KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers. Read more here osnews.com | 7/29/10 6:44 PM

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been harvested and published on the net by a security consultant. The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID. BBC News osnews.com | 7/29/10 6:43 PM

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has distributed invites to an exclusive media event in New York, where it's expected to show off the first device to run the brand new BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 6. CIO.com offers predictions for how the event will unfold. osnews.com | 7/29/10 6:42 PM

The GNOME foundation and the LiMo group announced a partnership to help push Linux forward in the consumer field. The only notice that anyone has seem to have taken is mockery. So why can someone announce some dedication to promoting open source software in the mobile space and generate no enthusiasm in the mobile space? Android. osnews.com | 7/29/10 6:15 PM

GNOME developer Dave Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. This "Census" is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. This project's aims were to answer three questions in particular: What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like? osnews.com | 7/29/10 5:59 PM

During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release. osnews.com | 7/29/10 5:47 PM

The latest panic in desktop Linux lad was that Dell would no longer be selling Ubuntu pre-installed on laptops and netbooks. Alas, for those who love drama, it wasn't true. In fact, Dell is expanding its Ubuntu desktop Linux offerings. osnews.com | 7/29/10 5:44 PM

An interesting article at Ars Technica takes a look at some compelling data (the longer-than-normal processor update cycles in Apple's personal computer lineup) and speculates that Apple's enthusiasm for its partnership with Intel might be cooling. Like Apple's soured relationship with once-BFF Google, this may be the result of Intel's increasing activities in the mobile computing space. osnews.com | 7/27/10 8:44 AM

Fraunhofer's FIT . . . has recently appeared on the YouTubes, where we must say it looks pretty darn good. Not only does it not require special gloves or markers, this thing also works in real time and can support multiple users (and multiple fingers). osnews.com | 7/27/10 8:38 AM

Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here's how to do it. osnews.com | 7/27/10 8:35 AM

Real-Time apps have been popularized by social-notification tools like Twitter and Friendfeed. With a Real-Time web app you can get website information as soon as it's published. Learn techniques that allow you to create responsive, continually updated web applications that conserve server resources while providing a slick user experience using jQuery, XMPP and PHP. osnews.com | 7/27/10 8:34 AM

CentOS, with almost 30% of all Linux servers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived distro is #1 according to Web Technology Surveys. osnews.com | 7/27/10 8:31 AM

So, there I am enjoying a nice Gilmore Girls episode after a long day's work, and Engadget's iPhone application brings the good news: the US Library of Congress has added a DMCA exemption for jailbreaking or rooting mobile phones! This is a major blow to Apple, who actively tried to keep jailbreaking a criminal offence, and a major win for everyone who believes that the phone you buy is actually yours, and not the manufacturer's. osnews.com | 7/26/10 6:48 PM

CIO.com highlights a number of new multimedia features in RIM's new BlackBerry OS, which used to mostly business-focused. osnews.com | 7/26/10 2:13 AM

While browsing through dealextreme.com, a popular online shop for electronic products here in Asia, I was really surprised to see several iPad-like tablet computers that are sold for as low as $99 (US). Another surprising thing is that they are all powered by Android. osnews.com | 7/26/10 2:10 AM

For years, researchers have touted graphene as the magic material for the next generation of high-speed electronics, but so far it hasn't proved practical. Now a new way of making nanoscale strips of carbon--the building block of graphene--could kick-start a shift toward superfast graphene components. osnews.com | 7/26/10 2:08 AM

Humane PC and its Humane Reader child are open source hardware projects with some seriously low-cost internal components. At volume the PC could retail for as low as $20, and that's with 2GB of microSD storage, USB / PS/2 plugs, and video out. The PC is primarily designed to output low-res, black and white text to a TV, making it a low cost reader for developing countries, and the Humane Reader project pre-loads the device with thousands of Wikipedia articles (much in the vein of the OpenMoko WikiReader). osnews.com | 7/26/10 2:07 AM

