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Google's iPad competitor

By James Lawson, ITWeb journalist
Johannesburg, 08 Feb 2010

Google's iPad competitor

Developers of Google's open source operating system Chrome OS recently posted a mock tablet design on its Web site, chromium.org, reports CNN Money.

The design was released two days before Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled its own tablet, the iPad. According to chromium.org, Google's operating system would be optimised for a tablet that has a 5- to 10-inch screen, but it could work on larger devices.

When Google first announced it was building an operating system, its focus was on the netbook market. Although the developers say they are still primarily focused on netbooks, the operating system could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices, including an iPad-like tablet computer.

Moonlight 3.0 preview available

The open source alternative to Microsoft's Silverlight, Moonlight, has come a step closer to mirroring the latest edition of Microsoft's challenger to Flash, says The Register.

Miguel de Icaza of the Mono project says a preview of Moonlight 3.0 has been delivered for testing. Features include early work on user interface virtualisation to handle large sets of data, and a platform abstraction layer that separates Moonlight from the windowing system engine.

Microsoft also updated its agreement not to pursue patent claims on versions 3.0 and 4.0 of Silverlight. The software giant has also offered protection to third-party distributions of Moonlight, not just those using the Novell-sponsored Moonlight.

ATI releases OSS Evergreen drivers

ATI, the graphics chipset manufacturer of AMD, has released its open source drivers for its ATI Radeon HD 5000 Evergreen family of GPUs, states The Inquirer.

With the release, the ATI kernel mode-setting support is almost complete but hasn't been published, while the current open source ATI driver offers no 2D acceleration and does not have 3D support through either the classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D.

The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors. AMD's Alex Deucher who had written most of the code says he hadn't got Displayport connectivity working right yet.

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