Daniel Phillips has announced the prototype design of a new linux filesystem (implementation has only begun). The most interesting thing seems to be a different way of implementing versioning: "Unlike the currently fashionable recursive copy on write designs with one tree root per version, Tux3 stores all its versioning information in the leaves of btrees using the versioned pointer algorithm. This method promises a significant shrinkage of metadata for heavily versioned filesystems as compared to ZFS and Btrfs".

People have been saying for some time that operating systems will eventually just become windows to the "cloud" (essentially browsers) and everyone will just use web applications, but now a company called CherryPal is really doing it. Plus, the CherryPal uses only 2 Watts of power.

As someone who uses Windows Vista practically daily, I've always wondered where all the negativity in the media comes from. Sure, Vista isn't perfect (as if any operating system is), but I just don't see where all the complaints are coming from. It runs just fine on my old (6 years) machine, all my software and hardware is compatible, and it's stable as a rock. Microsoft has been wondering the same thing, and after a little test, they may have found out why people seem to dislike Vista so much.

Matthew Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD 2.0. Also HAMMER filesystem is released with the new DragonFly. Read the full Release Notes.

The How Software is Built blog secured an interview with Helio Chissini de Castro, one of the KDE developers employed by Linux distributor Mandriva. Helio talks about Mandriva, about KDE 4, and about the state of open source software in Brazil, where he is based.

Mandriva and Precedent Technologies (PTech) are pleased to announce a new partnership, working together on the release in September in the United States of a new low-cost desktop - the TechSurfer - with Intel Atom CPUs and Mandriva Linux preinstalled. TechSurfer is a web-centric computing platform that is designed for customers who mostly surf the web; download music; and utilize VOIP services, such as Skype. The TechSurfer platform is also suitable for light desktop applications. TechSurfer is powered by the Intel Atom processor. The Atom processor was designed especially for web-centric computers. TechSurfer prices starts at $399.99 with Mandriva Linux pre-installed: Microsoft Windows will cost an extra $100. The system will come with a three-year manufacturer's warranty. Find out more in the press release. Editor's note: Looks like Mandriva is taking full-advantage of the Low-cost hardware arena. First the Intel's ClassmatePC then the GDium and now PTech.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has an interesting blog entry about how Sun Microsystems will start introducing Nand Flash with ZFS as an enterprise storage solution by the end of this year. With the price of Flash memory already plummeting this could be an economical alternative to the expensive NAS solutions.

Mark Shuttleworth today urged development of Linux models to rival what Apple has done on the desktop and mobile devices. Certainly on the desktop experience, we need to shoot beyond the Mac, but I think it's equally relevant [in] the mobile space, Shuttleworth said, outlining the challenge as figuring out how to deliver a 'crisp and clean' experience, without sacrificing the community process. Key to this will be services-based mechanisms for creating revenue for free software that go beyond advertising, Shuttleworth said, adding that cadence in free software releases spurs innovation, and that a regular release schedule, as well as meaningful ties to Windows, will be essential to fulfilling the vision.

There are no less than five apps to turn my iPhone into a flashlight, yet I can't turn it into a 3G-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Why? Because the SDK has more restrictions than Guantanamo-devs can't integrate with the OS and have to steer way, way clear of copyright and trademark issues-so the most innovative, game-changing apps might not ever make it to your squeaky clean iPhone." An editorial by Gizmodo. Many kinds of apps (from multi-IM apps running on the background, to copy/paste) require the level of system integration that either is not possible via the existing official API, or that Apple artificially limits via lawyers.

The GNU/Linux operating system is blessed to have sound partition management tools like GParted which are very easy to use. However, when it comes to the management of 'virtual partitions' known as volumes, things are quite different. There is Linux Volume Management, or LVM for short, however it can only really be used from the command line.

Mac Antivirus developer Intego might have stumbled across an OS X specific virus being offered for auction that targets a previously unknown ZIP archive vulnerability. From Intego's posting, it appears that an enterprising auctioneer seems determined to make sure that his name is one that is not forgotten when it comes to Apple security, claiming that his exploit is a poisoned ZIP archive that will "KO the system and Hard Drive" when unarchived.

NSA takes its Flask architecture to the open-source community to offer an inexpensive route to trusted systems. "What it really helps out with is something called zero-day exploits," said Daniel Walsh, a principal software engineer at Red Hat and leader of the company's SELinux team. "If you have a bug in your software that allows a machine to be taken over, SELinux [provides] another layer of controls to make sure that application only does what is was designed to do. SELinux is your last line of defense."

"I've read past reviews by other reviewers describing Vector Linux as "better Slackware than Slackware" or "what Slackware should be" and I always felt that was a bit of a stretch. With this release it isn't. You get all the reliability and stability of Slackware, better performance than vanilla Slack (at least on my hardware) and the features and most of the conveniences users of distributions touted as user friendly have come to expect."

David Williams over at iTWire has done a comparison of Windows vs Linux. It is performed by doing functionally identical tasks in both the OSes. This comparison is not a fair one by any measure. The laptops running the Windows and Linux were different in the hardware config and the software used for the tests were comparable but clearly different (MS Office vs OpenOffice; IE vs Firefox 3).

