Apparently, their solution requires Linux kernel 2.6.31, X.org 1.7 (modified), and a series of corresponding hardware and experimental drivers (including a simple Asus Eee T91MT).

So it's not quite turnkey, but if you willing to tinker a bit, all the resources are online to run a multitouch version of Linux on a few different hardware platforms. And if you're running Linux, there's a good chance you're willing to tinker a bit. [ENAC Interactive via Netbook 3G via lilliputing]

Last year, we compiled the most popular Linux downloads of 2008 and the most popular Linux posts. The most popular Linux downloads, however, tend to also be released for Windows and Mac systems, and we'd rather not repeat ourselves.

So! This year, we ran through our archives and pulled out the posts most directly related to Linux: informational, how-to, Linux-focused downloads, and the like. For good measure, though, we'll list the most popular cross-platform downloads at the end, which will look very familiar to those posted in our Most Popular Free Mac Downloads of 2009 and Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2009 posts.

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows

And it really does, too, after a bit of command line tweaking. It's a close relative of the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop. This one doesn't require any installation, however, and you can even take it with you on a thumb drive. This holiday season, feel free to show Uncle Steve just how open and free Linux can be.

Linux Puts the Lie to WEP "Security"

Using a BackTrack 3 Live CD (which we previously profiled, Gina showed us how easy it was to crack a Wi-Fi network's WEP password, offering a sound reason to upgrade your age-old router, and providing a kind of last-ditch solution for those in need of emergency connectivity. She also provided more WEP-cracking tools and tips, including some sound reasoning on why anyone would still use a fallible encryption scheme (or use something much stronger).

Looking Ahead to Ubuntu Releases

Every year, at least two versions of Ubuntu are released in six-month lockstep. This year gave us Keir Thomas' peek at the 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" release, and our own screenshot tour. That release was more about subtle changes and improvements. Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, brought a whole new look to the free OS, along with some major decisions on default applications and immediate improvements like faster, slicker boot-ups and a universal software store. We are, as ever, eager to see what crops up in April.

VirtualBox Makes Linux Life Easier

Sun Microsystems' free VirtualBox software is free, offers an open-source edition, and is generally easy enough for beginners to get into. Not coincidentally, it solves a big problem for Linux users who just occasionally need access to one or another Windows apps or features. It also keeps adding on new features, like support for Windows' gaming graphics, and making life generally better for those running one system inside another.

Features We Wanted to See from Ubuntu (and a Response)

"If every Ubuntu developer were assembled at one place, here are five things we'd ask them to accomplish." That's the grand daydream that launched our list of five features we want to see in Ubuntu, including strong sticking points like a decent video editor and a design-centric look. Not all of that is under of the Ubuntu team's purview, but Community Manager Jono Bacon still took the time to respond to our wishlist, noting the progress on many of the fronts we wrote on. That was a very nice moment.

Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony

Simply installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu together isn't all that hard—just do Windows before Ubuntu, and leave a little room for the Linux. Fine-tuning it for convenience, access, and general usability, though—that's something we spent a lot of time thinking on. We wrote it all down, step by step, in this post.

Build a Cheap But Powerful Boxee Media Center

Following up on Adam's guide to building a small, silent XBMC media center on the cheap, Lifehacker's resident Linux nerd (Howdy!) wrote up an alternative guide to getting a more powerful, Linux-backed, Boxee-centered HTPC running. Seeing as how the upcoming Boxee beta and pre-built Boxee Box will include sped-up support for this very kind of NVIDIA-powered, Linux-based system, this Boxee setup will actually hit its real peak in 2010.

Nine Must-Have Features We Want to See in a Google OS

Now that we've actually seen what Chrome OS will look like, and even taken it on an open-source test drive, we can run through our initial wish list for the Linux-based netbook OS and do the tally: Three yays (speed, syncing, and blurred desktop/browser experience), two nays ("All kinds of hardware" and native Linux apps), and four shoulder shrugs (integrated Quicksilver-like app launcher, powerful keyboard shortcuts, user privacy, and enterprise-friendly setup). There's a lot more bound to come in 2010, though, including the first official release, so stay tuned.

GNOME Do and Docky Are Slick Linux Interfaces

We dig GNOME Do as a Quicksilver-like application launcher that knows your system better than you do. When it rolled in a dock interface, it got a bit more unstable, but even more helpful—and notably more smooth and eye-pleasing than the standard GNOME interface. The two projects have since gone their separate ways, but, installed side by side, they still make for a better Linux experience.

