1. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

2. Because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code.

3. We are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds.

4. Chromium OS User Interface Concepts (video)



5. Design Documents: Software Architecture, Security Overview

VMware Virtual Machine with Chromium OS can be found here (torrent).

We’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

…

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Read more >>

Another pulications on the topic:

1. Alas, poor Microsoft at PCWorld
2. Google Chrome: Lookout Windows and OS X at Gizmodo
3. Google Chrome lives at arctechnica

P.S. Linus “almost Santa” Torvalds’ announcement is definitely worth reading:

Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an all-new kernel – and I’m sure that if your computer could smile, it would have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.

2. Top 10 Coolest Open Source Applications in 2008. Well, good reading in New Year Eve.

3. Bootable FSF membership cards: USB flash drive comes with pre-installed gNewSense 2.1.

4. Sabayon Linux 4.0 is realeased (smart Gentoo based distro): 25% boot speed gain, 8500 applications, ext4, KDE 4.1.3, Gnome 2.24.2, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0 and more…

5. Pidgin 2.5.3 is out. Best GTK based instant messenger is ready for downloading. Changelog.

PacSec 2008 Conference will be held on November 12/13, 2008, at Aoyama Diamond Hall in Tokyo, Japan. The presentation is planned as “Gone in 900 Seconds, Some Crypto Issues with WPA – Erik Tews”.

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Area) is widely used to protect many corporate and personal wireless networks. This protocol implements IEEE 802.11i standard and is a successor of WEP algorithm which was cracked in 2001.

Read more here: Once thought safe, WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked.

1. Hats off to Linux!. Intel and Netscape have announced investments in a small company developing the Linux operating system (RedHat).
2. Apache 1.3.2 is released. Upgrade now!
3. Microsoft questions Linux’s free model. Rich Gray, intellectual property attorney, thinks that the Linux model may not last.
4. MCI WorldCom Exec On Linux: Not So Fast. Uunet has not yet decided whether to deploy Linux.
5. Caldera announces partnership with Sybase.
   

   Caldera has made two announcements today: They will be shipping Sybase with their next release of OpenLinux, and OpenLinux 1.3 will be out on September 28th 1998.

6. Interview: Linux creator Linus Torvalds (in Real Audio).

1. Canonical Store is to sell multimedia codecs for Ubuntu. Codecs are developed by Fluendo and Cyberlink. It is still possible to do sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and get that staff installed…
2. In A comparative look at compact sysadmin distributions article Cory Buford shares the observations he got during review of several portable (not more 210 Mb) Linux distros which may be helpful to handle “minor catastrophes”. BTW I prefer RIPLinuX
3. T-Mobile, Google and HTC announce that first phone based on Android platform will be out next week (23th of September 2008).
4. Google is going to launch its own “computer navy” (sea floating data centres). Now jokes – rumors.
5. Codeweavers company has adapted Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac platform.
6. Mozilla asks to display firefox EULA in Ubuntu 8.10. Some people are really disturbed about that.
7. XFCE 4.6 first alpha is out for public testing.

And we just launched Linux and Open Source News aggregator at Linux Screw, so you are welcome to set it your homepage

Sounds strangely? Just read below!

Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away.

This text was somehow seen by The Times in this patent application written by Google… Rather interesting article is published at their site. As for me, I didn’t know that Microsoft is planning to build data centres in cold climes of Siberia or that Sun is going to place its supercomputers in abandoned coal (see cold) mine…

By the way all data centers around the world consumed about 1% of all electricity in 2005. How do you think, what would be in 2009?

Useful Links:
Data Center Knowledge
Discussion at Slashdot

• This release features GNOME 2.22. GNOME now includes a webcam photo and video creation utility called Cheese, improved network filesystem support, a new international clock applet, Google Calendar support and custom email labels in Evolution, a new Remote Desktop Viewer, improved accessibility features, and PolicyKit integration.
• KDE 4.0.3 is available in the KDE Live image as well as the regular DVD.
• Xfce 4.4.2 is available as part of this release.
• NetworkManager 0.7 provides improved mobile broadband support, including GSM and CDMA devices, and now supports multiple devices and ad-hoc networking for sharing connections. It is now enabled by default on installations from DVD, CD, the network, and Live images.
• The Fedora installer, Anaconda, now supports partition resizing for ext2/3, NTFS filesystems, creating and installing to encrypted file systems, improved Rescue Mode with FirstAidKit, independent locations for the second stage installer and the software packages. A redesigned, larger netboot.iso image now features a second stage installer partly for this reason.
• Live USB images now support persistence, so your data and setting changes will be preserved even after rebooting.
• PackageKit, a new set of graphical and console tools, with a framework for cross-distribution software management, has replaced Pirut in this release of Fedora. The PackageKit graphical updater is available instead of Pup. Behind PackageKit, the performance of yum has been significantly improved.
• FreeIPA makes managing auditing, identity and policy processes easier by providing web-based and command line provisioning, and administration tools to ease system administration. FreeIPA combines the power of the Fedora Directory Server with FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution.
• Ext4, the next version of the mature and stable ext3 filesystem is available as a option in this release. Ext4 features better performance, higher storage capacity and several other new features.
• This release of Fedora uses Upstart, an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon.
• Firefox 3 brings a number of major improvements including a native look and feel, desktop integration, the new Places replacement for bookmarks, and a re-worked address bar.
• The completely free and open source Java environment OpenJDK 6 is installed by default. IcedTea 7, derived from OpenJDK 1.7, is no longer the default. IcedTea includes a browser plug-in based on GCJ, and is available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. GCJ is still the default on PPC architecture.
• OpenOffice.org 2.4, with many new features, is available as part of Fedora 9.
• Fedora now includes Perl 5.10.0, which features a smaller memory footprint and other improvements.
• Fedora now includes TeXLive to replace the older, unmaintained TeX distribution.
• Fedora 9 features a 2.6.25 based kernel.
• Kernel crashes can be more automatically reported to http://www.kerneloops.org/ and diagnosed in a friendly way via the kerneloops package installed by default. Crash signatures are commonly referred to as oopses in Linux.
• Work on the start-up and shutdown in X has yielded noticeable improvements.

***** Download Fedora 9 here

***** Complete Release Notes are here

***** Here is the link to Fedora Wiki

Since we’ve began offering Ubuntu on some consumer systems, two clear areas of feedback from the IdeaStorm community and Direct2Dell readers have been: offer Ubuntu on more hardware, and offer it worldwide.This Ubuntu-related post is still the third most commented post in Direct2Dell’s history-many of the 654 comments are asking for it in more countries.

Looking through XPS M1330 technical information (Intel Core Duo up to 2.20GHz, up to 4Gb RAM, 128 MB Video, 200GB HDD, etc.) and price starting from £599, I would like to say that this Dell’s product definitely has future. And it’s too bad I don’t live in Spain, UK…

Get more information on the laptop here, the next step would be to customize and buy one while notebooks are hot!

We announced big news today – our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we’re acquiring MySQL AB.
…
This puts products like MySQL in an interesting position. They’re a part of every web company’s infrastructure, to be sure. And though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL (from auto companies to financial institutions to banks and retailers), many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support.

Read full article here and here (official agreement announcement)…