Eugenia Loli Archive

If you are sticking with XP - and plenty of us are - and you're planning to miss the upgrade to Vista read this article on the Australian PC World. It looks at big questions like: will Windows XP still be properly supported by Microsoft and, as a primary development target, by third parties? Is there something we've missed, some hidden gotcha that's going to trip us up?

The upcoming Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring release will boast the easiest ever support for synchronizing with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices in any distribution. The adventurous can already try out the support in the current 2008 Spring pre-release repositories, by following the instructions here. Mandriva has uploaded a video demonstrating how easy it is to synchronize with a Windows Mobile 6 device right out of the box with Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. Support is included for synchronizing with both KDE (KDE PIM) and GNOME (Evolution). Similarly easy synchronization is also possible with many Nokia phones and with Blackberry devices.

A few days ago the news that Pioneer, manufacturer of some of the best TV sets ever made, hit the net that they will cease manufacturing of their plasma panels. The reality is, amidst high prices and misguided customers who think that modern plasmas have limited lifetime, the LCD technology has won the market, even if inferior -- according to many expert A/V reviewers. Because of this, Pioneer will outsource their future plasma panels to Matsushita, who recently came up with a 30000:1 contrast ratio panels -- directly competing with Pioneer's thus far superiority. In a new interview with Gizmodo, Pioneer says that Kuro will continue to live, but LCD panels will also be sold by Pioneer, using Sharp's panels (Sharp LCD panels are known to have banding issues though, but there is not much they can do as Sharp almost owns Pioneer). What all this have to do with OSNews? The Kuro/Elite plasma Pioneer line runs on Linux. I bought for my household recently their 50" 5010FD model, which is indeed as good as reviews around the net and magazines say it is.

Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

The time may come where you will have to burn both a Blu-Ray disc for your family, and an HD-DVD disc for your boss who got hurried out and bought that HD-DVD player just so he can show off to all of you who waited for the format war outcome. Besides, while the HD format war is over, there are still over 1.3 million HD-DVD devices out there. I have modified some HD authoring methods found on the net in a way that 80% of the work to be done is the same for both formats, and with the rest 20% of the work only taking an additional 10 minutes for each format to be muxed and burned. Blu-Ray method is here, and the HD-DVD method is here (methods are identical up to step #7). Not only that, but you won't even need an HD burner, as these methods exercise plain DVD-R discs and they are using freeware tools.

Gizmodo has a video of Nokia's prototype touchscreen-based Symbian S60 interface. The first devices might be ready as soon as end of 2008. In the meantime, Nokia announced their highest-end S60 smartphone, the N96. It's pretty similar to the N95 that we reviewed last year, but with the addition of a DVB-H receiver for digital TV signals in Europe and Asia, 16 GB of flash storage, and the N-Gage gaming platform built-in.

The completely new theme for Ubuntu 8.04 has been deferred to the following release. The original plan was to have a fresh theme for every long-term-support release, starting with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. Now it has been decided to put off the redesign until Ubuntu 8.10. Many theme concepts can be found in the Ubuntu Artwork wiki.

"In addition to Project Indiana Developer Preview 2, Solaris users can now rejoice over the next release in the Solaris Express Developer Edition family. SXDE 1/08 is the quarterly update to Sun's next-generation Solaris Operating System that is built from the latest OpenSolaris Nevada technologies. This first SXDE release of 2008 brings a host of new features for the developer such as NetBeans 6.0 and the GlassFish v2 application server. Even for those that aren't developers, SXDE 1/08 brings new features further down on the Solaris stack such as the Sun xVM virtualization server with support for libvirt, support for the 802.11n Intel 4965 wireless chipset, and a variety of new services."

A few weeks ago PureMobile sent us in the Sony Ericsson K850i, one of the most high-end non-smartphones in the market today. The device sports a 5MP camera and triband 3G, features that are highly admirable for the price. Read on for more.

Windows Vista SP1 includes a number of enhancements over the original Vista release in the areas of application compatibility, device support, power management, security and reliability. You can see a detailed list of the changes in the Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 whitepaper. One of the improvements highlighted in the document is the increased performance of file copying for multiple scenarios, including local copies on the same disk, copying files from remote non-Windows Vista systems, and copying files between SP1 systems. How were these gains achieved? The answer is a complex one and lies in the changes to the file copy engine between Windows XP and Vista and further changes in SP1.

Geeks.com sent us in the 28" HannsG HG281DJB monitor for a review. This VGA/HDMI LCD monitor has an outstanding 1920x1200 resolution, making it good enough for both PC and TV usage.

"My first brush with mouse gestures on the Opera browser was an accident, but the ability to quickly move backward or forward in the browser history, open new windows, close tabs, and more without using the menus or moving the mouse toward the navigation toolbar won me over immediately. Nowadays, this feature is available in Firefox and Konqueror too, and you can even configure mouse gestures for GNOME and KDE desktop environments." More here.

"A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial commenting on how horrible browsing the Web is on most mobile devices. Amazingly, there's already a solution for this problem, at least for some users. It's called Skyfire, and it is far and away the best web browser for Windows Mobile I've ever seen." More at Brighthand.

The KDE desktop environment is going cross-platform with support for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to porting the core KDE libraries and applications, developers are also porting popular KDE-based software like the Amarok audio player and the KOffice productivity suite.