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.

“More than 7,000 customers have chosen Oracle Linux for mission critical systems because of our world-class support offerings,” said Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Oracle Linux and Virtualization. “The addition of Ksplice’s zero downtime update technology further extends our Linux technology leadership.”

Oracle says that the addition of Ksplice’s technology will increase the security, reliability and availability of Oracle Linux by enabling customers to apply security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting.

Ksplice, started by four MIT students, released the initial extension on April 23, 2008 and offered prebuilt and tested updates for the Red Hat, Cent OS, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, among others. The application also supported virtualization technologies OpenVZ and Virtuozzo.

“System administrators are forced to choose between known best practices and added operational costs when administering Linux updates,” said Jeff Arnold, CEO, Ksplice Inc. “Ksplice’s technology will be able to take Oracle’s kernel updates and transform them into zero downtime updates that provide always-accessible systems with no reboot necessary. This results in improved system availability and security as well as reduced operational costs for the customer.”

At the time of Oracles announcement, about 700 companies did use the service to protect over 100,000 servers, Ksplice said. The open community expects that a fork based on the original source-code will appear soon to offer continued support for other Linux kernel variants, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu.

The NetBSD project, forked off from the BSD 4.3 release, focuses on high performance, scalability, and stability. Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles Hannum, the original founders of the NetBSD project, wanted to produce a unified, multi-platform, production-quality, BSD-based operating system. The first official version, NetBSD 0.8, was released in April 1993.

Over the years, the operating system was ported to a large number of 32- and 64-bit architectures, including PDAs. Today, NetBSD supports about 57 hardware platforms and 15 different processor architectures. The distribution focuses on security (through the Kernel Authorization framework), Virtualization (through the Xen virtual-machine), and storage usability (many enterprise features like iSCSI, logical volume management and the ZFS file systems are supported).

Straight forward licensing terms allow everyone to use, modify, redistribute or sell derivates as they wish, as long as they do not remove the copyright notice and license text.  Products based on NetBSD can be developed without the requirement to make the resulting source code public. However, the operating system also includes the GNU development tools and other packages that are covered by the GPL and other open source licenses. NetBSD was used in NASA's SAMS-II Project to measure the microgravity environment on the International Space Station.

The three most notable descendants of the Berkeley Software Distribution operating system are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.1 are available for download here.

"Much of Android's quarterly share growth came at the expense of RIM, rather than Apple," said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. "The HTC EVO 4G, Motorola Droid X, and other new high-end Android devices have been gaining momentum at carriers that traditionally have been strong RIM distributors, and the recent introduction of the BlackBerry Torch has done little to stem the tide."

Compared to the third quarter 2009, RIM’s numbers look even bleaker: BlackBerry’s market share declined by 53 percent, while Apple’s iOS lost 21 percent. "There has not been much share left to grab from the other operating systems," said Rubin. "The iPhone has held its own at AT&T, but Apple faces challenges in further expanding its domestic market share, while still retaining exclusivity."

The Apple iPhone 4, BlackBerry’s Curve 8500, the LG Cosmos, Motorola’s Droid X and HTC’s EVO 4G are the top five handsets sold during the third quarter in the U.S., according to The NDP Group.

"Koobface has numerous functionalities that include key logging, connection to IRC servers, and posting malicious links on social networking sites," says Symantec on its blog. The payload is composed of multiple files. "The Trojan is written in Java, which is a platform independent language. Individual modules contain Java compiled files (.class files), which are packaged in a Java runtime executable (.jar files). As long as a computer has the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on it, which is often the case across all the platforms, the threat can execute itself," Symantec says.

After infecting a computer, Koobface attempts to gather sensitive information such as log-in credentials or credit card numbers. It was first detected in December 2008 and a more potent version appeared in March 2009. Usually, a message directs users to a third-party website where they are prompted to download a video or a faked update of the Adobe Flash player. After the download, the infected computer becomes a Zombie or Host Computer.

Koobface includes a DNS filter program that can block access to security websites and a proxy tool that enables attackers to control the infected PC or Mac. For now, Mac users can count on one additional layer of security: a warning message saying that a self-signed Java applet is requesting access to the computer. If they stay alert and deny access, the worm cannot execute.

"This is a sobering reminder that hackers are turning their efforts toward Mac OS X as Apple's market share grows, and users should be vigilant in protecting their computers and taking precautions when surfing the web," said Nicholas Ptacek, a security researcher at SecureMac.