Wind River Linux Secure, a secure embedded Linux, is in evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to be certified to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+), conforming to the General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile. Upon certification completion to Common Criteria EAL4+, Wind River Linux Secure is expected to be the first commercial embedded Linux operating system accepted by NIAP. osnews.com | 7/26/10 2:02 AM

Today's commercial-grade programming languages - C++ and Java, in particular - are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon. osnews.com | 7/26/10 1:57 AM

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled a touchscreen tablet that he claims they will be able to produce for just $35. The device is being aimed at students, and seems to be taking the One Laptop Per Child idea and running with it. "Despite the price, users will get a touch-screen, a PDF reader and a webcam for video conferencing. There has been no confirmation of its specifications but reports suggest 2GB of memory, Wi-Fi and Ethernet and power consumption at just 2W. Naturally, the device will run Linux." osnews.com | 7/26/10 1:44 AM

Blogger Kevin Bowling takes a look at the never-ending stream of benchmarks from Phoronix, with various Linux distros pitted against each other and even different operating systems, and he wonders, are they bullshit? . Case in point, this Debian vs FreeBSD benchmark that was submitted to OSNews yesterday. osnews.com | 7/26/10 1:36 AM

Just after 3 weeks of the binary compatible vp8 decoder release, the FFMpeg team still impressing us but this time with a new benchmark of their own vp8 decoder. The new ffvp8 decoder written independently using pre-existent FFMpeg code-base is now the fastest vp8 decoder with margins going more than 30% faster than Google's official codec specially on 64bit machines. osnews.com | 7/26/10 1:30 AM

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, announced the GENIVI Alliance (founded by BMW, GM, and others) has chosen MeeGo as the basis of its next reference release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). Also see this blog post. osnews.com | 7/26/10 1:28 AM

"As a long-time fan of GeoWorks Ensemble (now Breadbox Ensemble), a DOS based graphical user interface and office suite popular in the 80s, I've run it under a variety of operating systems and emulators over the years. You see, Ensemble requires an underlying operating system to provide a DOS compatible file system, not unlike early versions of Windows that required DOS. [...] With the release of eComStation 2.0 I thought I'd revisit the challenge of getting Breadbox Ensemble running under OS/2 again [...] but to add a further twist, since I didn't want to do this on a dedicated machine, I chose to see if I could get things running under VirtualBox." Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 7/25/10 11:36 AM

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5. Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. Version 8.1 of PC-BSD is available for download from mirrors, as well as via torrent. osnews.com | 7/21/10 6:49 PM

Early takes on the Technical Preview of Windows Phone 7 are more thumbs up than screw up. But is it too late to sway users? osnews.com | 7/21/10 4:14 PM

The Eee Pad, announced at Computex recently, was to be Asus' first foray into the tablet market, running Windows 7 and coming in both a 10 inch and 12 inch versions. The latests rumors, according to German site NetbookNews.de, state the Asus may be dropping Windows 7 in favor of a custom version of Android. With HP dropping their Windows tablet project some months back, and now Asus backing out of their plans, is there any hope for Windows to take hold in the tablet market? osnews.com | 7/21/10 4:13 PM

Yesterday, Jolicloud released the much anticipated final version of Jolicloud OS 1.0, a web-based operating system built with netbooks in mind. The new release has been rebuilt from the ground up using Google's Chromium OS codebase in place of Mozilla's Prism backend. We got a chance to test the latest version of Jolicloud on Dell Mini 9 netbook, and were thoroughly impressed with what the OS has to offer. Here's what we found. osnews.com | 7/21/10 4:12 PM

Japanese printer company Brother has invented a battery that can be recharged by shaking it. It's intended for devices like remote controls that use very little power and would normally require infrequent battery charges, so unfortunately you couldn't use it to power a car that could drive forever on a bumpy road. osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:09 PM

Long time fans of openSUSE Linux and its commercial big brother, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, will find a lot to like in this latest update. osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:07 PM

The free open-source disk encryption software Truecrypt reached version 7.0. Among the new features are hardware-accelerated AES, support for devices that use sector sizes other than 512 bytes, ability to configure a volume to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer, favorites organizer, and more. Downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available here. osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:06 PM

