windows Ultimate Extras as a unique series of add-ons that would be available to Windows Vista Ultimate customers. To date, we have released four sets of Extras - Windows Hold'Em, 16 Language Packs for the Windows multi-language user interface, Secure Online Key Backup, and Windows BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool. We want to let our Windows Vista Ultimate customers know that we are actively working to deliver the remaining Extras that we identified in January."

"It wasn't too long ago that I was sitting down to write a review of the ThinkPad X60s which, at the time, was a pretty exciting product. The X60s, and it's slightly heavier counterpart, the X60, are still both very relevant notebooks, but they have since been replaced with newer models. The two new systems, the X61 and the X61s, are very similar to the models that came before them, but take advantage of some of the same technological upgrades that were brought to other new models, like the T61 and R61."