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When you spend a lot of time looking at different Linux distributions you get used to reading the phrase, "... is a general purpose operating system with a focus toward..." Sometimes it's a focus toward ease of use, sometimes it's a focus toward improved package management, other times it's security. There are a lot of general purpose Linux distributions out there, which is good, but one thing I love about Linux is its ability to fill a niche. For instance, it would be difficult for me to get through a work week without having tools such as GParted Live, for partition management; Knoppix, for hardware detection; and Clonezilla, for saving and restoring disk images. This past week I had a chance to talk with Steven Shiau, one of the developers behind Clonezilla.

A serious dispute is brewing in the world of ebooks, pitting publishers and Apple against giant online retailer Amazon. A significant part of the appeal of ebooks is that they are (or should be) much cheaper than printed editions. In the publishing world, royalties paid to the author typically represent just 10% of the retail price. Both publishers and retailers take their cut. Printing is usually 30%, and then there are warehousing and shipping costs.

Version 0.4.2 of the little-known microkernel-based multiserver operating system HelenOS has been released. See their official release notes to find out what other bleeding-edge features besides an experimental and highly modular networking stack this release brings.

With the new version 10.02, the Genode OS Framework significantly extends its supported base platforms by the addition of two modern microkernels, namely Codezero and NOVA. In contrast to most operating systems that are tied to one respective kernel, Genode enables the development of specialized component-based operating systems that are portable across 6 different kernels including the whole family of open-source L4 kernels. Each kernel has different strengths, which increasingly become available at the framework's API level. For example, the new version 10.02 enables applications to benefit from the real-time scheduling as provided by the OKL4 and L4ka::Pistachio kernels.

Any doubts regarding Oracle's stewardship of Java were dispelled yesterday, as Ellison and company have made it clear that they are very interested in making Java an even stronger alternative to .Net, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. "We have the money to invest in Java, because Java is a very profitable business for us already," said Ellison, whose plan for integrating Sun technology is ambitious, serving an even more ambitious goal: to create a soup-to-nuts tech juggernaut akin to IBM in the 1960s. Java will remain a key component of this push, with a new Java runtime, greater modularity, better support for non-Java languages, improved performance, and multicore-optimized garbage collection in the works, McAllister writes. Also revealed are plans to unify the Java SE and Java ME programming models and APIs and to enable JVM to run natively on hypervisors, allowing developers to run multiple Java instances on a single virtualized server.