Windows 7 will become the leading operating system worldwide in the PC installed base, running on 42 percent of PCs in use by the end of 2011. Gartner's latest PC OS forecast shows 94 percent of new PCs will be shipped with Windows 7 in 2011.

"Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the U.S. and Asia/Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from 4Q10," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. "However, the economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions."

The forecast assumes that Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that gets deployed to everybody through big corporate wide migration. In the future, many organizations will also use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualization and cloud computing in the next five years.

"By the end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7," Jump said.

Shipments of Apple iMacs and Mac OS share on new PCs have seen increases in the last 12 months. The Mac OS was shipped with 4 percent of new PCs worldwide in 2010 versus 3.3 percent in 2008. Mac OS is forecast to be on 4.5 percent of PCs in 2011, and grow to 5.2 percent of new PCs in 2015. Shipments will grow stronger in mature markets where consumers are buying into the Apple product ecosystem.

"The adoption of Mac PCs and Mac OS is a result of Apple's ability to grow well above the market average in the last 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface (UI) point of view and ease of integration with other Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch," Jump said.

The Mac OS share still varies greatly by region, as Apple has much stronger presence in North America and Western Europe. The fastest growth is expected to happen in selected emerging countries, where Apple and Mac OS are growing from a small base.

Gartner does not expect Chrome OS, Android or webOS to get any significant market share on PCs in the next few years. Analysts believe that to get any consideration as an alternative for a traditional PC, lighter OSs will first need to get strong positions on emerging client devices such as Web books and media tablets. Even then, it is unlikely that they will have any impact on Microsoft and Windows OS's hold on positions on traditional professional PCs in the time frame of the current forecast. This is because of application compatibility issues and the high proportion of Windows-specific applications within many enterprises.

Gartner estimates that only in 2012 will the market reach the point of crossover between Windows-specific and OS-agnostic applications for enterprises, as 50 percent of the applications will be OS-agnostic. In the consumer space, the company believes that the proportion of OS-agnostic applications is already above the Windows-specific applications. This could help Chrome OS and Android make inroads into the consumer space in the next three to five years.

"What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS," said Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president and general manager, Palm Global Business Unit, HP. "The platform's unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP's scale can do with webOS."

The Linux based operating system provides a multitasking experience, access to the web, stereo audio playback, and the ability to find information on the device or in the cloud using the Just Type feature, integrated access to user information with HP Synergy, and HP's Touch to Share capability for sharing web addresses between a TouchPad and compatible webOS based phones. The new technology allows users to share URLs and text messages between the tablet and smartphones by tapping the phone on a designated area of the TouchPad.

Video chat between compatible webOS devices is available, and Skype video calling allows users to connect with any computer, phone, or media player that has the application installed. Contacts in social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter can be searched and accessed from the main screen.

The tablet will be available with 16 GB or 32 GB of internal storage for $499.99 and $599.99 respectively. Preorders in North America and Europe will begin June 19. HP says that it will partner with AT&T to introduce a connected version of HP TouchPad later this summer.

“Overall, I think we’ve managed to take the now defunct MySQL 6.0 tree (way back in 2008) and release something that can truly live up to the line database for cloud,” Drizzle programmer Stewart Smith says on his blog. “Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable. The future is bright, there is so much more to do to make the ultimate database for cloud. Drizzle7 is a great platform to build on – both for us (developers) and us (people who use relational databases).”

While initial development was started in 2008 by Brian Aker, the team now includes contributors from Canonical, Blue Gecko, Data Differential, Google, Intel, Rackspace, Six Apart, and others. Drizzle has also actively participated in the Google Summer of Code Project. The database uses plug-ins to add features such as query cache, logging to files, syslog, remote services, and the authentication system. Drizzle also supports multiple concurrent engines and a wide variety of native data types.

“Drizzle7 is something that can be packaged in Linux distros,” Smith says. “It’s no longer something where the best bet is to add the [Personal Package Archive] PPA and upgrade every two weeks or build from source yourself. If you’re looking to deploy Drizzle (or develop against it) you can rely on this release.”

