Freespire 2.0 Alpha2 (1.1.73) is now available for download. "Merged Upstart boot scripts, improved boot time noticed; updated ATI Drivers to current version; enhanced Nvidia support; added knetworkmanager; and much more."

A shadowy organization called Larrabee Development Group has set a most ambitious goal: unseating AMD/ATI and Nvidia as the largest producers of high-end graphics chips. And it might just succeed. It may seem unfathomable for an unknown such as Larrabee to knock off two of the most powerful processor companies. That is until you realize that Larrabee is little more than a weak disguise for Intel. The chip giant has, in fact, ramped up its graphics efforts in recent weeks to create a product code-named Larrabee theoretically capable of besting AMD and Nvidia's best kit.

The holiday season hasn't gone exactly as Microsoft had hoped and Ballmer sits down with CNET News.com to discuss life after Vista, battling the iPod, and the rising importance of mobile devices.

The third installment in the Leopard Technology Series for Developers provides an overview of Leopard's application technologies: Time Machine, iChat Theater, the Instant Message Framework, the Calendar Store, the Ruby and Python Cocoa bridges, the new Scripting Bridge, Core Animation and 64-bit GUIs.

GNOME 2.17.3 has been released: "This is our third development release on the road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. You all know what you have to do now. Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away.

Pegasos.org has (one of) the (only) first reviews of the Efika, the system on a chip thing from Genesi (or bPlan? I lost track). "What can I say? It's a great piece of hardware. bPlan lives up to our expectations yet again. They even exceeded them about its media capabilities. For thin client or tiny desktop usage it will work just fine as long as you choose a low footprint window manager. As a network workgroup server I can't see any difficulties with this hardware. Configure it and you're set."

"Recently, I had a chance to sit down with a few folks from Apple who gave me a guided tour of Apple's upcoming server operating system, which is slated for release sometime in the spring of 2007. Mac OS X Server 10.5, or Leopard, will be the seventh release of the server operating system since 2000 and the second version to run natively on Intel processors."

Michael Loeffler has announced the release of OpenSUSE 10.2 to the ftp servers. "As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power managment and last but not least our improved package management." Update: Screenshots.

The Haiku network stack currently under heavy development is reportedly working with the Vision IRC client. Haiku developer Axel Dörfler reports that the network stack can now successfully run the Vision IRC client (screenshot on the Haiku website). At this stage, the network still needs to be configured manually, but this can be easily done by editing a couple of files as explained here. Haiku can use BeOS network drivers, so if your NIC is not supported, you can try finding a driver on BeBits.com.

AMD has started to ship chips made on the 65-nanometer process. These chips will consume about 30 percent less energy than the same ones produced on the 90-nanometer process when running at the same speed. In the first chips shipped on this process, virtually all of the benefit comes in reduced power consumption, said Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development at AMD.

"Google's PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims, 'the heart of our software is PageRank'. As we'll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages."

Our friends over at Hi-Mobile sent us in for a review two items this last week: the velerable LG Chocolate KG800 and an add-on camera flash accessory for Sony Ericsson fast-port phones. Check in for more.

El Reg reviews the Dell Inspiron 6400, and concludes: "With a base price - for the T7200 Core 2 Duo - of GPB 789 inc. VAT and shipping, the Inspiron 6400 is an excellent and affordable route into the Core 2 Duo world. It has all the credentials to be a dependable multimedia companion with its great screen, comprehensive connectivity and decent processing power. But be aware it's neither exciting to look at nor to game on."