Presto Loads a Streamlined Desktop in 15 Seconds

Well, we thought Presto looked like a pretty neat quick-boot alternative for Windows users, at least while it was free, and promising boot-ups in mere seconds. Then we tried it out and clocked it at a more human 15 seconds, found it to be kind of a simplified Xfce desktop, and, oh, right, this other operating system from some search company was announced. Not to say Presto is a dead option, but, at this point, it might need an overhaul (Chrome installed, maybe?) to grab much more than a glance.

Install Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu with One Command

Even released every six months, Ubuntu still manages to make its users wait on some newly-released apps getting official support—like Firefox, most importantly. This little Python script makes short work of bringing your built-in Firefox up to the bleeding edge.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide Available as a Free Download

Author Keir Thomas did the freely-licensed thing with his pocket guide, and we were all very glad to have it.

Elisa is a Simple, Streamlined Media Center

Looking for something that just plays your music, shows your videos and pictures, and doesn't get in your way or bog you down with flashy features? That's what Elisa is, and it looks pretty nice while doing so.

Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look

It really, really does. If you don't mind the obvious break in your your free-as-in-speech fidelity, it's a pretty nice setup.

Jolicloud Netbook OS Is a Bit Like Chrome OS with Awesome Desktop Applications

Adam's headline pretty much says it all—you get most of the benefits of a fast-loading, small-screen-oriented OS, but with far more adaptability and a wide range of awesome Linux apps you can install.

Popular Cross-Platform Apps

Google Chrome, Alpha and Beta Releases

Google Chrome, which just barely turned one, has actually been up and running on many Linux systems since its earliest days, due to the hard work of Chromium open-source hackers. You could grab the alpha in May, try out a CrossOver-built release in September, and grab the official beta last week. Been holding off on your Chromium and just now trying Chrome? Check out our power user's guide to Google Chrome to get acquainted.

Namebench Helps You Find the Fastest DNS Server for Your Computer

Google came out with a free DNS service, but many folks are learning, with the help of namebench or the also-excellent DNS Name Server Benchmark, that what the big G does isn't always the best. Test out all the popular, public DNS systems to see what's your own network's best bet.

Google Earth 5.0 Released, Looks Incredible

Google Earth 5 is one of those lucky Linux products that Google still intends to keep up to date, unlike its sad cousin Picasa. So being able to put historical imagery, ocean maps, and improved world touring on a Linux desktop is A-OK with many readers.

Firefox (Of Course)

Firefox seemed to have met its first real challenge for the Best Alternative Browser this year, but it kept up with the modern web at its own pace. This year saw a big Firefox 3.5 release and a bunch of Firefox 3.6 betas (1, 2, 3, and 4). It'll be interesting to see if Linux distributions consider Chrome as their default in 2010, but we expect Firefox to stick around for quite some time.

Thunderbird 3 Officially Released with New Features, Improved Look

A lot has changed since Thunderbird 2.0 release, but 3.0 brought enough savvy features—awesome search, smart syncing, and tabbed content—to make it an ultimate online/offline message hub.

HandBrake Updates to 0.9.4 with Over 1,000 Changes, 64-Bit Support

Yeah, Mac and Windows users probably find HandBrake really helpful. But Linux is where encoding to non-restricted formats can be crucial, so seeing regular development is a very nice thing. On any platform, Handbrake remains a favorite video encoder—even after developers dropped AVI/XviD support.

Alsooooo, the Chrome Extensions page is now open, so you can easily grab add-ons for the latest Chrome beta on Windows, just like Firefox. (So excited for these to take off.)

Finally, Google Bookmark Sync is also live—it stores your bookmarks in your Google account, so you can access them on any computer, though for now, Chrome's the only browser getting the seamless syncing love. [Google, Google via SAI, Lifehacker]

According to a new report by Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, Linux preinstalls represent 32% of the 35 million netbooks shipping this year (a number consistent with Dell's own reports). And it makes sense. Pretty much any variation of Linux is lighter weight than Windows (even the improved performance of 7 over Vista is paid for in battery life). And in the lowest end of the hardware market, I'd bet consumers are a lot more cognizant of the impact an OS has on the final price of a computer. [Computer World via Slashdot and Awesome Image]

Confusingly, the name of Else's first phone is actually "First Else". As we mentioned in October, the phone has a 3.5-inch (480 x 854-pixel) touchscreen display, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and 5-megapixel camera (capable of 480p video at 30fps). It's also very likely to have a TI OMAP 3430 processor, a 1450mAh battery, up to 32GB internal memory, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Apparently, it may only support HSDPA 3G and EDGE (no Verizon).

