A recent IDC report showed Linux servers continuing to increase market share for x86 architecture with a second consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, but the bigger news could be Microsoft's even bigger surge with Server 2003. The software giant's Server 2003 showed modest gains in Q1, with IDC reporting that Microsoft Windows Server revenue was USD 4.8 billion in Q1. This number represents 10.4% year-over-year growth and a gain of 1.9 points of revenue market share over the same period in 2006. Windows encompassed 38.8% of all server revenue in Q1 of 2007.

Tonight (19:00 CET), Apple's CEO Steve Jobs will deliver his keynote speech for the attendants of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Fransisco. As always, the Mac world is buzzing with rumours. Firstly, a photo taken with a camera phone suggests Apple will release a sub-notebook, with a 10" LED widescreen, 120GB flashdrive, and a programmable LCD keyboard. Another persistent rumour is that Apple will replace its iMac line with thinner, brushed-metal 20" and 24" iMacs. Lastly, a German website claims to have an outline of the keynote speech - this outline confirms the new iMacs, but also has some interesting notes on Leopard: a unified, standard theme (this alone would make the keynote worthwhile for me), a new Finder, resolution independence, and more. As always, take these rumours with a bag of salt.

"It wasn't until last week during a meeting with Sun that some new light was shed on the Solaris Check Tool and as a result we decided to explore this tool further. Check Tool is a bootable CD that lets the user know whether the hardware they have installed is likely to work with Solaris or not. If a third-party driver is needed for a particular piece of hardware, the Check Tool will even provide a link to the driver needed. There are currently a few rough spots with the tool, but improvements are planned and in this article we will share more information on this program that can tell you in a matter of minutes whether you'll face a hardware compatibility nightmare or will be running Solaris/Solaris Express with ease."

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lit a 60 watt light bulb from a power source two meters away and with no physical connections between the source and the appliance. The 'WiTricity' device - the term coined by the MIT team to describe the wireless power phenomenon - uses magnetic fields to deliver power to the gadgets remotely."

A minor extra release of MINIX 3.1.3 was done, called 3.1.3a, correcting some flaws in 3.1.3. "Found after release time and fixed in 3.1.3a: mkfs does not check for overflow of firstdatazone field in superblock; a missing check in rename caused moving directories to hang sometimes; autopart truncates new partitions at 4GB. If you want to create a larger partition, use part (expert mode) to do that first; and more."

El Reg takes a look at ten desktop computers, from Apple's Mac Pro to Dell's exotic XPS M2010. The verdict: "The ten PCs we have looked at here represent a huge cross-section of the computer market and as such offer varied functionality depending on specific needs and budgets. If you're looking for an imposing combo of power and potent design then the Alienware really should be your first and only port of call. For us, if money were no object we'd opt for the Dell XPS for its sheer bling factor, but in the real world give us an Apple Mac Pro and we're happy."

"There's nothing new under the sun, some folk say, and that's certainly true of Palm's recently announced Foleo. It's the palmtop reborn in a slightly sexier, slightly larger form. Even its name is reminiscent of that bygone arena - it's rather like the Atari Portfolio, the world's first palmtop PC, released in June 1989."

The second release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This is the second 'rc' release, and contains primarily bug fixes and other minor improvements." Get it from the download page.

"The Linux kernel is the core of a large and complex operating system, and while it's huge, it is well organized in terms of subsystems and layers. In this article, you explore the general structure of the Linux kernel and get to know its major subsystems and core interfaces."

"Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information."

The KOffice team has released KOffice 1.6.3. "This is the last maintenance release of the 1.6 series, containing mainly bug fixes. There are bug fixes for almost all of the components. See the complete changelog for the complete information."

"In "Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face," we began our extensive assessment of Windows Vista with a focus on the changes to the graphical framework of Windows. We also talked about improvements to the general Windows API, the media foundation, and improvements in sound. In what follows, we look at three remaining areas of major improvement for Vista: security, networking, and storage. At the end, we present the first round of our criticisms of the new OS. In the coming weeks, we will unveil our performance-oriented examination of the OS."

Kolibri 0.7.0.0 has been released. "Less than 4 months since our previous release and we are glad to give you a new one, Kolibri 0.7.0.0. There are quite a lot of changes for such a small amount of time. The kernel was modified to use a flat memory model and to support fast system calls (sysenter, syscall). There are also many other changes such as kernel configuration using external ini-file, special /sys directory, system boot screen improvements, and much more." The web operating system EyeOS 1.0 (and 1.0.1 shortly after) has also been released.

Red Hat just made it possible to bootstrap OpenJDK using only Free Software by building on top of gcj and replacing the binary blobs with code from GNU Classpath. The result is called IcedTea. IKVM also made a GNU Classpath/OpenJDK hybrid making it possible to run parts of the OpenJDK class libraries on mono and .net. And finally the Cacao team released a new version of Cacao that can use either GNU Classpath for a full J2SE implementation or that uses the Sun GPL J2ME libraries, including jits for lots of different architectures (alpha, arm, mips, ppc, ppc64, x86 and x86_64).