"The key to fixing a bug discovered in the field is accurate information about the system's state when the bug manifests itself. In this whitepaper, Abraham Kcholi and Gad Meir show how the Windows CE Error Reporting module can be used to retrieve that information."

This morning Sun officially released Java 6 for download after over two years of development. The Java 6 development cycle has been the most open of any Java release with weekly builds available to the public and extensive collaboration between Sun and over 330 external developers. Sun has worked with over 160 companies to ensure backwards compatibility, stability and optimum performance of applications running on the JVM.

Here is a review of SuSE Linux while here is a hacking guide to add non-free apps on 10.2.

Matthew David provides a tour of the Windows Presentation Foundation, a feature of .NET 3.0 that simplifies adding 3D, video, data, and vector designs to your applications.

European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft's software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows. During the past few years, Europe's elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway. Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.

"This guide describes how to generate and use a private/public key pair to log in to a remote system with SSH using PuTTY. PuTTY is an SSH client that is available for Windows and Linux. Using key-based SSH logins, you can disable the normal username/password login procedure which means that only people with a valid private/public key pair can log in. That way, there is no way for brute-force attacks to be successful, so your system is more secure."

According to Google Trends, but also according to Distrowatch, our own statistics here at OSNews and overall sense of the industry during 2006, Ubuntu has a big leap in mind share ahead of its competition (please note that we don't dare to say "market share", although we are pretty confident that it's the most used Linux desktop out there today). The second Fedora has a very small edge ahead of SuSe (while in US is a clear second), while Debian is following fourth. Mandrake+Mandriva (add both names on Google Trends and then sum the results) is clearly way below the previous four distros, but a clear 5th nonetheless. Last year Ubuntu was only a bit ahead of the other distros worldwide, but 2006 seems to have skyrocketed the distribution in the people's minds and computers.

Apple yesterday seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees. Apple continues to gloss over the interface, refining it even more and there is an overly presence of black gloss. Among the new features, Safari 3 has the ability to view videocasts and listen to podcasts in browser while TextEdit can now export and open new Word 2007 documents.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (what's with the middle initial?) has reviewed the recently released OpenSUSE 10.2. "Sooner than anyone expected it, Novell's openSUSE community Linux distribution project has delivered a new version: openSUSE 10.2. As a dyed-in-the-wool SUSE user since S.u.S.E Linux 4.2 first appeared in 1996, I decided to immediately give this version a try."

Kristian Vander Vliet, aka Vanders, has been working on a document that explains how to port drivers to Syllable. This document first starts off as a primer on how to write drivers for Syllable. Then the document shows how to port a driver from Linux to Syllable. Kristian chooses to focus on network drivers and ported the broadcom tg3 driver from Linux while writing this document.

A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system - which include an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 35 GB hard drive - may not be nearly enough. "Despite Microsoft's claims that Vista can run on such trailing-edge systems," writes Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research, "iSuppli believes the reality is quite different."

Microsoft has hit back at critics, including IBM, which voted against approving the company's Office OpenXML format as an Ecma standard, claiming it is nothing more than a vendor-dictated specification that documents proprietary products via XML. Ecma International announced the approval of the new standard Dec. 6 following a meeting of its general assembly and said it will begin the fast track process for adoption of the Office OpenXML formats as an ISO international standard in January 2007.

Today, Nintendo released its Wii console in Europe and the UK, meaning the launch is now complete. The Inq has a set of photos of the device, comparing it to the Xbox 360, while El Reg has a review of the oddball among the new game consoles.

According to research carried out by French firm Xiti Monitor, use of the Firefox browser continues to grow in Europe. Since April this year, the geeky alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer gained an extra four percent of the market across the continent. According to Xiti's research, the browser is now used by some 23.2 per cent of European PC web surfers - up from 19.4% in April.