As for the Linux-based OS, it uses a one-thumb wheel that avoids digging through menus, has GPS aware reminders, can record voice calls/messages and store them along with when the call was made, and straight-up looks sci-fi.

It seems that Linux-based mobile operating systems like Android and webOS will soon have a new competitor. [First Else via Pocket-Lint and SlashGear | Video via Engadget]

ELSE INTUITION™ is a complete mobile platform developed by ACCESS and Emblaze Mobile. Thanks to the combination of ACCESS Linux Platform v3.0 and an advanced user interface engine, jointly developed by Emblaze Mobile and ACCESS, ELSE INTUITION™ delivers a highly compelling and differentiated user experience, coupled with state-of-the-art hardware, accelerated 2D/3D graphics and elegant transition effects. ELSE INTUITION™ takes advantage of ACCESS Linux Platform v3.0 to provide advanced flexibility and configurability, enabling users to run multiple applications simultaneously, switching between them with ease. All data and content, including contacts, appointments, videos and photos can be rendered anywhere, not just within a single dedicated application, giving users faster, easier and more consistent access to their information

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about Chrome OS 1.0. You can build that now and (maybe) install it on your netbook, and should be able to buy on hardware next year. All that stuff is, to borrow a word that Google loves to misuse, is a beta. A test. A trial. A first step toward a larger vision, which Google has been hinting at since they branched out from search: In the future, we will live on the internet. We'll be able to do all the things we do on computers now, and probably more, while connected to the cloud. And it'll be great.

Chrome OS is an explicit step towards making this happen, but the version we saw today is just an early, broad step. Google even said so! Despite early talk about how Chrome OS could be a full replacement OS one day, suitable for regular ol' laptops and desktops, today's preannouncement of a version strictly for netbooks included an admission that it would only be intended as a secondary OS. So, what does Google need to see this thing through, and make Chrome as capable as the OSes we're used to using now? Lots:

The Internet Needs to Get Way, Way Faster

And I'm not just talking about higher bandwidth. Broadband connections are pretty quick nowadays, but compared to reading—and especially writing—data to a hard drive, sending bits over the internet is excruciatingly slow. And Chrome OS isn't even really a true web OS: it'll slurp the guts of larger web applications like Gmail and Gcal and effectively make them local, meaning that the kinds of tasks that require low latency and fast load times will run tolerably.

That kind of local storage, along with Javascript technologies like AJAX, is a salve. We need them because communicating with a server for every event in an application would take forever, and make using them miserable. Remember how webmail used to be, before it got all AJAXy? Awful. And it still would be, if not for recent Javascript advances and local storage.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making web apps local, and Chrome OS will keep doing that forever: it's the only way Chrome OS can work offline. But that doesn't cover everything. What about high-bandwidth tasks like photo and video editing? To do it the way they suggest would require constant syncing between local memory and a remote server. These are basic tasks for a computer. Basic tasks that'll be impossible on Chrome until super-low-latency, 100mbps+ broadband is commonplace, and not only commonplace, but wireless and effectively ubiquitous. That's quite a few years away, even by generous estimates.

Web Apps Will Need To Get Much Better

I'm sure Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar will be totally swell in Chrome OS. They're some of the most feature-complete web apps in the world, and they're good enough to replace desktop apps for most people. But what about VoIP apps? Torrent clients? Media players? Image editors? Video editors? There are web apps for almost all of these things, but collectively, they amount to a big bag of dick. Trimming videos with YouTube's tools is nothing like editing them in Final Cut, or even iMovie. Cropping a few images in an online photo editor and playing with their contrast is fine, but what about my bloated Sony RAW files? There are still some massive gaps in the web app world, hence Google's repeated, vague pleas for developers to do better, alright?

Web Standards Will Have To Evolve, Fast

Google wants to replace regular apps with web apps by making web apps more like native apps, in concept and execution. Eventually, the hope is that they could use the new features of HTML5, like local storage, drag and drop, canvas drawing, native animation and location awareness, to have all the powers of a native app. Thing is, HTML5 is just a stepping stone; it'll take more than a few new HTML tags to pave the way for honestly native-seeming applications.

Google's obviously got a lot of leverage over standards bodies like the WHATWG and W3C, so they could help move new HTML capabilities along in theory. But even HTML5 is brand new, and very few people are using that. It'll be at least another generation before developers will be able to code native-equivalent apps in web languages, and that's assuming that standards development keeps heading in that direction. Which it might not.

