Details have emerged this week that Microsoft may be planning to make it mandatory for laptop manufacturers who want to support its operating system to install hybrid flash drives. A Microsoft document specifying requirements for flash storage led to speculation that hybrid storage would be mandatory for all Vista laptops, from June 2007, but this has been denied by Microsoft.

GNOME 2.15.3 has been released. This is a development release, en route to GNOME 2.16, scheduled for September 2006. Release notes and download instructions are listed in the release anouncement. In the meantime, GNOME needs girls.

Monitoring your file systems and ensuring they don't fill up is a vital process in the day-to-day management of your UNIX systems. This article looks at methods for keeping an eye on disk space, discovering which files, users, or applications are using up the most space, and how to make use of quotas and other solutions to find the information you need.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server for SUN Sparc 64bit architecture. This release is an Ubuntu distribution for your servers, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, and a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default. Other packages and applications are available from a global network of mirrors, and professional, commercial technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world."

PC-BSD has just released their roadmap en route to PC-BSD 2.0. They want to focus on making the PC-BSD specific tools integrate better with the rest of KDE, while also doing a lot fo work on the installer. The team also released a list of open volunteer positions for those willing to help.

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. Itfeatures insights into the role of end-users in the GNOME community, and an interview with Emmanuele Bassi, gnome-utils maintainer and GTK+ developer. Writers in this edition are Vincent Untz, and Lucas Rocha, respectively.

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point.

Bill Gates is transitioning out of his full-time role at Microsoft, the software giant that's been under pressure due to a sagging stock price, competition from Google and nagging delays in the Vista operating system. In a press conference held Thursday after the stock markets had closed for regular trading, Gates announced that over the next two years he will gradually step away from his daily responsibilities at the company he co-founded some 30 years ago.

"Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Linspire are making headway in the desktop market, but if you want to try something really different, you can find other, less-well-known alternative operating systems. While these OSes may not be the most stable, or have the greatest hardware support, they offer some unique ideas." SkyOS, Haiku, Syllable and Visopsys are reviewed.

The Nexenta project, which builds a distribution combining the OpenSolaris kernel with applications from Ubuntu, has announced a new alpha release of NexentaOS: "This release provides a fully integrated Ubuntu Dapper Drake userland, OpenSolaris core (build #40), and contains overall 11800 packages. In addition, Alpha 5 contains: Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit (via NexentaOS APT); live upgrade; and OpenOffice.org 2.0, natively compiled on Nexenta OS."

"Parallels today announced that its Desktop for Mac virtualization software is available for purchase for $79.99, following the conclusion of a Beta program that generated more than 100000 testers from 71 countries and has resulted in the current stable, high-performance version. As a special incentive to new customers, the company will make the product available for $49.99 for 30 days following today’s announcement."

"Network attached storage has been known to Unix users for a very long time with NFS. NFS is reliable, performs well on the performance front, but it is infamous for its security. The biggest problem with NFS is that the client is responsible for controlling user file access. The NFS server just accepts file system operations on behalf of a given UID and enforces nearly no control. NFS require you trust your clients, something that may not be adequate. Andrew File System is an alternative network file system. In this interview, I ask Ty Sarna about his experience with AFS. Ty Sarna has been an AFS user since 1992 and is a NetBSD developer since 1998."

Microsoft's delay with the release of Windows Vista has left enough wiggle room for other players to pursue the desktop operating system market. An old Microsoft rival, Novell, is angling to seize the day with the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, a desktop OS geared to beat Vista in cost, manageability and features.

A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, VMware Player. It's a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can't create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.