"Lines that once seemed clear are being smudged. Perhaps we delude ourselves to think that we once knew the difference between a 'big' operating system and a 'little' one, but today the biggest operating system ever written runs on desktop personal computers, not mainframes, and desktop operating systems are migrating to telephones and other consumer devices, while there is a trend for the "little" operating systems developed specifically for those devices to take on many of the capabilities of desktop operating systems as those devices themselves become more like computers. And, as further evidence that the apocalypse is upon us, you can, with Apple's blessing, run Windows Vista natively on your Macintosh. What are operating systems coming to?"

Linux is the clear winner out of a dispute between the Russian legal authorities and schools over who should carry the can over the use of pirated Windows software, The Inquirer magazine reports. Rather than attacking mobsters who peddle pirated copies of Windows directly to companies, the Russian coppers decided to lock up a Sepich headmaster who bought hot Windows software which came from Perm region’s Capital Construction Administration. Microsoft says that the incident has nothing to do with them, but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead.

Thanks largely to the open sourcing of the JDK, 2007 promises to be the most exciting year in Java programming. With the developer community in the driver's seat, expect to see Java programming propelled forward, backward, and sideways, probably all at once. This article takes a look at what's ahead for Java in Open Source and predicts what is coming for the Java platform.

Yesterday, Linspire and Canonical issued a joint announcement that Linspire would begin to base its distributions on Ubuntu rather than Debian, and that Ubuntu users would be able to use CNR to install proprietary applications and drivers, starting with the Fiesty Fawn release. Linspire is just the latest distro to switch from Debian to Ubuntu, though it may be the highest-profile distribution to do so. Are other distros in talks with Canonical? Steve George, Canonical's director of support and services, says that Canonical is in talks with other vendors, and says, "I think you'll see some announcements next week about other people using us as a platform."

Development of Mac OS X 10.5 is wrapping up faster than many at Apple even anticipated, and at present, a release can be expected as early as late March, sources say. Alongside the release of Version 10.5, code-named Leopard, will be new versions of Apple's consumer software suites, iLife '07 and iWork '07, which saw their release date pushed back due to expanded feature sets in both the applications. In addition, sources confirm that iLife '07 and iWork '07 will both contain numerous features dependent on Mac OS X 10.5, but whether Apple has made the unlikely and drastic move of completely axing support for earlier operating systems is less certain.

When it comes to open sourcing Solaris and Java, patents and politics are leading Sun toward a change of heart. The question is which open source licence should govern the building of projects out of the company's technology crown jewels. The open source Solaris project began with a Community Development and Distribution License, and open source Java employs version 2 of the General Public License. Now, though, Sun likes the idea of governing both projects with the upcoming GPL version 3, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said in a speech and an interview at the company's analyst summit in San Francisco on Tuesday.

"When Microsoft brings out a new operating system, it's always nice to know that you can actually take advantage of it. Sure, you're used to whatever you currently have, which is most likely Windows XP, but you also know that sooner or later, something new will come along that requires the new operating system. So when Vista finally shipped, I decided that the time had come. I'd upgrade one of the machines in the back room."

Longtime Windows expert Scot Finnie gave the Mac a three-month trial as his primary machine for work and home use. After 3 months, he concluded: "If you give the Mac three months, as I did, you won't go back either. The hardest part is paying for it - everything after that gets easier and easier."

"After a long and arduous journey that included a suspended validation last year, the Open Source Software Institute has announced that OpenSSL has regained its FIPS 140-2 validation and is now available for download. The validation process, which normally lasts a few months, took an astounding five years to complete, and those involved with the projects say they are already devising ways to avoid such long delays in future validations."

"One of the highlights of my recent trip to Europe was getting the chance to publicly show off some of the new features in our next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework (codenamed 'Orcas') for the first time publicly. You can download the deck I presented here . You can also watch a version of the Belgium talk. Orcas is going to be a pretty exciting release, and contains a ton of great functionality that I think you will really love. I'll be drilling down into more details of it over the next few months in many more blog posts."

When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

This is a long review of modern Word Processors. Part 1 published today covers Open Office (open source cross platform), as well as MS Word 2007, and WordPerfect X3.

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spell-checking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

UNIX has a dialect all its own and you will find with the UNIX command-line, there are many ways to skin a cat. Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, shares his extensive knowledge and experience with command-line combinations to help you expand your mastery of the UNIX language and in the command-line in particular.