Dozens of readers submitted today's biggest news bugget: "Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, codenamed "Dapper Drake". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures, for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu." For those who like the visuals, OSDir provides the fix. Update by TH: Instructions on installing this release on Apple's MacBook.

The inevitable flood of Vista Beta 2 reviews are starting, and today there are two prominent reviews. Tom's Harware UK has spent 500 hours with Vista and given it a general thumbs up in its screenshot heavy review. Ars Technica also takes a look at the progress of Vista, but trivializes some larger Vista features, such as the completely rewritten Windows Mail.

Microsoft is to overhaul Windows' graphic driver model after realising that the one that will ship with Windows Vista - Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.0 - needs improvement in the way it shares GPU resources between programs and Windows itself.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, speedups in KHTML, over 800 minor issues fixed, small new features and new translations.

Novell's OpenSUSE 10.1 is a solid, multipurpose Linux-based operating system that - in addition to being a very good distribution in its own right - offers an early peek at the SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop product that Novell is set to ship this summer. What has always (and still does) set SUSE apart is the measure of management homogeneity that the distribution brings to this diverse set of components - mostly through its Yast system configuration framework. Overall, eWEEK Labs appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp.

Sun Microsystems will fire up to 5000 workers this year, as the company tries to cut costs and make it easier to post quarterly profits. All told, Sun expects to cleave off between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of its 37500 person workforce. The firings mark the first mass layoff to take place under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has historically been reluctant to let go of staff, despite Wall Street's constant calls to trim costs via layoffs. CNet has more.

Newcastle-based Jade Integration will launch one of the smallest thin-client computers available in the UK to date, the Jack PC, next month. Containing all the electronics needed to run as a low- to medium-power PC, the Jack PC, as its name suggests, will fit into a standard size wall socket. The entire PC sits on two layered circuitboards. It contains an AMD RISC processor to help reduce power consumption and heat output. The Jack PC thin client fits into a wall socket and is so energy-efficient it can get its power over Ethernet.

After a year in beta testing, Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off Windows Live OneCare, its all-in-one security and PC care subscription service. That package includes antivirus, anti-spyware and PC tuning and backup tools, along with free support for $49.95 USD per year.

Because of Ubuntu's big release tomorrow, a review of the latest release candidate. It concludes: "To sum up my experience with Ubuntu’s Dapper I will say that it is easily the most impressive Linux distribution I have used to date. The combination of speed, stability, ease of use and the excellant apt-get package manager, makes it the Linux distro to beat. The 5 years of upgrades is another incentive to try out Dapper as well. This would be the first time I would recommend a Linux distro to any computer user (including Windows users) and feel confident they would like the system, as well as be able to use the system proficiently shortly after testing out the system."

In his Weblog entry last week, Jonathan Schwartz wrote that "despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much on the table" as a possible option for open source Java. Schwartz also reported that Sun is making serious progress on open sourcing Java. "We're now making serious progress on open sourcing Java (and despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much on the table), while focusing the debate on what matters most: not access to lines of code (that's already widely available), but ensuring compatibility," said Schwartz.

Thiago Macieira says in his blog: "With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features." From now on, the KDE 4 tree will use DBUS. Due to the very extensive use of DCOP in KDE, this is a big jump for DBUS, "probably bring more applications into D-BUS in one go than there currently are".

"The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce its participation in the Google Summer of Code program designed to introduce students to open source software development. The FreeBSD Project received over 120 applications, amongst which 14 projects have been selected for funding."

"In the previous article in this series, you discovered a whole world of messages that the .NET Framework doesn't even capture. These messages can signal all kinds of events, request changes, and even can end your application. Unfortunately, the techniques described in that article only work for messages that the CLR passes to your application. Sometimes, you want to track messages that the CLR doesn't support."

"This article explains how a Solaris OS application with large memory requirements can effectively create a subprocess without unduly running out of memory or creating a deadlock. It also explores a related issue of how application memory is committed in the Solaris OS as opposed to other operating systems such as Linux." Here's a related article on ZFS and Solaris Containers