D'Amore gets his paychecks from Nexenta, so he wants OpenSolaris to continue to evolve as well. But the project is dead in the water and the community needs a new place to hang out and tweak code for inclusion in a code base.

D'Amore has invited Oracle to participate in Illumos, but like the OpenSolaris community, has not heard anything from the software giant.

The biggest problem is that an important minority of the code distributed with OpenSolaris is closed source, something that has annoyed the OpenSolaris community for five years. Sun didn't allocate resources to fix this and neither has Oracle.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley, in a Friday blog post, asserts that Apple quietly patched the Mac's malware protection to thwart a backdoor Trojan horse that could allow hackers to control an iMac or MacBook remotely.

"Unfortunately, many Mac users seem oblivious to security threats which can run on their computers. And that isn't helped when Apple issues an anti-malware security update like this by stealth, rather than informing the public what it has done."

The first major update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in more than three years hit last month, and judging by the traffic that took down Red Hat's download servers, it's long over due.

Also new for virtual guests is the SELinux sandbox feature that allows guest machines to run in isolated environments. The new sandbox features can be applied to just about any untrusted code you'd like to execute, but it's particularly handy with virtual machines.

The doc suggests that it may be possible in future to simply grow new organs and limbs for injuried or sick humans - even, perhaps, to repair their damaged brain in situ.

"If we know what is happening when tissues are regenerated under normal circumstances, we can begin to formulate how to replace damaged and diseased organs, tissues and cells in an organised and safe way following an injury caused by trauma or disease."

South Korea said the operating system is aimed at monitoring user activity.

The Red Star operating system uses a popular Korean folk song as its start-up music and numbers years using a calendar which starts counting from the birth of state founder Kim Il-sung, making 2010 the 99th year.