It's that time of year again-- the time for the latest and greatest Crossover release for both Mac and Linux platforms. Version 8.0 brings new and updated support for many applications, especially Quicken 2009, Microsoft Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7 (why Linux or Mac users would want IE7 is beyond me, but to each his own). Also, the Wine project has, of course, benefited more from Crossover's advancements.

Just like last week, we feature another open source microkernel today. Jari OS is an open source microkernel operating system, licensed under the GPL. The actual microkernel is called muString, and packed on top are isolated core and system services as well as device drivers, just like you'd expect from a proper microkernel implementation. Version 0.0.1 alpha was released earlier this month.

Sun Microsystems may have dropped a bit of weight by the time Oracle officially acquires the company. According to two people briefed on Sun's plans, the company has cancelled its Rock chip project, putting an end to one of its biggest revitalization bets. Sun has been working on the Rock project for more than five years, hoping to create a chip with many cores that would trounce competing server chips from IBM. and Intel. The company has talked about Rock in the loftiest of terms and built it up as a game-changing product. In April 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of Sun, bragged about receiving the first test versions of Rock. But the two people familiar with Sun's plans say Rock has met with an unceremonious end. The people requested anonymity, as they are not authorized to speak with the press about Sun's plans. Michelle Parkinson, a Sun spokeswoman, said the company had no comment.

While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to "eat these vendors' lunches", offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. "It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been," says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins "really depends on what developers do", says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer.

Instead of having too many appliances and devices plugged into one outlet, why not reverse the idea? In order to save ourselves from the rat's nest of wires below the entertainment center (or the computer desk), David Friedman, photographer, had the idea to have an entire wall of plugs. Just imagine. No more crowded daisy-chains, no more losing pets and small children to the mess underneath, and just think how jealous the neighbors will be with the new sort of 21st-century art you'd have on your wall-- changeable depending on your current mood, too!

Last week we talked about whether or not the Debian project would include Mono in its default GNOME installation. This incited some heavy debate on OSNews, but sadly, the Mono debate also lead to some very nasty blog posts in the Debian community. Time for damage control, Debian project leader Steve McIntyre must've thought.

A few days ago Opera launched a placeholder website which said they were going to "reinvent" the web, on June 16. Well, it's June 16, and Opera has announced Opera Unite, a technology which allows individual Opera users to connect to one another, turning every machine running Opera Unite into a web server.

It's not available in the latest kernel just yet, but if you just so happen to have gotten your hands on a USB 3.0 device you want to use at full spectrum (you lucky jerk) or want to do this for the sake of geekiness, it's now possible to get USB 3.0 support for Debian and Ubuntu systems. The USB 3.0 subsystem will be integrated into the Linux kernel "soon," but if you've got some time on your hands, instructions have been provided to do it yourself.

The critical Java vulnerability in Mac OS X which we reported on earlier has finally been fixed by Apple. "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 delivers improved reliability, security, and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and later." The fix for this vulnerability is in there.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr. All demon spawn from Web 2.0, and we all love to make fun of these websites and the services they provide. However, here in the West, where everything is at arm's length and democracy is something we do not remember fighting for, it's easy to forget that what looks silly and useless to us, can be of the utmost importance somewhere else in the world. Update: I've been informed that the first casualty has fallen at the hands of armed government supporters. Hundreds of thousands of people are now on the streets all over Iran. More updates inside.

KDE, the K Desktop Environment, is a free software project based on a desktop environment for UNIX-like systems. Learn how to build small but extremely useful applets for Plasma - the new shell for the K Desktop Environment - starting with a handy memory monitor applet.

According to various rumours, Steve Jobs would make a surprise appearance during last week's keynote address at the WWDC, marking the end of his sick leave. While that rumour turned out to be false, Apple has now confirmed that Jobs will return to Apple at the end of June.

The Interactive Computing Lab team in ENAC, Toulouse, has been successful in collaboration with Linux developers in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainline X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5/X Server 1.7), we now have multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions. This multi-touch support requires the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. How this works right now is by reading the input events, translating them into multi-touch events using simple gesture recognition, and then sending D-Bus messages over to Compiz to produce multi-touch effects. Right now the code is deemed just a proof-of-concept, but they are currently working on a better implementation.

It's an almost 50/50 split of Apple and Microsoft news. Apple's WWDC is an unavoidable news-machine outputting Snow Leopard, Safari 4, new MacBook s and the iPhone 3GS (The 'S' is for sucks -- ed. It's a joke!). Microsoft returns the volley with their decision to remove IE completely from Windows 7 in Europe, but between all this giant game of tennis we find a quiet moment to discuss QNX and SkyOS too.