Alan Cox, the famous Linux kernel hacker, saw his Thinkpad explode. His wife writes on her weblog: "Alan was on the other side of the room from the laptop. I was elsewhere. He yelled out, I ambled towards the room in my own good time, and then I heard 'Fire! Real fire! Call the fire brigade, now!' and I speeded up a bit." This is the first laptop of a tech 'celebrity' to explode.

"With the recent public release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 beta 1, system administrators like myself (and their IT managers) may face major system upgrades in the near future. Given that I've got until 2012 before maintenance support for RHEL 4 ends, I need to see real value to convince me to upgrade, especially when you consider RHEL 4 has proved to meet the needs of my organization nicely. So, the question is why should enterprises upgrade from earlier releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux when RHEL 5 is officially released?"

I just received an email from Bernd Korz informing me that the Zeta 1.21 live CD has been released for everybody to download. Korz says the first results from testers were very positive. The download page says: "Magnussoft ZETA 1.21 - An Operating System that provides a lot of new advantages combined with high performance besides general tools for your daily work."

Hackers are hitting paydirt in their search for browser bugs. According to Symantec's twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report, hackers found 47 bugs in Mozilla's open-source browsers and 38 bugs in Internet Explorer during the first six months of this year. That's up significantly from the 17 Mozilla and 25 IE bugs found in the previous six months. Even Apple's Safari browser saw its bugs double, jumping from six in the last half of 2005 to 12 in the first half of 2006. Opera was the only browser tracked by Symantec that saw the number of vulnerabilities decline, but not by much. Opera bugs dropped from nine to seven during the period.

NetBSD held a public 'Bugathon' this weekend: developers and users gathered together on a public IRC channel where they discussed and fixed a lot of PR's (270 bugs closed in just two days). It was such a success that the NetBSD developers plan to organize such event regularly. There's also a website (still under construction).

A small registry hack in Vista RC1 will turn on the Windows Mobile Device Center, Microsoft's replacement for ActiveSync. Microsoft enables the WMDC only for internal testers, but this little hack enables WMDC for everyone. Much-needed for PDA owners.

How often have you rebooted your TV set in the past year? Probably a lot less than you have rebooted your computer. Of course there are many "reasons" for this, but increasingly, nontechnical users don't want to hear them. They just want their computer to work perfectly all the time and never crash. MINIX 3 is a project to develop an operating system as reliable as a TV set, for embedded systems and mission critical applications, but also for future $50 single-chip laptops and general desktop use. The focus is being small, simple, and reliable. Note: This is the last entry for the Alternative OS Contest.

In the latest study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, over 700 technology experts were asked to evaluate an assortment of scenarios in an attempt to determine potential trends for the year 2020. With responses from representatives of the World Wide Web Consortium, ICANN, the Association of Internet Researchers, and major corporations like Google and IBM, the report reflects the perceptions of "Internet pioneers," more than half of whom "were online before 1993."

You've decided to expand your horizons. You've been programming exclusively in Java (or C++, or Perl, or Ruby) for a while now. You're happy and productive, but you have this nagging feeling that you're solving problems by rote rather than thinking as creatively as you once did. Learning a new language, especially one that forces you to re-examine some of your notions about software development, may be just the ticket.

Andrew Morton posted his patch queue with numerous comments about merge plans into the mainline kernel. Among his comments he noted that he would not yet be merging the Reiser4fs, "reiser4. I was planning on merging this, but the batch_write/writev problemight wreck things, and I don't think the patches arising from my recent partial review have come through yet. So it's looking more like 2.6.20."

The Elive team has released Elive 0.5, the Enlightenment-based distribution. This distribution is one of the few (the only?) Enlightenment distributions, and offers the 'legacy' E16 and the new and advanced E17. This new release comes with a Debian kernel version 2.16.15, autolaunchers for all sorts of removable media, and much more. Read the changelog, view some screenshots, and download.

"Gael Duval, the founder of the popular MandrivaLinux project, was fired from Mandriva last spring in an effort to cut costs. Almost immediately afterward, Duval began work on a new GNU/Linux distribution, Ulteo. As of this writing, Ulteo has not yet released its first beta edition, but it should be available soon. While we're all waiting, I figured I'd ask Mr Duval some questions about Ulteo, Mandriva, and starting GNU/Linux projects in general."

"In this short guide I will show how to set up a simple DHCP server on a Debian Sarge system whose sole purpose is to assign IP adresses, a gateway, DNS servers, etc. to client computers from the local network that don't have a static IP address. You can use such a DHCP server in your home network, your office, etc., for example if your router doesn't come with a built-in DHCP server."

GNOME's Luis Villa has wrote an interesting entry in his blog, explaining why it is in Linux's best interest that distribution communities seek out small Linux OEM companies and help them in providing the best Linux experience possible. "Obviously it is in RH, Canonical, and Novell's interests to actively pursue Big Enterprise Fish like HP and Dell. But I'm really surprised that the communities around these distros haven't sought out the smaller, and potentially growing, companies that are offering computers with Linux pre-installed. It seems like this is a win-win for everyone."