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That was the title published in The New York Times online.

Shocked with this title I asked myself:

- “Did Google released a computer before my GPhone? WT*”.

This isn’t true, but it might be what the Google Team is thinking, or planned, for the future.

Following the NYTimes, Walmart started selling a $200 USD computer with the gOS pre-installed. The “Everex”(gPC) features a VIA C-7 1.5Ghz, 512MB RAM, and an 80GB hard drive.

But what is the gOS? - you might ask.

Somehow based on Ubuntu 7.10 this is a Linux operative System dressed up with Google. It is straight for the “usual computer user, that doesn’t understand much of Linux and Internet, but still want to give it a try”, or how the original site states - “beautiful desktop for normal people”.

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For some reason XP isn’t included in the picture bellow, but my main Operative System at the moment is Ubuntu(unix), but I go often to XP synchronize my pda, it’s better than going to Vista [yuck].

Now what we all need to know is: What is yours?

Got this from Natyvw blog.

Ok, this post already comes a bit late since gentoo has already been released for quite some time. However, since no mention was given on this blog, I felt compelled to write something about it.

Gentoo is a meta-distribution. This means that, trough a complex and yet incredibly easy to use system called portage, you can get source packages + dependencies and compile them, making sure you always have the latest (or most recent stable software, depending on your choice) software available. This is why gentoo 2007.0 is considered to be nothing more than a snapshot of gentoo at a certain point in time. Expect an updated version sometime later this year.
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One of the things a new Linux user with long Windows past most misses when giving his first steps in the *Nix world is the lack of interoperability between the two platforms. I know at least I did. The first distribution I used was Ubuntu Linux. When I first booted into the system, there was no support for windows networking and printer sharing. Still, I could live well enough with those shortcomings and, installing samba and cups was not that much of an odyssey. What made me most uncomfortable was the fact that I had no write access to any of the data I had kept in my external disc. As most of my friends use Windows, NTFS was the best filesystem choice for it (FAT was no good because of 4GB+ files).

After doing a lot of googling, I discovered that write access was considered dangerous, but there was a new project called ntfs-3g. Their goal: Fast, Safe and Easy write access to NTFS file systems. I must admit I was a bit skeptical about it at first. I didn’t want to risk my or my friend’s files on an experimental driver, so I waited.

The wait is over!

Very recently the guys over ntfs-3g.org released the stable version of their ntfs-3g driver, and I must say: It rocks! In the last 24 Hours I have transfered some 50Gb of files and my Windows box is yet to report any problems. The thing I like the most in *Nix world is that when something is labeled stable, that usually means it is -really- stable. This seems to be one more example.

Luís Costa//

Following the previous post, I decided to write the following review on the current state of the desktop technologies provided by the major OS providers.

Everything in the tech world revolves around trends. The latest one is “Accelerated Desktops”. Apple was the first company to understand the importance users gave to the way their Desktop’s looked. To satisfy the desktop beauty enthusiasts, they introduced the dock from which the users control their applications and also many other effects such as the genie effect (seen when a window is minimized).
Following the trend set by Apple, Microsoft also started working on it’s Aero engine which now powers Windows Vista and all it’s bells and whistles. XP’s sucessor is filled up with transparencies, shiny menus, blur effects and glass-like icons.

But the greatest surprise didn’t come from any of the two above mentioned companies. The biggest “boom” in desktop acceleration came from the OpenSource world. I’m talking about the new Linux Accelerated Desktops. A year ago, a man named Davied Reveman who works for Novell presented the OpenSource community with two new major technologies: Xgl and Compiz. Xgl provided a layer on top of which Compiz could run and Compiz provided all the effects you could wish for, and many more. I owe Compiz the final motivation that made me look at Linux seriously. In one year, impressive work has been done on this new technology and, at this point, there is no rival for Compiz or Beryl (compiz’s fork).
My personal choice in the last couple of months has been Beryl. Beryl is a derivation of Compiz code which focus on fast development rather than stable development. It fits me better; I like to be on the bleeding edge. All this development has only been possible because of the increasing commitment from companies such as Nvidia who now provide support through their drivers for these new kind of applications.
Beryl provides the user with all kinds of effects but, most importantly, it actively makes work more productive. In my opinion, this is the decisive difference between Windows Vista Aero and Beryl. While most of Windows’s effects do nothing to enhance the way the user works, beryl achieves that with plugins such as “wpicker”/”scale”, “transparent windows” and “cube”. If you want to take a loot at a few examples, click here.

As you can see, competition in this area is fierce. Hopefully that’ll mean the user will see improvements much faster and that the overall desktop experience will rapidly become a lot more productive and pleasant.

– Luís Costa