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LXer Feature: 23-Nov-2009

Verizon Wireless sold 250,000 units of its Droid by Motorola phone, according to eWEEK, which has also given the Droid a rave review. Meanwhile, the rumor of a Google-branded Android phone refuses to die, Palm's CEO trash-talks the Droid, and tomorrow Google will unveil its Linux-based Chrome OS, say various reports.

Mobile specialist Palm strengthens its team by hiring Matthew Tippett, the Linux graphic driver developer since 2003 at ATI, to be in charge of Linux kernel development.

According to Harald Welte, the source code for the Palm Pre GSM model, currently being sold in Europe is now available from the opensource.palm.com site. Earlier this week, Welte pointed out that the source code for the new model of the Palm Pre was not available to the public, as it should be to comply with the terms of the GPL. An email to Welte from Palm has now confirmed the availability of the code for WebOS 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

From this week, Palm's Pre smartphone is being made available in the UK and Germany. Telefonica subsidiary O2 is selling the device both on and off contract. The Pre runs Linux and, as well as a version of the 2.6 kernel spruced up by Palm with a raft of patches, includes all the usual suspects, such as BusyBox and the Gstreamer framework for playing audio and video with an ALSA back end.

In Part I we tested out Android on VirtualBox. Now we'll try running Palm's WebOS as a Virtual Appliance.

Today, with the greatest of pleasure, I am ready to share with you the birth of our third product -- WikiReader. Three simple buttons put three million Wikipedia articles in the palm of your hand. Accessible immediately, anytime, anywhere without requiring an Internet connection. No strings attached. With WikiReader you'll be prepared for those unexpected moments when curiosity strikes. And once you have it, you'll realize how often you ask yourself questions during the day.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2009

Palm has announced that it will simplify its developer program for the Linux-based Web OS behind its new Palm Pre smartphone. The device maker is thereby responding to hefty criticism about its App Catalog.

In December, Palm will open the official webOS developer program to support the creation of applications for the Pre and other upcoming smartphones. The company also launched its App Catalog of applications available for download.

Your move Apple, oh wait - no! You've got to hand it to Palm, it's made itself one tenacious mole for Apple to whack. The company's long-running fight to keep the Palm Pre compatible with iTunes entered yet another round of assured futility over the weekend. This Saturday, Palm released version 1.2.1 of WebOS, which "resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with the latest version of iTunes (9.0.1)". It also fixes Exchange 2007 compatibility and some security issues, but that's not really the point of the rollout.

The Linux-based Palm Pre is a sleek smartphone full of features-- but is it feature-ful enough? Gerry Blackwell gives a detailed report on this new entry in the smartphone marketplace.

Forget the netbook or the net-top PC. How about a tiny net-server that fits in the palm of your hand and sells for $600? A Japanese vendor is touting a lilliputian Linux Web server that weighs 8 ounces and consumes just 8 watts. At 5.2-inches-by-3.1-inches in size -- and 1.2 inches thick -- the OpenBlockS 600 is about the size of two cigarette packs side-by-side. For non-smokers, that's two iPhones stacked on top of each other.

Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform. Ajaxian.com co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith have accepted new positions helming Palm's developer relations team. The duo announced their change of venue on their blogs this Friday.

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2009

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

You think you own your stuff that you paid your own money for? The Sony PS3, the XBox, the Palm Pre? Think again---these titans of tech are not selling products...

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers. Akademy-es started on Friday 10th with a talk by Cenatic, a governmental foundation with the aim to promote and improve knowledge of free software in public administrations, companies, universities, etc. For that, the foundation is creating and developing different courses both online and at site based on free software. They want to create a specific course for the KDE desktop, so they asked for collaboration from KDE España, the Spanish organisation to support and promote the KDE project in Spain. The president of Cenatic showed his interest in the project and this collaboration will be starting in the coming months.

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition. When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold--they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason--open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Open source project Amarok, in an open letter to Palm, has invited the company to work with them. The reason: the Apple iTunes 8.2.1 update guarantees that the Linux-based Palm Pre smartphone can no longer use the iTunes music management software.