The < http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki Nexenta > project is dedicated to bringing the power of Ubuntu and APT to the Solaris platform.

In response to recent concerns expressed by Matthew Garret, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has written an insightful about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian.

Debian Etch will be < http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?src=rss&id=1076 released > in December 2006. Etch is the first Debian release to include official AMD64 support. Other notable improvements include XOrg, GCC4, and Secure APT.

The Genunix wiki has < http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_build_Mono_on_Solaris instructions > on how to build Mono for the Solaris operating system. Although I doubt that Sun will ever embrace .NET, It's nice to see that not every Solaris user is a Java fanatic.

At the Debian conference, some developers < http://www.alobbs.com/news/1125 proposed >creation of an OpenSolaris Debian distribution. I am not a very big fan of Sun, but the availability of moderately current software via APT on the OpenSolaris platform sounds appealing. Unfortunately, Sun's CDDL license doesn't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. If such an endeavor is predicated on Sun's willingness to dual license OpenSolaris < http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060130-6074.html under the GPL >, we may be waiting a very long time.

Developer John Birrell has successfully < http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/DTrace_reaches_prime_time_on_FreeBSD/0,2000061733,39257452,00.htm ported > large portions of Sun's DTrace tool to FreeBSD. At this time, it supposedly passes 793 of Sun's 1039 tests. DTrace is an extremely powerful and useful tool for software development and system administration, and a BSD port is definitely a cool idea.