Monthly Archive:: November 2008

Howsoftwareisbuilt.com posted up an interview with Adam Williamson, Mandriva community manager and developer, covering some information on Mandriva development and also more general discussion on the distribution industry. I'd like to take the opportunity here to wish Adam, OSNews reader, the best of luck in finding a new job. Adam told us he'll be leaving Mandriva at the end of December. Please note that the above interview was conducted before this news was out.

Even though there are a lot of happy people using Apple's iPhone very happily, there's also a group of people who are not so happy, most likely because of Apple's rather strict policies regarding applications and developers. While most of these people would just jailbreak the thing, some take it a step further - by installing another operating system. Yes, Linux now runs on the iPhone (1st gen/2nd gen, and the 1st gen iPod Touch).

Even though FreeBSD 7.x is already out and updated, the FreeBSD team keeps working on the FreeBSD 6.x branch, now designated the legacy branch. They released FreeBSD 6.4 today, with lots of new features, fixes, and updates. They are expecting FreeBSD 6.4 to be the last release in the 6.x branch.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

"Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web."

The KDE team has released the first beta of KDE 4.2, slated for release coming January. Quite a lot of new features have been added, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This release also makes a lot of strides to feature parity with KDE 3.x, by adding those small little features that KDE 3.x users are barely aware of, but which were missed in KDE 4.0/4.1, such as taskbar grouping, multiple rows in the taskbar, panel auto-hiding, a traditional icon desktop through 'full-screen' foderview, and so on.

openSUSE is adopting a new license which is based on the the license used by Fedora. The new license will be used for the release of openSUSE 11.1 . "Users no longer need to agree to the license. This is not an EULA, it's a license notice," says Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager. This is an effort make openSUSE easy to re-distribute and make modifications. To learn more about what is new in openSUSE 11.1 check out this review of the 11.1 beta4 release.

Intel joined Taiwanese mobile phone service provider Chunghwa Telecom to launch Gigabyte Technology's M528 mobile Internet device on Monday in Taipei. The device, which runs a Linux OS, sports a 4.8-inch touchscreen, QWERTY keypad and 4GB solid-state drive, has an 800Mhz Intel Atom Z500 microprocessor inside. Gigabyte's specs page for the device is here.

Apple isn't exactly known for catering to the lower end of the market, but so far, it doesn't really seem to have slowed them down much. They are selling more Macs than ever, and especially in the ever-growing notebook market, Apple is very successful. However, with people all worried about possible economic downturn, and with the success of cheap, small laptops (netbooks), people are starting to speculate if Apple will enter the netbook market.

As most of you will know, Microsoft is currently involved in a class-action lawsuit about the company possibly misleading its customers about which computers could run Windows Vista. The story goes that when Microsoft delayed Windows Vista they allowed computers makers to label existing stock as "Vista Capable", even though these computers could only run the basic, Aero Glass-less version of Vista. The most recent development is that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer will be questioned under oath.

Fedora 10 is now available, sporting a new graphical boot-up sequence, OpenOffice.org 3, many improvements to sound support via PulseAudio, and other updates. See the release notes here, and Linux Format has a detailed look at F10's features and changes.

A common problem for web developers - but some users as well - is that of websites that work in one browser, but not in another. Some websites are (still) 'optimised' for Internet Explorer, but with the popularity of other browsers reaching ever greater heights, the problem becomes apparent to more users. A new browser from Japan, called Lunascape5, tries to address this issue by allowing you to seamlessly switch between three different browsing engines (IE's Trident, Mozilla's Gecko, and Safari/Chrome's WebKit).

"The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April. The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements. In addition to the ongoing long-term usability enhancement efforts, Canonical and the Ubuntu development community are focusing on several specific technical goals for 9.04, including improving performance and boot time and integrating web services more tightly with the desktop."

The private computer museum of Max Burnet has every bit of computing nostalgia imaginable, ranging from the first UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, a string of old Apple's including the Apple Lisa, a Spectrum Sinclair (doh!) ZX81, Bill Gates' personal favorite the MITS Altair 8800, a DEC VT100 terminal, and a range of IBM mainframe consoles from the 1960s and 1970s. If you have never seen what this old stuff looks like, this slideshow offers a snapshot of the past. And if you thought PCs became fashionable with the Apple iMac, then you haven't seen the lime green or powder blue consoles of some of DEC's machines from the 1970s.