Someone's Going to Have To Solve the UI Problem

Talking about Chrome OS's interface almost seems like a waste of breath, since your real UI is the internet, which is the very definition of inconsistent. Part of the reason email apps, Twitter apps IM clients, and the like are still so popular is because they offer services that people want in an interface that's consistent with the rest of their system. Web apps offer no such thing.

Sure, if all you use are Google products, you're fine: Your life is blue, white, boxy and clean. But what about when you want to jump over to Meebo? Or Aviary? This kind of inconsistency wouldn't be acceptable in another OS, so it would feel like a compromise here. I suppose you could use tools like Greasemonkey to reformat pages on the client side, but this is hacky and, well, lots of work. We'd need some kind of framework for skins, or something, to make the experience more uniform.

People Will Have To Give Up On Owning Media, an Get Comfortable With Subscription Services

People need their music and videos, and now, most people have collections. That's sooooooo 2009, am I right? For Chrome OS to work, people are going to have warm up to subscription services and streaming media.

Before you get mad at me, forget about Rhapsody and Napster, and think more about your cable company, your wireless company, or your beloved Netflix. Those work, and these kinds of arrangements are going to have to be extended to all media. Which is possible, but also fraught, since you really won't own your media.

The Rest of the (Browser) World Has To Be Onboard

During the announcement, Google made the point that the Chrome browser in Chrome OS won't have any special talents that Chrome elsewhere won't, and that at present it's no more able—in terms of what kinds of web apps it can run—than, say, Firefox. Nobody's going to want to write web apps just for Chrome (that would make them Chrome apps, right?), so it's vital that other browsers support the same new HTML standards that Chrome needs to succeed. Google can go all out supporting the latest, greatest web standards, but unless everyone else does too, nobody—not even Google—is going to write for them.

None of these things are impossible; in fact, most of them sort of feel inevitable, given that they're all just extrapolations of obvious trends from the last few years. They're just optimistic, and sit well in the future. Chrome OS can carry out Google's LET'S ALL LIVE ON THE INTERNET vision when the conditions are right, eventually. But these are long-term bets, measured in years.

That might make sense to a room full of Google engineers. To the rest of us, though? It's abstract. It's strange. It seems gimped. It's largely irrelevant, and it's not all that exciting. Yet.

According to Techcrunch this isn't really a launch, but rathe a chance to give us a first look at the OS, and for Google to detail their actual launch plans (we've been sitting tight with the "late 2010" projection from the initial announcement):

The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we're told. More notably, they will be giving a "complete overview" of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.

Knowing what Chrome OS will look like is only half the fun anyway—three months after it was announced, we still don't really know what the hell it is, or how it's going to work. Soon! [Techcrunch]

The story inspired widespread hyperventilation last week, most of which revolved around a few impassioned quotes:

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention".

This from Groklaw, a site that specializes in free and open source software legal affairs, i.e. exactly this kind of thing. But for whatever reason—zeal? clicks?—their reading of the patent, which we picked up, turn out to overblown. Says Sudo maintainer Todd Miller, via Ars:

I've already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don't think that is the case," he wrote. "Sudo simply doesn't work this way. When a command is run via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task.

So, if not this, then what does the Microsoft patent cover? Back to Ars:

Specifically, it describes a user interface which displays accounts that have the necessary rights to perform an action when the user is blocked from performing an action that requires higher access privileges.

These are similar, but not patent similar.

Turns out, though, that there is a Linux tool called PolicyKit just like what Microsoft patented, which prompts users to switch to a higher-level user account when they hit against a permissions barrier. It was created after the patent was filed, but before it was made public. So, Microsoft, on all counts: not guilty. [ArsTechnica]

Previously, Google had set the release date had been set roughly at H2 of 2010. In their words,

[T]he first netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010

Of course, that's when a dedicated product will launch, as in, a netbook from a prominent manufacturer running Chrome OS as sold. But Google did go on to say in the same announcement that that they'd "soon be working with the open source community," after which Eric Schmidt dropped a few hints that we could see Chrome OS, most likely in beta form, "as early as this year." So, that brings us to the new rumor: TechCrunch has it from a "reliable source" that we'll see Chrome OS within a week, available as a download. It'll have limited driver support, meaning Google will only endorse installation on a limited number of computers—mostly netbooks—including a number of Eee PCs.