Linux loadable kernel modules are on of the most important innovations in the Linux kernel. They provide a kernel that is both scalable and dynamic. Discover loadable kernels, the ideas behind them, and learn how these independent objects dynamically become part of the Linux kernel.

"The Japanese love those things!" That's what I've heard a lot of people say when I've talked to them about my latest obsession, the Coco 6035Re Bidet toilet seat. As part of OSNews' ongoing project, "Building The Wired Home," I wanted to try to see what the march of technological progress has brought to the bathroom, so we installed a bidet seat in OSNews' House of the Future. It turns out, I'm pretty impressed. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

In this article, learn how to be a more productive Linux systems administrator. These 10 essential tricks will lead you on your way to being one powerful Linux systems administrator. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

Andrew Ziem takes a close look at Microsoft Word performance in a benchmark with 4500 measurements in 5 categories covering 6 versions and 12 years of releases to determine whether Word has become slower or faster over the years.

Microsoft rarely gives out sales numbers, but Vista is another story. Due to bad press, the company apparently wants to remind everyone that Vista is still selling well. The software giant recently announced that it would be putting resources into launching a marketing campaign that will fight back against Apple's ads and incorrect Vista assumptions and will instead tell the "real Vista story."

Linus Torvalds is remarkable, not only for being the technical genius who wrote Linux, but for then being able to inspire and lead an enormous team of people to devote their free time to work on the operating system and bring it to maturity. We sent Richard Morris off to interview Linus, and find out more.

We covered earlier about Apple suing Psystar the creator of Open Computer. Now we have more details of the complaint . Apple's complaint is now available online (registration required).

Linux and UNIX-like operating systems in general are regarded as being more secure for the common user, in contrast with operating systems that have "Windows" as part of their name. Why is that? When entering a dispute on the subject with a Windows user, the most common argument he tries to feed me is that Windows is more widespread, and therefore, more vulnerable. Apart from amusing myths like "Linux is only for servers" or "does it have a word processor?", the issue of Linux desktop security is still seriously misunderstood.

Peter Wayner takes a deep look at four cloud computing services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus, each of which simplifies your workload but forces you into a 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine you may not like. Although the services do let you pull CPU cycles from thin air when you need it, they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. Overall, Wayner finds the 'clouds' rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.'

Geeks.com sent us in a pretty cool computer gadget: a vintage-looking internet radio device, the iMedia100. I have a soft spot about classic-looking devices that have modern features, so this was an interesting experiment for me. Read on for more. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Walter Bright talks about D and his desire to improve on systems programming languages. Many successful concepts from other languages like JavaScript, PERL, Ruby, Lisp, Ada, Erlang, Python, etc., have had a significant influence on D, he says. He adds: "D 1.0 was pretty straightforward stuff, being features that were adapted from well-trod experience in other languages. D 2.0 has ventured into unexplored territory that doesn't have a track record in other languages. Since these capabilities are unproven, they generate some healthy skepticism. Only time will tell."

Software engineer Satoshi Nakajima, the lead architect of Microsoft's Windows 95, picked up a Mac for the first time two years ago. He was so impressed, he says he'll never again touch a PC again. Satoshi loves Apple products so much, he started a company in April, Big Canvas, to develop for Apple's iPhone platform full-time. "We have chosen iPhone as the platform to release our first product (for) several reasons," explains his company's website. "We love Apple products... You need love to be creative."

Scott Finley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ported the Linux files system Ext2 to Microsoft's new research operating system Singularity. One of the most striking observations was the author's comments on Singularity's robustness. "Perhaps the best testament to Singularity's dependability was the extremely good system stability during the development of ext2... If the ext2 process terminated as the result of a failure, it only resulted in open channels closing. Other processes could (and did) recover gracefully." Finley's report details all his findings quite extensively.

The convoluted case of SCO v. Novell dealt a heady blow to the SCO Group Wednesday, with United States District Judge Dale Kimball ordering the company to pay $2.5 million to Novell for improperly claiming, and collecting royalties for, the Unix operating system.

Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about these small laptops (sorry, I don't participate in the hype of calling them netbooks or whatever) - the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Just like Xandros with the Eee, Mandriva is providing the operating system for the upcoming GDium system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10", 1024x600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The device is powered by the (for us) exotic Chinese Loongson processor, which is based on a MIPS design. Mandriva is working together closely with the GDium team to provide an optimal software experience. Available from September 2008, with a price expected to be round and about EUR 400.

"Linux is a powerful and versatile operating system that can be utilized to hack just about any electronic hardware device. To prove it, I have here a list of popular gadgets that are already known to run Linux."

At the heart of every networking device is an operating system that enables traffic flow. In the case of networking vendor Juniper, that operating system for the past ten years has been JUNOS, a network operating system with its roots in the open source FreeBSD operating system. Juniper has updated JUNOS every 90 days since 1998.

Linux security may seem daunting, but there are a host of best practices to simplify the maze. Recently, Steve Grubb of Red Hat Inc. outlined some important security principles, including minimizing admin access, the increasing sophistication of SELinux and the importance of auditing systems.

