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.

"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.

"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."

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.

"Currently there are 2 solutions for Mac owners with an Intel chip for running Windows XP on their machine. First up is the solution from Apple called Boot Camp and secondly is the Virtual Machine (with Virtualization) from Parallels. So what's the difference? With Boot Camp Windows will be running 'natively', this means it will be running on the machine as if it was running on any regular PC from any manufacturer. This means full access to the CPU, Graphics and all other aspects. With Parallels Windows XP will be running on a 'Virtual Machine', this means that OS X will be running like normal with WinXP running inside a separate application, in effect two operating systems running at once."

This paper tries to compare Linux vs. Solaris. Its author comes to many conclusions, among which this is one of the more interesting: "All-in-all Solaris is a powerful, stable, conformant-to-standards OS that can run many open source applications as well as Linux, and some (mainly multithreaded applications) better than Linux. Like in the cases of Red Hat and Suse, the cost of support is extra, but it is more reasonably priced. Security patches are free which makes Solaris similar to Windows."