Hasta La Gadget!

Hey Linux kernel! You’re 15! You know what that means—look back on fond times, recompile, and gather all of your copyright-reform-loving, terminal-typing friends and have a rager!

After 15 hard punches to the flipper, we’ll recount the important moments in your life and the accomplishments you’ve managed to rack up before even being allowed to legally buy cigarettes and porn in most states:

• 1987: MINIX, the more dangerous and hardcore older brother you’ve always idolized, was born.

• 1991: Linus Torvalds is pissed he can’t access his university’s UNIX servers to his liking, so he wrote the code that would become your DNA. Which I guess is better than your parents just getting blind drunk and conceiving you in their Vegas drive-through honeymoon suite.

• March 13 1994: Judging by this pretty hardcore looking log file, your version 1.0 was release on this day 15 years ago.

• 1996: You’re two years old, and you already have a logo. Tux the penguin is created.

• 1998: Richard Stallman, kind of like your step dad, shaves his beard. It grows back to the same fullness the next day.

• November 2000: The first Linux-powered cellphone is announced, the IMT-2000 in Korea. It was developed by SK Telecom, Seoul National University and “PalmPalm Technology.”

• 2003: IBM releases those creepy ads comparing Linux to an (autistic?) sponge-like kid soaking up all the world’s knowledge.

• 2004: Ubuntu’s first release. You’re going mainstream kind of!

• ???: Linux will finally power the toaster in my home.

It’s been a great life, and here’s to many nerdier years to come.

Ok I just wrote a birthday card to an operating system. I think I need to go shotgun a Coors Lite to balance out the 1,020 geek points I just accumulated. Shotgunning it just because, not in honor of any birthday or anything.

MSI did a laudatory job this morning baffling us with its Winki release, but we managed to find an exceptionally kind, English-speaking representative at its CeBIT booth today who broke it down for us. In short, Winki is MSI’s new instant-on operating system. It’s Linux-based, and looks a heck of a lot more elaborate than the HyperSpace instant-on OS that we toyed with in January. The kicker is that at least for now, this thing is only for desktops, as it’s actually built into a small module (shown above) that plugs directly into an MSI motherboard. At first, only select mainboards will come bundled with Winki, but it just might roll out across MSI’s entire mobo line. The dame we spoke with wouldn’t divulge any details on whether this OS would ever come to its wide-ranging laptop line, but we suspect it will in due time. Winki provides easy access to IM services, Skype and the internet, which is a shortcut to Doom away from being all the true gamer needs in life, anyway.

Filed under: Desktops

MSI Winki eyes-on: it’s an instant-on OS, but for desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve always had a thing for instant-on OS environments like SplashTop, and now Xandros is looking to bring that concept to every laptop with Presto!, a new Linux distro that’s said to boot in “seconds.” The idea isn’t so much to replace Windows as it is to supplement it — you select between Windows and Presto at boot, you’ll still have access to all your files, and you can even uninstall Presto from Add / Remove programs. Not a bad way to get your Linux feet wet, and Presto seems like it’s pretty functional as well: Xandros already powers the Linux Eee PCs, and it sounds like Presto will run decently on similarly low-powered / older hardware. The stock install comes with Firefox, Skype, a media player and office suite, but Xandros is working on an app store, so you should have lots of other options soon. Sounds promising — we’ll see how it goes when the beta’s released on March 16.

[Via GadgetMix]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Xandros announces Presto! instant-on Linux distro originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not every day we see an all-new angle on the laptop form factor, much less a netbook with aims at innovation. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a company dubbed “Always Innovating” is trying to spice things up a bit. The Touch Book is an ARM-powered netbook that weighs less than two pounds and claims battery life of 10 to 15 hours, but the real magic happens with the removable screen — it slides right out of its keyboard dock and acts as a fully functional touchscreen tablet. When docked, the screen can lay out flat, and the keyboard can even be folded all the way under into an “inverted V” shape. There are other oddities like internal USB plugs to cut down on dongle mess, and the whole screen is magnetic for mounting on a fridge. The machine is running a Linux OS with a touchable 3D UI. The only press shots right now are these sketchy-looking renders, but Always Innovating is currently previewing the Touch Book at DEMO 09 in California, and plans to ship in Spring of this year with a starting pricetag of $299.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablet PCs

Touch Book from Always Innovating harbors removable tablet, netbook pricepoint originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Marvell has the technology and the vision, and if the company gets its way the world will soon be overrun by lilliputian Linux machines. Hiding in wall warts and the like, these guys will begin quietly taking over tasks that we once relegated to servers and desktop machines. To this end, the company has just announced that they’ll be making the SheevaPlug dev kit available. This is the platform that PogoPlug is based on, consisting of a 1.2GHz Kirkwood processor, 512MB flash storage, 512MB DRAM, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and USB 2.0. This bad boy supports many standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions, and the whole thing plugs directly into a standard wall socket, drawing “less than one tenth of the power of a typical PC” while in use. Currently available for $99, the company says that it anticipates a price drop to $49 “in the near future.”

Filed under: Desktops

Marvell’s SheevaPlug Linux PC fits in its power adapter originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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