The legal case between Apple and Psystar has just taken another, very small turn. Psystar gained a small victory over Apple today, because U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup allowed Psystar to modify its counter-suit against Apple, after he had dismissed the original counter-suit. However, something more interesting came out of this ruling: the judge hinted at what would happen if Psystar were to win.

The center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional, massive operating systems of the past, as even the major OSes are slimming their footprint to make code bases easier to manage and secure, and to increase the variety of devices on which they can run, InfoWorld reports. Microsoft, for one, is cutting down the number of services that run at boot to ensure Windows 7 will run across a spectrum of hardware. Linux distros such as Ubuntu are stripping out functionality, including MySQL, CUPS, and LDAP, to cut footprints in half. And Apple appears headed for a slimmed-down OS X that will enable future iPhones or tablet devices to run the same OS as the Mac. Though these developments don't necessarily mean that the browser will supplant the OS, they do show that OS vendors realize they must adapt as virtualization, cloud computing, netbooks, and power concerns drive business users toward smaller, less costly, more efficient operating environments.

The Avant Window Navigator (Awn) project has released version 0.3.2 of the dock for the Free Desktop, and its applets. This represents a year's worth of bug fixes, performance improvements, and new applets. The developers are actively working on getting updated packages to various distributions. The source code tarballs for both the dock and the applets are available on Launchpad.

"In January we published a review of the AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs on Linux- when we looked at four of the Opteron 2384 models. The performance of these 45nm quad-core workstation/server processors were great when compared to the earlier AMD Barcelona processors on Ubuntu Linux, but how is their performance when running Sun's OpenSolaris operating system? Up for viewing today are dual AMD Shanghai benchmarks when running OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10, and a daily build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release."

No major events of announcements this week, but that doesn't mean we didn't have any interesting content the past 7 days. The steady stream of news about Windows 7 continues to flow, while the netbook stream dried up a bit. We also some very interesting releases this week, such as the latest ReactOS and a new JNode release. Linus Torvalds made headline news once again because of his comments about having multiple Linux distributions, and it became clear SGI is in trouble yet again. This week's My Take is about working on a dream.

US resident already had the pleasure/disgrace (take your pick) of buying non-Apple computers with Mac OS X pre-installed through PsyStar. European customers were left out in the cold, as PsyStar is a US-based company which undoubtedly makes shipping across the pond rather expensive. Despair no longer, European clone enthusiasts: German PearC is here.

Fedora 11 Alpha was released a couple of days back. Phoronix takes a quick look "While a few delays were experienced by the Red Hat engineers and community working on Fedora 11 (a.k.a. Leonidas), the first alpha release of this popular Linux distribution is now available. The 11th release of Fedora will bring a huge set of new features and updated packages, with much of the work already being visible in Fedora 11 Alpha." "Starting with the installation, Fedora 11 is now using the EXT4 file-system by default but there is support built into the Anaconda installer for Btrfs, which recently entered the mainline Linux kernel."

Blood Frontier is a hot new free and open source first person shooter with original artwork and based on the Cube 2 engine. Phoronix takes a look "Blood Frontier is based upon the Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine. Like Cube and Cube 2, Blood Frontier uses OpenGL and SDL, which makes it multi-platform friendly with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X." Read more

If there is one company out there that embodies "former glory", it just has to be Silicon Graphics Incorporated. Once one of the most well-respected high-performance computer and software makers of the world, it is now a mere shadow of its former self. The most recent set of financial results from the company do not bode well for the already troubled company.

According to Keir Thomas, author of "Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference," the said book has been downloaded over 150,000 times within days of its launch. The book is supposedly written for even the timid of the Windows users who wish to switch over, assuming that the user has "zero Linux knowledge." According to Thomas, the book takes the unknowing user by the hand throughout the installation process and then delves into the file system and manager, and even covers the command line features as well as system security. The book was published and sold for $9.94 on Amazon, but is also available for free as a downloadable PDF here. Assuming each download represents a struggling to-be Linux user, it sounds like there are just barrels of them waiting to be converted.

Recently, the first public version was released of the alpha development version of REBOL 3, the advanced programming language by Carl Sassenrath of Amiga OS fame. Now, native versions have also been released for Linux and Mac OS X. Like the private version of a year ago, the Linux version runs on Syllable Server. These versions are currently comparable to REBOL/Core 2, without the graphical system, and can be downloaded through here. REBOL is an important part of Syllable's cross-platform strategy.

Common Windows problems could soon be solved by clicking a "Fix It" button. Microsoft has started putting the button on its web-based support pages that detail the most common problems hitting PC and Windows users. Clicking the button kicks off a download that, once run, carries out the series of steps needed to fix a specific problem or remove a bug. Microsoft also has plans to extend the click-to-fix system to help users recover from a crash.

You have to hand it to them: Microsoft has made an excellent marketing move the last couple of days. Remember the UAC issue we reported on earlier? It turned out that changing UAC settings did not actually trigger a UAC dialog, allowing scripts and malware to disable UAC altogether without the user ever noticing anything - obviously leaving the system wide open. After stating numerous times the company wouldn't do anything about this issue, they have now done a complete 180, and will fix UAC to work as many had already advised. A brilliant marketing ploy right there.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. Some funny responses by the passers-by in this little nonsense-investigation.