Longhorn RC due next week

THE LONG WAIT for Longhorn is inching its close after Microsoft said today that it should have a release candidate of the server OS out next week. However, Microsoft still won't ship the product, officially named Windows Server 2008, until early next year.

At IDF, Microsoft showed its virtualisation hypervisor, best known by its codename of Viridian, running Novell's Suse Linux under Windows. Ray Noorda wouldn't have approved but Microsoft and Novell are best buddies these days after they signed off a wide-ranging and controversial pact earlier this year.

Regular readers will know that Viridian is not scheduled to be available until six months after Longhorn itself finally ships, leaving us plenty of scope for more stories like this. µ