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Younger, prettier sister still not allowed out in public Owners of the latest Nokia phones can now update to Symbian Anna, assuming their operators permit it, but having caught a glimpse of her younger sister they might not be impressed.…Free Whitepaper: Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers

'Let's all pick one kernel and stick with it for a bit' Plans are afoot to establish a long-term support system for new versions of the Linux kernel to help slide the penguin into more smartphones.…

Standardized way to look at open source license compliance is released.

A lot of people hate Canonical's Unity desktop, but a lot of people also hate the current state of the GNOME 3.0 Shell too. For those that are still fond of the GNOME 2.x environment, there is a fork of GNOME2 that's been little talked about up to this point. This fork is called the Mate Desktop Environment...

Connoisseurs of fine wine, gourmets, lovers etc etc A massive survey of smartphone users purports to show that iPhone users are sushi-eating leaders, while anyone touting an Android handset prefers steak and following others.…

In SMB/CIFS parlance, a domain is similar to a workgroup: It's a collection of related computers, typically existing on a single local network. A domain, however, features a special computer known as a domain controller that manages logons for all the servers in the domain. It also provides a few additional services. Samba can function as a domain controller, but you need to set several Samba options for it to do so.

While the BFS scheduler is getting ready to celebrate its second birthday, in just three weeks AMD's open-source Radeon graphics driver strategy for Linux will be turning four years old. It was on the 6th of September in 2007 that I exclusively broke the news to the world on AMD's open-source strategy, which has ended up being a game-changer in the Linux world. AMD continues to support open-source hardware enablement on their latest graphics processors and recently even hired more developers to work on the code and documentation. How far have they come though in four years?

The $40 Lion convenience fee You can now purchase Apple's Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, on a flash drive for $69 – and, yes, it's the exact same operating system that's available at the online Mac Store for $29.99.…

Over the past few days there's been an active discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list surrounding the memory copy (the memcpy function to copy blocks of memory) performance within the kernel. In particular, an application vendor claims to have boosted their application (a video recorder) performance by 12% when implementing an "optimized" memory copy function that takes advantage of SSE3...

One of the projects being worked on via X.Org / Mesa with the 2011 Google Summer of Code is morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) support for Gallium3D / Mesa. Back in July there was MLAA code ready to be tested, but now the student developer behind this code, Lauri Kasanen, has published patches that add the post-processing infrastructure to Gallium3D. The work may soon be ready to be merged to master...

ViewSonic says it's now shipping a Intel Atom-powered tablet that lets users run Android apps without leaving Windows 7. The ViewPad 10Pro has a 1.5GHz Atom Z670 processor, 16GB or 32GB of SSD (solid state disk) storage, a 10.1-inch touchscreen with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, and up to eight hours of battery life, according to the company....

Google has agreed to pay Motorola Mobility an unprecedented $2.5 billion in reverse break-up fees if its $12.5 billion acquisition fails to go through, says a report. Meanwhile, observers are debating the value of Motorola's patents vs. the baggage of its ongoing litigation, weighing the impact on other Android OEMs like Samsung and HTC, and glimpsing an opportunity for Microsoft....

Tease out the logic of snarled, deeply nested if/else constructs with the Flatten Conditionals refactoring

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

Benjamin Franzke, the open-source developer that for a number of months has been contributed to Mesa / Wayland, has continued with his work. His latest achievement is landing some new EGL code in Mesa, which will benefit Wayland too...

Outside of the direct X.Org / Mesa / Linux work being done this year as part of Google's Summer of Code, one of the more interesting projects is work by a student developer with GIMP who is bringing OpenCL support to the graphics program's GEGL image library...

Intel's Eric Anholt and Ian Romanick have each published a large number of patches to the Mesa development list. Eric dropped a series of 37 patches that implement his MapTextureImage work for OpenGL while Ian Romanick has nine patches today for his Mesa IR cleaning...

Hot on the heels of news that it will be acquired by Google, Motorola Mobility announced a 1GHz, Android 2.3-ready & plus& version of a rugged phone it first released last year. The Defy+ will go head to head with the similarly 3.7-inch Samsung Xcover announced last week in Germany, since both handsets are said to offer resistance to water, dust, and scratches....

Google agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, a move to protect Android from the rampant patent infringement litigation and give Google a hardware counterpart to Apple. The company remains committed to keeping Android & as an open platform and a vibrant open source community,& stated Google SVP Andy Rubin.

Are you a Droid handset maker? You were Google has made its largest-ever acquisition, and biggest corporate gamble, by splashing out $12.5bn for Motorola's phone division, Motorola Mobility. The deal puts Google into the hardware business in a serious way – and into direct competition with licensees of its Android operating system, who woke up this morning thinking they were Google's business partners.…