Nexenta OS celebrates its first alpha release today. Their first alpha, dubbed 'elatte', features OpenSolaris kernel build #27 (non-debug, with ZFS), Xorg 6.8.2-77, more network drivers, bug fixes, and more. Download it here.

Here is a (very) brief interview with Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the Linux kernel 2.6 tree. Andrew discusses the debates behind revision control systems, new kernel features and his own -mm tree.

"Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local."

"Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes. This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues."

"While it's not my distribution of choice, Mandriva 2006 definitely has some serious allure to new and experienced desktop Linux users alike. It's dead easy to install, a breeze to use and configure, has enough applications included to keep even the most die-hards happy, and it's got overwhelming support from the company and community at large." Read more here.

The Gentoo release team has announced the availability of Gentoo Linux 2005.1-r1, a bug-fix update to the current stable release.

"Apple can alter its business plan slightly and become the well-liked dominant force in the technology market. Everything Apple needs sits right in front of them for the taking. Users are simply waiting to restart global innovation and take the PC to the next step."

"For the last two years, I've been keeping track of the UN sponsored, International Telecommunication Union administered, World Summit on the Information Society process that held its first mass meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in December 2003. The process culminated last week with a meeting of over 19000 people in Tunis, Tunisia. I was reading the final reports emanating from the conference over the last several days, a question occurred to me. What happened to open source?"

This tutorial deals with setting up a WLAN HotSpot on a Linksys WRT54GS router using OpenWrt, ChilliSpot, and FreeRadius. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for Linksys WRT54G. ChilliSpot is a wireless LAN access controller. It is used for authenticating users of the wireless LAN. It supports web based login for hotspots. FreeRadius is a server that manages remote user authentication and accounting.

The first (not complete, though) English translation of the Pegasos Book has been released. Its goal is to gather a whole of information and articles on the Pegasos and its operating systems (MorphOS, Linux, MacOSX with MacOnLinux) in only one document which can be consulted off line or printed easily.

"In a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid."

The open-source Mozilla Foundation released the latest iteration of its Firefox Web browsing software on Friday, promising faster navigation, increased customization and improved security in the third beta version of its upcoming application. Labelled Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 3, the new installment of the Web browsing software claims many of the same types of improvements as the last several test versions of the application.

After a long, exhausting, yet very productive third quarter of 2005 FreeBSD 6.0 has been released. Many activities were put into the background in order to make this release the success it has become. Read the status report here.

"Yesterday, I had an hour to work with Apple's new Power Mac Quad G5, and for anyone in the broadcast, sciences, music, print and photography industries, I have some advice: Place your orders now!"