Desktop software

The race to faster boot times is on.

MontaVista, an embedded Linux company based in Santa Clara, Calif., said Tuesday its latest system is able to boot in one second and released a video that shows a vehicle dashboard system going from cold boot into a "fully operational" state in that time.

The one-second timing may not be directly translatable to a desktop Linux OS environment, however, because booting a full-fledged OS requires additional drivers and processes to be launched.

Intel's Netbook Linux OS, Moblin, is also eyeing fast boot times. The chipmaker recently partnered with Phoenix … Read more

For those who use Firefox 3.5 but also want to use Gmail with no network connection, Google has an answer: a new version of its Gears plug-in.

Gears endows browsers with some new abilities, including accessing some Web applications even while a computer is offline and juggling multiple simultaneous tasks more effectively. And using Gears, Google last week began letting people see their location on Google Maps by clicking the small circle below the navigation controller and above the zoom controller.

Major updates to Mozilla's open-source browser often break add-on compatibility, and the earlier version of Gears wouldn'… Read more

Google's revelation that it will create its own operating system will bring just one reaction from operating system enthusiasts worldwide.

"Not another Linux distribution," they'll cry.

They'll say this because if there is one problem that the Linux and open-source community has suffered repeatedly over the past two decades, it's been fragmentation.

It was bad enough that the Unix operating system fragmented repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s. Systems administrators (like myself, earlier this decade) were forced to learn several different platforms: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD...the list was always growing longer.

But the … Read more

That Google operating system rumor is coming true--and it's based on Google's browser, Chrome.

The company announced Google Chrome OS on its blog Tuesday night, saying lower-end PCs called Netbooks from unnamed manufacturers will include it in the second half of 2010. Linux will run under the covers of the open-source project, but the applications will run on the Web itself.

In other words, Google's cloud-computing ambitions just got a lot bigger.

"Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers … Read more

The bad news: first-quarter spending on computing technology was worse than forecast. The good news: growth could resume earlier, according to a report Forrester Research released Tuesday.

The analyst firm reduced its forecast for 2009 information technology spending from a 3 percent decline to a 10.6 percent decline, but it's the hitting bottom, it said. Spending should return to growth in the fourth quarter in the United States, and in the first half of 2010 in Europe and Asia, Forrester said, basing its forecast on newly collected data.

"The big drops are not precursors to further declines,&… Read more

The One Laptop Per Child operating system is now available for free downloading for "any" PC or Netbook, according to its maker.

Sugar Labs, responsible for building the low-cost device's XO-1 operating system, released it online last week for loading onto any USB flash drive greater than 1GB.

Called "Sugar on a Stick v1," Sugar Labs hopes it will help spread the use of the OS in classrooms, without the need for the OLPC machine.

An IDC analyst said earlier this year that the OS would be one of the OLPC's more attractive aspects … Read more

Mozilla is exhorting users to "upgrade the Web" with Firefox 3.5 and variations on that better-browsing theme can be found with Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

The hope is that the Web will evolve from a series of relatively static pages to a lively home for Web applications--everything from today's e-mail to tomorrow's spreadsheets. But it could take awhile for reality to catch up with the vision.

It's indeed a bright, shiny future for browsers, and the avant-garde is advancing rapidly. Web developers eager to invigorate their Web sites or build fancy Web applications have to reckon not only with the massive, slower-moving army of ordinary Web browsers, but also with inconsistent support for the latest technology.

Browsers of the future Many of new browser features stem from HTML 5, the still-not-finalized next iteration of the HyperText Markup Language standard that defines how Web pages are described. HTML 5 has spurred the arrival of built-in video and audio, local storage that Web sites or applications can use, "Web workers" that can perform background processing tasks for a Web application, drag-and-drop for better user interfaces, and other technologies. … Read more

Update at 2:00pm PDT: Comment about Microsoft selling own products at retail price has been added.

You no longer have to drive to your local Staples or Best Buy to grab the latest copy of Microsoft Office.

Dell has become the first non-Microsoft company allowed to sell downloadable Microsoft products at its Dell Download Store. The agreement, announced Thursday, gives Dell the right to sell Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Expression Web and similar Microsoft programs directly to online customers.

"With everyday savings plus on-demand access, the Dell Download Store addresses our customers' two main concerns: price and immediacy,&… Read more

Dell has stopped selling 8.9-inch Netbooks, focusing instead on ones with slightly larger screens.

Visitors to Dell's U.K. Web site earlier on Monday found the Mini Netbook page displaying the phrase "Available in 8.9" but no actual options for buying the Mini 9 model. The site focused instead on Dell's Mini 10 and 10v Netbooks.

U.S.-based tech site Engadget noted that a customer service representative in the U.S. had confirmed the "end of life" of the Mini 9.

Dell is the latest Netbook manufacturer to move away from … Read more