The obvious question now is what will it look like, though I'd like to remind you that, in all likelihood we've been given a pretty good preview: Remember the version of Chrome browser for Chrome OS that leaked for Linux machines a few weeks ago? It had (or has, above) a nonoperational Start-style button, a clock embedded in the title bar, and a minimalist interface, and it's probably a pretty good indicator as to where Google's going with this. [TechCrunch]

Besides it's impressive top speed, the interesting thing about the bike is that it features a dedicated IP address, on-board web server, WiFi and Linux.

Mavizen is calling the TTX02 a "laptop on wheels", signaling their approach to electric motorcycles via a consumer electronics perspective. According to Azhar Hussain, TTXGP founder and entrepreneur, the consumer electronics perspective comes from the notion that "we are living in a click culture and connectivity is the key, across the board. Our approach was to find how we could make a laptop go racing. We think electric vehicles have more in common with consumer electronics than traditional automotive."

Of course, the "consumer" part of all this doesn't necessarily mean you or I will be checking our email flying down the road on this thing. The bike is going to be produced in a limited 50-unit run and aimed towards the racing scene—a development platform of sorts that can be used by professionals to customize the bike to fit their needs. Although, I suppose it is not impossible for the average Joe to get their hands on one—if you are willing to pony up the $41,300 asking price that is. [Asphalt and Rubber]

Maybe he's just a laid back guy. Maybe the copies are pirated. Maybe it's because there is a shitload of copies and only like one appears to have been sold. Actually, Microsoft tried to spoil the Japan Linux Symposium by setting up a booth across the street. Obviously, Torvalds was amused. [Picasa via Engadget]

The Else Intuition, aside from being one of the first phones to use Access' Linux Platform v3.0 OS, is a 3.47-inch 480x854 slab of handset, with an OMAP 3430 processor, 16GB of internal memory, a five-megapixel camera, A-GPS, and 3.5mm headphone jack. It's capable hardware to start with, and the Palmy (an honestly, kind of sleepy) v3.0 OS has been slapped with a completely new OpenGL-accelerated interface, codeveloped by Access and Emblaze, who had promised an "ultimate holistic device," whatever that means, late last year.

It's a lot to process, and there's not a ton of info to run with here: There's no hands-on to indicate if this left-field software is any good, and the companies won't get any more specific than "[worldwide] operator evaluations are currently underway" as far as potential release dates go. That said, this looks like decent hardware, albeit seriously bricklike, and newness counts for a lot in mobile software. (Pre, anyone?) Maybe this whole Access fiasco wasn't so crazy after all? [Access via Impress]

The Hero's kernel is the bottommost part of its software; it's the part that manages basic functions like memory allocation, device drivers and the like. For modders to be able to access and compile this is great news for potential Hero modders, who'll be able to drop this kernel into cooked ROMs with all manner of interfaces, app configurations, performance tweaks and the like. What this won't do is help bring features like the Sense UI to other handsets—though modders are doing pretty well with that on their own—because those components are distinct from the kernel.

While this might seem like a generous move on HTC's part, it's not: The Hero's kernel is a modified Android kernel, which is in turn a heavily modified Linux kernel. In other words, parts of it are irreversibly open source, which means that HTC is legally required to release this code—they're actually kinda late here. [HTC]

There's all kinds of new hotness in Snow Leopard and Windows 7, but what's old and busted is when stuff crashes, even on the newest OSes. This is how that happens, and why it's thankfully happening less and less.

There are about a bajllion ways for a computer to crash, from hardware to software, so we're going to start with the little crashes and work our way towards kernel panics and BSODs.

Application Crashes

Broadly speaking, the two most common causes of crashes, according to Microsoft's Chris Flores, a director on the Windows team, are programs not following the rules, and programmers not anticipating a certain condition (so the program flips out). The most obvious example of the former is a memory error. Basically, an operating system gives a program a certain amount of memory to use, and it's up to the program to stay inside the boundaries. If a program makes a grab for memory that doesn't belong to it, it's corrupting another program's—or even the OS's—memory. So the OS makes the program crash, to protect everything else.

In the other case, unexpected conditions can make a program crash if it wasn't designed with good exception handling. Flores' "oversimplified" example is this: Suppose you have a data field, like for a credit card number. A good programmer would make sure you type just numbers, or provide a way for the program to deal with you typing symbols or letters. But if the program expects one type of data and gets another, and it's not designed to handle something it doesn't expect, it can crash.

A completely frozen application is one that has crashed, even though it stays on your screen, staring at you. It's just up to you to reach for the Force Quit and tell the computer to put it out of its misery. Sometimes, obviously, the computer kills it for you.