Although Mobile Safari is more than adequate at rendering normal Web pages, many Web developers created versions of applications aimed at the iPhone. Here in Part 3 learn what to do when the user reaches the end of the list structure and your application actually needs to display content. Part 1 discusses how to set up your server to detect and serve alternate content to Mobile Safari, and Part 2 explores actual content you might create for an iPhone or iPod touch.

Neil McAllister deliberates the question of public disclosure of open source vulnerabilities, contrasting Ounce Labs' announcement of security vulnerabilities in the Spring Framework for Java with Linus Torvalds recent missive on the Linux kernel development mailing list. Sure, vulnerability bulletins raise awareness of real danger, but they also distract from other productive activities. To find the right balance between keeping users informed and maintaining an orderly and holistic development process, McAllister suggests we take a biologist's view of how species deal with risk perception.

A window manager in GNU/Linux is a piece of software which controls placement and appearance of windows in a graphical user interface in X. All the WMs listed here can easily be obtained through your distribution's respective repositories.

InfoWorld's Curtis Franklin reviews the four leading contenders to supplant Microsoft Office in business and finds that, while Google Docs is not ready to take on the full mantle, OpenOffice and Zoho provide viable alternatives should IT endeavor to wean business off Office.

Today was one of those days when I wished Java would support multiple return values. I had to develop a rather CPU-intensive algorithm which would compute a solution for a knotty constraint problem. Having a solution alone is sometimes not enough and you also need to add some parameters which measure the quality of the computed outcome. Most of these accompanying parameters can or have to be computed within the algorithm itself, but Java allows you to return only one value either an object or a primitive type. People working with Lisp, MATLAB or Perl, just to mention a few, don't have a problem like this at all. Functions supporting multiple return values is already implemented at the language level and frameworks make heavy use of this. But as a Java programmer you are pretty much stuck here and need to consider some other means to come out of this situation. In the following I would like to give some hints on that topic. Hopefully they are of help for anyone having the same problem every now and then.

Microsoft's Windows beat operating system rivals Mac OS X and Ubuntu in a three-month test of update server uptime, according to Pingdom, a Swedish uptime monitoring company.

This preview of the upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 release highlights aspects that should be of interest to systems and storage administrators who have to deal with large storage environments. ZFS is a big component that is referred to often, but there are new storage services and capabilities in addition to ZFS that might be overlooked and are quite compelling. Editor's Note: We ran an article yesterday that covered the surface level (eye-candy) improvements of the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris.

The CEO of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is stepping down. Hector Ruiz had been just the second person to lead AMD after company founder Jerry Sanders. He'll be replaced by the chip maker's No. 2 executive, Dirk Meyer.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Luca Cardelli is a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.

The ext3undel utility can recover accidently removed data on ext3 filesystems. Users can recover a specific file by name, or they can restore all files marked as deleted. ext3undel is a wrapper for other recovery programs such as Photorec, Foremost and SleuthKit.

While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho.

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

In an interesting and exciting turn of events, Haiku was able to secure a space at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 by negotiating with LinuxWorld organizers (IDG) and ReactOS who will be sharing the exhibit space with Haiku this year. Average LinuxWorld attendance is more than 10,000 people, and represents a large amount of commercial and media interest. This should provide excellent exposure and opportunities for both projects alike.

Gustav Duarte has written a three part article about the computer boot up process. The series starts with the Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map of an Intel computer and then he covers the processes that take place from the BIOS initialization to the boot loader. The final part is the coverage of the Kernel Boot Process.

This preview of the upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 release highlights aspects that should be of interest to systems and storage administrators who have to deal with large storage environments. ZFS is a big component that is referred to often, but there are new storage services and capabilities in addition to ZFS that might be overlooked and are quite compelling. Editor's Note: We ran an article yesterday that covered the surface level (eye-candy) improvements of the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris.

After a few delays and tons of rumors, Intel's fifth generation notebook platform has arrived. Centrino 2, previously known as Montevina, comes with with it a line of new Core 2 Duo processors, upgraded graphics and Wi-Fi, and DDR3 RAM. One of the first notebooks to be released with Centrino 2 is Lenovo's newest ThinkPad, the X200. This is the update to the X61 which not only had all the new Centrino gear, but moves to a widescreen display.

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy has been using a converted Windows Server 2008 as his primary OS since hitting a wall using Vista as a Visual Studio development platform four weeks ago. According to Kennedy, the guerrilla 'Workstation' 2008 OS has turned his Dell notebook into a well-oiled machine that never gets sluggish and rarely needs to reboot. Those interested in making the switch should check out win2008workstation.com, a clearinghouse for 'Workstation' 2008 tips and techniques. Kennedy also offers a link to a Windows 2008 Workstation Converter utility for quick conversion.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, recently did an interview with derStandard in which he discussed issues with Ubuntu's latest release, innovation, the future of GNOME, and other subjects. Perhaps the most interesting thing he said is that Linux does not yet deliver "a good enough user experience." Of course, you could say that of any operating system. Editor's Note: QT-based Gnome was also an interesting point-of-view.