The Gentoo release team has just announced the launch of their 2006.1 version, so TechGage is going to take a look at what's new. Included in the updates is an improved installer/LiveCD with Networkless mode, smarter partitioner, updated compiler and more.

Two editorials on Vista, from eWeek and Microsoft Watch. The former: "The looming choice for Windows users is either to stick with Windows XP (and older hardware) or take Windows Vista cold turkey. But Microsoft doesn't have to be so tough - Apple did it differently with the Mac OS X rollout." The latter: "How will Microsoft - and its business customers - cost-justify upgrading to Vista in the coming months/years? With Windows Vista, Microsoft needs to please at least two constituencies with very different sets of requirements."

Sun Microsystems has canceled its lower-end UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor, choosing instead to focus its priorities on alternatives including its more radical 'Niagara' chip family. Sun had planned to introduce the UltraSparc IIIi+ chips in three servers, the V215, V245 and V445, models that likely will be announced at a Sun event Sept. 13. But the company chose to scrap the chip, John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said in an interview Thursday.

"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."

I downloaded a few VMware images for use in VMware player. The mouse (a PS/2 type) did not work either in ReactOS or in Syllable, but did work in PC-BSD (all in VMware Player). Later, I downloaded the install-cd iso of ReactOS and burned it to a CD. The image is a tiny download (19MB uncompressed), so it didn't take long. I intended to install ReactOS on a laptop and desktop.

"Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. "Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community," the team said on the Mozilla development website. "Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly."

"Since we released Geekbench 2006 on July 10th, we've received over 4800 Geekbench results; over half of those results are from computers running Mac OS X. I took a look at the results, and found that we've received results for almost every computer model Apple's shipped in the past six years, from the iMac G3 to the Mac Pro. Since we love us some benchmarks here at Geek Patrol, I thought it'd be interesting to put together an overview of Mac performance over the past six years."

The 4th international GPLv3 conference is being held at Bangalore and Richard Stallman is one of the prominent delegates. This is a transcript of the interview with RMS where he is asked a couple of questions related to GPLv3 and free software in general.

A new version of Mono has been released, and it contains many significant updates and bug fixes. " The Mono Basic compiler and the Basic runtime have been removed from the Mono distribution. A new compiler that is compatible with Visual Basic 2005 and a matching runtime are now part of a separate distribution. On this particular release, we are offering the basic runtime, but the compiler is not able to run completely on Mono yet."

Google has announced the release of the source of an old OCR software called Tesseract in source. "In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing."

Hi-Mobile.net once again kindly stepped up and sent us in the next-generation Motorola Linux-based ROKR-E2 feature phone. In the tradition of the ROKR devices, the E2 is also built around the idea of music on the go, while it's the first Linux phone to have an initial retail cost smaller than $256. Read inside for our detailed review, video and pictures.

Charles Hannum, co-founder of NetBSD posted to 3 major BSD lists saying that "The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation."

This article addresses the most commonly encountered scenarios and errors while porting Fortran or any UNIX or Linux-based applications on different systems. Discover how to port Fortran-based High Performance Computing applications, such as computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling, weather modeling, and linear algebra packages, using IBM XL compilers and gnu compilers on large clusters.

"Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple's board of directors at their meeting today. Eric also sits on Google's board of directors and Princeton University's board of trustees. "Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple's board of directors," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead."