power consuption comparision:Mac OS X vs. Ubuntu 11.04, Windows 7

Due to hardware availability, this Independence Day benchmarking was just carried out on an Apple Mac Mini with a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor, Apple Mac-F22C86C8 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP79 chipset, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics, 1GB of system memory, and 120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD.

Apple Mac OS X 10.6.8, Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1, and Ubuntu 11.04 were all tested in their 64-bit editions and benchmarked in their stock configurations. The only change to Windows and Ubuntu Linux was installing the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver.

The Mac Mini's power consumption was monitored using an USB-based Watts Up Pro power meter with the recording being done by the Phoronix Test Suite on an independent system. The test scenarios included:

Boot / Start-Up: For five minutes the power consumption was polled on each system as it performed a cold boot followed by idling at the desktop (automatic log-in) for the remainder of the time.

Mac OS X 10.6.8 update now available

It looks like Apple's getting another fix in before Lion slinks on to the scene. Mac OS X 10.6.8 is now available for download, and brings with it a number of "general operating system fixes," including further support for IPv6,