"Todd Bishop, Robert McLaws and even I have been keeping a close eye on Windows SideShow, one of the last remaining features in Windows Vista yet to be thoroughly explored. Largely due to hardware constraints, not many people have seen SideShow devices let alone play with one. So apart from the infamous Channel 9 video, a few screenshots and concept art, we really don't know much about the experience. Or should I say, until today."

Memory leaks can be tough and costly problems to solve, so it makes sense to use good tools to clearly point out and understand where the leaks are coming from. This article outlines an approach you can use while tackling memory leaks, and it discusses how to take advantage of the MALLOCDEBUG tool that is supplied with AIX.

"Sun has released Solaris 10 11/06 today. Internally, we called this 'Update 3'. The biggie features for this update are Trusted Extensions and Secure by Default. Yes, all of the security features you loved back in Trusted Solaris, are now standard as part of Solaris 10. This isn't just for the feds either. Banks love it. Wall St. loves it. Corporations that need to follow Sarbanes-Oxley love it." Get it here, a what's new guide is also available.

"There are several 'business', 'corporate', or 'professional' desktop operating systems on the market today, all aimed at seeping into large corporations that already use GNU/Linux on servers. It's a pretty good plan, and most of the operating systems in this arena are pretty good - not perfect, but pretty good. Xandros has had such a product for a while now, and it's always been near the top of the list in terms of features and quality. The market is now mature and the products are more competitive, though, and the product formerly known as Xandros Business Desktop, while still a good operating system, isn't keeping up with the industry's pace."

PC-BSD 1.3 RC1 has been released. From the changelog: "Fixed icon size issues in KMenu; installer now does not display extended partitions; installer now can use empty primary partition space to install; fixed issue with BSDStats not properly reporting usage; fixed problem with 'Start' icon text not being translated properly; fixed issues when using installer to upgrade system from 1.2 to 1.3; closed numerous other issues from BETA2." Get it here.

Yet another review of OpenSUSE 10.2. "I'm very disappointed in it. It hasn't changed much. It still is one of the best desktop Linux solutions available, its configuration tools are brilliant, its Gnome desktop is great and uniquely designed but the quality of its package manager is simply unacceptable. If you've ever used APT before you can't decently consider using this." Update: Another. Update2: One more.

"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.