Drizzle is available for download here. Information on how to install the database in an Ubuntu environment are available here, users interested to deploy Drizzle using RedHat or Fedora can get start here.

RHN Satellite 5.4 delivers compliance improvements, and greater flexibility in content and subscription management, the Raleigh based company says. It also provides support for managing the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Administrators can use the management tool to patch some versions of Sun Solaris.

"We've been using Red Hat Network Satellite for several years now as a key component in the efficient management of our IT Operations," said Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/UNIX administrator at Salt River Project. "We continue to be impressed with the power and versatility of the product and are excited to see the release of version 5.4."

The systems management platform offers a single interface to optimize groups of Linux systems regardless of the architecture they are deployed on to ensure compliance with best practice security standards and regulations such as PCI-DSS, FISMA, and HIPAA. It enables IT organizations to manage the lifecycle of Red Hat deployments and perform audits of their infrastructure.

RHN Satellite 5.4 allows administrators to schedule staged deployments and update thousands of systems during short maintenance windows. Third-party content including firmware repositories can be managed, and the new FlexGuest environment adds guest support through a virtual environment.

The web-based interface allows administrators to instantly see the status of the most critical systems. The management tool can be used to control the entire application stack on all Red Hat and non-Red Hat Linux deployments from a single console. New deployments can be made based on existing system profiles.

A short video outlining the capabilities of RHN Satellite 5.4 is available here, and system requirements are outlined here.

"Offering Fedora on Amazon EC2 is a way to deploy Fedora on a wider scale. Anyone will be able to have multiple Fedora virtual machines at his or her fingertips quickly," said Garrett Holmstrom, a Fedora Cloud SIG community member. "On the opposite end of the spectrum, this will give faster and easier access to a dedicated Fedora instance that is accessible from anywhere in the world. People without persistent Internet access will be able to host their web sites using Fedora. Anyone will be able to try out Fedora from a server perspective without needing to install, boot, or even download it themselves."

Fedora 14 is based on Linux Kernel 2.6.35, which introduces graphics stack improvements and the ability to spread incoming network loads across CPUs.  GNOME 2.32 is its default desktop environment, but KDE 4.5 can be selected as an alternative during the installation. To provide an improved experience on netbooks and small devices, the latest distro includes a subset of the MeeGo software.

"I'm very proud of the work that has been put into Fedora 14," said Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith in a statement. "A myriad of contributors have helped to make free and open source software more pervasive with this release."

The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments, or Spice for short, provides users with an enhanced remote desktop experience. It provides the foundation to take advantage of accelerated 2D graphics, encryption, and hardware cursor support. Users of Windows clients will appreciate that Spice offers some video drivers and tools right out of the box. Fedora 14 also includes an updated technology preview of the Gnome shell environment which is part of the upcoming 3.0 release of the Gnome desktop software. A feature called libjpeg-turbo nearly halves the amount of time it takes to load and save JPEG images.

Developers will appreciate that Fedora 14 supports D, an emerging systems programming language that combines the performance of C and C++ with the productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python. The system python 2 stack has been upgraded to 2.7. The new "gdb-heap" package adds a new "heap" command to /usr/bin/gdb which allows you to get a breakdown of how a process is using dynamic memory. Netbeans 6.9, an integrated development environment, and Eclipse, an IDE with tooling for various languages, are included.

Another technology that makes its debut in the new release is OpenSCAP, an open source of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) framework implementation. It allows administrators to leverage security services and standards and audit systems to make sure that they are compliant with existing policies. The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) provides support for remote and out-of-band management.

A complete list of Fedora 14 features is available on the Fedora community's release announcement. The latest distribution is available for 32- and 64- bit environments and can be downloaded here. Tutorials, tips and tricks to get the most out of Fedora 14 are available here.

Additional links to open source software that has been tested and deployed are available here.