Archive

It seems Lenovo is being selective in which markets get Linux on its new range of IdeaPad netbooks. "People in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the UK, will be offered the company's new IdeaPad S10 with either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS, but Australian and US computer buyers will only be offered Windows XP according to Lenovo."

"In a little over a month since version 0.3.5, we are announcing the release ReactOS 0.3.6. This release along with the rest of the 0.3.x series is still considered alpha quality software, so do not set your expectations too high. ReactOS 0.3.6 is the product of the current development focus: bugfixes, compatibility, and stability."

"AMD's plan to integrate a CPU and GPU on a single chip, codenamed Fusion, has been a hot topic since the CPU manufacturer first announced it planned to purchase ATI. AMD hasn't had much to say about Fusion lately, beyond confirming that the project exists and is still in development, but new rumors have surfaced over what form Fusion might take when it surfaces in 2009."

OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 is a free, open source alternative to Microsoft's Office application suite. It is fantastic if you need basic office applications such as a word processor or spreadsheet at no cost. However, large organisations and power users may be disappointed by its lack of features and support. Read the full review here.

Do we need even more Linux distros? That's a contentious topic, but if you'd like to make your own flavour of Fedora, see this guide to using Revisor, Fedora's re-build application. With some intermediate Linux knowledge (and a spare few hours), you can customise Fedora DVDs with your own software selection and updates.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat with Guido van Rossum, best known as the author of Python, and currently working for Google, CA where he gets to spend at least half his time developing the language.

"Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."

Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed on the PS3. Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging installation steps eliminated. This article introduces the basic configuration knobs and widgets specific to the PS3 running Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that gets improved performance.

"Once upon a time there was a printer who lived in the woods. He was a lonely printer, because nobody knew how to configure him. He hoped and hoped for someone to play with." That is an excerpt from the Readme file for gnome-cups-manager. There are more snippets from different programs that might pique your interest.

Today, support for metadata journaling has been added to NetBSD's implementation of the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), eliminating the need for lengthy file system checks after a crash or power failure. Support for converting existing file systems to use the new journaling capabilities is provided as well. See the official announcement for all the details.

For the first time, you can hit your computer and get a meaningful response! Knock some sense into your computer with a Hard Drive Active Protection System-aware kernel, an accelerometer-enabled laptop, and a Perl script. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. Tap the display lid once to move your mp3 player to the next track. The possibilities are endless.

JavaScript creator and current CTO of Mozilla Corporation Brendan Eich provides a detailed history of JavaScript, including some of the more interesting programs written with JavaScript, right up to how JavaScript has been essential to the Ajax or Web 2.0 revolution. Eich started work on JS in 1995 and says he's been surprised by how popular it has been: "I was resigned for a long time to JS being unpopular due to those annoying popups, but more: due to its unconventional combination of functional and prototype-based object programming traditions." And with multicore/massively-parallel computers upon us, Eich talks about the future of JavaScript: "JS has its role to play in addressing the multicore world, starting with relatively simple extensions such as Google Gears' worker pools -- "shared nothing" background threads with which browser JS communicates by sending and receiving messages."

SplashTop is an instant-on Linux environment created by DeviceVM. SplashTop does not intend to provide a full computing environment, but it satisfies a home user's basic needs such as email, VOIP, IM, etc. Asus is the primary partner of DeviceVM and SplashTop started to get bundled with Asus motherboards and Asus notebooks. Now the good folks over at the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop to run from a USB stick on non-Asus motherboards, run custom applications and launch a terminal inside the Linux environment.

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 'thornicrofti'. This beta includes the newest release of KDE 4, KDE 4.1 final, GNOME 2.23.5, Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.26 final. The new beta also switches to using splashy (rather than bootsplash) for boot and shutdown graphics, and adds synchronization support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. As always, Mandriva reminds you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, they strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.