Without question, Ultrabooks are the sexiest, trendiest laptops on the market right now, and with good reason. They’re thin and light like a MacBook Air and every bit as good looking (and in some cases, they’re thinner, lighter, and better looking than their iOS competitors), fast, and highly portable with long-lasting battery life. All of these things are attractive in a notebook, but if you could afford a desktop replacement laptop, would you still shop an Ultrabook? That’s a question consumers will have to answer.

According to DealNews.com, paying a premium for a decked out 17-inch laptop is something notebook shoppers used to do, but not anymore. Prices have dropped so much, in fact, that DealNews claims the new average price point for scoring a deal on a “souped up” 17-inch laptop is $550.

“And we’re not talking budget laptops here,” DealNews explains. “Desktop replacement laptops are high-end systems with a quad-core Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a minimum 750GB hard drive. So while Apple may be toying with the idea of terminating its desktop replacement, we’re here to tell you that desktop replacements are where you’ll find the best laptop deals today.”

According to DealNews, prices for desktop replacement-class systems typically climb after all the Black Friday sales come and go, but “after last November, deals on these premium laptops have not rebounded; instead they remained at Black Friday lows.” It’s a buyer’s market, and if you’re paying more than $800, you’re paying too much, DealNews says.

We don’t necessarily agree with that last statement, at least when talking about the more hardcore desktop replacement laptops with more powerful graphics options than what you’ll find on a typical 17-inch notebook. But the point is well taken that if you’re spending a fortune on a 17-inch system, you probably could have done better by shopping around, especially if you don’t need an ultra high-end GPU.

Image Credit: Hewlett-Packard

While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release, assumed to be Mandriva Linux 2012.

In a posting on the Mandriva wiki, development community members stated that even though there is no official roadmap as of yet, "there is a Mandriva community effort around a new Mandriva release, in order to keep people stimulated to contribute." The community draft is not hosted or sponsored by Mandriva, so any plans are tentative on Mandriva’s official position to come.

In the Development Community Draft, a few details are emerging. The first was the assumption that the next release will be dubbed Mandriva Linux 2012, "scheduled to be released in 2012."

Per Øyvind Karlsen will be acting as project leader with Bernhard Rosenkränzer & Matthew Dawkins serving as release managers. They figure the desktop edition will be released in "i586, x32, & x86_64 DVDs live and installable images." A technology preview is planned before the end of the month with an alpha to arrive in June. Beyond that is to come.

The draft points to a spec proposal and an idea list as possible features. Some of the spec proposals include things like Switch to eglibc, Switch to gcc 4.7.x, Adopt prelink by default, and Revive Aurora bootloader. The list of features will firm up in the weeks to come.

No mention was made on whether Mandriva will be staying with the ROSA desktop other than a reference to the "Mandriva Desktop," which almost sounds like Mandriva 2012 will be using ROSA or a ROSA-like desktop. Some were hoping to see a more default KDE return.

Of course, nothing is written in stone as of yet.

Fresh on the heels of releasing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical has delivered an updated version of its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. As found in previous versions, this new update features applications likely to be appreciated by business users, and doesn’t include various games and other entertainment-focused options. The update is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and here’s more on what you’ll find in it.

Canonical, of course, has made much noise recently about how it wants more enterprises and businesses of all sizes to adopt Ubuntu. The 12.04 release expanded long-term support and added cloud computing options for just that reason. The new Business Desktop Remix is squarely focused on business users, as noted on the Canonical blog:

"Designed for corporate and government organisations evaluating Ubuntu for their desktop infrastructure, the Business Desktop Remix is a simple base image that can be deployed into your corporate environment or used as a starting point for further customisation."

The post also clarifies some of the choices regarding bundled applications:

"To save time in deployment, we’ve removed games, social networking programs, file sharing apps and technical tools. In their place, you’ll find software more appropriate for a corporate environment, including VMware View, the Adobe Flash Plugin and the OpenJDK 6 Java runtime environment. Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix provides full language support in both 32 and 64-bit builds, just like the standard Ubuntu. Users also benefit from the great new productivity features introduced in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, including built-in support for Microsoft Windows RDP 7.1 and the Microsoft Visio diagram importer in LibreOffice Draw."

Can a combination of long-term support, and a set of applications optimized for business users help Ubuntu become more entrenched in businesses? Many businesses are standardized on Microsoft’s platforms, and in some cases extricating these businesses from those platforms is a tall order. However, just as Red Hat has found success aggressively supporting open source software, Canonical can definitely increase Ubuntu’s footprint in businesses.

The Business Desktop Remix requires registration, and you can register and download here. 

This week, the Citrix Synergy conference is going on in San Francisco, with lots of news related to Citrix’s CloudStack strategy coming out, and more. Through today, Friday, you can still access live keynotes and sessions from the conference, available by webcast here. Here is a roundup of some of the major news out of Citrix Synergy.

Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says "customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models."

Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene. 

In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here.  Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.

