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Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 might just be the salve to soothe Windows Vista ouchies, but what Windows fans really want is something that hasn’t yet been announced. Mary-Jo of All About Microsoft says that internally, there’s a project called Singularity that’s designed to solve all kinds of shortcomings in current operating systems, upending the traditional way of thinking in favor of something dramatically different. And while Singularity won’t be released to the public, Midori, which takes a lot of cues from it, will.

According to Microsoft 2.0:

“There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.

“What’s also interesting about Midori is who is running the project. One-time Gates heir-apparent Eric Rudder is heading up the effort. Midori is being incubated under Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s wing. ‘Everyone under him (under Rudder on Midori) is a multi-year vet, has a super fancy title, and is going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days,’ one Microsoft tipster told me.

“When and how Microsoft will roll out Midori is still a mystery. But it sounds like the company thinks the project is serious enough to dedicate a considerable amount of time/people/resources to it.”

So it won’t be in Windows 7, but from the sounds of it, Midori might be far enough along to make it to Windows 8. Will they still keep calling it Windows to hold onto the brand, or will they call it something different to illustrate how dramatically separate it is from what we’re currently using?

Steve Langasek has announced the availability of the delayed first alpha release of Ubuntu 8.10, code name “Intrepid Ibex”: “Welcome to Intrepid Ibex Alpha 1, which will in time become Ubuntu 8.10. Alpha 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Intrepid development cycle. The primary changes from Hardy have been the re-merging of changes from Debian and the upgrade of the Linux kernel to a pre-release version of 2.6.26. As with the beginning of any development cycle, the Intrepid one has seen the merge floodgates open once again. This merge not only brings in lots of new version of various packages, but also a fair number of totally new applications.” Read the release announcement and release notes for further details. Only the “alternate” installation images have been made available with this release; download them from here: intrepid-alternate-i386.iso (698MB, MD5, torrent), intrepid-alternate-amd64.iso (697MB, MD5, torrent). Also released: Kubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 and Xubuntu 8.10 Alpha

This represents a rapid turnaround for Mac OS X version updates, with the last point upgrade having been released just one month ago (May 28th). The new update, however, is a requirement for some of the features of Apple’s upcoming MobileMe service.

Update: Alongside OS X 10.5.4, Apple also released Security Update 2008-004 for users running OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5 - 10.5.3. This security update appears to be included in the OS X 10.5.4 update but has also been made available as a standalone update.

Finally, Apple released Safari 3.1.2 for Mac OS X 10.4.11. This update addresses a WebKit vulnerability that was fixed for Windows XP and Vista users in Safari 3.1.2 for Windows (released June 19th) and for Leopard users with the 10.5.4 update.

June 30 is the day that Microsoft begins phasing out Windows XP by no longer providing copies of the operating system to PC makers and retailers for preloading on new machines. It’s also a good day (thanks to a recent New York Times opinion piece) to start looking ahead to what comes next — after Windows.

That answer could be Softie Eric Rudder’s mysterious “Midori” project.

First, the back story: As San Jose State Professor Randall Stross notes in his Times article, “Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air,” Windows has become big and unwieldy. That’s why Microsoft has been working for the past several years on reducing dependencies within Windows. And that’s what MinWin, the slimmed-down Windows core that Microsoft’s Core team has built (which supposedly won’t be at the heart of Windows 7) is all about.

Microsoft also has been investigating for the past several years what a non-Windows-based operating system might look like. That project, which recently hit the 1.0 milestone, is code-named “Singularity.”

This is how the Singularity team described its mission:

“The Singularity project started in 2003 to re-examine the design decisions and increasingly obvious shortcomings of existing systems and software stacks. These shortcomings include: widespread security vulnerabilities; unexpected interactions among applications; failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers, and a perceived lack of robustness. We believe that many of these problems are attributable to systems that have not evolved far beyond the computer architectures and programming languages of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The computing environment of that period was very different from today….”

As Microsoft officials have said, Singularity — a microkernel-based operating system written as managed code — is for research purposes. Microsoft has no plans to commercialize it.

But what Microsoft hasn’t discussed publicly — which I address in my Microsoft 2.0 book — is that Microsoft is working on a derivative of Singularity, code-named “Midori,” which could end up seeing the light of day somewhere down the line. From Microsoft 2.0:

“There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.

“What’s also interesting about Midori is who is running the project. One-time Gates heir-apparent Eric Rudder is heading up the effort. Midori is being incubated under Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s wing. ‘Everyone under him (under Rudder on Midori)  is a multi-year vet, has a super fancy title, and is going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days,’ one Microsoft tipster told me.

“When and how Microsoft will roll out Midori is still a mystery. But it sounds like the company thinks the project is serious enough to dedicate a considerable amount of time/people/resources to it.”