This FreeBSD newsletter covers the foundations recent activities, such as the 2006 fund raise campaign, the network stack virtualization project, the FreeBSD/sun4v and FreeBSD/arm projects, Java for FreeBSD, BSD conferences and a new 10Gigabit network testbed.

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month. On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. Update by Thom: Ars thinks the situation is hot air, mostly, something I agree with (a cracker already has to have login credentials for the flaws to be of any use).

An Economist.com editorial examines the OS lay of the land on the eve of Vista's release, and makes an interesting case for why Windows "rules the world". Do you agree? We report, you decide.

This is a first of a series of articles which aim to provide a complete and working example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC framework) model. The model is to hold information about a 3D scene for use with OpenGL renderers like QGLWidget. The first thing to do when designing a model is to thing what is the purpose of making it. In this case, I want the model to store information about a 3D scene which can then be rendered using OpenGL (QGLWidget). The scene is to consist of some objects, which can be defined using various ways offered by the OpenGL specification. Part 2 and part 3 are also published.

"It has come to be expected. Linux and open source news in 2006 was a potpourri of topics that included Windows-Linux interoperability, wild acquisitions and corporate spending sprees and stories of enterprise-level companies buying into open source and Linux en masse. Even better than that, many of yesterday's Linux and open source stories listed below still have the legs to become tomorrow's big news all over again."

"A rootkit is a collection of tools a hacker installs on a victim computer after gaining initial access. It generally consists of network sniffers, log-cleaning scripts, and trojaned replacements of core system utilities such as ps, netstat, ifconfig, and killall. I know of two programs which aid in detecting whether a rootkit has been installed on your machine. They are Rootkit Hunter and Chkrootkit."

For those of you who have not followed the comment thread on the 'On Favouritism, Apologies, and Black Helicopters' story: I there promised to write an article about all the customisations I do on KDE to make it look and (more importantly) behave in my own preferred way; as a sort of Christmas present, so to speak (it is not like it is a fast news day today). Read on!

"Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with Nvidia Corp and is an X.Org project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far."

Microsoft's Nick White blogs about the system requirements for Windows Vista. "We've officially released more detail on the system requirements for Windows Vista. These requirements outline what determines whether a PC is categorized as Windows Vista Capable or Windows Vista Premium Ready." Out of experience I can say these requirements are fairly realistic; the only thing I do not advise is the 512MB for Vista Capable; I'd suggest to up to 1GB no matter what.

"Let's be honest here. When most of us think of open source and free software, we really aren't thinking of something flashed to a BIOS ROM chip. And yet when it comes to the Linux BIOS project - that's exactly what's happening here. The LinuxBIOS is a project designed to work out any perceived shortcomings from existing BIOS options distributed on today's motherboards. Started back in 1999, it has been in development steadily for quite some time now."

Fresh from a positive experience installing Sarge on an old home server, the author of this review attempts to install a Debian Etch desktop on an old Thinkpad. How does it turn out? Surprisingly well.

"Hyperion Entertainment is very pleased to announce the immediate availability (for registered AmigaOne customers) of Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update. Originally released in May of 2004, Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility. Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update is the culmination of 5 years of development and takes the form of a stand-alone ISO image which contains a full installation of all Amiga OS 4.0 components. A list of new features can be found here. Availability of PowerPC hardware suitable for operation with Amiga OS 4.0 will be announced by third parties early 2007." Together with Microsoft selling Linux and Apple switching to Intel, this is the definitive proof that hell is now officially frozen. I sure know I'm taking ice skates with me to the grave.

The Cocotron is an open source project which implements an Objective-C API very similar to that described by Apple Computer's Foundation and AppKit framework documentation. "The Cocotron Development Tools are a gcc based cross-compiler toolchain which plug into Xcode, once installed they enable Xcode projects written in Objective-C to be compiled for platforms other than Mac OS X, such as Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The CDT is used to compile The Cocotron and non-OS X targets."

Opera for the Nintendo Wii has been released. "Opera on Wii adds a new dimension and functionality to a video game console system. It is a unique Web experience that everyone can use, and the Intelligent Zoom feature allows consumers to read Web content on the TV from the comfort of their couch." Ars has a review. Update: 5 2 screenshots of Opera for Wii rendering OSNews.