WindowsForDevices.com has obtained an exclusive copy of the powerpoint slides used in the keynote presentation at Microsoft's 3rd annual Windows Embedded Developer Conference at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Also, according to data recently compiled by Evans Data Corp (EDC), Windows and Linux are running neck-and-neck in terms of developer use for future projects.

Microsoft Corp. has told beta testers of Office 11, its next-version Office desktop productivity suite, that the product will only work with the Windows 2000 operating system with Service Pack 3 installed, Windows XP and later desktop releases. While Office 11 is slated for release next year, today Win9x/ME/NT OSes still hold about 52% of the overall OS market, and by next year's Office release, this is still expected to be around 40%. This is a tremendous amount of sales getting wasted (Office is the main income for Microsoft), but Microsoft said that this decision was mostly taken in order to incorporate new technologies on Office that are only available on the 2k/XP OSes, and also for security reasons ("Windows 9x is inherently insecure" Sloan Crayton of Microsoft said).

The KDE Project yesterday announced the release of KDE 3.1 RC 1. This release, while important, will have but a short lifespan (RC 2 is scheduled for next Monday), and so binary packages are not planned. More info at the Dot.

Linux distributor SuSE is hoping to get desktop users to switch to its operating system with a new edition of its software specifically designed for office workers--including software that allows it to run Microsoft Office and other Windows applications. Read the report at ZDNews.

Recent research on reconfigurable hardware designs has highlighted novel ways in which computers can dynamically change their structure to increase performance and density. However, work has only just begun to develop operating systems that can exploit theses types of hardware. Akin to hitting a moving target, making stable operating systems that can adapt to rapidly changing hardware will be an interesting challenge to operating systems researchers.

The Middleware Company (market leader in enterprise Java training and consulting) has performed a new comparison of the performance and scalability of J2EE and .NET based on the familiar Pet Store application. This time, the Middleware Company has re-coded the J2EE Petstore and optimized the implementation for performance. Their report show that .NET outperforms Java in most of the specific tests they conducted. Lots of discussion already here.

"As good as Mac OS X is for desktops and laptops, one wonders if the FreeBSD inside is not too restricted by the Apple jacket around it to also make for an efficient, secure and fast server OS. Apple is now busy convincing the world that Apples make also for excellent server appliances in the handy U1 format, thanks to OS X. That new product is called Apple Xserve. Many potential buyers are, however, asking themselves if OS X—given its recent introduction—is ready today to handle their critical apps." Read the article at Byte. In the meantime, Apple released Darwin 6.0.2 for both PPC and x86.

The latest blast of great distros continues with Xandros Desktop. Xandros is another debian based distro, geared toward the desktop and promising good Windows compatibility. Our initial impression of Xandros is very positive. It lives up to a lot of its potential, with a few drawbacks. Read the review.

Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree. LinuxJournal tests the preemptible patch.

Microsoft Corp. is developing two new versions of its Windows CE operating system that will give smart devices greater storage capabilities and, as such, a more vital role in the enterprise as a portable data repository. "Everybody knows that Microsoft Corp. rarely innovates. You know the knock. While companies like Apple Computer Inc. roll out bold and original hardware and software products, Microsoft relies on tweaks to its world-dominant Windows software." This article is at Boston.com.

GTK-Sharp, the C# bindings for GTK+ is now on version 0.5, same version as QT-Sharp is. Both work with Mono, the free .NET implementation. On other dev news, Qt 3.0.6 is released, changes here.

Plaintiffs in private antitrust lawsuits including Sun, Netscape and Be win a point as they are told they may be able to use findings from the government's earlier case.

ZDNet is reporting on a recent Butler Group report that estimates that by 2009 Linux will have greater market share than proprietary OSes from Sun, HP, and IBM.

After reading many of the posts regarding the recent OSNews story, "An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0", I thought this article may be useful to those who would like to try Debian, but are a little intimidated by its installer. Several of the posts to the above mentioned story indicated that Debian's installer was a huge hurtle for many people, who would otherwise like to try it. I have found Debian to be the most useful flavor of Linux, so I wanted to write an easy, though somewhat long, walkthrough in the hopes of allowing a wider audience to experience first hand this stable and unique Linux distribution.