Canonical Ltd announced it few days ago. It's available for download or upgrade now.

eWEEK.com recently reviewed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. As they compared the linux desktop operating system with other linux distros, they commented in their article "Ubuntu 6.06 Is Current Desktop Linux Champ" that:

Canonical's Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is an excellent Linux-based operating system—so excellent, in fact, that it not only earned eWEEK Labs' Analyst's Choice designation but has also become our clear favorite among Linux desktop distributions.

They also discussed in another article on whether Ubuntu would pose any threat to Window Vista. Though I believe it won't, but I strongly recommend you to give it a try. Here's some screenshots.

Speaking of Ubuntu, I just got my CDs yesterday, after requesting for them on June 8th, 2006. If you don't want to wait that long (well, it's more than 1 month for me) and you live somewhere near Malaysia, I have a few extras. Just leave a message in this post and I'll try to mail it to you as soon as possible.

What will it do to your windows?

The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is "Access is denied". On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.

Note that you are required to have a genuine windows to download it. Besides Windows XP, you can use it on Windows 2000, Windows NT and Windows Server 2003 as well.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 - $349 per server per year
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 - $50 per desktop per year

Alternatively, to get yourself a free or open source one, download it here: openSUSE.org. You may also get a CD delivered to you via The Linux Store.

I also came across a review by DesktopLinux on the new SUSE. Take a preview before you download!

Just fill up your mailing address and The Linux Store will mail Linux CDs to your house. At the moment, they are giving out following distros:

• Suse
• Fedora
• Mandriva
• Gentoo
• Debian
• Knoppix

Besides those, there's also an other distro section for you to fill up whatever Linux distribution you want.

Get your CDs here: The Linux Store [free.thelinuxstore.ca]

It seems like Ubuntu is not being included in the list because Ubuntu have provided the service itself. So, if you are interested in Ubuntu go here: Ubuntu (Linux) 6.06 LTS.

In case you have problem making up your mind to determine which Linux distro to use, go here: Choosing The Right Linux Distro.

I received an invitation from HardwareZone to attend Open Source Symposium 2006 event organised by redhat. Here's the content of the email:

Experience the Power of Open Source Architecture

Feeling helpless and trapped with your existing proprietary platform and applications?

Held ransom by costly software upgrades?

Open source innovation is not a fad. It is here to stay. Enterprises around the world have migrated to Linux because they used to be as frustrated as you. Things happen for a reason. Especially good things. Isn’t it time you make them happen?

Hear what Linux users have to say

The revolution of choice continues. Come August, Red Hat will kick off a series of open source symposiums across 14 cities in Asia Pacific. Rediscover choice in mission critical enterprise computing face-to-face with Linux communities, including developers and users, customers and industry watchers. This is where your doubts and the myths about open source will be debunked.

Spend a day with us and you’ll see.

The details of the event in Kuala Lumpur is as follows:

• Date: 6-7 September 2006 (Agenda)
• Time: 9.00am - 5.30pm
• Venue: Carlton Conference Centre
  The Ritz -Carlton Kuala Lumpur Banquet Hall, Level 3
  168 Jalan Imbi, Kuala Lumpur 55100, Malaysia

Developers: Do note that there's a session for you.

The registration is free for the first 50. So, be first to register!

Besides Kuala Lumpur, the event will also be held at other cities: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Manila, Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

Get more details from the official website of Open Source Symposium 2006.

We expected to see "beta bloat" hamper the overall performance of the Vista beta, but that was not the case. Vista and XP both ran our iTunes encoding test in the same amount of time. Even more surprising, Vista was actually almost 6 percent faster than XP on our Adobe Photoshop CS2 image-processing test. The F.E.A.R. scores were close but not identical. The takeaway from the F.E.A.R. scores, however, is that at least for this one game, DirectX 10 is not only stable, but the current DX 10 beta version is showing comparable performance to DX 9.

After reading that article, I don't think the same way. Well, look at the hardware settings:

We loaded Windows Vista beta 2 (build 5384) and Windows XP Professional SP2 on a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, with 1GB of DDR2 memory running at 664MHz and an ATI Radeon X850 XT graphics card.

How about 800MHz Pentium III, with 512MB of SD-RAMs and Riva TNT2 AGP? I'm sure Windows XP can run very smoothly on such settings, but Windows Vista will not fit into such a machine.

Agree or not? Have your say (shoot me if I'm wrong).

I'm not ready for such huge installation for myself. I've too many thing in progress and can't afford to lose any data as the beta operating system might cause instability. Hope you can try it out! Have fun.

Some related links:

• Release news
• Request for Ubuntu CDs
• Download Ubuntu

In Reuters:

Gartner targets a Windows Vista release in the April-June quarter of 2007, nine to 12 months after Microsoft conducts a second major test, or "beta," release for Vista during the current quarter.

I've upgraded my RAMs for it, but the operating system still has a long way to be released.

Anything you want to say?