TuxRunner

So just in the past few weeks I’ve been seeing a fair amount of news articles and blog postings around the Internet showing attempts at getting other OSes running on the Nokia N900.  Some of them are surprising, and others aren’t.  But here’s a small list of some examples of other operating systems that have been known to run on the N900.  Yes, some are under an emulated environment, but I’m still counting it even if it is emulated.  What I’m not going to dive into here is the console game systems that have been successfully emulated on the N900.  That’s a whole other article.

Windows 3.1/95/98/NT4 – Appears that it’s possible to run Windows on the Nokia N900 under an emulation package called DOSBox.  DOSBox has been around for about 8 years now and runs on many different host OSes such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.  It’s emulates an x86 PC with DOS and includes sound, graphics, joystick, mouse, and modem support.  DOSBox was ported to Maemo5 and allows the N900 to run old video games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.  So since it emulates a full x86/DOS environment, why not try running one of those older OSes to see if they work? (continue reading…)

This company rocks!  That’s all there is to it.  I can’t believe the netbook they’re selling right now.  It’s everything you could want on a small, low-cost computer….including a factory-installed copy of Linux.  It seems like most manufacturers are now pushing their netbooks with copies of Windows XP (bleh!!!), but companies like ZaReason and System76 aim to please the Linux community with cool hardware sporting the latest editions of one of the most popular Linux distros available..Ubuntu.

I’ve bought computers from ZaReason before.  They offered one of the earliest netbooks on the market back in late 2007, and since I couldn’t get my hands on an Asus Eee PC (supplies were VERY limited for the 8g model) I quickly put an order in for an Everex Cloudbook.  ZaReason was one of the only retailers other than Walmart to sell the Cloudbook early on.  It ran gOS 2.0, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu.  While the hardware was pretty good, the operating system left a lot to be desired.  It wasn’t optimized or properly configured for the Cloudbook.  Pair that with poor support from Everex and newer netbooks that came out sporting Intel’s new Atom processor…the Cloudbook was doomed from the start. (continue reading…)

I have to admit, when I first started seeing news about Microsoft releasing code to be included with the Linux kernel, I thought that the world had stopped spinning.  Really, this is like GM designing the engine block for a Ford vehicle, and submitting it to them for use on their next line of cars.  Unheard of (well, maybe it’s possible now since all of the car companies are trying to get out of the same hole.)

I thought for sure this was going to float like a lead balloon with the Linux community.  Seems that in some areas of the open-source community it has, people are not happy with this. Then I read Linus Torvalds’ reaction to the submission and was proud to hear what he had to say! (continue reading…)