Google and 33 other companies have announced an ambitious industry alliance that will maintain a completely open source mobile phone stack. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) says phones based on its Linux-based “Android” stack will reach market in as soon as eight months.

The Android stack is based on “open Linux kernel,” the group says. It also includes a full set of mobile phone application software, in order to “significantly lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services,” OHA said.

The stack appears to have been created by Android, a mobile phone software house that Google acquired just over two years ago. The Android stack’s name is apparently a reflection of co-founder Andy Rubin’s fondness for robots. Rubin previously co-founded Danger, a software house that continues to provide software for the Sidekick “hiptop” marketed by T-Mobile.

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When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS)—sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch—in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.

The Linux file system architecture is an interesting example of abstracting complexity. Using a common set of API functions, a large variety of file systems can be supported on a large variety of storage devices. Take, for example, the read function call, which allows some number of bytes to be read from a given file descriptor. The read function is unaware of file system types, such as ext3 or NFS. It is also unaware of the particular storage medium upon which the file system is mounted, such as AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) disk, Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) disk, or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk. Yet, when the read function is called for an open file, the data is returned as expected. This article explores how this is done and investigates the major structures of the Linux file system layer.

More on this from IBM developerworks.

Related: Anatomy of the Linux Kernel

If you like to customize your desktop, easy mode can be pretty frustrating. On the other hand, everything is well designed to fit on the Eee PC’s 800 x 480 pixel monitor. (Well, almost everything. Every now and again a menu will pop up that you just can’t edit properly because it extends below the screen. But we’ll get to that in another post). And restricting access to some of the more advanced features is probably a good thing for many users who aren’t familiar with Linux.

It turns out there is a pretty simple way to enable a full KDE desktop, but if you want the best of both worlds, you can also add customizable start menu to your easy mode interface. Somewhat ironically, this might be harder than enabling the full desktop.

Following the tips at Notebook Review one can easily create a start menu by doing the following:

• Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T
• Type “sudo bash” to get root access
• Create a hidden folder by typing “mkdir /home/user/.icewm”
• Copy a config file to it by typing cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm/”
• Type “nano /home/user/.icewm/preferences” to open an editor
• Scroll down until you find “TaskBarShowStartMenu,” and change the 0 to 1
• Hit Ctrl+x to exit
• Next time you reboot or restart your X server by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace you will have a shiny new start menu

There’s just one problem. It’s mostly empty. Fortunately the folks at EeeUser have some suggestions for populating it by editing the menu file.

First, you need to copy “menu” from /etc/X11/icewm/ to /home/user/.icewm/. You can either do this using the method above, or using the File Manager. But in order to see all the directories and files in file manager, you’ll have to select “Show Hidden Files” and “Show All File Systems” from the View tab.

Now go ahead and open menu using the nano command, or by clicking it in the file manager. Now you can edit the menu by adding programs you’ve installed and removing applications you don’t use or which aren’t actually available. In general, the format for a new entry is: prog “title” icon_name program_options (example: prog Audacity audacity)

And here is a nice video tutorial on howto install and manage third party/unsupported applications on your Eee PC (video by Brad L.):

For more tips, examples and on adding repositories and making advanced changes, check out the EeeUser forum and Wiki.

Cross-platform, open source application jUploadr lets you upload your photos to Flickr.

Of course there are already lots of ways to upload images to Flickr, but jUploadr’s extensive batch editing, tagging, and privacy options, along with its cross-platform-y-ness is thumbs up in my book. jUploadr requires Java, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Applications like jUploadr are great for posting photos and editing photosets in the photo-sharing website Flickr, but its Java core can make it slow and wonky for some users. GNOME-based application Postr is a streamlined posting solution that features drag-and-drop file choosing, tag and description editing and, most of all, a clean, simple interface. Postr is a free download for Linux systems and available in many repositories.

Free open-source app Kflickr gives Gnome and KDE users an easy way to upload images to Flickr. Assign the photo’s title, tags, description, upload size, license, photoset, and whether the image will be public or private prior to uploading with Kflickr, which can also upload images in bulk. Kflickr can be found in most repositories under the install command kflickr.

Related:

• Upload your Photos in an Instant with Kflickr
• Flickr uploaders for Linux

For those that may have missed it, the ATI/AMD fglrx 8.42 display driver that was released last month had introduced AIGLX support. The open-source “Radeon” driver for ATI graphics cards going up to the R400 generation has supported AIGLX for quite some time, but the ATI binary display driver hadn’t until last month. However, one of the complaints about the fglrx implementation of AIGLX is that in the 8.42.3 driver, some are encountering slow performance in Compiz / Compiz Fusion. We have taken an ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI-E graphics card, which is supported by both the Radeon and fglrx drivers, and have compared their Compiz performance in a few different scenarios.

ATI Open vs. Closed-Source AIGLX Performance

The system once again was running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and X server 1.3, but with these benchmarks, the Compiz effects were disabled during testing. The hardware included a PCI Express ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB graphics card, Intel Pentium D 820 (2.80GHz dual-core), 2GB of DDR3-1333 memory, and an ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38) motherboard. We had used Enemy Territory and GtkPerf as our vehicle for benchmarking the two drivers, since both benchmarks are compatible with the current Radeon driver. The ATI driver used was fglrx 8.42.3.

