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"As with the last Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) beta, there's improvements to the private browsing mode, the performance has increased, pages render faster, pages with JavaScript code run much faster, with the new Tracemonkey engine. And a few major improvements."

Many manufacturers have now joined the Open Handset Alliance to cooperate on developing Android; an operating system originally tailored to mobile phones, with a practical browser and a lot of applications. The obvious next move is to adapt it for netbooks as well. Computerworld.com reports that Skytone, a previously unknown Chinese manufacturer, has just announced an Android netbook with an ARM processor that is to cost around $250.

Vuurmuur 0.8 bèta 1 is released. Vuurmuur (Dutch for Firewall) is a powerful Firewall Manager built on top of the Linux Iptables.

When Oracle announced plans to acquire Sun Microsystems (and by association, MySQL), some folks reacted with concern. Others reacted with delight. But one start-up company — named Continuent — certainly deserved to celebrate.

One of the most popular open source programs (technically Free Software) in the world got a major boost this week. GCC 4.4 adds in lots of new features the biggest of which is the Graphite Framework.

Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that three of the eight patents cited in Microsoft's lawsuit against TomTom have been posted for prior art review by the Linux community. The evidence is being compiled to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that the patents are invalid.

The popular media manager Boxee has been updated for the latest Ubuntu 9.04.

Linux vendor Red Hat is ramping up for its next community Linux release as Fedora 11, codenamed "Leonidas" hits its preview milestone release today -- showing off the future of Linux technologies. "We need to continue to keep our eyes on the prize," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields said. "To me, that is making sure that Fedora is at the forefront of innovation and making sure we're delivering the future first to home consumers and to business users. We are showing them the technology that they will want to invest in for the future."

Touted as a Cloud OS, vSphere enters the cloud computing fray with a bang.

This is a proprietary article about commercial proprietary software. This is not a commercial ;)

The ProBook offers users a number of new features, including an optional Linux-based operating system pre-installed -- Novell Inc's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 -- for those seeking an alternative to the dominant Microsoft Corp Windows platform. It is HP's first-ever Linux pre-install on a standard business laptop, the company said. The PC maker does offer some netbooks with Linux. "It's pretty much a natural evolution," said Carol Hess- Nickels, HP's director of marketing for worldwide business notebooks. "We want to provide a different option ... it's probably a little time yet before we'll know exactly what the demand is, but we did think it was something worth trying."

The European Research Council will provide an additional 2.5 million euros to fund development of the Minix 3 operating system for a further five years. The funding will bankroll the workPDF of three academics and two developers. The UNIX-like operating system, which emphasises stability and reliability, is the brain child of computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum says that there are fundamental flaws in the design of all current computer systems and that radical change is needed in future designs to achieve necessary levels of stability and security. His goal is to create a system capable of repairing itself in the event of failure.

The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second released of the G:Noblin. The G:Noblin 3.0.rc01 (2.9.90) is Released.

The game has all the elements you've already encountered in other RTS titles: resource gathering, upgradable buildings, workers, warriors and an enemy to eradicate from a map of your choice. What makes Globulation 2 particularly interesting is the way you'll have to make some sort of order in the total chaos of your units.

When you have to pay people to do your open source development, even development that is in their interest to have done, you are naturally going to take a proprietary attitude toward what results. You may indeed wonder what the excitement of open source is all about - is it just taking your work for nothing? It's not, but Microsoft has never gone far enough down the open source incline to know any different and I wonder if it ever will.

The Android is about to take the leap from the cell phone to the netbook, and much like the first Android-powered cell phone, the first iteration is a bit of head-shaker.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The second and final day of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop was held in San Francisco, California on April 7. Conflicting commitments kept your editor from attending the entire event, but he was able to participate in sessions on solid-state device support, storage topology information, and more.

Zimbra, the open source email provider owned by Yahoo, plans to launch a formalized partner program in the next few weeks or so. More than 700 partners already sell or host Zimbra’s software, which is marching toward 50 million paid customers, The VAR Guy hears. But that’s no all. Here’s where Zimbra is heading next in the channel.

The first thing that strikes you about Eschalon is the music. It's soothing, calm, makes you feel comfortable while playing. And play you will. Alot. This is not the kind of game you can finish in a week then move on to another turn-based game. You'll give up your social life, you'll start arguing with your girlfriend about going to sleep late and in a few more day you'll be calculating everything in turns. I swear to God I was seeing tiles on the street by the third week.