Unlikely partners Intel and Nokia have joined forces in an attempt to fend off increasing mobile competition from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The two companies have merged their mobile OSes into one entity: Meego. You can expect the first mobile devices running on MeeGo later this year.

MeeGo is a merger of Nokia’s Maemo OS and Intel’s Moblin OS, both of which are Linux-based. Maemo is the platform that runs the Nokia N900, while Moblin runs on phones such as the LG GW990 and netbooks from Foxconn, Acer, and others.

Overall though, both are small fry when compared to Google’s Android platform or Apple’s iPhone OS, which could be part of why Intel and Nokia felt it was necessary to team up.

As for how the thing will work: well, it’ll be built around the Moblin core OS, but it will utilize Nokia’s Ovi Store for its apps. It’ll be hosted by the Lunx Foundation as an open source project. Oh, and MeeGo will not just be for mobile phones either, but is intended to work on netbooks, tablets, and televisions as well.

In some ways, the entire thing just seems like a “too little, too late” attempt by both companies to muscle their way back into the smartphone market that Apple and Google have been taking by storm. Neither Moblin nor Maemo have the intuitive interface of Android or the iPhone OS (or the app catalog of either), and it’s tough to see how a merger will change that.

Still, at least they’re not giving up without a fight — it’s too big of a market to simply surrender. Combining resources and encouraging open source additions will probably help its development as well. We’ll see what the two companies come up with later this year.

MeeGo is designed from the ground up to be open in every way. Combining the best of both Maemo and Moblin, and their developer communities, the new ecosystem will deliver a range of experiences for users, including internet-based, computing, communications, multitasking and multimedia. Users will be able to easily move their applications from one device to another and use the same applications on a range of different devices.

Intel president and CEO, Paul Otellini said “Our vision for seamlessly communicating between computing devices from the home, auto, office or your pocket is taking a big step forward today with the introduction of MeeGo. This is a foundational step in our evolving relationship with Nokia. The merging of these two important assets into an open source platform is critical toward providing a terrific experience across a variety of devices and gaining cross- industry support.”

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Indexing updates could be retrofitted to Windows XP, and Vista turned out to be more hungry for resources than previous Windows versions. Windows 7, however, has been out for a few weeks, and feedback has generally been great. We decided to revisit our first look at testing these two operating systems head-to-head and directly compare Windows Vista and Windows 7, to see if the reported benefits are really noticeable.

What is Performance at the OS Level?

Most people think of application performance when they talk about performance in general. However, the operating system plays a major role in the process chain that creates everyday computing experiences. The OS is what switches a processor between power-saving and fast operating states (or even intermediate active states that determine performance in Intel’s Turbo Boost mode via P-states). The OS, or to be more precise its dispatcher, distributes threads across available processor resources, and Windows 7 is more aggressive about using thread headroom for the sake of performance.

However, performance also has to be defined by the user experience during ordinary operating system actions, such as system bootup, standby, application launching, hibernation, or shutdown. If the OS were a bit quicker on applications but consumed several minutes during start-up or shutdown, you’d probably want to ditch it. Hence our second round of testing not only includes benchmarks and application tests but also a look at these everyday operations.

* Gateway LT3114u Netbook|
* Ubuntu Server 32 bit
* 1Gb Usb Flash Drive
* Another Pc running Ubuntu Desktop or UNetbootin

In order to setup Ubuntu linux operating system on your Gateway netbook, you must already have Ubuntu installed on another desktop/laptop or you can use a free program called UNetbootin for Windows based pc’s. In order to create the Ubuntu linux distro usb install disk the first thing that you are going to want to do is begin downloading the Ubuntu Server 64 bit edition to your other computer that is currently running Ubuntu linux. Now you may be wondering why I am having you download the server editon, instead of the desktop version.

The reason is that I had problems with the desktop distro when I tried to setup it on the Gateway netbook, but if you install the server distro then run tasksel to complete the desktop install, you will have no problems. After the Ubuntu Server distro is done downloading, go to the USB startup disk creator located under System -> Administration, and insert the usb flash drive and load the iso file to create your ubuntu usb install disk.

After you have created the Ubuntu usb flash drive, insert it into your Gateway Netbook pc and power on the pc. Press the F2 key to change the boot order, you will want to set the usb drive to be the first booted drive. After the Ubuntu install disk boots up, all you will have to do is install the base system. Once you have installed the base system on the netbook, you are going to want to set a root password.

sudo passwd root

Type Password

Enter super user mode:

su

Then run tasksel:

tasksel

After the window opens, check the box next to Ubuntu Desktop and then uncheck all the server options if any are selected. After you have made your selections, select the Ok button and let installation begin. After tasksel is complete with the installation, you should then reboot your computer. After you computer restarts, you will now have a working Ubuntu desktop edition running on your netbook. All you have to do now is remove the Ubuntu server kernel and replace it with the Ubuntu desktop kernel. This can be done by searching for linux-image under the Synaptic package manager.

