2009/06/10
TheRegister: OpenSolaris ported to ARM chips
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris project has quietly announced the operating system that just added support for Sparc has now been ported to ARM - commonly used in embedded devices, handhelds and, increasingly, netbooks.
It is perhaps an indication of how just stressful things are at Sun these days, with the $5.6bn acquisition by Oracle hanging over it combined with what's shaping up as terrible fiscal fourth-quarter results coming ahead of the crucial July 16 vote by shareholders on the Oracle deal, that no one at Sun or OpenSolaris mentioned the ARM port was coming when announcing OpenSolaris 2009.06 last week.
The leader for the ARM port of OpenSolaris is William Kucharski, who leads the PowerPC and container development efforts for Solaris and who is also the leader of the port to IBM's System z mainframes.
IBM and Sun made some noise about this mainframe port last November when IBM finally and officially sanctioned the deployment of OpenSolaris on mainframe engines configured originally to run Linux. Since then, this Sirius variant of OpenSolaris has gone about as far as the Polaris port for Power iron: just this side of nowhere.
Late last year, Sun announced that OpenSolaris was supported on Intel's Atom processors.
It is hard to imagine there is a lot of room for OpenSolaris on the kinds of devices served bv Atom-based processors, a market where Linux is finding a home and Windows could extend its existing PC hegemony. Linux is being customized by many different projects - there's Google's Android and Intel's Moblin for netbooks and possibly for so-called "smartbooks" - plus the question of whether Microsoft will port the Windows client operating system commonly found on laptops and desktops to ARM. Windows Mobile already runs on ARM-based phones.
Then again, a good device can drive the operating systems' sale. Look at the iPhone. End users and consumers buying these new classes of computers don't really care what the operating system is, even if the vendor does. And that means OpenSolaris might have a better chance on netbooks and smartbooks and other devices than it does on the desktop.
Of course, this would have to be true by definition, since OpenSolaris has very little chance on desktops outside of the Solaris developer community.
One problem with OpenSolaris on ARM-based machines is the relative lack of applications. OpenSolaris 2009.06 has 1,700 applications, as this review of the operating system at Ars Technica correctly pointed out, a lot lower than the 26,000 packages in the Ubuntu repository, for example.
While the OpenSolaris repository has most of what developers need to create code as part of their day jobs or hobbies, ARM-based machines are all about end-user applications.
The OpenSolaris ARM port, as you can see from the updated OpenSolaris 2008.05 release notes, is actually based on the initial 2008.05 Project Indiana release of OpenSolaris, which is now two releases behind.
The ARM port is specifically for NEC's NaviEngine 1 multicore system-on-chip ARM processor and a reference board outlined in the release notes. There's no word on when the ARM port will catch up and be part of the standard releases, or when other ARM chips and products will get support. ®
CNet: Google's Schmidt dings Bing
by Tom Krazit
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as one might expect, offered no public sense that Microsoft's new Bing search engine has him pacing the halls at night.
Google plans to review Microsoft's Bing tomorrow, but CEO Eric Schmidt isn't losing sleep just yet.
"It's not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year," Schmidt said Tuesday in an interview with Fox Business Network. "I don't think Bing's arrival has changed what we're doing. We are about search, we're about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation."
Bing has been well-received in its first trip around the Internet, but it obviously has an awfully long way to go before it makes a dent in Google's business. Still, with some in the search industry now wondering if Yahoo really intends to compete in search over the next few years, Bing may shape up as the only true alternative to Google.
Schmidt seemed to acknowledge those thoughts. "Google is about getting all the information and organizing it. Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well."
Earlier in the day, Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said the company planned to hold "a review tomorrow on it with the executive committee," so it's not like Google is ignoring the possible threat, either.
Schmidt held forth on a wide range of topics during the interview, including:
• Yahoo: "As you know we got within an hour of doing a very deep partnership with Yahoo, but we were unable to do it because of the government and their concerns over various parts of the deal."
• Smartphones: "This is the year of mobile phones. What we like is every one of these has a powerful browser and every one is used to search."
• And Google's new plug-in for Outlook: "I grew up with Outlook as well, which is why we're doing these things. It's very important to bridge the new kind of customer, the young customer, with the existing customer that has grown up with the Microsoft infrastructure."
InfoWorld: The MacBook turns Pro
by Dan Frakes
When Apple quietly updated the 13-inch MacBook a couple weeks ago, giving the company's least-expensive – and previous-generation-design – laptop better performance than the more-expensive aluminum unibody models, it was a good hint that the aluminum models were due for a refresh. After all, what company wants to undercut its "premium" models by selling a better-performing product for less money?
Sure enough, just 12 days later, Apple announced updates to nearly the entire MacBook line. The MacBook Air gains faster processors; the 17-inch MacBook Pro gets a faster processor and a larger hard drive; and the 15-inch MacBook Pro sports faster processors, higher RAM capacity, a solid-state drive option, a longer-life battery, an improved display, and an SD memory-card slot (in lieu of the ExpressCard slot found on the previous version). All of these changes are accompanied by lower prices.
These are notable upgrades, but it's the changes to the 13-inch MacBook that are generating the most buzz. Keep in mind that Apple's consumer laptop line got a dramatic overhaul just last October, when the company switched all but the entry-level model to a new aluminum unibody enclosure, converted to LED displays, added a multi-touch trackpad, upgraded the graphics and processor performance, and even added the "pro"-level backlit-keyboard feature (albeit only to the most-expensive model).
As I pointed out at the time, these upgrades brought the MacBook models enticingly close to the 15-inch Pro line. For people who didn't need the large screen, the less-expensive 13-inch MacBook was mighty tempting. In fact, it appeared that Apple omitted FireWire from the MacBook models solely to differentiate them from the Pro line.
So it was interesting to hear, during Monday's WWDC keynote, Phil Schiller ask rhetorically, "What can we add to just make [the MacBook] a MacBook Pro?" Indeed, the 13-inch member of Apple's laptop line now includes most of the same features and technologies as its larger siblings: a longer-life, integrated (read: non-swappable) battery, improved display technology, 8GB RAM capacity, a 500GB hard drive or 256GB SSD, a backlit keyboard on all models, and an SD memory-card slot. It even includes...wait for it...FireWire 800.
The 13-inch model still can't match the 15-inch MacBook Pro when it comes to screen real estate and processing power - the 15-inch models start at 2.53GHz and can reach 3.06GHz, while the new 13-inch models start at 2.26GHz and max out at 2.53GHz. The 15-inch MacBook Pro is also available in a dual-video-card configuration. But the two lines are otherwise nearly identical. In fact, they're similar enough that Apple has officially bestowed "Pro" status upon the unibody 13-inch models - welcome, 13-inch MacBook Pro.