Crashes, as you probably experience almost daily, are limited to programs. Firefox probably crashes on you all the time. Or iTunes (oh God, iTunes). But with today's operating systems, if you hit an omega-level, take-down-your-whole-system crashes, something's likely gone funky down at the kernel level.

System Crashes

The kernel is the gooey core of the operating system. If you think of an operating system as a Tootsie pop with layers of sugary shell, it's down at the lowest level managing the basic things that the OS needs to work, and takes more than a few licks to get to.

More than likely, your computer completely crashes out way less than it used to—or at least, way less than Windows 95. There's a few reasons for that. A major reason, says Maximum PC Editor Maximus Will Smith, is that Apple and Microsoft have spent a lot of time moving stuff that used to run at really low level, deep in the guts of the OS, up a few layers into the user space, so an application error that would've crashed a whole system by borking something at the kernel level just results in an annoying program-level hang up. More simply put, OSes have been getting better at isolating and containing problems, so a bad app commits suicide, rather than suicide bombing your whole computer.

This is part of the reason drivers—the software that lets a piece of hardware, like a video card talk to your OS and other programs—are a bigger source of full-on crashes than standard apps nowadays when it comes to modern operating systems. By their nature, drivers have pretty deep access, and the kernel sits smack in the middle of that, says Flores. So if something goes wrong with a driver, it can result in some bigtime ka-blooey. Theoretically, signed (i.e., vetted) drivers help avoid some of the problems, but take graphics drivers, which were a huge problem with Vista crashes at launch: Flores says that "some of the most complex programming in the world is done by graphics device driver software writers," and when Microsoft changed to a new driver model with Vista, it was a whole new set of rules to play by. (Obviously, stuff got screwed up.)

Another reason things crash less now is that Apple and Microsoft have metric tons of data about what causes crashes with more advanced telemetry—information the OS sends home, like system configurations, what a program was doing, the state of memory, and other in-depth details about a crash—than ever. With that information, they can do more to prevent crashes, obviously, so don't be (too) afraid to click "send" on that error message.

In Windows 7, for instance, there's a new fault tolerance heap—basically, a heap's a special area of memory that's fairly low-level—which could get corrupted easily in past versions of Windows. In Windows 7, it can tell when a crash in the heap is about to happen and take steps to isolate an application from everything else.

Future Crashes

Of course, there are other reasons stuff can crash: Actual hardware problems, like a memory failure, or motherboard component failures. Hard drive issues. Hell, Will Smith tells us that a new problem with high-performance super-computing clusters are crashes caused by cosmic rays. A few alpha particles fly through a machine and boom, crash. They weren't a problem 30 years ago.

Granted, you don't have to worry about that too much. What you might worry about in the future, says Smith, with the explosion of processor cores and multi-threaded programs trying to take advantage of them, are the classic problems of parallel processing, like race conditions, where two processes are trying to do something with the same piece of data, and the order of events gets screwed up, ending in a crash. Obviously, developers would very much prefer if the next 5 years of computing didn't result the Windows 95 days, and programming techniques are always growing more sophisticated, so there's probably not a huge danger there. But as long as humans, who make mistakes, write programs, there will be crashes, so they're not going away, either.

Thanks to Maximum PC's Will Smith! Blue Screen of Death photo by Sean Galbraith originally posted on Gizmodo here.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about crashes, blueberry pie or popcorn kernels to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The only file you can really do anything is is a .deb—that's a Debian-based Linux installer package—meaning that Debian (and Ubuntu) users can install it with a few clicks. On Ubuntu 9 I got a dependency issue when I tried to install, but is was easy to fix: I just enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories in Synaptic, and upgraded the library it told me too.

As for the browser itself, it's not unlike regular Chrome, barring a few telling differences. For one, the clock is on display in the titlebar, as if this browser is going to be the only app you see when using Chrome OS. There's also a frustratingly enigmatic little Google logo in the top left corner, which looks like a menu. When you click it, it pops up with a prompt to log in with an @google.com email address. Oh well. In any case, downloads are still working from here; feel free to post more mirrors in the comments. [Living in a Google World via Techcrunch]

Nokia's aging Symbian S60 OS isn't maturing so well, as seen on their N97 handset, and though they've made some positive strides with Maemo, it sounds like they might be limiting themselves to those two OSes—at least until the market forces them elsewhere. On the other hand, the "No Android" statement was pretty obvious.