There is a general dissent growing at the popularity that Ubuntu enjoys among the Linux users. Considering that Ubuntu has maintained the number one slot at distrowatch.com for a whole year now, the feeling is a bit expected. This article tries to explore what is it that makes Ubuntu so popular among its users and how other linux distributions can take a leaf from ubuntu to effectively leverage their position in the popularity chart.

Apple announced that they are using the LLVM optimizer and JIT within their Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard' OpenGL stack. LLVM will help in delivering better performance of the GL stack.

Were you to walk around LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, for almost every person you'd see sitting, you'd see a laptop in front of them. And, if you're a snoopy person, like me, you'd also see that about half of those laptops were running Linux. That doesn't sound like that much? Think again. Even a year ago, Linux-powered laptops were a rarity. Find out why Linux journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks the Linux desktop is poised for success.

Transitive, a start-up specialising in software that translates software for one chip so it can run on another, plans to release software this quarter so programs for Sun Microsystems' Sparc chips can be used on Intel Xeon chips.

There are some new clues that Mac OS X Leopard will drop G3 support. Its ReadMe file does not mention it, its web pages do not mention it and Apple even made a deliberate change to their 64bit webpage to remove the G3 mention recently. My take: This was not unexpected. For each new version Apple required one more additional feature in order to work (in the past it has been USB, then firewire etc) and now it's G4+. I bet that the client version of OSX after Leopard would require a supported 3D QuartzExtreme-compliant graphics card in order to boot up.

Telephia released some very interesting research numbers on mobile web browsing in USA (both on feature phones and smartphones). Openwave (free simulator) leads with 27% and together with Motorola they make over 50% of the US mobile browsing market. Apparently, Americans mostly care about Mail, Weather and Sports when it comes to mobile browsing. Opera Mini is pretty popular lately, but it seems that Telephia only counted the pre-installed browsers in their survey. When we are talking worldwide numbers and only about smartphones though, Nokia's S60/80/90 phones are beating everyone else with over 64% of the smartphone worldwide market share (please note though that smartphones make up only about ~10% of the overall phone market but their numbers are growing fast).

DirectX10 is not just another version of DirectX. This version has been re-built from the ground up to change the way applications think about material management and load balancing between the CPU and GPU. D3D10, as also DirectX10 is called, takes advantage of the improved communication between the CPU and GPU and efficiently manages the data transfer between them. Screenshots included.

"GNOME 2.16 Beta has been in Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) for the past few days . It is functioning extremely well. I’ve seen some occasional crashes with Epiphany and Nautilus but I hope that it will be fixed soon. Other than that, there are lots of new things in GNOME 2.16", read the pictorial review here.

OpenSolaris isn't a true open-source project, but rather a "facade," because Sun Microsystems doesn't share control of it with outsiders, executives from rival IBM say.

Check inside for our photo review of this year's LinuxWorld. In short, Novell rocked the show, while Red Hat and Sun were missing completely! We think that there were fewer people visiting this year... However, we got to see the new PalmSource ALP OS, we chatted with Motorola about their Linux SDK's state of affairs and more!

The new "Linux-enabled" Lenovo laptop launched this week at LinuxWorld will not actually come "pre-loaded" with Novell SUSE Linux, a high-ranking Lenovo official said today, contradicting some industry reports stating otherwise.

If you are a security conscious or have to spend some time on less reputable web sites a great option is to use either Linux or OS X. Because the high majority of security threats which we are exposed to are designed to compromise Windows, by moving to a non-Windows operating system those threats no longer matter. This is not true all the time, especially for spam and phishing, but the possibility of a virus or spyware is greatly decreased. The problem is, of course, that people are reluctant to move to a new operating system, even a free one. A solution to this is virtualization, or basically running one of these non-Windows operating systems from within Windows.

Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 2 version "Odin" has been released: It comes with GNOME 2.16 beta 2, Kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8, with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2, i965 support, and new kernel factorization: normal, enterprise and legacy). KDE 3.5.4, more applications migrated to XDG menus, new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva Theme (only included in GNOME for now) and a new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn).

Windows Mobile 5.0 is an operating system for the mobile devices. It is based on Windows CE version 5.0 and is a 32-bit operating system. Just like any other operating system, it performs many services like process management, file management, memory management and also power management. In this article, OSWeekly explores the memory architecture of Windows Mobile 5.0.