Microsoft on Wednesday gave developers access to a key piece of Windows Vista, months ahead of the operating system's release. The company posted near-final versions of two software development technologies that are part of WinFX, the underlying programming model being introduced with Vista, which is slated to ship late this year. The release is "a significant checkpoint" on the road toward delivery of the company's new programming model since it allows developers to build and deploy applications on their core production systems, according to Ari Bixhorn, director of Web services strategy at Microsoft.

The VP of Intel's digital enterprises group told the INQ this morning that the Itanium microprocessor is starting to make waves in the corporate enterprise market. Kirk Skaugen, of the servers platform group, showed a slide which claimed the Itanium processor was eating into Sun and IBM Power shares, based on "customer revenues". He also said that since the fourth quarter of 2003, applications for the Itanium family had grown to 5900 by the end of 2005.

Corel is targeting disaffected Microsoft customers with discounted 'upgrade' offers for those who switch to the new WordPerfect Office X3. Corel on Tuesday announced an updated version of WordPerfect Office, its rival to Microsoft's dominant Office suite. The new program adds the ability to import and export its files to Adobe's PDF. The software also has a new interface and promises better support for multilingual characters and an easy way to strip out metadata from a file. ZDNet has a review too.

Intel has released betas of its software development tools for Mac OS X running on the Intel architecture. The tools consist of a Fortran and C++ compilers, a math kernel library and a performance primitives library. The tools are specifically designed to support Intel's Core Duo dual-core processor, as found in all the new Macs. The toolchain integrates into Apple's Xcode IDE, meaning the Intel compilers can be used in the production of Universal Binaries--applications packaged with code for both Power and Intel architecture machines.

"Mandriva today announced a new partnership with HP to distribute HP computers pre-loaded with Mandriva Linux 2006 to 37 countries in Latin America. As part of the agreement, Mandriva has been named the 'Preferred Linux Partner for Latin America' and Mandriva Linux 2006 has been optimized and certified for HP machines. The companies will work together on sales, support and marketing in all Latin American territories, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico."

"Monad, also known more formally as the MSH Command Shell, is a next generation Windows command shell. Built on top of the .NET Framework, MSH provides a powerful infrastructure for the automation of a wide range of administrative tasks. At last, the command line is a first-class citizen in the world of Windows system management."

Opera 8.5 Pocket PC beta version is based on the same core as the Opera 8.5 desktop browser and brings the full internet to mobile Pocket PCs. The version is available for both WM 2003 and WM 5.0. We tested the browser and we were very happy to see that it supports the VGA resolution out of the box, as our comparative screenshot reveals. There are still bugs though, namely with zoom control, fonts become huge when unchecking the "fit to screen" option or going landscape, and the fact that it doesn't pop up the virtual keyboard when a form field/URL-bar is focused. Other than that, it looks great.

Trolltech has updated and renamed its graphics toolkit and development kit for embedded Linux devices. "Qtopia Core" is based on a Linux port of the company's Qt 4.0 development framework, and replaces its earlier Qt/Embedded product. It targets "single-application products" built on embedded Linux.

What ever happened to the total computer newbies who tried Debian (part I | part II)? Mike, Diane, Mary & Carla are still doing very well, although much has changed since the first articles were written. They no longer use Libranet. They no longer use Gnome & believe it or not, Windows has now been installed. Read along to find out what happened.

Ars reviews the Intel iMac, and concludes: "For $1299, the iMac Core Duo is a good buy. You get a 160GB SATA hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, and a 1440x900 17" LCD monitor along with a dual-core CPU. I'm always reluctant to play the cross-platform price comparison game, but I will note that this machine stacks up quite favorably in terms of price and features with Pentium D desktops. All in all, the iMac Core Duo is an impressive machine. If the rest of Apple's product line moves to Intel this smoothly, the transition should prove to be a big success."

"Steve Jobs foiled the rumormongers once more at last week's Macworld Expo. Most observers expected that Apple would announce the first Macintosh computers that partake of powerful and efficient Intel Core Duo microprocessors, the same used by top-notch Windows machines. But almost no one thought that the first of these machines would be the most popular Macs that Apple makes - the elegant desktop iMac and the workhorse PowerBook laptop (now renamed the MacBook Pro). After his keynote, he spoke to NewsWeek's Steven Levy, between sips of tea."

"This interview was conducted with Martin F. Krafft, the author of 'The Debian System'. Despite Debian GNU/Linux's important role in today's computing environment, it is largely misunderstood and oftentimes even discounted as being an operating system which is exclusively for professionals and elite users. In this book Krafft, explains his concept of Debian, which includes not only the operating system but also its underpinnings."

The 'preliminary' due date for the next collection of fixes and patches for Microsoft's desktop operating system is as more than a year later than many company watchers were expecting. Microsoft has gone public with a tentative date for its third service pack for Windows XP. And that date - the latter half of 2007 - is considerably later than many company watchers were expecting.

A push is under way to endow Linux with a virtual partitioning technology used by rival operating systems to make servers more efficient. SWsoft is trying to get OpenVZ made part of the mainstream Linux kernel - the software at the heart of the operating system - and a part of the major commercial Linux versions, said Kirill Korotaev, a project manager at the company. In this, it has a major ally: Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, which plans to add the software to its free Fedora version of Linux for enthusiasts.