With some 24 hours until Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to kick off Macworld Expo, Think Secret presents a compilation of information we have received and reported over the last number of months concerning Apple's anticipated announcements.

PCMag reviews the HP TouchSmart IQ770, an all-in-one computer with a touchscreen display, and conlcudes: "Is the HP TouchSmart IQ770 an iMac killer? In a word: maybe. In its current incarnation the IQ770 certainly outclasses the current Windows-based Editors' Choice the Sony Vaio VGC-LS1. I am going to hold my final judgement on the IQ770 until we put it up against other Vista-based PCs, but so far I like what I see."

"Two luminaries - chairmen of Apple and Microsoft - make keynotes this week, in a highly anticipated standoff between the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld. While analysts, bloggers and reporters will debate different strategies in operating systems (Leopard vs. Vista), entertainment (iTV vs. Home Server, Media Center and Windows Live), digital media (iLife vs. Windows Ultimate Extras and Windows Live), music (iPod vs. Zune) or mobiles (iPhone vs. Windows Mobile), I will focus on the men's personalities and the companies' different approaches to the events. The contrasts in style and substance will be important in making sense out of the companies' announcements."

"In this weeks' edition of the Road to KDE 4, we'll take a look at the up and coming KWord 2.0 as part of the KOffice project. KWord 1.6.1 is already a powerful KDE-integrated word processor, but with KDE 4 technologies, KWord 2.0 promises to be among the most powerful free word processors available. Read on for more details."

"Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected. The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good news is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed. At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."

The first screenshots have emerged of the new official Ubuntu meta package 'ubuntu-restricted-extras'. This package enables the multiverse/universe repositories (after a warning), after which it installs various non-free packages such as Flash and various codecs. The package is for the upcoming Feisty Fawn release only. More information can be found in the Wiki. Thanks to Digg.com for pointing this out.

The new ReactOS newsletter has been published. "Currently the main development branch "trunk" even though it has many new features and bug fixes since 0.3.0, it currently has several issues that prevent it from being relatively useful. Furthermore functionality that once worked no longer does, this is called a regression. Until trunk has been reasonably fixed 0.3.1 will not be released. Be assured that the developers are working hard on fixing the current issues and bringing forth a good public release as soon as humanly possible."

Microsoft has pulled four bulletins from its announced list of Patch Tuesday fixes, but did not specify why it was backpedaling on the security releases. It now plans to issue four security bulletins on Tuesday, rather than the eight originally announced, the software giant said last week in an updated notice on its Web site.

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. The NetBSD Packages Collection is a framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 6400 packages. It is used to enable freely available software to be configured and built easily on supported platforms. Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q4 announcement in Alistair Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users m-l for more information.

Long standing user of Arch Linux side-steps the typical OS-review template and takes a fresh look at several features of Arch Linux that make it an interesting and exciting distribution. Update: A recent interview with Judd Vinet, Arch's founder.

Amid the hype surrounding the release of Windows Vista, Mac users are taking solace from the fact that Mac OS X is still a champ on many fronts. Here are some reasons why reviewer John C. Welch opts for Apple.

Nokia has quietly begun delivering an upgrade to its Linux-based 770 Internet Tablet. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is available now from at least two retail stores in the U.S., priced at $399.99, CompUSA's Chicago "superstore" has confirmed. The device features GTalk and a VGA video-call camera via WiFi.

"TUAW talks about the growing swell of upcoming apps which will use Leopard APIs, and therefore, will require Leopard to run. I'm sure some users are wondering why developers are doing this, and some developers are wondering if they should do the same. Many early adopter end-users are planning to upgrade to Leopard regardless, but some might want to wait for various reasons. From the casual observer's perspective, the obvious thing to do is support older versions of Mac OS X in order to have access to a larger market. In a sense, that's true. But there's more to the story."

"There's been radio chatter this week of a possible new addition to the Windows family: a 'Home Server'. If the chatter is right, Microsoft will unveil it at CES, which kicks off next week. 'Home Server', according to my sources, is about centralized storage, home automation and security."