Monthly Archive:: July 2009

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

That was my first reaction when I saw the headline. Should Hannah Montana and Linux even be allowed to be in the same sentence? Someone apparently thinks so. According to IT Knowledge Exchange, Hannah Montana Linux, obviously designed with Hannah Montana fans in mind, emerged recently on Twitter, being tweeted and re-tweeted so many times. It's been hosted at SourceForge and is currently available for download, but you had probably get your copy quickly because I'm sure the long, iron arm of Disney will find out about this project and quickly shut it down. Big companies are often touchy about their trademarks.

Mark Shutttleworh, the head honcho over at Canonical and Ubuntu, has given an interview to derStandard.at during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. He talks about GNOME 3.0, the struggle to improve the user experience on the Linux desktop, as well as various other things.

"After just over one month in market, we wanted to take the opportunity to THANK YOU for all your feedback and support of Bing and provide an update on our early results. We’ve been really pleased to hear so much positive feedback, and we appreciate all you who’ve taken the time to pass along your ideas on how we can continue to improve."

It seems like only yesterday when Haiku was nothing more than a mere promise. Oh how the times have changed, as evidenced by yesterday's news: Colin Guenther has ported the FreeBSD WiFi stack to Haiku, and managed to get a connection, browse the internet, and download a large file.

"The next version of Office moved a step closer to reality on Monday as Microsoft released an invitation-only technical preview of Office 2010. However, the release of the software will be limited. Attendees of this week's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, as well as the recent TechEd show, will gain access to the desktop versions of Office 2010." More here.

Analyst firm DisplaySearch has done a study into the notebook market, and from that study they conclude that in 2009, netbook shipments will grow to 20% of total notebook shipments. At the same time, sales of "normal" notebooks will remain flat year-over-year.

Even though news has been slow the entire week due to the fact that it's summer and people are more interested in vacation than in technology news, we still had a lot of interesting stuff this week. Google obviously captured the headlines with its Chrome OS, but we also talked about Mono, Richard Stallman, and many other things.

PureMobile sent over the Nokia E75, one of Nokia's latest business phones. Let's see how the phone stacks up compared to the rest of Symbian S60 3.x phones we have around.

"The Linux 2.6.31 kernel is still under active development until it is released later this quarter, but the merge window is closed and most of the work going on is to address bugs and other regressions within this massive code-base. Some of the key additions to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel include many graphics-related advancements (merging of the TTM memory manager, Radeon kernel mode-setting, Intel DisplayPort, etc), an ALSA driver for the Creative X-Fi, initial USB 3.0 support, file-system improvements, and much more. To see how the general system performance has been impacted by the new Linux kernel that is in development, we have a few benchmarks today."

We're having a very slow newsday today, since basically everyone and their cow is compulsively pushing out articles on a product that doesn't even exist beyond an announcement Google's Chrome OS, with none of them being particularly interesting. What is interesting is the news that Intel has been aware of Chrome OS for a while now - in fact, Intel is working with Google on this new operating system.

We already more or less confirmed that Microsoft would offer a Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade family pack, with the only missing piece being a more definitive idea on the price. Thanks to a few overeager retailers, we now know that the suggested retail price for the 3-license upgrade pack will be 149 USD, a savings of 210 USD. The family pack is currently not yet available.

The FreeBSD team has started the beta cycle for FreeBSD 8.0 by releasing this new version's first beta. It was intended as an evolutionary release with few groundbreaking features, but as time went by, more and more interesting features crept in. As always, the What's cooking for FreeBSD? page has a good overview.

Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" was released a little while ago, so before it became too old of news, I thought I'd take a whack at experimenting with it for the sake of netbookers everywhere (and for myself, naturally). As I type this on gedit after about two weeks' use, let's just say that the system on my EeePC 1000 HE is, for the most part, rather glorious-- pun intended. As a bonus, I also got Google's Chromium browser to run on it, so keep on reading to find the section on that.