Time for the second article of highly useful, cool and fun utilities, commands, and tricks that should help you gain better productivity and understand your system better.

The XtreemOS consortium developers have released version 2.1 of their Linux-based Grid operating system. In addition to the usual bug fixes and stability improvements, the latest release features a new version of the XtreemFS replicated and distributed object-based file system

The SproutCore developers have released version 1.0 of their JavaScript-based, client-side, web application framework. The 1.0 release took around 18 months of work and involved the rewriting of over 20,000 lines of code and the addition of 6,000 unit tests

I think I can say this pretty simply: If not for Samba, Linux wouldn’t be where it is today.

Virtualization has come to be the hot pick for consolidating and cutting hardware costs. All those machines within machines raise questions about the safety of what's inside, though, and according to a recent study, some are seriously lacking in good answers. The analysts at Gartner have been pondering virtualization lately, with particular emphasis on how migration affects security.

Over the next few weeks, I will show you how to take an old, slow computer and make it into a text-only Linux workstation with surprising capabilities, including document production, email, instant messaging, audio playback, USENET news, calendaring, and, yes, even web browsing.

A physical disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions on which the operating system can read and write data. GParted enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions.

The activity I like the most is fixing bugs. It's one of the great things of open source and the one that I enjoy the most: by having the code available, I'm able to fix a program and make it do what I want without having to go through the original developer.