ATI Open vs. Closed-Source Performance

Also check out ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista.

The live version of openSUSE 10.3 is now available as a GNOME or KDE CD. Both contain the same software as the 1 CD installation versions would provide you with, but as a live version.

The live system can be used as a productive system or rescue system. You can also use it to just check out how openSUSE 10.3 runs on your computer without touching your hard drive. The Live CDs are available as 32bit versions in US English only and also contain, for the first time, an install option on the desktop. You can see a screenshot of the KDE Live CD below:

If you click on the Install icon you will be guided through the installation of openSUSE 10.3 onto your hard drive.

For now the images are available at:

• openSUSE 10.3 GNOME Live
• openSUSE 10.3 KDE Live

The Live CDs version will be incorporated into software.openSUSE.org over the next few days.

– opensuse news

“We see the distribution-model-with-software-collection approach as a key part of the story going forward, in terms of how we pull in the broader open source platform that is largely what defines Linux.”

Project Indiana is a Sun project designed to create an OpenSolaris binary distribution that will focus on providing a single CD install with the basic core operating system and desktop environment, along with the opportunity of installing additional software off network repositories. Officially, the final Project Indiana variant of OpenSolaris is expected in the first half of 2008, but Murdock said that Sun’s goal is to get it into the field in March 2008.

Currently The OpenSolaris Developer Preview is the first milestone of Project Indiana. As mentoned above it is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system. It is not a final release and is intended for developers to try, test, and provide feedback.

The overarching goal of the project is to encourage the growth of the OpenSolaris eco-system. When the OpenSolaris project started, it was originally focused on developers and a source base. With the introduction of Project Indiana, a binary distribution will be a reference for other binary compatible distributions to form with the hope of avoiding the same fragmentation that is frequent in Linux. One of the project management goals of Indiana is to produce a new version of the distribution every 6 months, operating a strict time based release schedule. Many open source software communities have already adopted similar schedules and have proved to work well.

Indiana will eventually produce a distribution with a faster moving lifecycle, both from development to deployment and support. The core install CD will be freely re-distributable and network repository easily mirrored locally. While Solaris will continue to be a high level enterprise operating system with a much slower lifecycle, Indiana will be a leading edge distribution delivering a current set of best of breed software to those who may require a particular feature set and accepting the consequences of a faster moving train.

The Project Indiana preview also sports a new packaging system called Image Packaging System, which is a network-based, repository-driven packaging system akin to those available for popular Linuxes. The existing Unix SVR4 package system is also still part of OpenSolaris, too, and the IPS packager has been tweaked so it can import the thousands of SVR4 applications out there in the world that run on Solaris. Murdock says that Sun will work with application package maintainers to give them the tools so they can create IPS-compatible packages for OpenSolaris, and in fact, Sun is counting on the vast developer community to eventually make a much broader array of applications available on OpenSolaris and therefore Solaris. This approach, says Murdock, is how Debian Linux grew to support over 25,000 applications in around 14 years. “Of course,” Murdock concedes, “those numbers are a little different from the usual ISV package counts, since it might contain 40 different versions of Tetris.” ZFS being the default file system.

After downloading this ISO (the Developer Preview is only 629MB), the image can be burned to a disc and immediately booted. Project Indiana incorporates a “Slim Install” LiveCD for x86 systems, and GNOME as it’s DE. Just like a number of Linux distributions, you can boot to this CD and start using it without ever touching the contents of your hard drive.

Sun is actively working to bring more developers into the Solaris ecosystem, and one of Indiana’s goals is to make Solaris, and the features and functionality it offers, more familiar and accessible to people, Murdock said.

Check out nice preview of Indiana by phoronix.

The murder trial against Hans Reiser starts on Monday. Even without a body, prosecutors say they have a solid case. Reiser, a prominent and successful East Bay computer programmer, is accused of killing his wife Nina a year ago. ABC’s 20/20 got an exclusive interview with him. It’s been little more than a year since Hans Reiser was arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife. A jury was finally selected last week after going through a pool of 300 people.

Video here

I believe Linux will become the de-facto standard desktop operating system. Though it’ll take a while for many users to break free from ties to Windows, there is good reason to believe that this day will come.

Consider that the global community is already beginning to rally behind standard document formats. In addition, as browsers like Firefox gain more market share, users are less tolerant of Internet Explorer-only web sites. However, the transition is slow and will continue to be a slow one. Most people will switch away from Windows only when dollars are on the line.

More from Informationweek

OpenBSD is famous for its focus on security. On November 1^st, the team is proud to announce Release 4.2.

Even though security is still there, this release comes with some amazing performance improvements: basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper), and the improved frequency scaling on MP systems can help save nearly 20 percent of battery power.

And then the new features: FFS2, support for the Advanced Host Controller Interface, IP balancing in CARP, layer 7 manipulation with hoststated, Xenocara, and more!

Federico Biancuzzi interviewed 23 developers and assembled this huge interview…