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Virtual machines (VMs) are widely used in enterprise and development environments and by individual users. VMs are often used to easily allow multiple operating systems to be run on a single computer.

Sun Microsystems has announced that it has upgraded its VirtualBox virtualization software. The main new feature of VirtualBox 3.1 is that users can move VMs between host machines with no interruption.

The new version not only allows the user to move a VM between machines, but the VM can also be moved between different host operating systems, computer classes, and to and from machines running different CPUs. That means an administrator could move a VM running on an Intel machine with the Windows OS to a machine using AMD processors running Linux without any break in services or downtime.

Sun’s Jim McHugh said, “As a cross-platform hypervisor, VirtualBox allows customers to easily evaluate and deploy virtualized systems, using their existing x86 hardware, operating systems and skill sets.”

Flexibility and ease of moving VMs from one machine to another isn’t all the new version adds. Sun claims that the new version has a 30% performance boost compared to the previous version of the software. The new version also allows an administrator to move the VM back and forth to any arbitrary snapshot date.

Sun reports that the VirtualBox software has been downloaded over 20 million times since the free software product debuted in 2007. The app is only free for individuals and has licensing fee for enterprise users that includes tech support starting at $30 per user.

The company behind VirtualBox — Sun — cut 3,000 jobs in October to reduce costs amid the poor global economy.

The 550+ Windows 7 early adopters who took our survey mostly echo the positive response that the upgrade has received from professional reviewers, pundits, and users of pre-release editions. A sizable majority say they’re extremely satisfied with the OS and rate it as a clear improvement on both the beloved Windows XP and the widely-panned Windows Vista. Crippling installation problems-the bane of every upgrader’s existence, and always a legitimate reason to postpone switching OSes-were rare.

Our full report follows. But first, some quick facts on the folks who took our survey:

• Prior to using Windows 7, forty-six percent of respondents ran Windows Vista, and thirty-two percent ran Windows XP. Seventeen percent ran Vista and XP about equally, five percent ran an OS other than Windows, and a whopping 0.7 percent used a version of Windows other than Vista or XP.
• Seventy-three percent upgraded an existing PC to the final version of Windows 7, and eight percent are running it on a PC that came with the OS pre-installed. Fourteen percent are still using a pre-release version, and six percent are running it on a Mac via Boot Camp or a virtualization program.
• Sixty-four percent of respondents rate themselves as expert Windows users; thirty-five percent say they’re intermediate ones. Less than one percent call themselves beginners.
• Sixty-one percent are using Windows 7 entirely or mostly for home/personal use. Twenty-five percent are using it about equally for home/personal and business use. Just fourteen percent are using it entirely or mostly for business use.
• Sixty-one percent are using a 64-bit edition of Windows 7, and thirty-one percent are running a 32-bit version.
• Eighty-two percent did a “clean” install of the OS from scratch; nineteen percent installed it over Windows Vista.
• Fifty-nine percent say they’ve used Windows 7 extensively, and thirty-six percent say they’ve done so a fair amount. Five percent say they’ve just used it a little so far.

It’s important to note that our goal wasn’t to survey a representative, projectable, normalized sampling of all Windows 7 users. The responses that follow are from members of the Technologizer community who chose to take our survey. Their opinions are their own-but we think they make for interesting reading even if they’re not the last word on how average users will react to Windows 7.

Getting Up and Running

As with all things, first impressions count with operating systems. And if you’ve bought an OS as an upgrade, the first impressions it makes come in the form of the installation process.

As I’ve written before, there’s no such thing as an operating system upgrade that doesn’t cause headaches for some percentage of the people who install it. In the case of our survey takers who installed Windows 7, however, the number who encountered major hassles was very small-presumably in part because Windows 7 is so similar to Vista under the surface. The fact that the vast majority of respondents performed clean installations rather than installing on top of Vista surely helped, too.

Eighty-four percent say the process went off without meaningful hiccups; thirteen percent say it went fairly well. A total of three percent reported major problems, two-thirds of which were resolvable. Pretty impressive-when PC World surveyed Windows XP users shortly after that OS shipped, half reported installation difficulties.

The fact that respondents’ upgrades tended to go smoothly doesn’t mean that they didn’t encounter any issues with their new operating system. Two problem areas stand out: More than forty percent had to try and resolve driver issues, and more than a third needed to deal with software incompatibilities. Other problems, however, were reported by a much smaller percentage of respondents. For instance, eleven percent reported crashes or blue screens of death. And only six percent said that Windows 7′s performance was poor, which is a relief given that the original version Windows Vista quickly developed a reputation as a poky resource hog.

