We love our computers and electronics. That is, until they stop working. Then these computers and their peripherals, from printers to monitors, not to mention your handhelds, batteries, and accessories, often become digital garbage.

These things aren’t made to last after all. (No computer or phone maker is going to mind if you buy an upgrade every year or two.) Consequently, all of this junk ends up in the back of your closet or stored in your garage, collecting dust, because you aren’t sure what to do with the stuff. The best thing to do with this growing accumulation of old electronic equipment is to either donate or recycle it.

Donate your old computers and phones whenever you can to groups that will fix and clean them up and then put them back to good use. Even the oldest computer, something you consider the most obsolete of digital dinosaurs, can probably be used by someone.

There are times, though, when a device is too far gone and there’s nothing else that can be done to bring it back to life again. Even a charity doesn’t want your unusable junk. That junk—called e-waste—is potentially dangerous. Electronics are filled with “heavy metals” (read: toxic metals) and carcinogenic chemicals that are fine when you’re using them, but not so much when sitting in a landfill or, worse, when people try to recycle them incorrectly. Thousands of tons of e-waste is shipped overseas yearly to countries like China and India where it gets dumped and maybe burned, which puts mercury and lead into the air.

So on this 41st Earth Day, we want to point out the places you can take your old or even dead electronics, so they can end up either being used by someone in need or safely recycled.

The first alpha release of Ubuntu 11, dubbed Natty Narwhal, has just been released. It is classed as a “developer snapshot,” and is provided more as a sneak preview of what’s to come in Ubuntu 11. Regular users of Ubuntu 10 should not upgrade.

Along with the usual package updates and an updated kernel (2.6.37), Ubuntu 11 will also ship with Firefox 4. The alpha build includes Firefox 4 beta 7, and it will be upgraded with newer builds as they become available. The other big change is that the Unity desktop environment now enabled by default, replacing GNOME. You can still switch back to another desktop environment, if you don’t like Unity (but looking at the screenshot above, how can you not like it?)

There are various changes and notes for the other Ubuntu releases — Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Netbook Edition — but mostly, this alpha is focused on the standard Desktop Edition of Ubuntu.

Chef – Chef is a relative newcomer with their project being only one year old but they are aggressively developing their project as can be seen by the frequency of their code check-ins. is an integration framework for configuration management for all types of IT infrastructure but especially popular among cloud deployments. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure. Chef is professionally supported and sponsored by Opscode.

collectd – collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics store the values in a variety of ways, one implementation is to store them in RRD files. What makes collectd particularly useful is it’s plugin architecture which allow the daemon to collect information from a variety of services and servers like Apache, memcache and Linux Vserver. collectd on its own is really interesting but what I really see is an opportunity for collectd to feed other systems management tools.

Eucalyptus – Eculyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Eucalyptus Systems provides consulting, training and support services.

OpenNebula – This is perhaps the most interesting and most relevant project of the list for cloud computing, billing itself as the open source tool kit for cloud computing. OpenNebula is a tool that can be used to build any type of Cloud deployment and manage virtual infrastructure in a data-center or cluster or to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, for highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports public clouds by providing cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

OpenQRM – I have been a fan of OpenQRM for a long-time or at least well before the hoopla around Cloud Computing and have had the opportunity to work with technology when it was still part of a now defunct venture-backed company, Qlusters, and then spun out as a stand-alone open source project. While OpenQRM is not what I would consider a tool for public clouds I think it’s geared towards people delivering private virtual clusters or cloud capabilities. openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT infrastructure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins. What’s really interesting about OpenQRM is that it can suck up physical installations, create an image, write that image to a SAN and then run the virtual instances on demand. I think the opportunity for OpenQRM is to be able to suck those images up and then spit them out to cloud computing resources like EC2, RightScale or Rackspace Cloud.

Puppet – The Ruby on Rails project is a great configuration management tool, very similar to Cfengine (which pre-dates Puppet) and Chef (which was started after Puppet). Puppet is a model-driven open source framework designed to automate the building and configuration of servers. Puppet lets you perform normal administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) on any number of systems, using essentially the same code, even if those systems are running completely different operating systems.

RabbitMQ – RabbitMQ is an enterprise messaging system released under the Mozilla public license that adhere’s to the AMQP standard (AMQP is a standard that allows middleware products to send messages to one another). What really strikes me about RabbitMQ is the activity in their community especially their mailing lists and IRC channels. This was astounding to me as I feel like I am pretty up-to-date on active open source projects but before John’s post I was in the dark about RabbitMQ. Of the ones listed so far it’s really one that I feel like there’s really something substantial there. Commercial support is available from RabbitMQ LTD.

Zenoss – Zenoss made John’s list because of it’s Amazon Web Services monitoring capabilities and its ability to monitor all sorts of other cloud and virtual infrastructure. I am also excited about Zenoss making the list because the Zenoss Community is working to extend Zenoss Core to monitor all infrastructure you already have. I am very excited about the future of Zenoss as the community continues to expand its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.