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If smooth-as-silk memory sharing and file caching bring joy to your heart, you know you're a Linux geek. And if you're a Linux geek, there's apparently no time like the summertime to indulge in the sheer pleasure of playing with cool stuff in the Linux universe. Some generous bloggers have tagged some of the shiniest treasures for us. What other gems are out there, friends? We'd love to know.

There are several ways to run Windows programs on Linux (virtualisation, WINE) and vice versa really isn't a problem either with Cygwin, or better yet, native ports thanks to the Windows variants of Gtk+ and Qt. Still, what if Windows support was built straight into the Linux kernel? Is something like that even possible? Sure it is, and the Chinese figured it'd be an interesting challenge, and called it the Linux Unified Kernel.

What does the U.N. and E.U. have in common with the World Bank and the European Central Bank? They want to exchange statistical data in an uncomplicated manner. Out of this need has grown the SDMX standard and its respective tools, as a case study by the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) information service has revealed.

PC/OS Developer Roberto J. Dohnert has announced the release of PC/OS 10 Open64 Workstation. The desktop distribution designed for 64-bit systems is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and includes all of the latest security and bug patches up to the 25th of May. All of the PC/OS editions, including OpenDesktop, OpenWorkstation and WebStation, utilise the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and focus on providing ease of use out-of-the-box.

Cobol, the venerable computer language so beloved of Y2K-fearing businesses, has hit 50 years young today, having been invented on the 28th of May 1959 at a meeting of the Sort Range Committee at the Pentagon. The news comes from Cobol specialists Micro Focus, who tell us that there are two hundred times as many Cobol transactions as there are Google searches ever day, and that here in the UK we're all using Cobol-powered applications a average of ten times daily.

With the Linux 2.6.30 kernel being prepped for release in early June, we have set out to provide a few benchmarks of this latest Linux kernel to see how it compares to its two earlier predecessors. While this new kernel may offer support for new file-systems (NILFS2, in particular), support for LZMA/BZIP2 kernel image compression, a new CPU architecture (Microblaze) and many other changes, are there any major performance regressions or improvements like we have spotted with our previous Linux kernel benchmarks?

This guide explains how you can set up an iSCSI target and an iSCSI initiator (client), both running Fedora 10. The iSCSI protocol is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows iSCSI initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) iSCSI target using normal ethernet cabling. To the iSCSI initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

The KOffice team is extremely pleased to finally announce version 2.0.0 of KOffice. This release marks the end of more than 3 years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications.

RedHat, one of the biggest contributor to open source and Linux, proved the world that the Open Souce service based model is profitable. RedHat introduces all the exiting new technologies in Fedora, the community driven distribution sponsored by RedHat.

Just five years ago, Vic Gundotra argued that web apps could never rival their desktop brethren. But that's when he worked for Microsoft. He works for Google now. And he sees things quite differently. In 2004, Gundotra and his Microsoft team - responsible for driving developers to Windows - pointed to an application called Keyhole as a prime example of the sort of desktop goodness that could never be duplicated on the web. Then Google bought Keyhole, a Windows app that stitched satellite photos into a pan-and-zoom-able virtual landscape, and just months later, it turned the app into a web service.

When you visit a Secure website in Firefox chances are that the FavIcon for the website is replaced with a Green bar with the details of the company. This is because of the default properties in Firefox to display detailed information of the website from the Extended Validation Certificate on the website. However, if the website doesn’t host a Extended Validation certificate then the website URL (link) in the address bar is not highlighted or in otherwords shows as a normal website URL.

Clement Lefebvre from the Mint development team has announced the release of Linux Mint 7 (code named Gloria). Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and media codecs. The release is based on Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), the 2.6.28 Linux Kernel, X.org 7.4 and GNOME 2.26.

This book is marketed to everyone who uses or wants to use twitter with an eye on being popular, either personally or professionally. I don't mean that in a frivolous way. Twitter has become an important tool for self-promotion of individuals and businesses. OK, I doubt that Bill Gates worries that the number of followers he has in any way affects Microsoft's profit margin (actually, I can't find the "real" Bill Gates on twitter, but there are a number of "parody" profiles with his name on them), however there are a number of "big bananas" on Twitter who tweet regularly for more than just a lark (if you'll pardon the "bird" metaphor).

ZaReason is preparing to expand its portfolio of Ubuntu systems — including a new server and netbook, according to CEO Cathy Malmrose. But that’s not all. US-based ZaReason also continues its push deeper into the European computer market.

Need details on your file system’s data? FS_scan allows you dig deep into your storage, giving you the ability to perform trend analysis on the results.

Open source database vendor Ingres might stand a better chance at taking on the enterprise with Oracle fixing to swallow developers' favorite MySQL along with Sun Microsystems. To help, it's begun forging alliances with open-source operating-system companies. Red Hat and Ingres have been sniffing around each other for the past few weeks. Ingres in mid-April said it was signing up as a charter member of the Open Source Channel Alliance created by Red Hat and Synnex, an IT distributor with more than 15,000 channel partners in the US, Canada, and Mexico, to drive open source solution sales.

Last week we took a look at four great Linux/FOSS applications that are as good as any of their competitors, FOSS or proprietary. Today I'll wrap up with four more fine applications that I think are excellent and bragworthy, and that have not already been reviewed to death.

The Northern Territory has seen the formal launch of One Laptop Per Child deployments in Australia.

Open source may have had a late start in the realm of enterprise virtualisation, but the meticulous and attentive development of this technology has led to better products in the long run. Not only is open source virtualisation now fully enterprise-ready, but it offers greater cost-savings and more flexibility that its proprietary counterparts.

SSH doesn't lend itself well to tcp analyzers. However, if you have that privilege, you can get the same results with strace!