At the conference, Citrix is also swe covered here. Citrix is positioning Podio as a new part of its GoTo line of products, which includes GoToMeeting, and if you consider Podio alongside both GoToMeeting and CloudStack, it becomes clear that Citrix has its eye on end-to-end cloud platform tools, including approachable front-end applications. While Podio isn’t open source, its freemium model and user-configurable cloud collaboration environments have an open and flexible ethos to them. There is a good discussion of this week’s Podio demos here.

With all of Citrix’s CloudStack moves, it’s becoming clear that CloudStack will do direct battle with OpenStack, but we’ve noted that there is room for both of these open source cloud platforms.  We’ve covered Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy. Both OpenStack and CloudStack have many big backers, so it’s natural that these two platforms are being characterized as engaged in a high-profile fight.

The ReadWriteCloud Channel extrapolated on the notion that multiple cloud platforms can succeed in an excellent point in a post titled "It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud":

"Assuming even one-third of the companies that pledged to support CloudStack become serious contributors, CloudStack should have a bright future. It takes little away from OpenStack for CloudStack to succeed…After all the dust settles, it would be best for everyone from the open source cloud communities to figure out how they can work together. The "there can be only one" approach isn’t going to help anybody, and may benefit Amazon, VMware and other proprietary vendors who can market their wares without any drama."

We’ll round up more news from Citrix Synergy, but through the end of today, you can still catch the free webcasts of events from the conference.

Street Fighter x Tekken handles colors in a completely different way from Street Fighter 4 and its derivatives as a result of the color customization feature. Instead of just pulling colors and textures directly from the texture image, the textures look like this:
and the game calculates the appropriate color based on a series of numbers, which represent a color mix from the texture image’s color channels. These numbers are stored in the *.obj.emm files–specifically the ‘MatCol’ attributes–alongside the various other object materials and material attributes.
There are two main ways to edit *.obj.emm files, manually via hex or using NanjouJ’s MatEdit tool, which is a little more user-friendly than fiddling with hex codes. In this tutorial, we’ll be using MatEdit to copy colors from another color file, rather than calculating the color from scratch. If you would like to calculate an entirely new color from scratch, this post from yajirobe does a good job of explaining it.
So, first thing, we need to make backups of any of the files we plan to mess with. Once you’ve done that, go download MatEdit from the AE wiki’s ‘tools’ page and identify which files you want to work with. I’m going to be copying a color from one of Ryu’s *.obj.emm files into one of Poison’s.
Now, create a new folder (on your desktop or wherever) and copy matedit.exe and both Ryu and Poison’s *.obj.emm files into it. Then, hold ctrl+shift on your keyboard and right-click somewhere inside that folder, and choose ‘Open command window here’:
 This will open a command line window, but don’t freak out. I’m going to tell you exactly what to type in.

First thing, we want to export the materials from both of our files, using the syntax “matedit.exe export [target obj.emm file] [newfile.txt].” So, in my case, I’m going to type (replace PSN/RYU and poison/ryu as appropriate for your files):

matedit.exe export PSN_01_01.obj.emm poison.txt

and

matedit.exe export RYU_01_01.obj.emm ryu.txt

If done correctly, you should have two new files in your directory, in my case, poison.txt and ryu.txt. At this point, we’re done with the command line for now, but don’t close it yet because we’re going to need it again later.

For now, open both files in the text editor of your choice. Notepad works, but I prefer Notepad++ (it’s free and awesome; go get it).

Open both of the txt files in your text editor. You’ll see a series of sections which correspond to the various objects that make up the character’s model. In each section, there are a bunch of variables and values that tell the game how to render each object. The ones we’re worried about today are the MatCol variables:
 You’ll notice that I highlighted just the *R, *G and *B MatCols, which correspond to the red, green and blue color channels, respectively, and not the *A MatCol, which corresponds to the Alpha channel. You shouldn’t mess with the alpha value if you’re just trying to change colors.

So, lets say we want to take the color of Ryu’s pants–i.e., white–and copy it over to Poison’s hair. To do this, we would hop over to our ryu.txt file and search for ‘pants.’ Then, scroll down through his ‘pants’ section until we find the MatCol subsection.
 In this case, I only have a single color, MatCol0 to choose from, but some models will have multiple color groups, such as MatCol1 and MatCol2. These MatCols represent the color groups that can be customized in-game, so make sure you’re choosing the correct one.

Copy those values and then switch over the poison.txt file and search for ‘hair.’ Scroll down to the MatCol section and replace the values there with your new, copied values:
 Great, we’re almost done.

The last step is to import the modified text files back into the target *.obj.emm file. So, back to your command line window (if you didn’t listen earlier and closed it, just open a new one) and type:

matedit.exe import poison.txt PSN_01_01.obj.emm

Now you’re ready to test it out. Copy the PSN_01_01.obj.emm file into your [install directory]\resource\CMN\battle\chara\PSN folder, overwriting the one that was there (you made a backup, right??) and go check it out.

If you had calculated a new color from scratch using yajirobe’s instructions instead of copying the color from some other costume, you would go through the exact same steps, only using your calculated color numbers instead of the ones from Ryu’s pants.

That’s it. Have fun, share your work and always make backups.