DistroStuff

There are lots of interesting desktop environments for X, other than the big two three GNOME, KDE, and Xfce. One of those is Etoile, a highly modular and leightweight environment based on GNUstep. Etoile is entirely project and document based, which means that you focus on your documents, and not on applications. Earlier this month - and we missed it, my apologies - the project released version 0.4.0.

Mon, 1 Dec 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.

Sun, 30 Nov 2008

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).

Sat, 29 Nov 2008

El Reg has a write-up on the amazingly beautiful and hopelessly impractical Honeywell Kitchen Computer. We've covered this bizarre piece of computing history before on OSNews, in my list of the ten most beautiful computers. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, read on for more details. Trust me, you want to know.

Sat, 29 Nov 2008

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.

Fri, 28 Nov 2008

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.

Fri, 28 Nov 2008

While most people detest Flash for its rather resource intensive operation, and its role in creating really annoying websites where the back and forward buttons don't work, the tool does have an important place on the web. Most internet video players, such as Youtube's, run using Flash, and as such, it's kind of important to be able to run it. eComStation has just taken the first few steps to being able to run the official Flash player - Mensys has received permission from Adobe to distribute the Windows version with eCS, which with a bit of work will work on eCS using ODIN. This is a first step but the legal block is gone now, Mensys' Roderick Klein writes, The writing of the code to run the Flash DLL is the next big step!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008

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.

Thu, 27 Nov 2008

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.

Thu, 27 Nov 2008

Linux distributions come and go by the dozens almost every day, and most of them live and die an unknown, irrelevant life, mostly because no, changing three icons and adding the suffix '-nix' to any random word doesn't make it different from Ubuntu. Anyway, sometimes, a new distribution is started that brings something new to the table. One such distribution is Glendix, which aims to combine the Linux kernel with the userpsace tools from Plan 9. Distribution is probably not the right term for this project.

Wed, 26 Nov 2008