Tag: Operating system

Eee-book on Its Way

by
Image representing Asus as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Asus, the creator of the EeePC, which launched the netbook craze, wants to break into the E-Book market with a product that could be at least $100 less expensive than current offerings. A proposed model would have two screens, more closely resembling a regular book, as well as many more features than the current offerings, including Skype and such.

This isn’t really outside of the realm of possibility. Take the EeePC versus the proposed Eee-book a step further. Picture a device the size of the original netbook at 7 inches, or even the 10 inch size, turn it on its side, replace the keyboard with a second screen, add in an orientation sensor, a few buttons, possibly a touchscreen, and the ability to plug in a USB keyboard, and it would become a small system that could double as a nettop device. Give it a Linux-based OS, with SD expansion, and 3G or Wi-FI options, and it can do anything.

Technology continues to advance. We’ll see what happens.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

64-Bit Support

by
AMD64 Logo
Image via Wikipedia

Arch Linux announced that a previous announcement that they were discontinuing support for the 32-bit/i686 architecture in their distribution was, in fact, a an April Fool’s joke.

On a positive note, some users discovered that they were, in fact, running 64-bit processors, and many of them switched to the Arch Linux 64-bit version. As they put it in their original post, “the overall opinion of the developers is that the x86_64 port is now complete enough to justify this decision and that this is in keeping with Arch’s philosophy of supporting current generation hardware. The x86_64 architecture has been available since 2002 (compared to i686 which is from 1995), and we believe most of our i686 users have x86_64 compatible hardware.”

If you are running a 64-bit processor, why shouldn’t you run the 64-bit version of your operatng system? While 64-bit Windows is still, for some reason, immature and undersupported, it is very mature on Linux, although some software has not be retooled to compile under it…Boxee comes to mind.

Fedora 11, the next version of Fedora we’re so enthused about, they are revisiting their architecture support. The 32-bit version of Fedora will now be built for i586 by default, instead of i386, indicating a removal of official Fedora support for older 32-bit processors. Realistically, anyone who is still running an older processor…you should upgrade. The update should produce speed increases.

The biggest advantage of 64-bit operating system is that it allows addressing of more than 3.5GB of RAM. With RAM becoming more and more affordable(Our first megabyte cost $80, now that’ll get you several gigabytes), the speed boost is a useful one. Further support under 32-bit Fedora for PAE-supporting 32-bit hardware(Pentium II/III/4, or Atom) will allow some support for more RAM under these processors.

And finally, 64-bit OSes can run 32-bit software. Backward compatibility is assured.

So, why not? Someone tell us.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Microsoft is in the Toilet

by

Crunchgear posted this amusing image from Russia. It reads, “Windows Vista – The Digital Future Starts Here.”

We’re not thrilled with Vista from the time we spent fiddling with it. It certainly, we admit, has some new features of us, but a lot of things are not as easy to locate in the system as they were under XP.

That aside, Microsoft is advertising on toilets. We can just picture poor Yuri, after a night of drinking vodka, stumbling to the restroom to worship the porcelain deity and…inspired by the ad he sees as he voids his stomach, buying a new computer loaded with Microsoft Windows Vista.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]