Top 10 MCU Vendors 2008

From EETIMS

It is sad to see that quite some of them are struggling. Renesas and NEC Electronics are struggling and may combine force. Freescale and NXP are also not in good shape. Atmel and Infineon are not really much better either.

Here are some articles from EETIMES.
NEC Electronics, Renesas target next April for merger
Can Freescale beat the odds?
Will KKR inject more funds into NXP?

LXDE under Ubuntu 9.04

LXDE is a light weight desktop environment. It is not as full-feature as XFCE and some say it is just a bunch of program around Openbox and PCManfm. But actually there are more and more programs for LXDE and I think it has its place for light weight desktop environment.

LXDE under Ubuntu 9.04 is really very fast. If you are a minimalist and tired of Gnome and KDE and if even XFCE is too big for you, LXDE is worth a try. Apparently Ubuntu 9.04 does not come with the latest XFCE stuffs compared to XFCE's Sourceforge site.

Here is the screenshot with Lxlauncher which you may find similar things with some netbooks.

Xubuntu 9.04 First Impression

I already ran XFCE 4.6 in Ubuntu 8.10. So I installed XFCE under Ubuntu 9.04 and it was quite smooth. Personally I am more at home with Gnome but XFCE seems to be quite functional and responsive.

There is a Chinese Live CD distro based on Xubuntu (along with LXDE) : Hiweed Linux. The 2.0RC version is based on Xubuntu 8.10. Maybe
it should instead be based on 9.04. Hiweed added ibus and ibus-pinyin and some other Chinese addons to Xubuntu.

Screenshot:

Kubuntu 9.04 First Impression

I had not found any really good impressions about KDE for Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) ever since I used 5.04. I have better impressions about KDE since running KDE 4.2.2 under Ubuntu 8.10. But the startup time and logout time are both a bit slow there.

Apparently Kubuntu 9.04 is better. It is noticeably faster than KDE 4.2 under Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 during login/logout and normal operation. So that is a big positive. KDE 4.2 is really quite sleek and beautiful compared to plain Gnome although the smoothness is still not as good as Gnome.

Initially I got no sound when playing MP3, similar to what I met when I installed Arch Linux the first time. The log-in/log-out sound are there. The mixer shows the correct device, just got no sound from other applications. By comparison, Gnome just works without any issues with 9.04, as always even since 5.04 (ok I admit I had some problems with 5.10 initially last time). I had to use Mixer of Gnome to "kick-start" the sound. I got sound but Dragon player still does not work. KDE told me this during after startup that"Notification from Phonon: The audio playback device HDA Nvidia (ALC1200 Analog) does not work. Falling back to default." I checked back the 8.10 installation and actually the problem with Dragon Player was there already.

Overall KDE4.2.2 under Kubuntu 9.04 is actually quite good even though there are occasional stability problem here and there. I will run KDE session more often than last time. Hopefully KDE 4.3 will be even better.

Screenshot: