boot

NEW ORLEANS--Mozilla may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to mobile technology, but that may change early next year. Its mobile operating system code-named Boot to Gecko is developing rapidly, but it will face challenges both technical and tech cultural.

Judging from my colleague Stephen Shankland's take on how Boot to Gecko performed at its public unveiling in February, Mozilla has definitely made progress with the phone. The build I used was installed on a Samsung Galaxy S II.

The interface appears to be a mix of traditional iOS-style app icons, and Windows Phone-style … Read more

When a problem arises in OS X because of a software configuration error, often one troubleshooting step to take for clearing the issue or at least investigating it further is to boot into Safe Mode; however, sometimes Safe Mode may not work.

Booting to Safe Mode in OS X is done by holding the Shift key at startup, which triggers a minimal boot environment where only basic Apple-supplied extensions and services are loaded. This will help you determine if problems are happening from peripheral devices or third-party extensions such as those supplied by some security software packages. In addition to … Read more

It's been a busy year at the home of Firefox, as Mozilla went public with major developments meant to change the Web, but it's about to get much busier as it looks to make those initiatives a reality. A key step forward will be to unify its development schedules under a project named Kilimanjaro.

Oh, and it wants to have Kilimanjaro bagged by September of this year. The related bugs blocking Kilimanjaro have all been marked as "highest priority."

Damon Sicore, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, explained in a forum post that Kilimanjaro is about … Read more

New Intel solid-state drives are aimed at boosting Windows startup and wake times, making them a hardware feature that will be especially applicable to Windows 8.

The Intel SSD 313 Series offers what is in effect a solid-state drive cache, increasing the "responsiveness" of PCs that are based on hard disk drives -- that being a word Intel and Microsoft throw around a lot these days.

Responsiveness is code for the kind of instant-on experience you get on a tablet or smartphone.

And both Windows 8 PCs (think: ultrabooks) and tablets should offer that kind of responsiveness as … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions on external hard drives appearing as read-only, Apple's USB modem not working after upgrading to OS X Lion, whether triple-booting OS X and Windows will work properly, and Safari's menu bar disappearing after zooming the window. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, post them in the comments!

Question: External hard drive appearing as read-only MacFixIt reader Orlando asks:

Stupid Andy sits in the guest seat and he has a bone to pick with Cinavia today. I'm warning you that this discussion is technically the first time we've nerded out about DRM systems so hard, but it's relevant in terms of resale, personal file backups, and the rumor that the next PlayStation console won't allow used games.… Read more

Mozilla's Marketplace has begun accepting app submissions, looking toward the ultimate goal of building a standalone operating system for the open Web.

As part of the company's Boot to Gecko project, these apps would allow for cross-device and multi-operating system integration, which means anchoring the apps to the user and not to the device or platform.

"Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, a developer can build an app using responsive design, and that app can offer the same look and feel as a device-native app, without having to rewrite for every desired target platform," Joe Stagner, Mozilla'… Read more

Apple's move to Intel processors for its Mac systems in 2006 opened up many opportunities for Mac users, one of which was the ability to install and boot Windows directly on the Mac hardware without any emulation. To facilitate this for those who needed it, Apple introduced Boot Camp to easily partition the hard drive and supply drivers to the Windows OS for various features like iSight cameras and multitouch trackpads.

Boot Camp is a great option to have on the Mac, but unfortunately its support from Apple is rather limited, especially if you need to migrate from your … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was … Read more