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.

YouTube has cool video showing Windows games using DirectX running inside VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. This is demonstrating full DirectX 8.1 support inside Windows XP virtual machines.

Examine three traps you could fall in when porting Java Web applications from Windows to AIX, and learn how to maneuver around them.

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

"I have a huge list of all of the tweaks that have been done to the operating system but I'll save that for next week. Also, if you're wondering, you can expect Windows Mobile 6 devices in the marketplace worldwide by second quarter 2007." More here (screenshots). Betas of WinMob6 also had integrated VoIP support via SIP in them, but it doesn't seem that this was announced along the other features.