The sixth development release of the OpenSolaris-based, desktop-oriented Nexenta OS has been released: "Nexenta OS Alpha 6 is now available. Release Highlights: Nexenta Zones - opens the possibility to create custom zones and pre-install with selected software; integrated BrandZ - allows running Linux userland; SVR4 packaging - to install native Solaris packages (missing drivers, etc.); OpenSolaris build 50, with numerous kernel fixes and features."

"As presented at the Opera Backstage event in London today, Opera 9.1 will include enhanced fraud protection. Today we display the name of the certificate owner in the right end of the address field when you're on a secure site. In 9.1 we will reuse that field to display more information about the trust level of the site you visit."

The popular MySQL database is slated for a future split between what MySQL AB calls the Community and the Enterprise versions. Read the official announcement and further opinions and explanations from Kaj Arno (MySQL VP of Community Relations) and Stephen O'Grady (software industry analist). In Arno's own words: "We recognise that the needs of the MySQL Community are different from the needs of commercial enterprise customers. After 11 years of producing our software, we can no longer hope that a single offering is the best solution for both Community and Enterprise users. Consequently, we are introducing two different offerings for each distinct target group."

"A couple of weeks ago, Apple invited me to its campus to get a close-up look at Apple's Xserve Xeon. It is a marvel of physical design, so much so that I find that it implausible that Xserve Xeon and Xserve G5 could have been designed by the same company. Xserve G5 was pretty tight, but Xserve Xeon makes its predecessor, not to mention ever PC 1U rack server I've seen, look slapped together. I was struck by perfectly Xserve Xeon was designed, and in particular by how easily it comes apart. I have high standards in this regard. I told a friend that I will only buy or recommend servers that I can install, remove, disassemble and repair with one hand, a TSA-approved butter knife and no instructions."

At the MicroProcessor Forum, Dr. Brad McCredie of IBM continued to tease out particulars regarding the POWER6. The presentation discussed a lot of general microarchitecture features, but did not reveal many specific details; a full revelation of the microarchitecture will likely have to wait till ISSCC, next February. However, from the details that were revealed, it is clear that the POWER6 inherited many characteristics from its predecessors, yet made substantial improvements in others.

"A fortnight after announcing plans to share the RISC OS 5 source code, developers Castle have slapped a 69 quid price tag on their latest OS upgrade. The news has lead to some confusion over the future direction of the operating system, and fuelled concern that crucial components of RISC OS 5 will remain closed source as chargeable updates."

"When it comes to computers, the average person usually believes that 'newer is better'. After all, you can get more memory, a faster processor, and a larger hard disk, merely by waiting a few months. Old hardware is usually shunned as being of little value. In contrast, the elementary education sector has consistently found traditional educational methods to be superior to the newest, latest, and greatest methods. Some of the most knowledgeable and capable children are produced by the schools that use seemingly antiquated techniques. So what happens when the world of technology collides with the world of education? Why, the Commodore 64 makes a comeback!"

"To make Linux applications usable worldwide, with no inequity between Western dialects and the rest of the world's many languages, you must be able to deliver localized versions that input, store, retrieve, and render any language, no matter how complex. The multilingualization library, or m17n, provides a single internationalization solution for all languages on UNIX-like platforms."

Microsoft has agreed to make a number of changes to Windows Vista in response to guidance from the European Commission, the EU's competition regulator. It has also had successful talks with competition authorities in Korea who raised concerns about Microsoft's business practices. It expects to ship Vista on time in that country as well. Here's a summary of Microsoft's explanation of the changes that will be made in Windows Vista. Microsoft says the changes will apply worldwide.

"The Lenovo ThinkPad T60p is the first ThinkPad to officially support GNU/Linux. Unfortunately that support is not quite as broad as some would like - you're more or less forced to install and use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The good news is, SLED 10 is a highly usable, stable, and configurable operating system. Officially you're supposed to buy a support contract from Novell if you need help installing the operating system on a ThinkPad T60p, but if you'd prefer to do it on your own, this guide will walk you through the process."

"Whenever IT managers complain about their jobs, one of the things that always tops the list of their complaints is the time, money, and annoyance that comes from simply integrating the servers, storage, and networking gear they acquire. If integration is a big pain point, then so is building out data centers. In many cases, companies simply do not have the power and cooling to add more gear to their data centers without causing a meltdown. Enter Sun with Project Blackbox."

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application.

A recent security advisory announced today by Rapid7 explains, "the NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver for Linux is vulnerable to a buffer overflow that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code as root. This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page). A working proof-of-concept root exploit is attached to this advisory." The advisory goes on to note that the FreeBSD and Solaris binary drivers are also likely vulnerable and cautions, "it is our opinion that NVIDIA's binary driver remains an unacceptable security risk based on the large numbers of reproducible, unfixed crashes that have been reported in public forums and bug databases."

Fedora Core 6 has been delayed again. "Over the weekend we ran into a few more bugs with Fedora Core 6 that we decided were important enough to fix. There were some multilib compose issues (wrong packages landing in the wrong dirs), some translation files that would cause tracebacks in things like anaconda (whoops), and a fedora-release package that forgot to enable updates (double whoops). For these reasons and a few others, we decided to respin the release candidate tree and push the release date out another couple of days."