News Tidbits: New kernel, Edgy Stuff, Alky

Here's some interesting articles I've found over the past few days:

• Jorge Castro mentions some possible features that are being worked on for Edgy.
• Linux Watch gives an overview of the new 2.6.17 kernel, which include a nice speed boost for EXT3 filesystems (that's most people), the groundwork for better WiFi support (don't we keep hearing that?), and a cool SMP detection feature...

... and here's a piece of software to keep an eye on:

Alky

Alky is "is a tool that allows you to convert a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary." It's an alternate approach of getting software to run on another platform (as opposed to the WINE approach, which they make clear on their site.) I was a bit skeptical at first, since they say they're "focused on high-end gaming at the moment". High-end gaming is the area where it's hardest to do any cross-platform chicanery because games often use a bunch of different advanced APIs (think DirectX, OpenGL, OpenAL, EAX, etc.), which can be tough to reimplement or work around.
However, later down their page I noticed:

Although it's a very new project, it will already convert (nearly) any Windows executable into a Mac OS X executable and attempt to run it, with some success and a fair amount more debug data.

Pretty good. I'm keeping an eye on this one.