Open Recall: Android, Chrome OS, Ruby, and DOS on the Raspberry Pi

rpix86 emulates PC DOS on a Raspberry Pi
Source: Patrick Aalto

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news, but are worth covering. In this edition: Eric Schmidt on a possible Android and Chrome OS merger, why Jeff Atwood uses Ruby, Arch Linux switches to MariaDB, Fenrus Linux, a PC DOS emulator for the Raspberry Pi, the latest Linux Mint Debian, and Red Eclipse 1.4.

• Android and Chrome OS will stay separate – Google chairman Eric Schmidt has told attendees of a Google event in India that Android and Chrome OS are "certainly going to remain separate for a very long time, because they solve different problems", according to The Verge. While Schmidt said the two platforms would not merge any time soon, the common elements between them would increase, which some suggest could mean Android apps running on Chrome OS.
  

• Fenrus Linux – Intel developer Arjan van de Ven has started a new Linux distribution intended for developers. Fenrus Linux is described as "a little bit unconventional" and van de Ven says he will be making "some unexpected technology choices" in the process of building it. Interested developers can download a first image of the distribution from van den Ven's web site.
  

• Why Ruby? – Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood explains why he is building his next generation forum software Discourse in Ruby and not in .NET, as many people would have expected. Atwood goes into detail and, in spite of loving .NET as a language, in his opinion, Ruby is the better choice now.
  

• DOS emulator for the Raspberry Pi – rpix86 is a PC DOS emulator for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Written by Patrick Aalto, the software emulates a 80486 CPU, Super VGA graphics, a SoundBlaster 2.0 audio card, and a combination of 640KB of low memory, 4MB of EMS memory and 16MB of XMS memory.
  

• Linux Mint Debian 201303 – The latest version of the Linux Mint edition based on Debian Testing updates the MATE desktop to version 1.4 and Mint's own Cinnamon to version 1.6 and includes a number of improvements in its installer. The new version also implements a Plymouth-based splash screen.

• Arch Linux switches to MariaDB – Arch Linux is the latest in a list of Linux distributions that have decided to switch from MySQL to MariaDB as their default implementation of a MySQL-based database. MySQL will be dropped from the main repository to the Arch User Repository (AUR) within a month.

• Red Eclipse 1.4 – The developers of the open source, cross-platform first person shooter Red Eclipse have released version 1.4 of their game. The arena-style shooter is targeted at casual gamers and the developers say it "lends itself toward a balanced gameplay, with a general theme of agility in a variety of environments." Red Eclipse 1.4 can be downloaded from SourceForge.
  

(fab)