LXer Weekly Roundup for 12-Jul-2009

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2009

Microsoft to issue "Community Promise" for C# and CLI: First the big news: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise patent licensing to both C# and the CLI. The announcement was done by Peter Galli at Microsoft over at Port25. A few months ago we approached Bob Muglia and Brian Goldfarb (@bgoldy) at Microsoft with a request to clarify the licensing situation for the ECMA standards covering C# and the CLI (also ISO standards, for the ISO loving among you). Previously Microsoft had detailed the patent license plans and today they have delivered on those plans. Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct. In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

Microsoft issues patent promise, dispels Mono legal concerns: This could have significant implications for Mono, an open source implementation of .NET that is developed by Novell. Mono is being adopted by a growing number of developers and has been used to build some popular desktop Linux applications, including the Banshee music player, the Tomboy note application, the F-Spot image manager, and the GNOME-Do launcher. Several of those applications are included by default in widely-used Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.

Netbooks Are Little Notebooks, and Linux on Netbooks Rocks: Most computer users don't want an inflexible little Internet machine that runs only a Web browser, especially not for three or four hundred dollars or more. Something like that should come free in a box of cereal. Most want all the functionality of a full-sized notebook, only smaller, lighter, and with significantly longer battery life.

Introducing the Google Chrome [Linux - ed.] OS : It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google could kneecap Microsoft with Chrome OS: It's the announcement we've all be waiting for, one that Google at one point in the past said it wouldn't make. But it did: Google will release its own PC operating system, Chrome OS, to leverage the company's Web-based Google Apps and bypass Microsoft's Windows operating system entirely on not just netbooks but every PC platform from the smallest ARM ultraportable to a full Intel-based desktop.

What ChromeOS is (NOT): As Devin Coldewey pointed out on a recent CrunchGear post, many people seems to be getting over-exited about the new Google ChromeOS. I think that many bloggers are making more of ChromeOS than what it actually is. Maybe it is time to sum up what Google's new OS is and what it is not!

Review: Linux Mint 7 Is Glorious: 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.