Dell has this "highly sophisticated website" telling us "WHICH OPERATING SYSTEM SHOULD I CHOOSE ?" Ubuntu or Windows? Read the site and understand why it is a "highly sophisticated website" osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:06 PM

We've been expecting HP to make an official announcement on its rumored webOS tablet since their acquisition of Palm, but have come up with nothing yet. Crave is reporting that we may at least finally have a name for the device after the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted HP a trademark last week. The name? The HP PalmPad. While not entirely original, it's a nice nod to the company which is making the device possible and is at least more descriptive than say the Streak or the (what the hell is a) JooJoo. osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:05 PM

Microsoft confirmed the existence of a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows. The new zero-day vulnerability is easily exploitable via USB storage devices, network shares or remote WebDAV shares. All that is required for exploitation is for the contents of the USB device to be viewed in Windows Explorer. Specially crafted shortcut (.lnk) files are allowed to execute code when the shortcut's icon is loaded to the GUI. An exploit targeting this vulnerability is currently in limited use and additional exploits are very likely in the coming weeks. osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:04 PM

On July 15th the latest Android super-phone was released by Motorola and Verizon Wireless. All hail the Droid X. The release was not without controversy though. The Droid X, while greatly raising the bar for Android phones in general, does so at the expense of the very power users and community that made the original Droid the gotta-have phone it became. Alienating this group may have far reaching consequences for Motorola. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 7/20/10 7:01 PM

Jolicloud is a Linux-based operating system for netbooks. It is built upon Ubuntu and the earlier versions had a user interface which is quite similar to Ubuntu Netbook Remix. However, with Jolicloud 1.0, which has been launched just a few days back, things have changed. Instead of the old interface, Jolicloud 1.0 now has a HTML5 based interface. In Jolicloud can use native Linux applications or web applications. However, with the HTML5 UI, they are blurring the difference between the two. Moreover, the new UI have simplified installing applications a lot. osnews.com | 7/19/10 6:33 PM

Maverick Meerkat, the version of Ubuntu slated to be released later this year, brings with it several features and improvements that the Linux community has been eagerly looking forward to. I've taken a look at the blueprints for this next release, and picked out a few of the major items that Linux end-users will be interested in. Here are 5 things to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10. osnews.com | 7/19/10 4:56 PM

Even lighter, even faster cloud-based Linux OS released called Peppermint Ice, from the team that brought you Peppermint Linux OS. osnews.com | 7/19/10 4:44 PM

Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project. osnews.com | 7/19/10 4:41 PM

Steven Chin, one of the main people behind JFXtras has created a petition to OpenSource JavaFX: osnews.com | 7/19/10 4:39 PM

I'm a couch potato. There, I've said it. I love sitting down and watching sci-fi movies, like any good geek would. And this is an (almost religious) action that hasn't changed for many, many, years. But I feel that we're in for a surprise soon. The way we watch TV and access content is about to change. TV watching will at last arrive into the 21st Century, and the technology giants will be there to duke it out for the reigns of this new industry. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 7/18/10 10:32 AM

Interested in test driving the latest version of Google's Android OS without buying a new mobile device? Here's how to run Android on your PC for free with the Android SDK Emulator. osnews.com | 7/17/10 5:46 PM

We'd argue that the "wow" factor still isn't there quite yet, but we'll admit: Symbian^4 is clearly going to be a bit of a departure from the versions that came before it. The Symbian Foundation has posted the first handful of home screen UI shots on its developer wiki recently showing redesigned widgets, app categories and search, pop-up menus, and a standard-issue numeric touchscreen keypad -- and unlike Nokia's concept videos from before, these are from a real emulator running real code. osnews.com | 7/17/10 5:43 PM

One would think that laying claim to the largest share of the world's smartphone market would attract the most high-quality mobile software developers, but that doesn't seem to be the case for Nokia. osnews.com | 7/17/10 5:40 PM

The most vulnerable and exploitable operating system ever! osnews.com | 7/17/10 4:42 PM

The folks at WineHQ have released the second major stable version of Wine: "This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard. It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, and over 3,000 bug fixes." osnews.com | 7/16/10 8:46 PM