Are the percentages of users who reported problems impressively low, or unsettlingly high? That’s subject to debate. But here’s something that isn’t: Both Windows XP and Windows Vista also suffer to some degree from all the gotchas that respondents said they encountered in Windows 7.

(In this infographic and those that follow, the scale of 0% to 100% represents the percentage of survey respondents who answered a particular question as indicated by the bars.)

“Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that are resulting in system issues for some customers,” Christopher Budd, Microsoft’s security spokesman, said in an e-mail. “The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports.”

The report Budd referred to stemmed from a blog post by U.K.-based security vendor Prevx last week that claimed recent Windows updates

changed Access Control List (ACL) entries in the registry, preventing some installed software from running properly. The result, said Prevx, is a black screen, sometimes dubbed “black screen of death” in an allusion to the “blue screen of death” that Windows puts up after a major system crash.

Since that initial report, Prevx has called out a pair of updates, one in late November and the other from last July, as the cause of the black screen lock-out.

“The conditions under which the actual black screen is triggered are spasmodic,” admitted Dave Kennerley of Prevx’s support team in an update to the original blog post of last week. “Some test systems always trigger the condition, others are less consistent. The windows patches which seem common to the issue arising are & KB915597 and KB976098.”

Kennerley’s use of the word “spasmodic” is a turn-about from his initial post of last Friday, which was headlined “Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP.”

Searches of Microsoft’s support forums by Computerworld have found only one “black screen” thread with posts from last month. Since yesterday, several additional users have reported that their PCs have been afflicted with a black screen.

“Received a patch on Nov 24 or 25. Upon reboot the computer has a totally black screen,” said a user identified only as “General Zod” in a message added to the thread around 2:30 p.m. ET today. “Not even the BIOS startup stuff appears.”

Kennerley also said that the flaw was in the WinLogon Shell registry entry for Explorer.exe, the name of Windows’ file manager. “The entry exists perfectly in the registry but is unusable/inaccessible and is therefore ignored by the OS resulting in the desktop and task bar not being loaded,” Kennerley added.

Some outsiders were skeptical today of Prevx’s contention that the black screen problem was due to the two updates Kennerley cited. Rafael Rivera, who writes the Within Windows blog — and most recently took Microsoft to task for lifting code from an open-source project for the company’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT) — said his investigation pointed toward November’s Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) update. MSFT, which is upgraded and delivered to users automatically via Windows Update, detects and deletes malware that Microsoft has identified as pervasive and dangerous.

“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics,” said Aldous in a PCR interview. “We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.”

The mention of Apple’s influence on Windows 7 made many people sit up and take notice – including those at Microsoft. Clearly the notion that Microsoft tried to emulate “Apple Mac” with Windows 7 is an unpopular view.

Microsoft community manager Brandon LeBlanc responded to the interview through the Windows Team Blog, writing, “An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.”

Microsoft also sent another statement to PCR, which read, “Simon was incorrect in describing Windows 7 in this way and subsequent headlines claiming that the Mac OS inspired Windows 7 are totally inaccurate.

“Over nine out of ten computer users choose Windows. Over the years, hundreds of millions of Windows users have given us great feedback and we have derived great insight about User Interface (UI) design. The Windows 7 UI was designed to make computers simpler to use and to take advantage of new and innovative technologies Microsoft is bringing to market. One example of this is the multi-touch support in Windows 7, which is not supported by the Mac OS.”

So there you have it. Windows 7 wasn’t Apple’s idea, it was your idea.

CodenameWindows discovered that Microsoft was recruiting new software engineers for Windows 8. The job listing, originally listed here, now shows that the job is no longer available. However, it revealed that Microsoft sought out new recruits for the planning and preparation of the Windows Update Client for Windows 8.

“We just finished up work on Windows 7, and are pushing forth on Windows 8 planning and preparation,” the description read. “There are opportunities to work on a number of hard problems, including third-party application updating, updating virtual machines while they’re turned off (turns out this is pretty hard!), and delivering full applications, among others.”

Just to provide an idea what Microsoft was looking for, the job required five years of industry experience, and a BS or greater in Computer Science or related technical fields. Obviously, the job listing indicates that Microsoft may be gearing up to develop Windows 8 despite version 7 just now hitting store shelves last month. It’s unknown when the job was filled, or if Microsoft will post other Windows 8-related listings.

Keep an eye out for additional Windows 8 nuggets, possibly in the coming weeks as news of the job listing gets passed around the tech sites.